IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement. IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World. That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US president warns there was ‘much more to follow’ after B1 bridge on the Karaj northern bypass in western Tehran, Iran, was targeted on Thursday
Trump has claimed that Iran was “right at the doorstep” of gaining a nuclear weapon.
Earlier on Wednesday the president said he did not care about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium (HEU), arguing it was deep underground and could be monitored by satellite.
From the very beginning my campaign for president in 2015, I said I would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This regime has been chanting death to America, death to Israel.
Continue reading...Bondi earned president’s ire over handling release of Epstein files and failing to prosecute his political enemies
Donald Trump has fired Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, dismissing a loyalist who reshaped the justice department but still failed to please a president fixated on prosecuting political enemies and frustrated with the politically explosive release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social: “Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.”
Continue reading...Headlining set for Netflix Is a Joke festival marks first outing with major streamer since misconduct allegations in 2017
Netflix is welcoming Louis CK back into its fold.
The comedian, long subject to questions regarding rehabilitation and so-called “cancel culture”, will headline a show at the Hollywood Bowl next month as part of the streamer’s Netflix Is a Joke festival – his first major outing with a streamer since allegations of sexual misconduct at the height of the #MeToo movement. Later this summer, Netflix will also premiere CK’s new special, Ridiculous, which he directed and executive-produced.
Continue reading...By constitutional design, the press is antagonistic to the government. As the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in his opinion defending the publication of the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago, “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
Such a free and unrestrained press requires a cohort of committed legal advocates. Whether to counter the federal government’s repeated insistence on ignoring freedom of information laws, or the Trump administration’s overt hostility and retaliation against news organizations that confront and debunk its unconstitutional narratives, a robust network of attorneys is needed to protect the press’s constitutional function.
That’s why President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional executive order aiming to punish preeminent United States law firms over their pro bono clients represents an unacceptable attack on the legal profession and poses a threat to an independent press. And that is why 42 media organizations and press freedom advocates, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief Thursday urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to affirm four District Court decisions. All four lower courts found the Trump administration’s executive order that imposed sanctions on law firms for representing President Donald Trump’s political opponents unconstitutional.
The amicus brief, authored by Andrew Sellars and Kendra Albert of Albert Sellars LLP, argues that the press plays an essential role as both a proxy for the public and a check on government power. This role requires an oppositional relationship with government interests. The president’s executive orders targeting lawyers with clients opposed to his agenda severely restricts press organizations’ access to legal counsel, particularly for outlets relying on pro bono or reduced-fee representation.
“An independent media requires First Amendment champions to guarantee citizens access to the information necessary to hold our government accountable,” said David Bralow, PFDF’s legal director. “This is why The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, legal advocates, and other partner organizations nationwide filed an amicus brief to prevent the administration’s unconstitutional efforts to intimidate lawyers fulfilling their professional oaths.”
The coalition includes news organizations, press associations, advocacy groups, media law firms, and individual attorneys with over five centuries of collective experience in First Amendment and press freedom issues.
“We are honored to represent this august group of news outlets, advocacy organizations and First Amendment attorneys at the D.C. Circuit. The public needs the press, and the press needs independent counsel, who cannot be subject to sanction because the president dislikes their clients,” said Kendra Albert, partner at Albert Sellars LLP.
“The Press Freedom Defense Fund exists for moments like this one. Alongside 42 coalition partners, we are drawing a clear line: a free press is not a privilege this or any administration may revoke,” said Annie Chabel, The Intercept’s CEO. “It is a constitutional right — and so is the independent counsel required to defend it.”
The post The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund Leads Cohort Fighting Trump’s Unconstitutional Media Attacks appeared first on The Intercept.
The Environmental Protection Agency also added microplastics to its contaminant candidate list for the first time.
Bondi reacts to her ouster by Trump – who was reportedly frustrated with her handling of the Epstein files; Todd Blanche to serve as acting attorney general
During its brief pro forma session today, the US House took no action on the funding bill to end the historic DHS shutdown, after Senate-passed legislation was sent to the lower chamber earlier today.
The House’s next procedural meeting will be on Monday, meaning the lapse in funding for several subagencies will continue until at least next week. However, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson may even wait until lawmakers return from a two-week recess to ensure the measure, that his party rejected last week, can pass.
Continue reading...Interest rates for a typical home loan jumped Thursday to 6.46%, the highest level since September 2025. House-hunters aren't pleased.
A $10,000 6-month CD combines profitability and flexibility. Here's how much interest savers can earn by acting now.
Hakeem Jeffries predicts Pete Hegseth could be next as party alarmed by damage done by ‘terrible’ attorney general
With quips, memes and jabs, Democrats cheered Donald Trump’s firing of attorney general Pam Bondi on Thursday, while the president’s Republican allies praised her relatively brief tenure overseeing the justice department.
Trump announced Bondi’s departure on Truth Social, saying: “We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future.” Her deputy Todd Blanche will take over as acting attorney general.
Continue reading...‘Partnership’ on drug pricing also gives patients in Britain greater access to potentially life-extending treatments
British drug exports to the US will escape tariffs imposed by Donald Trump as part of a controversial UK-US medicines deal that critics fear will mean less money for the NHS.
The deal will also give patients in Britain greater access to potentially life-extending drugs because the rules have been relaxed to allow the NHS to pay more for particular treatments.
Continue reading...  | Omg the beauty! Just from first touch & holding of the board this bad boy is built so solid. [link] [comments] |
Picking the right processor for a particular workload will always be important. But when it comes to AI–and more specifically, AI inference–the selection of any individual chip is less important than how the whole system is architected. Today’s acquisition of GigaIO’s data center business by d-Matrix, as well as Nvidia’s $2 billion investment in Marvell earlier this week, show this to be true.
d-Matrix originally made a name for itself by developing a novel digital in-memory compute (DMIC) technology that it delivers as a chiplet that plugs directly into the PCI bus. Its latest in-memory compute offering, dubbed Corsair, incorporates three-dimensional digital in-memory compute (3DMIC) that fuses the processor directly into SRAM modules connected to PCIe Gen5. Corsair was developed specifically for AI inference utilizing large language models, and delivers 150 TB/s of memory bandwidth, which helps AI models connect with data and deliver better results quicker.
The Santa Clara, California company, which raised $275 million in a Series C round last November and has raised a total of $429 million since it launched in 2022, announced its first acquisition today. d-Matrix is buying the data center business of Carlsbad, California-based GigaIO, which develops a composable infrastructure, dubbed FabreX, that connects GPUs, FPGAs, and other XPUs using PCI and CXL standards. GigaIO uses FabreX with its SuperNODE platform, which connects up to 32 XPUs to a single node.
d-Matrix’s Corsair processor incorporates in-memory compute in a 3D-stacked chiplet form-factor
The acquisition shows that d-Matrix understands that AI inference requires more than just a fast chip. “Inference is bigger than any one chip,” said Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-Matrix. “It’s now a systems problem.”
Succeeding with AI in the future will mean breaking workloads up into smaller tasks that run across a variety of different processor types, including CPUs, GPUs, and inference accelerators, Sheth said.
“That means data must move efficiently across chips, nodes, racks, and entire data centers in real time,” he said. “This acquisition accelerates our ability to deliver infrastructure built for this new reality, where low latency, efficiency, and scale all matter at once.”
GigaIO plans to continue as an independent entity focused on edge computing. The company recently announced the Gryf, which it positions as a “portable supercomputer” that can fit in the overhead bin of a jetliner.
Nvidia is also moving beyond chips. Big Green became the world’s most valuable company as a result of its powerful GPUs, which have been in high demand since soon after OpenAI sparked the current AI boom by releasing ChatGPT in late 2022. Its roadmap calls for ever-more powerful GPUs, with today’s Blackwell giving way to Rubin in 2026, to be followed by the Feynman GPU in 2028.
NVLink Fusion connects other vendors’ AI accelerators to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform
But even Nvidia recognizes that one GPU does not good AI make. Its recent GPU Technology Conference was full of news about other types of chips, including its new Vera CPU and the Groq language processing unit (LPU), the IP for which it paid $20 billion to acquire in December. CEO Jensen Huang was adamant that successful AI requires all seven of its chips, which it now refers to as its Vera Rubin platform.
“Most people forget that Nvidia’s business is much, much more diversified than a chip company,” Huang said during a Q&A with the press at GPC in March. “And the reason for that is because we’re full stack and we can help people build AI factories anywhere.”
Nvidia doubled-down on that move this week when it announced that that it’s investing $2 billion into Marvell, the $8 billion custom chipmaker based in Santa Clara. Marvell develops a variety of custom silicon, including ASICs for AI accelerators, switches, storage controllers, gaming consoles, and silicon photonic devices. It worked with AWS to develop its Trainium XPUs for AI model training. It has also worked with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The $2 billion investment from Nvidia is geared toward improving Marvell’s integration with NVLink Fusion, which is Nvidia’s plans to build an open ecosystem around its proprietary scale-up NVLink interconnect. According to Nvidia, Marvell will provide custom XPUs and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking components. Nvidia, meanwhile, will provide the reset of the stack, including Vera CPU, ConnectX NICs, BlueField DPUs, and the NVLink interconnect and Spectrum-X switches, as well as “AI compute” (i.e. GPUs).
“Our expanded partnership with Nvidia reflects the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optical interconnect and accelerated infrastructure in scaling AI,” said Matt Murphy, chairman and CEO of Marvell. “By connecting Marvell’s leadership in high-performance analog, optical DSP, silicon photonics and custom silicon to Nvidia’s expanding AI ecosystem through NVLink Fusion, we are enabling customers to build scalable, efficient AI infrastructure.”
In December, Marvell spent $3.25 billion to acquire Celestial AI, which was developing a scale-up optical interconnect. Celestial AI was building Photonic Fabric, a scale-up optical interconnect that could deliver up to 16 terabits per second of bandwidth. Marvell was expected to incorporate the Celestial AI interconnect with its support for UALink. But now that it’s working with Nvidia and its NVLink Fusion interconnect architecture, it will be interesting to see how that UALink evolves.
Whether it’s UALink, NVLink Fusion, or Ultra Ethernet that becomes the vehicle for breaking down the memory wall, it’s clear that pushing the limits in AI inference these days requires a whole-of-system approach that goes beyond the capabilities of any individual chip.
Related Items:
Nvidia’s Shift from GPUs and AI ‘Inference King’ Economics
Agentic AI Is Driving Workloads and Infra On-Prem and to the Edge
d-Matrix Takes On AI ‘Memory Wall’ with 3D Stacked In-Memory Compute
The post Forget About Chips. It’s the System That Matters For AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Two people reported killed in attack on newly completed suspension bridge after strike splits structure in half
Donald Trump claimed responsibility for destroying Iran’s largest bridge, a day after he threatened to bomb the country “back to the stone ages” if a deal to end the five-week-long war he started was not reached.
The US president shared footage of part of the newly built 136 metre-high $400m B1 suspension bridge between Tehran and Karaj collapsing dramatically on to the causeway below amid a rising plume of black smoke.
Continue reading...President Trump has ousted Pam Bondi as attorney general, saying she will be taking a job in the private sector.
Owe money for taxes but expecting a refund? Here's what could happen and how you can protect what's yours.
In need of extra financial support now? Here's what the monthly payments will look like for a $30,000 personal loan.
A Radio-Canada reporter noticed his maple syrup tasted odd; testing revealed it was adulterated with cane sugar
An investigation by Canada’s national broadcaster has found that a major Quebec producer has been diluting its maple syrup with cane sugar and selling the fraudulent product to grocery chains.
In a sting operation that involved false identities and covert recordings, journalists from Radio-Canada’s Enquête programme found that a low-cost syrup sold in major grocery store chains was heavily diluted.
Continue reading...AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options. The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 4GB models are seeing new $25 price increases, the 8GB models seeing $50 price increases, and the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is seeing a $150 price increase. The Raspberry Pi Compute Modules are also seeing increases from $11.25 to $100 USD.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Government must ‘come down very hard’ on online trade in knives and weapons, says policing and crime minister Sarah Jones
Children are setting up online businesses selling knives in the same way they trade clothes, the policing and crime minister has said.
Sarah Jones heard how children as young as 12 were buying and selling the weapons on the internet and social media, at the opening of the new National Knife Crime Centre in Bloomsbury, central London, on Thursday.
Continue reading...Most of Google's cloud storage plans come with extra access to AI tools like video generation.
Blessing from NCPC comes just days after judge ruled work on project cannot proceed without congressional approval
Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project received the approval of Washington’s planning authorities on Thursday, two days after a judge ruled work cannot proceed without Congress’s approval.
The National Capital Planning Commission, which is chaired by one of Trump’s former lawyers, gave the green light to the “East Wing Modernization Project” on Thursday, describing the ballroom as just the latest stage over two centuries of continuous changes.
Continue reading...Britain’s Keir Starmer hosts a meeting of world leaders for talks on the waterway amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration to join the Iran war.
The opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel said that because it believes the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, President Trump does not need to comply with it.
Yvette Cooper hosts virtual summit of more than 40 countries to consider coordinated action in face of closure of vital shipping lane
More than 40 countries gathered to discuss “every possible diplomatic, economic and coordinated measure” to pressurise Iran into reopening the strait of Hormuz, the UK foreign secretary has said.
After chairing a virtual summit on Thursday, Yvette Cooper said coordinated action was needed as Iran’s “reckless strikes” on international shipping and efforts to “hijack the global economy” were hitting nations from across the globe “who played no part in this conflict”.
Continue reading...The commission, which is chaired by a White House staffer, voted 9 to 1 to approve the design, which includes a ballroom with seating for 1,000 guests.
The US president couldn’t give a single coherent reason for why this aggressive war of choice must still be prosecuted
Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory speech on Iran on Wednesday night was as puzzling as it was divorced from reality. I had hoped he would declare victory and end the war. Some feared he might provide cover for a ground invasion. Instead, he told us in essence to be patient, that he is almost done, but he was utterly unclear about what more there is to accomplish.
If there was ever a purpose to the war, it was to curtail Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump harped on that goal repeatedly in his speech, noting that he had long vowed that he “would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon”. But he didn’t mention that Iran has long agreed to eschew a nuclear weapon. If that is the only goal, this entire war has been pointless.
Continue reading...I have never been able to experience this, but I heard that the X7 is such a smooth board. I love watching videos and everyone in the reviews are saying that this is a way more powerful board than future motion S series. Looking for some feedback before my purchase, I am planning on buying the full complete board and not buying the parts individually
About to be the first in my local onewheel group to go vesc. I ride a S series right now and i have complete trust in the boards power.
I want the x7 but i have never rode one. The website says that this is more powerful than a S, yet lighter. Just looking for some feedback and comparison, or spec.
Company refocuses on bringing datacenter-class computing directly to the edge with Gryf.
CARLSBAD, Calif., April 2, 2026 — GigaIO today announced the sale of its SuperNODE platform and patented PCIe Gen 5-based AI fabric FabreX to low-latency AI inferencing pioneer d-Matrix. The sale is the logical culmination of the companies’ strategic partnership to deliver inference solutions for AI at scale.
In April 2025, the two companies announced the integration of d-Matrix’s Corsair inference platform into GigaIO’s SuperNODE architecture to create a solution that supports dozens of Corsair accelerators in a single node. This collaboration became the industry’s most scalable AI inference platform, with an integration that enabled end users to deploy ultra-low-latency batched inference workloads at a new scale.
With the sale, d-Matrix has also acquired key rack-scale engineering talent from GigaIO, providing additional resources to rapidly deploy complete solutions for high-performance inference to data centers.
“We have worked closely with d-Matrix for more than a year to create rack-scale systems with industry-leading, high-performance inferencing,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “We are excited to see our world-class FabreX technology extend to full system capability and believe that d-Matrix, in combining its inference engines with our fabric, is the ideal company to challenge the existing hegemony.”
Moving forward, GigaIO will focus on bringing datacenter-class computing directly to the edge. Powered by FabreX and designed with SourceCode, GigaIO’s Gryf is unique in its ability to scale to the performance of a field supercomputer within such a small, portable form factor, providing real-time intelligence and analytics that were previously impossible without massive infrastructure.
“The edge market has a huge upside, with increased need to deploy new, modern, meaningful compute closer to the users, and that’s what GigaIO is going to be focused on,” said Benjamin. “As AI becomes an increasingly integrated part of daily business and life, the ability to execute sophisticated workloads closer to data inputs and outputs becomes ever more essential. We are excited to rethink the long-standing paradigm of stripped-down capabilities at the edge and instead deliver a new approach with mobile datacenter-class hardware that can execute increasingly complex use cases wherever they are needed.”
Gryf has enabling users to dynamically deploy applications anywhere, at any time. Organizations can process critical data on site without the latency issues from data transfers, accessing computing power in a ruggedized, field-ready design that can be deployed virtually anywhere. GigaIO has cited strong interest in Gryf from defense and intelligence, sports and media organizations, and the energy sector.
More from HPCwire
About GigaIO
GigaIO redefines scalable AI infrastructure, seamlessly bridging from edge to core with a dynamic, open platform built for every accelerator. Its flagship product, Gryf, is the world’s first suitcase-sized AI supercomputer that brings datacenter-class computing power directly to the edge.
About d-Matrix
d-Matrix is pioneering accelerated computing for AI inference, breaking through the limits of latency, cost and energy. Its Corsair compute accelerators, JetStream IO accelerators, and Aviator software deliver fast, sustainable AI inference at data center scale. Learn more at www.d-matrix.ai.
Source: GigaIO
The post GigaIO Sells SuperNODE and FabreX AI Fabric to d-Matrix appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN DIEGO, April 2, 2026 — Cohu, Inc., a global supplier of equipment and services optimizing semiconductor manufacturing yield and productivity, today announced that two customers have placed follow-on orders totaling $30 million for the Eclipse platform configured with active thermal control for testing of next generation high-performance computing (HPC) processors.
The orders, which are expected to be delivered over the next couple of quarters, expand Cohu’s presence in the fast-growing HPC market and reflect rising demand for scalable, high performance test solutions as processor complexity, power density and thermal constraints continue to increase. Together, these production-level engagements underscore the increasing importance of scalable, thermally precise test architectures as HPC devices push the limits of performance.
Within these follow-on orders, one customer is subscribing to Cohu’s PAICe Prescriptive software analytics – worth a potential of $330 thousand in annual subscription fees – to help drive higher overall equipment efficiency (OEE) in production at its outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) partner. PAICe Prescriptive continuously analyzes equipment signals and behavior patterns to predict issues before they impact production and provides guided repair recommendations to reduce troubleshooting time, improve productivity and lower mean time to repair (MTTR).
“These follow-on orders reinforce the strong customer momentum we are seeing for Eclipse, including continued demand projected in the second half of this year. Additionally, other customers are qualifying the Eclipse for their processor test needs over the next couple of quarters,” said Luis Müller, Cohu President and CEO. “We are fast expanding in the high-performance computing market and estimate delivering results toward the higher end of our $60 million to $85 million guidance for this segment in 2026.”
About Cohu
Cohu, Inc. (NASDAQ: COHU) was founded in 1947 and is a global technology leader supplying test, automation, inspection & metrology products, software analytics solutions and services to the semiconductor industry. Additional information can be found at www.cohu.com.
Source: Cohu
The post Cohu Announces $30M Follow-On Orders for High Performance Computing Test appeared first on HPCwire.
London mayor says more arrests will be made after young people stormed into shops as part of social media trend
Sadiq Khan has warned against any repeat of “utterly unacceptable” scenes of disorder in Clapham earlier this week, saying culprits who assault and intimidate shop workers will face the full force of the law.
The mayor of London said more arrests would be made in the coming days, and urged anyone considering more violence over the Easter weekend to think again.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license. Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses. The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around. The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google. Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
U.S. NSF ACCESS simulations using TACC’s Stampede3 system shed light on hemolysis risks in blood pump conditions
April 2, 2026 — For patients with heart failure, blood pumps can be lifesaving. But the very forces that sustain circulation can also harm it damaging red blood cells through hemolysis and compromising the body’s oxygen supply.
Credit: ztigmafx/Shutterstock
Now, supercomputer simulations are revealing how red blood cells deform under stress, offering new insights that could lead to safer, more effective blood pump designs.
“Supercomputing infrastructure is critical to advancing healthcare and scientific knowledge,” said Keefe Manning, Ph.D., who holds joint positions in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, and the Department of Surgery, Penn State College of Medicine.
“We’re able to create more complex environments and parameterization now because of supercomputers. Their value in science cannot be understated. As we apply concepts such as a digital twin and as we improve the infrastructure, we can modify the physiological models in a way that we never could before and accelerate our understanding.”
Manning is the corresponding author of a study on computational modeling of red blood cells, published January 2026 in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. In it, he and colleagues lay the foundation for understanding hemolysis, the red blood cell destruction associated with blood pumps, referred to as mechanical circulatory support devices (MCSDs).
Workflow and imaging platform for in vitro red blood cell deformation experiments. Credit: DOI: 10.1007/s10439-026-04000-4
The science team was awarded supercomputing allocations on the Stampede3 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) by the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which provides support for thousands of scientists across the nation.
The Red Blood Computational Model
Manning and colleagues’ model advances beyond earlier methods that used simplified stress calculations and lacked mechanistic predictability for complex flow conditions.
Instead, they adapted the governing droplet deformation evolution equation to scale to the complex, multidimensional flow environment characteristic of MCSDs in a continuum approach that uses the open source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM.
The authors calibrated the model’s constitutive parameters to reproduce human red blood cell data with reasonable mean absolute error.
Data and Post-Processing
On the data side, the scientists collected blood samples from a dozen people. They ran the blood through microfluidic channels, capturing images that were post-processed to reveal the extraordinary shape-changing of red blood cells. While many people are familiar with their ubiquitous biconcave disc shape, red blood cells can also be squished flat like a folded parachute or stretched out like a torpedo as they squeeze through tiny capillaries.
“The novelty of our study lies in the volume of experimental data that we collected internally to calibrate the droplet model,” Manning added.
Accelerating Science Through Supercomputing
This research marks a step forward in understanding the biophysics of red blood cell behavior in very thin layers, behavior at the flow fields that has been hard to reproduce in simulations.
“A simple laptop computer won’t be able to do the computation, “Manning said. “ACCESS resources have been critical for Hannah Palahnuk, my PhD student, to get this work done. Having OpenFOAM supported within ACCESS is important for our research in helping improve healthcare of our nation’s population and create future technology that will be less harmful to red blood cells.”
“I utilized the ticketing system when I needed help, and the staff were responsive and helpful,” said study co-author and principal investigator Hannah Palahnuk, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Penn State University.
“TACC’s Stampede3 supercomputer provided a much higher core-hour allocation, allowing high-fidelity, high-resolution simulations in reasonable amounts of time. This was extremely helpful as the resources are free and they are driving forward important research in the biomedical engineering field,” she added.
Bringing Simulations Closer to Reality
Moving forward, the research will model more realistic physiological conditions for red blood cell concentrations and translate these advances into direct hemolysis measurements.
“Once validated at scale across real-world fluid environments, this work could deepen our understanding of hemolysis in blood pumps, and help save lives in the process,” Manning concluded.
About the Research
The study, “Modeling Red Blood Cell Deformation at Supraphysiological Strain Rates Using a Droplet Framework,” was published January 2026 in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. The study authors are Hannah P. Palahnuk, Nicolas A. Tobin, and Keefe B. Manning of The Pennsylvania State University. Funding was provided by the Walker Assistantship program at the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory and grant U54 TR002014-05A1 from the National Institutes of Health, with computational support from ACCESS allocation MDE 24001.
Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC
The post TACC: How Supercomputing Reveals Early Red Blood Cell Damage appeared first on HPCwire.
April 2 is International Fact-Checking Day, purposefully set the day after April Fools’ Day (when mistruths are encouraged). The day was launched in 2016 by the International Fact-Checking Network, which calls it “a global celebration of truth and accuracy.”
This year’s International Fact-Checking Day theme is: “We Stand for Facts.”
We’ve been doing that for more than 20 years. FactCheck.org has been holding politicians accountable for the claims they make — and providing the facts to our readers — since our launch in 2003.
To commemorate this day, we gathered various mentions of our work over the years by politicians of both parties. Social Media Manager Josh Diehl searched the Congressional Record and dug up clips from C-Span to produce it. We include, of course, then-Vice President Dick Cheney, during a 2004 vice presidential debate, mistakenly calling us “FactCheck.com” (instead of FactCheck.org), a mention that nonetheless essentially put us on the map. Since then, lawmakers have periodically cited our work on the House or Senate floor.
FactCheck.org is a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, along with more than 180 fact-checking organizations around the world. Signatories adhere to a code of journalistic ethics and principles rooted in nonpartisan and transparent work. FactCheck.org Director Lori Robertson is a member of the IFCN advisory board.
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 Happy International Fact-Checking Day appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Stocks retreated Thursday after investors were left unsettled by President Trump's Wednesday night speech.
Federal agency, which normally supports state and local public health labs, has been hobbled by staff departures
The US federal agency responsible for monitoring diseases has temporarily halted certain diagnostic testing, including those for rabies, human herpesvirus and several other infectious illnesses.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a list on Monday showing that more than two dozen types of testing are now unavailable.
Continue reading...Daniel Kebede tells his members that detail in new policies ‘just does not deliver’ and schools are ‘running on empty’
The leader of the UK’s biggest education union has torn into the government’s record on schools, accusing Labour of letting down the nation’s children and failing to deliver on its promises for education.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), was unsparing in his criticism of the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson’s policies in a speech to delegates at the NEU’s annual conference in Brighton on Thursday.
Continue reading...A great effort will be needed to undo the damage once the US president has gone. But with the constitution unable to bring him to order now, that is what we must do
The US is extraordinary. One day it goes to the far side of the moon and revives the space age. On the same day, its president is looking to the far side of the Earth and says he will take Iran “back to the stone ages”. It may be a giant leap for mankind, but in what direction?
There can be no point other than prestige in sending humans to the moon, which is why more than 50 years have passed since they last went there. Robots can perform all we need in space. Returning the Iranians to the stone age is a different matter. The last time the US made the same boast was against Vietnam in a typical threat (much misquoted) by Gen Curtis LeMay. Vietnam crushed the US in the ensuing war.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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.
Continue reading...Selling silver? Here's how the timing, your strategy and your buyer choice can impact your final payout.
Speaking in South Korea, the French president defended the transatlantic alliance and called for return to peace
Emmanuel Macron has sharply criticised Donald Trump’s inconsistent and often contradictory pronouncements on the Iran war and Nato, saying if “you want to be serious” it was better not to come out with a something different every day.
“There is too much talk … and it’s all over the place,” the French president said on Thursday during a state visit to South Korea. “We all need stability, calm, a return to peace – this isn’t a show!”
Continue reading...Tina Peters, an election denier, was found guilty in 2024 of allowing unauthorized access to county’s voting equipment
A Colorado appeals court on Thursday ordered the resentencing of a former state election official who was found guilty of allowing unauthorized access to her county’s voting equipment, the latest development in a closely watched case that has attracted considerable attention from Donald Trump and other election deniers.
Tina Peters, a former clerk in Mesa county in western Colorado, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2024 after a jury found her guilty on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the secretary of state. Peters was the county clerk in 2020 and later allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s Dominion voting machines. Sensitive information from the machines later wound up on the internet.
Continue reading...Former government adviser Polly Billington urges bigger steps to shield people in UK from effects of Iran war
Keir Starmer should convene a global energy summit of the same order as Gordon Brown’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and put Britain on a “war footing” to reduce its exposure to fossil fuels, a Labour MP and former government adviser has said.
Polly Billington, who was an aide in Brown’s government, warned that economic pain was “hurtling down the tracks” and a bigger response was needed to protect the British people from the consequences of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Continue reading...Wizards apologize over half-time April Fools’ prank
Promotion that appeared to trick fan draws backlash
Team issues statement saying stunt was pre-planned
The Washington Wizards apologized on Thursday after an April Fools’ Day in-game promotion during their loss to the Philadelphia 76ers prompted criticism on social media.
During Wednesday night’s game at Capital One Arena, a fan was brought on to the court for a blindfolded half-court shot promoted as being worth $10,000. The shot missed, but arena staff and performers reacted as if it had gone in and briefly presented the fan with a ceremonial check as part of what later was revealed to a scripted skit.
Continue reading...Body camera video has been released of Tiger Woods' arrest, after a car crash in Florida. He has been charged with driving under the influence.
The autopsy results for Nurul Amin Shah Alam sparked fresh calls to investigate the circumstances surrounding the visually impaired refugee’s death, which provoked outrage in Buffalo.
Former UK foreign secretary among 3,000 signatories of open letter to Isaac Herzog after spate of killings
The former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind is among leading members of the Jewish diaspora urging the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to intervene to stop “attacks by Jewish extremists” on Palestinians in the West Bank.
An open letter to Herzog facilitated by the London Initiative – a liberal Zionist network of 360 people, including eminent Jewish, Israeli and Israeli Palestinian figures – has attracted more than 3,000 signatories, including diplomats, philanthropists, rabbis and academics from Australia, Canada, across Europe, South Africa the UK and US. It follows a spate of killings and arson attacks by settlers on Palestinian civilians in March.
Continue reading...Golfer has pled not guilty to DUI charges
Hydrocodone pills found in pocket after arrest
Bodycam footage of Tiger Woods’s arrest for DUI shows the golfer looking surprised when he was handcuffed by police officers at the scene of a vehicle crash last week.
“I do believe your normal faculties are impaired, and you’re under an unknown substance, so at this time you’re under arrest for DUI,” Martin County Sheriff’s deputy Tatiana Levenar told Woods after officers conducted a series of field sobriety exercises on the 50-year-old.
Continue reading...BERKELEY, Calif., April 2, 2026 — Rigetti Computing, Inc. has announced that it has sold a 9-qubit Novera QPU to the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The Novera QPU, which was shipped in March, will be at the core of USask’s first quantum computing system. The system will be managed by USask’s Centre for Quantum Topology and its Applications (quanTA), an interdisciplinary institute devoted to advancing quantum science and quantum technology development.
“By providing hands-on access to real quantum computing hardware, academic institutions like USask are enabling students and researchers to pursue groundbreaking advances in quantum science and technology. We are delighted that USask has selected a Rigetti Novera QPU for their quanTA Centre and congratulate them on this exciting new phase of quantum technology exploration and innovation,” said Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti CEO.
“At quanTA, our goal is to make Western Canada a competitive force in quantum science and quantum technology development. The establishment of a quantum computing testbed is fundamental to providing the USask community with the resources needed to embark on innovative research in areas including quantum materials, quantum algorithms, and quantum computing architecture. With the Novera QPU at the core of our first quantum computing system, we are excited to embark on this next era of discovery,” said Dr. Steven Rayan, quanTA Executive Director and USask Mathematics and Statistics Professor.
“This remarkable milestone is a monumental achievement that positions USask as a key player in quantum research on the world stage. As we step into the future, USask is continuing to establish itself as a cutting-edge institution and a hub for national and international quantum-focused research that will propel work in agriculture, health sciences, defense technologies and more across the Prairies,” said Vince Bruni-Bossio, USask President and Vice-Chancellor.
The fully assembled quantum computing system combines hardware from companies who are all members of the Novera QPU Partner Program — an ecosystem of quantum computing hardware, software, and service providers whose technologies are compatible with the Novera QPU. The Novera QPU will be installed in a Zero Point Cryogenics dilution refrigerator, Qblox control systems will be installed for operating the qubits, and QuantrolOx software will be integrated for automated qubit bring-up, characterization, and tuning.
While the Novera QPU can be integrated with our partners’ technology, customers can also purchase full-scale quantum computing systems based on Rigetti’s modular Cepheus architecture ranging from 36 to 108 qubits. These systems include a sourced dilution refrigerator, Rigetti’s control systems, and QCS Outpost, a comprehensive software operating environment for administering, monitoring, integrating, and using a Rigetti quantum computer. Rigetti can manage the entire delivery and installation process to ensure a fully operational quantum computing system.
Rigetti QPUs are manufactured in Rigetti’s Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility.
About Rigetti
Rigetti is a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing. Rigetti quantum computers are based on superconducting qubits, which are widely believed to be the leading qubit modality given their maturity, clear path to scaling, and fast gate speeds. Current Rigetti quantum computing systems achieve gate speeds of 50-70ns, which is about 1,000 times faster than other modalities such as ion traps and neutral atoms.
Rigetti sells on-premises 9-qubit to 108-qubit quantum computing systems, supporting national laboratories and quantum computing centers. Rigetti’s Cepheus 36-qubit to 108-qubit systems are based on the Company’s proprietary chiplet-based technology and include the Company’s control electronics. Rigetti’s 9-qubit Novera QPU supports a broader R&D community with a high-performance, on-premises QPU designed to plug into a customer’s existing cryogenic and control systems.
The Company operates quantum computers over the cloud through its Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform, enabling global enterprise, government, and research clients to pursue R&D. The Company’s proprietary quantum-classical infrastructure provides high-performance integration with public and private clouds for practical quantum computing.
Rigetti developed the industry’s first multi-chip quantum processor for scalable quantum computing systems. Leveraging this proprietary technology, Rigetti deployed the industry’s largest multi-chip quantum computer in 2025 with Cepheus-1-36Q, based on four 9-qubit chiplets tiled together. The Company designs and manufactures its chips in-house at Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility. Learn more at https://www.rigetti.com.
Source: Rigetti
The post Rigetti Announces Novera QPU Sale to the University of Saskatchewan appeared first on HPCwire.
Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times. One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Prosecutors have charged a man allegedly connected to two deaths tied to the "Texas Killing Fields," a site where dozens of bodies have been found since the 1970s.
Just got a used onewheel and the person I bought it from told me I should buy motorcycle gear. Is this valid, or overkill? Is knee pads, elbow pads and a helmet okay for a beginner?
Ps-it needs a new tires. How hard is it to DIY a tire change? Is kart tires fine or is it worth paying extra for a onewheel one?
Prosecutors unveil artefact linked to lost Dacian civilisation after it was stolen from Dutch museum last year
A priceless ancient gold helmet from Romania that was stolen last year from a museum in the Netherlands, has been recovered as part of a plea deal reached with the suspects.
Under the guard of balaclava-wearing police, prosecutors unveiled the 2,500-year-old Coțofenești helmet, which is considered a cultural icon of Romania, during a news conference on Thursday in the eastern Dutch city of Assen.
Continue reading...US president’s 19-minute Wednesday address at the White House was met with bewilderment from commentators
Donald Trump’s primetime nationwide address on the war with Iran caused widespread bewilderment, with commentators voicing shock at his vow to continue bombing to “bring them back to the stone ages”.
Speculation before Wednesday’s speech from the White House Blue Room suggested that the president might be about to signal a winding up of the US military effort, which began on 28 February.
Continue reading...  | Just wanted to update y'all, I ordered the X7 supercharged 2 days ago. Its out for delivery today. That's actually unbelievable! I was thinking a month maybe. Shout out to the fungineers team, they are crushing it. I know a lot of people are getting them within a week or two now so they have definitely been working there asses off to make us happy. Which I think deserves a shit ton of credit. 🙏🏻 [link] [comments] |
Dozen people arrive under new deal but legal challenges expected with scheme criticised as ‘dehumanising process’
A flight carrying people being deported from the US has landed in Uganda, as Donald Trump’s administration pushes on with its strategy of expelling migrants to countries they have no ties to.
The deported people would stay in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.
Continue reading...The court ruled 8-1 against a Colorado law banning ‘conversion therapy’ for youths. What does it mean for other states, and why did two liberals side with conservatives?
The US supreme court ruled 8-1 this week against a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for youth, in a case that could have major consequences for transgender and queer youth across the US, and for healthcare more broadly.
Colorado’s 2019 law prohibits licensed clinicians from seeking to change the gender identity or sexual orientation of youth patients under 18. It is one of 23 states with similar restrictions.
Continue reading...Private credit investment firm’s move is latest sign of crumbling confidence in unregulated lending market
A major private credit investment firm, Blue Owl Capital, has imposed a cap on withdrawals after investors tried to pull $5.4bn from two key funds, in the latest sign of crumbling confidence in the unregulated lending market.
The New York-headquartered firm released filings on Thursday that showed a surge in redemption requests, with investors asking to take back 21.9% of the cash stored in Blue Owl’s $20bn (£15bn) Credit Income Corp fund between January and March. Meanwhile, investors requested 40.7% of funds from its $3bn tech lending fund.
Continue reading...You don't need a scanner to sign, scan and send official documents. Just use the iPhone in your pocket.
Off and on during the Iran war, President Donald Trump has threatened U.S. attacks on civilian infrastructure if the Iranian government fails to meet certain demands.
On March 21, Trump wrote on Truth Social that "if Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!"
Although Trump later extended that deadline twice, he said March 30 on Truth Social that "if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and (the oil distribution hub) Kharg Island," and "possibly all desalinization plants."
Trump said such targets have "purposefully" not yet been targeted in U.S. strikes, but that such attacks could be made "in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’"
In his April 1 prime time address, Trump said, "If there is no deal, we will hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously."
Since Trump’s initial threat, non-governmental groups and Democratic lawmakers have urged him not to strike civilian infrastructure, saying it would go against international law.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. — who is running for Senate this year — said on MS NOW March 24 that "bombing civilian power infrastructure is a war crime."
Experts in international law said Moulton’s assertion is well supported, though there is some gray area in determining whether such attacks would be legal under international law. In addition, experts said it is unlikely that Trump or any other U.S. official would be brought to account if they made such a move, because neither the U.S. nor Iran is a member of the International Criminal Court.
Moulton’s campaign did not provide evidence for his statement.
The most directly relevant provision of international law comes from Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, specifically three portions of the agreement. They say:
All parties to a conflict "shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants" and "shall direct their operations only against military objectives."
"Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited."
Attacks on military targets are those that "make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization … offers a definite military advantage."
Together, these provisions would make the bombing of civilian targets, including those in Iran, "a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law," said Milena Sterio, a Cleveland State University law professor who specializes in international law. The bombing of a civilian target "would give rise to a war crime," she said.
Even though the U.S. has not ratified Protocol I, the agreement has "the status of customary law, which is binding on all states," Sterio said. "It doesn't not matter that the U.S. is not a member of the protocol."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told Politico that "if there are attacks either on Iran or from Iran on energy infrastructure, I think that there are reasonable grounds to think that they might constitute a war crime."
There is some nuance in the rules dictating how the attacks are classified by the UN, however. Targets with both military and civilian uses are known as "dual use."
An attacking state could argue that an otherwise civilian target is serving a military purpose, making it a legitimate military target, Sterio said.
Under that argument, another provision of Protocol I — the "principle of proportionality" — comes into play.
"You would still have to weigh the military advantage anticipated against the civilian harm your attack will cause," Sterio said. "When it comes to cutting off power for thousands or tens of thousands of individuals, it may be argued that the civilian harm outweighs the military advantage."
The proportionality principle "is only relevant if the targets are being attacked as military targets — to provide a quantifiable military advantage to the attacker," said Stuart Ford, a University of Illinois-Chicago law professor. By contrast, if they are being attacked as a way to punish the civilian population, Ford said, "then it doesn't matter whether they are dual use targets. You can never intentionally attack an object with the purpose of causing civilian harm."
Such a military advantage "must be the real reason behind the strike, and not simply a pretext to terrorize the civilian population," said Pace University law professor Alexander K.A. Greenawalt.
The specific type of infrastructure targeted might matter, too.
Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch, told CNN that desalination plants — which produce more than half the drinking water for U.S.-allied Qatar and Bahrain, though less for Iran — "are purely civilian infrastructure. There is no legal argument whatsoever for attacking them."
Other types of infrastructure, such as power plants, might be more legally justifiable as targets, depending on how extensive their military use is.
"Whether a power plant would constitute a military objective or civilian object would depend on the facts and circumstances, but the president’s categorical statement represents a threat to target even civilian objects regardless of the requirement for distinction, which would be a war crime," Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, told The New York Times.
In a statement to PolitiFact, a White House spokesperson did not directly address the question of whether such attacks would constitute war crimes.
"The terrorist Iranian regime has committed egregious human rights abuses for 47 years, including brutally killing its own people for merely speaking out against its oppressive rule," the statement said. "By achieving the military objectives stated under Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is making the entire region safer and more stable by eliminating Iran’s short- and long-term threats to our country and our allies."
The International Criminal Court, as seen in The Hague, Netherlands, Dec. 9, 2025, prosecutes people for serious international crimes such as genocide and war crimes. (AP)
It’s unlikely that Americans would be prosecuted for bombing civilian infrastructure, experts said. Theoretically, the International Criminal Court would be the relevant prosecutor; the court, for example, has issued arrest warrants for Russians accused of intentionally attacking civilian targets in Ukraine.
But a prosecution can proceed only if the alleged crimes take place on the territory of a member state or are carried out by a national of a member state. Neither the United States nor Iran are members of the International Criminal Court. The United Nations Security Council also has the authority to refer a case to the ICC. But the U.S. has veto power on the Security Council, so it would be able to block such a referral.
"Possibly the U.S. could investigate itself, but countries are typically not good at investigating their own behavior and imposing accountability on themselves," Sterio said.
And that option is even less likely now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given the president legal immunity for official acts, Greenawalt said, because the president would likely be able to establish that he is waging the war in his official capacity.
Moulton said, "Bombing civilian power infrastructure is a war crime."
This is a widely accepted interpretation of international law. However, the U.S. could argue that a particular attack is justified because the infrastructure had a dual civilian-military use and that the benefit from the enemy’s military setback was greater than the harm to civilians.
U.S. officials are unlikely to be prosecuted for any alleged war crimes because neither the U.S. or Iran is a member of the International Criminal Court.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.
They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News.
Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch. While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle. Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Central American country to receive up to 25 migrants a day expelled as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown
The Costa Rican government has agreed to receive up to 25 deported migrants a week from the United States, the latest deal in the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to deport scores of people to “third countries”.
With the new agreement, Costa Rica seeks a closer alliance with Donald Trump’s government, which has been securing cooperation from other Central American countries in accepting deportees from other nations who have been detained by US immigration agents.
Continue reading...Do price hikes and content choices have you stuck? Our rundown can help you sort through the best options.
A new batch of A24 films including Problemista, Under the Skin and Dream Scenario are available this April on free streaming services.
Brent crude rises 8% as US president vows to hit Iran ‘extremely hard’ over coming weeks
Oil prices have soared after Donald Trump vowed in a televised speech to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the coming weeks, knocking hopes of a near-term end to the conflict in the Middle East.
Brent crude prices jumped by as much as 8% on Thursday to $109.74 a barrel, reversing Wednesday’s drop when hopes of a de-escalation in the Iran war pushed the international benchmark below the $100-a-barrel mark at one point.
Continue reading...Wage garnishment doesn't happen overnight, but the timeline may be shorter than you think.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Trump claims Iran war ‘nearing completion’ and seeks to justify conflict in prime-time address
Middle East crisis live: Macron criticises Trump and says opening strait of Hormuz by force ‘unrealistic’
Stock markets are falling across Europe, as investors react to Donald Trump’s special address last night, in which he vowed to send Iran “back to the stone ages”.
Frankfurt’s stock market has started the day with a bump; Germany’s DAX share index is down 1.5%.
“In what might be the most dramatic April Fools’ of recent years, Donald Trump did nothing of what was expected in his speech. Instead of ‘no more war’, we got ‘no, more war!’, with heavier strikes expected and a fresh warning of attacks on power plants.
This leaves markets back where they were last week, and now we have to price in hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that aren’t coming out any time soon. The gloomy predictions of last week would have been perhaps misplaced if Trump had signalled a quick end, but now markets are back to pricing in economic catastrophe.”
Continue reading...After a successful liftoff on Wednesday, astronauts are headed to the moon. Here's what happens next.
President Trump said he would sign an order to pay all DHS employees as a plan to reopen most of DHS and pursue additional funding moves forward in Congress.
According to a top Shapiro campaign official, the total more than doubles the previous benchmark for a Pennsylvania gubernatorial race at this stage.
Sexual violence is a widespread weapon of war in Sudan. “Survivors frequently and clearly identified the perpetrators as RSF fighters,” Doctors Without Borders says.
Thom Tillis joins McConnell in warning withdrawal would aid rivals and threaten US security
A second Republican senator spoke out in defense of Nato on Thursday, joining Mitch McConnell and the Democrats, after Donald Trump said that he was “absolutely” considering withdrawing from the alliance after it refused to take part in the joint assault with Israel against Iran.
“Nato stood by America when we were under attack and came to our aid after the September 11th attacks. Their soldiers fought and died alongside our troops in Afghanistan,” said Thom Tillis, a Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, who co-chair the Senate Nato observer group.
Continue reading...My Pint doesn’t turn on at all. I haven’t updated the firmware since 2021.
I see mixed reviews about the Quart, some saying it’s awesome, some say you’re crushing cells and poor quality. I also see it might be possible to put a Pint X battery in there?
I have no soldering experience and no speciality tools, 3D printer, etc., just a drill and bits. Obviously I’d prefer more range but I’m open to sending to FM for a stock battery if the other options are too difficult or costly.
Post your questions below to get insight from the Guardian’s politics live blogger on the future of Labour and the role of the political reporter
Q: Do you agree with the Tories about wanting more oil and gas drilling from the North Sea?
Davey says Kemi Badenoch claims she can get an extra £2.5bn in tax revenue by allowing more exploration in the North Sea. He says she is “just lying”. He says everyone knows that that is not realistic.
Continue reading...The new food delivery features showcase Alexa Plus's latest integrations with third-party apps.
Robbers used firework bombs to break into the Drents Museum in 2025, stealing the 5th-century BC golden Helmet of Cotofenesti and three gold bracelets.
This blog is now closed
Back to Trump’s frustration with European allies – although it doesn’t involve a Nato member this time – Austria is the latest country to risk the US president’s wrath after a defence ministry spokesperson confirmed it denied all US requests for military overflights related to the Iran war.
“There have indeed been requests and they were refused from the outset,” Col Michael Bauer told AFP, adding that every time a similar request “involves a country at war, it is refused.”
Continue reading...Nasa mission enters second day, with crew hoping to become first people to orbit moon in more than 50 years
Four astronauts are preparing to leave Earth’s orbit and slingshot towards the moon as Nasa’s Artemis II mission enters its second day.
The high-stakes 10-day voyage is expected to mark the first time in half a century that humans will return to the vicinity of the moon. It is a crucial test of Nasa’s ambition to land humans back on the lunar surface this decade, and stay there permanently.
Continue reading...Ocasio-Cortez says Israel can fund its own defense and she will oppose any new US aid amid human rights concerns
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US representative, said on Wednesday that she will oppose any future US military aid to Israel, including for defensive systems.
In a statement on social media, Ocasio-Cortez said that Israel was fully capable of funding “Iron Dome and other defensive systems”, and that “consistent with my voting record to date, I will not support Congress sending more taxpayer dollars and military aid to a government that consistently ignores international law and US law”.
Continue reading...Just curious how many of us out there have bad knees? How do you deal with it? Have any riders gone through knee surgery? How was the recovery? Did it make riding better afterwards?
Just a little back story, broke my tibial spine in a car accident a long time ago. I can walk but impact hurts, a step, a jump, any impact hurts. I’ve lived with it long enough to have learned to ignore the pain. But if it’s really acute my legs shuts off and just buckles. Because of this I’ve been scared to do tricks, bonks, things like that. But I enjoy the ride nonetheless. But I wish I could do more.
As the climate crisis intensifies the storms lashing south Florida, it is imperative to design spaces that soak up the water. The 19.4-acre Bayshore Park is an example of how to design spaces that protect from and connect residents to nature
Continue reading...The Frame and Frame Pro TVs boast improved performance in lit rooms and access to over 5,000 artworks.
Valve's March 2026 Steam Survey shows Linux gaming usage jumping to a record 5.33% share -- more than double macOS's 2.35%. Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey numbers show Windows losing 4.28%, down to 92.33%. Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers. Month over month they report a 31.85% drop to the Simplified Chinese language use and English use increasing by 16.82% to 39.09%. Other languages also showed gains amid the massive decline in Simplified Chinese use. The latest numbers for March show around a quarter of the Linux gamers are running Steam OS. Due in part to the Steam Deck APU being a custom AMD product and the popularity of AMD hardware on Linux for its open-source nature, AMD CPU use by Steam on Linux gamers remains just under 70%.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A 7-month-old baby sitting in her stroller was killed by an apparent stray bullet in Brooklyn Wednesday afternoon, in what's believed to be a "gang motivated" shooting.
Senate-passed funding plan for DHS languishes despite agreement between Republican congressional leaders
The US House of Representatives on Thursday took no action on a compromise measure that would end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), raising questions about how much longer the record-long funding lapse will persist.
The department has been without funding since mid-February, after Democrats refused to vote for its appropriations unless Republicans agreed to new guardrails on federal agents involved in immigration enforcement operations.
Continue reading...The coffee chain said it will also pay its workers weekly to provide more financial flexibility.
Director and producer is co-creator of You Are Here, a one-day immersive theatrical event traversing 75 years of youth culture
Out of chaos come great cultural movements, according to the director and producer Danny Boyle, who will inflict a little curated chaos on London’s Southbank Centre with what has been described as an “epic, one-off pop culture spectacular”.
Boyle, whose 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony drew on the rich thread of British culture, is the co-creator and director of You Are Here, a one-day immersive theatrical event traversing 75 years of youth culture and social movement: think teddy boys, Lovers’ Rock, punk, Ziggy Stardust, rave, acid house, the spoken word, Brit pop, ballroom to name a few.
Continue reading...Lebanese-French man Ali Cherri demands investigation into Beirut bombing as possible war crime against civilians
A Lebanese-French artist has filed a legal complaint in a Paris court about an Israeli bombing of his family home in Lebanon that killed his parents and a domestic worker, claiming the attack could constitute a war crime.
The suit, filed with the French war crimes unit on Tuesday, is a rare instance of an individual pursuing war crimes charges for an Israeli bombing. It is also the first time a French court has taken a case over Israel’s bombing of Lebanon.
Continue reading...ARMONK, N.Y., April 2, 2026 — IBM today announced a strategic collaboration with Arm to develop new dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security.
Credit: Shutterstock
IBM’s leadership in system design, from silicon to software and security, has helped enterprises adopt emerging technologies with the scale and reliability required for mission‑critical workloads. As AI moves deeper into core business operations, IBM continues to invest in hardware platforms such as the Telum II processor and Spyre Accelerator, which are designed to bring AI from experimentation into everyday enterprise use.
Through this collaboration, IBM and Arm aim to extend this track record of innovation by combining IBM’s enterprise leadership in systems reliability, security, and scalability with Arm’s own leadership in power‑efficient architecture, workload enablement expertise, and broad software ecosystem, to build flexible and scalable computing platforms for the future.
“As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run across a broader range of environments,” said Mohamed Awad, Executive Vice President, Cloud AI Business Unit, Arm. “Our collaboration with IBM builds on this progress, extending the Arm ecosystem into mission-critical enterprise environments and giving organizations greater flexibility in how they deploy and scale these workloads.”
“This collaboration is a natural extension of IBM’s leadership in hardware and systems innovation,” said Tina Tarquinio, Chief Product Officer, IBM Z and LinuxONE. “It continues IBM’s pattern of anticipating enterprise needs well ahead of market inflection points—developing capabilities early so clients are prepared as new workloads and business models emerge. Our aim is to expand software choice and improve system performance while maintaining the reliability and security our clients expect.”
“Enterprise infrastructure is entering a new phase where flexibility, workload portability, and ecosystem reach are becoming just as critical as performance and reliability. As AI and data-intensive applications reshape requirements, organizations are looking for platforms that can evolve without forcing disruptive tradeoffs,” said Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “What IBM and Arm are signaling here is a meaningful step toward that future that could broaden how enterprises think about deploying and scaling modern workloads. While the full implications will take time to unfold, it’s clear this reflects a deeper level of investment in long-term platform innovation and ecosystem expansion than we typically see at this stage.”
A Collaboration Designed for What’s Next
The collaboration is focused on three key areas. First, the companies are exploring how to expand virtualization technologies that allow Arm-based software environments to operate within IBM’s enterprise computing platforms. This work is designed to expand software compatibility and further streamline how developers and enterprises bring Arm applications into mission-critical environments.
Secondly, enterprise infrastructure must support high-availability operations, as well as security and local data sovereignty requirements. IBM and Arm are exploring new ways to support the performance and efficiency demands of modern workloads, including AI and data intensive applications. The work includes enabling enterprise systems to recognize and execute Arm applications, with the goal of helping Arm-based environments align with the reliability, security, and operational requirements enterprises need.
Finally, the collaboration is focused on long term ecosystem growth. By creating shared technology layers between platforms, IBM and Arm aim to open the door to broader software ecosystems and greater flexibility in how applications are deployed and managed. This approach could give enterprises more choice, positioning them to adopt new applications and architectures while continuing to leverage their existing investments.
“IBM’s defining role in shaping enterprise infrastructure spans decades, showcasing the breadth and commitment required to support our clients’ most intensive and sensitive workloads,” said Christian Jacobi, Chief Technology Officer and IBM Fellow, IBM Systems Development. “This moment marks the latest step in our innovation journey for future generations of our IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, reinforcing our end-to-end system design as a powerful advantage.”
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
Source: IBM
The post IBM Collaborates with Arm on Dual-Architecture Systems for AI and Data Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer requested a major disaster declaration from President Donald Trump after tornadoes in Branch, Cass and St. Joseph counties killed four people and destroyed homes and businesses.
Microsoft is flexing its muscles with new voice, transcription and image AI models.
At a time when the populist right is on the rise, progressives are shooting blanks while history rushes headlong into an automated future
Canberra rolled out the red carpet this week to one of the AI overlords whose technology is driving the world down the path of creative destruction. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, the putative “good” tech oligarch, was spinning his version of a machine-driven future with the elan of a man who has untangled the mysteries of the universe – or at least built a predictive text model that can scrape the output of humanity and spit out compelling summaries of our collective consciousness.
He regaled the prime minister, assorted elected officials and the tech sector’s glitterati with his pitch for good AI that would transform the economy, before becoming the first to sign up to the government’s new datacentre principles, conveniently released just a week earlier. It was compelling shill and, to be fair, Amodei is not the worst of the gods. He created Anthropic after leaving Open AI when the company dispensed with its not-for-profit, “safety first” mission. He regularly shares thoughtful essays on the path of technology and has been open about his fears for the impact of his own products. He broke with the Trump administration over the limits to how his technology would be used to spy on citizens and enable autonomous weapons, turning himself into an enemy of the state.
Continue reading...Of course the vice-president is obsessed with extraterrestrials – look how bad things have gotten on Earth
I can’t fault anyone for looking around at the state of things on the planet Earth and pondering the existence of aliens. Who wouldn’t want to hop on the Starship Get-Me-The-Hell-Out-Of-Here right now? It costs me a vital organ to fill up my gas tank, everyone I know is unemployed and the cast of Bravo’s Summer House is crumbling before our eyes. Unfortunately for alien observer JD Vance, he’s partially responsible for two of the three. Pretty sure the vice-president isn’t hooking up with Amanda Batula, so he’s off the hook for that one.
On a recent appearance on The Benny Show, a conservative podcast you’ve never heard of, Vance outlined his “obsession” with UFOs. He might not be fully read into the current state of extraterrestrial discourse, but he does have a theory. Vance said: “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion.”
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Continue reading...Christina Marie Plante was last seen on May 19, 1994, after leaving home on foot to go to a stable where her horse was kept.
Affected cars include models in Peugeot, Citroën, Vauxhall, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Jeep and Fiat brands made since 2023
The European carmaker Stellantis has issued a recall for 44,000 UK vehicles after discovering a fault that could result in its cars catching fire.
The fault has been found in certain models across its Peugeot, Citroën, DS Automobiles, Vauxhall, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Jeep and Fiat brands, produced between 2023 and 2026. Key vehicles affected by the recall include the Citroën C3, Peugeot 208 and Vauxhall Mokka.
Continue reading...Understanding the pricing trends and dynamics of the gold market is crucial for making sound financial choices.
Mortgage interest rates have changed significantly in recent weeks. Here's what they are as of April 2, 2026.
Commentary: NASA is sending four astronauts farther into space than any humans have ever traveled. But there's a much deeper subtext about what it all means.
People broke matzoh, read from the Haggadah and sang — with no need to worry about when the next air raid siren might sound.
Two gay Iranian men seeking asylum in the U.S. could face execution if they're deported to Iran, a move the Trump administration has not ruled out.
Exclusive: Ryan Bridge is co-founder of Raise the Colours, which has been criticised for anti-immigrant rhetoric
The leader of a flag campaign group has been arrested on suspicion of causing religiously and racially aggravated harassment.
Ryan Bridge is the co-founder of Raise the Colours, which has put up hundreds of union and Saint George flags across England and attracted criticism for spreading anti-immigrant rhetoric. He was arrested on Tuesday and released on police bail the following day.
Continue reading...BOSTON, April 2, 2026 — QuEra Computing today open-sourced its T-gate simulator (Tsim), a GPU-accelerated quantum circuit simulator that, for the first time, lets researchers simulate non-Clifford gate operations at the speed and scale that quantum error correction (QEC) development demands.
QEC is the essential bridge between today’s noisy quantum processors and the fault-tolerant machines that will deliver practical quantum advantage. Designing effective QEC protocols — including surface code experiments, magic state distillation circuits, and logical gate sequences — requires simulating circuits at the physical level across millions of shots. Because a real fault-tolerant, commercially relevant quantum computer is still in development, the quality of these simulation tools directly shapes the pace of progress.
Yet today’s toolkit has a critical gap. Non-Clifford gates, particularly T-gates, are what make quantum circuits universal: without them, quantum computations offer no speedup over classical computers. The most widely adopted QEC simulator, STIM, handles only Clifford gates. Other tools that support T-gates are limited in qubit count or are too slow for the statistical analysis that QEC research requires. Tsim closes that gap, supporting quantum circuits with 80+ physical qubits and producing millions of samples in parallel — approximately 600 nanoseconds per shot for an 85-qubit circuit on an NVIDIA GH200.
“We built Tsim for our own research and are releasing it because the entire QEC community benefits when researchers can simulate realistic fault-tolerant circuits quickly and at scale,” said Shengtao Wang, VP of Algorithms and Applications at QuEra Computing. “By open-sourcing Tsim, QuEra has extended its fault-tolerant momentum from hardware into software, giving the research community tools to design and validate the protocols that those machines will run.”
By enabling fast simulation of the gate operations that make quantum computing universal, Tsim gives researchers, quantum software developers, and hardware engineers worldwide a powerful tool to:
Tsim is compatible with the STIM circuit format and API, so researchers can extend existing simulation pipelines to non-Clifford circuits with minimal effort. It is also part of QuEra’s open-source Bloqade ecosystem, which provides a complete workflow from quantum program definition through compilation, noise modeling, simulation, and decoding.
The release extends a landmark year for QuEra’s fault-tolerant program. In 2025, four Nature papers — produced in collaboration with, and in several cases led by, QuEra’s academic partners at Harvard and MIT — demonstrated continuous operation of multi-thousand-atom arrays, integrated fault-tolerant architectures with up to 96 logical qubits, the first logical-level magic state distillation, and algorithmic fault tolerance that reduced runtime overhead by 10–100x for reconfigurable architectures such as neutral atoms.
QuEra will hold a Tsim webinar on April 28 at 1:00 PM EST. Register here.
Access Tsim on this GitHub repository.
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 they help users tackle classically intractable problems, and enable government programs to build national capability and sovereign capabilities. We do this through our quantum innovation platform, combining quantum systems available on-premises and via the cloud with application co-design and collaborative research. Born at Harvard and MIT, still advancing together, QuEra operates globally from Boston, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom. As quantum computing moves from “one day” to “Day One,” QuEra delivers practical impact today while advancing toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems. See what’s possible at quera.com.
Source: QuEra
The post QuEra Launches Open-Source Package to Simulate Logical Quantum Circuits at Scale appeared first on HPCwire.
Ukraine has forged the defense industry the continent desperately needs.
Both platforms are great cable TV alternatives, but which is right for you? Let's break it all down.
The coalition of organizations says Trump’s executive order restricting who can receive mail ballots is unconstitutional
A coalition of civil rights groups sued the Trump administration on Thursday, saying that a new executive order to limit mail-in voting is unconstitutional.
The order, which Trump signed on Tuesday, instructs the federal government to come up with a list of eligible citizens who can vote in each state. It also instructs the US Postal Service to only transmit mail-in ballots to people on that list.
Continue reading...Catch up on this year's Oscar winners and some great titles that are leaving soon.
Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed socialist New York State Assembly Member Claire Valdez on Thursday in a Democratic primary shaping up as a test of how factions of New York City’s progressive wing will work together under Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in New York’s 7th Congressional District has put major progressive organizations and figures at odds. Hoping to capitalize on growing national frustration with conservative Democrats and lingering momentum from Mamdani’s win in November, national progressives and their counterparts in New York are fighting to succeed Velázquez with an ally in Congress.
They just haven’t agreed on who it should be.
Sanders, the Vermont independent, is giving a boost to the socialist wing behind Valdez’s campaign, which includes Mamdani and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the campaign shared with The Intercept.
“Claire Valdez is a union organizer who worked minimum-wage fast food jobs and understands firsthand how this economy fails working people,” Sanders said in a statement to The Intercept. “In my view, Congress needs more voices who come from America’s working class. Claire has the experience and vision we need to take on the oligarchy and fight for unions, Medicare for All, and affordable housing. I’m proud to endorse her campaign for Congress.”
Velázquez has endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Valdez’s main competitor. Reynoso also has backing from leading progressive officials and groups in New York City like Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and the New York Working Families Party.
Already facing losses this cycle in races where competing progressive candidates did not consolidate their support, national progressives like Sanders are picking sides in the battle to define the future of the electoral left under Mamdani.
Velázquez endorsed Reynoso shortly after Valdez launched her campaign in January standing alongside Mamdani and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. Some local observers saw Velázquez’s move as a rebuke of the mayor and a harbinger of a fight between factions of New York City’s left, endangering a relationship Mamdani and Velázquez had built since she became the first member of Congress to back his mayoral campaign.
Velázquez left little room to speculate on that question in comments she made to the New York Times in January, when she said Mamdani had opened up conflict between groups in his coalition by involving himself in primaries; that she was unfamiliar with Valdez, who is originally from Texas; and that she was skeptical of newcomers to the city who think they know who should represent New Yorkers in office.
In a statement to The Intercept, Valdez named Sanders as a key inspiration for her political beliefs and career.
“Three things made me a democratic socialist: shitty jobs, the labor movement, and Bernie Sanders’ runs for president,” Valdez said. “His political revolution changed my life — and showed millions of Americans what’s possible when working people organize. I’m grateful for this endorsement and ready to join the fight in Congress against the oligarchs and for economic democracy.”
On Wednesday, the Valdez campaign announced that it had raised $750,000 from 11,200 donors in the filing period that just ended, though the Federal Election Commission has not yet processed and verified the figures. Reynoso had raised just over $317,500 by the end of 2025, before Valdez launched her campaign, according to available FEC data. His campaign has not yet announced its most recent fundraising figures and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Valdez’s endorsements include PAL PAC, the new pro-Palestine group opposing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; Justice Democrats; Leaders We Deserve PAC; Jewish Voice for Peace Action; attorney and political advocate Zephyr Teachout; Democratic New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport; and several members of the New York State Assembly.
Reynoso’s backers include Make the Road Action; New York Communities for Change; several powerful local unions including 32BJ SEIU and DC-37; Attorney General Letitia James; New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler and Pat Ryan; and several New York City Council members.
The post Bernie Sanders Backs Claire Valdez in NYC House Race Dividing Left and Progressives appeared first on The Intercept.
Those in US given chance to have more professional usernames without losing access to account
Did your McLovin!1976!@gmail.com email address seem funny at the time but less so now you are applying for dozens of jobs?
Google has said it is giving US users a chance to appear more professional by letting them change their Google account username – whatever appears before @gmail.com in an email address – without losing access to their account.
Continue reading...New tickets released for some group games and final
Fans attempting to buy tickets encounter glitches
Fifa has raised the top ticket price for this year’s World Cup final to $10,990 as it released a new batch of tickets for sale on Wednesday.
The news, which came after the 48-team field for the World Cup was set, will do little to quell claims that Fifa is pricing fans out of the tournament. The most expensive ticket for the 2022 World Cup final was about $1,600.
Continue reading...Christina Marie Plante was reported missing in May of 1994 from Star Valley when she was just 13 years old
A woman in Arizona who went missing 32 years ago, when she was just 13 years old, has been found alive, authorities said this week.
Christina Marie Plante was reported missing in May 1994 from Star Valley, Arizona, after she “vanished without a trace from her community”, according to a statement released on Wednesday by the Gila county sheriff’s office.
Continue reading...Anger in France after US president puts on French accent and mocks Macron during private lunch in Washington
Emmanuel Macron has said Donald Trump’s comments about his marriage were “neither elegant nor up to standard” after the US president put on an accent and mocked his French counterpart and his wife during a private lunch in Washington.
Arriving in South Korea on Thursday, Macron made clear his displeasure at Trump’s comments, which appeared briefly in a video on the White House YouTube channel before being removed.
Continue reading...With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck, a new analysis finds.
One market analyst says Trump warning the Iran war will take 2-3 more weeks, without a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, "was far less than" investors had hoped for.
Commentary: Foldable phones have been full of compromises for the longest time, but things are changing slowly and steadily.
Mastery of banal style is losing its usefulness – but language is more powerful than ever. It’s up to the writer to do what machines can’t
I recently heard an exchange at a playground that should worry the executives at AI companies more than any analyst’s prediction of a bubble. A boy and a girl, maybe 10 years old, were fighting. “That’s AI! That’s AI!” the girl was shouting. What she meant was that the boy was indulging a new and particular breed of nonsense: language that sounds meaningful but has no connection to reality. The children have figured the new world out quickly, as they do.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, neither as an apocalypse nor as the solution to all life’s problems, but as a disruptive tool. The recent scandal over Shy Girl, the novel by Mia Ballard, was doubly revealing. Hachette cancelled its publication amid claims it was reliant on AI generation (Ballard has said that an acquaintance who edited the self-published version used AI, not her). But the book was originally self-published. Apparently readers and editors didn’t mind until the use of AI was pointed out to them.
Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure
Continue reading...Your home deserves the best floodlights. Here are the bulbs that impressed me the most.
Player was in rehab before lawsuit was filed, says attorney
Wide receiver’s lawyer says client innocent of wrongdoing
Los Angeles Rams star Puka Nacua is in rehab and was there before he was sued by a woman who says he made an antisemitic statement and bit her on the shoulder, according to his attorney.
“He was in [rehab] a substantial period of time before any of these allegations broke ... and he’s scheduled to be there for a while longer,” Levi McCathern told The California Post.
McCathern told the newspaper Nacua’s decision to enter rehab was not a direct response to the lawsuit his accuser filed against him by Madison Atiabi last month, but an attempt “to improve his overall behavior in every aspect of his life.”
Continue reading...NASA's Artemis II astronauts launched on a nine-and-a-half-day mission around the moon and back.
im 6' 205 lbs with a rally xl for my first onewheel. im getting about 16 miles per ~80% of a full battery charge. im riding around 18 mph on asphalt. does that sound like normal range?
thanks
Bank of England survey in March shows chief financial officers foresee 3.7% increase over coming year
Companies in the UK expect to raise their prices more rapidly over the coming months as the war in the Middle East drives up costs, Bank of England research shows.
The Bank’s regular survey of more than 2,000 chief financial officers conducted last month, after the Iran conflict began, shows they now expect to raise their prices by 3.7% over the coming year.
Continue reading...Bank holiday traffic predicted to peak on Thursday, as petrol and diesel prices surge from fallout of Iran war
Drivers are being urged to hunt for the cheapest petrol and “to fill up as usual” as UK travellers prepare to make 21.7m journeys on what is expected to be the busiest Easter on the roads in four years.
The average price of a litre of unleaded petrol rose by 20p from 132.83p on 1 March to 152.83p by the end of the month, raising concerns about the cost of filling up for Easter journeys, as rising oil prices triggered by the US-Israel war with Iran translated to higher prices at the pumps.
Continue reading...Once-hyped, celebrity-backed company snapped up by American Exchange Group for fraction of former value
Allbirds, the San Francisco sustainable trainer brand once valued at more than $4bn, is being sold for just $39m (£29.6m) after global demand for its wool-based footwear failed to materialise.
American Exchange Group, the owner of a string of brands including the fashion label Ed Hardy and the accessories maker Born, is snapping up the struggling company once touted as the future of footwear.
Continue reading...Thousands were killed and wounded during the Battle of Copenhagen, considered one of Adm. Horatio Nelson's "great battles."
Funeral director Robert Bush had previously admitted to dozens of counts of fraud at hearing in October
A funeral director has admitted preventing a lawful burial after 30 bodies and a quantity of ashes were found at a funeral home in Hull in 2024.
Robert Bush, 48, had previously admitted to dozens of counts of fraud at a hearing in October, after police raided the premises of Legacy funeral home on Hessle Road over concern for care of the dead.
Continue reading...Some schools in Minnesota have already announced closings or shifts to virtual learning on Thursday as another round of winter weather threatens parts of the state.
For examples of how little a team’s form in the World Cup run-in matters in the tournament itself, look no further than the US
The last time the United States men’s national team entered into the final stretch of their preparations for a World Cup on home soil, the results were dire. From January through April of 1994, the Americans, who were mostly sequestered in a full-time training camp, played 12 games and won just twice. They even managed to lose to Iceland, who were a total non-factor in global soccer back then.
Then, that ’94 team went on to survive the group stage and narrowly lose to eventual champions Brazil, 1-0, in the round of 16. They delivered on expectations in spite of their deflating run-in.
Continue reading...De-dollarization promises to reorder the world, reducing American power globally
The US-Israel war on Iran is expensive. It’s expensive in terms of human lives, first of all. It’s expensive too, in pure currency – about $12bn a week for the US. And it’s expensive in how it’s causing the tectonic structures that underpin our global economy to shift. De-dollarization, the name given to the process countries undertake in unwinding their reliance on the dollar, promises to reorder the world, reducing American power globally. Its impact will be felt domestically in what we pay to borrow and whether we can afford to borrow at all.
Iran’s near-total blockade of the strait of Hormuz has had a dramatic impact on the prices of oil and natural gas, which puts major inflationary pressure on the economy of every country in the world. Practically, inflation makes people and businesses poorer, a process that reinforces itself if it’s not stopped (which is partly why central banks exist).
Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: OpenAI hasn't been shy about spending money lobbying for favorable laws and regulations. But when it comes to its involvement with child safety advocacy groups, the company has apparently decided it's best to stay in the shadows -- even if it means hiding from the people actually pushing for policy changes. According to a report from the San Francisco Standard, a number of people involved in the California-based Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition were blindsided to learn their efforts were secretly being funded by OpenAI. Per the Standard, the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition was a group formed to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act, a piece of California legislation proposed earlier this year that would require AI firms to implement age verification and additional safeguards for users under the age of 18. That bill was backed by OpenAI in partnership with Common Sense Media, which proposed the legislation as a compromise after the two groups had pushed dueling ballot initiatives last year. But when the coalition started to reach out to child safety groups and other advocacy organizations to try to get them to lend support to the bill, OpenAI was apparently conveniently left off the messaging. The AI giant was also left out of the marketing on the coalition's website, according to the Standard. That reportedly led to a number of groups and individuals lending their support to the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition without realizing that they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. As it turns out, OpenAI isn't just one of the members of the coalition; it is the group's biggest funder. In fact, the Standard characterized the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition as being "entirely funded" by OpenAI. While it's not clear exactly how much the company has funneled to this particular group, a Wall Street Journal report from January said OpenAI pledged $10 million to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act. Gizmodo notes that OpenAI's backing of the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act "could be self-serving for CEO Sam Altman," who just so happens to head a company called World that provides age verification services.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In week five of Rhik Samadder’s diary, our resident AI skeptic decided to let AI take the lead on a date. If uncanny valley was a conversational style, it’s this
I’m single. Is it because I am emotionally avoidant, waiting on a unicorn, or under 6ft tall? Perhaps a spicy meatball of all three?
Or could it be that I haven’t used the magic of AI yet?
Continue reading...Workers allege abuse, visa fraud and medical neglect during the New Jersey temple’s construction – and say two died from lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust
In the center of the suburban town of Robbinsville, New Jersey, sits the largest modern Hindu mandir outside India.
What visitors from around the world see is a breathtaking display of craftsmanship – hand-carved stone from Rajasthan assembled across a sprawling 185-acre complex. The temple has gone viral on social media for its intricate designs, which took millions of hours to complete. Baps Swaminarayan Akshardham, the religious organization behind the site, has built similar temples across the globe. But some workers say these monumental structures came at a high cost.
Continue reading...Simon Dudley fired after his comments were condemned by prime minister and families of fire victims
Reform UK’s housing spokesperson has been sacked from his role after he described the Grenfell Tower fire as a “tragedy” but said that “everyone dies in the end”.
Keir Starmer had called on Nigel Farage to sack Simon Dudley, a former head of Homes England, after comments which were condemned by Grenfell families and others.
Continue reading...US moves towards reestablishing working relations between two countries after abducting President Nicolás Maduro
The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
In recent years, the unhoused community in Wilmington has grown in size and in its need. In response, Mayor John Carney introduced a short-term plan to convert an Eastside park into the only sanctioned city area for its unhoused population.
A chaotic scene unfolded during a sunny Wednesday afternoon at Christina Park as Wilmington officials attempted to carry out a plan to move residents of a city-sanctioned homeless encampment out of their personal tents and into government-issued ones.
The effort drew protests from housing advocates and resistance from some residents, who feared the changes could threaten their property and disrupt the community.
The morning began calmly enough at the Eastside park as city workers prepared to place wooden pallets onto squares painted on the park’s grassy field, marking newly designated tent spots. Previously, residents of the encampment had chosen their own spaces, spreading throughout the park with tents, sofas, generators, and grills.
As the crews set up, several housing advocates also congregated, and could be seen speaking with encampment residents, city officials and police.
The mood was initially lighthearted but grew tense as the day progressed, with many advocates saying they became frustrated with city decisions to abruptly decrease the size of each tent plot, and to restrict the amount of belongings that residents could keep outside the tents.
Also inflaming tensions was a rumor that spread during the day that a city official said police would arrest anyone who refused to move into the new tents.
“They are threatening arrest,” housing advocate Shyanne Miller said through a megaphone as protesters gathered. “We are not having it.”
Eventually, several of the advocates began to demonstrate against the city’s actions. Some even placed themselves behind a forklift to prevent work crews from setting up pallets on which the new tents would be placed.
“As soon as all this stuff came to light, it became super evident that doing that work would be incredibly unethical and ultimately damaging to the community out here in the park,” said one protester who offered his name only as Gene.
Throughout the day, officials from Mayor John Carney’s office sought to defend their decision to move the encampment residents, stating that it was done out of concern for the park’s appearance, as well as to make it easier for paramedic crews to respond to emergencies in the community.
Asked if residents who didn’t move into the new tents would be arrested, Carney’s chief of staff, Cerron Cade, said that those who refuse to move to city-provided tents would have to leave the encampment entirely.
“We have to have some rules. And if folks don’t want to follow the rules, there’s no doors to the park. They can leave,” Cade said.
As Cade spoke, some residents of the encampment chided him for the city’s action. Still, most watched passively as the protesters and city officials engaged in standoffs and debates.
In interviews with Spotlight Delaware, six residents of the encampments expressed fear that the city’s mandate to move would result in the loss of their possessions – including their own personal tents.
Two of those residents also said they would outright refuse to move out of their personal tent, complaining that the city’s plan to condense the community onto a smaller footprint would spark conflicts.
“I don’t want no f***** neighbors, dude,” said one of them who didn’t provide their name.
“We’re not moving,” said another resident, Ron “Philly” Simmons, who has acted as a de-facto leader of the community during its first few months as a city-sanctioned encampment.
In contrast, one man who was settling into one of the new city-issued tents, called them “fantastic,” even as his move clearly exhausted him. The 67-year-old , Jerry Alford, said he has cancer, among other ailments.
But Alford’s enthusiasm changed when asked whether he knew that the table he had placed in front of the new tent was an apparent violation of new city rules.
The rules state that encampment residents can only keep a chair and a bike outside of their tents. All other belongings must remain in their tent.
“Why? What’s that hurt?” Alford asked, referring to his table.
By Wednesday evening, Wilmington officials released a statement again asserting that the park setup is intended to improve safety, organization, and emergency access for the community.
Officials noted that residents are being asked to consolidate belongings into city-issued tents to reduce clutter, trash, and pest concerns, with additional services like showers and laundry expected soon.
“This site has always been intended to be a temporary solution as folks move toward treatment and more stable housing,” the statement read.
City officials also asserted that no arrests were made at the park and that they were “disappointed” that protests delayed setup efforts.
By the late afternoon, city crews took their forklift and left the park with several pallets still in a stack and some tents not yet pitched.
The decision to move people out of their tents comes about six months after Carney first declared that Christina Park would become a legal homeless encampment in the city.
He did so in line with recommendations that had been issued by Wilmington’s homelessness task force, which Carney established early in 2025.
Following Carney’s decision, dozens of people moved into the park. By December, Spotlight Delaware reported that an estimated 50 tents had been pitched in the grassy field along the northern half of the park.
Despite the growth, Simmons told Spotlight Delaware then “there’s no way to really live in a public park” — particularly one that at the time had no showers or bathrooms.
By January, the city entered into a contract with the homeless services organization, Friendship House, to oversee the homeless community by coordinating donations, providing bathrooms, cleaning services and security, and by offering case management for residents.
That same month, the city also brought portable restrooms for the encampment – which residents had been requesting for weeks. Shower and laundry services are expected to begin at the park later this month, according to the city.
On Wednesday, the executive director of the Friendship House, Kim Eppehimer, told Spotlight Delaware that the decision to move park residents out of their tents and into new ones was a city decision. The Friendship House, she said, is trying to support residents while helping to facilitate the city’s plan.
“This is a difficult situation, and we truly recognize that,” Eppehimer said.
The post Tensions flare as Wilmington officials move the Christina Park homeless encampment appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2, PC; Deck Nine/Square Enix
Max and Chloe, the two teen protagonists of the 2015 game, reunite as adults – giving players the chance to finally finish their journey
In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for two reasons: its female protagonists, a depressingly rare feature at the time, and its unique brand of millennial cringe. The thirtysomething Frenchmen who created this series may not have had the best grasp of the 2010s teen lexicon, but they did have a good gauge on what’s important about any coming-of-age story, and that’s the relationships between the characters. Max Caulfield, the shy, time-travelling wannabe photographer, and Chloe Price, the traumatised, punk-rock tearaway, had a memorably intense friendship. It was the heart and soul of that game, and now, 11 years later, they are reunited as adults in this final chapter of their story.
For a lot of players, Max and Chloe felt like more than best friends. The game’s original developers were not brave enough to make this explicit in 2015, but newer custodians Deck Nine retconned a romantic relationship between Max and Chloe into 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. You can still play Reunion as if the two really were just friends, resulting in some awkward ambiguity in some scenes. Whichever way you slice it, though, this is a game about first love, and how it always stays with you, even when its object does not. And damned if it didn’t make me feel something.
Continue reading...President Trump said in a speech that the U.S. will complete its military mission in Iran "very shortly," and that U.S. forces have achieved "overwhelming victories."
Divers in race against time to unearth wreck of the Dannebroge before seabed becomes construction site
More than 200 years after being sunk by Adm Horatio Nelson and the British fleet, a Danish warship has been discovered on the seabed of Copenhagen harbour by marine archaeologists.
Working in thick sediment and almost zero visibility 15 metres (49ft) beneath the waves, divers are in a race against time to unearth the 19th-century wreck of the Dannebroge before it becomes a construction site in a new housing district being built off the Danish coast.
Continue reading...Democrats criticize speech as doing little to answer Americans’ ‘most basic questions’. Plus, how rap lyrics were used to help sentence a man to death
Good morning.
Donald Trump declared the month-long US-Israeli war against Iran a success “nearing completion” in his prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening – despite the conflict wreaking global economic chaos, damaging transatlantic alliances and hitting his approval ratings.
What is the significance of Trump’s comments on HEU? The apparent decision to leave it appears to conflict with his assertions that a key war aim was to ensure Iran could never make a nuclear bomb.
Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.
What has Houston said about the rocket’s deployment? Flight controllers confirmed that all four solar arrays, which will provide the spacecraft with continuous electrical power throughout its lunar journey, were deployed successfully.
Continue reading...If you want a Galaxy S26 Ultra but can't quite afford it, shopping the older model is the way to go.
 | Just click Confirm Order on Floatwheel website and it chucks an error I swear it was working earlier today and now that I have the crypto in my wallet it doesn't work :( [link] [comments] |
Whether in the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, coaches and players at this NCAA tournament have found the fun in basketball again
Kara Lawson’s Duke team saw their Final Four dreams dashed with a 70-58 loss to UCLA on Sunday. The Blue Devils had pulled an impressive, buzzer-beating upset of No 2 seed LSU in the Sweet 16 days before, but against the No 1 Bruins in the Elite Eight, they didn’t give a repeat performance. They missed a few key moments in transition that could have changed the game and helped them to their first Final Four in 20 years.
In the end, though, it was OK.
Continue reading...The supreme court appears poised to reject Trump’s attack on a foundation of US identity. We must hope it follows through
American opponents of birthright citizenship – the right of all those born on the soil of a country to claim full legal rights and political representation in that nation – like to point out that many countries don’t have it. On Wednesday at the supreme court, during the oral arguments in Trump v Barbara, the case challenging Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States by executive order, the Trump administration’s solicitor general, John Sauer, claimed that “almost every country” denies birthright citizenship. Trump himself made the unusual choice to attend the oral arguments in person, signaling his investment in the issue and perhaps hoping that his presence would intimidate the justices into ruling in his favor. But he left soon after Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the ACLU who represented his opponents in court, began speaking. Not long after he left the supreme court building, Trump used Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to echo the rightwing argument about the supposed rarity of birthright citizenship worldwide. “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship! President DONALD J. TRUMP” he posted.
This is not true. The United States’ birthright citizenship – which was originally established in very plain, explicit terms in the 14th amendment, and has been reaffirmed twice by Congress and by more than a century of supreme court precedent – is typical of the Americas. In the western hemisphere, only a handful of countries deny automatic full citizenship to infants born within their borders. They are contrasted with the rest of North and South America, where the legacy of slavery led most states to adopt birthright citizenship.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...Exclusive: Pressure intensifies for Gabbard after president’s displeasure with Iran war testimony
Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet officials in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It is not clear that Trump will actually fire Gabbard over the episode. Currently, there is no standout candidate to take the job, and advisers have cautioned that creating a high-profile vacancy before a successor is ready could cause unhelpful political distractions.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
In recent months, rising operating costs and low sale prices have put significant financial strain on Delaware crop farmers. Fertilizer and fuel price increases spurred by the ongoing war in Iran have made the situation more challenging for local farmers, forcing them to make difficult choices about growing strategies heading into this year’s planting season.
Amid already razor-thin profit margins, fertilizer and fuel price increases caused by the war in Iran are putting more stress on Delaware farmers heading into the spring planting season.
While some Delaware farmers were able to forward contract their fertilizer and fuel cost, meaning they locked in prices months ago, those who waited will be forced to endure costs that have nearly doubled since the war began in late February.
In an industry that is already volatile, with corn and soybean prices low and operating costs for farmers high, many Delaware farmers say they don’t have much room to weather the costs of war-induced price hikes.
“The prices aren’t working,” Dover-area farmer Paul Cartanza told Spotlight Delaware. “Every time something happens, the farmers are the first to feel it.”
Fuel and fertilizer costs make up between 18% and 20% of most farmers’ total operating costs, said University of Maryland agricultural economics researcher James McDonald. While exact prices depend on the type of fertilizer, prices have increased by somewhere between 15% and 70% since the war started.
The price spikes stem from the Iran government’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz — a critical sea passage for oil, fertilizer ingredients, and other exports from the Middle East — in retaliation to American and Israeli bombings of the country. The fertilizer price increases, specifically, are a result of the blockage of nitrogen and phosphate materials, which are two key fertilizers for American farmers.
The Trump administration has said it is attempting to increase fertilizer imports from Venezuela, in order to offset the impacts of the lacking Middle Eastern supply.
But at a time when corn prices have dropped precipitously to $4 a bushel and soybean prices to $10.20, leaving farmers with less upside potential on their crops, Delaware farmers say they will need to turn to strategies like applying less fertilizer to fields and not tilling the crops in order to get by.
Not tilling, or growing crops without turning over the soil beforehand, saves on costs because farmers don’t have to pay for as much fuel to run their tractors and do the tilling.
Farmers say these fertilizer and tilling changes might decrease crop outputs, particularly if it also ends up being a bad weather year. But many do not see an alternative when fuel prices are soaring by 150%.
If crop yields are lighter as a result, it could also raise food prices later in the year – potentially leading to another burden for consumers.
“You don’t have much of a choice,” Harrington-based farmer Dave Marvel said. “This is a major issue. When fuel is up, everything is up.”
Adding to the challenging circumstances, farmers say, is the uncertainty as to when the war might end, and how long it could take for fuel and fertilizer prices to readjust.
“The fertilizer impacts might last for quite a long time,” said McDonald, the university researcher.” They’ll be facing higher prices, most likely well into the future.”
Even before the war in Iran skyrocketed input prices for the season, Delaware farmers were worried about scraping by this year with low prices and high input costs.
Jim Minner, a Felton-area corn and soybean farmer, told Spotlight Delaware in early March that he had adopted a mindset of “just get by” because of crop prices being so low and machinery costs so high in recent years.
A one-time farm bridge assistance payment from the federal government earlier this spring gave farmers a bailout amid the challenging circumstances, which many said they put toward bills they hadn’t been able to pay, or small machinery upgrades that they had been meaning to do.
Now, though, the fertilizer and fuel price landscape is adding another layer of uncertainty to an industry in which some are questioning its sustainability.
The price hikes also come just as Delaware farmers are beginning to plant their crops, which will begin in mid-April and continue through June for most farm operations.
Minner, who farms about 550 acres across Kent County, said he was able to forward contract most of his fertilizer this past fall, and pre-buy about 1,300 gallons of diesel at $2.60 per gallon – substantially lower than the current $5.79 per gallon that he’s seen at the pump.
While the early contracting has eased some of his financial stress, Minner said, he is still worried about having to refuel his tractor and combine tanks, and purchasing more nitrogen for his corn crops in June.
“You can cut back [on fertilizer] a little bit, but when you cut back, you’re going to cut yield back,” he said.
Smyrna-area farmer Jonathan Snow similarly said that he had already locked in the prices on some of his fertilizer before the war began. He will need to assess as the spring progresses whether he can get by with less fertilizer, or if his yields will suffer too much, depending on how wet or dry the weather has been.
Cartanza, the Dover-area farmer, has a different approach.
Cartanza did not forward contract his fertilizer this season, so he anticipates having to cut back on fertilizer and “rob the ground” of its existing nutrients, for which he said he might pay the price in future years.
Cartanza also said he intends to lean into the no-till or minimum-till crops, which allows him to save on fuel for his machinery and limit the amount of fertilizer he uses.
As Delaware farmers say they are keeping their heads down, trying to cut costs when possible and re-assess as the season goes on, McDonald said he anticipates the price impacts could persist for at least another six months.
Even if the war ends, or the Strait of Hormuz reopens, it will take significant time for facilities to repair from damages they have suffered and restart operations, and for prices to readjust, he said.
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 Delaware farmers feel increased strain from Iran war on fertilizer, fuel prices appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware labor officials and the Trump administration are at odds over whether immigration enforcement officials should have access to residents’ sensitive data. A Wednesday court hearing comes as a bill to restrict some state departments from sharing immigration information with federal officials is being considered by Delaware lawmakers.
Delaware’s top federal judge grilled attorneys from the state Department of Labor as they argued against complying with federal immigration officials’ efforts to obtain information about businesses suspected of employing undocumented employees.
Delaware District Court Chief Judge Colm Connolly interrogated Jennifer-Kate Aaronson, an attorney with the Delaware Department of Labor, during a lengthy Wednesday morning hearing, in which he questioned the legal basis of Aaronson’s argument for not complying with an administrative subpoena from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The case stems from a subpoena ICE issued to the Delaware Department of Labor in April 2025 seeking wage records for 15 Delaware businesses for the final two quarters of 2024, which the agency suspected of employing undocumented immigrants.
Connolly did not issue a ruling on Wednesday, and it remains unclear when one may come down.
Aaronson contended on Wednesday the subpoena is “overly burdensome,” and complying with it would hinder the normal operations of the state DOL. Disclosing the information, she added, would damage the trust between employers and the department.
Providing the information to ICE also would jeopardize the State Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund, which is funded by employer contributions and provides unemployment benefits to eligible workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own, she said.
Aaronson also argued that the DOL did not have to provide the information to ICE because the request fell under an exception in federal regulation law.
The subpoena, which originated from “hotline tips” that ICE received, sought employees’ names, addresses, wages and Social Security numbers from 15 Delaware businesses, according to court records. ICE’s subpoena efforts align with the Trump administration’s broader strategy of using federal and state agency data to bolster its promised immigration enforcement push.
Attorneys with the U.S. Attorney’s Office argued in court documents that wage records would help ICE further its focus on “worksite enforcement” and may help determine whether employees are using fake Social Security numbers or if employers are paying workers “under the table,” or using cash and without reporting it to the IRS, court records show.
Claudia Pare, assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware who represented ICE’s case Wednesday, argued the DOL is legally required to comply with the subpoena. Connolly appeared to agree with Pare’s arguments.
The DOL is not exempt from complying with a federal subpoena, Connolly said as he read the corresponding federal regulation law statutes aloud to the court.
Connolly publicly dissected the regulations that Aaronson cited by projecting his computer tab onto a large screen at the head of the courtroom. He asked Aaronson where the law shows the DOL has “full discretion” to decide not to comply with a federal subpoena as he highlighted law text.
Aaronson was not able to point to a specific subsection of the regulations in response, but she maintained that disclosure of sensitive information to ICE has never been mandated by federal law.
Connolly, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018, said it was not Aaronson’s “best day” when she wrote the legal brief presenting her case.
Delaware’s U.S. Attorney Ben Wallace said in a written statement that compliance with a federal subpoena is not optional, even when the recipient is a state.
“We are confident the District Court will see things the same way, and we eagerly await its decision,” Wallace said.
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings sat in the gallery during Wednesday’s hearing.
The court case was first filed in July 2025 by Julianne Murray, Delaware’s former interim U.S. attorney who was appointed by the Trump administration that same month. Murray stepped down in December after Delaware’s federal judges rejected her as Trump’s handpicked appointee, and instead selected Murray’s first assistant, Benjamin Wallace, for the role.
Pare, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, asked Connolly to seal the April subpoena when the case was first filed, arguing that ICE did not want to have the 15 business names become public and “prematurely alert” the targets of the agency’s worksite investigations.
Aaronson then filed a motion to unseal the subpoena in August. The 15 businesses suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants should have the opportunity to come to court and argue against their information being transmitted to ICE, she said during a previous court hearing.
While Connolly did not officially rule on the motion to unseal the subpoena Wednesday, he said it remained a good decision to keep the subpoena under seal. If suspected businesses are made public and associated with potentially hiring undocumented employees, it could harm their reputation if they’re ultimately found to be innocent, he said.
DOL officials received at least four subpoenas from ICE since February 2025, Aaronson said during an August court hearing. Department officials complied with one ICE subpoena that sought information about a single individual, Aaronson said.
In December, Rep. Sean Lynn (D-Dover) introduced legislation, House Bill 238, that would bar the Delaware departments of finance and labor from disclosing information about a person’s citizenship or immigration status included in any tax return, tax document or database within both departments.
To disclose that information, DOL employees would need to get approval from the Delaware Attorney General or a court order associated with a felony criminal investigation. House Bill 238 would also make the disclosure of the information, without prior approval or court order, a misdemeanor.
The legislation is awaiting consideration in the House Revenue & Finance committee.
It’s unclear how Lynn’s bill, if passed, would affect the subpoena case and any subsequent subpoena the DOL receives from ICE.
While Connolly did not issue a ruling in the case Wednesday, he appeared to support the federal officials’ arguments. It remains unclear when a ruling could come down.
The post Delaware’s top federal judge grills labor officials over ICE subpoena appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Last April, the president unleashed a tidal wave of tariffs on ‘liberation day’. Analysts say the policy has failed, even by the Trump administration’s own terms
Before Donald Trump declared “liberation day” on 2 April 2025 and shocked the world by raising import tariffs on nearly every country the US did business with, he had spent almost three months causing chaos in Washington.
The wholesale slashing of government jobs under Doge (the “department of government efficiency”) and the defunding of US aid agencies had shown White House watchers that the US president was in a hurry to upset institutions he considered profligate or useless.
Continue reading...Over 60 percent have used the tech in their work, a study found, even as experts say its unreliability could compromise judicial authority.
A Washington Post investigation reveals that a prolonged environmental review pushed back work on the Potomac Interceptor that was initially proposed in 2018.
As Iran’s retaliatory attacks hit regional centers of commerce, such as Dubai, the majority of the deaths have been among migrant workers who could not afford to flee.
Fake X account posing as his vet sparked global false reports of Jonathan’s death while soliciting crypto donations
At 194 years old, Jonathan the giant tortoise was a youngster when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne – and has now lived long enough to fall victim to a crypto scam.
News outlets including the BBC, Daily Mail and USA Today falsely reported his death after an X account posing as Jonathan’s vet broke the news.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 2, No. 1,748.
Our reporting started, like much of our work, in a spreadsheet. As I parsed through federal court data, I noticed something odd: Within months of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, prosecutors began filing obscure charges related to trespassing on military property — so many, in fact, that more cases were filed in 2025 than in the prior decade.
Nearly all of these charges originated from cases along the U.S. southern border, where last spring, the White House designated large swaths of land as national defense areas. Putting them under military authority allowed troops to play an unprecedented role in apprehending undocumented immigrants; federal soldiers are generally barred from enforcing the law on domestic soil. If you were caught in one of these zones, the government could also now prosecute you for breaking federal laws, including one enacted in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.
In an investigation we published recently, my co-reporters Perla Trevizo, Abe Streep, Pratheek Rebala and I dug into what experts say is a major flaw afflicting these prosecutions that threatens to ensnare people for crimes they did not commit: Migrants didn’t know the land they were crossing now belonged to the armed forces. And many judges have ruled that you can’t be guilty of trespassing on military land if you had no idea you were on it.
Since April of last year, we found, at least 4,700 immigrants already charged with entering the country illegally faced these military trespass charges; at least one had to wait in jail for more than a month to stand trial. Most of the charges didn’t stick. In fact, we found that in 60% of the resolved cases, the trespass charges were dropped or dismissed. Yet prosecutors kept filing them.
Download the full data used in our analysis on our GitHub page.
As we visited courtrooms in West Texas and New Mexico and pored through case records, it became clear how hard it would be to prove that someone knowingly trespassed on military land. Some couldn’t read. At least one person didn’t speak English or Spanish. The small signs are spaced far apart and easy to miss, and many migrants were arrested far away from them.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the prosecutions have deterred unauthorized border crossings and cartel activity. And prosecutors have argued in court that illegally crossing is enough to prove criminal intent for the military trespassing charges. Senior officials in the U.S. attorney’s offices handling trespass cases declined repeated interview requests.
In November, Perla, Abe and I set out to report throughout southern New Mexico and West Texas to see for ourselves what information we could gather about where the zones were and how they were marked.
Abe and I arranged a ride-along with Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart, whose New Mexico agency shares jurisdiction with Border Patrol and the military in one of the zones. A sergeant from her office drove us along a dirt road that parallels the border as she pointed out 12-by-18-inch red and white signs opposite the fence. She told us her office hadn’t received specific information about where the military zone boundaries were; all they had were the signs. Even in broad daylight, it was difficult to read the words on them unless we got within a few feet.
On another outing in New Mexico — this time with the photographer Paul Ratje — I went to a spot in Sunland Park where Ratje said he’d previously taken photos of the border fence. The 2-acre dirt lot sat less than a mile from residential neighborhoods and a popular Italian restaurant. From the lot, we could see more red and white signs along the nearby border road.
While we were taking pictures, a pickup truck with a Border Patrol livery approached us. I was surprised to see that inside, instead of Border Patrol agents, there were two Army soldiers. The soldier in the passenger seat pointed to the signage along the border road and told us not to go past there. The border road was part of the defense area, he told us, though the lot we were standing in wasn’t.
The next day, Perla and I returned to the same location. This time, a Border Patrol agent drove up. The lot was part of the defense area, he told us. When I pointed out that I had been given conflicting information the previous day, the agent said he was told by the military that people couldn’t be in this area. We left. (An Army spokesperson said that the base responsible for the defense area in New Mexico published a map in December; the lot was not included in it.)
My interactions with Border Patrol and the military had so far only added to our confusion about these areas. Later that day, Perla and I drove south to a stretch of border fence along the Rio Grande near Tornillo, Texas. We saw a Border Patrol van near a gate in the fence. We thought we’d try to ask where the defense area was. Before we could do that, another Border Patrol van pulled up to us. Soldiers, including one with a rifle strapped across his shoulder, emerged from both vehicles. Another soldier told us he was “not at liberty to discuss” the national defense area’s exact location.
The response bewildered us. We asked him how we were supposed to know whether we were trespassing. He shrugged. (Spokespeople for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense did not directly answer questions about these interactions.)
As we got back into our rental SUV, Perla and I wondered: If we, as reporters who investigate things for a living, couldn’t get a straight answer on where these military zones were, how did the government expect people crossing the border to do better?
In the four months between our reporting trip and the publication of our investigation on March 16, the government continued to file military trespassing charges in more than 1,300 cases. And it’s established new military zones, too, in Arizona, California and Texas.
The post Why We Went Looking for National Defense Areas Along the U.S. Southern Border appeared first on ProPublica.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 2, No. 1,026.
Gas is being stolen, and station workers in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India have been killed over shortages and high prices. Unrest is set to worsen the longer the war lasts.
The more people use social media, the less likely they are to believe democracy is the best form of government, the survey of over 20,000 Americans found.
Battlefield outcomes are connected by the sharing of weapons and intelligence as well as the damage to the global economy
The Iran and Ukraine wars are becoming more intertwined with every passing week – to the point that some analysts argue the two conflicts are beginning to merge.
Quite how each war will affect the trajectory of the other is hard to predict, but it is already clear that their interconnectedness is drawing more countries into both cauldrons, extending an arc of instability that straddles Europe and the Middle East.
Continue reading...The government looks ill prepared for the coming stagflation storm – its ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach won’t survive a blast of reality
Britain is facing the most severe energy shock since the early 1970s, but have no fear: the government has a plan. Details of said plan are still a little sketchy, but will be unveiled in the fullness of time. No need to panic. Keep calm and carry on.
It remains to be seen whether the UK is better prepared to cope with the fallout from Donald Trump’s war with Iran than it was with the pandemic six years ago. To be honest, that wouldn’t be difficult. Yet it is not exactly comforting that ministers are sending out a “we have your back” message to the public while at the same time seeking to reassure the financial markets that any help will be limited and targeted.
Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Scientists say extreme March heat caused an unusually rapid collapse of snowpack across the American West that's leaving major basins at record or near-record lows. "This year is on a whole other level," said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist. "Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning." The Guardian reports: [...] The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%. "This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past," Schumacher said. Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on March 8. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle -- a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off. "March is often a big month for snowstorms," Schumacher said. "Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth." More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was "likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west," climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week. "Beyond the conspicuous 'weirdness' of it all," Swain added, "the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west." Calling the toll left by the heat "nothing short of shocking," Swain noted that California was tied for its worst mountain snowpack value on record. While the highest elevations are still coated in white, "lower slopes are now completely bare nearly statewide."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA's Artemis II astronauts will spend about 24 hours orbiting the Earth and running checks on their spacecraft and life support systems before heading to the moon.
In today’s newsletter: Britain’s refusal to be drawn into the Iran war has triggered a backlash from the White House, with the president’s fury exposing the fragility of this once unshakeable partnership
Good morning. Another week, another tirade against the UK from Donald Trump. The US-Israeli conflict with Iran has further inflamed tensions in the special relationship, which was already under strain from attacks by the capricious US leader. So far this week, Trump has once again mocked the UK’s navy, instructed allies worried about jet fuel supplies to take it from the strait of Hormuz themselves, and announced that the US is considering leaving Nato.
The outbursts have become a pattern since the war with Iran began – and mark a departure from the unlikely friendly relationship Starmer and Trump have enjoyed until now.
Middle East | Donald Trump used a prime-time address to the nation to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiralling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.
UK politics | The UK will seek an even deeper partnership with the EU because of the instability wreaked by Donald Trump’s war with Iran, Keir Starmer has said, adding that the moment called for a more ambitious deal with Brussels.
Nasa | Nasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years.
BBC | The BBC confirmed in a statement it was first made aware of a police investigation into historical allegations of sexual abuse by Scott Mills in 2017.
NHS | Claims by Palantir that concerns over the US data analytics company’s multimillion-pound NHS contract are “ideologically motivated” have been rejected by the chair of a parliamentary committee.
Continue reading...Markets sink after president offers little detail on how he intends to wind down conflict over next two to three weeks
Donald Trump used a prime time address to the nation on Wednesday evening to declare the month-long war in Iran a success “nearing completion”, despite a spiraling conflict that has caused economic turmoil across the globe, fractured transatlantic alliances and eroded the president’s approval ratings.
In remarks from the White House, Trump argued that the US’s “little journey” to Iran had nearly accomplished “all of America’s military objectives”, but offered little clarity on how he planned to wind down the conflict over the next “two to three weeks”.
Continue reading...Quake with epicentre west-north-west of Ternate island shakes cities and prompts regional tsunami warning
One person has been killed after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia’s Ternate island, damaging buildings and triggering small tsunami waves.
The quake, which had a depth of 35km, occurred on Thursday at 6.48am local time, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-north-west of Ternate, an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province.
Continue reading...Anyone have any recommendations for foot pad sensors for the GT? I currently have the stock pads with sensors but I bought a pair of Airpads from Craft and ride a while back that currently need sensors and grip tape. I’m a lighter rider on a GT so the more sensitive the better i guess but at this point I’m willing to look at pretty much anything especially if it has the tape and sensor combo. Thank you!
Two-thirds of secondary school teachers report a decline in core abilities such as writing and problem-solving
Pupils using artificial intelligence are losing their capacity for critical thinking, according to a survey of secondary school teachers in England.
Two-thirds said they had observed the decline among children who they also said no longer felt the need to spell because of voice-to-text technology.
Continue reading...Tempers flared Wednesday during a community meeting about a controversial proposal that would give New Castle County more involvement with the finances of Brookside Community Inc.
How America and Israel can shape a new Middle East.
The Cooch’s Bridge chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution honored a local student for winning an essay contest March 21.
Trump says he expects the U.S. war with Iran to end within several weeks despite unrelenting attacks from both sides and Iran's iron grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
Reuters reports that SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, reportedly targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. Reuters reports: SpaceX puts more rockets in space than any other company and promises a chance to invest in humanity's return to the moon and attempt to colonize Mars. The company aspires to put artificial intelligence data centers in space, while running a lucrative satellite communications system that opens up much of the earth to the internet and is increasingly used in war. [...] A public listing at a potential valuation of more than $1.75 trillion comes after SpaceX merged with Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI in a deal that valued the rocket company at $1 trillion and the developer of the Grok chatbot at $250 billion. SpaceX is hosting an analyst day on April 21, encouraging research analysts to attend in person, [...]. The company is also offering analysts an optional visit to xAI's "Macrohard" data center site in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 23, and plans to hold a virtual session on May 4 to discuss financial models with banks' research analysts, the source said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A coalition of major Democratic groups sued the Trump administration, seeking to strike down an executive order that would exert more federal influence over mail-in voting — including by creating lists of citizens who are eligible to vote.
The Korean automaker debuts gas and hybrid variants of the Seltos SUV and announces the arrival of the all-electric EV3 in the US.
The subcompact and, hopefully, inexpensive EV3 is a welcome sight at a time when many automakers are cancelling their most affordable models and small EVs.
Kia's combustion-powered Seltos has grown up and glowed up with more space and bigger tech inside.
Nasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening (US time), carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years. The launch marks the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972 that humans will have left lower Earth orbit.
The rocket is orbiting Earth and will continue to do so until Thursday, when the translunar injection burn will take place and send it on the rest of its 386,242km journey to orbit the moon
Continue reading...Trump has expressed growing contempt for North Atlantic allies as they refused to be drawn into his war on Iran – key US politics stories from Wednesday 1 April at a glance
Donald Trump has said he is “absolutely” considering withdrawing the US from Nato, warning that the matter was “beyond reconsideration” after the refusal of US allies to join the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Trump has long been vocally sceptical about the benefit of Nato membership to the US, but since North Atlantic allies have refused to take part in the month-long, faltering US-Israeli assault on Iran, the president has stepped up his rhetoric.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 2.
I am willing to pay for more for more performance, but I want to make sure I’m not paying too much for not much performance. I’m wondering if the XL really has $600 more of performance than the GTS, or if I’m paying that for just a little more performance.
Anonymous activist Martha Root on how she hacked into, and took down, a dating site for white supremacists. With reporting from investigative journalist Eva Hoffman
There’s a dating site for everyone: Jdate for Jews, Muzz for Muslims and Raya for celebrities. And for white supremacists? WhiteDate, “for Europids seeking tribal love”.
The mysterious hacker/activist Martha Root tells Helen Pidd how, live on stage and in disguise, she hacked into WhiteDate and exposed a network of thousands of neo-Nazis looking for Aryan love.
Continue reading...Agreement comes after Wellington halted millions in aid to its former colony after Cook Islands formed strategic partnership with Beijing
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have signed a defence and security declaration, ending a year-long diplomatic row that erupted after the Cook Islands struck strategic agreements with China.
The Cook Islands was a dependent New Zealand colony from 1901-65 but has since operated as a self-governing nation in “free association” with New Zealand. Its roughly 17,000 citizens hold New Zealand citizenship. There are obligations between the two nations to regularly consult on matters of defence and security.
Continue reading...I’m looking to buy a used charger for my xr. Looking at this option before I gotta spend $100 on a new one.
From what I’ve found, there is limited offerings for front footpads for big feet. I’ve seen some posts that people purchase their own sensor, footpad and grip tape and wanted to ensure I wasn’t missing anything.
Parts - kush wide (front and back), stoked stock V5, aluminum bottom plate to ensure no pressure on controller battery boxes.
Footpad connector, I’m unsure which one I should get since fungineers is sold out. I see float life has one for XR+ or for GT/XRC
Stock stock V5 - to cut or not cut. Mainly trails riding. From what I’ve gathered, having a single zone is better for activation, but you have to learn how to jump off board or toe lift out. Cutting to dual zone allows heal lift to disengage, requires sealing.
Stocked stock v5 - do they come with adhesive? If not is it needed?
Did I miss anything? I assume it’s plug and play with the fungineers box.
Board will be a vesc build using Thor400.
Thank you,
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We’re starting to get pictures from outside the US supreme court ahead of oral arguments in Trump v Barbara, which will decide if the administration’s attempts to restrict birthright citizenship are unconstitutional.
Donald Trump has just arrived, and plans to listen to arguments at the court – the first time a sitting president has attended arguments.
Continue reading...CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., April 1, 2026 — EPB has joined the Southeastern Quantum Collaborative (SQC) as an inaugural member. SQC is an association of universities, technology companies and research institutions working together to accelerate the advancement and real-world application of quantum technologies across the Southeast.
Led by The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), the collaborative brings together organizations from academia, industry and government to strengthen regional leadership in quantum information science while developing the workforce needed to support emerging quantum technologies. The effort is also designed to help position the Southeast as a global hub for quantum innovation, supporting economic growth, national security and next-generation technology development.
EPB’s participation reflects Chattanooga’s growing role as a center for advanced technology and innovation. In 2023, EPB launched the EPB Quantum Network, the nation’s first commercially available, industry-led quantum network, lowering barriers to the development of a wide range of quantum technologies.
Later this year, with the completion of an IonQ Forte Enterprise computer, EPB Quantum Center will become the first U.S. quantum technology center to provide commercial access to both quantum networking and quantum computing resources. EPB Quantum Center will provide a destination to explore quantum possibilities while benefiting EPB’s customers in its 600-square-mile service area in and around Chattanooga.
“Quantum technology represents one of the most significant innovation opportunities of our time,” said Janet Rehberg, president and CEO-elect, EPB. “By joining the Southeastern Quantum Collaborative, EPB supports the development of a regional ecosystem that connects research, infrastructure and industry to accelerate innovation and drive economic development across the Southeast.”
EPB joins neighboring University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), which joined SQC earlier this year. Through a partnership with EPB, UTC became the first American university to host a node on a commercially available quantum network through its connection to EPB Quantum Network, enabling new research in quantum communications and networking. Additional regional momentum continues to grow, including the recent announcement of the Institute for Quantum Innovation led by EPB and Vanderbilt University, which aims to expand research and collaboration in quantum science and engineering.
EPB’s leadership in quantum technology builds on its experience as the operator of the nation’s most advanced automated grid and the world’s fastest community-wide internet, which generated $5.3 billion and 10,000 jobs in the first 15 years of operations. EPB began working in quantum technology with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory through an R&D 100 Award-winning collaboration that demonstrated how quantum security protocols can be deployed on power grids.
“Partners like EPB bring unique infrastructure and real-world deployment experience that will help accelerate the transition of quantum technologies from research to application,” said Dr. Rainer Steinwandt, Dean of the UAH College of Science and Executive Director of the SQC. “Their leadership strengthens the Southeast’s ability to compete in the rapidly evolving quantum economy.”
Through collaboration, research partnerships and workforce initiatives, the Southeastern Quantum Collaborative aims to strengthen the region’s position as a national leader in quantum innovation while creating new opportunities for economic growth and technology-driven investment.
More from HPCwire
About EPB
Located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, EPB is a nationally recognized energy and communications provider with a mission to enhance quality of life for the people it serves across its 600-square-mile service area. Starting in 2010, EPB gained notice as a national model for building and utilizing its 100% fiber-to-the-home network to deliver cutting-edge services such as the world’s fastest community-wide internet, now with service up to 25 Gig, and the nation’s most advanced automated electric grid. As a pioneer in fiber optic innovation, EPB also launched EPB Quantum to provide access to cutting-edge quantum technology platforms and help innovators bring paradigm-shifting solutions into the real world. With the launch of EPB Quantum Network in 2023 and EPB Quantum Computing (coming in 2026), EPB Quantum offers the most comprehensive, commercially available quantum technology platform in the U.S.
Source: EPB
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T-Mobile releases a cologne that smells like a phone (not really), Fortnite allows llama riding (yes, really), Warhammer: The Musical and more.
United will now allow travelers to share the location of lost items equipped with AirTags directly with airline staff.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 2, No. 760.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 2, No. 556.
If you own a Fitbit, keep an eye out for these upgrades.
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Houthi forces in Yemen have claimed responsibility for a missile attack on southern Israel this morning, saying it was a joint operation with Iran and Hezbollah.
In a statement, the Houthi movement said it carried out its third missile attack in the conflict “in conjunction with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon”.
Continue reading...Nurul Amin Shah, 56, who was visually impaired, was left outside Buffalo Tim Hortons on cold night and later died
Authorities have ruled that the death of Nurul Amin Shah, a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who was left by immigration agents at a restaurant in Buffalo, was a homicide.
Shah, who was visually impaired, died on 24 February, five days after US Border Patrol agents dropped him off in the parking lot of a Tim Hortons on a cold winter night without notifying his family or attorney.
Continue reading...It’s time once again for HPC Career Notes, our monthly feature that’s designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the HPC community, including promotion, new company hires, and accolade. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!
Rosa Badia accepting the Honor Award at the 31st Night of Telecommunications and Informatics (Image courtesy David Oller)
Rosa Badia, the director of HPC software research at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, has been awarded with the Honor Prize at the 31st Night of Telecommunications and Informatics. The award, jointly presented by the Catalan Association of Telecommunications Engineering and Digital Technologies (Telecos.cat) and the Official College of Informatics Engineering of Catalonia (COEINF), recognizes Badia’s career and her pioneering role in promoting HPC and distributed systems
Badia, who is also a 2026 HPCwire Person to Watch, has been with BSC since its founding 2004 and currently heads up its Workflows and Distributed Computing group. where she has driven the development of technologies such as the StarSs programming model and the evolution of research in this field. During her career, Badia has published more than 200 articles in international journals that demonstrate the potential of supercomputing across a range of fields, including healthcare, biomedicine, and risk management.
The “Nit de les Telecomunicacions i la Informàtica” is the pioneering institutional event and a benchmark for the Telecommunications and Information Technology sector, held in Barcelona since 1995. The Honor Award granted to Badia highlights the BSC researcher’s contribution to the development of research and innovation, as well as her role in consolidating the center as a European leader in supercomputing.
Penguin Solutions appointed Ian Colle to the role of SVP and chief product officer earlier this month. In his new role, Colle will be responsible for leading product strategy, roadmap development, and lifecycle execution for Penguin’s AI Factory Platform.
Ian Colle
Colle, who was named a 2026 HPCwire Person to Watch, brings 25 years of experience to Penguin Solutions. He most recently was with Amazon Web Services, where he served as general manager of advanced computing and simulation. At AWS, Colle helped build a global HPC and AI infrastructure business from the ground up and scale it into a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, leading globally distributed teams across product management, engineering, go-to-market, and operations.
Prior to AWS, Colle held senior engineering leadership roles at Red Hat and Intel, where he led global teams through periods of growth and acquisition, and at various startups. He will draw on that experience to support growth for Penguin Solutions AI Factory Platform.
“Penguin Solutions has the experience and expertise to deliver innovative AI Infrastructure including hardware, software, and services designed to drive the next generation of AI innovation,” Colle said. “I look forward to working closely with our customers to help them harness the power of AI to achieve their business goals.”
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Budhendra “Budhu” Bhaduri its first Chief Data Officer. The newly established role unifies ORNL’s enterprise data strategy to accelerate mission impact across open science, energy innovation, national security and laboratory operations.
Budhu Bhaduri
As CDO, Bhaduri will report to the deputy for science and technology within the laboratory director’s office and work closely with the CIO and associate laboratory directors to optimize ORNL’s data infrastructure and execute a strategy that accelerates research, strengthens efficient operations and scales across ORNL organizations and facilities, the lab said. Bhaduri will chair an ORNL Data Governance Council and partner with leaders of facilities, initiatives and AI-intensive projects across the lab, including those contributing to DOE’s Genesis Mission.
An ORNL Corporate Research Fellow, Bhaduri joined the laboratory in 1998 as a research scientist and most recently served as Director of Science, Programs, and Partnerships for the National Security Sciences Directorate. In 2025, he was recognized as one of the “Top 50 Data Changemakers in the Energy Sector” by CDO Magazine and the Data Society. Bhaduri is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Association of Geographers, and he holds professorial appointments at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He earned a doctorate from Purdue University, a master’s from Kent State University, and a master’s and bachelor’s from the University of Calcutta, India.
“Establishing a Chief Data Officer underscores ORNL’s commitment to treating data as a strategic asset for science and operations,” ORNL Deputy for Science and Technology Susan Hubbard. “Budhu’s proven leadership in complex, data-intensive programs will help unify our enterprise data strategy, modernize our architecture and governance, and accelerate responsible, AI-enabled discovery.”
O’Reilly Media has appointed Julie Baron to be the company’s new president. Baron, who previously was chief product officer for O’Reilly, succeeds Laura Baldwin, who is retiring after leading O’Reilly for the past 15 years as president and guiding the company as an executive since 2001.
Julie Baron
Baron enters the president role with over 20 years of experience in tech and media, including nearly a decade at O’Reilly. Since 2024, she’s led the company’s product vision as chief product officer, positioning O’Reilly to take full advantage of the promise of AI. Prior to her time at O’Reilly, Baron served in strategic roles at NPR, Boston Globe Media, EnerNOC, and IPSoft/Amelia AI.
“Laura has been an inspirational leader who has navigated this company over the years through many transformations,” Baron said. “I’m incredibly thankful for her mentorship and honored to be chosen to lead O’Reilly at such an exciting time in technology. There’s so much that we can do with AI. We need to be thinking critically, disrupting ourselves, driving innovation, and reexamining what we’re doing to provide value to our customers in new ways. That’s what will take us to the next stage of our growth.”
Neocloud provider Nebius has appointed Dan Lawrence as its new senior vice president and general manager for the Americas. In his new role, Lawrence will lead the company’s North American expansion and scale its commercial organization to meet demand for its AI infrastructure.
Dan Lawrence
Lawrence brings quite a bit of experience building and operating cloud businesses. Most recently, he served as senior vice president of global sales for cloud at Akamai Technologies, where he built the go-to-market model and scaled its compute business to approach $1 billion in revenue. Prior to Akamai, Lawrence held senior leadership roles at Amazon Web Services.
“We’re at an inflection point in computing, and powering the next wave of AI requires a fundamentally different kind of cloud,” Lawrence said. “Nebius stands out for three reasons. First, the team has the rare engineering DNA to design and operate the entire stack. Second, the company’s strong financial position allows us to deploy capital and capacity at a unique scale. And third, the pace of software innovation here is extraordinary. I’m excited to help build our presence in the Americas and bring this purpose-built AI cloud platform to builders across the region.”
Hitachi Vantara today welcomed a new CEO: Akinobu Shimada. Currently the president of Hitachi Vantara Japan (a position he will retain), Shimada succeeds the outgoing CEO, Sheila Rohra, who resigned for personal reasons on March 31 after 38 months with the company.
Akinobu Shimada
Shimada has spent more than 30 years with Hitachi, leading key initiatives in business strategy, technical strategy, and product strategy and development for storage and related hardware and software businesses. His career has been firmly rooted in Hitachi’s storage business, and he’s credited with its evolution.
“In recent years, as customers face increasingly complex and mission–critical data management challenges, expectations for trusted data infrastructure—and for Hitachi Vantara in particular—have continued to grow across industries,” Shimada said. “It is an honor to take on the role of CEO at such a critical moment. By growing together with our teams and uniting the insight, expertise, and passion of our people across the globe, I am committed to building the world’s most trusted data infrastructure and delivering meaningful value to our customers and their most critical initiatives.”
Thirty-six Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have been named Distinguished Members of Technical Staff (DMTS) in recognition of their extraordinary scientific and technical contributions, as affirmed by their professional peers and the broader scientific community. As distinguished citizens of the Laboratory and their respective fields, DMTS honorees exhibit a long-standing record of exceptional achievement, service-minded leadership, and dedication to mentoring the next generation of researchers.
DMTS is the highest technical staff level achievable by a scientist or engineer at LLNL and is a prestigious recognition on the personnel ladder, the lab said. Appointment to DMTS is reserved for laboratory scientists and engineers who have demonstrated at least one of the following: a sustained history of high-level achievements in programs of importance to the laboratory; a sustained history of distinguished scientific and technical achievements, having become a recognized authority in the field; or a fundamental and important discovery that has had sustained, widespread impact.
The 2026 DMTS cohort at LLNL include: Armando Alcaraz, Jonathan Allen, Dan Badders, Lorin Benedict, Suhas Bhandarkar, Juergen Biener, Patrick Brantley, Peer-Timo Bremer, Trent D’Hooge, Laurent Divol, Jon Eggert, Daniel Faissol, Carolyn Hall, Cyrus Harrison, Stefan Hau-Riege, Denise Hinkel, Doug Homoelle, Yongqin Jiao, Michael Johnson, Ed Kokko, Tzanio Kolev, Sergei Kucheyev, Peter Lindstrom, Pierre Michel, Aaron Miles, Christine Orme, Catherine Percher, Jennifer Jo Ressler, Robert Rieben, Artie Rodgers, Richard Seugling, Brian Spears, Pete Supsinskas, Damian Swift, Mark Wittig, and Shaocheng Xie.
For the previous edition of HPC Career Notes, click here.
The post HPC Career Notes: March 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
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There’s potentially alarming news from AccuWeather about a solar flare, which the forecasting service says could affect the Artemis mission.
While not an official Nasa source for weather and climate information or predictions, AccuWeather has been monitoring launch day conditions, and is reporting them on its own blog.
An X1.5 solar flare that occurred early on March 30 produced an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection that is now entering into the Earth’s atmosphere. As the day progresses, moderate to strong geomagnetic storm conditions are possible as a result of the coronal mass ejection impacting Earth’s atmosphere.
Communication between ground control and members aboard the rocket, and precise GPS tracking, can be at risk during strong geomagnetic storming.
Continue reading...NASA's Artemis II astronauts — three space station veterans and a Canadian rookie — stand out even in an astronaut corps full of super achievers.
Mass of spectators cheers dazzling Florida launch as astronauts head to moon for first time in almost 54 years
Nasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years.
The rocket is now orbiting Earth, and will continue to do so until Thursday, when the translunar injection burn will take place and send it on the rest of its 240,000-mile journey to the moon. Inside the Orion capsule, the four astronauts onboard immediately began tasks to assess how the spacecraft handled the 17,500mph ascent to orbit.
Continue reading...The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Venezuela's interim President Delcy Rodriguez, according to the Treasury Department, as the U.S. seeks to rebuild ties with the Venezuelan government.
NASA's Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity's first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team's target: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it," he said from the capsule. The Associated Press reports: Artemis II set sail from the same Florida launch site that sent Apollo's explorers to the moon so long ago. The handful still alive cheered this next generation's grand adventure as the Space Launch System rocket thundered into the early evening sky, a nearly full moon beckoning some 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman led the charge into space with "Let's go to the moon!" accompanied by pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. It was the most diverse lunar crew ever with the first woman, person of color and non-U.S. citizen riding in NASA's new Orion capsule. Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA's Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and '70s. It is NASA's biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence. Visit NASA's Artemis II Launch Day blog for the latest updates. Developing...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ofcom research shows people also concerned old posts could affect personal or professional life
Social media users in the UK are becoming less active on tech platforms due to the rise of video apps and fears that posts could come back to haunt them, according to the communications watchdog.
Ofcom said just under half of adult social media users (49%) now post, share or comment compared with 61% in 2024. The proportion exploring new websites has also fallen, from 70% to 56%.
Continue reading...An initial public offering could raise $75 billion, but the skies aren't entirely clear for launch.
US tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla, are being warned that they are being considered "legitimate targets."
Scientists tested a semi-autonomous robot with legs and an arm to see how well it could travel on its own.
The federal government may try to send 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos back to detention.
Woods focusing on his health and wellbeing after crash
Florida judge grants his request to leave the US
Tiger Woods has turned down the opportunity to captain the United States at the 2027 Ryder Cup, the PGA of America has announced.
The former world No 1’s decision comes after he announced he would step away from golf for a period to focus on his health and wellbeing. Woods was charged with driving under the influence after being involved in a car accident last week.
Continue reading...New Delta-class spacecraft promises more seats and more flights -- at an even steeper cost than before.
About to have to replace all the batteries on my onewheels. I looked on eBay and didn’t see too many options. Was contemplating making my own and just ordering a bunch of 18650s but never done it before.
What are the best choices for a drop in batteries nowadays? I have a pint, pintX, and a +xr. I’m planing on replacing them one at a time. I know going vesc is “the best” but that’s not in the budget atm.
Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: When Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew's servers without warning, players were left with a worthless game they'd already paid for. Now, consumer watchdog UFC-Que Choisir is fighting back, demanding gamers' right to play regardless of publisher whims. Supported by the "Stop Killing Games" movement, this landmark case challenges unfair terms before the Creteil Judicial Court (Val-de-Marne near Paris), and aims to protect players from disappearing games. The lawsuit that UFC-Que Choisir filed against Ubisoft on Tuesday alleges that the video game publisher "misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights," reports Reuters.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Most people fall far short of the savings they say they will need to maintain their standard of living in retirement, data shows.
Apple doesn't normally release a critical update for previous iOS versions, but DarkSword appears to be a serious threat.
Commentary: Is it too late to make a 2026 "in and out" list? I'm putting AI pessimism in the "out" column.
Bundy's full DNA profiled was entered into the FBI's national database, giving investigators a shot at solving potential cases linked to Bundy.
ZipNada writes: Two software researchers recently demonstrated how modern AI tools can reproduce entire open-source projects, creating proprietary versions that appear both functional and legally distinct. The partly-satirical demonstration shows how quickly artificial intelligence can blur long-standing boundaries between coding innovation, copyright law, and the open-source principles that underpin much of the modern internet. In their presentation, Dylan Ayrey, founder of Truffle Security, and Mike Nolan, a software architect with the UN Development Program, introduced a tool they call malus.sh. For a small fee, the service can "recreate any open-source project," generating what its website describes as "legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." It's a test case in how intellectual property law -- still rooted in 19th-century precedent -- collides with 21st-century automation. Since the US Supreme Court's Baker v. Selden ruling, copyright has been understood to guard expression, not ideas. That boundary gave rise to clean-room design, a method by which engineers reverse-engineer systems without accessing the original source code. Phoenix Technologies famously used the technique to build its version of the PC BIOS during the 1980s. Ayrey and Nolan's experiment shows how AI can perform a clean-room process in minutes rather than months. But faster doesn't necessarily mean fair. Traditional clean-room efforts required human teams to document and replicate functionality -- a process that demanded both legal oversight and significant labor. By contrast, an AI-mediated "clean room" can be invoked through a few prompts, raising questions about whether such replication still counts as fair use or independent creation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iranian American support for the U.S.–Israel war on Iran has plummeted, as euphoria over Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death shifts into concern over the conflict’s growing civilian toll, according to a new poll.
Nearly two-thirds of Iranian Americans now oppose the war after opinions were near evenly divided at the start of the conflict, according to a Zogby Analytics survey.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name. There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection.”
The nearly 17 percentage point leap comes as the prospects that the Iranian regime will collapse seem to have dimmed, the conflict’s endgame becomes increasingly murky, and steady bombings have swelled the number of civilians killed.
Jamal Abdi, president of the nonprofit group that commissioned the poll, the National Iranian American Council, said the survey results show that the diaspora’s feelings on the war are more complicated — and more negative — than pundits have suggested.
“This is a war that is supposedly being fought in our name,” Abdi said. “There’s a lot of wish-casting and projection and voices from the diaspora claiming that there is this mandate from our community, and it’s not based on data or facts or reality. It’s based on a campaign for regime change no matter what the cost is. It’s dangerous for our community to be used like this.”
NIAC has long been one of the major voices in the diaspora expressing skepticism about war with Iran. In days leading up to the February 28 strikes that started the war, however, figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the country’s former shah, were given prominent platforms to argue for regime change.
NIAC’s March 24 to 27 poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points, is the second that the group has commissioned from Zogby Analytics. An earlier survey was conducted from February 27 to March 5, a period that coincided with the final hours of U.S.–Iranian negotiations and the beginning of the conflict.
The survey results suggest that Iranian Americans are now more opposed to the war than Americans as a whole, after being more supportive at its start.
Iranian Americans are a sliver of the U.S. population, about 0.2 percent, making polling of the group more difficult than the general population. Abdi said that Zogby drew from a “significant list of contacts” in the Iranian American community to conduct the survey.
One prominent Iranian American, Ahmad Batebi — an exiled dissident who thanked President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the war began but has spoken out against targeting civilian infrastructure — questioned the poll results.
“My view is that the reported decline in support should be interpreted cautiously,” Batebi said in an email, “not only because opinion may indeed be shifting in real time, but because the more basic question is whether this polling instrument can credibly be treated as representative of the broader Iranian-American community in the first place.”
In the earlier survey, Iranian Americans showed nearly a 50-50 split in their position on going to war with Iran.
Iranian Americans now believe by a wide margin that President Donald Trump should end the conflict, according to the more recent numbers. 70 percent of respondents said that it was time to end the war. Only a quarter believed it should continue.
Trump is scheduled to give an address on the war Wednesday night, with officials giving mixed signals as to whether he will wrap up the conflict or expand it with a ground invasion.
The recent Zogby poll also captured an increasingly pessimistic view of the war’s likely outcome. Many Iranian Americans celebrated on social media when Khamanei’s death in an Israeli airstrike was confirmed on March 1.
Hard-liners have held onto power in Iran since then, however, leading to a dimming view of the future among the diaspora. Nearly 60 percent of Iranian Americans believe ordinary Iranians will be worse off a year from now and more than half believe the Islamic Republic will remain in power.
“There was probably some initial exuberance in that first week,” Abdi said, “and that has trailed off as we have seen civilian casualties and a shuffling of chairs in the regime but not any signal that the regime itself was going anywhere.”
The post Iranian Americans Have Turned Against the War, New Poll Finds appeared first on The Intercept.
The rugged concept previews an SUV (and a pickup) that would be designed, developed and built in the US.
The vision presented at the New York Auto Show marks the beginning of a new, even more localized chapter for Hyundai's ambitions in America.
Laura Ann Aime, 17, went missing on Halloween night and was found on the side of a highway bound and beaten a month later
New DNA testing has definitively linked the unsolved death of a Utah teenager in 1974 to the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, the local sheriff’s office said Wednesday.
Laura Ann Aime, 17, went missing on Halloween night 51 years ago after she left a party alone to go to a convenience store. About a month later, her body was found on the side of a highway, bound, beaten and without clothing.
Continue reading...A communications breakdown precipitated an announcement that immigration enforcement will occur at the service’s Parris Island graduation ceremonies in South Carolina, officials said.
"The scary scenarios are, unfortunately, extremely plausible" if the critical Persian Gulf waterway stays effectively sealed, economist Paul Krugman said.
Measure that would fund homeland security but exclude money for ICE could conclude lengthy funding lapse
An end to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be in sight, after Congress’s Republican leaders on Wednesday agreed to advance legislation that would fund most of the agency’s operations, with the exception of those involved in immigration enforcement.
The pact may conclude the longest such funding lapse in US history, which last month caused security lines to stretch for hours at some airports as employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a subagency of DHS, quit their jobs or called out of work after going weeks without pay.
Continue reading...NetApp built its reputation as a solid provider of network attached storage (NAS) for enterprises, which predominantly used Network File System (NSF) over Ethernet. Now, thanks to the extreme performance demands from AI adopters, the company is ramping up its investment in HPC technologies such as the Lustre and BeeGFS file systems and Nvidia’s InfiniBand interconnect as ways to maximize data throughput.
NetApp has supported Lustre, BeeGFS, and InfiniBand on its high-end EF-Series storage offerings for some time, according to Sandeep Singh, NetApp’s senior vice president and general manager of enterprise storage. EF-Series is block storage, and customers can expose a variety of parallel file systems on top of that, he said.
However, the experience of supporting Lustre on EF-Series storage appliances may not have been as smooth as it could be. That is why NetApp is making a big push with the launch of its newest EF-Series storage appliance to make sure that customers can expect smooth sailing when they adopt HPC technologies like Lustre, as well as BeeGFS and InfiniBand, he said.
With the latest line of EF-Series storage appliances, the EF50 and EF80, NetApp has completed interoperability testing to ensure that customers utilizing Lustre can get the full benefit of the parallel file system.
“We’ve built out a solution guide and done the interoperability testing for enabling our customers to go and deploy Lustre,” Singh said. “Obviously, we want to make sure that if and when customers go and deploy this entire solution, we are ready to help them in any types of troubleshooting scenarios.”
In addition to providing recommended Lustre settings as part of its solution guide, NetApp will set up their customers’ EF-Series box, test it and validate it to ensure that it’s working as planned, Sing said.
Lustre and BeeGFS offer very high read and write performance, which is why they’ve been adopted by supercomputing sites that are moving huge amounts of data for modeling and simulation workloads. As the AI boom kicked into high gear, organizations that may have started out using traditional NFS or parallel NFS (pNFS) file systems started adopting native parallel file systems like Lustre and BeeGFS to maximize the throughput of data into GPU clusters for AI training and to prevent the GPUs from sitting idle, which is a topic we covered in our special HPCwire series in October, “The Future of Storage for HPC and AI.”
NetApp started breaking out of its NAS shell while we were running that series. At its Insight conference held in October 2025, the company announced its fully disaggregated storage architecture, NetApp AFX. By ripping apart the direct storage connections, AFX enabled the company to blow past its previous limit of 24 storage nodes with the NetApp FAS architecture, which was capable of supporting a few hundred petabytes. With the disaggregated AFX architecture supporting up to 128 nodes, it could now handle 1 exabyte of storage within a single namespace, enabling it to better support its AI customers.
However, AFX is still limited by the throughput of connecting data over NFS and pNFS over Ethernet. With the launch of EF50 and EF80 appliances, NetApp customers are now able to enjoy the bounty of higher data throughput and lower latencies that come from saturating Lustre and BeeGFS links over InfiniBand networks running at 200 GBps.
NetApp EF-Series
The new high-end EF80 boasts read throughputs up to 110 GBps and write throughputs up to 57 GPps. The write througput, which is critical for checkpointing during AI training, is a 250% improvement over the previous generation of EF-Series appliances, the company said.
“Modern training workflows punish slow filesystems with dataset shuffles, small-file metadata storms, and checkpoint bursts that can stall pipelines for minutes at a time,” writes Priyadarshi (PD) Prasad, the VP and GM of AI Data Infrastructure at NetApp, in a March 17 blog. “In HPC, checkpoint/restart cycles are equally unforgiving: If scratch throughput lags, every save and recovery stretches runtimes and amplifies the penalty of failure. High-throughput storage and parallel file systems remove these bottlenecks and reduce the amount of power consumed, so GPUs stay fed, and jobs keep moving efficiently.”
According to Singh, the new EF-Series play an important role in providing part the three-ring architecture for customers. The first ring is the scratch space that’s closest to the AI or HPC workload and pushes the bounds of performance. The second ring is the “fast file” tier and that’s served by NFS and pNFS. The third ring is the very large scale object tier, which NetApp supports with S3.
“Where Lustre combined with our newly announced EF-Series fits in is bringing along this extreme level of performance for the most demanding workloads,” Singh told HPCwire. “In the AI training use cases, the write throughput is incredibly important. You pair that with a parallel file system, in this case Lustre on the front end, combined with EF-Series, and now you have a system that can scale massively, deliver just amazing levels of performance, and it gives you extreme density as well.”
Customer demands for higher storage throughput for AI training and inference was the main driver for NetApp’s decision to solidify its Lustre support, Singh said. However, HPC sites running more traditional modeling and simulation workloads may find NetApp a better fit for their storage needs as a result of these changes he said.
“We’re squarely, first and foremost, targeting on the AI front for customers,” he said. “We will see pockets … [of what] one would characterize as HPC, like weather simulation and other parts of the workloads, that will look like HPC where there will be an opportunity for this solution as well.”
And while NetApp previously offered support for InfiniBand with its EF-Series, Singh expects to see more interest in using Nvidia’s speedy, low-latency interconnect as they push the limits on their storage.
“We have had InfiniBand support for select customer use cases, going for the very high performance environments,” he said. “In this case, it’s again just the right fit where we see InfiniBand as a requirement in these AI use case deployments. Certain organizations absolutely need InfiniBand support.”
NetApp announced its new EF-Series during Nvidia’s GTC conference two weeks ago in San Jose. The company is embracing Nvidia’s vision for the future of storage for AI, which revolves heavily around its new Context Memory Storage (CMX) architecture. Singh said more announcements are coming that will see NetApp bolster its capability to provide large context windows and minimize the time to first token for agentic AI use cases.
The post NetApp Embraces Lustre as AI Pushes Storage Limits appeared first on HPCwire.
April 1, 2026 — MLCommons today released its latest MLPerf Inference v6.0 benchmarks, showcasing results across four key benchmarks for Intel’s GPU Systems. Intel’s AI systems featured Intel Xeon 6 CPUs and Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics, demonstrating accessible AI workload solutions across high-end workstations, datacenter, and edge applications.
MLPerf Inference v6.0 benchmarks showcase Intel Xeon 6 and Intel Arc Pro B-Series GPUs delivering powerful, low-latency AI inference for workstations and edge systems. Credit: Intel.
The results show a four GPU Intel Arc Pro B70/B65 system delivers 128GB of VRAM to run 120B parameter models with high concurrency, with the Arc Pro B70 providing up to 1.8x higher inference performance than the Arc Pro B60. Software optimizations, configured in an open, containerized software stack efficiently scales inference performance from single node to multi-GPU enterprise deployments improving performance and delivering up to 1.18x higher gains on the same Intel Arc Pro B60 hardware versus MLPerf v5.1.
“The combination of Intel Xeon 6 and Intel’s Arc Pro B-Series GPUs represent our investment to expand customer choice and value, offering real-world solutions that address both LLM models as well as traditional machine learning workloads, with leading performance and incredible value for graphics professionals and AI developers worldwide,” said Anil Nanduri, Intel vice president, AI Products and GTM, Intel Data Center Group.
As the demand for AI inference grows, the professional compute market is going through a major transition whereby graphics creators and AI developers seek out performance and value, without compromising data privacy or incurring heavy subscription costs tied to proprietary AI models.
Intel GPU Systems, featuring newly launched Intel Arc Pro B70/B65 GPUs, are designed to meet the needs of modern AI inference and provide an all-in-one inference platform combining full-stack validated hardware and software. With enhanced memory capacity, they aim to simplify the adoption and ease of use with a containerized solution built for Linux environments, optimized to deliver incredible inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P data transfers, and designed to include enterprise-class reliability and manageability features such as ECC, SRIOV, telemetry and remote firmware updates. For example, when compared to comparable competitor GPU solutions the Intel Arc Pro B70 is able to handle significantly larger models and context windows in multi-GPU setups – powering up to 1.6x as much KV cache capacity when running larger models.
AI inference is increasingly defined not only by GPU throughput but also by CPU-accelerated system performance. The CPU, shaping overall cluster efficiency and total cost of ownership, is also responsible for critical functions such as memory management, task orchestration, and workload distribution, while ensuring the security, reliability, and operational continuity essential to modern AI infrastructure.
Intel continues to be the only server processor vendor to submit stand-alone CPU results for MLPerf inference benchmarks, underscoring its leadership and strong commitment to advancing AI inference across both compute and accelerator centric platforms. As the most widely used host CPU in AI accelerated systems—with over half of MLPerf 6.0 submissions powered by Xeon—Intel further reinforces its position at the core of the industry’s AI infrastructure. This leadership extends to the silicon itself: Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores delivered up to a 1.9x generational performance gain in MLPerf Inference v5.1, while built-in AI acceleration technologies such as AMX and AVX512 allow workloads like LLM inference, fine tuning, and classical machine learning to run efficiently without the need for dedicated accelerator hardware.
More from HPCwire: MLCommons Releases New MLPerf Inference v6.0 Benchmark Results
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better.
Source: Intel
The post Intel Delivers Open, Scalable AI Performance in MLPerf Inference v6.0 appeared first on HPCwire.
A video shows the moment when the M/V Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, steams toward the stern of the fishing vessel.
The filing supports a plaintiff who alleges Monsanto failed to warn consumers about cancer risks tied to Roundup, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared open to invalidating President Trump's executive order that would end birthright citizenship.
In classic Cloudflare fashion, the CDN provider used April Fool's Day to unveil an actual, "not a joke" product. Today, the company announced EmDash -- an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress that aims to solve plugin security. Phoronix reports: With the help of AI coding agents, Cloudflare engineers have been rebuilding the WordPress open-source project "from the ground up." EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript and is a server-less design. Making plug-ins more secure than the WordPress architecture, EmDash plug-ins are sandboxed and run in their own isolate. EmDash builds upon the Astro web framework. EmDash doesn't rely on any WordPress code but is designed to be compatible with WordPress functionality. EmDash is open-source now under the MIT license. The EmDash code is available on GitHub.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Four states have now signed such legislation as Trump’s Save Act languishes in Senate with little chance of passage
The governors of Florida and Mississippi signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.
Four states have now passed proof-of-citizenship laws for voting this year, after South Dakota and Utah’s governors each signed proof of citizenship bills into law in March.
Continue reading...April 1, 2026 — The Research Council of Finland has opened a call for international collaboration in high-performance computing (HPC). The call is intended for individual research teams or consortia from all scientific disciplines. Each application must include at least one international collaborator and the proposed research must require access to EuroHPC or LUMI supercomputing resources. The total funding budget is approximately €6.5 million. The call closes May 6, 2026, 16.15 Finnish time.
LUMI is located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.
The aim of the funding is to support the development of versatile future data management and computing ecosystem and the expansion of related expertise at both national and international level. Funding will not be granted for coordination or planning of collaborations.
The funding will support international research collaboration that makes use of:
The funding granted under this call is based on Finland’s strategic partnerships with the above countries/regions.
Researchers who were granted funding in the 2024 and 2025 calls for international collaboration in HPC are eligible to apply for funding in this call. However, the research topic of the planned project must be substantially different from that of the already funded project. The research topics of researchers who were granted funding in earlier calls than these are not restricted.
The funding granted under this call is based on Finland’s strategic partnerships with the aforementioned countries/regions. The projects to be funded must combine the following aspects:
Learn more and apply here.
Source: CSC Finland
The post Research Council of Finland Opens Call for International Collaboration in HPC appeared first on HPCwire.
Most Americans support the rule that anyone born in the US is a US citizen, and a majority of supreme court justices are skeptical of Trump’s efforts to restrict it
It was a surreal morning at the US supreme court.
For more than two hours, the nation’s highest court considered arguments over whether Donald Trump – via an executive order – could tear down an idea that has been fundamental to the story and trajectory of the United States: that almost anyone born on US soil is an US citizen.
Continue reading...GOP leaders unveiled a plan to end DHS shutdown, mirroring a framework that the Senate pursued last week before it was quickly batted down by House Republicans.
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router.
Fortunately, you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer.
↫ Noah Bailey
I genuinely can’t believe making your own router with Linux or BSD might become a much more widespread thing in the US. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing – it’ll teach some people something new – but it just feels so absurd.
If you thought about buying one of these games before, now you don't have to!
Google is doubling down on AI video and trying to make it less expensive and energy-intensive to run.
The Texas-based company could go public with a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history.
So I’ve had my pint s for a little over a year now and it’s still just stock. So I wanna give it some upgrades. What should I buy?
Is it smart to open a HELOC this month? Here are three timely benefits homeowners should know about now.
President Trump says he's considering withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, following years of complaining about the alliance.
 | I paid $325 for the one wheel at a pawnshop just needs a charger it’s my first one! Did I get a good deal? [link] [comments] |
Nearly 2,000 internal files were briefly leaked after ‘human error’, raising fresh security questions at the AI company
Anthropic accidentally released part of the internal source code for its AI-powered coding assistant, Claude Code, due to “human error”, the company said on Tuesday.
An internal-use file mistakenly included in a software update pointed to an archive containing nearly 2,000 files and 500,000 lines of code, which were quickly copied to developer platform GitHub. A post on X sharing a link to the leaked code had more than 29m views early on Wednesday, and a rewritten version of the source code quickly became GitHub’s fastest-ever downloaded repository. Anthropic issued copyright takedown requests to try to contain the code’s spread. Within the code, users spotted blueprints for a Tamagotchi-esque coding assistant and an always-on AI agent, per the Verge.
Continue reading...British Medical Association leaders say PM’s threat to cut 1,000 new roles makes next week’s strike action more likely
Resident doctors have accused Keir Starmer of damaging the prospects of a deal to end their pay and jobs dispute by threatening to cut 1,000 new jobs for medics in the NHS.
The claim from the British Medical Association leaders came just before the Thursday deadline given by the prime minister for the union to accept the government’s final offer.
Continue reading...War shows little sign of easing despite Donald Trump claiming Iranian leadership ‘just asked’ for ceasefire
Israel unleashed two waves of attacks on Tehran and said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Wednesday with little sign of the war easing up despite Donald Trump repeating a claim that Iran’s leadership was seeking a ceasefire.
The US president, writing on social media, said that Iran’s president had “just asked” for a ceasefire and that American troops would be “out of Iran pretty quickly” as he sought to extricate the US from the war. He indicated that he was not concerned about leaving Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) – often cited as a justification for the war - in its presumed underground hiding place, arguing it could be monitored by satellite.
Continue reading...The Noem policy meant the secretary was required to personally sign off on thousands of DHS contracts.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country. Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students. These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden -- and many other nations -- moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too. As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Falth said. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting." Falth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy -- must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose." Further reading: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A plan briefed to Trump last week to insert ground forces to remove Iran’s nuclear material would be a very difficult endeavor of a type never before attempted in wartime.
Called Foundayo, the tablet becomes the second one to receive FDA’s green light after Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light on Wednesday to a new oral weight-loss medication developed by the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
Known as orforglipron or brand name Foundayo, the once-daily tablet becomes the second GLP-1 drug in pill form to hit the market in a short span of time, arriving after Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill received approval in December.
Continue reading...Almost 750 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the Middle East since October 2023, an analysis by The Intercept has found. But the Pentagon won’t acknowledge it.
U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a “casualty cover-up,” offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.
At least 15 U.S. troops were wounded Friday in an Iranian attack on a Saudi air base that hosts American troops, according to two government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hundreds of U.S. personnel have been killed or injured in the region since the U.S. launched a war on Iran just over a month ago.
President Donald Trump — who wore a blue suit, red tie, and a ball cap to the dignified transfer of the first Americans killed in the war — said casualties were inevitable. “When you have conflicts like this, you always have death,” he said afterward. “I met the parents and they were unbelievable people. They were unbelievable people, but they all had one thing in common. They said to me, one thing, every single one: Finish the job, sir. Please finish the job.”
On Tuesday, Trump teased that he would wind down the war with Iran in as little as two weeks despite not achieving many of his stated aims, such as “freedom for the people” of Iran, “tak[ing] the oil in Iran,” and forcing Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” At one point, the president even declared that the war would last “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
“When you have conflicts like this, you always have death.”
CENTCOM has sent outdated statements on casualty numbers, meanwhile, resulting in undercounts, including a statement sent Monday from spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins noting that “Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 303 U.S. service members have been wounded.” The comment was three days old and excluded at least 15 wounded in the Friday attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The command did not reply to repeated requests for updated figures.
CENTCOM also would not provide a count of troops who have died in the region since the start of the war. An Intercept analysis puts the number at no less than 15.
“This is, quite obviously, a subject that [War Secretary Pete] Hegseth and the White House want to keep under major wraps,” said the defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly.
In 2024, during the Biden administration, the Pentagon provided The Intercept with detailed chronologies of attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East that listed the specific outpost that was attacked, the type of strike, and whether — or how many — casualties resulted, along with an aggregate count of attacks by country.
The Trump administration’s numbers, by comparison, lack detail and clarity. The current CENTCOM casualty figures do not appear to include more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or otherwise injured due to a fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford before it limped off to Souda Bay, Greece, for repairs. CENTCOM did not reply to close to a dozen requests for clarification on the casualty count and related information sent this week.
“CENTCOM and the White House should be providing accurate and timely information on the costs and casualties involved in this war. After all, it is American taxpayers who are funding it and U.S. economic prosperity and economic wellbeing that is being undermined by it,” Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for measured U.S. foreign policy, told The Intercept.
“CENTCOM and the White House should be providing accurate and timely information on the costs and casualties involved in this war.”
As the U.S. has relentlessly bombed Iran, that country has responded with attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East using ballistic missiles and drones. CENTCOM refuses to even offer a simple count of U.S. bases that have been attacked during the war. “We have nothing for you,” a spokesperson told The Intercept. An analysis by The Intercept, however, finds that bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have been targeted.
On Tuesday, Hegseth said that Iran retained the ability to retaliate for U.S. strikes but that their attacks would be ineffectual. “Yes, they will still shoot some missiles,” he said, “but we will shoot them down.” On Wednesday morning, officials in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar all reported missile or drone attacks from Iran.
Iranian strikes have forced U.S. troops to retreat from their bases to hotels and office buildings across the region, according to the two government officials. The defense official was livid about the Pentagon’s failure to adequately harden the bases and ridiculed Hegseth’s Tuesday prayer at a Pentagon press conference. “May god watch over all of them, each day and each night. May his almighty and eternal arms of providence stretch over them and protect them,” said Hegseth.
“Why didn’t Hegseth protect them?” the defense official asked. “Anyone with a brain knew these attacks were coming.”
Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of Central Command, recalled that U.S. troops in the region have faced drone attacks for at least a decade. “At that time we identified a need to protect against this threat, and it has taken far too long for the DoD to respond and provide adequate protection for our deployed troops,” he told The Intercept, referencing drone attacks during the campaign against ISIS in the spring of 2016. “It was a known expectation that, if attacked, Iran would retaliate against our bases, installations, and forces, and I agree that we should have anticipated and been prepared for this inevitability.”
Kavanagh, who previously called attention to the vulnerability of U.S. outposts in the Middle East, echoed Votel. “It has been clear for years that the rapid proliferation of drones and cheap missiles would put U.S. bases and U.S. early detection radars in the region at risk, yet the Pentagon did little to protect them,” she said. “The failure to invest in hardened infrastructure was a choice. Congress should see this failure as evidence that simply giving the Pentagon more money is not a path to national security.”
“We would be better off if bases across the region were closed for good,” she added.
“We would be better off if bases across the region were closed for good.”
In public statements, Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi called out the U.S. for using civilians in nearby Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperative Council states as human shields. “U.S. soldiers fled military bases in GCC to hide in hotels and offices,” he wrote on X last week. “Hotels in U.S. deny bookings to officers who may endanger customers. GCC hotels should do same.”
Votel also expressed concern about troops using hotels and offices, noting it “could turn normal civilian infrastructure into military targets for the regime.”
Last month, an Iranian drone strike on a hotel in Bahrain wounded two War Department employees, according to a State Department cable reviewed by the Washington Post. CENTCOM did not respond to a request to confirm to The Intercept that those injuries stem from a March 2 attack on the Crowne Plaza hotel, a luxury property in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, but one official indicated this was likely.
Votel said that a failure to provide troops with adequate protection may handcuff U.S. operations. “I think this really complicates command and control and could affect unit cohesion and effectiveness,” he told The Intercept, referring to the transfer of troops to hotels and office buildings. “That said, we may not have many options if we cannot protect the military bases where they would normally be bedded down.”
At least 15 U.S. troops in the Middle East have died since the beginning of the Iran War, including six personnel who were killed in a drone strike on Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, and a soldier who died due to an “enemy attack on March 1, 2026, at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.” More than 520 U.S. personnel have also been injured, including those who suffered smoke inhalation on the Ford.
Prior to the current war with Iran, U.S. bases in the Middle East were increasingly targeted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and close-range ballistic missiles after Israel’s war in Gaza began in October 2023, most of the attacks occurring in the year following the outset of the conflict. At least 175 troops were killed or wounded in those attacks, including three service members who died in a January 2024 strike on Tower 22, a facility in Jordan. Other attacks targeted al-Asad Air Base, the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, Camp Victory, Union III, Erbil Air Base, and Bashur Air Base in Iraq and Al-Tanf garrison, Deir ez-Zor Air Base, Mission Support Site Euphrates, Mission Support Site Green Village, Patrol Base Shaddadi, Rumalyn Landing Zone, Tell Baydar, and Tal Tamir in Syria.
The casualty statistics do not include contractors, most of them foreigners who suffered non-combat injuries. Official U.S. statistics show that there were almost 12,900 cases of injuries to contractors in the CENTCOM area of operations during 2024 alone. More than 3,700 were the most serious non-fatal injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, requiring more than seven days away from work. Eighteen contractors were also killed, all of them in Iraq. The numbers are likely significant undercounts, but if even the fractional number of known contractor injuries is added to the tally, the casualty count for Americans and those on U.S. bases may top 13,600.
The post “Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.
LIVINGSTON, N.J., April 1, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced landmark results in the MLPerf Inference v6.0 benchmark suite. Participating in the Datacenter Closed division, CoreWeave leveraged NVIDIA’s newest AI infrastructure, the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72.
The AI industry is undergoing a fundamental shift with inference as the new critical focus. As enterprises move AI from experimentation into production and agentic workloads become the new standard, inference has emerged as the critical measure of performance. At the same time, demand for inference is growing faster than the underlying hardware can be deployed, and the gap between theoretical system performance and real-world output has emerged as a defining constraint on how quickly AI companies can grow. CoreWeave’s MLPerf v6.0 results reflect the company’s continued investment in full-stack optimization, consistently turning cutting-edge hardware into real-world inference performance.
“Inference is the defining layer in AI. It’s where models are actually put to work and where performance in production shows up. Benchmarks like MLPerf help measure how theoretical performance translates into real-world output,” said Peter Salanki, co-founder and chief technology officer of CoreWeave. “These latest results reflect our ability to deliver exceptional performance for the most demanding frontier reasoning models at scale through full-stack optimization. That’s why customers rely on CoreWeave to launch, scale, and operate AI workloads in production, where real-world value is created and where it matters most.”
CoreWeave’s v6.0 submissions reflected NVIDIA’s reference configurations as a verified, production-ready baseline across two of the most demanding reasoning models available: DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-OSS-120B. Key results include:
“The gap between benchmark performance and production reality has been one of the most persistent challenges in AI,” said Nick Patience, vice president & practice lead, AI platforms at Futurum Research. “CoreWeave’s MLPerf v6.0 results, particularly on DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate the company is closing that gap through disciplined, full-stack optimization, which is exactly what enterprises and AI labs need as inference workloads move from experimental to mission-critical.”
CoreWeave’s MLPerf v6.0 results provide additional validation as the only AI cloud to earn top Platinum ranking in both SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 1.0 and 2.0, which evaluate AI cloud performance, efficiency and reliability. These benchmark results reflect CoreWeave’s platform strategy: delivering infrastructure purpose-built for the demands of production AI, from high-performance compute through the software layer that builders depend on to develop, test, and deploy at scale.
More from HPCwire: MLCommons Releases New MLPerf Inference v6.0 Benchmark Results
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.
Source: CoreWeave
The post CoreWeave Delivers Leading Inference Performance in MLPerf Benchmark appeared first on HPCwire.
Some underscore Trump’s unprecedented court appearance as protesters defend 14th amendment right
About 250 demonstrators packed the steps of the supreme court on Wednesday, chanting in defense of birthright citizenship as Donald Trump himself watched from the public gallery in an unprecedented appearance.
Beija McCarter, an eighth grade US history teacher, and Noah Goldstein, a New Yorker who was also at last month’s trans rights rally, both arrived at the demonstration with little optimism about what the justices inside might decide.
Continue reading...Party, which has neo-Nazi roots, will hold ‘important ministerial posts within immigration’ if four-party coalition wins in September
The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said that he will allow the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) into government for the first time – and give its members key ministerial posts – if his coalition wins the next general election.
Despite becoming Sweden’s second biggest political party after the Social Democrats in the last election, SD currently plays only a supporting role in the minority-run coalition.
Continue reading...American commandos joined Ecuadorian troops in a joint mission aimed at dismantling a suspected criminal hub along the country's coast.
Ignoring a debt lawsuit won't make it go away, but it can make things significantly worse. Here's what's at stake.
April 1, 2026 — Developing artificial intelligence (AI) applications requires expertise, computing power, and data – preferably a lot of it, and fast. LUMI AI Factory’s entirely new Dataset-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution brings data and compute closer together in a way that directly meets the growing needs of AI and data-intensive research.
Traditionally, large datasets have been moved from one environment to another based on individual use cases – from archives to compute services and back again – a process that consumes both time and resources. The LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS service approaches the issue from the opposite direction: it makes data visible at the very location where the computing power already resides. This shortens the distance from data to results and makes experimentation and research more seamless.
The DaaS user interface is a data catalogue in which data producers can publish their datasets in a controlled manner, and data users can discover them without manual searching or separate services. The service brings together metadata, access rights and data locations into a single whole, making datasets not only discoverable but immediately usable on the LUMI supercomputer. This is especially important in AI development, where training models require large volumes of data, and where the physical proximity of data to compute significantly affects performance and the reproducibility of workflows.
LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS creates value for two user groups at once: data users and data providers. For data users, DaaS streamlines the search for AI-ready datasets and eliminates the bottleneck of copying a large dataset elsewhere before analysis. For data producers, the service offers a clear publication path that makes datasets discoverable in a controlled, standardized way and available for broader use. A published dataset does not disappear into an archive – it gains visibility and utilization.
What is New About the LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS?
The LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS is not yet another data repository, and its primary purpose is not the storage or publication of datasets with citation information. A data repository and DaaS are complementary service models: the former supports long-term preservation and citability, while the latter focuses on use.
A traditional data repository is a place where datasets are archived and from which they can be downloaded elsewhere for use. DaaS, by contrast, orchestrates access to the data, guides users through permissions, and combines metadata, authorization and data location into a single process. Datasets included in DaaS may physically reside in different systems, but DaaS presents them as a unified selection and enables their use without requiring users to move data between systems.
Because DaaS is not an archive, it is also not intended for long-term preservation. Data is stored in DaaS only as long as it is in demand for AI development. When demand decreases, data can be removed from DaaS – but a preserved version remains available in an appropriate data repository if needed.
Architecture built on existing components
DaaS is a service, not a standalone IT system. Its value comes from the combination of metadata, access rights and technical integration. The service is built modularly on top of existing, widely used components. CSC’s Fairdata-Metax provides the metadata warehouse, and Fairdata-Etsin serves as the user interface and search tool. LUMI-O brings object storage close to compute, CSC’s Resource Entitlement Management System (REMS) manages access rights and related approval processes, and IT4I’s LEXIS enables data transfer and orchestration across different systems. This approach is cost‑effective and low‑risk compared to building an entirely new system: each component is already proven in practice, and combining them enables a flexible, scalable and sustainable service.
Modularity also means the service can be expanded piece by piece to meet user needs. The architecture is not rigid, and new capabilities do not need to be built from scratch – speeding up development and keeping costs under control.
Service available, functionalities advancing
The LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS is not yet a fully productized service, but its first pre‑productized version is already available to both data providers and data users. In this version, some integrations between service components are still under development , and certain parts of the service operate manually through support from LUMI AI Factory experts. However, the automation of functionalities is continuously progressing.
The set of available datasets is also evolving. Currently, the data catalogue contains ten extensive dataset collections, each composed of multiple datasets. One of these is the Open Web Search Index, a continuously updated resource comprising more than 1,000 datasets with a combined volume exceeding one petabyte. The Open Web Index consists of structured, indexed web document data collected using open methods and intended for reuse without the need to crawl the entire web independently. It provides a foundational infrastructure upon which search services, analytics, research and AI models can be built. It enables users to “slice and dice” web data according to their own needs, making it particularly valuable for search engine development and training large language models.
As the LUMI AI Factory’s DaaS matures toward a fully productised service, it will increasingly become a vital tool for both data providers and data users. The goal is to create a service that improves data discoverability, reduces manual work, and above all accelerates AI development. DaaS is not merely a new technical platform – it is part of a broader shift toward data that is immediately usable exactly where its value is created.
Explore the LUMI AI Factory’s Dataset-as-a-Service in more detail and contact LUMI AI Factory experts here.
Source: LUMI Consortium
The post LUMI AI Factory Launches Dataset-as-a-Service to Bring Data Closer to Compute appeared first on HPCwire.
Wage garnishment can drain your paycheck before you see it, but federal law limits how much creditors can take.
Former athletes like me know that in professional sports you can get away with most things … as long as you’re talented enough
When the Chicago Bulls waived Jaden Ivey on Monday, after he made a series of unprompted anti-LGBTQ and religiously charged comments on social media, the move was framed as a response to “conduct detrimental to the team.” On the surface, the situation appears straightforward: a player said something controversial, and the organization acted.
But there’s a version of this story where Ivey is still in the league. Where he and his publicist create a swift and thoughtful apology, where his overnight inclusion education uses all the key buzzwords to prove his newfound allyship, maybe he pays a fine or makes a small donation, and he’s able to go back on to the court and live out his dreams in the NBA, a league which has been pro-LGBTQ+ for more than a decade. Ivey’s words exposed his beliefs. What followed revealed a lot about NBA teams: not just their stance on inclusion, but how they decide which voices are worth protecting and which are easy to remove.
Continue reading... ![MKBHD Owns a [Mini] Onewheel](img/7746fa45198055872c939455416310f7114a4361.png "MKBHD Owns a [Mini] Onewheel") | I spy a mini Onewheel in MKBHD's April Fools vid in the background 🤣 https://youtu.be/Hc0aqOEU2w8?si=uC1yg7n96ko7Lv0H [link] [comments] |
Discussion on how to ease impact from Iran war coincides with Food and Drink Federation almost tripling forecast
Food inflation could hit 9% in the UK this year even if the strait of Hormuz opens within the next few weeks, figures suggest, as the Iran war pushes up energy prices.
The Food and Drink Federation (FDF), which represents 12,000 food and drink manufacturers, has predicted prices will rise by “at least” 9% by the end of 2026, almost tripling a forecast of 3.2% that was made before the Middle East conflict.
Continue reading...PM to focus on European defence and economic partnership for ‘dangerous world’, in pivot away from US
The UK will seek an even deeper partnership with the EU because of the instability wreaked by Donald Trump’s war with Iran, Keir Starmer has said, adding that the moment called for a more ambitious deal with Brussels to strengthen trade and defence.
His comments came as the US president again said he was considering pulling the US out of Nato, which he described as a “paper tiger”. Trump has frequently lambasted the UK and European nations for failing to support the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, and criticised their militaries.
Continue reading...Im looking for the pinlayout for the original BMS/XRV Bms
i have found Pictures of it but its always differnt. Every picture has a differnt layout. Does anyone know wich one is correct?
darwinmac writes: OnlyOffice has suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after the latter forked its editors into a new project called Euro-Office, according to a report from Neowin. The move comes just days after Nextcloud and partners like IONOS announced the fork as part of a broader push for European digital sovereignty. In a statement, the company accused the project of violating its licensing terms and international intellectual property law, claiming that Euro-Office uses its technology without proper compliance. OnlyOffice also pointed to missing attribution requirements and branding obligations tied to its AGPL-based licensing model. As a result, its 8-year-old partnership, which allowed Nextcloud users to edit and collaborate on office documents right inside their own instance, has been suspended. OnlyOffice also accused Nextcloud of not behaving in a manner expected of a partner, alleging attempts to poach its employees and influence customers against the company. Nextcloud said it forked the OnlyOffice repository instead of collaborating with the company because the project is notoriously difficult to contribute to. It also pointed out that OnlyOffice is a Russian company with Russian employees who leave code comments in Russian. In addition to that, some users may feel uncomfortable using software that could be linked to the Russian government.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Brutal past experience has taught us that a cost of living crisis doesn’t affect us all the same, because we don’t all go into it with the same income or wealth
Perhaps the most celebrated writer on oil markets is Daniel Yergin. His work has won a Pulitzer and his advice sought by every president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. Let’s start by looking at an example.
Fifteen years ago, before the US and Israel started their war on Iran, killing thousands of civilians in the process, before the strait of Hormuz became as infamous as the Bermuda Triangle, and before experts declared “the greatest global energy security threat in history”, Yergin published The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. After hearing Trump announce a “very soon” end to the conflict for the second – or was it the third? – time, I dug out my copy. Just as I remembered, it devotes a chapter to the Persian Gulf.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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.
Continue reading...Crown Prosecution Service confirms support on inquiries after arrests on suspicion of misconduct in public office
Police are receiving advice from prosecutors as part of their inquiries into Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein.
The former duke of York and the former UK ambassador to the US were both arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office over their connections with the late financier. They have since been released under investigation.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s rocket company could go public as early as June, Bloomberg reports
SpaceX has confidentially filed for an initial public offering on the US stock market, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. The IPO is set to be one of the most closely watched and highly valued listings in market history.
Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could potentially seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn. The confidential filing will give regulators a period to review and discuss the company’s financial disclosures before investors and the public are able to view them.
Continue reading...With oil prices rising and hiring already slowing, economists warn the Iran war could further weigh on U.S. job growth.
Distressed riders who were stranded for hours say Apollo Go customer service agents offered ‘useless platitudes’
A “system malfunction” has caused several self-driving robotaxis to stall in the middle of the road in China, police have confirmed, after distressed riders were stranded for hours.
Local authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan said they began receiving calls “one after another” on Tuesday night from riders reporting that autonomous vehicles operated by the Chinese internet company Baidu had frozen.
Continue reading...Michael O’Leary says UK’s reliance on Kuwait for jet fuel supply amid Iran war exposes it to possible shortages
The UK is the most vulnerable country in Europe to potential jet fuel shortages as the Iran war throttles supplies from the Gulf, the boss of Ryanair has said.
Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the budget airline, said Britain would be the most exposed to jet fuel shortages because it relies on Kuwait for about 25% of its supply.
Continue reading...April 1, 2026 — MLCommons today announced new results for its industry-standard MLPerf Inference v6.0 benchmark suite. This release includes several important advances that ensure the benchmark suite tests current, real-world scenarios for AI deployments and delivers a comprehensive picture of AI system performance.
Five of the eleven datacenter tests in MLPerf Inference v6.0 are new or updated, and the release also includes a new object-detection test for edge systems. The major changes include:
“This is the most significant revision of the Inference benchmark suite that we’ve ever done,” said Frank Han, Technical Staff, Systems Development Engineering at Dell Technologies and MLPerf Inference Working Group Co-chair. “The decision to update so many benchmarks in this round was prompted by the extraordinary enthusiasm and collaboration from our members, who contributed an unprecedented amount of engineering effort and IP toward building new inference benchmarks. Adding these new tests allows MLPerf Inference to better keep pace with the breakneck pace of evolution in AI models and techniques so that our benchmarks are relevant and representative of real-world deployments.”
The open-source MLPerf Inference benchmark suite measures system performance in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner. The goal is to create a level playing field for competition that drives innovation, performance, and energy efficiency for the entire industry. The published results provide critical technical information for customers who are procuring and tuning AI systems.
“We thank Meta, Shopify and Ultralytics for their substantial collaboration with us in making these changes to the MLPerf Inference benchmark suite and for contributing their datasets, task definitions and expertise,” said Miro Hodak, Senior Member of Technical Staff at AMD and MLPerf Inference Working Group Co-chair. “These partnerships were essential in ensuring that the tests include scenarios and workloads that represent the current state of the industry.”
“MLPerf Inference benchmarks play a vital role in driving transparency and accountability across the AI industry,” said Glenn Jocher, CEO & Founder of Ultralytics. “At Ultralytics, rigorous, reproducible benchmarking is central to how we develop and validate our Ultralytics YOLO models — ensuring developers and organizations can make informed decisions about real-world performance. We’re proud to be part of an ecosystem that holds the entire field to a higher standard.”
“Commerce is one of the most complex domains in AI, yet researchers rarely have data that reflects that complexity,” said Kshetrajna Raghavan, Principal Engineer, Applied ML at Shopify. “Shopify is uniquely positioned to address this, sitting at the intersection of millions of merchants and billions of products. Sharing this taxonomy allows the whole field to evolve.”
New Tools for Submitters and Consumers
With Inference 6.0, submitters have the option to use a newly available harness to complete benchmark tests. The new system, LoadGen++, allows LLMs to run with a serving-style software stack, which is familiar from typical deployments today. “LoadGen++ is a significant upgrade from its predecessor, and represents an important investment by MLCommons that will allow us to stay nimble as we continue to produce benchmark tests that track the state of the art,” said Han.
In addition, the Inference 6.0 results can be viewed in a new online dashboard <link> on the MLCommons site. The dashboard brings new levels of interactivity to viewing results, including advanced filtering and customized performance graphs.
Large-Scale, Multi-Node Systems Gaining Attention
The submissions to Inference 6.0 demonstrate that technology providers want to showcase the performance of scaled-up, multi-node systems running real-world inference workloads. This round recorded a new high for multi-node system submissions, a 30% increase over the Inference 5.1 benchmark six months ago. Moreover, 10% of all of the submitted systems in Inference 6.0 had more than ten nodes, compared to only 2% in the previous round. The largest system submitted in Inference 6.0 featured 72 nodes and 288 accelerators, quadrupling the number of nodes in the largest system in the previous round.
“As more AI applications have moved into production and wide availability, the demand for large-scale, high-performance systems to run them has grown,” says Hodak. “At the same time, multi-node systems bring a unique set of technical challenges beyond those of single-node systems, requiring configuration and optimization of system architectures, network interconnects, data storage, and software layers. Stakeholders are eagerly stepping up to meet these challenges and run inference workloads at scale.”
The AI Community Continues to Embrace and Invest in MLPerf Inference
The MLPerf Inference 6.0 benchmark received submissions from a total of 24 participating organizations: AMD, ASUSTeK, Cisco, CoreWeave, Dell, GATEOverflow, GigaComputing, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Inventec Corporation, KRAI, Lambda, Lenovo, MangoBoost, MiTAC, Nebius, Netweb Technologies India Limited, NVIDIA, Oracle, Quanta Cloud Technology, Red Hat, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Supermicro.
“I would like to welcome our first-time submitters, Inventec Corporation, Netweb Technologies India Limited, and Stevens Institute of Technology,” said Han. “The AI ecosystem is large and diverse, and it continues to grow and evolve rapidly. On behalf of MLCommons, I want to also thank our members, our contributors, and our partners including Meta, Shopify, and Ultralytics, for collaborating with us to build and shepherding forward the most comprehensive and relevant performance benchmark suite for AI inference. Together, we are ensuring that stakeholders in our community have valuable, real-world information that helps them to make better decisions.”
View the Results
To view the results for MLPerf Inference v6.0, please visit the benchmark results dashboard https://mlcommons.org/visualizer.
About MLCommons
MLCommons is the world’s leader in AI benchmarking. An open engineering consortium supported by over 130 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 grew into a set of industry metrics for measuring machine learning performance and promoting transparency in machine learning techniques. Since then, MLCommons has continued to use collective engineering to build the benchmarks and metrics required for better AI – ultimately helping to evaluate and improve the accuracy, safety, speed, and efficiency of AI technologies.
Source: MLCommons
The post MLCommons Releases New MLPerf Inference v6.0 Benchmark Results appeared first on HPCwire.
Anthropic is using copyright takedown notices to try to contain an accidental leak of the underlying instructions for its Claude Code AI agent. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and adaptations of the raw Claude Code instructions ... that developers had shared on programming platform GitHub." From the report: Programmers combing through the source code so far have marveled on social media at some of Anthropic's tricks for getting its Claude AI models to operate as Claude Code. One feature asks the models to go back periodically through tasks and consolidate their memories -- a process it calls dreaming. Another appears to instruct Claude Code in some cases to go "undercover" and not reveal that it is an AI when publishing code to platforms like GitHub. Others found tags in the code that appeared pointed at future product releases. The code even included a Tamagotchi-style pet called "Buddy" that users could interact with. After Anthropic requested that GitHub remove copies of its proprietary code, another programmer used other AI tools to rewrite the Claude Code functionality in other programming languages. Writing on GitHub, the programmer said the effort was aimed at keeping the information available without risking a takedown. That new version has itself become popular on the programming platform.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Following a stint in Congress and as administrator of the Federal Transit Administration in the Trump administration, Marc Molinaro has launched a campaign for a New York state Assembly seat.
Molinaro, a Republican, recently exchanged X posts with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, criticizing Hochul on her party’s record in office.
Hochul posted, "I’ll keep working to lower costs for New Yorkers and put money back in their pockets." Molinaro replied on Feb. 14, "You have driven NYers to the financial cliff! Highest tax burden in America, exploding electric & energy costs, leading in population loss."
Earlier this year, we looked at whether New York has the nation’s highest tax burden (it’s either first or second in most rankings) and whether New Yorkers pay 49% more than the national average for electricity (they do, though most northeastern states pay more).
Does New York lead the nation in population loss? There are a few different ways to measure it, so the answer depends on the method used.
We were unable to reach Molinaro’s office for comment.
Losses to other states. This metric offers the strongest support for Molinaro’s statement.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, New York saw 137,000 residents move to other states during the year ending July 2025. That’s the second highest raw loss of any state. California ranked first, losing 229,077 residents to domestic migration (movement within the U.S.).
And on a percentage basis, New York had the highest percentage loss to domestic migration, at 0.69%. Hawaii, Alaska and California ranked second, third and fourth.
Overall population change. New York didn’t fare well in this category either, but it wasn’t the worst in the nation.
New York gained 1,008 people on net between 2024 and 2025. This increase stemmed from the combination of natural growth (births minus deaths) plus international immigration exceeding New York’s losses to other states.
New York’s gain was the smallest percentage addition of any U.S. state that gained population — but fared better than the five states that didn’t gain population at all during that period. California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, and West Virginia all lost population from 2024 to 2025.
New York’s decline is not a new development. New York’s population is down by 119,835 people since 2020, the second-highest raw number behind California. Other states to see losses during that period were Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia, Hawaii and Mississippi.
On a percentage basis, New York’s loss was the fifth-largest in the nation. New York lost almost 0.6% of its population from 2020 to 2025, behind West Virginia, Hawaii, Louisiana and Illinois.
Molinaro said New York leads the nation in population loss.
Population loss can be measured in two major ways. By one metric — migration to other states — New York has the second-highest raw population loss and the largest percentage of any state.
However, thanks to increases from births and international migration, New York gained a small number of people. Five other states had no gains.
The statement is partially accurate but ignores important information, so we rate it Half True.
Cannabis policy still divisive two years in, with SPD hailing it while CDU minister says it is risk to young people’s health
It was a landmark piece of legislation passed by Germany’s previous, centre-left-led government: a measure that legalised the personal recreational use of cannabis for over-18s despite warnings from critics it would cause a steep rise in the drug’s use, including by teenagers, and boost criminal gangs.
Two years on, controversy over the move has still not been stubbed out, with critics and proponents at odds over its impact on consumption, youth welfare and organised crime.
Continue reading...Hershey said Wednesday it will use classic recipes for all Reese's products starting next year, after getting criticism for changing the popular treats.
The US president issued an executive order in 2025 that seeks to undo constitutional right to birthright citizenship
The US supreme court on Wednesday appeared poised to protect birthright citizenship, the longstanding policy that babies born in the US are American citizens, in what would be a blow to a key immigration policy for Donald Trump.
The court heard oral arguments with Trump himself in attendance inside the courtroom’s public gallery. A majority of justices asked questions indicating skepticism about the government’s attempt to overturn birthright citizenship. But while some expected the case to be a clear-cut win for those challenging the government, it is unclear how many justices might side with Trump. A decision is expected this summer.
Continue reading...Footage shows a man windsurfing being forcefully thrown from his board as a whale breaches off the California coast
An unsuspecting windsurfer collided with a gray whale on the San Francisco Bay in a startling and rare encounter captured on video.
The footage shows the moment the surfer is forcefully thrown from his board as a gray whale breaches off the California coast, plunging him into the water.
Continue reading...Six teenage girls arrested after hundreds of young people gather in Clapham in ‘swarming the streets’ trend
Police have urged parents to “take responsibility” after scenes of widespread disorder in Clapham, south-west London, on Saturday and Tuesday. Officers said the incidents were caused by a TikTok trend for swarming the streets.
Six teenage girls have been arrested so far, and the Metropolitan police said there would be more arrests in the coming days as officers reviewed CCTV and body worn camera footage of the disorder. It urged parents not to allow their children to take part in similar events over the Easter weekend.
Continue reading...First fatal incident this year occurred hours after £16.2m ‘stop the boats’ deal agreed between Britain and France
Two people have died and another is missing after trying to cross the Channel from France to the UK on Wednesday morning. It is the first fatal incident in the Channel this year.
The deaths occurred just hours after an interim £16.2m “stop the boats” deal was agreed between the UK and France which will be in place until May. Negotiations will continue for a longer-term deal to replace the previous three-year deal, which expired on Tuesday. According to reports, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is trying to secure a “payment by results” agreement to reduce small boat crossings.
Continue reading...Donald Trump has said he is considering pulling the US out of Nato, likening the alliance to a ‘paper tiger’.
It comes after weeks of denouncements from the US president against allies for not helping to reopen the strait of Hormuz.
When asked about Trump’s comments, Keir Starmer said: ‘Nato is the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen’ and ‘whatever the noise, I’m going to act in the British national interest in all the decisions that I make’.
Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley
Continue reading...Wilson hasn’t played for US since 2024 due to pregnancy
Davidson makes return after ACL injury last year
Hayes’s core crystallizes ahead of World Cup qualifying
Sophia Wilson will make her long-awaited return to the US women’s national team next week, as part of a 23-player roster named by Emma Hayes for a trio of friendlies against Japan.
Wilson last appeared for the US on 27 October 2024, entering as a sub against Iceland in a friendly. She announced her pregnancy in March 2025 and did not appear for the US or club team Portland Thorns that year. Her daughter Gianna was born in September 2025. The 25-year-old Wilson made her return from maternity leave for the Thorns last month and started her first game last weekend in a win over the Kansas City Current.
Continue reading...FDA planned to fast-track applications for authorization, but agency reviewers raise alarm over addiction risk
Popular nicotine pouch products have yet to be cleared for sale in the United States despite a fast-track Food and Drug Administration scheme, as agency scientists hesitate to authorize them due to potential risks to new users, including children, three sources told Reuters.
New tobacco products like pouches, which users insert under their lip to get a nicotine buzz, must be authorised by the FDA in order to be legally sold in the US, the world’s largest market for smoking alternatives worth some $22bn.
Continue reading...The COVID-19 variant BA.3.2, nicknamed "Cicada," has been detected in at least 23 countries and half the states in the U.S.
US understood not to be invited directly to talks that will explore ways of reopening critical waterway
The UK will convene 35 countries – excluding the US – to explore ways to reopen the strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route for oil and gas that has been blocked by Iran.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said the next phase of discussions in the joint British and French efforts to secure the waterway would be held on Thursday, with Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, alongside international leaders.
Continue reading...Take a look at how the four Artemis II astronauts will sleep, exercise and even use the bathroom while on board the Orion spacecraft as they shoot for the moon.
Seniors could get a bigger tax deduction this year, but the rules matter. Here's what to know before filing.
Oscar winners, indie faves and more are streaming free this month.
Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, said hospitals could already replace many radiologists with AI for some imaging tasks -- if regulators allowed it. He argued the technology presents an opportunity to simultaneously cut costs and expand access. Radiology Business reports: Katz -- who has led the 11-hospital organization since 2018 -- said he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. Hospitals could potentially produce "major savings" by letting the technology handle first reads, with radiologists then double-checking any abnormal screenings. Fellow panelist David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said his system is already seeing great success in deploying such technology. The AI Westchester uses misses very few breast cancers and is "actually better than human beings," he told the audience. "For women who aren't considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it's wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000," Lubarsky said. Katz asked fellow hospital CEOs if there is any reason why they shouldn't be pushing for changes to New York state regulations, allowing AI to read images "without a radiologist," Crain's reported. In this scenario, rads could then provide second opinions, if AI flags any images as abnormal. Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain's. "I mean, I'm in charge of a safety-net institution. It would be a game-changer," Scott said about AI being used to replace rads.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ministers accused of being too fearful of offending Emirates to help Britons detained for sharing images of war
The families of UK citizens held in the United Arab Emirates over allegations that they shared images of the conflict with Iran have voiced frustration at the British government’s failure to help.
Several British citizens are among more than 100 foreign nationals who have been detained under draconian Emirate rules that outlaw publishing or sharing material that could “disturb public security”.
Continue reading...At 17, Cooper Lutkenhaus is the youngest world champion in track and field history – and potentially USA’s poster boy for LA28
Fire on the boards. Slack jaws off it. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be yards away from the 17-year-old American high school student Cooper Lutkenhaus when he powered away from a strong 800m field in Torun to become the youngest world champion in track and field history. But no sooner had the applause died down than the search for superlatives began.
“He’s like David Rudisha,” said Eliott Crestan, the Belgian who took world indoor championship silver behind Lutkenhaus. “In 10 or 20 years’ time, I’ll be able to say that I ran against him.”
Continue reading...While the event is technically finished we are still finding plenty of deals remaining.
Brent crude prices have fallen sharply, while the FTSE 100 is up 1.8% and government bonds are rallying
UK food inflation ‘could hit 9% this year’ as Iran war drives up energy prices
Iran war may increase mortgage payments for extra 1.3m UK households, says Bank of England
The bond market is also reacting to hopes of peace in the Middle East soon.
Government bonds are rallying, which is pushing down the yield (or interest rate) on UK debt.
Continue reading...Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a list of new additions to the streamer in April.
President Trump is seeking to end birthright citizenship, after years of criticizing the constitutional right.
President Trump went to the Supreme Court on Wednesday as the justices took up his executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, a major test of his immigration agenda.
Fifty-eight other people found alive during rescue involving inflatable craft in early hours of Wednesday
The bodies of 19 people have been recovered from an inflatable boat south of the island of Lampedusa by the Italian coastguard, a spokesperson told AFP.
Fifty-eight other people, including five children, were found alive during the rescue in the early hours of Wednesday and transported to Lampedusa by the coastguard, according to Roberto D’Arrigo.
Continue reading...April 1, 2026 — Using molecular dynamics simulations to train a machine learning model, scientists developed software that predicts and could help to exploit the effects of gas particle impacts on satellites in the upper atmosphere.
Over the past decade the space business has been booming, showing a dramatic increase in the number of new satellites launched into Earth’s orbit for telecommunications, navigation, and observation. As this trend continues, many of these satellites will be deployed in very low Earth orbits (VLEO), a loosely defined region between 200 and 450 km above the Earth’s surface. Flying satellites at these altitudes has many advantages, including reduced launch costs and the ability to observe Earth at higher resolution. This approach also reduces the accumulation of space junk that jeopardizes spacecraft at higher altitudes, because traces of the Earth’s atmosphere present in VLEO naturally slow satellites down, causing them to re‑enter and burn up once their missions end.
Flying satellites in very low Earth orbits offers scientific and economic advantages. Gaining a better understanding of what happens when oxygen particles strike satellites could improve flight dynamics and potentially lead to new propulsion concepts that extend satellite lifespan. Image courtesy of the Atlas Collaborative Research Center.
This atmospheric drag is caused mainly by atomic oxygen. These particles continually strike satellites in VLEO, influencing their flight paths, causing surface erosion, and ultimately limiting their operational lifetimes. For this reason, a collaborative research center at the University of Stuttgart called ATLAS (Advancing Technologies for Low-Altitude Satellites) has been conducting fundamental research on interactions between rarefied high‑energy flows and spacecraft surfaces, developing concepts for utilizing the residual atmosphere, and exploring new design and operational strategies that will support improved VLEO satellite design, lifespan, and economic viability.
In one ATLAS subproject, Miklas Schütte of the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Space Systems and Stephen Hocker of its Institute for Functional Matter and Quantum Technologies have been developing a method for better predicting how gas particles and surfaces of satellites interact at very low Earth orbits. “For us at ATLAS, the question is not just how we could optimize aerodynamics to minimize resistance, but how we could use the forces acting on satellites to control their orientation and orbit,” Schütte explained. In a recent paper in the journal Physics of Fluids (selected by the journal as an “Editor’s Pick”) the team describes a new computational approach that models how gas particles reflect off surfaces by considering these interactions at the smallest of scales.
HPC-Generated Data Used to Train a Machine Learning Model
Close to Earth, the aerodynamics of automobiles or airplanes are typically simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which treats gases as continuous flows. Because the atmosphere at VLEO altitudes verges on the vacuum of space, however, it is very thin. This means that individual gas particles are located at greater distances from one another and CFD principles do not apply.
Researchers commonly use a method called Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) to predict satellite drag in the upper atmosphere. Current DSMC implementations still rely on highly simplified models for gas–surface interactions, though. In most cases, models assume that reflections are either purely mirror-like or purely diffuse, with particles scattering in many directions. Experimental studies, on the other hand, consistently show that the actual distributions of reflected particles deviate significantly from these idealized assumptions.
A much more precise method for simulating particle–surface interactions is molecular dynamics (MD). Based on mathematics that accurately reproduce basic physical principles, MD simulates how molecules interact at the scale of individual atoms over very short periods of time. Achieving this resolution makes molecular dynamics simulations very computationally demanding, and they can only be done using high-performance computing (HPC) systems like those at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS).
An oxygen atom reflects off of a block of amorphous aluminum oxide, a material used in satellite construction. The coloring of the reflected atom corresponds to the extend to which its trajectory deviates from a perfect mirror-like reflection. Image: Institute of Space Systems, University of Stuttgart.
In an ideal world one might use MD simulations to catalog every possible interaction of a gas particle and a surface, but this would be impractical even using today’s fastest supercomputers. Moreover, modeling an entire satellite with many surfaces and angles, traveling through space at 8,000 meters per second, would be impossible.
Instead, the ATLAS team used molecular dynamics to support a data-driven, generative machine learning approach. To create their dataset, they used HLRS’s Hawk supercomputer to simulate 225,000 particle–surface impacts in VLEO, investigating five different velocity magnitudes each at nine different incident angles. The dataset does not nearly cover all possible interactions, but provides sufficient coverage of a spectrum of potential angles and velocities that would be typical for a satellite traveling in very low Earth orbits. Using 128 cores on Hawk, it took approximately one month to generate the dataset.
Based on the results, the team then trained a machine learning algorithm on the MD data. The resulting model is able to interpolate and extrapolate from the dataset to automatically predict particle reflections for any other situation within the spectrum of the VLEO regime, including particle–surface interactions not specifically simulated using MD. When the investigators checked the resulting model’s accuracy they found that its results closely replicate those seen in training and validation data, suggesting that it is much more effective at making reliable predictions than current state-of-the-art models.
Schütte developed this model into a particle scattering kernel that he then integrated into the DSMC simulation method in PICLas. DSMC, in turn, can be used to simulate at a larger scale how rarefied flows (composed of isolated particles and not continuous flows) interact with surfaces in space. “Integrating a scattering kernel into DSMC methods brings these extremely precise simulations of particle reflections at the microscopic level up into the macroscopic or mesoscopic scale that is needed to actually simulate a satellite,” Schütte explained.
Simulation Opens New Opportunities for Improving Satellite Design
Schütte says that the successes he and his colleagues have seen so far make it possible to ask new questions that they plan to investigate in more detail within the ATLAS project. For one, they will look more closely at how impacts can lead to the adsorption of atomic oxygen on the satellite surface. Once adsorption has occurred, incoming oxygen atoms can react with the adsorbed species to form molecular oxygen that eventually leaves the surface. At the same time, the impacts can directly erode the surface. A second question concerns the effects of roughness on the scattering of gas particles. The work so far has assumed that surfaces are flat, but it is expected that a more realistic representation of surface topography could produce different results. And finally within the broader ATLAS project, researchers will be able to use the improved models of particle reflection to optimize materials selection for satellite construction, offering better reflection capabilities for controlling spaceflight and orbit stability. In the meantime, Schütte’s new scattering kernel is already being used by other scientists within the ATLAS consortium.
Another tantalizing idea would be to collect oxygen molecules in VLEO environments, and use them as fuel in propulsion systems to counteract the effects of drag. The improved model of physical interactions between particles and surfaces provides an important tool for developing this concept. “Having an accurate surface model is a critical step in being able to design an intake that could capture particles in this way,” Schütte said. “Right now this is still theoretical, but if it becomes possible it could be a real game changer that would could dramatically reduce the cost and extend the lifecycles of VLEO satellites.”
Related Publication
Schütte M, Hocker S, Lipp H, et al. 2025. A machine learning framework for scattering kernel derivation using molecular dynamics data in very low Earth orbit. Phys Fluids. 37: 093609.
Funding for HLRS’s Hawk supercomputer was provided by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Science, Research, and the Arts and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
Source: Christopher Williams, HLRS
The post HLRS: Particle Scattering Model Could Improve Low-Orbit Spaceflight appeared first on HPCwire.
This is mostly a sanity check. In the clips you see the heel pad spontaneously engaging and disengaging while I'm not on it.
My board ghosted a few times, ran off on top speed without me on it, so I brought it back to the shop. they "reset the sensors" and that was it.
The annoying part is that they try to move the problem to me and ask me to contact FM directly, but i'm in the Netherlands, this shop is the only seller in the Netherlands, and it's their responsibility to fix this.
Soo.. I'm not crazy right? This is faulty?
This live blog is now closed
Meanwhile, the European Union has sought to ramp up pressure on Hungary to drop its veto on the €90bn loan for Ukraine, with the European Commission saying it will push ahead with its preparatory work for the loan to be paid out.
The commission said it would draft a legal text setting out the details of the first payment of €45bn in 2026 and what the funds would be used for, and send it to the European Council to be formally approved by the bloc’s 27 leaders.
“We proposed a ceasefire for Easter – in response, we’re getting ‘shaheds.’ We also proposed a ceasefire specifically regarding energy infrastructure – the Russians ignore this and once again attempt to strike our substations and transformers.
Ukraine is working with partners to expand joint capabilities to protect lives, while Russia continues to prolong the war in Europe, and by sharing its intelligence with the Iranian regime it is openly investing in fueling war in the Middle East and the Gulf.
Ukraine proposed a ceasefire for Easter. Russia responded with a swarm of drones targeting civilians.
Continue reading...
Since the Iran war began Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel have reported killing many Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. After Khamenei’s death, Iranian government officials said his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, took power.
On multiple occasions, administration officials including the president have declared that Iran has undergone regime change following U.S. military action.
President Donald Trump mused in comments on March 24, March 26 and March 27 that regime change had already happened in Iran.
On March 25, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Trump’s mention of regime change the previous day. She said, "I mean, has it not?" She later added, "There has been a change in the regime leadership, which is what the president said, so thank you for confirming he was right."
Aboard Air Force One on March 29, Trump said, "We've had regime change, if you look already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They're all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anybody's dealt with before."
Two days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed the statement in a press conference, saying that "regime change has occurred."
When we asked White House staff why they were using this term, spokesperson Anna Kelly said, "The regime has changed because the former leaders are dead."
Military and foreign policy experts say this regime change explanation is insufficient to fulfill the term’s traditional meaning. Removing top officials is a necessary step in regime change, but not sufficient, they said
"It's fair to say that there has been a leadership change in the regime, but the regime is still there because the basic structures, like the constitution, are intact," said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank. "Regime change (in Iran) implies that the government is something other than the current theocratic structure."
Boaz Atzili, an American University foreign policy and global security professor, agreed that a regime consists of more than people.
A regime consists of "ideas and institutions," Atzili said. "The institutions remained intact."
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the armed forces branch that is widely considered a backbone of the regime’s power, is maintaining and possibly even gaining more control, analysts say. Other Iranian government power centers, such as the Guardian Council and the Council of Experts, are also still in place.
Michael O’Hanlon, the director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said he’s not aware of a formal definition of "regime change," but he said that what has occurred in Iran would not meet the "common sense standard of a complete removal of previous leadership and its ideology."
Analysts said there are signs Iran’s new leaders are more extreme than the ones who were killed.
"Judging from their backgrounds, these leaders — some pulled out of retirement — are more hardline, anti-U.S., and anti-Israel than those they replaced," Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign-policy think tank, wrote in a recent analysis.
If regime change was the goal, "it has so far failed miserably," Atzili said.
On CNN March 31, foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria said, "The system of government in Iran is fully in place. The people who have replaced the old office holders appear to be more hardline, more militaristic. … So, how you can claim this is a new regime, I don’t understand."
Later in the same show, John Bolton — a pro-interventionist on Iran who served as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term but later broke with him — described the conditions in Iran as "moving in the direction of possible regime change."
At least one Trump administration official — Secretary of State Marco Rubio — has taken a more cautious approach to using the phrase.
On ABC’s "Good Morning America" on March 30, Rubio said that the U.S. is "dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace."
Trump said that in Iran, "We've had regime change."
The U.S. has killed many top Iranian officials, including its supreme leader. But multiple foreign policy and military experts said regime change is about more than just people; it’s about governing institutions.
Iran’s current government structure appears intact, bolstered by the same ideology and using the same levers of power.
Because killing top Iranian leaders is a step toward regime change but insufficient to achieve it, we rate the statement Mostly False.
RELATED: Barack Obama says regime change in Iraq took eight years
You'll want to stick around for the credits to see where the Nintendo cinematic universe might go next.
A sucker for a good sunset 🥰
IMG_5186.jpeg
An international break that many expected to provide clarity has instead provided fresh reasons to doubt the tournament co-hosts
Roberto Martínez has long been easy with a smile. Those moments aren’t in short supply after wins like Tuesday’s, when Portugal comfortably dispatched the United States 2-0 in Atlanta.
That smile was on full display afterward, when he was asked for his thoughts on how the US look ahead of their home World Cup.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour. In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane. [...] Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was "likely caused by a system malfunction," but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured, and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It's unclear how many of Baidu's robotaxis may have been impacted. [...] There were at least two other collisions on the same day, according to photos and videos posted on Chinese social media. A RedNote user in Wuhan confirmed to WIRED that she drove past a white minivan that had gotten into a rear-end collision with a parked robotaxi. The back of the Baidu car was badly damaged, but the two people standing beside the scene looked unharmed, she says. She added that she estimates she also saw at least a dozen more parked robotaxies.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iraqi civilians are paying the price of the Iran war Expert comment thilton.drupal
The US-Israeli war on Iran has disrupted oil exports, pushed up prices and deepened fears of electricity shortages.
Iraq has been increasingly dragged into the US and Israel’s war with Iran, with both sides attacking each other on its territory. Civilians have suffered as rockets and drones fall near residential buildings in cities including Baghdad and Erbil.
The war has also exposed the fragility of Iraq’s economy and society. Most Iraqis are facing this latest conflict with limited financial resources and minimal savings, and with low confidence in the state to protect them from the war’s impact.
For many households, the war has caused anxiety over whether they will keep receiving their salaries or be able to access food and medicine. There are also concerns over whether electricity supplies will continue as temperatures rise ahead of summer.
Suspected Iranian attacks on two tankers in Iraqi waters near the port town of Al Fao in early March have also highlighted Iraq’s heavy dependence on maritime trade. The disruption to Gulf shipping is already constraining imports and leaving Iraq-bound cargo stranded or delayed.
For a country that moves more than 90 per cent of its trade by sea, prolonged disruption in the Gulf risks hitting Iraq’s economy and depriving it of crucial oil exports that finance the majority of the state’s budget.
Iraq is confronting the war with weaker governance structures and less capacity to shield society from the fallout than many of its neighbours.
The Iraqi state budget is the main safety net for much of the population. It provides salaries to millions of Iraqis, and many households still rely on state spending for their day-to-day survival, whether through salaries, pensions or welfare linked to public expenditure.
Iraq’s economy is still heavily dependent on oil, with crude sales making up more than 90 per cent of the state’s income. When oil flows are disrupted, state spending is affected. In turn, this hits household budgets through increased rent, food, transport, medicine and education costs.
The war on Iran has exposed this reliance by directly damaging Iraq’s export capacity. Baghdad declared force majeure on foreign-operated oilfields after disruption in the Strait of Hormuz halted most crude exports.
Iraq still has about $97 billion in reserves, but much of that is not immediately liquid, and reserves can only provide short-term relief. Economists have estimated that Iraq has around two months before salaries are directly impacted, after which the government will have to resort to temporary fixes to keep salaries paid.
Across Iraq, basic food prices have risen by 15 to 25 per cent. In the Kurdistan Region, officials report that the price of vegetables usually imported from Iran has doubled, while fuel prices have reportedly risen by more than 20 per cent in some cities.
Meanwhile, the dinar has weakened on the black market from the official rate of 1,300 to about 1,550 to the dollar, adding further pressure on household purchasing power.
Electricity is likely to be the most serious way in which the war will be felt inside Iraqi homes.
Despite Iraq having large natural gas reserves, it flares most of this gas as it lacks the infrastructure to use it as fuel for electricity. Since 2017 Iraq has instead relied on imported Iranian natural gas to provide electricity. More than 30 per cent of Iraq’s current electricity generation depends on those imports, leaving it exposed to regional tensions.
Israel’s 18 March attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field disrupted a significant portion of Iraq’s gas imports. Gas supplies to Iraq have now resumed, but only partially, stabilizing the grid but leaving little margin for further disruption.
The electricity system remains fragile heading into the summer, when demand rises sharply due to the heat. With total generation capacity at only around 24-28 gigawatts and projected peak demand in 2026 at 57 gigawatts, any further disruption could quickly deepen shortages.
That vulnerability was already visible on 4 March, when Iraq suffered a nationwide blackout after a sudden drop in gas supplies to the Rumaila gas-fired power plant in Basra.
Iraq has previously explored alternatives to Iranian imported gas, including importing gas from Qatar and Oman and efforts to expand domestic gas production. But these are not immediate substitutes.
In Iraq, electricity shortages have historically sparked protests, with many citizens believing that years of higher oil revenues should have led to improvements to the country’s electricity infrastructure. The current conflict exposes how little has been done to make the system more reliable, despite repeated warnings.
Pressures from the war risk inflaming a set of pre-existing and politically charged grievances.
In Iraq, state legitimacy has already been weakened by years of corruption, policy short-termism and uneven provision. As the economic impact of the war ramps up, the public perception that the government cannot be relied on in a crisis matters almost as much as the immediate material impact.
Protests over jobs and services were already re-emerging before the war. Earlier waves of protest targeted the ruling elite over corruption and the failure to provide services. Historically, many protesters have also rejected Iranian influence as well as the wider pattern of foreign interference in Iraq enabled by the post-2003 political system.
How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet?
In the 50 years since it was founded, Apple has long been seen as one of the most significant technology companies globally. The design and manufacturing decisions taken in Cupertino, California have affected product design across the world, helping usher in an era of ubiquitous touchscreen computing while insisting on exacting user experience design principles. How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet? Test yourself with these 12 questions.
The Guardian’s Apple at 50 quiz
Continue reading...Congressional leaders announced that Britain's King Charles III will address a joint meeting of Congress as part of his visit to Washington later this month.
Joani Reid MP reportedly swapped flirtatious messages with senior officer in charge of nuclear-armed submarine
A Royal Navy captain in charge of one of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines stepped back from his duties over his relationship with the MP Joani Reid, whose husband faces allegations of spying for China.
The married senior officer was investigated by the navy last year over his contact with Reid after the messages, described as inappropriate, prompted an assessment of a potential blackmail risk, the Financial Times first reported.
Continue reading...As launch time approaches for NASA's first moonshot in more than half a century, anticipation is building for the Artemis II mission. Here's how to watch today's liftoff.
This is not an April Fools’ Day joke! FactCheck.org is a nominee for the 30th Annual Webby Awards in the category for Websites and Mobile Sites: News & Politics.
Now our loyal readers can help us win the Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted on by the public. Go to vote.webbyawards.com and sign in or sign up to vote.
This link will take you directly to our category. Or, to find us from the main page, click on “Categories,” then “Websites & Mobile Sites,” then “General Desktop & Mobile Sites,” and finally “News & Politics.”
Also, if you register with your email address, please be sure to confirm your account so that your vote will count. Click “Resend Confirmation Email” if one is not automatically sent to your email address. (If you still don’t see the email – which should say “Webby People’s Voice Confirmation” in the subject line – check your spam folder, as the Webby website suggests.)
The voting period ends April 16. The Webby winners, including the ones picked by a panel of expert judges, will be announced April 21. The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
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 We Could Win a Webby with Your Vote appeared first on FactCheck.org.
The argument for transitioning to renewables seems stronger than ever – and yet, attacks mount on the carbon price scheme that underpins the EU’s success at cutting pollution
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On the one hand, experts say, Europe is better prepared for this energy crisis than the last. On the other, it is still waging a culture war against the most obvious path out.
Fuel prices have soared to ruinous levels since the Iran war left ships of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) stranded in the Gulf. The pain is most acute in Asia, but high energy prices are already causing panic in Europe. Shortages could hit the continent this month, oil company Shell warned last week. Donald Trump’s “go get your own oil” comments on Tuesday sent prices to their highest level since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran. They briefly dipped below $100-a-barrel on Wednesday amid hopes that the war may soon end.
Continue reading...U.S. gasoline prices continue to inch higher after crossing the $4 a gallon threshold on Tuesday for the first time since 2022.
Apple's MacBook lineup now includes three tiers: Neo, Air and Pro. See our favorites and find the best MacBook for your laptop budget and needs.
...plus new movies Thrash, Apex, and Roommates arrive to Netflix this month, too.
In her first print interview since release, the Palestinian immigrant says after year in custody, she sees it as her duty to denounce ICE detention in the US
A Palestinian woman who was released last month after spending a year in a Texas immigration detention center told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that she sees “a lot of similarities” between the treatment of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and that of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Leqaa Kordia, who was detained by ICE following her arrest at a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza, says that she will continue to speak up about the rights of Palestinians, but that she now also sees it as her duty to denounce the “human tragedy” of immigration detention in the US.
Continue reading...Experts say the US believes it is entitled to resources it desires – a perspective president has supported for decades
Donald Trump said this past weekend he wants to “take the oil in Iran” by seizing control of a key export hub, echoing a refrain he has returned to for over a decade.
It’s a sign of his disregard for international law and belief in “fossil-fuel imperialism”, experts say.
Continue reading...We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming
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When the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?
Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way.
Continue reading...Your home devices and appliances quietly suck energy even when not in active use. I found the worst offender and it totally shocked me.
April 1, 2026 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will share their discoveries and innovations at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego, California, April 7-9. ARPA-E funds high-risk, high-impact energy technologies that can be quickly and meaningfully advanced to catalyze bleeding-edge energy research.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers will share their discoveries and innovations at ARPA-E’s Energy Innovation Summit in San Diego, California, April 7-9. Credit: Morgan Manning/ORNL.
The summit will convene nearly 3,000 global energy innovators, investors, engineers and industry leaders. They will access more than 400 displays of groundbreaking ARPA-E-funded energy technologies, define new areas of scientific research and drive the development of reliable, secure American-made energy for all.
Summit speakers will include U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, U.S. Undersecretary for Science Dario Gil, who also directs DOE’s Genesis Mission to accelerate science through artificial intelligence, and AMD Chair and Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su, whose company is delivering next-generation computing and AI solutions.
Researchers at ORNL, the United States’ largest lab for interdisciplinary science and energy research, play an important role — often with collaborators — in turning disruptive concepts into impactful products through strengthening the following:
Energy Storage
Nuclear Fission and Fusion
Grid and Materials Supply Chains
Alloys in Extreme Environments
Partner-Driven Projects
Additionally, in a panel called “Powering the AI Revolution,” Prashant Jain, head of ORNL’s Advanced Reactor Engineering Section, will talk about the explosive growth of AI and cloud computing and their effects on today’s power grid. He and other panelists will discuss financial stakes, capital costs, timelines and, ultimately, what is needed to unlock the gigawatts that future AI deployments will require.
Other summit activities will further highlight the importance of ARPA-E funding in driving critical energy innovation and ensuring U.S. technological leadership. Tech demos from companies and universities will showcase the world’s first practical superconducting electric machine, low-cost utility undergrounding, and plasma electrodes for fusion energy and other extreme environments. Investor sessions will explore funding for furthering fusion and powering AI. Students will have opportunities to present ideas for partnerships and commercialization.
Source: Dawn Levy, ORNL
The post ORNL to Feature Transformative Tech at ARPA-E Summit appeared first on HPCwire.
Chatham House's Corporate Reception 2026 21 May 2026 — 18:00 TO 20:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House
Join us for the annual Chatham House Corporate Reception.
Join us for a special evening held to thank our corporate members for their continued support. Network with other members, connect with our research experts and discover ways to engage with our work—all over drinks and canapés.This special evening is held to thank our 300+ corporate members and supporters for their continued engagement with the Institute, especially over this turbulent period. You will have the opportunity to network with policymakers, business leaders and the diplomatic community, in addition to meeting our experts while enjoying drinks and canapés at Chatham House.
We would be grateful if you could RSVP to Aisha Abdirahman at aabdirahman@chathamhouse.org by Thursday 23 April 2026, letting us know if you will be able to join us and the name and e-mail address of your guest.
Taken in by reports of Liz Truss joining Nasa or the launch of nappy ‘Twosies’? It’s that time of year again
The media ecosystem may have changed since the BBC’s spaghetti harvest report in 1957 or the Guardian’s 1977 travel supplement about the island of San Serriffe, but April fool stories are still with us.
Indeed, if you picked up Wednesday’s edition of the Guardian, you may have been taken in by our report that evidence has been found of coffee being consumed in England a couple of centuries before the first known examples, thanks in part to an expert called Macky Arto.
Continue reading...This will be the first time humans have traveled to the moon since the early 1970s.
Jurors hear 19-year-old recount FaceTime call after alleged cliffside attack on Oahu during wife’s birthday trip
The son of a Hawaii doctor accused of trying to kill his wife testified on Tuesday that his father told him that his wife had been cheating on him and that he had “tried to kill her”.
Emile Konig, 19, told jurors that he had received two FaceTime calls from his father, Gerhardt Konig, 47, on the morning of 24 March 2025 – the same day prosecutors allege that Gerhardt attempted to murder his wife, Arielle Konig, 37, during a hike on Oahu’s “Pali Puka” trail.
Continue reading...Experts say brutal March heat has left critical snowpack at record-low levels – and key basins in uncharted territory
Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.
Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will likely be too little too late.
Continue reading...Head of committee says it was appropriate for government to seek guidance on way out of £330m deal with US data company
Claims by Palantir that concerns over the US data analytics company’s multimillion-pound NHS contract are “ideologically motivated” have been rejected by the chair of a parliamentary committee.
It was also appropriate for the government to seek guidance on activating a break contract in the deal, said Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP who heads the science, innovation and technology select committee.
Continue reading...US president’s claim that conflict is nearing end prompts 15% drop in Brent crude and stock market climb in Asia
Oil prices tumbled and stock markets have rallied across the world after Donald Trump said the war in Iran would end in “two to three weeks”.
Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, fell as low as $98.35 a barrel on Wednesday, down more than 15% on the previous day and its lowest level in a week. It later recovered some ground, ending the day at $102.
Continue reading...American Heart Association bucks Trump administration line to suggest prioritizing plant-based protein over meat
The American Heart Association’s new nutrition guidance, released on Tuesday, emphasizes a dietary pattern rich in vegetables, fruits and whole grains, prioritizing plant-based protein over meat.
It also suggests limiting the use of sugar, salt and ultra-processed foods and replacing full fat dairy with non-fat and low-fat dairy.
Continue reading...Prime minister says UK will host meeting later this week with other nations on the reopening of the strait of Hormuz
Starmer says he understands why people are concerned about the cost of living.
He says he has already set out a five-point plan to deal with the crisis.
Just look at what’s happening today. Today your energy bills will be cut because of the action that we took at the budget. And whatever happens in Iran, that price is now fixed until July.
The most effective way we can support the cost of living in Britain is to push for de-escalation in the Middle East, and a reopening of the strait of Hormuz, which is such a vital route for energy.
To that end, we’re exploring each and every diplomatic avenue that is available to us.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 1, No. 1,747.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 1 #1025
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 1, No. 759.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 1.
President Trump has told Britain's Telegraph newspaper he could try to terminate U.S. membership in NATO. He's railed against NATO allies for refusing to join the Iran war.
Neural implants, AI agents, facial devices, robots: Where exactly will Apple be headed in the decades to come? I take some guesses with a futurist friend.
After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, the border collie was flown to safety by a pilot who was determined to reunite pet and owner.
The Soviet-designed military transport turboprop aircraft crashed into a cliff, sources at the scene told state news agencies.
Proxy servers offer critical benefits in security and competitive intelligence, but they introduce new complications and risks.
Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair, The Testaments and more titles hit the streamer this month.
Group cuts costs as shares plunge while it grapples with impact of Iran war on property market
One of Britain’s biggest housebuilders has said it will stop buying new land and hiring new staff, as it grapples with the impact of the Iran war on the property market.
Berkeley, a London-focused housebuilder, said it would cut costs as it warned that “geopolitical volatility” and “reduced potential” for interest rate cuts could weigh on the business.
Continue reading...I got stopped by the police telling me it's the first onewheel they see and took pictures to register it in their system, I need immediate insurance and we won't be able to ride onewheels in 2027 and beyond, any PEV from before 2024 is also not permitted. does anybody know if new boards are going to have a serial number or any sort of certification to make them legal?
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me paró la policía diciéndome que era el primer onewheel que habían visto e hizo fotos para registrarlo en su sistema, que necesito un seguro inmediatamente y que aparte de 2027 no se puede circular con el, cualquier patinete de antes de 2024 también está prohibido circular. ¿alguien sabe si los onewheels nuevos van a tener un número de serie o alguna certificación para hacerlos legales?
Sandhu Ponnachan appears in court on charges of dangerous driving and causing grievous bodily harm
A 36-year-old man has been remanded into custody after appearing in court accused of dangerous driving after seven people were injured when a car hit pedestrians in Derby on Saturday night.
Sandhu Ponnachan, from the Alvaston area of the city, appeared at Southern Derbyshire magistrates court on Wednesday having also been charged with six counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, one count of attempted grievous bodily harm, and one count of possession of a bladed article.
Continue reading...Syrian President al-Sharaa on Iran war: ‘Syria will remain outside this conflict’ News release jon.wallace
In his first UK public event, President Ahmed al-Sharaa urged negotiations to resolve the US-Israeli war on Iran – and discussed elections, reconstruction and foreign policy.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa visited Chatham House on 31 March for a conversation with Director and Chief Executive Bronwen Maddox – his first public event in the United Kingdom. The two discussed Syria’s reconstruction, its foreign policy, and its position on the Iran war, before the president took questions from the audience.
Asked by Maddox about his government’s position on Iran and the war with the US and Israel, President al-Sharaa said that:
‘There is no doubt that Iran… was at the forefront of the conflict led by the [former] regime against the Syrian people. However, after we reached Damascus, we did not have an issue with Iran in Tehran; rather, our problem was with Iran in Damascus, because it was occupying Syrian villages and towns, displacing people, and so on.’
‘We have held back from opening relations with Iran up to this point. Certainly, the war currently under way is negatively affecting the region by disrupting energy and fuel supplies, which in turn affects the global economy… What we had been advising was that they should look for a negotiated solution, rather than resorting to military force, because that carries major risks.’
Asked by Maddox if Syria would remain neutral in the war, he replied:
‘Certainly, unless Syria is subjected to direct attacks by any party, it will remain outside this conflict. 14 years of war are enough for Syria, during which we have paid a very heavy price, and we are not prepared to go through a new experience. Those who have gone through the hardship of war know the value of peace…’
Asked if his government was helping to prevent weapons being transported to Hezbollah in Lebanon, President al-Sharaa said:
‘We, too, have paid the price for Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria over the past 14 years. Hezbollah was also an active partner with the [former] regime in the killing of the Syrian people.
‘Nevertheless, after we reached Damascus, we tried to adopt policies that would not harm the situation in Lebanon. We were keen that the conflict should not extend into Lebanon, while at a minimum protecting our borders. Protecting the borders requires that those responsible for securing them prevent the entry of weapons and cases of smuggling.’
Addressing relations with Israel, he said:
Portrait of President al-Sharaa taken at Chatham House by Ander McIntyre
‘We tried through dialogue and discussion. Indirect negotiations began and then moved to direct negotiations. We reached good points, but at the last moments we always find a shift in the Israeli position.’
Maddox also pressed al-Sharaa on his 2025 promise to hold elections within five years: ‘Are you still on track for that?’ she asked.
‘Certainly, Syria has taken initial steps. We held a national dialogue conference that produced recommendations. After that, we issued a constitutional declaration which stipulated that the first term would be five years as a temporary measure.
‘During this period, we also conducted elections for the People’s Assembly, whose first session will begin next month.
‘Of course, after five years, there will be further steps, as we have reviewed the laws and laid the groundwork for holding free elections in Syria.’
Here is a video clip of President al-Sharaa discussing the US-Israel war on Iran. You can watch the event in full here.
For 128 years, it’s been clear that if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. The court must not turn back the clock
I am lead counsel in the challenge to Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. As I and my team help the ACLU legal director, Cecillia Wang, prepare for the supreme court argument in this case on Wednesday, we are poring over legal minutiae and sharpening our arguments. But the larger questions that loom over the whole case are simple: What does it mean to be an American? Will we adhere to the best of American history and protect the values of equal citizenship and opportunity?
In early America, like today, people born on US soil were citizens, even if their parents were immigrants. That’s a principle we inherited from England as part of a body of rules known as the “common law”. In England, that rule was originally about monarchical power; but in our young republic it found new life as a principle of equal citizenship. As waves of immigrants arrived, the birthright rule ensured that the child of Irish or German immigrants would be no less citizens than those who traced their lineage back to the Mayflower.
Cody Wofsy is deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel on the Trump v Barbara legal team
Continue reading...James Broadnax was a teenager when a jury convicted him of capital murder, with his rap lyrics presented as evidence he posed a threat of ‘future dangerousness’
James Broadnax has been locked up in a 6ft-by-10ft cell on death row in Texas for more than 16 years, and in that time he has developed coping mechanisms for passing the long and desolate days.
A favourite technique is to write spoken word poetry at his cell desk. He becomes so engrossed in the creative process that he can lose himself for hours, transfixed in what he calls a “time gap”. In one of his recent poems, featured in a short death row documentary, Solitary Minds, Broadnax, who is 37, describes how he writes:
Continue reading...MIT Technology Review discovered that startup R3 Bio has pitched an ethically and scientifically explosive long-term vision beyond its public work on non-sentient monkey "organ sacks": creating human "brainless clones" or replacement bodies for organs as part of an extreme life-extension agenda. From the report: Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver. Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant. The fuller context of R3's proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They've been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash. And that's because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3's clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by [R3 founder John Schloendorn's] enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a "close encounter of the third kind" with "Dr. Strangelove." [...] MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called "body replacement cloning" in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains. A main purpose of the fundraising, investors say, was to support efforts to try these techniques in monkeys from a base in the Caribbean. That offered a path to a nearer-term business plan for more ethical medical experiments and toxicology testing -- if the company could develop what it now calls monkey "organ sacks." However, this work would clearly inform any possible human version.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Campaigners call verdict on Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham ‘grotesque’ and part of attempt to ‘undermine civil liberties’
Two prominent leaders in the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain have been found guilty of breaching protest conditions, in what campaigners called a “grotesque” and “shocking” decision.
Ben Jamal, 62, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), and Chris Nineham, 63, vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition, were accused of failing to comply with conditions imposed on a protest on 18 January 2025. They were subsequently charged with public order offences.
Continue reading...The final season of The Boys arrives, along with loads of other new original shows and movies, this April.
Some European countries have blocked Israeli and US planes from moving weapons through their airspace. Plus, a rocket heads to the moon for the first time since 1972
Good morning.
Donald Trump has launched a tirade against European countries that refused to join the Israel-US war against Iran, calling out the UK and France, as transatlantic relations continue their downward spiral and the war wreaks havoc on the global economy.
What pushback has there been from Europe? France has blocked Israeli planes from flying weapons through its airspace, while Italy refused last-minute permission for US bombers to land in Sicily. Spain has already denied the US use of its bases and airspace. The UK, however, has allowed the US to use its bases for a war that its government says is illegal.
For the latest updates, follow our live blog.
Continue reading...Your iPhone gets new emoji, video podcasts and more.
Company chaired by Trump ally Larry Ellison seeks to reassure investors that bet on AI infrastructure will pay off
Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.
The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.
Continue reading...Most modern dishwashers have one important part that needs regular cleaning. I asked an expert about how and how often to do it.
The distorted face emoji is fun, but the orca is number one in my heart.
From an interactive session of Sex With Friends to improvised Robot Karaoke, the Friday Live celebration of play and performance amid the museum’s venerable halls was a reminder of gaming’s cultural clout
In the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, beneath a looming dome with ancient statues visible through nearby arches, a programmer/DJ is busy live-coding a glitchy electronic music set. Either side of her, large LED displays show streams of code and strobing pixellated images as the bass pounds. She’s part of a group named London Live Coding, an experimental collective that makes music by writing and manipulating audio programs. It is loud, disorientating and brilliant, and I can’t help wondering what Queen Victoria and her husband would have made of it.
The set is part of the museum’s long-running Friday Late evening series, a collaboration with the London Games Festival. It showcased a range of independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, focusing on the link between play and performance. Visitors were given a map and left to wander the halls, corridors and galleries looking for installations. You could play the Bafta-winning comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here! on a giant screen beneath a 13th-century spiral staircase. You could wander down the darkened Prince Consort’s gallery and find groups of giggling pals playing the hilarious erotic physics puzzler Sex With Friends, in which ragdoll-like characters have to be guided into (consensual) sexual encounters – much to the amusement of spectators.
Continue reading...Five Nights at Freddy's 2, The Real Housewives of Rhode Island and more also arrive on Peacock.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware’s largest hospital system is expanding both in and out of the state. On Monday, the hospital said it would spend $75 million to build a new inpatient rehabilitation facility as part of that expansion.
ChristianaCare announced Monday it is building a new $75 million inpatient rehabilitation facility for patients in need of physical, speech and occupational therapy near its Newark hospital.
The announcement comes as part of the hospital’s $865 million investment into health facilities across the state, and more than a month and a half after announcing plans for a new $65 million campus in Georgetown.
ChristianaCare said it would partner with the Pennsylvania-based Onix Group, a commercial real estate company that focuses on hotel and health care developments, on the project. Some of its properties include the Hyatt Place on the Wilmington Riverfront, Dover Town Center on U.S. Route 13, and Cadia Healthcare Silverside near Talleyville.
The new 92,000‑square‑foot facility would open in summer 2028, offering 73 beds for rehabilitation services and creating 122 new jobs.
ChristianaCare cited the state’s aging population as part of its reasoning for constructing the facility, as well as relieving pressure on Wilmington Hospital’s emergency department. At Wilmington Hospital, ChristianaCare runs its “Center for Rehabilitation,” where it offers treatment for patients recovering from strokes and other traumatic injuries.
The hospital said it would transfer the Center for Rehabilitation’s 40 beds to the new Newark center, and the space in Wilmington would be converted to an inpatient step‑down unit to free up space in the emergency room.
“As one of the highest-quality programs in the region, these services are in high demand,” said Bradley Sandella, clinical leader of ChristianaCare’s medical subspecialties service line, in a statement. “But our ability to grow has been constrained by the space limitations in Wilmington Hospital.”
In recent months, the hospital has announced expansions both in and out of the state after saying last summer it would spend $865 million on new health facilities in the coming years.
Last month, the health care giant announced it aims to open a new $65 million campus in Georgetown. Months before that, it said it was building a health center dedicated to treating cancer in Middletown.
The health care system expects its new Georgetown facility — which would offer emergency beds, behavioral health care, specialty care and primary care — to open by 2028. It is partnering with health care-focused developer Emerus Holdings to build the facility at 20769 DuPont Blvd., just south of the Bridgeville Road intersection.
After a failed bid to merge with Southern New Jersey’s Virtua Health, the Georgetown plans could indicate that ChristianaCare sees more opportunity in its own backyard, and is willing to disregard the loose geographic monopolies that health care systems have enjoyed in Delaware for decades.
“This new campus will help close gaps in access by bringing high-quality, equitable and more convenient care directly into the community that needs it most,” ChristianaCare’s CEO Dr. Janice Nevin said in a statement. “Our goal is simple: ensure that every Delawarean can access the care they need, in the right place at the right time.”
ChristianaCare’s new facility would also come as federal funds will soon start to flow into Delaware’s southern counties to support rural health, and the hospital system continues its expansion both in and outside the state.
Like up north with its new rehabilitation center, ChristianaCare framed its decision to expand into Georgetown as part of a commitment to serve Delaware’s aging population.
Its Middletown cancer center, which is slated to open in May 2027, would solidify its foothold in the suburbs south of the C&D Canal. The $92 million health center would bring primary care, behavioral health, pediatrics, neurology and cardiovascular care, among others.
Since 2020, ChristianaCare has ventured deeper into the suburban Philadelphia health market, purchasing defunct hospitals and building its own in the surrounding towns. The hospital system announced last year it would partner with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, better known as CHOP, leaving Delaware’s chief pediatric hospital, Nemours Children’s Health, on the sidelines.
However, late last year the hospital and New Jersey-based Virtua Health terminated a letter of intent they signed last summer that had signaled the health systems were considering merging in the coming years.
Combining the current ChristianaCare and Virtua Health footprints would have created a system covering more than 10 contiguous counties in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland, with more than 600 facilities, nearly 30,000 employees and more than 500 residents and fellows.
The deal also would have required numerous regulatory sign-offs in both states, pitting potential hurdles to completing the deal. That included a review by attorneys general in Delaware and New Jersey because both systems are not-for-profits.
In Delaware, the prospect of an out-of-state merger was met with skepticism from Gov. Matt Meyer, who challenged the move when asked about it at a July press conference.
“I think when any medical practice in Delaware, and especially nonprofit hospitals, get some positive return from serving Delawareans’ health, that money should be reinvested in Delaware, not in another state,” Meyer said.
The post ChristianaCare announces new $75M rehab facility in Newark appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
We need a 5% wealth tax on America’s 938 billionaires. Over a 10-year period, this bill would raise much-needed $4.4tn for public coffers
Never before in American history have so few had so much wealth and power. Today, the top one per cent owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, worth $805bn, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.
And that inequality is getting worse. Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history from Donald Trump, 938 billionaires in America became $1.5tn richer. Since he was elected, President Trump and his family have become $4bn richer.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delmarva Power is the largest energy provider in the state, serving more than 300,000 customers. If its rate increase request are approved by regulators, customers will see higher monthly bills.
Electric bills for Delmarva Power customers in Delaware are going to increase, again.
Last week, Delmarva Power officials notified state energy regulators that they will raise the average home’s electricity bill by $15 a month, citing a need to pass along higher energy supply costs.
While the increase is formally characterized as a request to energy regulators, Delmarva Power and state officials say it will very likely be approved because of its pass-through nature.
The increase is one of two that will result in higher energy bills for consumers in 2026.
In December, Delmarva Power requested an increase in the amount of profits it can legally earn in the state, which will result in a 4% jump in electricity rates in July. Delaware regulators may ultimately reject the increase — or lower it — at a later date, which would lead to refunds of any excess payments.
Delmarva Power Region President Marcus Beal previously told Spotlight Delaware that the company needs the additional money to pay for upgrades to the utility’s aging electric infrastructure.
In an interview Tuesday, Beal noted that last week’s price increase differs significantly from the one filed in December because the supply costs are “the side of the bill that we don’t control.”
As a regulated, for-profit utility, Delmarva Power is allowed to operate as a monopoly provider of energy in much of the state. To have that status, the company has to submit formal requests to regulators at the Delaware Public Service Commission when it wants to raise electricity or natural gas rates.
Delaware Public Advocate Jameson Tweedie fits into the system as the formal proponent for the interests of electricity customers.
In a statement, Tweedie’s office said it will not oppose last week’s rate increase request because it “has no reason to think” that a previous energy auction that returned higher wholesale electricity costs was unfair.
Still, Tweedie has said he will oppose Delmarva Power’s December rate increase request, arguing it is unfair to increase the utility’s profits while customers are struggling to pay rapidly rising energy bills.
A typical residential electricity customer in Delaware sees an average monthly bill of $157, a Delmarva Power spokesperson said. The two rate increase requests combined would increase those bills by about 13%, or $21, beginning in July.
Delmarva Power supplies electricity to 344,000 residential or commercial customers in Delaware, making it the state’s largest private utility. It also provides natural gas to a smaller number of customers in the state.
GET INVOLVED
Delaware residents can make their voices heard about Delmarva Power’s latest request by submitting public comments online here. To do so, commenters should include the rate increase’s docket number, 26-0389, in the online form.
Comments can also be made at the beginning of Delaware Public Service Commission meetings. Commission spokesman Matt Hartigan said Delmarva Power’s latest request will likely be heard on April 22.
Customers struggling to pay higher energy bills can use Delmarva Power’s Assistance Finder search tool to apply for energy assistance programs and community resources.
Delmarva Power’s rate increase request follows an electricity supply auction that produced high prices that were the result of growing electricity demand that hasn’t been matched by new power supplies, Beal said.
In essence, the imbalance in supply and demand has driven up the cost of electricity, which is then passed on to consumers.
That imbalance has been growing over the past few years and much of the regional increase in demand has come from big energy users, such as data centers.
The latest rate increase request comes a year and half after another regional electricity auction sparked a backlash from state governors, consumer advocates and environmentalists who called on the industry-run grid operator — PJM Interconnection — to enact sweeping reforms, including faster approvals of proposed wind and solar projects.
Delaware is in the same regional electricity grid as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which have all seen a boom of new construction of data centers because of the growing computing demands from artificial intelligence applications.
Separately, Delmarva Power said in December that it is currently working with five developers to build data centers in Delaware.
Of those, one is an “early stage prospect.” The others are showing “more advanced interest,” according to the company.
If all are approved, the data centers would nearly double the current electricity demand of all homes and industry in the entire state
Beal said Delmarva Power will have to provide power to any data center customers that come to the state, despite the staggering new energy demands they would bring.
“We are required by law to serve all customers. We cannot discriminate,” Beal said.
The post Delmarva Power electricity bills set to go up again in 2026 appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
We now know all 48 teams that will play in the US, Canada and Mexico later this year – this is how they got there
Nine countries qualified as group winners – Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Ghana, Cape Verde, South Africa, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire – and the Democratic Republic of Congo gave the continent a 10th representative at the tournament by battling through the playoffs.
Egypt
Mohamed Salah scored twice as Hossam Hassan’s side beat Djibouti 3-0 in Casablanca in October and made up for missing out on Qatar 2022 by reaching the finals with a game in hand. This will be Egypt’s fourth finals, even though they have yet to win a game. Bizarrely, the Pharaohs did qualify for the first World Cup, in 1930, but missed their boat from Marseille to South America after a storm delayed them.
Khalid Ahmed, 24, from Ealing in west London, also charged with one count of possession of prohibited ammunition
A 24-year-old man who was stopped at Dover has been charged with 10 counts of possession of a firearm.
Khalid Ahmed, from Ealing in west London, who is a dual Dutch and Irish national, is to appear at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday, where he will also face one charge of possession of prohibited ammunition.
Continue reading...If you don't want to pay for a personal trainer or gym membership, the best workout apps are a great alternative you can use anywhere, anytime.
State department says it is working to ensure release of freelancer ‘as soon as possible’ after abduction in Baghdad
An American journalist, Shelly Kittleson, has been kidnapped in Baghdad by a suspected Iranian-backed Iraqi armed group, the US has said, as regional security deteriorates after the US-Israeli attack on Iran.
Kittleson is a longtime freelancer in the region, reporting extensively from Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
Continue reading...The Climate Briefing: Climate change, energy and geopolitics Audio thilton.drupal
Anna and Bhargabi are joined by three experts to explore the links between climate change, energy and geopolitics.
As the conflict in the Middle East rattles energy markets, this episode explores the connections between climate change, energy, and geopolitics. It addresses questions such as:
- What does the war in Iran reveal about the links between fossil fuels, vulnerability, and power? What lessons can be drawn?
- What does the energy transition mean for global geopolitics, and how should governments manage the ‘messiness’ of the process?
- How are the impacts of climate change reshaping our world, and what can be done to navigate the challenges that arise?
To unpack these dynamics, Anna and Bhargabi are joined by Arthur Snell (a former diplomat and author of Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It), Michael Bradshaw (Professor of Global Energy at Warwick Business School, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, and author of The Geopolitics of Energy System Transformation: Managing the Messy Mix), and Dr Beatrice Mosello (Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House).
The Climate Briefing explores key themes in the UN climate negotiations and international climate politics. The podcast is hosted by Bhargabi Bharadwaj and Anna Aberg from Chatham House and features interviewees from governments, international organizations, academia and civil society organizations from across the world.
You can also listen to The Climate Briefing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The American star hasn’t scored since 2024 for the US, but he and manager Mauricio Pochettino are taking it in stride
Nobody on the US men’s national team is worried about Christian Pulisic’s severe lack of goalscoring form.
At least, nobody is saying they are.
Continue reading...With the NFL’s Chicago Bears weighing a once-unthinkable move to Indiana, a new federal bill aims to give cities the right to keep their teams
WWE star CM Punk called it “straight greed”. Illinois governor JB Pritzker called it a “slap in the face”. An overwhelming majority of fans say they will hold a grudge.
This cacophony of disgust has been prompted by the real possibility that the Chicago Bears could relocate to Hammond, Indiana. The Bears’ owners bought a site in Arlington Heights, Illinois, for a new stadium, but negotiations over property taxes have stalled construction. Meanwhile, Indiana has thrown its hat into the ring, passing a state bill on 26 February authorizing funding in Hammond. Chicago’s current home, Soldier Field, is a rental, open-air venue with the smallest seating capacity in the NFL. Still, it is not only in Illinois; it is in Chicago proper along Lake Michigan. Arlington Heights, while about 25 miles north of the city, is at least within state lines.
Continue reading...Former Infowars video editor and field producer spoke on his experience working on the show in an NPR interview
A former video editor and field producer for Alex Jones’s Infowars has said his work for the notorious conspiracy theorist was “nonsense” and “lies”, but he kept at it for four years in his 20s because the far-right media company’s founder was a magnetic presence and it earned him good money.
Josh Owens made those revealing remarks in an NPR interview published on Tuesday promoting his new memoir about once having been an employee of Jones and Infowars – a conversation that also detailed the hand he said he had in fabricating a video of an operative of the Islamic State (IS) terror group sneaking into the US from Mexico immediately after a beheading.
Continue reading...The Trump administration official leading an effort to loosen rules on methane pollution was an unnamed author of key industry arguments against those same rules just four years ago when he was an oil and gas lobbyist.
Aaron Szabo, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter objecting to proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest emitters of the planet-warming gas, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.
Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of the AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he drafted the arguments against the restrictions, which were finalized later in the Biden administration. He has also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemicals sectors. While he did not hide that work during his confirmation last year as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people working in these companies want to ensure the environment is properly protected.”
In his current role overseeing federal climate rules at the EPA, Szabo has been soliciting input and even specific regulatory language from oil industry groups that stand to gain from watered-down methane rules, according to internal emails, calendar entries and records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed to Szabo’s previous lobbying as evidence that the EPA had effectively been captured by the oil and gas industry. “Now he can do Big Oil’s dirty work from inside the EPA,” Whitehouse told ProPublica in an email.
As part of its plan to “unleash American energy,” the Trump administration has waged an unprecedented campaign against regulations on fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. One of its biggest moves was to repeal the “endangerment finding” that classified greenhouse gases as pollutants — the basis for the EPA’s authority to limit emissions at all. Rather than throw out the methane rules entirely, however, Szabo’s office is working to revise them, emails and documents show. It has already delayed many of the compliance deadlines until next year.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a climate superpollutant, responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since preindustrial times, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. When it escapes into the atmosphere without being burned for energy, it can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, research shows. The oil and gas business is the largest industrial source of U.S. methane emissions, in part because of leaks from poorly maintained equipment. If it is uneconomical to collect the gas for sale, companies sometimes intentionally release it in a process known as venting.
To cut down on methane discharges, President Joe Biden’s EPA imposed much stricter controls on oil and gas operations, including requiring increased monitoring for leaks and equipment upgrades. According to agency estimates, the new rules would have lowered the industry’s methane emissions by nearly 80%. And, given that the gas breaks down relatively quickly, this would have been one of the fastest ways to reduce global warming.
Industry groups pushed back. In the January 2022 letter that Szabo helped to draft, the AXPC used the word “burdensome” 10 times to describe the new requirements and pushed for more “flexibility” to allow for less expensive leak-detection methods and less frequent monitoring, among other requests.
The group also cast doubt on the rules’ expected climate and health benefits, highlighting what it called “the importance of communicating the significant uncertainties within the estimates.” The AXPC’s chief executive, Anne Bradbury, added in a later statement that the rules risked “undercutting US production in the near and long-term — which will lead to increased energy costs and reduced energy security.”
The AXPC failed to persuade the Biden administration to change its approach. But it renewed its push after President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered federal agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind” any “undue burden” on domestic energy production.
Szabo, after two years as a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, joined the administration on Day 1 as an adviser to EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He immediately signaled that he planned to weaken the regulations he had argued against as a lobbyist. His staff met with AXPC representatives as early as Feb. 6, 2025, less than three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, to discuss its petition to “reconsider” the methane rules, according to emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests and shared with ProPublica by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry. His staff went on to meet with them at least twice more, and Szabo himself was listed as a required attendee for a meeting with Bradbury last July.
The AXPC didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica seeking comment.
According to records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica, other oil industry representatives have described their meetings with Szabo and his staff as highly favorable to their interests. “Mr. Szabo assured us that the EPA is focused on these [methane] rules and doing everything that can be done to limit the damage they will cause,” the leadership of a major trade group wrote to its members last year in an internal newsletter.
Lee Fuller, of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, also spoke glowingly about his meeting with Szabo’s office on a conference call with industry representatives last year.
“It was one of the more fascinating meetings that we’ve ever had, just because they were suddenly willing to talk to us,” he said. “And they’re also suddenly willing to talk about things that we’ve been trying to get them to do for years, and they’ve never even let it kind of come onto the radar screen.”
The IPAA declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but linked to a September 2025 letter in which the group publicly asked the EPA for exceptions to the methane rules.
Szabo’s office has even invited oil industry groups to offer specific wording for the revised rules. “We had a call several weeks back re. pneumatics on temporary equipment,” Mike O’Connor of the American Petroleum Institute wrote to an EPA official, referring to devices that are a major source of methane emissions. “EPA had informally requested input on this topic and any suggested reg. text language. We are providing the attached draft document as informal input to EPA’s inquiry.” The draft called for a number of exemptions.
The shift in priorities under Szabo can also be seen in communications from the EPA itself. In a June 2025 email reviewed by ProPublica, an agency official asked O’Connor to meet and discuss alternative leak-detection methods. Echoing the language in the AXPC comment that Szabo helped to draft, the official spoke of “the additional flexibility we would like to pursue.”
“I think their agenda was, from what I could tell, to do what industry wanted,” one former EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, said of Szabo and other Trump appointees at the agency.
“Since when is it a bad thing for public officials to ask the public what they think?” the EPA said in an emailed statement, referring to Szabo’s interactions with oil industry representatives. Szabo “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter. He met with EPA career ethics staff when he started at EPA to ensure he is aware of and complies with federal ethics requirements.”
Szabo’s affinities are hardly a secret. He is thanked by name in the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. As part of the nomination process for his appointment at the EPA, he also submitted ethics disclosures listing oil, natural gas and chemicals companies he had lobbied for.
Still, at his confirmation hearing on March 5 last year, he repeatedly declined to elaborate on his role in Project 2025, beyond saying he provided “general advice and thoughts” on the Clean Air Act.
The post The Trump EPA Official in Charge of Methane Regulations Helped Write Oil Industry Argument Against Those Rules appeared first on ProPublica.
Some of HBO Max's biggest shows are back this month, along with tons of major movie releases.
North Carolina and other states have insurance plans for kids in foster care, but many doctors did not accept patients on the plans, leaving kids' guardians scrambling to find health care providers.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court marked International Trans Day of Visibility with yet another ruling that puts the lives of trans people at risk. The justices ruled that Colorado’s statewide ban on conversion therapy for young people likely violates a Christian counselor’s First Amendment rights. The decision threatens conversion therapy bans nationwide, which are currently on the books in nearly half of all U.S. states.
The 8-1 ruling has far-reaching, terrifying potential consequences. And not only for trans youth: It indicates that speech delivered by licensed health care practitioners in a professional capacity, no matter how harmful and debunked the claims, cannot be banned as illegal conduct, because it counts as protected speech.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the one dissenting judge, appeared to appreciate the grave stakes of this ruling.
“Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients.”
“Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want,” Jackson wrote in a blistering dissent. “Largely due to such State regulation, Americans have been privileged to enjoy a long and successful tradition of high-quality medical care. Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition.”
The dangers of conversion therapy to trans and queer youth cannot be overstated. According to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide-prevention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, “LGBTQ+ youth who experienced conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year.”
Conversion therapy, however, may not be the only potentially harmful intervention the ruling would apply to. As Jackson added in her dissent, the ruling “might make speech-only therapies and other medical treatments involving practitioner speech effectively unregulatable — not to be reached via licensing standards, medical-malpractice liability, or any other means of state control.”
It is a ruling, then, completely in line with our Trumpian moment of decimated medical care standards and eliminationist assaults on trans people. Indeed, it was done with support from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed wrote, the court’s logic in the ruling holds that “any medical treatment delivered through words rather than instruments could now carry First Amendment protection — a framework that could shield a doctor who encourages a patient to commit suicide, a dietician who tells an anorexic patient to eat less, or a therapist who deliberately steers a vulnerable client away from life-saving treatment.”
Reed noted that the decision risks extending constitutional protections to “speech-based professional conduct” in other fields, like a lawyer giving knowingly harmful legal advice.
The crux of the majority’s opinion rests on the contested line between speech that is protected against government interference, and conduct, which can be regulated.
“Her speech does not become ‘conduct’ just because a government says so or because it may be described as a ‘treatment’ or ‘therapeutic modality,’” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority opinion, referring to the speech of Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, who sued the state of Colorado over the conversion therapy ban with representation from the right-wing legal giant the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Gorsuch’s opinion draws an extraordinary conclusion about the role of certain speech acts in professional health care settings.
The Colorado law did not ban Chiles from holding and expressing Christian views; the law, like regulations in over 20 other states, banned conversion talk therapy — that is, speech acts delivered with the specific aim to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
It is precisely professional conduct that the law regulates.
As Jackson noted in her dissent, “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of a scalpel.”
Every major medical and mental health association has condemned the practice of conversion therapy.
Given the danger posed by the court’s decision, it may seem surprising that the two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, sided with the far-right majority. Their decision, according to their concurring opinions, related to the fact that Colorado’s law was not written in sufficiently “viewpoint-neutral” language.
“We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint-neutral laws regulating health providers’ expressions because, as the Court holds, Colorado’s is not one,” wrote Sotomayor.
With this far-right supermajority Supreme Court, however, even cautiously worded conversion therapy bans may not survive the conservative justices. In the last year alone, the court has bucked precedents and ignored medical expertise, not to mention basic humanity, in previous anti-trans decisions like banning trans youth health care and ejecting trans people from the military.
The court’s Tuesday decision did not in itself strike down the Colorado law, but in siding with conversion therapy, the justices returned the case to the 10th Circuit, where the highest form of judicial scrutiny will be applied. The law will almost certainly be struck down.
If existing bans are invalidated, those seeking to stop a further proliferation of conversion therapy may now have to use “creative methods,” Reed wrote, like tort law and malpractice law.
This is the grim legal terrain forged by the Trump regime and bigoted groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, aided by too many negligent or complicit liberals. Medical malpractice and harmful speech acts are protected, whereas trans kids’ existence gets no protection at all.
The post Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection at All appeared first on The Intercept.
NASA launched four astronauts on a historic nine-day trip around the moon and back. Here's everything to know about the Artemis II mission.
An analysis from Penn Wharton Budget Model shows that baby boomers and the Silent Generation received an estimated $2.7 trillion in federal outlays last year.
President Trump indicated the Iran war may wrap up "very soon" and he could abandon efforts to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as the war pushed U.S. gas prices over the $4 mark.
A Starlink satellite broke apart in orbit after suffering an unexplained "anomaly," apparently due to an "internal energetic source" rather than a collision. "The incident appears to have created some debris, with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks," reports Scientific American. From the report: The satellite lost communication at about 560 kilometers above Earth, Starlink said. While the statement from Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Musk's rocket company SpaceX, merely noted that investigations are ongoing, LeoLabs said its radar observations of the event indicated an "internal energetic source" as the likely cause rather than a collision. The incident underscores the potential hazards of the increasingly large numbers of satellites and other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit -- some 10,000 Starlinks are currently in orbit and counting. Starlink's statement said that "the event poses no new risk" to the International Space Station or to the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, targeted for April 1.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Calls for tougher laws as network stretching from Caribbean to Georgia generates riches for offshore tycoons by appearing to prey on the vulnerable
Immaculately groomed and beaming from ear to ear, Andres Markou looks every inch the golden boy of the gambling sector. The youthful boss of MyStake, a fast-growing digital casino, has been pictured shaking hands with the Brazilian football legend Ronaldinho over a lucrative branding partnership.
Elsewhere, he can be seen collecting industry awards, or offering “visionary” insights to interviewers. There is only one hurdle blocking Markou’s ascent to the very top of his trade: he does not exist.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: As conflict engulfs Iran, shifting global alliances and soaring energy prices are reshaping the existing power balances that could redefine the next stage of international security
Good morning. So far, there is only one clear winner from the war in Iran: Russia. Before the US and Israel attacked Tehran in late February, Moscow was preparing deep budget cuts to education and healthcare funding to pay for its invasion of Ukraine, which has now entered its fifth year.
In just over a month of the fighting in Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has experienced a dramatic reversal in fortunes. The global oil price has shot up from a prewar average of $72 to well over $100 per barrel, providing a financial boost of multi-billions for Moscow that shows little sign of ending.
Middle East | Donald Trump has launched a tirade against European countries that refused to join his war against Iran, calling out the UK and France.
Military | The UK is sending more military support to the Gulf, taking the total deployment to 1,000 troops.
NHS England | Some medicines could run out in weeks or even days, NHS England head warns, after supply line shocks.
UK politics | Nigel Farage to ‘steer well clear’ of UK CPAC event in July being led by the short-lived former prime minister Liz Truss.
UK news | King Charles’s state visit to US to go ahead in late April despite Iran war concerns.
Continue reading...Here's where the self-driving company operates and where it's headed soon.
South Korea will delay the shutdown of coal-fired plants, while the Philippines also plans to boost the output of its coal-burning plants
Governments across Asia are ramping up their use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, as they try to cover huge energy shortfalls triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.
The move has triggered warnings from climate experts who point to coal’s devastating environmental impact, and say the energy crisis should be a wake up call for governments to invest in renewables, which can offer a more stable supply that is not exposed to price shocks.
Continue reading...For more than 50 years, ophthalmologists Joshua Kalin and, later, his son Neil served generations of Newarkers out of an office in Kelway Plaza.
President Trump is planning to deliver a prime-time address Wednesday night to "provide an important update on Iran," the White House said, as the president faces critical decisions in the monthlong war.
Content creators love the built-in camera; sceptics call them ‘pervert glasses’. Do we really need any more hi-tech wearables, even with a voice assistant that sounds like Judi Dench?
Lately, I’ve been hearing Judi Dench’s voice in my head. She tells me tomorrow’s forecast, when to turn right, that there’s been another message in my group chat. Day or night, Dame Judi is eager to assist. When I ask the eight-time Academy Award nominee what I’m looking at, she answers: a residential area, a person in a pub, daffodils. “They are a bright yellow colour and are often associated with spring.”
This isn’t a delusion. This is, apparently, progress. I am test-driving Meta’s smartglasses and Dench voices its integrated AI assistant: “Here to chat, answer questions, create images and provide advice and inspiration,” said “Judi” when I selected her over the actors John Cena and Kristen Bell. “Shall we begin?”
Continue reading...Why the future of science might be Chinese.
A war’s unintended consequences—for Iran, the Middle East, and the global order.
The Iran war will accelerate the region’s economic transformation.
The Newark Arts Alliance’s latest exhibit showcases the many talents of its members.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia is going to further clamp down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used by millions of Russians to get around internet controls and censorship, Russia's digital minister said. In what has been cast by diplomats as Russia's "great crackdown," the authorities have repeatedly blocked mobile internet and jammed major messenger services while giving sweeping powers to cut off mass communications. "The task is reduce VPN usage," Digital Minister Maksut Shadayev said on state-backed messenger MAX late on Monday, adding that his ministry was trying to impose the limits with minimal impact on users. He said decisions had been taken to restrict access to a number of unidentified foreign platforms without giving details.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A rescue mission involving volunteer helicopter crew and public donations ended in joy after Molly was located and brought home
A spot of furry black and white appears among the jagged rocks of New Zealand’s alpine backcountry. It is Molly the border collie, sitting near the foot of a waterfall where she had been separated from her owner one week earlier.
Molly was rescued on Tuesday after an avalanche of donations from the public funded a volunteer team made up of former helicopter pilots and crew to mount a search in the wilderness.
Continue reading...  | Installed the Land + Surf VRH and lost my fender but everything I put there rubs on the tire including the original fender delete. Did this happen to anyone else and is there a solution? I even shaved it down with a Sawzall but still rubbing, any advice is appreciated! 🙏 [link] [comments] |
The AI company blames the leak on human error, but says no customer data was released.
“No punishment. No investigation,” the Pentagon chief wrote on social media hours after military officials announced they had grounded the pilots involved.
Critics say ‘election integrity’ plan to compile national voter list is unconstitutional and will be blocked by the courts
Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order seeking to restrict mail-in voting and compile a national voter list in a move that is unprecedented and probably unconstitutional.
The order directs the administration to establish a federal list of confirmed citizens that can legally vote in each state, and orders the postal service to send mail-in ballots only to those on the list. During a press conference at the White House, Trump said the administration would like to require voter ID and proof of citizenship, and repeated falsehoods about mail-in voting.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed.
Donald Trump confirmed that King Charles and Queen Camilla, will travel to the US for a state visit from 27 to 30 April.
The president said that the trip will include a banquet dinner at the White House on 28 April. “I look forward to spending time with the King, whom I greatly respect. It will be TERRIFIC!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Continue reading...Lewis’s son Avi Lewis was elected leader of progressive New Democratic party a day before his father’s death
Stephen Lewis, the Canadian diplomat, politician and human rights advocate, who spent decades tirelessly working to focus global attention on the HIV/Aids epidemic, has died of cancer.
Lewis, who served as the Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, as well as the head of Ontario’s New Democratic party (NDP), was 88.
Continue reading...Announcement part of controversial shakeup described by critics as administration attack on ‘science and scientists’
The Trump administration will move the US Forest Service headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City and shut down its regional offices, the agriculture department has announced. The announcement sets in motion a controversial reorganization for the country’s second-largest federal land management agency that Trump officials have planned since last year.
The move, which the USDA touted as a “commonsense approach”, recalls the first Trump administration’s chaotic attempt to relocate the Bureau of Land Management from Washington DC to Colorado, first announced in 2019. The agency lost nearly 90% of its Washington-based staff, who declined to move – only for the BLM to return toWashington after Joe Biden took office.
Continue reading...A federal judge directed the Trump administration to restore the legal status of migrants allowed into the U.S. under a now-defunct Biden administration program for asylum-seekers who arrived at the southern border.
Christian Pulisic struggles in more attacking role
Francisco Trincão opens scoring in first half
US play Germany, Senegal before World Cup opener
The US men’s national team met Portugal at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Tuesday evening having spent the days leading up to the match preaching about intensity. Following a 5-2 drubbing at the hands of Belgium on the weekend, players and coaches alike stressed the importance of showing well against Portugal, sixth in Fifa’s world rankings.
Instead, the US closed this window with another flat performance, undone by a talented Portuguese side that easily unlocked the US in front of a sellout crowd of 72,297. The 2-0 loss was the USMNT’s eighth consecutive defeat at the hands of a European opponent, a stretch that’s seen them outscored 22-6.
Continue reading...Trump taunts allies to ‘go get your own oil’ as some nations dig in heels to oppose conflict and global destabilization – key US politics stories from Tuesday 31 March at a glance
Donald Trump launched a fresh tirade Tuesday against European countries that refused to join his war against Iran, calling out the UK and France, as transatlantic relations soured from the spiralling conflict that has wreaked havoc on the global economy.
On his Truth Social website, the US president told governments worried about fuel prices to “go get your own oil” by force from the Gulf, comments that sent oil prices even higher.
Continue reading...They may look the same, but when a new one goes missing, you'll notice a difference in how much easier it is to locate.
March 31, 2026 — Bringing researchers to the state of the art is crucial to the use of AI for science research, and this summer, that’s exactly what the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and collaborating institutions are doing.
Deep Learning for Science School 2025
They’ll host the 2026 Deep Learning for Science (DL4SCI) Summer School, a five-day intensive program assembling researchers and engineers to explore the latest advances in deep learning and AI. Hosted at Berkeley Lab from July 20–24, the 2026 iteration will emphasize foundation models, reasoning, and agentic AI for scientific discovery. The deadline to apply is April 10.
“Since we started this event in 2019, we’ve seen an explosion in the sophistication of deep learning and AI approaches used in science,” said Wahid Bhimji, Division Deputy for AI and Science at NERSC and a co-organizer of the event. “It remains our focus to bring bleeding-edge techniques from practitioners in industry, academia, and labs to the wider fundamental science community.”
Built around in-depth lectures, research talks, and hands-on tutorials teaching emerging approaches to foundation models for science, the program will span the end-to-end lifecycle – data, training at scale, adaptation, and evaluation – along with sessions on reasoning-centric workflows and agentic systems. Students can expect a blend of theory, practical application, and networking opportunities to bolster their understanding and prepare to bring what they’ve learned into their work.
It’s this range of learning experiences that makes DL4SCI a valuable tool for developing an AI-conversant workforce, according to organizers. And because the program is tailored to issues and skills at the forefront of AI as it evolves, each iteration offers unique opportunities.
“DL4SCI is a week packed with insights, hands-on learning, and opportunities to connect with peers and experts, with lectures, talks, and tutorials from experts at the forefront of AI,” said Ben Erichson, a researcher in the Berkeley Lab Scientific Data Division and a co-organizer of the event.
But summer school isn’t just about gaining knowledge; it’s also about people. Summer School will also facilitate networking and collaboration through breakout sessions, group activities, and optional poster sessions. These forums will allow participants to engage directly with instructors and peers, fostering vibrant discussions on how current research trends—particularly in foundation models, reasoning, and agents—can be leveraged in scientific domains. By the end of the program, attendees will be equipped with the tools and expertise necessary to implement, evaluate, and scale modern AI solutions in their research.
“I love meeting participants who are applying AI to so many exciting science problems,” he said. “So I can’t wait for this year’s event!”
About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab
High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
Source: Elizabeth Ball, Berkeley Lab
The post Berkeley Lab: DL4SCI 2026 to Spotlight Discovery Through Agentic AI, Foundation Models appeared first on HPCwire.
Many countries in Europe have called the conflict illegal, with some blocking Israeli and US planes from moving weapons through their airspace
Donald Trump has launched a tirade against European countries that refused to join his war against Iran, calling out the UK and France, as transatlantic relations soured from the spiralling conflict that has wreaked havoc on the global economy.
On his Truth Social website, the US president told governments worried about fuel prices to “go get your own oil” by force from the Gulf, comments that sent oil prices even higher.
Continue reading...JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon shares his thinking on capitalism, AI, prediction markets and more in an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil.
Iraq’s interior ministry said it had arrested one suspect, seized a car and was looking for accomplices.
⚽️ US kick off v Portugal at 7pm ET in Atlanta, Georgia
⚽️ Final friendly before 2026 World Cup roster is named
⚽️ Questions? Thoughts? Email Alexander here
⚽️ Last time out: US 2-5 Belgium | Another lowlands debacle
From Jeff Rueter: It’s tough to resist rampant speculation on the back of this final lineup before Pochettino picks his squad. Morris and Berhalter, former academy teammates in Columbus, will be desperate to show the requisite bite and midfield moderation to make their cases for World Cup inclusion. Clearly there’s some desperation to get Pulisic back among the goals if he’s serving as a nominal line-leader.
US fans ought to hope Alex Freeman puts in a shift that keeps him in the lineup. Whether he’s right-most of three center-backs or a right back (or wing back), he’s been a staple of the team’s best performances in recent windows.
Via Pablo Iglesias Maurer: It’s about an hour before kickoff and Mercedes-Benz Stadium is already filling in quite a bit. One thing was made abundantly clear on the walk over here – this will be a much taller task for the US in terms of the crowd, which is 50/50 rooting interests at best and perhaps even pro-Portugal. Belgian fans were hard to come by on Saturday, when the US got thrashed anyways.
Continue reading...US president reiterates that responsibility for reopening the vital oil and gas hub rests on the countries who rely on it
Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry has said it has intercepted and destroyed ten drones over the past hours, and eight missiles launched towards the Riyadh area and the country’s eastern region.
Early this morning Kuwait said its air defences were responding to hostile missile and drone attacks. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait said where the drones or missiles came from.
Iran attacked and set ablaze a fully loaded crude oil tanker off Dubai. Local authorities later said response teams contained the incident with no oil leakage and that no injuries had been reported
Donald Trump warned that the US would obliterate Iran’s energy plants and oil wells if it did not open the strait of Hormuz.
The Israeli military said four soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Lebanon, where its forces are clashing with Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Two giant Chinese container ships have sailed through the strait of Hormuz on their second attempt to leave the Gulf after turning back on Friday, ship-tracking data shows. The transit signals a diplomatic breakthrough between Beijing and Tehran as Iran widens its list of approved nations for transiting the vital route, Lloyd’s List reported.
Indonesia’s foreign minister called for an emergency UN security council meeting and a thorough investigation” into a “heinous attack” after three UN peacekeepers from Indonesia were killed in southern Lebanon.
Blasts were heard in Tehran and power cuts hit some areas of the capital, Iranian media reported on Tuesday. Israel earlier carried out missile strikes on what it called military infrastructure in Tehran and infrastructure used by Hezbollah in Beirut.
Japan and Indonesia agreed to step up coordination on energy security, Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi said on Tuesday.
Two Iranian missile launches targeted central Israel, Israeli media reported, with the emergency service saying it had not received reports of any injuries.
Turkey reported a ballistic missile launched from Iran had entered Turkish airspace before being shot down by Nato air and missile defences.
An earlier summary of key developments is here.
Continue reading...Tiger Woods announced Tuesday that he's "stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment" after pleading not guilty to charges including driving under the influence.
White House officials have been trying to drum up new strategies to prevent a GOP wipeout in the midterm elections.
Woods pleads not guilty and demands jury trial
Deputies cite signs of impairment in affidavit
Hydrocodone pills found in pocket after arrest
Tiger Woods said he will step away from golf to seek treatment and focus on his health after his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence after a rollover crash near his Florida home.
“I know and understand the seriousness of the situation I find myself in today,” Woods said in a statement posted on X. “I am stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on my health. This is necessary in order for me to prioritize my well-being and work toward lasting recovery.”
Continue reading...Kid Rock posted videos of the helicopters hovering by his Nashville home on social media over the weekend. The Army later confirmed the helicopters were on a training mission.
Just hours earlier, an Army spokesperson said the crew had been suspended from flying while the Army conducts a formal investigation into why the Apache helicopters flew near Kid Rock's Nashville house.
Pentagon chief’s remarks come after US army said crews suspended amid investigation into incident in Tennessee
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth said the crews of two US army AH-64 Apache helicopters that hovered next to the singer Kid Rock’s swimming pool while he clapped and saluted on Saturday are no longer suspended.
“No punishment. No investigation,” Hegseth wrote on social media. “Carry on, patriots.”
Continue reading...President Trump has long wanted to place additional restrictions on mail-in voting, which he has called "mail-in cheating."
The new artwork supports theories that the game's next hero will be Frankie, a member of Ashe's Deadlock Gang.
Sector cites ‘billions of pounds in additional costs’ from new business rates and increase in minimum wage thresholds
Two-thirds of hospitality businesses are planning to cut jobs as a result of “suffocating” costs imposed by government, as new business rates and higher wage bills come into force.
Many pubs, restaurants and hotel companies will see their costs increase significantly from 1 April after Rachel Reeves’s changes to business rates and an increase in minimum wage thresholds announced at the chancellor’s November budget.
Continue reading...UK researcher uses maths to explain seeming inevitability of phenomenon experienced by many motorists
It is a situation experienced by many motorists: one driver overtakes another only to find the slower car is right behind them when they reach a red light. Now a researcher has used mathematics to reveal why the situation feels inevitable.
Dr Conor Boland from Dublin City University has called his work “The Voorhees law of traffic”.
Continue reading...Policymakers should address financial barriers that hinder young people from starting families, says thinktank
Politicians hoping to persuade young people in the UK to have more children should prioritise tackling housing affordability, according to research by the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
There has been growing concern in recent years about Britain’s declining birthrate, given the long-term fiscal pressures of supporting an ageing population.
Continue reading...The home affairs select committee said Prevent cannot deal with the modern challenges of fighting extremism
The government’s anti-terrorism programme, Prevent, is “outdated and inadequately prepared” to deal with modern challenges such as extremists adhering to no particular ideology, an influential cross-party group of MPs has concluded.
The home affairs select committee has called for a reset to the approach for dealing with fast-evolving online subcultures promoting antisemitism, anti-Muslim hostility, misogyny and violence, as well as an over-representation of neurodiverse people and those with mental health conditions.
A growing prevalence of under-18s being drawn into extremism.
Neurodiverse individuals, particularly those with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, being over-represented among referrals to the programme.
Fluid or hybrid ideological beliefs among those referred and a shift toward nihilistic violence.
Influencers and creative tools such as memes, humour and coded messaging being used to spread extremist content in a way that is accessible and appealing.
Generative AI being used to produce large volumes of tailored content and disinformation.
An increase in hate crimes and incidents in the UK that are linked to anti-blasphemy activism, anti-Israel extremism, anti-Muslim hostility and eco-extremism.
Continue reading...The new rules are the first major change to the country’s laws governing child-rearing in more than a century
Divorced couples in Japan will be able to negotiate joint custody of their children from Wednesday, in the first major change to the country’s laws governing child-rearing in more than a century.
Previously, Japan’s Civil Code required couples to decide which parent would take custody of their children when they divorce.
Continue reading...Polestar and Volvo are ending Polestar 3 production in Chengdu, China, and consolidating all output of the electric SUV at Volvo's plant in South Carolina. "The move to consolidate global Polestar 3 production in Charleston help[s] generate efficiencies for both companies, whilst also underscoring our confidence in the plant and the role it plays in our manufacturing footprint," said Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars. "The U.S. is a very important market for Volvo Cars, both to support our growth ambitions as well as a strategic production site to meet regional and export demands." Ars Technica reports: Volvo had a challenging 2025, with sales falling by 7 percent. Meanwhile, Polestar, which was spun out from the Swedish OEM's performance arm into a standalone startup in 2017, had a rather good 2025, seeing a 34 percent increase in sales. So increasing the proportion of Polestar 3s to come out of South Carolina seems sensible. And as we learned last September, the midsize electric Volvo EX60 will also go into production at the South Carolina site later this year, and then we'll see a still-unnamed hybrid Volvo in 2030. The two companies also announced today that Volvo agreed to extend part of a shareholder loan it made to Polestar and will convert the rest into Polestar shares. Polestar will still owe Volvo $661 million, due at the end of 2031, and another $274 million will become Polestar stock now, with a further $65 million in the second quarter of the year. Since December, Polestar has also raised $1 billion through three equity financing investments.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Looking for a solution to charge my XRC on trails with no power outlets
Would something like this work? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FFZJFBYH/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=AKSIB48CQUPXZ&psc=1
Also would love to know what other people are using/what's the best solution is
US president demolished East Wing of White House last year to make way for 90,000-sq-ft project
A US judge has halted the construction of Donald Trump’s $400m White House ballroom.
The US president demolished the historic East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the project.
Continue reading...So, I’ve been having some nosedive issues on my Fungineers X7 (Thor 300, only about 35 miles lifetime). It seems to only happen when I don’t have “Disable Moving Faults” on, which led me to think I have a crap foot sensor (Stompies v3… I think). Most of the time, I seem to experience these nosedives when I’m riding a mellow trail. I never go too aggressively, typically staying at 10 mph as this board has me a little spooked. I tend to get a WheelSlip warning around the same time as sensor disengagements, which looks like a chicken-or-egg problem. Today, while riding around to build my confidence on the board a bit more with Disable Moving Faults on, I encountered a “stuck” IMU. I took a screenshot of what it looked like on the AppUI of the VESC Tool. I stopped throughout my ride to check for any weird warnings or errors that might help diagnose these nosedives, and on the last stop, the board wouldn’t reengage. Regardless of how I moved the board around, the orientation on the AppUI page never changed.
I’ve already run through the IMU recalibration in Float Hub, which seems to have helped, but could this issue be behind some of my nosedives? What’s the likelihood of a bad IMU? Anyone else experiencing this with the Thor 300?
Looks like Google's Fitbit and Pixel smartwatches might be getting a new sibling.
Milpitas approves measure to distribute smart doorbells and says residents can upload footage to police database
A Silicon Valley city will offer its residents free wireless doorbells equipped with cameras to help police collect video evidence.
The city council of Milpitas, a suburb north of San Jose, California, recently approved $60,000 to provide these devices on a one-camera-per-household, first-come, first-served basis, as was first reported by Milpitas Beat and confirmed by the Guardian.
Continue reading...President has falsely claimed ‘legendary’ fraud for limiting mail-in ballots and himself voted by mail last week
Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to compile a national voter file and to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, an unprecedented move that is probably unconstitutional.
The executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to compile a list of verified US citizens who can vote in every state. It also directs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to begin rule-making on a process that would require states to notify the agency of voters who intend to receive a mail-in ballot and prohibit them from receiving one unless they are on a USPS-approved list of eligible voters.
Continue reading...The latest Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta updates introduce hands-free nutrition logging and real-time translation, moving the smart glasses closer to the "continuous assistant" Meta promised.
There's a Spicy Saja McMuffin, Derpy McFlurry, Ramyeon McShaker fries and two new dipping sauces -- one in a bright purple.
Trump administration claims list is part of an EEOC investigation into antisemitic discrimination at university
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.
US district judge Gerald Pappert said employees can refuse to take part in the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation but the agency “needs the opportunity to talk to them directly to learn if they have evidence of discrimination”.
Continue reading...A federal judge has ordered Penn to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination.
bobthesungeek76036 shares a report from the Register: Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners. The layoffs were carried out via email, according to copies of the message viewed by Business Insider. The email told affected workers they would be terminated immediately and to provide a personal email for follow-up. The cuts echo a TD Cowen forecast earlier this year, when the investment bank questioned how Oracle would finance its expanding AI datacenter buildout and suggested headcount reductions could reach 20,000 to 30,000. It is not clear how many employees were notified on Tuesday, but one screenshot that purports to show the number of internal Slack users showed a drop of 10,000 overnight. [...] Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company's workforce. According to posts from Oracle workers on LinkedIn, the cuts were spread through multiple departments around the country, with employees in Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas taking to social media to say they were among those chopped. "This news didn't seem to affect stock price," adds bobthesungeek76036. "ORCL is up 6% for the day."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The ban applies only to the sale of new routers manufactured outside the US. Americans with existing foreign-made routers can continue to use them.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO said the bank may one day introduce prediction market features, but said "there's a bunch of stuff we won't do" in that space.
Company said it achieved valuation of $852bn, mentioning in a blogpost it generates $2bn a month in revenue
OpenAI announced on Tuesday it had closed a fundraising round of $122bn and achieved a valuation of $852bn. The funding cements the ChatGPT maker as one of the most highly valued private companies in the world.
The artificial intelligence firm received multibillion-dollar investments from companies including Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, which committed $110bn, according to the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI also allowed a select group of individual investors to contribute about $3bn. The funding round ranks among the highest-ever in Silicon Valley. OpenAI said last month it was expecting to raise $110bn in funding, but upped that figure in its latest announcement.
Continue reading...JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon thinks AI will shorten the work week and lead to medical breakthroughs, while acknowledging the technology's potential impact on the nation's workforce.
The Swiss company says its new Workspace, like its Unlimited suite, gives users more control over their privacy and security.
The cute blue-and-white mascot made his debut during the MacBook Neo launch, but he's back in more TikTok videos. Long live "Lil Finder Guy"!
Citing the first amendment, judge says president’s executive order is unlawful and unenforceable
Citing the first amendment, a federal judge on Tuesday agreed to permanently block the Trump administration from implementing a presidential directive to end federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), two media entities that the White House has said are counterproductive to American priorities.
The operational impact of US district judge Randolph Moss’s decision was not immediately clear – both because it will probably be appealed and because too much damage to the public-broadcasting system has already been done, both by the president and Congress.
Continue reading...
With the Pentagon potentially seeking a $200 billion supplemental package to fund the ongoing war with Iran, President Donald Trump defended that figure in part by saying U.S. ammunition “was taken down by giving so much to Ukraine.” He then exaggerated the amount of aid to Ukraine and falsely said that former President Joe Biden “didn’t rebuild anything” in the defense stockpile.
Trump has a point that the military assistance provided to Ukraine reduced the U.S. reserve of weapons. But that aid largely has not affected the military operations in Iran, defense experts told us.
Furthermore, Biden signed multiple spending bills passed by Congress that included funding to replace the older weapons that the U.S. gave to Ukraine with new items. Experts also told us that Biden’s administration put money into increasing the production of munitions for the military.
“Of course, the Biden administration built a lot in terms of military equipment,” Mark F. Cancian, senior adviser for the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us in an email. “Whether it did enough is another question.”
The subject of the $200 billion request came up during a March 19 meeting in the Oval Office when a reporter asked Trump why the funding would be necessary if, as Trump had said, the war with Iran would “pretty soon” be over.
“Well, we’re asking for a lot of reasons beyond even what we’re talking about in Iran,” the president responded. He went on to add: “We want to have vast amounts of ammunition, which we have right now. We have a lot of ammunition, but it was taken down by giving so much to Ukraine. They gave so much. You know, Biden gave $350 billion worth of cash and military equipment to Ukraine, and he didn’t rebuild anything.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also brought up Biden when asked about the potential $200 billion supplemental in a press conference that same day.
“As far as $200 billion, I think that number could move,” Hegseth said. “It takes money to kill bad guys. So, we’re going back to Congress and folks there to ensure that we’re properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is – everything’s refilled and not just refilled, but above and beyond.”
He went on to say: “And I think, you know, we’re also still dealing with the environment that Joe Biden created, which was – which was depleting those stock holds and not sending them to our own military, but to Ukraine – which is when, every time we reach back and look at any sort of a challenge we have, it goes back to well, send it to Ukraine.”
But as we’ve written, the U.S. did not give “$350 billion worth of cash and military equipment to Ukraine.” Trump has made that false claim multiple times.
During the Biden administration, nearly $183 billion – not including a $20 billion loan – was made available for aid to Ukraine, after Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a report released in February 2025 by a special inspector general overseeing U.S. support for Ukraine. The vast majority of that money was authorized by Congress in a series of bipartisan appropriations bills. A portion of the funding was dedicated to military assistance rather than humanitarian or other financial aid.
Biden’s Defense Department said in a January 2025 fact sheet that it committed more than $66.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, including approximately $65.9 billion following the invasion by Russia in early 2022. Part of that military aid included the transfer of a variety of missiles, artillery, tanks and other armaments from the Defense Department.
Defense experts told us that aid has temporarily reduced the U.S. reserve of available weapons.
“It is true that U.S. stockpiles are badly depleted by aid to Ukraine,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates a “restrained foreign policy,” told us in an email. “This long-term problem will take time to address. It is not something that has been resolved and is ongoing across many types of munitions and air defense.”
However, she said it would be “misleading” to suggest that military aid to Ukraine is responsible for most of the “current munitions concerns” in Iran because of the type of weapons that have been used in the war to date.
“With the exception of Patriot interceptors, most [of] the munitions in use in the Middle East were not given to Ukraine at any point,” Kavanagh said, referring to the PATRIOT air defense systems that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.
For example, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that the U.S. used more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iran in a month, raising concerns among some Pentagon officials about the limited supply. But the U.S. has not given Tomahawks to Ukraine, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has requested them.
Cancian, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also told us in an email that besides “Patriot batteries and missiles,” which Ukraine has used “extensively” against Russia, the munitions the U.S. gave to Ukraine “were almost entirely for ground forces, which is not an issue in the current war.”
So far, U.S. ground troops have not been ordered into combat. The U.S. and Israel have conducted joint airstrikes since launching the attack on Iran on Feb. 28. But thousands of American soldiers were recently deployed to the Middle East in case Trump does authorize ground operations.
“So, it is fair to link Ukraine aid to shortages in U.S. Patriot missile stockpiles, but not limited magazine depth more broadly,” Kavanagh said. “That larger problem stems from years of low production and constraints on the U.S. defense industrial base.”
Cancian said that CSIS has estimated that the inventory of Patriot missiles will last through the war with Iran, but “will be well below what war planners want for a possible conflict in the western Pacific.” Exact figures are not available because inventory totals are classified.
Meanwhile, both defense experts told us that Trump was wrong to claim that Biden did nothing as president to try to “rebuild” the stockpile.
“The Biden administration invested heavily in the U.S. defense industrial base and began a massive ramp-up in the production of many types of munitions that Trump continues,” Kavanagh said. “Much of the funding in the defense supplemental appropriations went to this purpose and the Pentagon made a real effort to expand munitions production and stockpiles. Some would say that Biden did not do enough or acted too slowly, but these are judgment calls. It is not accurate to say he built nothing.”
Cancian said that Biden “began the process of expanding munitions production by investing money in facilities and signing multiyear contracts.” He also noted that Congress, under Biden, appropriated money to replace all the military equipment that the U.S. sent to Ukraine.
Biden made that point himself in an October 2023 address to the American public.
“Let me be clear about something,” the former president said. “We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America.”
The issue, Cancian said, is that “it will take years before all of the replacement equipment arrives.” He said, “That gap constitutes risk if other conflicts break out.”
On Jan. 20, 2025, the day that Biden left office, the State Department said that Presidential Drawdown Authority had been used 55 times since August 2021 to provide military assistance to Ukraine “totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.” The February 2025 report from the Ukraine oversight inspector general said that Congress appropriated $45.8 billion to replace the materials the Defense Department donated to Ukraine.
Notably, when we asked about the $200 billion Pentagon request and Trump’s and Hegseth’s claims about Biden draining the U.S. stockpile, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the U.S. has all that it needs for operations in Iran.
“The US military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and weapons stockpiles to achieve the goals of Operation Epic Fury laid out by President Trump — and beyond,” she said in an emailed statement.
“Nevertheless,” she went on, “President Trump has always been intensely focused on strengthen[ing] our Armed Forces and he will continue to call on defense contractors to more speedily build American-made weapons, which are the best in the world.”
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The post Trump Links Biden’s Ukraine Aid to Pentagon’s Iran War Funding Request appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Americans have made clear to politicians that rising prices are a major concern. But has milk escaped inflationary pressure? That’s what a New York congressional candidate recently said.
Blake Gendebien is a farmer seeking the Democratic nomination in New York’s 21st Congressional District, which will come open because Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik is retiring.
In a Jan. 30 X post, Gendebien wrote that milk prices "currently are no higher than they were in 1980’s, even as fuel, feed, and equipment costs keep climbing."
A spokesperson for Gendebien’s office, Georgia Greenleaf, pointed PolitiFact New York to federal price data. We looked at the numbers and found that Gendebien had a point, although the comparison needs some explanation.
The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked the price of milk since January 1980. Until June 1995, it measured the price per half gallon. Since July 1995, it has measured the price per gallon. To make the data series comparable over the full period, we multiplied the half-gallon prices from January 1980 to June 1995 by two and kept the subsequent data the same, at one gallon. (This isn’t a perfect adjustment, since purchasing larger quantities of an item often leads to a bit of a price break, but it’s a reasonable estimate.)
Next, we divided each month’s per-gallon milk price by the January 1980 price to show how much it had risen from that baseline.
This calculation showed that the price of milk has roughly doubled from $2.03 to $4.03 per gallon since January 1980.
So if you look at the price of milk in isolation, it hasn’t stayed constant since the 1980s. But if you compare the rise in the price of milk to overall consumer price inflation — the most reasonable way of measuring price changes over a 46-year period — milk has risen in price by far less than other items have.
From January 1980 to February 2026, overall consumer prices have more than quadrupled. That’s about twice as fast as milk prices have risen since January 1980.
Alan Bjerga, National Milk Producers Federation executive vice president of communications and industry relations, agreed that today’s prices are "lower in real dollars" — that is, accounting for inflation.
The main reason is greater efficiency at the farm level, experts said. According to the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding, U.S. dairy cattle produced four times as much milk per cow in 2021 as in 1945, and twice as much as in 1970. This increase stems from improvements in genetic selection and herd management, the council found.
Because the average cow produces much more milk in 2026, Bjerga said, the average farmer has much more milk to sell, and with greater supply comes lower prices.
"It’s fair to say that nominal farm-level milk prices have not increased at the US national rate of inflation," said Alex White, a Virginia Tech agricultural economics and management instructor.
Gendebien said milk prices "currently are no higher than they were in 1980’s."
That’s not the case using nominal dollars — but few products stay the same in price over more than a four-decade span. When comparing prices over a period that long, economists typically factor in overall consumer price inflation.
Using that method, milk has seen price increases far below that of overall consumer prices. Milk prices have roughly doubled since January 1980, compared to a rough quadrupling for consumer prices overall. In that context, it’s reasonable to say that milk prices are no higher than they were in the 1980s.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.
When it comes to the economy, President Donald Trump often celebrates how many people are working.
"More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country," Trump said at a Saudi investment conference in Florida on March 27.
Trump has made this case in at least four previous speeches this year.
In January, U.S. employment hit an all time high. But raw employment numbers are driven by overall population growth, so any president can claim an all-time high during their tenure.
A more telling statistic about employment trends during Trump’s second term is that the past year-plus has seen the weakest job creation record in 16 years.
For nearly nine decades, nonfarm employment — the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ standard employment measure — has risen steadily. It has dipped during recessions, but within a couple of years, the statistic returns to its previous peak and then exceeds it, until the next recession.
In February, 158.5 million Americans were working, according to the bureau. That was down slightly from the 158.6 million people working in January. The January total is the highest ever.
To support Trump’s statement, the White House pointed us to a different statistic: the labor force participation rate for prime-age workers, people ages 25 to 54. This metric shows what percentage of a given population is either working or looking for work; using a 25-to-54 age range filters out any skew from the baby boomers who are retiring in large numbers every month.
Like nonfarm employment, the labor force participation rate for prime-age workers isn’t the highest ever, but it’s close. In February, 83.9% of prime-age workers were working or looking for work; the all-time high was 84.6% for a month in 1999.
"With labor force participation for prime-age Americans at a 25-year high, thanks to this administration’s pro-growth agenda, that puts American workers first," White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. "More Americans than ever before are working or coming off the sidelines to look for work."
Because the labor force participation rate counts both workers and people who are looking for work, this isn’t the most direct way of testing Trump’s statement about people with jobs. A more direct way is through a third statistic: the employment-population ratio for prime-age workers. This metric divides the number of workers by that age group’s population.
This statistic is also close to an all-time high. In February, 80.7% of prime-age workers were employed; the all-time record was 81.9% in early 2000. It has largely stalled since early 2023, under both Trump and his predecessor, President Joe Biden.
Bottom line: Three employment metrics show relatively high levels and rates of employment today, but none is currently at a historic record.
Other federal data undercuts the notion that the U.S. job market is strong. Monthly employment changes during Trump’s second term are more negative than they were during other recent presidencies, including his initial term.
In the fall of 2010, the recovery from the 2007-09 Great Recession began to heat up. And nearly every month for the next 14 years — from October 2010 to December 2024 — jobs increased month over month, not including three months during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
This represented most of Barack Obama’s presidency, all of Trump’s first term (minus the three pandemic months), and all of Biden’s.
By contrast, since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the government has released data for 14 months — and six of them have seen monthly job losses.
Another way to slice the data is to look at the average job gains for each president. For a fair comparison, we did not calculate periods of recession, when jobs plummet, or immediate recoveries, when jobs spike.
We looked at four periods: Obama’s third and fourth year, Obama’s second term, Trump’s prepandemic period and Biden’s final three years, which were largely after the pandemic. Each period saw an average monthly employment increase of between 176,000 and 236,000.
Trump’s second term is a distinct outlier: The average monthly gain has been less than 11,000.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum, said the employment picture is even worse than that, because only one sector — health care — has been keeping the second-term Trump employment figures above water.
"We have a golden age for the home health aide, but most people are working in industries that are shrinking," Holtz-Eakin said. "If you’re thinking about the average worker, it’s not good."
Trump said, "More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country."
The employment peak came in January 2026, though it dropped the following month. However, population growth primarily shapes this metric, so economists do not consider it a meaningful statistic.
Two other statistics — the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio — are relatively high, but not at their all-time highs.
A more relevant yardstick shows Trump’s second term underperforming his predecessors Obama, Biden and himself from his first term. After 14 years of almost uninterrupted monthly job gains, almost half of Trump’s months in office have seen job losses.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.
Here's what to know about the Amazon Live FAST channel on the streaming service.
The exhibit promises an interactive experience with some of Apple's greatest products.
It's not every day you can save over $500 on a portable power station and solar panel combo, but you'll want to act quickly before the sale ends tonight.
If you're on an older AT&T wireless plan, your price is going up in April. But by how much?
Peacock's got the goods to make your movie night pop.
Class-action suit against FBI and justice department alleges agents were wrongfully terminated for investigating Trump
Three former FBI agents filed a class-action lawsuit against the bureau and justice department on Tuesday, along with the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, claiming they had been wrongfully terminated for working on the criminal cases related to Donald Trump.
The agents – Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman and Michelle Ball – all worked on a public corruption squad in the FBI’s Washington field office and worked on investigations of Trump. All three were abruptly fired from the FBI last year.
Continue reading...A top EU official is urging Europeans to work from home, drive less, and cut air travel as the bloc braces for a prolonged energy crisis triggered by the Gulf conflict. The European Commission is also pushing member states to accelerate renewables and other energy-security measures as oil and gas disruptions continue. Politico reports: In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jorgensen said Europe was facing a "very serious situation" with no clear end in sight. "Even if ... peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future," he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU's 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis. "The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off," Jorgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less. He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included "work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometers [an hour], encourage public transport, alternate private car access ... increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices." Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying "this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 15-inch M4 MacBook Air has dropped to just $999, but time's ticking to get yours.
Nicknamed the "God Squad" by groups who say it can decide a species' fate, the government's Endangered Species Committee exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act.
In 2025, NextSilicon authored a winning proposal alongside a consortium of leading research and technology organizations to establish the ODISSEE project (Online Data Intensive Solutions for Science in the Exabytes Era). This European Union-funded initiative focuses on processing and analyzing the massive volumes of data generated by leading research infrastructures, such as high-energy physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) and radio astronomy at the SKA Observatory (SKAO). These facilities expect to produce data at the exabyte scale, requiring a new generation of computing technologies that go well beyond traditional architectures.
The scale of the challenge is staggering. CERN’s LHC already generates approximately one petabyte of raw collision data per second during operation, with only a fraction stored for analysis after real-time filtering. Once operational, SKAO will handle two petabytes of raw data each second. Current systems cannot keep pace with these volumes and scaling them further via conventional means imposes significant energy constraints, rendering brute-force approaches impractical.
As a result, traditional computing architectures – like those designed around predictable workloads and static data pipelines – struggle to keep pace with these volumes. ODISSEE aims to address this gap by developing flexible, data-centric computing approaches that can more easily adapt to the irregular burst-driven nature of scientific data.
The author visiting CERN in Switzerland (Image courtesy Ilan Tayari)
Supported by the EU’s Horizon Europe program, ODISSEE unites leading research institutions, universities, and technology companies across Europe to develop next-generation data-intensive computing solutions that are scalable, energy-efficient, and adaptable to various scientific fields. The consortium includes partners across multiple countries, including national research organizations (CERN, SKAO, CNRS, and SURF), leading universities (EPFL, ETH Zurich), and other technology companies (SiPearl, Energy Aware Solutions).
This diversity in partners reflects the project’s core premise: no single institution or vendor can solve the exabyte challenge alone. The project also reflects Europe’s increasing focus on HPC and AI sovereignty, strengthening the continent’s ability to build strategic computing capabilities while remaining an active participant in the global research community.
Recently, I attended the ODISSEE Annual Consortium Meeting at CERN along with my colleague Oded Margalit, NextSilicon’s Head Scientist. Over the three-day event, we met with project partners to review technical progress and strengthen collaboration across the consortium.
ODISSEE has now entered its second of three years. In the first year, the consortium focused heavily on coordination and technical preparation, aligning research goals across scientific domains and establishing the baseline infrastructure needed for integration work ahead. NextSilicon contributed two servers equipped with four Maverick-2 accelerators and collaborated with partners to train researchers on new approaches to the project’s scientific computing challenges. Other partners made similar contributions across software tooling, networking, and workload characterization.
The first day emphasized the scientific challenges behind the project, including presentations on dark matter research, radio astronomy, and high-energy physics related to the LHC. We touched on the computational challenges researchers face, from raw processing power to data movement across distributed systems to long-term storage of experimental data for later analysis.
The second day focused on technological solutions, with partners showcasing innovations that ranged from performance programming techniques to power optimization and post-exascale computing initiatives. Discussions centered on how emerging hardware architectures, including dataflow and reconfigurable computing approaches, can better address workloads than traditional CPU/GPU/FPGA architectures. Energy efficiency was a consistent theme, reflecting both the practical constraints of exabyte-scale processing and Europe’s broader commitment to sustainable computing.
The day ended with a visit to CERN’s LHCb experiment, one of four detectors positioned along the 27-kilometer ring. We descended 103 meters underground to see firsthand the physical infrastructure generating data for the project. LHCb specializes in studying the differences between matter and antimatter, producing vast datasets that require new approaches to storage, movement, and computation. For our team, it was a powerful reminder that behind every exabyte of data is a scientific question waiting to be answered.
As ODISSEE enters its second year, the consortium is shifting from coordination to implementation. Key priorities include demonstrating initial integration results across the project’s target workloads and expanding hands-on engagement with the consortium’s hardware platforms. In June, the project will host a hackathon focused on integrating fast communication with computation, giving researchers from across the consortium direct experience with the tools and approaches under development. The goal is to move beyond benchmarks and begin showing preliminary results on real scientific workflows from both primary use cases.
The consortium is also exploring how emerging open standards, including the RISC-V processor ecosystem, could help create a more flexible and sovereign European hardware stack. The broader European HPC community views open instruction set architectures as critical to future computing systems, and several ODISSEE partners are contributing work in this area.
The annual meeting also created opportunities beyond the formal agenda. During the week, consortium members met with the CERN openlab team to explore potential collaborations in which ODISSEE-developed technologies could contribute to the lab’s broader research goals. Separately, Oded and I met with leaders of the SETI project, led by Andrew Siemion, to discuss co-sponsoring a Ph.D. project at the University of Bordeaux that investigates the use of advanced computing architectures for SETI and transient-signal detection. These cross-disciplinary connections are exactly the kinds of outcomes a project like ODISSEE is designed to enable.
The author (right) and Oded Margalit, NextSilicon’s Head Scientist (Image courtesy Ilan Tayari)
ODISSEE sits at the intersection of scientific discovery, advanced computing, and Europe’s long-term strategic priorities. As the EU increasingly views HPC as critical digital infrastructure, projects like ODISSEE help ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of exascale scientific research.
This project exemplifies a collaborative model where research institutions and technology companies work together to develop sovereign computing capabilities. Rather than only relying on imported hardware and software, initiatives like ODISSEE are uniquely positioned to establish European expertise in areas such as processor architectures, system software, and application optimization.
The project’s second year will be a critical test of whether emerging architectures can deliver when applied to real scientific workloads with demanding performance and efficiency requirements. As ODISSEE progresses toward its 2027 conclusion, the results will help shape Europe’s roadmap for post-exascale scientific computing and offer practical lessons for the global HPC community navigating similar data-intensive challenges.
About the author: Ilan Tayari is co-founder & VP of Architecture at NextSilicon, a chip startup aiming to address the scientific computing market.
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The post How ODISSEE is Preparing Europe for Exabyte-Scale Scientific Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
The Army is “committed to enforcing standards and holding personnel accountable,” an official said. The flybys were not authorized.
Stocks rally after reports suggest Trump might end the war soon, saying ‘we’re not going to be there for too much longer’
Average US fuel prices have exceeded $4 a gallon for the first time in four years, piling pressure on drivers as Donald Trump’s war on Iran continues to boost oil markets.
The nationwide average climbed to almost $4.02 on Tuesday, according to AAA data, capping an extraordinary rise from $2.98 just a month ago. The fuel price last reached this high in August 2022.
Continue reading...Coming soon: Two UFC fights, the Masters golf tournament, a Cheech & Chong documentary and more.
Northerners may want to stay up late, with their eyes on the skies.
Poll of 10,000 teachers also finds ‘overwhelming’ exam anxiety and rising absenteeism linked to poor mental health
Almost half of primary school teachers are seeing pupils with eating disorders “at least occasionally”, rising to four in five at secondary level, according to a survey by the UK’s largest education union.
The findings emerged in a poll of 10,000 teachers in English state schools about pupils’ mental health, which also revealed “overwhelming” exam anxiety in secondaries and dwindling numbers of counsellors to support students.
Continue reading...A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to replace the White House's East Wing,
American journalist Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in Baghdad on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter as well as an Iraqi official.
Shortages of helium, a byproduct of natural gas processing, could create problems for semiconductor and medical equipment manufacturers.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss blocked the Trump administration from enforcing provisions of his executive order that directed federal agencies to cut off funding to NPR and PBS.
Forecasters continue to predict an 80% chance of favorable weather on Wednesday for the launch of four astronauts on a flight to the moon.
Italy blocked U.S. use of a base, the latest instance of European nations refusing deeper involvement in the war despite U.S. threats of backing away from NATO.
Google is rolling out a feature in the U.S. that lets some users change their Gmail address without creating a new account or losing their data. TechCrunch reports: Users who have access to this feature can go to their Google Account settings, navigate to Personal info > Email > Google Account email option. Tap on the "Change Google Account email" button to start the process of changing your username. Users will be able to change their username only once every 12 months. Plus, they won't be able to delete their new email address for that period of time. The company said users' old emails will be preserved, and the old email address will serve as an alternate address for the account. Users will be able to sign in to Google services using both the old and the new addresses. You can learn more via Google's support page.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The newest wave of backlash against AI on social media is directed at Bluesky.
The inspector general for the National Archives concluded human error, not political motivations, was to blame for the release of New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill's military records last year.
Though the US is almost certainly not going to have a draft, media commentary and online anxiety have surfaced
The United States is almost certainly not going to have a military draft to fight Iran. That hasn’t stopped the chatter, and anxiety, across the country.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has ordered a number of marines and army paratroopers to head to the Middle East, gesturing toward a possible ground war to reopen the strait of Hormuz or secure nuclear weapons material. The provocative military activity has led to speculative conversation about what it would take to invade a country twice the population and three times the territory of Iraq.
Continue reading...The long and winding road may lead to Cupertino. Apple will reportedly celebrate 50 years with a little help from one of the Beatles.
Following major gold price changes in March, investors should consider these questions before starting this April.
Luanne James said as a librarian she had an obligation to protect the public’s right to access information
A Tennessee library director has been fired after she refused to relocate more than 100 LGBTQ+-themed children’s titles to the library system’s adult section.
The Rutherford county library board on Monday voted to fire Luanne James following a heated emergency meeting that involved supporters of hers chanting “We stand with Luanne!” while wearing shirts that read “Protect the freedom to read.”
Continue reading...Luca Cella Walker asked chatbot for best way for someone to kill themself on railway line before his death
A 16-year-old boy killed himself after asking ChatGPT for the “most successful” way to take your own life, an inquest has been told.
Luca Cella Walker, a private school pupil from Yateley, Hampshire, died on 4 May last year.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A global ban on taxing digital streaming and downloads across national borders expired on Monday, after members of the World Trade Organization concluded an annual meeting without agreeing to extend it. U.S. representatives had pushed to extend the ban, which prevents the more than 160 members of the W.T.O. from issuing duties related to e-commerce. But Brazil and Turkey blocked a motion for a longer extension. U.S. representatives excoriated the outcome as further proof of the organization's irrelevance. The W.T.O. provides a forum for trade negotiations and setting rules for global trade. But U.S. officials have long criticized the group for its failure to police unfair trade practices by countries like China. Over the past year, the Trump administration has further abandoned W.T.O. by issuing its own global framework of tariffs instead. [...] Brazil had pushed for a two-year extension of the moratorium on e-commerce duties, while the United States wanted a permanent one. The countries couldn't come to a compromise, but negotiations are set to continue in Geneva this spring. W.T.O. members also failed to reach an agreement on future reforms for the organization. Bernd Lange, the chair of the international trade committee for the European Parliament, wrote in a post on X that "supporters of the multilateral trading system are waking up with a hangover." "We knew that a breakthrough might not materialize, but that doesn't make it any less painful," he wrote, adding that "without an agreement to extend moratorium on digital tariffs, a period of great uncertainty could soon begin for businesses and consumers." Jonathan McHale, the vice president of digital trade at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, called the outcome "deeply disappointing." He said: "For more than two decades, W.T.O. members have recognized that imposing tariffs on electronic transmissions would be counterproductive, but allowed the issue to become a negotiating football."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PARIS, March 31, 2026 — Atos Group, a global leader of AI-powered digital transformation, announced today that it has completed the sale of Bull, its Advanced Computing activities, to the French State for an enterprise value up to €404 million including contingent earn-outs totaling €104 million.
The Group previously announced that it had signed a share purchase agreement on July 31, 2025 following the receipt of a confirmatory offer. The transaction perimeter has been adjusted since signing to exclude zData, a leader in Big Data consulting and solutions. As a result, contingent earn-outs were revised from €110 million to €104 million (and consequently the enterprise value from up to €410 million to up to €404 million).
The Advanced Computing activity comprises the High-Performance Computing (HPC) & Quantum as well as the Business Computing & Artificial Intelligence divisions. It generated revenue of c. €0.7 billion in fiscal year 2025 and was previously part of Eviden, Atos Group’s brand for products and systems.
Following this divestiture, Eviden now encompasses cybersecurity products, mission‑critical systems and Vision AI. Its revenue, pro forma for the disposal of Advanced Computing activities, reached c. €0.3 billion in fiscal year 2025.
This divestiture marks a significant step in the execution of Atos Group’s strategic plan to refocus on its core markets. By streamlining its portfolio, the Group strengthens its focus on cybersecurity, mission-critical systems and digital services – areas where it holds strong, long-term growth potential.
The transaction has been designed to ensure full continuity of service for Bull’s clients and employees. The French State is now the sole shareholder of Bull, underscoring its commitment to preserving and developing sovereign capabilities in supercomputing and AI.
More from HPCwire: What the Return of Bull Means to European HPC
About Atos Group
Atos Group is a global leader in digital transformation with c. 61,000 employees and annual revenue of c. €7.2 billion (pro forma for the disposal of Advanced Computing activities), operating in 61 countries under two brands – Atos for services and Eviden for products and systems. European number one in cybersecurity and cloud, Atos Group is committed to a secure and decarbonized future and provides tailored AI-powered, end-to-end solutions for all industries. Atos Group is the brand under which Atos SE (Societas Europaea) operates. Atos SE listed on Euronext Paris.
Source: Atos Group
The post Atos Completes Sale of Bull Advanced Computing Unit to French State appeared first on HPCwire.
Theoretical discovery opens the door to building quantum computers with significantly reduced resources
March 31, 2026 — Quantum computers of the future may be closer to reality thanks to new research from Caltech and Oratomic, a Caltech-linked start-up company. Theorists and experimentalists teamed up to develop a new approach for reducing the errors that riddle today’s rudimentary quantum computers. Whereas these machines were previously thought to require millions of qubits to work properly (qubits being the quantum equivalent to 1’s and 0’s in classical computers), the new results indicate that a fully realized quantum computer could be built with as few as 10,000 to 20,000 qubits. The need for fewer qubits means that quantum computers could, in theory, be operational by the end of the decade.
Image credit: Caltech/Robert Hurt (IPAC-SELab)
The team proposes a new quantum error-correction architecture that is significantly more efficient than previous approaches. Quantum error correction is a process by which extra, redundant qubits are introduced to correct errors, or faults, enabling the ultimate goal in the field: fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The results exploit special properties of quantum computing platforms built out of neutral atoms, which serve as the qubits. Alternative platforms in development include superconducting circuits and trapped ions (ions are charged whereas neutral atoms are not). In a neutral atom system, laser beams known as optical tweezers are used to arrange atoms into qubit arrays. Manuel Endres, a professor of physics at Caltech, and his colleagues recently created the largest qubit array ever assembled, containing 6,100 trapped neutral atoms.
“Unlike other quantum computing platforms, neutral atom qubits can be directly connected over large distances,” Endres says. “Optical tweezers can shuttle one atom to the other end of the array and directly entangle it with another atom.”
This dynamic ability to move atoms is key to the researchers’ ultra-efficient error-correction scheme, which they describe in a new report posted online. The study’s co-first authors are Madelyn Cain, lead theoretical scientist at Oratomic, and Qian Xu, the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech and now a research scientist at Oratomic. The senior authors are Endres; John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech; Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, assistant professor of theoretical physics and a William H. Hurt Scholar at Caltech who is currently on leave while serving as CTO of Oratomic; and Dolev Bluvstein, a visiting associate in physics at Caltech and CEO of Oratomic. Other authors include Oratomic’s Robbie King and Lewis Picard, and Harry Levine of Oratomic and UC Berkeley.
The theoretical results involved innovating new architectures to greatly reduce the overhead of error correction.
“We’ve spent years learning how to leverage this remarkable ability of neutral atom computers to rearrange qubits dynamically,” Cain says. “Our results now make useful quantum computation with neutral atoms appear within reach by reducing qubit counts by up to two orders of magnitude.”
Xu adds, “For decades, qubit count has been viewed as the main obstacle to fault-tolerant quantum computing. I hope our work helps shift that perspective.”
The report stresses that the team’s findings mean that fault-tolerant quantum computers could be on the horizon. Previously, experts in quantum computing thought that such an accurate machine would take another 10 or even 20 years to build.
“I’ve been working on fault-tolerant quantum computing longer than some of my coauthors have been alive,” Preskill says. “Now at last we’re getting close.”
Huang says, “I always considered theoretical research on the usefulness of large-scale quantum algorithms to only be of interest in the distant future. Our new study made me realize they might come true in the next few years.”
Importantly, the accelerated timeline indicates that the security of digital communications—which includes everyday financial transactions and many other forms of private messaging—could be vulnerable to data breaches sooner than expected. Today’s computers protect data using encryption schemes, such as RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography). In these classical schemes, data are encrypted using hard mathematical problems that are infeasible for current computers to solve.
Quantum computers will have the ability to break both encryption schemes thanks to an algorithm developed by Peter Shor in 1994, now a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. To protect against this scenario, organizations around the world have been migrating to new encryption schemes capable of resisting quantum computer attacks. The authors emphasize that the rapid progress toward practical quantum computing underscores the importance of safe and timely migration to these new cryptographic standards.
Quantum computers are based on the laws of quantum physics—laws that govern the behaviors of subatomic particles such as electrons and photons. In the quantum realm, particles exhibit properties foreign to the classical realm we live in, including superposition, in which a particle exists in two places at once, and entanglement, in which particles remain intimately connected even after being separated by long distances.
Because nature is quantum at its most fundamental level, quantum computers are posited to have the power to unlock scientific mysteries, including quantum gravity and room-temperature superconductivity, as well as other problems in chemistry, medicine, sustainability, machine learning, and more.
The qubits at the hearts of these machines become both superimposed and entangled; however, these quantum states are delicate and prone to collapse. When this happens during a calculation, the information stored by the qubits is damaged, leading to errors. To address this problem, researchers have come up with error-correcting methods, like those used by classical computers, in which redundant qubits are used to check for the presence of errors. But error correction is trickier with quantum computers: Today’s most common protocols often require about 1,000 or so physical qubits to act together as one single “logical” qubit—the qubit carrying out a desired calculation.
A working quantum computer will require at least 1,000 logical qubits in total, but if each logical qubit is made of 1,000 physical qubits, the whole computer would require 1 million qubits. Scaling up a quantum machine to that large of a size would be extremely challenging, so researchers have been working on ways to scale down the number of physical qubits required for each logical qubit.
The new study describes how this can be achieved using neutral-atom arrays. In other error-correction schemes, such as those using so-called surface codes, qubits arranged in two dimensions are limited to connections to their direct neighbors. In neutral atom arrays, the qubits can be connected to many other qubits that are far away, enabling what scientists call high-rate codes. In such protocols, each physical qubit can participate in many logical qubits instead of just one.
The new scheme means that each logical qubit could be encoded with as few as five or so physical qubits, as opposed to the 1,000 needed with other techniques.
“It’s actually very surprising how well this works. It’s what we call ultra-efficient error correction,” Endres says.
While the results are theoretical, neutral atom quantum systems have rapidly advanced experimentally in recent years, with researchers demonstrating early error-corrected operations and arrays exceeding 6,000 atomic qubits. Significant engineering challenges remain to combine these capabilities into scalable systems, but the new research suggests that neutral atom architectures could ultimately run quantum algorithms powerful enough to impact modern encryption. More broadly, as these systems scale to thousands of logical qubits performing millions of operations, they are expected to enable a wide range of applications with major scientific and economic impact.
“Fault-tolerant quantum computing with neutral atoms is a rapidly emerging topic, and it was clear there are many understudied opportunities for finding shortcuts,” Bluvstein says. “We gathered some of the world’s top experts in the topic at Caltech to put all the pieces together. What we came up with—a clear road map to building a quantum computer—came faster than we expected.”
The next steps are to take larger arrays like those of Endres and his group and scale them up to even larger numbers while demonstrating low error rates, a process that will require additional technological advances.
The scientists founded Oratomic, with Bluvstein as CEO, with the goal to build the world’s first utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. Oratomic will work in close collaboration with Caltech’s Advanced Quantum Computing Mission, an on-campus interdisciplinary effort, which will continue to study the fundamental science of quantum information processing. In the longer term, the Caltech team plans to have quantum “supercomputers” on campus for solving scientific problems.
“Now it’s time to build the machines,” Bluvstein says.
The study “Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits” was conducted at Caltech and Oratomic. Research at Caltech was funded by Caltech. Manuel Endres and John Preskill also acknowledge support from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center. Manuel Endres also acknowledges support from the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation. Qian Xu also acknowledges funding by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech.
More from HPCwire
Source: Whitney Clavin, Caltech
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LUXEMBOURG, March 31, 2026 — Gcore, a global edge AI, cloud, network, and security solutions provider, today announced the launch of GPU Virtual Machines (VMs) on NVIDIA Hopper, delivering flexible, cost-efficient access to AI compute. As AI development becomes more iterative and central to company functioning, organisations increasingly need infrastructure that can scale dynamically. Gcore’s VMs with NVIDIA GPUs make high-performance computing more accessible to a broad range of customers.
This new addition to Gcore’s AI infrastructure and software suite is launching first in Sines-3, Gcore’s sovereign AI region in Portugal, as a response to growing demand for European-based AI infrastructure. GPU VMs provide access to the same NVIDIA Hopper GPUs with high-bandwidth NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking as Gcore Bare Metal GPU Cloud, without requiring a long-term commitment to hardware. This flexible deployment model is ideal for use cases such as early/growth-phase AI startups looking for performant GPUs without the high fixed costs, EU R&D labs needing sovereign infrastructure for burst PoCs and experiments, and research institutions seeking to run short-term, high-intensity fine-tuning runs on a budget.
Cutting Idle Costs Without Complexity
Some AI jobs require the full power and always-on availability of dedicated bare metal clusters. Others need something more agile: compute that can be sized up or down quickly, used for a burst of experimentation, powered down when idle, and spun back up when the next training run begins. Gcore’s new GPU VMs allow companies to match GPU capacity and cost to the stage of their project with precision.
One of the biggest advantages of GPU VMs is how they behave when they’re not in use. When the instance is powered off, GPU billing pauses automatically. Volumes, IPs, and configuration remain intact, but the GPU meter stops running, so companies only pay for storage and IPs while paused.
When ready to start work again, teams can restart the VMs without needing to set up or reconfigure. They can flexibly use a single Hopper GPU, scale to two or four, or jump to an eight-GPU VM when their workload requires it.
Key product capabilities:
Part of a Larger AI Infrastructure Roadmap
Gcore GPU VMs are the latest expansion of Gcore GPU Cloud, which already includes Bare Metal GPUs and Spot Bare Metal GPUs (a cost-saving option where capacity becomes available when there is spare capacity in a region). Customers can combine and switch between these GPU solutions in the Gcore Customer Portal for precision and flexibility over how their GPU compute is paid for and used.
Seva Vayner, Product Director, Cloud Edge & AI at Gcore, said: ”This launch reflects Gcore’s mission to democratize access to AI and connect the world to AI anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re an early/growth-phase AI startup, a SMB looking for performant GPUs without the high fixed costs, an EU R&D lab needing sovereign infrastructure for burst experiments, or a research institution seeking to run short-term, high-intensity fine-tuning on a budget, Gcore GPU VMs deliver the flexibility and cost efficiency you need.”
To deploy a GPU VM workload on Gcore with just 3 clicks, click here. For more information on how to scale AI workloads without compromising on compute price, speak to the Gcore team.
About Gcore
Gcore is a global provider of infrastructure and software solutions for AI, cloud, network, and security, headquartered in Luxembourg. Operating its own sovereign infrastructure across six continents, Gcore delivers reliable, ultra-low latency performance for enterprises and service providers. Its AI-native cloud stack enables organizations to build, train, and scale AI models seamlessly across public, private, and hybrid environments, while integrating AI, compute, networking, and security into a single platform for mission-critical workloads.
Source: Gcore
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AMSTERDAM, March 31, 2026 — Nebius today announced the construction of a new AI factory in the Finnish city of Lappeenranta with capacity of up to 310 MW. The first capacity from the Lappeenranta AI factory is expected to be available to customers in 2027, and it will be one of Europe’s largest dedicated AI factories when fully deployed.
The construction of the Lappeenranta AI factory follows Nebius’s recent expansion of its first Finnish data center in Mäntsälä up to 75 MW, completed earlier this year. The company plans to expand further in Finland in future as it continues its global capacity build-out.
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said: “We have been building in Finland for many years and are pleased to be expanding our presence here. Lappeenranta represents a significant addition to our global AI infrastructure build-out, and will make a significant contribution to achieving our capacity goals.”
Nebius is building one of the largest footprints of purpose-built AI compute globally, and is targeting more than 3 GW of contracted power by the end of 2026. As part of this, the company recently secured approval for its first gigawatt-scale AI factory in Independence, Missouri.
In the EMEA region, the company has already secured more than 750 MW of contracted power across its own sites and colocations. In addition to its Finnish locations, Nebius is building an AI factory near Lille, France, that will have capacity of 240 MW when fully deployed.
As global demand for high-performance compute for AI training and inference continues to accelerate, Nebius’s AI factories will serve AI builders with the latest Blackwell and Rubin generations of NVIDIA accelerated compute. The Mäntsälä facility houses Europe’s first operational deployment of the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform, and Nebius intends to offer the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform starting later this year.
The Lappeenranta AI factory is a multi-building campus on a ca. 100-acre industrial site, and will bring substantial economic and employment benefits to the South Karelia region of Finland. The construction phase is expected to create up to 700 skilled construction jobs, mostly sourced in the Lappeenranta area, with around 100 permanent positions once the data center is operational, as well as hundreds of indirect employment opportunities for operations and maintenance.
City of Lappeenranta Mayor Tuomo Sallinen welcomed the announcement: “Lappeenranta offers an increasingly attractive environment for innovation, with our universities playing a key role in developing top talent tailored to the needs of high-tech industries. The new data center will position our city at the forefront of Finland’s AI ecosystem and help meet Europe’s growing demand for artificial intelligence for decades to come. We’re proud that this project is being realized in Lappeenranta and in Finland, built sustainably on clean energy and driven largely by Finnish expertise.”
Nebius is actively exploring partnerships with local academic institutions via Nebius Academy to upskill local residents in AI expertise, develop the talent pipeline, and support long-term innovation and economic development in the region.
Sustainability will be a key design principle for the Lappeenranta AI factory, building on Nebius’s track record Mäntsälä, where its data center design ranks among the most energy-efficient facilities globally. Electricity sourcing will reflect Nebius’s predominantly low-carbon energy mix.
Servers will be cooled using a closed-loop liquid cooling system, eliminating the need for the AI factory to rely on water intake from local supplies and thus keeping water consumption to a minimum. As in Mäntsälä, the cooling system will be designed to integrate a heat recovery system, opening the opportunity for excess server heat to be donated to the local district heating network. In Mäntsälä, this approach avoided approximately 4,000 tonnes of CO₂e emissions associated with heat production in 2025 and reduced heating costs for connected households by around 10%.
About Nebius
Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents, and services worldwide.
Source: Nebius
The post Nebius to Construct 310 MW AI Factory in Finland appeared first on HPCwire.
WASHINGTON, March 31, 2026 — Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle AI Data Platform for US federal agencies. Purpose-built to securely connect industry-leading generative AI models with agency data, applications, and workflows, the platform enables civilian and defense agencies to unify critical information so they can move faster, reduce information silos, and make informed, mission-critical decisions at scale.
Credit: Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock
For US federal government agencies, Oracle AI Data Platform makes data AI-ready and enables the creation and deployment of agentic applications by harnessing the combined capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Autonomous AI Database, and OCI Enterprise AI. This enables developers to rapidly design, build, and deploy enterprise lakehouses, AI agents, and mission-ready applications using a modern, scalable foundation. At the same time, civilian and defense agency users benefit from real-time insights, automated workflows, and secure agentic experiences that streamline decision-making, elevate day-to-day operations, and help teams execute with greater speed, confidence, and mission impact.
“Federal agencies are under increasing pressure to turn data into a secure, decisive mission advantage at speed and scale,” said Kim Lynch, executive vice president, Government, Defense & Intelligence. “By unifying Oracle’s leading cloud infrastructure, AI database, and AI services, Oracle AI Data Platform for Federal Government provides a powerful, cost-effective way to connect data and workflows to generative AI. This helps agencies accelerate innovation, improve mission outcomes, and meet their mandates with greater confidence.”
A Unified Data Foundation for the AI Era
AI Data Platform for Federal Government represents a fundamental shift in how federal agencies can approach data management. By automating data ingestion and enriching data with context, it helps transform raw, fragmented data into reliable, mission-ready intelligence. Built-in generative AI tools make that intelligence immediately usable, enabling agencies to accelerate AI adoption, improve operational efficiencies, and act with greater speed and confidence. The platform is designed to reduce cost per query, improve inference performance, and increase throughput compared with other cloud providers by bringing together:
The platform supports open ecosystem compatibility with Python, Spark, open-source AI/ML frameworks, and existing agency tools—ensuring agencies can leverage their current investments while adopting next-generation AI capabilities.
Built for Federal Security, Compliance, and Sovereignty Requirements
Oracle AI Data Platform is engineered to address the most stringent security and compliance demands in the federal market. It operates within OCI’s FedRAMP High-authorized Government Cloud with IL4 and IL5 support for sensitive and controlled unclassified information (CUI), backed by always-on encryption, granular access controls, and comprehensive audit logging aligned with NIST and FISMA frameworks.
For agencies requiring the highest levels of data sovereignty, Oracle offers dedicated and isolated cloud regions—including Oracle National Security Regions—for air-gapped environments, as well as Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer for cloud-managed infrastructure deployed entirely within agency facilities.
For more information about Oracle AI Data Platform for federal agencies, visit https://www.oracle.com/government/federal.
About Oracle
Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.
Source: Oracle
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Tax debt and tax liens aren't the same and misunderstanding the difference can cost you a lot over time.
Full-time employees cut their 401(k) participation and contribution rates last year amid an affordability crunch, new research shows.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 31, 2026 — Vertiv, a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, has announced an investment of ~$50 million to expand its manufacturing presence in Ironton, Ohio, and its headquarters campus in Westerville, Ohio. The projects are expected to create hundreds of new jobs through 2029 and strengthen Vertiv’s ability to support growing customer demand for AI, high-density computing, and other critical digital infrastructure applications.
Vertiv’s Ironton facility will expand manufacturing capacity for advanced liquid cooling and chilled water systems, strengthening supply chains and supporting high-density AI infrastructure and next-generation data centers.
The Ironton expansion, which is expected to be operational in the second quarter of 2027, is planned to increase production capacity for Vertiv liquid cooling and chilled water systems used in advanced thermal management applications. With the expansion, total capacity at the facility is expected to increase by ~45% for these systems, helping Vertiv expand regional production, improve responsiveness to customer demand, and shorten supply chains.
As AI adoption accelerates and compute densities continue to rise, customers are requiring more advanced thermal management solutions to support next-generation GPU clusters, large-scale model training, and other high-performance workloads. Vertiv’s investment is designed to expand the manufacturing, engineering, sales, services, and logistics capabilities needed to help customers deploy and scale this infrastructure more efficiently.
“Ohio operations remain integral to Vertiv’s strategy,” said Giordano (Gio) Albertazzi, CEO of Vertiv. “This investment expands our manufacturing capacity and strengthens the engineering, sales, service, and logistics capabilities that support customers building the next generation of digital infrastructure. It also reflects our confidence in the talent, commitment, and long-standing support we continue to see across Ohio and within the communities where we operate.”
Vertiv has a rich history in Ohio, founded more than 60 years ago as Liebert Corporation, a pioneer in data center precision cooling. Today, Vertiv’s Ohio footprint spans 14 facilities, including manufacturing, research and development, testing labs, service and sales offices, customer experience centers, a training facility, and its global headquarters. By expanding both its manufacturing footprint and headquarters capabilities in the state, Vertiv is further positioning its U.S. operations to serve customers with greater scale, speed, and operational resilience.
Vertiv delivers end-to-end infrastructure, from grid to chip and chip to heat reuse, where power, cooling, IT, and services operate in unison and are built for multiple compute generations ahead. With global reach and a portfolio of innovative industry-leading technologies and services, Vertiv is enabling customers to deploy efficiently and scale seamlessly, helping customers manage the challenges associated with modern digital infrastructure.
About Vertiv
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv does business in more than 130 countries.
Source: Vertiv
The post Vertiv Expands Ohio Manufacturing to Support AI Data Center Cooling Demand appeared first on HPCwire.
BOULDER, Colo. and TUSTIN, Calif., March 31, 2026 — Spectra Logic, a global leader in data management and storage solutions, together with Geyser Data, a provider of purpose-built cold data archiving services, today announced a new tape-as-a-service archive deployment in London, marking the first European location available through the Geyser Data portal.
The London deployment expands the companies’ tape-as-a-service model into Europe. It introduces a new regional provider location designed to deliver predictable, long-term archive storage. Customers can select the London archive location through the Geyser Data portal alongside the existing Los Angeles deployment, giving organizations additional geographic choice for storing and retrieving cold data.
As more organizations move cold data to the cloud, many discover that archive storage can incur additional costs for data retrieval, egress, and API activity, making long-term storage difficult to predict. Some organizations choose to deploy and manage on-premises tape libraries for predictable archive economics. Geyser Data offers another option by delivering tape-powered archive infrastructure as a service. The platform provides a cloud-based archive copy with predictable pricing, giving existing tape library customers and new cloud users a way to store and retrieve long-term data without unexpected fees.
Through the tape-as-a-service model, hosting providers can deploy archive infrastructure in their local markets while delivering the service through the Geyser Data platform. Spectra Logic supplies the tape library infrastructure and core archive technologies, while Geyser Data provides the software and cloud platform that enable customers to access archive storage through an Amazon S3-compatible interface.
The approach creates a repeatable framework for expanding archive capacity globally. Local service providers operate the infrastructure, channel partners can deliver archive services to customers in their regions, and end users gain more options for where their data resides while maintaining a consistent archive experience through the Geyser Data portal.
The London deployment is hosted in a Digital Realty facility, providing a carrier-neutral interconnection environment and connectivity options designed to support enterprise archive workflows, hybrid architectures, and large-scale data movement.
“London is an important milestone because it demonstrates that tape-as-a-service can scale into new markets through a growing provider ecosystem,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Geyser Data. “Organizations are looking for archive infrastructure that is purpose-built for long-term cold data retention with predictable economics. At the same time, service providers want a practical way to deliver those capabilities locally. Expanding to London gives customers more geographic choice and validates that this model works.”
“As demand for long-term data retention continues to grow, providers are looking for reliable infrastructure that can support archive services in their regions,” said Nathan Thompson, chief executive officer of Spectra Logic. “Our tape library platforms and S3-compatible archive technologies power the underlying infrastructure that makes these deployments possible and give providers a proven foundation for delivering scalable cold data archiving.”
The London deployment represents the latest step in Geyser Data’s global expansion strategy. In addition to its U.S. presence, the company recently announced a partnership in Brazil that is expected to bring another archive deployment online later this year, continuing the expansion of the tape-as-a-service provider ecosystem.
Customers can now archive data in either London or Los Angeles through the Geyser Data portal. A free 30-day trial with limited capacity is available for both locations.
About Spectra Logic
Dedicated solely to data storage innovation for more than 40 years, Spectra Logic helps organizations modernize their IT infrastructures and protect and preserve their data with a broad portfolio of solutions that enable them to manage, migrate, store, and preserve long-term business data, along with features to make them ransomware resilient, whether on-premises, in a single cloud, across multiple clouds, or in all locations at once. To learn more, visit www.spectralogic.com.
Source: Spectra Logic
The post Spectra Logic and Geyser Data Expand Tape-as-a-Service with New London Archive Deployment appeared first on HPCwire.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 31, 2026 — Hammerspace today announced support for FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, enabling the Hammerspace Data Platform to be configured to meet the U.S. government standard for cryptographic security. This milestone positions Hammerspace to support deployments in federal, defense, healthcare, finance and other highly regulated environments. Integration into the Hammerspace Data Platform is planned for an upcoming release by the end of 2026.
“This validation is an important milestone for government and other security-sensitive deployments,” said Molly Presley, SVP of Global Marketing at Hammerspace. “The bigger challenge is maintaining control of distributed data across data centers, clouds and edge environments without sacrificing performance or flexibility. That is where Hammerspace is differentiated. We built our platform to secure, govern and orchestrate data at the data layer itself – providing the foundation organizations need for AI at scale.”
By supporting FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, Hammerspace meets key requirements for secure data protection in regulated environments and is advancing the integration of these capabilities into the Hammerspace Data Platform.
Security Enforced at the Data Layer for Consistent Control, Compliance and Data Sovereignty
Hammerspace delivers consistent, policy-driven orchestration, governance and protection across distributed environments, providing consistent control in multi-site and hybrid-cloud architectures. With the integration of FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, the platform is designed to provide:
The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3 is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and establishes stringent requirements for the design, implementation, and validation of cryptographic modules used to protect sensitive data. Validation requires independent testing by accredited laboratories and is mandatory for systems used by U.S. federal agencies and organizations operating under stringent compliance mandates.
Learn more about Hammerspace solutions for the public sector at https://hammerspace.com/public-sector.
About Hammerspace
Hammerspace is the high-performance data platform built to simplify and optimize AI infrastructure at scale. It makes all your data immediately accessible – anywhere across on-premises and cloud environments – without copying or migrating data into new silos. By integrating with existing storage, networking, and applications, Hammerspace creates a unified, high-speed data backbone for AI, enabling organizations to accelerate every stage of the AI pipeline while eliminating data silos.
Source: Hammerspace
The post Hammerspace Adds FIPS 140-3 Cryptography Support to Data Platform appeared first on HPCwire.
Jamie Dimon told "CBS Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil that "what's more important for the future of the world is that this war successfully conclude."
Anybody riding one currently? I was literally checking out with the X7 sport after weeks of going back & forth between the SC or Sport, when it suddenly removed the board from my cart & said it was sold out.
So being my impatient self I saw that as a sign & the Super charged was available so i bit the bullet & purchased it instead. 😅
Says 25 days for shipping but we will see.
Super amped for this absolute beast of a machine.
It's just hard to find a lot of current riders talking about it, there's some stuff out there but not much. Everything I see is nothing but positivity & pure shredding enjoyment.
A new feature allows Google Account users in the US to update their Gmail address.
Tabloid outlet has covered Republicans and Democrats relaxing at places such as Disney World as shutdown drags on
When US federal workers were missing paychecks and the partial government shutdown entered its seventh week, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was doing what any responsible lawmaker would do: riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand at Disney World in Florida.
Naturally, TMZ had photos of the vacationing senator on its homepage a few days later.
Continue reading...Case involves a former prosecutor removing nearly all Black jurors in a 2006 capital murder trial, raising legal questions
The US supreme court appeared skeptical on Tuesday of whether jury selection in a trial was conducted appropriately when they heard oral arguments in a death penalty case about racial bias in jury selection stemming from Mississippi.
Doug Evans, a now-retired prosecutor, removed all but one Black person from a jury that convicted Terry Pitchford of capital murder in 2006. The judge, Joseph Loper, allowed the juror strikes, despite objections from the defense counsel, and Mississippi’s supreme court upheld the conviction.
Continue reading...Jim Mackey responds to concerns about cost implications and supply disruption link to war against Iran
The head of the NHS in England has said he is “really worried” about medicine supply issues.
A number of experts have raised concerns about cost implications and supply disruption linked to the war in Iran.
Continue reading...Two-month arrangement aimed at preventing small-boat crossings comes as existing deal expires
The UK will pay France an extra £16.2m to keep police patrolling Channel beaches and prevent a surge in small-boat crossings after negotiators failed to agree a permanent deal before a midnight deadline.
The stopgap arrangement, which will last for two months, comes after French negotiators refused to agree to UK demands for further interventions and patrols to stop asylum seekers from reaching the UK via the Channel.
Continue reading...Australia is preparing possible court action against major social media platforms that are failing to enforce the country's social media ban on under-16s. "Three months after the ban came into effect, the eSafety Commissioner said it was probing Meta's Instagram and Facebook, Google's YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok for possible breaches of the law," reports Reuters. From the report: Communications Minister Anika Wells said the government was gathering evidence "so that the eSafety Commissioner can go to the Federal Court and win." "We have spent the summer building that evidence base of all the stories that no doubt you have all heard ... about how kids are getting around that," Wells told reporters in Canberra. The legal threat is a striking change of tone from a government which had hailed tech giants' shows of cooperation when the ban went live in December. Under the Australian law, platforms must show they are taking reasonable steps to keep out underage users or face fines of up to $34 million per breach, something eSafety would need to pursue in a civil court. The regulator previously said it would only take enforcement action in cases of systemic noncompliance. But in its first comprehensive compliance report since the ban took effect, eSafety said measures taken by the platforms were substandard and it would make a decision about next steps by mid-year. "We are now moving âinto an enforcement stance," said commissioner Julie Inman Grant in a statement. The regulator reported major compliance gaps, including platforms prompting children who had previously declared ages under 16 to do fresh age checks, allowing repeated attempts at age-assurance tests until a child got a result over 16 and poor pathways for people to report underage accounts. Some platforms did not use age-inference, which estimates age based on someone's online activity, and some only used age-assurance measures like photo-based checks after a user tried to change their age, rather than at sign-up. That made it "likely many Australian children aged under 16 have been able to create accounts on age-restricted social media platforms by simply declaring they are 16 or older", the regulator said. Nearly one-third of parents reported their under-16 child had at least one social media account after the ban took effect, of which two-thirds said the platform had not asked the child's age, it added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Allergy season is here, but you don't need to suffer. CNET put 15 of the latest air purifier models through CNET's smoke bomb test to find out which perform the best at particle filtering, noise levels and energy efficiency.
The event sounds similar to an incident that caused SpaceX to lose a satellite in December.
 | I've bought 3 different chargers for my onewheel plus xr and none of them fit it. It's a smaller plug in. What kind of charger do I need? [link] [comments] |
Police said two people headed the network, including one person considered to be the "narco-architect" and "mastermind of the tunnels."
Nearly a quarter of voters cite Reform leader’s support for US president as main reason against voting for his party
By day 31 of the war in the Middle East, Nigel Farage had become somewhat less vocal about the closeness of his relationship with Donald Trump.
“Trying to read what’s really in the minds of people in the White House right at the moment is a mug’s game,” said the MP, as he unveiled his party’s latest “pledge” to cut the cost of living on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The German chancellor has drawn condemnation from NGOs and members of his own government
Friedrich Merz has drawn condemnation from NGOs and members of his own government after he called for the vast majority of Syrians living in Germany to “go back to their homeland”.
The German chancellor, who was elected last year after promising a tough line on immigration in a bid to beat the far right, made the remarks during a visit to Berlin on Monday by the interim Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Continue reading...Volker Türk says bill, which applies to Palestinians convicted of terror charges but not Jewish extremists, must be repealed
A new Israeli law that would allow the execution of Palestinians convicted on terror charges for deadly attacks, but not Jewish extremists accused of similar crimes, would constitute a war crime if enacted, according to one of the UN’s most senior human rights officials.
Speaking amid mounting international condemnation of the bill, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, described the law as “patently inconsistent with Israel’s international law obligations, including in relation to the right to life”. He added that it “raises serious concerns about due process violations, is deeply discriminatory, and must be promptly repealed”.
Continue reading...Milly Alcock's hero says she "has no people" as she and Krypto drift off on a new adventure.
Grady Martin writes: A security researcher has leaked a complete repository of source code for Anthropic's flagship command-line tool. The file listing was exposed via a Node Package Manager (npm) mapping, with every target publicly accessible on a Cloudflare R2 storage bucket. There's been a number of discoveries as people continue to pore over the code. The DEV Community outlines some of the leak's most notable architectural elements and the key technical choices: Architecture Highlights The Tool System (~40 tools): Claude Code uses a plugin-like tool architecture. Each capability (file read, bash execution, web fetch, LSP integration) is a discrete, permission-gated tool. The base tool definition alone is 29,000 lines of TypeScript. The Query Engine (46K lines): This is the brain of the operation. It handles all LLM API calls, streaming, caching, and orchestration. It's by far the largest single module in the codebase. Multi-Agent Orchestration: Claude Code can spawn sub-agents (they call them "swarms") to handle complex, parallelizable tasks. Each agent runs in its own context with specific tool permissions. IDE Bridge System: A bidirectional communication layer connects IDE extensions (VS Code, JetBrains) to the CLI via JWT-authenticated channels. This is how the "Claude in your editor" experience works. Persistent Memory System: A file-based memory directory where Claude stores context about you, your project, and your preferences across sessions. Key Technical Decisions Worth Noting Bun over Node: They chose Bun as the JavaScript runtime, leveraging its dead code elimination for feature flags and its faster startup times. React for CLI: Using Ink (React for terminals) is bold. It means their terminal UI is component-based with state management, just like a web app. Zod v4 for validation: Schema validation is everywhere. Every tool input, every API response, every config file. ~50 slash commands: From /commit to /review-pr to memory management -- there's a command system as rich as any IDE. Lazy-loaded modules: Heavy dependencies like OpenTelemetry and gRPC are lazy-loaded to keep startup fast.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is tentatively expected to testify publicly before the House Armed Services Committee on April 29, according to two sources familiar with the plans.
Long time crunch troubleshooter, first time crunch thread poster.
I have a 5" Superflux HS and was experiencing a strange acceleration crunch/noise around 4k ERPM. Thanks to nexinity on discord, he recommended the following fix which completely remedied the issue.
Motor → FOC → Filters: Increase “Maximum ERPM for phase filters” to 6000-8000 ERPM.
My issue seems completely remedied at 6k, but if I see any further issues I’m going to increase it to 8k (as nex did and has been running for a long time). Apparently there are no adverse affects to doing this, but I will edit or reply to this thread if that changes.
Core focus will be on beauty, personal care and home products after spinning off brands such as Hellmann’s and Pot Noodle
Unilever has agreed to combine its food business with US-based McCormick in a $44.8bn deal that will give the Marmite-to-Hellmann’s mayonnaise owner majority control of a food empire.
The Anglo-Dutch company will control 65% of the new spin-off, which will combine brands such as Knorr and Pot Noodle with McCormick’s condiments and spices including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.
Continue reading...Marine told investigators he found the round ‘in the field’ about a year ago and kept it, thinking it wasn’t live
A US marine was detained at a California airport after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel found a live 25mm explosive round in his checked baggage, police said.
The round was found during the screening process of checked luggage at the Palm Springs international airport on Monday, the Palm Springs police department said in a news release.
Continue reading...John Healey says extra deployment is defensive response to ‘expanding threat’ from Iran
The UK is sending more military support to the Gulf, taking the total deployment to 1,000 troops, amid more jibes from Donald Trump about Britain’s refusal to get involved in offensive operations against Iran.
Speaking from Qatar where he met UK troops, the defence secretary, John Healey, said the extra deployment was in response to an “expanding threat” from Iran.
Continue reading...An incident at the end of the Duke-UConn game reminded Black people of something we already know: we’re treated differently in America
The UConn-Duke game on Sunday night was one for the ages. A last-second game winner from freshman Braylon Mullins took down the top-seeded Blue Devils, who at one point had led by 19 points. It is a moment that will be replayed over and over for years to come.
However, something strange happened after Mullins’s shot. UConn’s head coach Dan Hurley approached referee Roger Ayers and touched foreheads with the official while glaring into his eyes. It wasn’t quite the “head-butt” some called it on social media but it was an eye-catching scene. For his part, Ayers told ESPN the incident was “absolutely nothing” but it wouldn’t have been unusual for Hurley to be given a technical foul, which would have given Duke free throws and a chance to win the game with 0.4 seconds left. Hurley mystifyingly has said he thought Ayers was trying to “chest bump me to celebrate.”
Continue reading...DNA testing confirmed bones found on Salmon Creek beach belonged to Walter Karl Kinney, a man last seen in 1999
Human remains discovered in the summer of 2022 on a beach in California recently were identified as those of a former banker who disappeared in 1999.
The DNA Doe Project (DDP) on Thursday announced that bones found on Salmon Creek state beach in northern California in June 2022 – by a family searching for seashells – belonged to 59-year-old Walter Karl Kinney, a former banker who lived in nearby Santa Rosa.
Continue reading...Argonne and industry partners advance AI-enabled technologies to strengthen U.S. critical materials supply chains and accelerate domestic production
March 31, 2026 — As the United States expands artificial intelligence (AI), modernizes the electricity grid and grows advanced manufacturing, access to critical materials has become a national priority. Materials such as rare earth elements, lithium, cobalt and graphite are essential to these efforts. Today, many of them are still mined or processed overseas. This leaves U.S. manufacturers exposed to supply disruptions, price swings and geopolitical risk.
Aclara’s Rare Earth Separation Pilot Plant in operation. Image credit: Aclara.
To reduce these risks, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is relying more heavily on public-private partnerships. Through its Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, DOE is linking federal research capabilities with industry-led deployment to help move new technologies from the laboratory into the marketplace faster.
As part of this approach, DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory is working with companies across the mining, processing, recycling and manufacturing value chain. These collaborations focus on developing technologies that make domestic production more efficient, resilient and economically viable.
Accelerating the Path from Science to Industry
One recent example is a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Argonne and Aclara Resources. The project centers on developing an AI-enabled digital twin for heavy rare earth separation. Argonne is applying its strengths in advanced computing, process modeling and AI to support the scale-up of separation technologies for Aclara’s pilot plant, which is being developed in partnership with Virginia Tech.
The goal is to help technologies reach industrial readiness faster. By pairing Argonne’s AI-powered process simulation platform with data from Aclara’s recently inaugurated rare earth pilot plant, the team aims to reduce both time and cost as operations move from pilot scale to commercial facilities. This transition is one of the biggest barriers to building new U.S.-based capacity.
The collaboration supports Aclara’s plan to build a $277 million heavy rare earth separation facility in Louisiana — the first of its kind in the U.S. with a secured ionic clay raw material feed. By the time production begins in 2028, Aclara expects to have more than a year of operational data from its pilot plant, enabling faster ramp-up, improved efficiency and stable long-term operations.
“By combining real-world industry needs with deep expertise in the science of scale-up at national laboratories, we can speed the deployment of advanced technologies that strengthen domestic supply chains,” said Claus Daniel, associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Advanced Energy Technologies directorate. “This work reflects Argonne’s role in building regional industrial innovation hubs, such as the Gulf Coast and the Midwest, by aligning research investments and leveraging complementary capabilities to support U.S. competitiveness.”
“This partnership with Argonne is a critical accelerator for Aclara’s strategy to establish a reliable U.S.-based supply chain for heavy rare earths,” said Ramon Barua, CEO of Aclara. “By combining our proprietary separation technology and pilot-scale data with Argonne’s world-class capabilities in advanced computing, we are significantly reducing scale-up risk, accelerating industrial deployment and strengthening the foundations of a secure domestic supply of these critical minerals.”
A National Strategy Built on Innovation and Partnerships
Partnerships like this are central to DOE’s broader approach to rebuilding domestic critical materials supply chains. Rather than relying only on traditional mining, DOE is supporting research that improves processing efficiency, unlocks new material sources and enables recycling and reuse at scale.
“We need new ways to source and process the materials that support our energy system,” said Audrey Robertson, Assistant Secretary of Energy who leads the Office of Critical Minerals, Materials, and Manufacturing. “That means investing in innovation that reduces risk for industry, shortens the path from the lab to the market, and builds supply chains that are secure, resilient, and based in the U.S.”
These efforts are already delivering results. Argonne and its industry partners are demonstrating pilot-scale processes and AI-enabled optimization tools that can be adopted directly by manufacturers. At full production, Aclara has indicated that its Louisiana facility could supply more than 75% of U.S. demand of dysprosium and terbium, significantly reducing reliance on overseas processing. These rare earth materials are used in high-strength magnets that allow for the efficient operation of electric motors.
By pairing federal research investments with industry execution, DOE and Argonne are helping create a new generation of U.S.-based critical materials supply chains. These supply chains are designed to deploy faster, withstand disruption and support long-term industrial growth. Rebuilding domestic capacity is no longer a distant goal. It is already underway, one partnership at a time.
Source: Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne Advances AI-Enabled Rare Earth Separation with Aclara Partnership appeared first on HPCwire.
For many young people entering the workforce, the stigma of hands-on jobs is fading. There a competitive appeal – and they all require human expertise
Gib and Michelle Mouser are proud of their son’s career – just not in the way they once imagined.
Only 23 years old, Cale Mouser already earns well over six figures, and he’ll end up making substantially more. He is an acknowledged expert in a highly specialized field who spends hours in deep thought solving hard problems. He uses a computer, but he’s not stuck behind it.
Continue reading...Publisher alleges AI research company’s chatbot violated its copyright over Coconut the Little Dragon series
Penguin Random House has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging its chatbot ChatGPT violated copyright by mimicking and reproducing the content of a popular series of German children’s books.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday with a Munich court against OpenAI’s Ireland-based European subsidiary, states Penguin Random House’s legal team had prompted ChatGPT to write a story in the vein of Penguin author and illustrator Ingo Siegner’s Coconut the Little Dragon series.
Continue reading...Defence minister outlines plans to destroy all homes and villages in area ‘in accordance with the model in Gaza’
Israel says it will occupy swathes of south Lebanon and destroy the homes along the border to prevent the return of about 600,000 residents, prompting concerns of long-term forced displacement.
The defence minister, Israel Katz, said that when fighting with Hezbollah ended, Israel would occupy the area under the Litani River, about 19 miles from the Israel-Lebanon border, as part of its so-called buffer zone inside southern Lebanon.
Continue reading...Donald Tusk and Micheál Martin say reported phone call with Moscow on sanctions confirms Hungary ‘doing the bidding for Russia’ within EU
Back to Iran and the perceived lack of support from European Nato allies, US president Donald Trump has now turned to criticising France in his latest outburst on social media.
In a post on Truth Social, he said:
“The Country of France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the “Butcher of Iran,” who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!! President DJT”
Continue reading...The visit "will celebrate the historic connections and the modern bilateral relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States," Buckingham Palace says.
Tiger Woods was arrested last week in Florida and charged with driving under the influence after a vehicle crash.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado counselor who challenged a law banning conversion therapy for minors, ruling that lower courts failed to apply "sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny."
President Trump told CBS News that he is not ready "quite yet" to abandon efforts to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz amid the Iran war, despite a Truth Social post suggesting allies need to do it themselves.
Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by several European companies that aims to offer a "truly open, transparent and sovereign solution for collaborate document editing," using OnlyOffice as a starting point. The project is positioned around European digital independence and familiar Office-style editing, though it has already drawn pushback from OnlyOffice over alleged licensing violations. "The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine," adds How-To Geek. From the report: Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by Nextcloud, EuroStack, Wiki, Proton, Soverin, Abilian, and other companies based in Europe. The goal is to build an online office suite that can open and edit standard Microsoft Office documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) and the OpenDocument format (ODS, ODT, ODP) used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The current design is remarkably close to Microsoft Office and its tabbed toolbars, so there shouldn't be much of a learning curve for anyone used to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Importantly, Euro-Office is only the document editing component. It's designed to be added to cloud storage services, online wikis, project management tools, and other software. For example, you could have some Word documents in your Nextcloud file storage, and clicking them in a browser could open the Euro-Office editor. That way, Nextcloud (or Proton, or anyone else) doesn't have to build its own document editor from scratch. Euro-Office is based on OnlyOffice, which is open-source under the AGPL license. The project explained that "Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged" with OnlyOffice's developers, with outside code changes rarely accepted, so a hard fork was required. The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The project's home page explains, "A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government." As for why OnlyOffice was chosen over LibreOffice, the project simply said: "We believe open source is about collaboration, and we look for opportunities to integrate and collaborate with the LibreOffice community and companies like Collabora." UPDATE: Slashdot reader Elektroschock shares a statement from OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov, expressing his concerns about the Euro-Office inclusion of its software with trademarks removed: "We liked the AGPL v3 license because its 7th clause allows us to ensure that our code retains its original attributes, so that users are able to clearly identify the developers and the brand behind the program..." Bannov continued: "The core issue here isn't just about what the AGPL license states, but about the additional provisions we, as the authors, have included. This is a critical distinction, even if some may argue otherwise. We firmly assert that the Euro-Office project is currently infringing on our copyright in a deliberate and unacceptable manner." "As the creators of ONLYOFFICE, we want to make our position unequivocally clear: we do not grant anyone the right to remove our branding or alter our open-source code without proper attribution. This principle is non-negotiable and will never change. We demand that the Euro-Office project either restore our branding and attributions or roll back all forks of our project, refraining from using our code without proper acknowledgment of ONLYOFFICE."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The first full moon in spring isn't actually pink, but it determines the date of Easter each year.
We're celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary by reminiscing on the tech titan's biggest moments.
Meta claims social media addiction isn’t real. Juries disagree
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor for the Guardian. I’m hoping futilely for warm spring weather in New York City, but while it’s still cold, I’m sitting inside and reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Published in 2010 and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, the book is a fascinating record of our anxieties about technology at a time when the iPhone was just three years old and Facebook was just six. Google Chrome had debuted two years prior, and I think I was using Mozilla Firefox as my main browser. Stay tuned for a fuller analysis once I finish, but my early impression is that Carr’s observations have stood the test of time.
This week in tech, we’re discussing one major topic: two landmark cases against Meta and YouTube over social media addiction. Whether social media is clinically addictive or not, the liability for it has been determined.
‘Accountability has arrived’: dual US court losses show shifting tide against Meta and co
The Guardian view on social media in the dock: tech bros move fast – society is trying to catch up
I was paid to write fake Google reviews – then my ‘bosses’ tried to scam me
Keep under-fives’ screen time to no more than an hour a day, UK advice says
Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia
Federal judge sides with Anthropic in first round of standoff with Pentagon
Bernie Sanders and AOC introduce bill to pause building of new datacenters
Continue reading...Anyone know of any repair shops/people who can change a tire on my Pint X in Orlando, Kissimmee or even Tampa area? I’m willing to drive a bit if I have to. Just can’t seem to find anything at all. Thank you!
SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 31, 2026 — NVIDIA and Marvell Technology, Inc. today announced a strategic partnership to connect Marvell to the NVIDIA AI factory and AI-RAN ecosystem through NVIDIA NVLink Fusion, offering customers building on NVIDIA architectures greater choice and flexibility in developing next-generation infrastructure. The companies will also collaborate on silicon photonics technology.
Credit: Shutterstock
In addition, NVIDIA has invested $2 billion in Marvell.
The partnership builds on NVIDIA NVLink Fusion, a rack-scale platform that enables customers to develop semi-custom AI infrastructure using the NVIDIA NVLink ecosystem. Marvell will provide custom XPUs and NVLink Fusion-compatible scale-up networking, while NVIDIA will provide the supporting technologies, including Vera CPU, ConnectX NICs, Bluefield DPUs, NVLink interconnect and Spectrum-X switches, and the rack-scale AI compute.
For customers developing custom XPUs, NVLink Fusion enables a heterogeneous AI infrastructure fully compatible with NVIDIA systems, allowing seamless integration with NVIDIA GPU, LPU, networking and storage platforms while leveraging NVIDIA’s rich technology stack global supply chain ecosystem.
The companies will also partner to transform the world’s telecommunication network into AI infrastructure with NVIDIA Aerial AI-RAN for 5G/6G, and advance world-class networking for AI, including advanced optical interconnect solutions and silicon photonics technology.
“The inference inflection has arrived. Token generation demand is surging, and the world is racing to build AI factories,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with Marvell, we are enabling customers to leverage NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure ecosystem and scale to build specialized AI compute.”
“Our expanded partnership with NVIDIA reflects the growing importance of high-speed connectivity, optical interconnect and accelerated infrastructure in scaling AI,” said Matt Murphy, chairman and CEO of Marvell. “By connecting Marvell’s leadership in high-performance analog, optical DSP, silicon photonics and custom silicon to NVIDIA’s expanding AI ecosystem through NVLink Fusion, we are enabling customers to build scalable, efficient AI infrastructure.”
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we’re building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world’s leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world’s data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers’ current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we’re ultimately changing the way tomorrow’s enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA AI Ecosystem Expands as Marvell Joins Forces Through NVLink Fusion appeared first on HPCwire.
Can the Poles pull off their first win in Sweden after almost a century?
The Azzurri head to Zenica looking to claim their spot in this summer's tournament.
So I bought two from a family friend for 400 apiece for me and my girlfriend a ride. They came with everything including all the extra parts. handle, wheel cover, two fast chargers, couple other things. They only had about 30 miles a piece on them basically brand new.
Although nice to have them, my girlfriend doesn’t really like riding that much. It’s nice to have it for when she does, but I’m wondering what I could get for both of these and if it’s worth trading them in or selling them for something better. One has about 180 miles and the other one has about 100 now. It would be great to have if I needed something in a city, but I don’t live in a city and I don’t use it to get to work. Is it possible to find someone who wants to trade for something better that needs 2 pints? is the value still worth 400 apiece? I feel like the value is going down a ton since last year because they’re selling them for like 700 bucks on their website now
Video posted on social media depicts a rendering of the proposed 50-storey gargantuan structure decked in gold
In a city of respected art deco buildings, ridicule is being heaped on the latest structure proposed for Miami’s skyline: the Donald J Trump presidential library, unveiled in ambitious plans posted to social media on Monday night.
A 1 minute 40 second video tour of the proposed gargantuan structure revealed it will be decked, almost inevitably, in Trump’s trademark gold, including a giant statue of him, and will feature Air Force One, the $400m Boeing “flying palace” gifted to him by Qatar, in its cavernous lobby.
Continue reading...Falling behind on debt in retirement can trigger a chain of consequences, but you have more options than you think.
Maybe I missed the memo? There was chatter around a year ago including preorders - but now nada. Nothing on the website either.
Brandon Sklenar and Amanda Seyfried also star in the film, which is coming to the Starz app.
Foreign ministers Ishaq Dar and Wang Yi met in Beijing as Pakistan pushes for peacemaker role
Pakistan and China have released a joint five-part proposal for peace in the Middle East, after Pakistan’s foreign minister flew to Beijing on Tuesday to seek Chinese support for the country’s faltering efforts to negotiate an end to end the war.
The one-day meeting between Ishaq Dar and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, came as Pakistan continues to push for the role of peacemaker between the United States and Iran, even as the war shows little sign of relenting.
Continue reading...The king will address Congress during the visit, which will commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence
Q: What do you make of the suggestion that Donald Trump could end the Iran war without securing the strait of Hormuz? Or do you think he should finish the job?
Farage replies:
I don’t think we should take literally anything right now that Donald Trump says … And then the last thing he’s going to do, or the last thing his colleagues in the White House are going to do, is to give the Iranians any idea of what their true intentions are.
Was it to remove nuclear capability? Was it aimed at regime change? I don’t think any of us quite know the absolute truth about that.
The problem is any third party inquiry is a waste of space unless you can subpoena police officers, social services, civil servants who were all part of turning the collective blind eye. And I think everything this government has done on this issue is an attempt to literally kick the can down the road, to not fully open this up.
Continue reading...Critics say exemption for fossil fuels exploits White House’s ‘self-made gas crisis’, and could doom the rare Rice’s whale
A US government panel on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a move which critics say could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life.
The Endangered Species Committee – which had not convened in more than three decades – voted to approve the request for the ESA exemption at the request of the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Continue reading...Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine held a news conference at the Pentagon as gas prices in the U.S. continued to climb amid the ongoing war with Iran.
When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr talks about broadcast licensees serving the “public interest,” he loves to emphasize “localism.”
Localism is the idea that powerful entities (in this case, broadcasters) should serve the needs and interests of the communities they service. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue with, especially at a time when news deserts are spreading, small-town outlets are folding, and, thanks to the administration in which Carr serves, local public radio stations are reeling.
When you look at the fights Carr actually picks with broadcasters over the “public interest” requirement, however, a curious pattern emerges. They aren’t local stories at all, unless you consider Tehran and San Salvador local. They’re national and global stories that upset not residents of underserved heartland communities, but President Donald Trump, the man whose gilded face Carr wears as a lapel pin.
Sure, when he’s playing for the home crowd, Carr will openly admit, and even brag about, helping Trump reshape the national media to his liking. That’s what he did at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, bragging about such “wins” as the Paramount–Skydance merger in Trump’s ongoing feud against media adversaries. Carr’s FCC approved that deal only after unconstitutionally extracting editorial concessions from CBS News and helping Trump launder a multimillion-dollar alleged bribe though the courts.
But in less partisan settings, from congressional testimony to mainstream media interviews, localism has become Carr’s go-to talking point whenever he’s pressed on his unconstitutional efforts to police news content or confronted with his past statements railing against the partisan suppression of news. He’s not censoring the airwaves, he claims; he’s just sticking up for the little guy.
Yet Carr has never threatened a broadcast license because a newsroom ignored city council meetings or local crime, or offered a biased take on a school board’s budget decisions. It would, of course, violate the First Amendment for him to do that too — the FCC, as Carr once said, “does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’” But at least it would be consistent with his populist gimmick.
In fact, his threats arise from coverage on national news networks, not their local affiliates, which actually hold the broadcast licenses he’s threatening to revoke. In other words, he’s threatening to punish local news stations for national content they don’t produce, and sometimes don’t even air, that angers Trump.
Let’s play back some of Carr’s greatest hits; see if you can spot the localism.
Carr also likes to tell broadcasters what they should air, but he doesn’t implore them to report more or better local news. Instead, he launched the “Pledge America Campaign,” calling on broadcasters to meet their public interest obligations by airing “patriotic, pro-America content” celebrating “the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”
And in an expressly anti-local “public interest” intervention, Carr enthusiastically backed Trump’s directive to give the Army-Navy football game an exclusive broadcast window. Carr said in a press release earlier this month that “such scheduling conflicts weaken the national focus on our Military Service Academies and detract from a morale-building event of vital interest to the Department of War.” Because, of course, the hallmark of community broadcasting is not letting fans watch their local teams because the Pentagon needs a morale boost for its illegal, unpopular wars.
As a prior version of Carr knew, the FCC cannot police journalism for ideological bias. Localism is a Trojan horse Carr uses to legitimize his attack on the Constitution.
His only serious effort to impact local news undermines it instead by consolidating more local licenses under conglomerates like Nexstar and Sinclair — companies that are ideologically aligned with Trump on national issues but have long track records of ruining local coverage through cost cutting. Carr even bent ownership rules to approve a $6.2 billion Nexstar–Tegna merger, which which a federal judge halted Friday because of harms to local news consumers.
Nexstar is aggressively cutting jobs at flagship stations like WGN in Chicago and KTLA in Los Angeles, even as it lobbies for permission to expand further. Sinclair has decimated local newsrooms across the country, replacing them with centralized national programming — the exact opposite of the localism Carr claims to champion.
The real Brendan Carr is the unrepentant censorship czar who shows up at CPAC and openly threatens broadcasters on X, not the slicker version who rails against coastal elites to change the subject when questioned about his unconstitutional antics.
Carr is among the most shameless bootlickers (or Florsheim dress shoe-lickers) in an administration full of sycophants. The only localities whose interests he serves are the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He’s the last person who should be policing the “public interest,” locally or anywhere.
The post Trump’s FCC Chief Says His Censorship Protects the Little Guy. It Really Serves One Powerful Man. appeared first on The Intercept.
Fifa president made comments at Iran-Costa Rica game
Infantino says Iran will play games in the US as scheduled
Iran scheduled to open World Cup in LA on 15 June
The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, told AFP on Tuesday that Iran “will be at the World Cup” and will play their group matches in the United States as scheduled, despite the Middle East war.
“Iran will be at the World Cup,” Infantino said at half-time of Iran’s friendly against Costa Rica in Turkey. “That’s why we’re here. We’re delighted because they’re a very, very strong team, I’m very happy.”
Continue reading...A Las Vegas performer has sued Taylor Swift over the title of her hit album "The Life of a Showgirl," alleging it violates the performer's trademark.
Merlin could disappear in worst-case scenario, with British isles facing ecological ‘point of no return’
The merlin, Britain’s smallest bird of prey, is one of more than 200 species that will become extinct in the UK if action is not taken to curb emissions and unsustainable land use, a study has claimed.
According to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), there is a 20-year window in which decisions on climate and land use will determine the fate of dozens of Britain’s native species.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration on Monday issued a long-awaited proposed rule to open up retirement plans to alternative assets, paving the way for private equity and cryptocurrencies to be added to 401(k) accounts. The measure, announced by the U.S. Department of Labor, is intended to ease longstanding barriers to incorporating these less liquid and less transparent assets into American retirement plans. It follows an executive order from President Donald Trump last summer and could clear the way for alternative asset management firms to tap a large new source of capital. Industry groups have argued private market investments can enhance long-term returns and diversification for retirement savers, while skeptics warn higher fees, complexity and limited liquidity could limit those gains and pose risks for retail investors. Some private market funds that are already available to wealthier individual investors have shown signs of strain in recent months. Private credit funds known as business development companies have seen a wave of withdrawals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the proposed rule was "an initial step" and aimed to be "mindful of the importance of protecting retirement assets." The guidance lays out how plan trustees, who have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of members, can incorporate these assets. They would have to "objectively, thoroughly, and analytically consider, and make determinations on factors including performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, performance benchmarks, and complexity," the DOL said. Trustees who abide by them will be granted safe harbor that protects them from lawsuits, it added. The Supreme Court agreed earlier this year to hear one such case filed in 2019 by a former Intel employee claiming trustees made "imprudent" decisions by investing in hedge funds and private equity funds.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Robert Morris, who started Gateway church, pleaded guilty in October to sexually abusing girl in the 1980s
The founder and former pastor of one of the US’s largest megachurches has been released from an Oklahoma jail six months after pleading guilty to sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s.
Robert Morris, 64, who started Texas’s Gateway church and also once served as a White House spiritual adviser during Donald Trump’s first presidency, pleaded guilty in early October in Osage county district court on five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child.
Continue reading...Family pushing for greater controls after inquest finds Oliver Robinson’s prescription was ‘obstacle’ to proper care
Oliver Robinson felt he had exhausted conventional therapies when he left the Priory, a private mental health facility where he was treated for depression and addiction between 2019 and 2022. Initially he found relief from a new kind of prescription elsewhere. But by the time he took his own life in November 2023, aged 34, his family believe his medicine was making him worse.
In January, an inquest concluded that Robinson’s prescription for medicinal cannabis had “probably contributed to his death”. Catherine McKenna, the coroner for Manchester North, also ruled that his continued use of the prescription, first issued to him in May 2022 by Curaleaf Clinic, a private cannabis provider, “acted as an obstacle” to him receiving appropriate psychiatric and addiction care. His family understand this to be the first ruling of its kind.
Continue reading...Dozens of other vessels leave area after drone strike causes fire onboard tanker owned by Kuwait’s state oil company
When Iran attacked a fully loaded crude oil tanker anchored at Dubai port on Monday night, damaging the vessel’s hull, hundreds of seafarers stranded on tankers anchored nearby were close enough to watch as the vessel burned.
Thousands more were able to listen to radio messages sent from the tanker to port authorities, as the latest strike on a merchant vessel during the US-Israel war on Iran reignited fears for the civilian maritime workers trapped in a war zone.
Continue reading...As calls for restrictions on under-16s’ online activities gather pace, some are urging curbs on online gaming. The idea is a mess from top to bottom
Last week, Meta and YouTube were found liable for creating intentionally addictive products that affected the wellbeing of young social media users. The ruling has supercharged an already growing movement from governments and regulators to restrict or ban social media use for under-16s, as has been done in Australia, to protect children from potential harm.
But there is another way that about 85% of kids and teens congregate online – and that is through video games. It has been suggested that curbs on online gaming should be considered alongside social media restrictions in future legislation. There is some precedent: in 2021, China restricted young people’s online gaming time to one hour a day on weekends and holidays. But I have a lot of questions about how such curbs would work, and whether they should be attempted.
Continue reading...The three former agents were seasoned investigators who primarily handled public corruption investigations and were assigned to special counsel Jack Smith's team.
Heathrow wanted changes to fund upgrade, but airlines warned cost increases would be passed on to passengers
The UK aviation regulator has partly rejected plans by Heathrow to significantly raise its landing fees to fund a multibillion-pound upgrade, arguing the airport can still invest without steep rises to ticket prices.
The Civil Aviation Authority said the average charge for each passenger should rise from £28.40 to £28.80 between 2027 and 2031.
Continue reading...Home to one of the world’s largest deposits of freshwater, the Great Lakes region will soon host next-generation generators – just as prices are being hiked across the US
Submersible hydroelectric technology deployed across the Great Lakes could become a key cog in clean energy efforts, supporters say, amid surging electricity demand and costs.
Home to one of the largest deposits of freshwater on the planet, the Great Lakes region has on its shores some of the largest cities in North America in Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Detroit, where electricity demand is growing. While none of the five Great Lakes have significant tides or currents to fuel hydropower, several of the waterways that link the lakes do.
Continue reading...If you have $7,500 saved, a CD account may be worth considering. Here's how much interest it can earn right now.
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.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco says his election fraud probe of the Proposition 50 Special Election last fall has come to a halt due to "politically motivated lawsuits and court filings."
Single biggest donation to a UK university in modern times will establish a new school of government bearing his name
The British billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Rokos has donated a record £190m to the University of Cambridge to establish a new school of government, which will bear his name.
It is believed to be the single biggest donation to any UK university in modern times and is intended to support Cambridge to become a leading training ground for future world leaders.
Continue reading...Excited after that "You're welcome" scene at the end of the season premiere? Let's keep it going.
This is what Apple, cybersecurity professionals and CNET's iOS experts recommend you do to keep your data safe.
Ukraine says Russian spy satellite had photographed base before strike, as Moscow accused of helping Tehran
The destruction of a US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft in an Iranian strike on a Saudi Arabian airbase has raised questions over how a critical surveillance asset was left unprotected, and how Iran was able to launch a direct strike on the plane.
The plane was one of 16 operational E-3s, which first went into production in the 1960s and carry sophisticated monitoring equipment that allow them to warn of airborne threats such as missiles, as well as surveil and monitor their assigned battle space including communications, troop and equipment movements and air defence sites.
Continue reading...It's never been more important to make the most of your money when buying a phone. These tips will help you shop better.
ZURICH, March 31, 2026 — IBM and ETH Zurich announced today a 10-year collaboration to advance the next generation of algorithms at the intersection of AI and quantum computing. This initiative represents the latest milestone in the long-standing collaboration between the two institutions, further strengthening a scientific exchange that has helped create the future of information technology.
Credit: Shutterstock
Algorithms are the hidden architecture of modern technology. They power scientific discovery, economic growth, and technological progress, from classical computing to today’s AI revolution. With quantum computing bringing increasing value to science and industry, entirely new algorithmic foundations — as well as new ways of understanding and representing data — are required. Over the next decade, IBM and ETH Zurich aim to create new classes of algorithms capable of bridging classical computing, machine learning, and quantum systems to address some of the today’s critical challenges in business.
IBM will also support the creation of professorship positions and research projects at ETH Zurich, with the goal of advancing the algorithmic expertise of the next generation workforce. The education and research efforts will focus on new algorithmic paradigms for AI and quantum systems, including hybrid approaches that combine classical, AI-driven, and quantum computation to address challenges in four key areas: optimization and combinatorial problems; differential equations and dynamical systems; linear algebra and Hamiltonian simulations; and complex system modeling. These mathematical foundations are particularly important at the intersection of AI and quantum computing, where new algorithmic approaches could soon help unlock practical value from today’s quantum hardware and redefine how complex problems in science, industry, and society are solved.
Alessandro Curioni, IBM Fellow, VP Algorithms and Applications, IBM Research said: “Algorithms have always been the true drivers of computing revolutions and are at the core of our history at IBM Research. I strongly believe that the future of computing will be written not only in hardware or software, but in the algorithms that connect the two. As AI and quantum computing converge, we are witnessing the dawn of a new algorithmic era — and shaping this future requires both industry and academic scientific depth. IBM and ETH Zurich have a long and distinguished history of working together at the frontiers of science and technology. With this agreement, we are committing to inventing the algorithmic foundations of the future.”
Prof. Dr. Joël Mesot, President of ETH Zurich, said: “ETH Zurich and IBM share a longstanding commitment to excellence in research, and our focus in developing pioneering technologies is anchored in long-term societal benefits. The partnership with IBM reflects our ambition to co-create groundbreaking technology and to empower the next generation of AI and quantum computing experts.”
IBM has helped define every major era of computing, from foundational algorithmic breakthroughs — including the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) — to pioneering artificial intelligence — with systems like Deep Blue and Watson. Showcasing decades of leadership in algorithm design and implementation, IBM continues to push the boundaries of what computation can achieve.
ETH Zurich stands among the world’s leading scientific institutions, with a legacy that includes 22 Nobel laureates and some of the most influential minds in mathematics, physics, and computer science — from Albert Einstein to Eduard Stiefel. ETH was the birthplace of numerous ideas that form the mathematical and algorithmic backbone of modern science, and ETH-created programming languages, numerical methods, and theoretical frameworks are still in use to this day.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.
Source: IBM
The post IBM and ETH Zurich Target New Algorithmic Foundations for AI and Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
Families fear undocumented relatives could be turned away or detained at recruit celebrations in South Carolina
Federal immigration agents will be stationed at Marine Corps graduation events this week, the service has announced, raising fears that undocumented relatives celebrating their loved ones’ achievements will be seized and deported.
The service is presenting the unusual move as a security enhancement for family events over the next few days at the Parris Island Marine Corps recruiting depot in South Carolina.
Continue reading...No other injuries were reported after the attack at a small Bulverde campus, where classes were cancelled
A 15-year-old student shot a teacher at a Texas high school and then fatally shot himself on Monday, according to authorities, who were still investigating what led to the early morning attack.
No other injuries were reported at Hill Country college preparatory high school in Bulverde, a small but growing city near San Antonio.
Continue reading...SAN MATEO, Calif., March 31, 2026 — QuSecure, Inc., a market leader in post-quantum cybersecurity and cryptographic agility, today announced it is collaborating with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in the Migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography Project Consortium to bring awareness to the issues involved in migrating to post-quantum algorithms and to develop practices to ease migration from current public-key algorithms to replacement algorithms.
Quantum computers capable of breaking public key cryptography threaten current information systems. NIST’s post-quantum cryptography program developed standardized quantum-resistant algorithms to protect digital information. Organizations must identify where vulnerable public key algorithms exist across hardware, software, and services and prioritize migration to NIST post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to protect data and processes from future threats.
“Public-key cryptography is widely used to protect today’s digital information,” said William Newhouse, Security Engineer, NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. “With the advent of quantum computing, and its potential to compromise many of the current cryptographic algorithms, it is critical that organizations begin to plan for many of the technological and operational challenges that a migration to post-quantum cryptography will present. This project aims to help organizations in that effort.”
As a contributing member of the consortium, QuSecure will collaborate with Automated Cryptography Discovery and Inventory and post-quantum cryptography vendors to understand tool performance across enterprise environments and use cases. QuSecure will test solutions in NCCoE lab environments with enterprise PQC tools to identify capability gaps and strengthen post-quantum cryptography migration strategies. The company will share technical expertise and deployment barriers to improve interoperability, implementation performance, and coordination with standards bodies and industry sectors.
“This collaboration with the NCCoE brings industry leaders together to tackle one of today’s most pressing cybersecurity challenges – the transition to post-quantum cryptography,” said Garfield Jones, QuSecure SVP, Research & Technology Strategy. “By working across government, industry, and academia, we can help organizations identify quantum-vulnerable systems, manage risk, and prepare for a secure, quantum-resilient future.”
The initial scope of this project will engage the industry to demonstrate the use of automated discovery tools to identify instances of quantum-vulnerable public key algorithms that are widely deployed, and to manage associated risks. Other goals include development and improvement of migration strategy, interoperability and performance of implementations, and outreach to standard developing organizations and industry sectors.
As part of NIST, the NCCoE is a collaborative hub where industry organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions work together to address businesses’ most pressing cybersecurity issues. This public-private partnership enables collaboration in the creation of practical cybersecurity solutions for specific industries, as well as for broad, cross-sector technology challenges. The NCCoE was established in 2012 by NIST in partnership with the State of Maryland and Montgomery County, Maryland. Information is available at https://www.nccoe.nist.gov.
About QuSecure
QuSecure is the pioneer of orchestrated crypto-agility and the creator of QuProtect R3, the first end-to-end crypto-agility and cryptographic command platform. QuSecure enables organizations to identify high-value assets, modernize cryptography without operational disruption, and achieve continuous compliance—all while preparing for the quantum threat.
Source: QuSecure
The post QuSecure and NIST’s NCCoE Partner to Address Post-Quantum Algorithm Migration appeared first on HPCwire.
Defence ministry says US failed to request authorisation in time for parliament to give approval as required by international treaty
Italy has denied the use of an airbase in Sicily to US military planes carrying weapons for the war in Iran after the US did not follow the required authorisation procedure.
A source at the Italian defence ministry confirmed a report in Corriere della Sera that “some US bombers” had been due to land at Sigonella – one of seven US navy bases in Italy – before heading to the Middle East, but that use of the base had been denied because the US sought authorisation to land only while the aircraft were already en route to Sicily.
Continue reading...US-Israel war on Iran: What next for Lebanon? 14 April 2026 — 13:00 TO 14:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Online
Experts examine the conflict’s trajectory, its impact on Lebanon’s people and the future of Hezbollah’s role in the Lebanese state.
Experts examine the conflict’s trajectory, its impact on Lebanon’s people, and the future of Hezbollah’s role in the Lebanese state.Amid the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, the conflict in Lebanon is intensifying. On 2 March, Hezbollah launched rockets and drones into Israel in response to strikes on Iran. Since then, Israeli military attacks have killed more than 1,000 people, injured around 2,500, and displaced nearly one-fifth of Lebanon’s population.
The conflict is unlikely to subside soon. On 24 March, Israel’s defense minister announced plans for a military occupation of a large area of southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government would have limited options for responding. Meanwhile, it continues to struggle with whether and how to confront Hezbollah without inflaming internal tensions.
In this webinar, experts will examine the conflict’s trajectory, implications of a potential Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and the future of Hezbollah’s role in the Lebanese state. Panelists will also discuss how this latest round of conflict has impacted Lebanon’s people and what is needed to support recovery.
SAN DIEGO, March 31, 2026 — Monarch Quantum, a developer of integrated photonics hardware for quantum technologies, today announced a $55 million oversubscribed growth round, led by Serendipity Capital, a leading deep tech investor, with participation from 55 North, the world’s largest dedicated pure play quantum fund, and Global Innovation Labs. Founded in 2025, Monarch entered 2026 with more than $60 million in customer contracts from leading quantum companies including Quantinuum, Infleqtion, and NASA, bringing total capital and customer contracts to more than $115 million within six months of founding.
Monarch Quantum Founding Team
The funding will accelerate production of Monarch’s Quantum Light Engines, photonic control systems for quantum computing, sensing, and networking, while supporting scale-up, supply chain expansion, and global partnerships to meet growing demand for next-generation quantum hardware.
Founded in 2025 by photonics industry veteran Dr. Timothy Day, Monarch entered 2026 with more than $60 million in customer contracts from leading quantum companies. Importantly, this investment will enable Monarch to expand support for leading organizations at the forefront of quantum technology including Quantinuum, Infleqtion, and NASA, as they advance their next-generation quantum roadmaps. This also supports positioning the company as a critical hardware infrastructure supplier to the emerging quantum ecosystem.
“Quantum technologies are reaching a point where infrastructure matters as much as the qubits themselves,” said Dr. Timothy Day, Chairman and CEO of Monarch Quantum. “Our Quantum Light Engines replace complex laboratory photonics systems with manufacturable hardware, enabling our customers to scale quantum platforms faster and more reliably.”
Rob Jesudason, CEO and Founder of Serendipity Capital said, “Integrated photonics – and Monarch’s Quantum Light Engines in particular – are a critical enabler for the deployment of quantum technologies. Monarch Quantum is uniquely positioned to become the global leader and enable quantum computing companies to deliver their roadmaps. Tim and his team have a proven track record in photonic integration, and we are delighted to partner with them to achieve the next stage of their growth.”
The Infrastructure Gap in Quantum Technology
Quantum technologies are set to transform industries from healthcare to national security, with governments accelerating investment through initiatives like the U.S. National Quantum Initiative. Yet today’s systems still rely on complex, lab-scale setups that are difficult to scale—creating a key bottleneck.
As public and private investment grows, scalable photonics infrastructure is becoming essential to move from research to commercial deployment. Monarch’s Quantum Light Engines provide this critical layer, enabling precise photonic control across quantum computing, sensing, and networking.
Monarch’s Quantum Light Engines serve as a hardware infrastructure layer for quantum technologies, providing the precise photonic control systems required across multiple quantum computing modalities while also supporting emerging quantum sensing and networking architectures.
Building the Photonics Infrastructure Layer for Quantum Systems
Monarch Quantum is led by a team with a successful history of turning advanced photonics research into commercial technology platforms. Dr. Day and the founding team bring decades of experience scaling complex laser systems through a disciplined systems engineering approach. The team previously built and commercialized Daylight Solutions, a leader in quantum cascade laser technology whose systems are deployed in low-SWaP infrared countermeasure platforms for lightweight rotary and fixed-wing aircraft, bioprocessing and semiconductor inspection. The company was acquired by aerospace and defense contractor Leonardo DRS in 2017.
At Monarch Quantum, the team is applying that same commercialization expertise to integrated photonics, enabling quantum hardware developers to move from laboratory-scale experiments to scalable, manufacturable systems.
World-Class Investors in Monarch Quantum
The Monarch Quantum growth capital round brings together a world-class syndicate of institutional investors with deep experience across the full quantum technology stack, photonics infrastructure, and supply chain supporting the quantum ecosystem.
Serendipity Capital invests in companies that enhance and secure the critical technologies and infrastructure of tomorrow. Their permanent capital structure allows them to invest for the long term. Through the expertise within their ecosystem, they facilitate access to strategic partners, provide the capital and offer hands-on practical support to enable their leading portfolio companies to realize their potential.
Kai Hudek, General Partner at 55 North, said, “Quantum technologies will only achieve real impact if they can be engineered and manufactured at scale. We see Monarch’s technology as critical infrastructure for the ecosystem, enabling quantum platforms to move from bespoke laboratory setups to reliable, manufacturable systems. The company combines deep photonics expertise, strong systems engineering, and high-quality manufacturing validated by real commercial demand. We’re excited to partner with Tim and the Monarch team in this next phase of growth and help build the photonics backbone for quantum systems worldwide.”
“Monarch Quantum represents exactly the kind of breakthrough technology we aim to support,” said David Park, General Partner of Global Innovation Labs. “At Global Innovation Labs, our mission is to translate deep scientific innovation into globally impactful companies. Monarch brings together exceptional scientific depth, visionary leadership, and strong market timing. Integrated photonics is emerging as a critical enabling layer for quantum computing, advanced sensing, telecommunications, and next generation AI infrastructure. As demand for photonic technologies accelerates across these sectors, Monarch’s platform has the potential to unlock new performance frontiers. We believe the company has both the technology and the team to become a global leader in this space.”
More from HPCwire: Monarch Quantum Launches to Deliver Scalable Systems to Quantum Ecosystem
About Monarch Quantum, Inc.
Monarch Quantum is a U.S.-based quantum photonics company building integrated photonics systems — Quantum Light Engines — for quantum computing, sensing, and communications. Monarch Quantum combines best-in-class photonics components with systems engineering and advanced packaging to enable scalable, deployable quantum hardware. The company serves quantum OEMs, national laboratories, defense integrators, and advanced research institutions worldwide.
Source: Monarch Quantum
The post Monarch Quantum Raises $55M as Demand Grows for Photonic Quantum Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.
Anyone have some old ones laying around? I just vesced my board and would love to get some of the rails next. Thanks!
BOSTON and PARIS, March 31, 2026 — Alice & Bob, a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing, has been awarded $3.9 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry (QC 3) program to develop fault-tolerant quantum algorithms aimed at discovering rare-earth-free permanent magnets – a critical component in electric motors and turbines.
To meet their goal, Alice & Bob will strive to achieve a 10,000-fold speed-up in computing time compared to state-of-the-art classical simulations, enabling realistic material calculations within approximately one day. They will show this speed-up experimentally on Alice & Bob’s fault-tolerant quantum computers, and theoretically with resource estimates.
“Designing high-performance magnets without rare earth elements is one of the hardest problems in material science, as these materials are extremely difficult to simulate with classical computers. A hybrid approach – where classical methods compute environmental parameters and quantum computers simulate highly correlated electronic systems more accurately – could significantly accelerate the discovery of new magnetic materials.” said Juliette Peyronnet, U.S General Manager at Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob will lead the three-year project in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory, GE Vernova’s Advanced Research accelerator, and Professor Emanuel Gull (a visiting Professor at Warsaw University and a Professor at University of Michigan), leading a group that will create classical algorithms that will work in conjunction with Alice & Bob’s quantum algorithms. Los Alamos will develop tensor network tools to optimize quantum circuits, and GE Vernova’s Advanced Research accelerator will perform a technoeconomic analysis of material discovery opportunities enabled by the hybrid algorithm.
“Finding ways to prepare high quality states via tensor network optimization is a critical tool that will help develop fault-tolerant quantum algorithms applied to challenges like rare-earth-free minerals permanent magnets,” said Marco Cerezo, Los Alamos scientist and Laboratory lead on the project. “This team effort converges expertise to leverage quantum computing for an important, practical outcome.”
“Our team is excited to collaborate with this outstanding technical team and ARPA-E to evaluate how quantum computing could drive forward industrial materials design and discovery,” said Jonathan Owens, Senior Scientist – Computational Materials Physics at GE Vernova’s Advanced Research Center in Niskayuna, NY, U.S.A.
High-performance magnets underpin many technologies central to the global energy transition. Today’s dominant magnet, neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB), was discovered in the 1980s and relies on rare-earth elements and related processes whose supply chains are geographically concentrated and politically constrained.
Finding alternatives has proven difficult. The magnetic behavior of candidate materials emerges from complex quantum interactions between electrons, making accurate simulation extremely challenging for classical computers. Quantum computers, which directly model quantum systems, could allow researchers to simulate these materials far more efficiently.
If successful, the approach could accelerate the development of cheaper, more sustainable magnets for future energy and industrial technologies. The algorithm developed could also be easily adapted to solve other challenging problems in chemistry and materials science.
About Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €130 million in funding and employs more than 200 people. Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches.
Source: Alice & Bob
The post Alice & Bob Secures $3.9M ARPA-E Award to Apply Quantum Computing to Magnet Design appeared first on HPCwire.
At first glance, the AirPods Max 2 don't seem like much of an upgrade from their predecessor. But after I went hands-on with them, I grew more impressed with the changes, though I still have a few gripes.
The globally available feature is finally rolling out in the US, but you'll need to buy extra hardware to use it.
Brittlestars, sea anemones and a catshark among new-to-science species collected during expedition off the Queensland coast
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Marine scientists have discovered more than 110 new fish and invertebrate species in the Coral Sea – a figure they believe could exceed 200 as more are identified.
The species were found in waters between 200 metres and 3km deep in the Coral Sea marine park, Australia’s largest marine protected area, which spans nearly 1m sq km to the east of the Great Barrier Reef.
Continue reading...As the US midterms approach, Americans must take action to shield democracy from Donald Trump’s assault
Donald Trump is going all out to pressure the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which he insists on calling the Save America Act. On 8 March, he posted on Truth Social: “It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed … MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL … ”
The New York Times reports that the president “has called the measure his ‘No. 1 priority,’ saying it would ‘guarantee the midterms’ for his party.” He has even asked Senate Republicans to use their majority to end the filibuster and pass the bill.
Continue reading...Sling and YouTube TV help you cut the cord, but what do they offer?
As living costs rise, the state where Gates and Bezos made billions is targeting top earners – could other states follow?
Noel Frame knows exactly how difficult it is to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy, because she has been trying to do just that – first as an activist, then as a state legislator – for the past 15 years. And until recently almost all of her efforts ended in failure.
She lives in Washington, a solid blue state that should, in theory, be hospitable to the idea of more progressive taxation and has plenty of multimillionaires to target, since it is the home of Microsoft, Amazon and an array of other tech-driven corporations. While the wealth of these tech giants has grown exponentially in recent decades, the state – which levies no income taxes – has struggled to bring in enough revenue to pay for basic services like public schooling and long-term healthcare.
Continue reading...STAMFORD, Conn., March 31, 2026 — Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company, predicts that by 2028, the growing importance of explainable AI (XAI) will drive large language model (LLM) observability investments to 50% of GenAI deployments, up from 15% today.
Gartner defines XAI as a set of capabilities that describes a model, highlights its strengths and weaknesses, predicts its likely behavior and identifies any potential biases. It can clarify a model’s functioning to a specific audience to enable accuracy, fairness, accountability, stability and transparency in algorithmic decision making.
LLM observability solutions monitor, analyze and provide actionable insights into the behavior and performance of LLMs. They go beyond standard IT measurements, such as response times to look at specific LLM metrics such as hallucinations, bias and token utilization. These tools are used by teams that develop and operationalize AI systems, and increasingly by IT operations and SREs responsible for the performance and resilience of these systems in production.
“As enterprises scale GenAI, the trust requirement grows faster than the technology itself,” said Pankaj Prasad, Sr Principal Analyst at Gartner. “XAI provides visibility into why a model responded a certain way, while LLM observability validates how that response was generated and whether it can be relied on.
“Without robust XAI and observability foundations, GenAI initiatives will be restricted to low risk, internal, or noncritical tasks where output verification is easily managed or inconsequential, severely limiting the potential return on investment.”
Growing Need for XAI and LLM Observability as Mandatory Trust Mechanisms
Gartner forecasts the global GenAI models market will exceed $25 billion in 2026 and reach $75 billion by 2029, driven by rapid adoption across industries. As usage increases, so does the need for mechanisms that verify AI-generated content and protect against hallucinations, factual inaccuracies and biased reasoning.
“Traditional observability is focused on speed and cost, but the priority is now moving toward deeper quality measures such as factual accuracy, logical correctness and sycophancy. This shift requires new governance-focused metrics and evaluation methods, such as human-in-the-loop validation of the generated content’s narrative and citation accuracy,” said Prasad.
“Explainability turns a GenAI output into a defensible, auditable insight. LLM observability ensures the model behaves as expected over time. Without both, GenAI cannot mature beyond controlled lab environments.”
To improve the reliability, transparency and business value of GenAI use cases, organizations should prioritize the following steps:
Gartner clients can read more in Predicts: AI will unlock Observability at Scale.
About Gartner
Gartner (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective business and technology insights that drive smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.
Source: Gartner
The post Gartner Forecasts Rising Explainable AI Demand to Boost LLM Observability Adoption in GenAI appeared first on HPCwire.
CHICAGO, March 31, 2026 — memQ, an industry leader in quantum networking solutions for distributed quantum computing, announced today the closing of its $10 million Series A round of financing. The round was co-led by Quantonation and Ocean Azul Partners, with syndicate participation from both existing and new investors.
Quantum computing is the next major shift in computing, forecasted to become a $100 billion market by 2035 according to McKinsey & Company; in that the quantum communications subsector alone is projected to reach up to $15 billion. Key workloads include quantum secure networking, distributed quantum computing, blind quantum computing, and quantum sensing. Each of these are expected to require the ability to network quantum-capable systems across a range of distances, and potentially across varied quantum computer architectures and qubit modalities.
“Quantonation was the industry’s first venture fund dedicated to quantum technologies and deep physics, recognizing the potential for quantum systems to transform our use of information,” stated Christophe Jurczak, founding partner at Quantonation.“We see in memQ the potential to unlock and accelerate the power of quantum across our entire portfolio, as well as the industry at large – and to be a clear industry leader in that process.”
The memQ xQNA portfolio provides the core components needed to network quantum systems together for modular growth, unlimited scale, and real-world use cases such as scale-out configurations, cooperative processing, and blind cloud quantum computing – all using dense and efficient chip-scale technology. The company’s quantum network interface controllers (QNICs) allow various types of quantum computers to join a network without collapsing the quantum state; the quantum memory modules (QMMs) provide stable quantum memories for centralized entanglement operations; the quantum control system (QCS) orchestrates qubit and entanglement operations across a distributed network with atomic precision; and the distributed quantum compiler (xDQC) distributes workloads across the network based upon optimum resource allocation for maximum performance.
“memQ’s breakthrough technology addresses a key issue facing today’s quantum computers: the inability to work together over classical networks; this blocks them from leveraging the type of modular scale-out configurations that are key to today’s HPC and supercomputer systems,” stated Charles Foley, Chairman and CEO of memQ. “Our end-to-end architecture provides qubit-agnostic connectivity and control of connected quantum systems over standard optical telecom links, using chip-scale solutions that are efficient, powerful, and straightforward to integrate.”
“Photonic integrated control circuits are a key enabler of the utility-scale, networked quantum systems we’re building at Atom Computing. memQ is making meaningful progress on technologies that could be central to scaling quantum computers, and we look forward to collaborating with their team to accelerate that vision,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder, Atom Computing.
Industry analyst firm Global Quantum Intelligence (GQI) was among the first of the market research firms to analyze memQ’s technology, which was included in an industry diligence report published in December 2024. “At GQI, we monitor the evolution and development of the quantum industry as a whole – from science, to technology, to products, and eventually to business models. memQ’s approach to developing an extensible quantum network architecture based upon commercial fab processes and platforms is a leading approach to delivering quantum networking at scale,” reported Andre Konig, CEO of Global Quantum Intelligence. “Capabilities such as this will be prerequisite to quantum computing attaining its full promise.”
More from HPCwire
About memQ
Founded in 2021 as a technology spin-out from the University of Chicago, memQ is dedicated to enabling the scalable implementation of quantum computing through standards-based connectivity across optical connections between quantum computers anywhere. The company’s portfolio provides secure connectivity and control across local, campus, metro, and wide-area quantum compute resources with high-fidelity and low-loss, regardless of qubit structures employed. More information is available at www.memq.tech.
Source: memQ
The post memQ Announces Series A Funding to Drive Extensible Quantum Networking appeared first on HPCwire.
Spin-off launched with 10 nations, as original event remains mired in protests and boycotts over Israel’s involvement
Eurovision is seeking to expand into the Asian market by hosting a version of its song contest in Bangkok this year, just as the original annual event is being buffeted by discord and boycotts on the eve of its 70th anniversary edition.
The grand final of the inaugural Eurovision song contest Asia will take place in Thailand’s capital on Saturday 14 November, the Switzerland-based organisation announced on Tuesday. Broadcasters from 10 countries have confirmed their participation.
Continue reading...There's no shortage of prestige shows on Apple TV this month.
A new documentary charts the tragic events that led to the former NBA star overdosing in a Nevada brothel – and what came next
There’s a version of the Lamar Odom story that ends in a Nevada brothel. It’s not hard to imagine the grand finale – the TMZ bulletin relating his fatal drug overdose, followed by emotional tributes to what was lost: a radical basketball prodigy of the New York tradition, a two-time NBA champion with the Kobe Bryant Lakers, a glittering career that spanned coasts and eras before caving under the weight of addiction. A cautionary tale of incandescent fame, with Odom’s celebrity wife Khloé Kardashian cast as a man-eater to eclipse her more notorious older sister, would have been the epilogue cemented in a thousand think pieces.
But by living to tell the tale, Odom has instead become the latest fallen star to prove a core truism of Western mythmaking: heroes who don’t die young are doomed to live long enough to become the villain in their own tale.
Continue reading...Why are UK energy costs so high? And how to bring them down. Independent Thinking Podcast Audio sfarrell.drupa…
As the Iran war pushes energy costs to the front of everyone’s mind, Bronwen Maddox and Sir Dieter Helm discuss what the UK government should do.
An earlier than usual episode of the Independent Thinking podcast, ahead of the Easter break.
In a one-on-one conversation, Chatham House Director Bronwen Maddox discusses energy with Sir Dieter Helm, Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford, who has been advising governments and writing on energy, water and the environment for decades.
They examine how energy policies of different governments over decades led to the UK’s energy costs being so high. And what the government should do if it wants to guarantee security of supply – and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Are those concerned about climate change right to push for net zero? Are current policies driving industry from the UK? Should there be more nuclear power stations, or more drilling in the North Sea?
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists, and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
More ways to listen: Apple podcasts and Spotify.
Lawyers for the man charged with killing Charlie Kirk are citing a federal agency's report in questioning the link between a bullet from his autopsy and a rifle found near the scene.
The average price of gas across the U.S. last reached $4 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent crude oil prices surging.
Opposition lawmakers, rights advocates and some foreign governments condemned the law as discriminatory. Israelis in the territory are tried in different courts.
I see it’s the cheapest one on the website but also says it supports up to 250lbs. I’m 175, would it work?
The Cupertino colossus has created some of the most iconic products over the last 50 years. Here are ones that stand out.
In 2003, the US claimed its Iraq incursion would be brief. Now there’s competition for the title of worst-planned war in American history
The US-Israel war on Iran is a colossal blunder of world historical proportions. As clear an act of aggression as one can imagine, the war is blatantly illegal, continuing the death blow to international law and norms that began (most recently) with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
The war has also been launched with magnificently poor planning, as the United States seems shocked by and unprepared for how Iran uses every means at its disposal to restrict shipping in the strait of Hormuz. And with the massive disruption to the international supply of energy and certain necessary commodities, the global economy is teetering on collapse, with the United States and Israel mortgaging the futures of many poorer nations around the world – especially in Asia and Africa – for their own imperial adventurism.
Continue reading...Telegram is increasingly blocked and mobile internet users face blackouts in effort likened to Iranian shutdowns
Russia is in the midst of a vast, slow-moving effort to splinter its internet from the rest of the world, say activists and experts, with steep consequences for millions of people who are gradually being cut off.
Unlike Iran’s internet shutdowns earlier this year, Russia’s shutdown is a piecemeal and opaque effort. It is defined by escalating mobile internet blackouts across cities and provinces, growing restrictions on certain kinds of traffic, and new blocks on Telegram, a messaging app essential to communication and daily life for most Russians.
Continue reading...The US vice-president still dreams of succeeding Trump in 2028. No wonder he’s desperate to distance himself from the price rises caused by the war with Iran
Bombing little kids in the Middle East? Whatever. Immigration agents killing US civilians in the street and terrorising local communities? Meh. The Epstein files still not being released in full? Annoying, but there’s probably an explanation. Gas prices blowing past $4 a gallon (80p a litre) because of the war on Iran? An outrage!
There are a lot of things that Maga can forgive the dear leader for, but high fuel prices? In a country addicted to cheap energy, that’s a red line. A month into the reckless and unconscionable war on Iran, Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking. According to a national poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the president’s approval rating has fallen to 33%, the lowest during his second term. His base is still behind him, but if gas prices keep rising, along with the cost of everything else, even it could turn.
The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
New York-based Gao Zhen was detained in 2024 during a family visit to China and then tried for ‘defaming national heroes’
The Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen, known for making satirical sculptures of China’s former leader Mao Zedong, has been tried over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs”, his wife and a rights group have said.
Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit to China from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, his wife, Zhao Yaliang, and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese human rights defenders group, said.
Continue reading...The bank plans to lend $80 billion to small businesses over the next 10 years as part of what it's calling the "American Dream Initiative."
Every onewheel chair video I see involves wild bodyweight movement which IMHO defeats the purpose. Disclaimer: I'm an armchair engineer without a Onewheel.
Would a chair mounted in a 2-axis slider right under the seat and controlled with linkages to a joystick or each sliding armrest be a better solution? Armrests as joysticks?
Would the sliders need to be at the level of the footpads?
What about a rotationally-constrained ball pivot mounted atop the fender with linkages controlling A-axis and B-axis tilt?
Champions UConn face South Carolina on Friday
Bruins will take on Longhorns in other semi-final
The women’s Final Four is on repeat. No 1 seeds UConn, UCLA, Texas and South Carolina are in the Final Four for the second straight season, just the second time the same teams have reached the sport’s final weekend in consecutive years.
Only the matchups and location will be different this time. Reigning national champion UConn will face South Carolina on Friday in Phoenix after playing UCLA last season. The Bruins will take on the Longhorns.
“I don’t think people understand how hard it is to do it,” Texas coach Vic Schaefer said. “I think it bodes well for all of us, but there’s four or five more teams right there nipping at your heels.”
Just not this season – or last. The only other time the same four teams reached consecutive Final Fours was when UConn, Tennessee, Stanford and Georgia did so from 1995-96.
Everyone will be trying to stop the Huskies in this one. UConn have been the standard in women’s college basketball under coach Geno Auriemma. The Huskies have won 12 national championships, played in 25 Final Fours – a record 14 straight from 2008-22 – and have won 1,288 games in 41 seasons under Auriemma.
A wartime leader’s words are critically important. But Trump, contradicting himself and denying reality, is no Churchill
During a White House ceremony on 9 April 1963, then president John F Kennedy bestowed honorary citizenship on former prime minister Winston Churchill, remembering how effectively Churchill inspired millions with his words during the second world war. As Kennedy put it, Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle”.
The same cannot be said of Kennedy’s successor Donald Trump. Their names may be awkwardly conjoined atop the shuttered Kennedy Center, but the comparison ends there. Kennedy, like Churchill, spoke effectively, with great attention to the facts, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis, when the world’s leaders hung on every phrase and participle spoken by the leader of the free world.
Continue reading...There are plenty to choose from regardless of your teeth needs. These toothpastes will keep them white.
You can equip your rental with personalized security options. My picks can fit nearly anywhere -- no screws required.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo say a new "quadratic quantum gravity" framework could explain the universe's rapid early expansion without adding extra ingredients to Einstein's theory by hand. The idea is especially notable because it makes testable predictions, including a minimum level of primordial gravitational waves that future experiments may be able to detect. "Even though this model deals with incredibly high energies, it leads to clear predictions that today's experiments can actually look for," said Dr. Niayesh Afshordi, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute (PI). "That direct link between quantum gravity and real data is rare and exciting." Phys.org reports: The research team found that the Big Bang's rapid early expansion can emerge naturally from this simple, consistent theory of quantum gravity, without adding any extra ingredients. This early burst of expansion, often called inflation, is a central idea in modern cosmology because it explains why the universe looks the way it does today. Their model also predicts a minimum amount of primordial gravitational waves, which are tiny ripples in spacetime geometry created in the first moments after the Big Bang. These signals may be detectable in upcoming experiments, offering a rare chance to test ideas about the universe's quantum origins. [...] The team plans to refine their predictions for upcoming experiments to explore how their framework connects to particle physics and other puzzles about the early universe. Their long-term goal is to strengthen the bridge between quantum gravity and observational cosmology. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After three months of testing, I found the best countertop and cordless water flossers for battery life, cleaning braces, travel and more.
You can download and 3D print the little spaceman from Project Hail Mary, and it's inspiring, like the movie itself.
Ex-Radio 2 presenter reportedly investigated over claims relating to teenager but case closed due to lack of evidence
Scott Mills was questioned over allegations of serious sexual offences against a boy under 16 in 2018 but the case was later closed due to lack of evidence, it has emerged after he was sacked with immediate effect.
Mills, who hosted Britain’s most popular radio breakfast show on BBC Radio 2, was taken off the air last week, and on Monday the BBC announced his contract had been terminated.
Continue reading...test conference 30 April 2026 — 08:00 TO 09:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online test conference
Authorities said the smuggler turned to forest paths and camels to avoid road checkpoints.
A soldier who made “inappropriate remarks” has been dismissed from service, the IDF said. Reservists from the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda unit held the journalists for two hours.
Homes evacuated in Lurgan as police carry out controlled explosion on device, which man was forced to carry in ‘terrifying ordeal’
Gunmen hijacked a car, placed a device inside and forced the occupant to drive the vehicle to a police station in Northern Ireland on Monday, prompting a security alert and the evacuation of about 100 homes.
Some streets in Lurgan, County Armagh, remained shut on Tuesday morning as police investigated the scene.
Continue reading...The attack came hours after Trump threatened to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s energy plants and oil wells unless it opened the strait of Hormuz. Plus, Israel to give death penalty to Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks
Good morning.
Iran attacked and set alight a fully loaded crude oil tanker anchored at Dubai port, causing damage to the vessel’s hull, in the latest strike on merchant vessels in the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz. The fire was extinguished within hours and no injuries were reported.
What has Trump said about the war’s end? He has continued to give mixed messages, threatening to destroy Iran’s energy facilities unless it agrees to peace terms – while simultaneously claiming diplomatic progress in ending the war the US started together with Israel. Iran has accused the US of using diplomacy as a smokescreen to prepare for more attacks.
Which countries are most vulnerable to economic shocks? The Philippines, which imports almost all of its crude oil from the Middle East, is particularly exposed to surging prices, which have triggered protests and widespread anger.
Why now? The government of Iran, which the US has attacked, is a prolific and sophisticated disinformation actor, while Russian and Chinese influence operations continue to target US allies globally.
How would the embassies do it? They have been told to use local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to make US-funded narratives feel more organic.
Continue reading...New AT&T customers can pay one price for a home and wireless bundle.
Exclusive: Reform UK will be ‘steering well clear’ of CPAC event in July, says a source, as will senior Tories
Nigel Farage will snub a major conference of US conservatives that is being brought to the UK by Liz Truss.
The short-lived former prime minister, who was accused of crashing the economy, was chosen by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to lead a version of the event in the UK in July.
Continue reading...Kareem’s Daily Quote: When the tale gets loud but the facts stay put
The Story Didn’t Start Where the Headlines Say It Did: Houthis and the Iran war
Video Break: C’mon…we gotta do it one more time…March Madness!
A Man Steals a Lectern and Still Runs for Office: The joke that went too far
Selective History Makes Bad Law: Reconstruction wasn’t optional
What I’m Watching: Send Help
Jukebox Playlist: Nice work if you can get it
“Facts are stubborn things.” — By John Adams. Or Tobias Smollett. Or Alain-René Lesage (who wrote a book that Smollett translated).
It was a line that John Adams dropped during a courtroom argument that still hits harder than most modern political speeches. “Facts are stubborn things” was such a good line that it traveled at least a century, from novelist Alain-René Lesage who put it in one of his writings in the 1600s, to our future U.S. president in that courthouse in 1770.
Adams was defending British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, of all things. The British weren’t terribly popular, as you might guess, and Adams was emphasizing that facts and evidence can’t be altered by personal wishes or emotions as he highlighted the importance of truth in legal proceedings. Facts don’t bend just because they make us uncomfortable. They don’t soften because someone yells louder. They just sit there, unmoved and unmoving, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
And honestly, that’s the part we seem to struggle with the most.
We live in a moment where the tall tale often outruns the truth by several miles. Someone posts a clip, a headline, a half‑sentence ripped of context, and suddenly it becomes “the thing.” By the time the actual facts show up, the misinformation has already unpacked its suitcase, made itself at home, and whispered that other famous phrase of conquest, “Hold my beer.”
You see it in politics, in courtrooms, in the way people talk about history…like it’s a buffet warming under hot lights, growing less appetizing by the second, while we pick the parts we like and leave the rest behind. You see it in the way some folks treat the Constitution like a choose‑your‑own‑adventure book. You see it in the way a man can break into the Capitol and make off with the Speaker’s lectern, and still convince people he’s a serious candidate for public office.
Fabrication is always easier than truth. It’s cleaner. It’s flattering to the bearer.
The facts…not so much. Facts are inconvenient. They complicate the narrative. They remind us that actions have consequences, that history has context, that rights weren’t handed down by magic but fought for by real people with real stakes. Facts don’t care if they ruin your argument or even your day, and they especially don’t care if they make your favorite politician, artist, philosopher or scientist look bad.
Which is exactly why fact matter.
The moment we start ignoring facts, everything else starts to wobble. Institutions wobble. Trust, democracy, they all wobble. You can’t build anything sturdy on top of a story you made up because it felt good. But that’s exactly what people in power are doing. War is bad until it isn’t. Redistricting is wrong until it helps our team. Autopens are evil until they’re useful, just like mail-in ballots. So-and-so is admirable, respected, maybe even a hero, until some inconvenient truth emerges.
Thankfully, facts don’t need us to like them. They don’t need our permission. They just need us to stop pretending they’re negotiable.
So when someone tells me a comforting story that asks me to ignore the messy parts, the historical record, the humanitarian numbers, that’s my cue to slow down. To ask questions. To look for pieces that were conveniently trimmed away.
Because facts are stubborn things. And the people who fear them the most usually have the most to hide.
As Cesar Chavez Day becomes Farmworkers Day, we must remember that the hero is the movement
The way we commemorate history is often – too often – by celebrating an individual with a statue, a place name, a holiday. While some have been torn down – statues of Gen Robert E Lee have given way in some parts of the US to statues of Harriet Tubman – Republicans are trying to reverse the shift in statuary. To that end, the Trump administration recently plunked down a Columbus statue on the White House grounds, a replica of one thrown into the harbor in Baltimore in 2020 as the Black Lives Matter protests addressed racism and colonialism.
Still, maybe the age of individual heroes is fading. This year, Jon Wiener, a retired history professor and current Nation magazine editor, nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel peace prize for its residents’ valor and solidarity in opposing ICE and defending their neighbors. The magazine’s editors wrote: “Through countless acts of courage and solidarity, the people of Minneapolis have challenged the culture of fear, hate, and brutality that has gripped the United States and too many other countries. Their nonviolent resistance has captured the imagination of the nation and the world.” The Nobel is a longshot, but the Twin Cities – both Minneapolis and St Paul – got the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award “for risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members ... with extraordinary courage and resolve”.
Continue reading...The Supreme Court will consider the legality of President Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Only a handful of inpatient psychiatric facilities operate in Delaware, many of which are privately owned. Oversight for these facilities often falls to state and federal regulators, leaving patients and their families who are harmed by treatment with few options for accountability.
Tia Wright found her 22-year-old son, Darrian, in the emergency room on an early Saturday morning last year. Hours before he arrived at Christiana Hospital, he received a powerful sedative cocktail inside one of Delaware’s psychiatric facilities.
Darrian, who has an intellectual disability that limits his cognitive function, voluntarily admitted himself to the Rockford Center in Newark after telling his mother he wanted to die.
He woke up in the emergency room less than 48 hours later.
At the time of his admission to Rockford, Darrian weighed less than 115 pounds. And during his short stay, Darrian received multiple medications on top of a shot of Benadryl, Ativan, and Zyprexa, a potent combination meant to subdue patients during outbursts, his medical records show.
An independent psychiatrist who reviewed a redacted copy of Darrian’s medical records said he received a large amount of sedating medications when accounting for his body weight. The psychiatrist also said he would not have given such a powerful combination considering Darrian’s weight and the medications already in his system.
Once Darrian left the emergency room, his mother said he had side effects from the medications for weeks. Wright’s story mirrors that of another mother who claims Rockford overmedicated her then-8-year-old daughter, leading to hallucinations that told her to harm herself and others.
The accounts also come after state regulators documented the psychiatric hospital’s repeated violation of patient safety rules in 2022 and 2024. Rockford had regularly given children medications without their, or their parents’, consent, according to inspectors’ reports.
Additionally, two former employees who spoke with Spotlight Delaware said they believe de-escalation processes were not utilized enough in the facility.
The claims reveal a pattern of questionable, if not impermissible, druggings of vulnerable patients. And after turning to Rockford as one of the only care options of its kind in Delaware, patients and their families say they were left searching for recourse against a facility that did more to harm than help.
Recourse that they say has often proven hard to find.
Rockford CEO Bill Mason said in an email that his hospital cannot discuss patient care due to privacy laws, but that it prides itself on transparency and is committed to “high-quality, compassionate care.”
In another email, Mason “categorically” denied the hospital uses sedation as a first line of defense against patients.
Darrian returned to Rockford months later, after Wright said he wandered from home and was taken to a hospital, which later transported him to the facility. This second experience was not notable, she said.
Wright said she believes the facility was more careful with Darrian during his second stay, which lasted three days, because of her persistent calling during his first experience.
Still, Wright said she now places a note in Darrian’s bag advising anyone who may find him wandering in the future to not take him to Rockford.
Today, Wright said her son is more stable following a change in his medications. She has enrolled him in online school, and he does art classes. But she says he is stable because of her efforts, not because of outside help.
“It’s all me,” Wright said. “It’s not nothing that anybody else is doing.”
Early in the afternoon on March 21, 2025, Darrian received that subduing drug cocktail less than 24 hours after being voluntarily committed at Rockford.
Hours later, he arrived in the emergency room for “medication side effect,” according to medical records reviewed by Spotlight Delaware.
He reportedly received those medications following a spat of “aggression,” something his mother said she had never experienced. Instead, she said that if her son does have outbursts, it is because he is in pain.
“So you gave him all that medicine for what?” Wright said. “Because he was asking you questions? He was getting on your nerves?”
Yann Poncin, a psychiatrist who works with children at Yale Medicine, said combining medications can compound their effects.
Darrian had already received two doses of hydroxyzine, an anxiety medication, as well as a dose of Haldol, a powerful anti-psychotic, earlier in the day. He may not have been overly sedated at that point, but whatever drugs were still in his system, combined with the shot, may have over-sedated him, Poncin said.
“It’s a really large amount, and maybe risky in the context of the other things that he takes,” Poncin said. “And the way we know it was risky is because you saw the outcome.”
Darrian’s experience follows claims made by two other former Rockford patients who told Spotlight Delaware they experienced or witnessed staff threaten patients with sedation, when they otherwise would not have needed it.
Jessicalyn Van Lenten, from Bear, spent seven days in the facility in December 2025.
She said she saw staff instigating patients and questioned whether they are advised to practice other non-medication interventions first.
“They have no capacity to deal with people with mental health issues,” Van Lenten said.
During her stay, she said a staff member threatened her with sedation after she began raising concerns about her medication and other issues on her unit, like not being able to see the time.
Kate Lott, who worked in Rockford between 2024 and 2025, called her time in the facility “traumatizing.” She said she has worked in the behavioral health field for 26 years.
She said de-escalation was not promoted enough when dealing with patient outbursts, and the “first instinct” of support staff was to ask nurses to get sedation.
“It was easier to medicate than it was to de-escalate,” Lott said.
Demarco Delion said he worked at Rockford from 2022 to 2025 as a behavioral interventionist and trained new staff on de-escalation practices. But during his time in the facility, Delion said he was only called in to address outbursts after sedation had already been ordered.
He claimed he saw sedation used by staff in anger, rather than in attempts to help a patient.
“I witnessed a lot of it,” Delion said. “… Up to the point where it brought tears to my eyes.”
Mason, Rockford’s CEO, vehemently denied claims that his hospital relied on sedation as an initial de-escalation method.
“Rockford follows all appropriate de-escalation techniques with sedation only used pursuant to a physician’s order and when all other efforts have been exhausted,” he said in an email.
In September 2024, Delaware regulators with the state’s health department found something alarming during an unannounced inspection at Rockford.
In reviewing a sample of five patients’ records, they found that in all of them the psychiatric hospital gave the children psychotropic medications without their consent, or that of their parent’s, in violation of both state and federal regulations.
Asked about the state report, Mason called it an opportunity for “continuous improvement.” He said the hospital has put processes in place to address its protocols. He did not elaborate on what, specifically, those processes entail.
According to a correction plan submitted to the state in late 2024, Rockford said it would revise policies to require physicians to obtain and document consent for medications. It also would audit its own compliance for at least six months afterward.
Such internal audits had not substantially changed the outcomes at Rockford previously though.
In 2022, Delaware inspectors found the hospital violated the same consent regulations. The facility avoided meaningful consequences beyond submitting correction plans to the state by saying it would retrain its nurses.
Regulators also said in a prior report from October 2023 that facility employees did not document any kind of aggressive behavior for a patient but still administered sedation. The report said an employee told inspectors there was no evidence in the patient’s chart showing sedation was necessary.
Lott, who also served as the director of Kirkwood Recovery Center in Wilmington from 2017 to 2022, said she was told by regulators at that time that it was their job to keep centers open when they were found to be noncompliant.
“They needed us to be open, to care for all these people – the homeless, the drug addicts, the mentally ill,” Lott said. “They needed us.”
In a statement from the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, which regulates hospitals, a spokesperson said the department cannot comment on specific allegations or personnel matters. He noted that all licensed facilities in the state are required to meet state and federal requirements regarding patient care.
“When deficiencies are identified, the Department takes appropriate enforcement action, which may include corrective action plans, sanctions, fines, or other remedies as warranted,” the spokesperson said.
Soon after her daughter’s stay at the Rockford Center last summer, Julia Bailey started to lock her cabinets, stow away her knives, and use surveillance cameras in her home in an effort to keep her children safe.
Not from any outside intruder, but from the voices and scary figures that told her then-8-year-old daughter to harm herself and others. Voices her daughter began hearing and seeing shortly after her time at Rockford.
The New Jersey mother told Spotlight Delaware her daughter, Oaklynn, never experienced hallucinations prior to her stay at the psychiatric facility.
“She never saw anything, or even spoke about seeing things, before she went to Rockford,” Bailey said.
Both parents, Wright and Bailey, told Spotlight Delaware that getting in touch with the facility and their children was nearly impossible.
When Bailey brought her daughter to Rockford in July 2025 for what would become an 11-day stay, she went days at a time without hearing from the hospital, she said.
On the day after Oaklynn’s admission, Bailey tried to speak to her daughter three times, but she said hospital staff hung up on her each time.
A week into Oaklynn’s stay and overwhelmed with frustration over the lack of communication, she attempted to call the hospital 45 times. The staff declined each of those calls, she said.
“My kid is in your care, she’s 8, she’s a baby, and I have no information as to what’s going on,” Bailey said.
Mason, Rockford’s CEO, said families can reach a nursing supervisor at the facility “24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
Wright, however, said her experience was not any better.
“You damn near gotta say you’re gonna burn the place down for somebody to call you back,” Wright said.
Hours after leaving her son, Wright said she received calls from Darrian saying he wanted to leave the facility.
She did not receive another update on her son, other than being told he was asleep, until Darrian’s father called Wright and told her their son had been admitted to the emergency department at Christiana Hospital.
Regulators have previously told Spotlight Delaware that closing facilities is often a last resort, and they give hospitals every chance to fix issues found by inspectors. In Delaware, where inpatient mental health providers are limited, a closure would hamstring an already stressed treatment system.
Typically, when hospitals are found in noncompliance, up to the point it poses “a serious threat to the health and safety of a patient,” state law says regulators can fine a hospital $10,000.
When the state decides to fine a hospital, it often amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist for institutions that often have multi-billion-dollar owners, like Rockford and nearby MeadowWood Behavioral Health Hospital.
Families and patients left in the aftermath of questionable treatment cannot always afford to sue a hospital, let alone withstand the years of litigation that comes with it. Such medical malpractice suits are also difficult to prove and, ultimately, to win, when a death or significant injury has not occurred.
So families often find themselves in the dark, clamoring for any kind of recourse.
Mason said the facility has a compliance hotline and that all claims are investigated. Additionally, he said families concerned about their children can reach out to the hospital, or speak to a patient advocate.
And late last year, the state fined Rockford $10,000 after it found unlocked doors between an adolescent and adult unit, posing a potential safety risk. But for a hospital owned by a company worth nearly $12 billion, the fine amounts to little.
Although her son is doing better, Wright says Darrian’s experience has left him unrecognizable to some family members.
Wright said she was unsure if Darrian would ever return to normal following his stay. But eventually, his side effects subsided. Still, she said her son is “different” since his time at Rockford.
“It’s like he went in for one thing,” she said, “and came out with 10 other things wrong.”
The post Families, ex-staff allege improper sedation at Rockford psych hospital appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Louis Mosley says government should resist calls to trigger break clause in £330m deal with US analytics company
Palantir’s UK boss has urged the government not to give in to “ideologically motivated campaigners” as government ministers explore a way out of a £330m NHS contract with the tech company.
Ministers have sought advice on triggering a break clause in Palantir’s deal to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP), amid questions over the company’s presence in the public sector.
Continue reading...Africa Aware: Can minerals buy peace in the DRC? Audio LToremark
Christian-Géraud Neema and Joshua Walker discuss how the short and long-term implications of the DRC’s pivot to the US are affecting its strategic autonomy, mining sovereignty, and what it means for President Tshisekedi’s political options.
As a key mediator in the ongoing conflict in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States has brokered peace agreements backed by security guarantees and by the investment potential of the country’s vast mineral wealth.
However, critics warn this ‘minerals for peace’ approach risks overlooking unresolved issues – from the protection of minority rights to the limited role of the African Union, and fragile state-society relations in the DRC.
In this episode, Christian-Géraud Neema and Joshua Walker join the Africa Programme’s Romane Dideberg and Lisa Musumba to discuss how the short and long-term implications of the DRC’s pivot to the US are affecting its strategic autonomy, mining sovereignty, and what it means for President Tshisekedi’s political options.
Africa Aware is a podcast from the Chatham House Africa Programme bringing together leading international experts to provide in-depth analysis and sharp insights on the political, economic and social issues shaping African countries, their international relations and the continent as a whole.
You can also listen to Africa Aware on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
‘Bear slayer’ Honey injured during confrontation to protect family and animals from ursine home invader
A half-blind, 12-year-old New Mexico dog is being called “bear slayer” after she fended off an ursine intruder at her family’s home, protecting dozens of chickens and other animals but only narrowly surviving the violent encounter.
As told by her caretakers, the story of Honey demonstrates the extreme loyalty of dogs to their owners.
Continue reading...In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.
The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.
In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.
But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.
Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.
The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.
In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”
The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.
The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.
Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.
“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.
The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.
The first quarter of 2025, and especially February of that year, saw the department declining to prosecute cases against thousands of defendants outside of its regular six-month review process.
Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.
“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.
A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”
The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.
The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.
Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.
The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.
“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”
Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.
“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”
Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.
Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Nearly 11,000 criminal cases were declined during her first month in office.
Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.
As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”
He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.
“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”
The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.
Many of the dropped cases were in programs the DOJ has claimed were priorities.
Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.
The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.
“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.
The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.
Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.
A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”
The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.
The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.
The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.
Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.
The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.
Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.
The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.
Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.
The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
The post Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration appeared first on ProPublica.
Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez is among a growing group of immigrants targeted for removal after arriving as children and gaining protections in the Obama era.
The report found advanced degrees in social work and psychology may have a zero to negative return, while medicine, law and pharmacy degrees show the highest return.
The lawsuit signals a historic shift for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose chair issued an appeal asking White men to report discrimination.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” U.S. President Donald Trump told the New York Times in a March 1 interview about his plans for war on Iran. Things have not gone as Trump hoped, to put it mildly. Trump’s search for the Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — a regime insider willing to comply with U.S. demands, as Rodríguez has since she ascended from Venezuela’s vice president to acting president following the January 3 U.S. attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro — hit a snag when the U.S. and Israel killed most of the would-be successors to Ayatollah Khamenei in the opening days of the war. During a March 3 meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump told reporters, “Most of the people we had in mind are dead.” (Trump omitted the crucial fact that the U.S. is to blame.)
As the war passes the four-week mark, it is abundantly clear Iran will not be the next Venezuela. Operation Absolute Resolve, the code name for the U.S. attack on Venezuela, was a spectacular success in tactical terms. The U.S. achieved its military aim of removing Maduro in just a few hours and suffered zero U.S. service member fatalities and only a handful of injuries, although the operation cost the lives of around 70 Venezuelans and 32 Cuban security forces. While this toll should not be minimized, it pales in comparison to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran, which as of mid-March has led to at least 3,000 deaths in Iran, Lebanon, and beyond. In contrast to Trump’s “brilliant operation” in Caracas, the war on Iran has exploded. Well over a dozen countries are now involved, and the war threatens to bring the global economy to a halt due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a pivotal passage for oil, liquid natural gas, fertilizer, and other crucial commodities.
As the world’s eyes remain fixed on Iran, it is important to ask: What has the Venezuela model actually achieved in Venezuela? The short answer is a new form of colonialism in which Venezuela has lost its national sovereignty. Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela, made in the hours after the January 3 attack, has not come to pass. The attack instead led to regime change without a change of regime, in which the U.S. removed Maduro but left his regime almost entirely intact. Trump has boasted of this fact, telling the New York Times, “Everybody’s kept their job except two people,” i.e., Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both of whom have spent the past three months awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail. The officials who now run Venezuela come directly from Maduro’s administration: Rodríguez; her brother Jorge, who heads the National Assembly; and the minister of interior, Diosdado Cabello. In a possible sign of future changes to come, Rodríguez on March 18 replaced Venezuela’s longstanding minister of defense, Vladimir Padrino López, all but surely in coordination with the U.S.
The flip side of this overall continuity is the Trump administration’s stunning and continuing sidelining of far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize and infamously gifted it to Trump in an unsuccessful attempt to curry his favor. Trump has supported Rodríguez because she offers that which he most wants: stability. A handover to Machado threatened to plunge Venezuela into chaos and civil war. Strictly speaking, this is not because Machado “lacks the respect within” Venezuela, as Trump claimed during his January 3 press conference. Polls indicate Machado remains the most popular politician within Venezuela. The problem, for Trump, is Machado’s longstanding opposition to any form of “collaboration” with the Maduro administration and Chavismo (the political movement associated with the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) more broadly. This radical stance makes Machado a major threat to Venezuela’s military and state apparatus. Machado may be reevaluating her hardline position as she plans to return to Venezuela. In a March 12 press conference, Machado spoke of a “grand national agreement,” presumably a power-sharing accord, a possibility she had long rejected. Trump, for his part, has reportedly told Machado, who fled the country in 2025, not to return to Venezuela. This is purportedly out of concern for her safety but is more likely due to Trump’s (not unreasonable) fear that Machado’s presence in Venezuela would undermine the continuity Trump has sought to preserve.
For now, Venezuela remains in the hands of former Maduro officials, who have presided over a transformation of Venezuela’s domestic and foreign policy that is both stunning and limited. The details of this transformation, and the way it is happening, lay bare Venezuela’s profound lack of national sovereignty. While Trump is not “running” Venezuela in an operational sense, the U.S. is now effectively dictating the country’s policy. This is evident in many ways, starting with the fact that the Rodríguez administration must submit a monthly budget to the U.S., which has the discretion to approve or reject Venezuela’s requests. The Trump administration has also seized at least 80 million barrels of Venezuelan oil and controls the sale of this oil, with the proceeds held not in Caracas but in a U.S. Treasury account (prior to that, they were held in a U.S.-controlled account in Qatar). American Democratic Party leaders have repeatedly questioned this arrangement, which is not only blatantly colonial and opaque but also creates the clear potential for corruption and malfeasance.
Under direct pressure from the Trump administration, Venezuela’s National Assembly has implemented sweeping oil and mining reforms. In late January, the National Assembly passed a major reform of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law regulating oil production. The reform institutes three fundamental changes: First, it dramatically lowers the taxes and royalties foreign oil companies pay to the Venezuelan state. Under the 2006 hydrocarbons law, the Venezuelan state took up to 65 percent of oil proceeds. The reform permits this to be reduced to 25 percent, lowers income taxes to 15 percent (from 30 percent), and caps royalties at 30 percent, with the executive given discretion to lower it even further. Second, the reform allows foreign oil companies to operate independently, instead of the previous mandate that foreign companies operate through joint projects with Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA. Third, the reform allows arbitration over disputes to occur in foreign courts, eliminating the earlier requirement that disputes be resolved within Venezuela. These changes give foreign oil companies dramatically greater material benefits and control over the country’s oil.
Foreign oil companies are already taking advantage. Shell and Chevron are reportedly close to signing major new deals for production in Venezuela. Chevron is the only U.S. oil major that remained in Venezuela throughout the Hugo Chávez and Maduro years, with Shell (like Exxon and others) having left the country in the wake of the 2006–2007 nationalization process under Chávez. Despite these deals, it will take significant time and resources — upward of $100 billion and a decade of work, according to experts — for Venezuela’s oil industry to approach its previous levels of production. These latest deals come in the wake of the second recent visit by a Trump Cabinet member to Venezuela. Energy Secretary Chris Wright toured Venezuela in mid-February, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum traveled there in early March, when he gushed about Washington’s desire to access Venezuela’s mineral resources. CIA Director John Ratcliffe and U.S. Southern Command General Francis Donovan have also recently traveled to Venezuela. During Burgum’s visit, Rodríguez promised to work at “Trump speed” to ramp up the U.S.’s access to Venezuela’s mineral resources. Rodríguez has been as good as her word, with the National Assembly swiftly moving to approve a new mining law that, like the hydrocarbons reform, will roll back decades-old nationalist legislation.
The U.S. has also pushed Venezuela to sever its relations with its rivals China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. A statement from Venezuela’s foreign ministry late last month about the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran shows the profound changes underway. The statement (which was later taken down) condemned Iran but failed to condemn or even name the U.S. or Israel. This is a major shift from the Chávez and Maduro years, when Venezuela stood with Iran and regularly condemned the U.S. and Israel. The change in Venezuela’s foreign policy is most clear on Cuba, which for more than a decade relied heavily on highly subsidized Venezuelan oil. After Maduro’s capture, Venezuela ceased all oil shipments to Cuba, directly contributing to the profound energy crisis it is now facing, marked by regular nationwide blackouts. The Trump administration has done everything it can to deepen this crisis by applying heavy pressure on Mexico and other countries to stop providing oil to Cuba. Trump’s open goal is regime change.
While Venezuela’s economic and foreign policy has shifted quickly and decisively, political change since Maduro’s capture has been much more slow going. There is still no timetable for elections, and the Trump administration is not pushing for a democratic transition any time soon. According to a New York Times report, Rubio and Rodríguez have discussed the possibility of holding elections in late 2027, and Rubio has made clear that there must be a new democratically elected government in Venezuela before Trump leaves office in 2029. Rodríguez has taken a few steps toward political liberalization. She has pledged to close the notorious El Helicoide prison, and on February 19 the National Assembly passed an amnesty law, which has been greeted as a positive development but criticized for limiting the time period and offenses covered by the law. According to a March 17 report by the Venezuelan human rights organization Foro Penal, as of February 24 the government had released over 400 political prisoners.
“People don’t care about the idea of sovereignty or nationhood when they’re dying of hunger.”
A key question is: How do ordinary Venezuelans feel about the changes happening in their country? One answer comes from the first in-person poll conducted in Venezuela following Maduro’s removal, with 1,000 respondents interviewed between January 24 and 30. The poll indicates Venezuelans largely support the January 3 operation and feel cautiously optimistic about the future but deeply unsatisfied with their economic situation and wary of the Rodríguez administration. Fifty-five percent of respondents approve of Maduro’s removal and 77 percent view him unfavorably. Rodríguez fares a tad better, with 73 percent viewing her unfavorably, while 37 percent approve and 41 percent disapprove of her performance as acting president.
This suggests many Venezuelans are in a wait-and-see holding pattern with Rodríguez. Tellingly, 62 percent of respondents list cost of living as their priority versus just 7 percent prioritizing democracy. The poll also indicates Venezuelans are evenly split in their views of the U.S. government and Trump, with roughly half supportive and half opposed. Of the respondents, 72 percent reported they feel Venezuela is moving in a positive direction and 83 percent feel optimistic about the future.
These findings are in line with recent public comments by Venezuelan scholars and journalists. In a February 3 online Atlantic Council forum, Guillermo Aveledo, a political science professor at Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, said most Venezuelans were feeling cautiously optimistic but continue to fear government repression. Aveledo also spoke of how citizens and the government will be testing the waters in the coming weeks and months to see what is acceptable in terms of public speech and protest.
During a March 11 interview I conducted with him, Andrés Antillano, a member of the anti-imperialist leftist organization Corriente Comunes and professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, expressed a similar but more critical view. Antillano said, “I believe Trump is more popular in Venezuela than in the United States,” and added, “there’s a consensus that what happened [on January 3] is for the better of the country.” He noted, “Government actors are happy because they’ve preserved their power. The right is happy because Trump, their great hero, is ruling. And the people are happy because of their expectation … that their life conditions are going to improve.” Antillano feels this is mistaken: “Not only have we not seen an improvement but in material terms, in economic terms, the situation has gotten worse and worse.”
Antillano views Venezuelans’ continuing immiseration — due to years of government mismanagement and punishing U.S. sanctions (which Trump eased on March 18, in a major policy shift allowing U.S. oil companies to deal directly with PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company) — as the reason for their acquiescence to Venezuela’s subordination to the U.S.
“People don’t care about the idea of sovereignty or nationhood when they’re dying of hunger,” he said.
Antillano remains deeply pessimistic about Venezuela’s future. “We are in a subordinate, colonial relationship. We’re a protectorate,” he said. He also said: “[Machado] wants to return to the country to defend the idea of the political transition. Thus, we could see the great irony of María Corina becoming the anti-imperialist figure and the Bolivarian government, with its anti-imperialist origins, becoming the great defender of Trump. It’s crazy, very strange. Everything that’s happening is very sad.”
He continued: “As a friend told me, Venezuela has gone from being a laboratory for emancipatory practices to being a laboratory for the new colonialism.”
But Antillano doesn’t believe all is lost, and said he believes “an important cycle of protest is coming.” He said Corriente Comunes “is actively driving the processes of struggle as the illusion of improvement — stemming from the colonial relationship with the United States — gradually fades away.” Antillano said that Corriente Comunes had recently “held a workers’ gathering, and we believe a very significant mobilization is about to take place in all the country’s major cities, a mobilization for wages, wage increases, and labor rights, which will be the largest in many years.”
The mobilization occurred March 12, the day after we spoke, and videos show it was large and contentious. Protesters broke through a line of police blocking the National Assembly and forced legislators to listen to their salary and pension demands. While Trump and Rodríguez are seeking economic liberalization without democratization, Venezuela’s workers and leftist activists have other ideas. Venezuelans will seek to write their own story, despite being mired in conditions not of their own making. Time will tell what vision of the country will prevail, and for the foreseeable future, all actors in Venezuela will have to reckon with the imperial behemoth to the north.
The post Trump Wanted to Replicate His Venezuela “Success” in Iran. What Has It Even Looked Like? appeared first on The Intercept.
Ibrahim Hassan claimed league is ‘out of the spotlight’
MLS commissioner says Hassan ‘should watch Messi’
In an interview with the Guardian, MLS commissioner Don Garber suggested that the Egyptian soccer executive who urged Mohamed Salah to avoid the league should watch Lionel Messi starring for Inter Miami.
Garber’s comments come after Egypt’s national team director, Ibrahim Hassan, said Salah should stay in Europe when he leaves Liverpool as MLS is “too far out of the spotlight”. Hassan later added that if Salah “does not receive offers from Europe, then a move to the Saudi league would be a good option.”
Continue reading...While Jannik Sinner’s duopoly with Carlos Alcaraz looks unbreakable, Aryna Sabalenka is dominating despite a more competitive women’s top 10
“No, I think it’s all an individual sport,” Jannik Sinner says, chuckling quietly, as he reflects on another triumphant fortnight at the Miami Open after his efficient win over Jiri Lehecka. Sinner had been asked whether he was aware that his win meant the maintenance of one of the defining records of this new era of men’s tennis: since the Madrid Open in April 2024, every tournament with Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz present has been won by either player. The duopoly continues.
Unsurprisingly, Sinner was far more focused on what the victory meant to him. By following his Indian Wells triumph with a title in Miami, he secured one of the greatest achievements of his career in the Sunshine Double. He has now won three consecutive Masters 1000 titles and 34 consecutive sets at this level. This was an immense feat, further underlining his enduring dominance over all challengers aside from his great rival, Carlos Alcaraz.
Continue reading...Researchers found that common nitrile and latex lab gloves can shed stearate particles that closely resemble microplastics, potentially "increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution," reports ScienceDaily. "We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem." From the report: Researchers found that these gloves can unintentionally transfer particles onto lab tools used to analyze air, water, and other environmental samples. The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles. Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution. "For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there's still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics," said researcher and recent doctoral graduate Madeline Clough. "This field is very challenging to work in because there's plastic everywhere," McNeil said. "But that's why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field." The findings have been published in the journal Analytical Methods.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The poster child of the AI boom, valued at $850bn, needs to show strategic discipline after ‘casting its net too wide’
If OpenAI is going to float this year, it has to get serious about its business model. The wow factor around the US company – the poster child of an AI industry boom that has stoked fears of a stock market bubble – has been long established, but when will the profits come? The party can’t go on for ever.
The developer of ChatGPT is one of the biggest startups in the world and is now valued at $850bn (£645bn). Meanwhile, it is reportedly spending $600bn on infrastructure (the amount it invests in datacentres and chips to power its AI models) by 2030. At least this is a reduction on an initial estimate of $1.4tn.
Continue reading...From Italy to France, Germany to Hungary, far-right governments and politicians are targeting media with the same playbook
Barely six months after Giorgia Meloni’s government was sworn in, the chief executive of Italy’s public broadcaster Rai resigned. Carlo Fuortes cited “a political conflict” as the reason for his departure in May 2023, a year before the end of his term.
The top posts quickly went to nominees with ties to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots. Rai’s CEO is now Giampaolo Rossi, a former Rai board member who has in the past voiced support for Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
Continue reading...
Almost as soon as I first took delivery of my Jackrabbit XG, I changed out the stock Jackrabbit handlebars with a pair of secondhand FMF bars sourced from Facebook marketplace, see this in my Jackrabbit XG Mods post. In practice, they turned out to be a compromise. The bars had been trimmed a bit too narrow, so the handlebar grips, brake lever, and throttle were all fighting for space. The throttle often snagged, so I had to trim down the handlebar grips in order to have enough space for the grips, brake leaver and throttle
Scrolling through Facebook Marketplace one evening, I spotted a pair of S&M 9.5‑inch rise bars listed for $15. The seller’s photos showed full‑width steel handlebars that looked roomy enough to solve my clearance problem. After a quick drive, I had the bars in my possession, ready to install.
Products Used in This Project
Removal was painless: I loosened the clamp bolts, slipped off the grips, and pulled the FM F bars out. The new S&M bars are bolted in place. Then I reinstalled the grips, brake, lever, and throttle. There is now plenty of room. And, no more issues with the throttle operation.
A short test ride confirmed the upgrade’s impact. The 9.5‑inch rise lifts my hands into a more relaxed position, while the added width eliminates the cramped feel of the FMF setup. Throttle response is smooth, and the brakes feel more ergonomic.
Swapping handlebars might sound like a minor tweak, but on a nimble bike like the Jackrabbit XG it transforms the entire riding experience. If you’re stuck with a narrow, cut‑down bar or the stock bars, keep an eye on local listings—sometimes the perfect upgrade is just a few clicks away.
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The post The Best Handlebars for a Jackrabbit XG appeared first on The Sideways Movement.
Snappy performance, high-quality screen, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad show cheaper can still be great
Apple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice.
The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air.
Continue reading...ChristianaCare is planning to build a new 73-bed inpatient rehabilitation hospital near Newark, officials announced Monday.
If you or someone you know suffers from frequent motion sickness, Samsung's free sound therapy app is worth a try.
Practice of using apartments to store relatives’ ashes has risen as rapid urbanisation and ageing population increases competition for cemetery plots
China is introducing a law to stop people storing the ashes of their dead relatives in empty high-rise flats rather than paying steep costs for increasingly scarce cemetery plots.
China’s new funeral management legislation will prohibit the use of “residential housing specifically for the purpose of storing cremated remains” and the burial of corpses or construction of tombs in “areas other than public cemeteries”.
Continue reading...A U.S. Marine was detained at the Palm Springs International Airport on Monday after he allegedly tried to bring a live explosive round through airport screening, according to Riverside County officials.
In Hungary, the Iran war is exposing tensions. On April 12, voters may decide that Orban’s geopolitical contortions are a liability
On 3 March, Viktor Orbán held a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin. According to official Hungarian reporting, the discussion focused on “energy issues” and other routine matters. What followed was anything but routine. Within days, the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, had flown to Moscow, and returned with two freed prisoners of war, dual citizens of Ukraine and Hungary.
Hungary is not part of the military conflict in Ukraine, but the message was unmistakable. With his PoW diplomacy, Putin was not only signalling goodwill towards Hungary, he was effectively endorsing Orbán’s re-election on 12 April.
Péter Krekó is a political scientist, behavioural scientist, and director of the independent thinktank the Political Capital Institute in Budapest
Continue reading...Baghdad slides into a conflict it long wanted to escape.
The end of the dream of economic integration.
Who will determine the fate of the Islamic Republic?
This blog is closed – our live coverage continues on a new blog here
Donald Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds (454kg) of uranium from Iran, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing unnamed US officials.
The mission would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer, the report says.
But the president remains generally open to the idea, according to the officials, because it could help accomplish his central goal of preventing Iran from ever making a nuclear weapon.
The combined effect of both waterways being shut to commercial traffic from countries that neither the Iranians nor Houthis favour would be devastating.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s remark that “the policy of a state lies in its geography” has never seemed more apt.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to "explode" in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centers. Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas. They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2C (3.6F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1C (16.4F). The effect wasn't limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centers: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30 percent reduction in the intensity. "The results we had were quite surprising," says Marinoni. "This could become a huge problem." Using population data, the researchers estimate that more than 340 million people live within 10 kilometers of data centers, so live in a place that is warmer than it would be if the data centre hadn't been built there. Marinoni says that areas including the Bajio region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2C (3.6F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn't otherwise be explained. University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist said the findings may be more complicated than they look. "It would be worth doing follow-up research to understand to what extent it's the heat generated from computation versus the heat generated from the building itself," he says. For example, the building being heated by sunlight may be part of the effect. The findings of the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be found on arXiv.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
California's governor says the order aims to prevent the misuse of AI technology.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 31.
Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff also running for governor, had seized 650,000 ballots
Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff, has halted a contentious investigation into a alleged voter fraud that has drawn opposition from the state’s attorney general.
The move marks a major reversal for Bianco, a prominent Donald Trump supporter who is one of the top two Republican candidates running for the governorship of California.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed.
The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the US is about to hit $4, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA).
This is up 33% from a month ago, when the average price was $2.98 per gallon. It is the highest national average since 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading...The Super Bowl will return to Las Vegas in 2029 for the second time after NFL owners voted Monday to award the nation's gambling and entertainment capital the big game.
I bought a used XR+ with only 6 miles on it. it says it’s fully changed and the board lights up when plugged in but wont power on if unplugged. The previous owner left it uncharged for a year. I disassembled it and it’s reading 63volts from the battery connects. Everything is pointing to a bad battery but the fact it says it’s fully charge and still putting off full volts is causing me pause before I drop $350 on an EBay replacement battery.
President says he is open to scaling back strikes on oil and wider energy industry if Moscow reciprocates. What we know on day 1,496
Continue reading...If approved, move is latest in series of buildings, warships, institutions, programs and currency named after president
He has buildings, institutions, government programs, warships, currency, and now Donald Trump is getting an airport that bears his name even as he looks forward to a towering Trump presidential library in Miami.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, signed a bill on Monday saying the Palm Beach international airport was being renamed to the President Donald J Trump international airport.
Continue reading...JD Vance headlined a closed-door gathering for the spring summit of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive donor group that Vance co-founded in 2019 during his stint as a private investor.
Cable signed by secretary of state Marco Rubio endorses Musk’s platform by name and suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit – key US politics stories from Monday 30 March at a glance
The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s Twitter/X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.
The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.
Continue reading...Clowns in Bolivia are upset by mandate that stops schools hosting events from which they earn a living
Dozens of clowns have marched through the streets of Bolivia’s capital to protest against a government decree that limits extracurricular activities in schools, threatening their livelihoods.
Wearing full face paint and their signature red noses, the clowns gathered on Monday in front of the ministry of education in La Paz to oppose a decree published in February. The new mandate says schools must comply with 200 days of lessons each year – in effect banning them from hosting the special events where the entertainers are frequently employed.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Environmental impact assessments are ‘incomplete’, say leaders, and private beach club could harm fragile ecosystems
Indigenous community leaders in Vanuatu have raised concerns over plans by the cruise operator Royal Caribbean to build a private beach club on the island of Lelepa, arguing environmental impact assessments by the company are “incomplete” and “misleading”.
The community leaders outlined the issues in a letter sent to Royal Caribbean on 26 February, which has been seen by the Guardian. The leaders also said the development could harm fragile ecosystems and a nearby Unesco world heritage site.
Continue reading...I have a XRC (shout out to the community for convincing me to upgrade) and I went out for a short ride on concrete today. At one point, I decided to stop to change my music. I hopped off the board, it tipped on its side, I changed my music, then righted the board and hopped back on. Only, when I leveled it out, I felt the motor engage, followed by immediate haptic buzz into a nosedive. The wheel did not really turn during this, almost like it was stuck, but directly afterward, it ghost rode in reverse a bit once I was off of it.
I engaged it with my hands, and noticed that the wheel didn't seem to want to move forward while on the ground. It would move fine if I was holding it up. I then turned off the board, turned it back on, and it started acting normally.
I rode it home a little more slowly to be safe, but it seemed totally normal during the short trip home.
I've only ever experienced that type of nosedive once while trying to go uphill on some pretty unforgiving vegetation. But this time, it was a flat sidewalk.
Should I be concerned?
The feature, introduced in beta in December, is expanding to iOS and to more countries.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 31, No. 1,746.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 31, No. 1,024.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 31, No. 758.
Countdown clocks began ticking Monday, setting the stage for launch of the Artemis II moon mission early Wednesday evening.
President Trump's family business filed a trademark application for the name in February in response to the Florida bill.
Iran contradicted Trump’s claims that direct talks with more a moderate regime in Tehran were making “great progress.”
Trusted Apple leaker Mark Gurman predicts the upcoming iPhone design will eclipse the iPhone 4, 6 and X.
Gavin Newsom signs order to prioritize public safety and rights as president seeks to prevent ‘cumbersome’ rules
California will impose new standards on artificial intelligence companies seeking to do business with the state, defying Donald Trump’s demands to keep the controversial industry as deregulated as possible.
The state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order on Monday that gives California four months to develop AI policies that prioritize public safety.
Continue reading...  | I finally fixed my battery pinching issue with my Pint X, and upon putting it back together, an error stating “I need my personal space” is repeatedly being shown. I disconnected the front pad and it doesn’t show the error, so I’ve narrowed it down to the sensor. How can I fix this? Do I need to take off “the 4th layer”? [link] [comments] |
U.S. stocks swung on Monday as oil prices kept climbing because of uncertainty about when the war with Iran could end.
Kid Rock shared videos to social media that show two Army helicopters outside of his Tennessee home. An Army official confirmed to CBS News that it was a training flight.
TSA staffing shortages remain far more severe than the national average, although wait times seemed to be stabilizing Monday.
Prosecutors investigate whether Farah Louis and Debbie Louis accepted bribes to help migrant shelter provider
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether a New York City councilmember and her sister, an aide to governor Kathy Hochul, accepted bribes or kickbacks in connection with the appropriation of city funds to a migrant shelter provider, according to a copy of a search warrant obtained by the Associated Press.
The warrant, signed on 19 March, seeks evidence of possible criminal violations involving councilmember Farah Louis, a Brooklyn Democrat, and Debbie Louis, who serves as Hochul’s assistant secretary of New York City intergovernmental affairs.
Continue reading...Police have arrested a Newark man accused of robbing or scamming several people who arranged to sell him items through an online marketplace.
Pixel fans hoping for a dramatic redesign might need to wait at least another year.
JetBlue is hiking bag check fees as airlines face higher jet fuel costs related to the Iran war, making flying more expensive.
New features behind a paywall include spotlighting one story per week, previewing stories without showing up as a viewer and extending your stories for 24 hours.
Congressman Joaquin Castro calls for release of boy, Kaleth, and mother from much-criticized detention Dilley facility
A two-year-old detained in a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, is sick and not getting adequate help, said Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from San Antonio. The boy, Kaleth, has a fever and is not eating the food served at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, which Castro said detainees have complained of having mold and worms.
“When his mother asked for help, the staff said it was all ‘mental’,” Castro wrote in a post on X. “A vulnerable child at the Dilley trailer prison was suffering and ICE denied their reality and their needs. It’s shameful and must stop.”
Continue reading...Microsoft is reportedly shifting Windows 11 app development back toward fully native apps. Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, said in a post on X that he is building a new team to work on Windows apps. "You don't need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer," he wrote. "If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." Huyn later said in a reply on X that the new Windows 11 apps will be "100% native." TechSpot reports: The description stands out at a time when many of Microsoft's built-in tools, including Clipchamp and Copilot, rely on web technologies and Progressive Web App architectures. The company's commitment to native performance suggests that some long-standing frustrations around responsiveness, memory use, and interface consistency could finally be addressed. For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Electric cars from 16 automakers in the US will be able to plan long routes with AI-powered charging suggestions.
hey all, I am looking to buy a VESC on a budget. I have selected the U-Box 100A-100V Lite. I was wondering if anybody has any opinions on it. For context, I am a bigger rider and mostly do trails, very rarely peaking at 16 mph. I have heard some mixed opinions on it and was wondering if there's a better controller for the same price? Thank you.
What is Alex's endgame?
Security staff at the Adelanto detention center found Ramos unconscious and unresponsive in his bunk
A Mexican immigrant has died at a detention center outside Los Angeles, marking at least the 14th death in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since the year began.
Security staff at the Adelanto detention center found José Guadalupe Ramos unconscious and unresponsive in his bunk on 25 March, according to an ICE press release. Staff attempted to carry out life-saving procedures, including CPR, then called emergency services, who took Ramos to Victory Valley Global medical center in nearby Victorville. He was pronounced dead there at 9.29pm.
Continue reading...The majority of immigration arrests made by federal agents during President Donald Trump’s enforcement surge in Minnesota last winter were of people with no criminal background, according to The Intercept’s analysis of newly revealed government data.
The data belies a common talking point made by the White House during the massive immigration operation: that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were arresting thousands of “dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”
From December 2025 to mid-March 2026, ICE made 4,030 arrests in the state. Of them, a staggering 2,532 arrests, or 63 percent, were of people with no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, according to the data, which was previously unreported.
“The data confirms what the American people have overwhelmingly known, which is that Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis was a complete failure.”
On February 4, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “President Trump’s commonsense immigration enforcement policies are delivering the public safety results the American people demanded, with more than 4,000 dangerous criminal illegal aliens already arrested in Minnesota since Operation Metro began.”
ICE’s own data contradicts the White House’s claim that all 4,000 people arrested were “dangerous criminal” undocumented immigrants at a time when about two-thirds of them had no records. (The White House referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not immediately respond.)
“The data confirms what the American people have overwhelmingly known, which is that Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis was a complete failure,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and a faculty fellow at the Deportation Data Project. “Instead of targeting the ‘worst of the worst,’ it was ordinary law-abiding people who were caught up in the immigration dragnet, resulting in the needless and cruel separation of families and inflicting untold suffering on American children.”
The findings are based on The Intercept’s analysis of federal government data provided by ICE in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project. The new tranche of data, published on Monday, includes information on all ICE arrests made nationwide till March 10.
The proportion of ICE arrests in Minnesota of immigrants without a criminal record increased sharply during the winter operation, dubbed “Metro Surge” by the Trump administration.
Between Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and the end of November 2025, 44 percent of all ICE arrests in the state were of people without criminal records. From December until February 12, the date that border czar Tom Homan said the operation was coming to an end, 64 percent of all ICE arrests in the state were of people without criminal records.
The period of the surge also represented a giant jump in the number of arrests themselves. Nearly 4,000 of the 5,998 ICE arrests in Minnesota since Trump took office occurred between December and February 12.
In January alone, there were 2,530 ICE arrests recorded in Minnesota, underscoring the impact of the operation. In comparison, there were 177 ICE arrests in the state in November, the last month before the surge began.
A vast majority — 97 percent — of ICE arrests in Minnesota between December 2025 and February 12 were “street arrests”; all of those were listed in the data as non-custodial arrests referring to detentions where the person is not taken from another agency’s custody.
In contrast, only 52 percent of all ICE arrests elsewhere in the country in the same period were non-custodial arrests.
The enforcement surge in Minnesota began in early December, then ramped up in January following the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The Trump administration responded to the killing by doubling down and sending hundreds more federal agents to the state to intensify the immigration enforcement crackdown.
Now, The Intercept’s analysis of ICE arrests data shows that after Good was killed, the rate of ICE arrests in Minnesota more than doubled.
There were 1,225 ICE arrests, or around 32 arrests per day, recorded in Minnesota from December 2025 until January 7, 2026, the day Good was killed.
Since then up until February 12, when Homan said the operation in the state was coming to an end, the rate of ICE arrests shot up to 74 arrests per day, with a total of 2.672 arrests being recorded.
The rate of ICE arrests stayed high despite the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis on January 24.
Around the time that the surge was announced, Trump administration officials repeatedly spoke of targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The metropolitan area boasts the largest Somali community in the country, and most of its members are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The ramped-up enforcement in the state dovetailed with a campaign by far-right figures with ties to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views against Somalis in the state.
YouTube videos made by a far-right influencer were reportedly responsible for the White House’s focus on the Twin Cities. The videos alleged widespread fraud by the Somali community, but many of the claims have since been debunked or shown to have been blown out of proportion.
According to The Intercept’s analysis of ICE data, however, only 112 ICE arrests recorded in Minnesota from December until mid-March were of people listed as having Somali citizenship.
Update: March 31, 2026
This story has been updated to include a response from the White House and a comment from Elora Mukherjee, a faculty fellow with the Deportation Data Project.
The post Two-Thirds of People Arrested by ICE in Minnesota Surge Had No Criminal Records, New Data Reveals appeared first on The Intercept.
Ayman Ghazali, naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, often consumed content linked to Lebanese group online
The assailant who attacked a synagogue in Michigan earlier this month was inspired by Hezbollah, the FBI said on Monday.
Jennifer Runyan, head of the FBI’s Detroit field office, announced during a press conference that Ayman Ghazali, 41, had frequently consumed Hezbollah-related content online before the attack. In a video recorded before he drove his truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township – a north-western suburb of Detroit – on 12 March, Ghazali said he wanted to “kill as many of them as I possibly can”.
Continue reading...Rather than purchasing new footpads from FM for $150, I would love to just replace the sensor. I've seen videos of people doing it, but cannot seem to find one for sale. Am I missing something? Thanks!
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military's most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit. The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military's constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements. RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Today, the official cost for the ground system for the GPS III satellites stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than $400 million to support a new series of GPS IIIF satellites set to begin launching next year, bringing the total effort to $8 billion. Although RTX delivered OCX to the Space Force last July, the ground segment remains nonoperational. Nine months later, the Pentagon may soon call it quits on the program. Thomas Ainsworth, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, told Congress last week that OCX is still struggling. The GAO found the OCX program was undermined by "poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development problems." By 2016, it had blown past cost and schedule targets badly enough to trigger a Pentagon review for possible cancellation. Officials also pointed to cybersecurity software issues, a "persistently high software development defect rate," the government's lack of software expertise, and Raytheon's "poor systems engineering" practices. Even after the military restructured the program, it kept running into delays and overruns, with Ainsworth telling lawmakers, "It's a very stressing program" and adding, "We are still considering how to ensure we move forward."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Saturday’s protests drew millions of people across the US and around the world. The Guardian spoke with some of them to see why they were there and what’s next
Saturday saw the greatest number of protests in US history, when more than 8 million people at 3,300 No Kings events took to the streets to oppose the policies of Donald Trump.
In the past few months, the Trump administration has sent more than 3,000 federal immigration agents into Minnesota’s Twin Cities, causing fear and havoc that was only furthered when agents killed two residents. Trump has also launched strikes on Venezuela and waged a war in Iran that has so far cost the US about $30bn to $40bn. That is on top of the US continuing to fund Israel’s war in Gaza; the ongoing immigration raids in other US cities, towns and rural regions; and the threats to trans rights, voting rights and more.
Continue reading...Cable signed by Marco Rubio and seen by Guardian suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit
The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.
The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.
Continue reading...
A video of what looks like an abrupt exchange between an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and an airplane passenger has stirred social media outrage. But it isn’t footage of an actual law enforcement encounter.
The video shows a man at an airplane cabin wearing a bulletproof vest and a badge with his face covered. The man asks a woman at the front of the plane for someone named "Juan Garcia." He then walks down the aisle to confront a bearded man.
"We would like to verify that you’re a citizen of this country, look dude, you’re wearing a Mexico shirt," the masked man says before escorting the bearded man and a woman seated next to him off of the plane. People on the plane jeer at the exchange and film the encounter with their phones.
"ICE thug kidnaps US citizen on a plane for being Latino," the video’s caption reads in a March 26 Facebook post.
Other X, TikTok and YouTube users also shared the video with similar captions.
The video may seek to replicate the tensions of real encounters recorded between ICE agents and U.S. citizens in cities across the U.S., but in this case it’s staged.
President Donald Trump sent ICE agents to help Transportation Security Administration workers with security lines across U.S. airports because of the partial government shutdown, but this footage isn’t a result of Trump’s order.
The video has a TikTok watermark with the username, @tonyandangel. The account posted footage of the supposed arrest on March 25, with the caption, "ICE agent removes US citizen from airplane. CRAZY!" The video is currently unavailable in the account.
The account has posted multiple skits and prank videos, including other videos in the same airplane set. We also noticed that some of the people in the purported ICE agent video were featured in other skits.
The blue chairs and carpet with the white airplane cabin matches the image of the airplane set offered to social media creators by Network Media, a company that provides creative coaching, and filming infrastructure for content creators, according to its website.
PolitiFact reached out to the video creator for comment, but didn’t receive an immediate response.
This video of a man being removed from an airplane by an ICE agent is a skit, we rate this claim False.
The app is a nightmare of a historically dangerous cyberattack waiting to happen.
Posted photographs show Patel smoking cigars, riding in antique cars and holding a large bottle of rum.
Justice department claims state is violating Title IX – the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination
The US Department of Justice sued Minnesota’s education department and the state’s school athletics body on Monday for allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports.
In a lawsuit, the justice department claims that by making female student athletes compete against transgender girls, as well as share locker rooms and bathrooms with them, Minnesota is violating Title IX – the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination for any programs that receive federal funding.
Continue reading...Front-load washing machines are more expensive to buy but cost less to operate. I crunched the numbers over time to see which is the better buy in 2026.
City regulator reduces number of loan agreements in line for compensation from 14m to 12m
Victims of the car finance scandal will be in line for payouts worth £830 on average, as the City regulator tightened the rules of its compensation scheme to cover fewer contracts.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released the final details of its planned redress programme, saying it had narrowed the number of loan agreements eligible for payouts from 14m to 12.1m contracts.
Continue reading...Four masked men are believed to have forced their way through an entry gate, grabbed the paintings and escaped by climbing a fence, Italy’s Carabinieri said.
Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again?
With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.
Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.”
↫ David Uzondu at Neowin
It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they’re even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: “AI” companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in “AI” that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many “AI” companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects.
This isn’t the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it’s definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I’ve ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn’t be surprising we’re already there. I’m sure Copilot’s competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit.
They’re enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee said that he believes there are “at least tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands” of noncitizens illegally registered to vote in the U.S., adding that a federal tool used in nearly two dozen states would help identify the number. But the tool has wrongly flagged many as being noncitizens, and there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.
The data-matching program employed in those states over the last year identified about 10,000 potential noncitizens on voter registration lists, out of about 49 million voter registrations checked, according to reporting by the New York Times citing federal officials. But upon further investigation, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified.
In addition, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens.
Experts and state audits refute the idea of widespread noncitizen voting.
The SAVE America Act championed by Lee — and touted by President Donald Trump as necessary to stop illegal voting by noncitizens — would require all states to submit their voter registration lists to the Department of Homeland Security to be run through this tool, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program. The bill passed the House and is being debated in the Senate. Lee made his comments about noncitizens being registered to vote in a March 22 interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Jasleen Singh, a senior counsel and manager in the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program, said that Lee’s speculation about the number of noncitizens on voter registration lists amounts to “another outlandish claim without evidence.” The reality, Singh said, is that “noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare.”
The SAVE program, Singh said, “is one of many tools that election officials have in their toolbox to use. It comes with a myriad of data flaws, and any results that come directly from a search to the SAVE program need to be viewed with that lens and with a good degree of skepticism.”
Acting upon an executive order from Trump in March 2025, DHS overhauled the SAVE program last spring to include Social Security data. Trump also waived fees to states to access the database, allowing bulk searches.
“What we do know is that in states that have started reviewing the voter registration files in order to weed out those [ineligible people] who might have registered, perhaps inadvertently … already there have been thousands of voter registration files identified in just the handful of states doing their own reviews,” Lee told the Hill on March 20.
We reached out to Lee’s office but did not get a response.
Many states — predominantly ones run by Democrats — have refused to share their voting lists with the SAVE program. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia for failing to provide the federal government with their lists.
But nearly two dozen states have utilized the SAVE program. Lee is correct that “thousands” of people have been flagged as potentially being noncitizens. As we said, of the 49.5 million voter registrations checked, DHS referred about 10,000 cases to investigators, according to a Jan. 14 New York Times report that attributed the figures to a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (There were 174 million people registered to vote in the U.S. for the 2024 election, according to the U.S. Census. In other words, less than a third of all names on state voter registration lists nationwide have been run through the SAVE program.)
But the Times reported that local election officials began to discover that some of the names flagged by the SAVE program turned out to be citizens. That appeared to be particularly true for recently naturalized citizens. Tens of thousands of people are naturalized as citizens every month, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.
A joint investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found that in addition to many citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, several election officials “came across instances in which voters marked on registration forms that they weren’t citizens, but were registered by election office staffers in error. Clerks also said voters have told them they’d misunderstood questions about eligibility when getting drivers’ licenses.”
Ongoing research by the Center for Election Innovation & Research “continues to find that sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically.”
Even in the states that have used the federal SAVE program, “Claims of large numbers of possible noncitizens on voter records are revised significantly downward after proper investigation and scrutiny. Most often, investigations into large claims reveal that at least some early flags were based on outdated, incomplete, or improperly matched data that incorrectly labeled eligible citizens as possible noncitizens,” CEIR reported in February. Those smaller, revised numbers “generally receive far less public attention.”
Interestingly, the SAVE America Act faces significant opposition from the top Republican election official in Lee’s home state of Utah, which last year initiated a citizenship review of all registered voters in the state. Ultimately, officials announced in January that they were only able to confirm the state voter rolls included one noncitizen, and that person did not vote.
State officials first compared voter records against driver’s license data, which records citizenship status. The conclusion: 99.9% of the state’s 2 million voters were citizens. But that left the status of 71,314 people unclear, so officials checked those against the SAVE database, which narrowed the potential number of noncitizens to 8,836. Staff in the state elections office then reviewed the remaining voters’ information. That narrowed the list to 486 they could not immediately verify were citizens. Officials sent letters to everyone in that group and got back 52 responses, including many from older voters who registered before the state required a driver’s license or Social Security number.
“The bottom line is, there is not a widespread problem,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said at the time. “You hear people say hundreds or thousands — it’s just not.”
Henderson, who oversees elections in the state, wrote in a January press release that through Utah’s citizenship review, “We also learned that the federal government does not keep accurate databases.”
The SAVE program, she said, “is notoriously inaccurate and frequently flags individuals who are, in fact, citizens.”
Henderson and others have also raised concerns about the SAVE America Act requiring states to use the DHS database immediately, in the midst of a midterm election year.
“If we want a federal law mandating voter ID or DPOC [documentary proof of citizenship], and it’s really not about disenfranchising a bunch of voters, then states and voters need an onramp with time to prepare — get the documents, obtain the right ID, set up the system,” Henderson wrote in a social media post on March 17. “That’s not what’s happening with the SAVE America Act. This bill would be effective immediately in the middle of an election year.”
Similar stories have played out in other states that used the SAVE program.
One of the first states to implement the SAVE program was Texas, and on Oct. 22, Texas’ secretary of state, Jane Nelson, announced that it had completed a full comparison of the state’s voter registration list against citizenship data in the SAVE database. Calling it a “game changer,” Nelson said the SAVE program identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter registration rolls — or less than 0.02% of more than 18 million voters.
Nelson said the list of those potential noncitizens was sent to Texas counties to conduct investigations, with the understanding that those deemed to be noncitizens would be purged from voter registration lists and those who were found to have voted illegally would be referred to the Texas attorney general for prosecution.
“Everyone’s right to vote is sacred and must be protected. We encourage counties to conduct rigorous investigations to determine if any voter is ineligible — just as they do with any other data set we provide,” Nelson said.
But that’s where things began to fall apart.
As a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune documented, lacking clear guidance, some counties investigated; others didn’t. Some sent letters to people on the list and purged those who failed to respond; others didn’t purge any names.
Some counties compared the names on their list to databases kept by the Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship if residents register to vote when obtaining a driver’s license. Those checks found many of those on the list identified as potentially noncitizens were citizens.
In Potter County, for example, three of nine voters on the list had proof of citizenship on file, the ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation found. In Travis County, it was 11 of the 97 voters flagged by the SAVE program. Overall, the counties that checked the SAVE-generated list against DPS records found “more than 5% of the voters SAVE identified as noncitizens proved to be citizens,” the investigation concluded.
“It has proven to be inaccurate,” Travis County’s voter registrar, Celia Israel, told the publications. “Why would I rely on it?”
While the SAVE program accurately identified many on the voter registration rolls who were ineligible to vote, “Several [counties] came across instances in which voters marked on registration forms that they weren’t citizens, but were registered by election office staffers in error. Clerks also said voters have told them they’d misunderstood questions about eligibility when getting drivers’ licenses,” the ProPublica/Texas Tribune report said.
In Louisiana, the SAVE program identified 403 potential noncitizens registered to vote, out of 2.96 million registered voters. That’s about 0.014%. Of those potential noncitizens, 83 cast at least one vote going back to the 1980s (though it was not clear how many of those were later verified to be noncitizens). In 2024, 2,006,975 people voted in the presidential election in Louisiana. Even if all 83 of them voted that year, that would translate to about 0.004% of all votes cast in the state.
“I want to be clear: noncitizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry said when the preliminary results were revealed last September.
Missouri also employed the SAVE program and generated lists of potential noncitizens, which it then circulated to local officials.
On Dec. 3, more than 70 county election clerks from both parties wrote a letter to the state’s speaker of the House warning, “These lists are deeply flawed: they are outdated, inaccurate, and include individuals we know to be U.S. citizens—our neighbors, colleagues, and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”
It’s not clear how many noncitizens flagged by the SAVE database actually voted. But there have been relatively few arrests nationwide for illegal voting by noncitizens.
That makes sense, Singh told us, considering the stiff consequences for convictions for voting illegally as a noncitizen. Current federal law requires those registering to vote to attest that they are citizens under penalty of perjury. Noncitizens convicted of voting in federal elections face fines, jail time and deportation.
“Someone who is in this country, who may not have documents, or who has a legal presence and is not a citizen yet, whatever it is, they’re not going to risk their ability to be in this country to cast a ballot, because they will be subject to deportation,” Singh said. “And it’s just not a risk that folks are, if we think about it logically and reasonably, that folks are going to be willing to take.”
According to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, just under 100 noncitizens have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982.
There may be so few prosecutions, Singh said, because by and large, when noncitizens are on registration rolls “it’s likely a mistake or because of an error by the person registering, or maybe the DMV … whatever it is, it’s a mistake rather than an actual intentional act.”
“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us last April. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. … The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”
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 Flaws in Government Tool to ID Noncitizen Voters appeared first on FactCheck.org.
By reimplementing these features using capabilities, we made the kernel simpler by moving complex scheme and namespace management out of it which improved security and stability by reducing the attack surface and possible bugs. At the same time, we gained a means to support more sandboxing features using the CWD file descriptor. This project leads the way for future sandboxing support in Redox OS. As the OS continues to move toward capability-based security, it will be able to provide more modern security features.
↫ Ibuki Omatsu
Redox seems to be making the right decisions at, crucially, the right time.
Samsung is reportedly planning to roll out AirDrop-style file sharing for older Galaxy phones via a Quick Share update. Early reports suggest the feature is appearing on devices from the Galaxy S22 through the S25, though it is not actually working yet. Android Central reports: As spotted by Reddit users (via Tarun Vats on X), a Quick Share app update is rolling out via the Galaxy Store on older Samsung devices that appears to add support for AirDrop file sharing with Apple devices. Users report seeing the same new "Share with Apple devices" section we first saw on Galaxy S26 devices in the Settings app after updating Quick Share. The update is reportedly showing up on Galaxy models ranging from the Galaxy S22 to last year's Galaxy S25 series. The catch, however, is that the feature doesn't seem to be working yet. It's appearing on devices running One UI 8 as well as the One UI 8.5 beta, but enabling the toggle doesn't activate the functionality for now. Users say that turning on the feature doesn't make their device visible to Apple devices, and no Apple devices show up in Quick Share either. It's possible Samsung or Google still needs to enable it server-side, but it does confirm that broader rollout to older Galaxy devices is coming. The feature could arrive fully with the One UI 8.5 update.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A landline could be your lifeline during a major mobile outage.
March 30, 2026 — To lead in space, America must lead in silicon. With NASA recently announcing a shift from short-duration missions to sustained lunar presence and deep-space exploration, autonomous, high-performance computing is no longer optional – it’s mission-critical. AMD is helping power that transformation, delivering the compute that enables the next era of exploration.
AMD Versal adaptive SoC. Credit: AMD.
As missions like Artemis II and NISAR increase in scale and complexity, high-performance computing and AI inference are becoming foundational. With over two decades of flight-proven space heritage, from the Mars rover to Earth observation satellites, AMD technologies are helping turn vast streams of complex data into actionable intelligence at the edge.
AMD’s comprehensive portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and adaptive SoCs enable mission partners to deploy the right compute for every environment. The result is lower latency, greater resilience, and the ability to build intelligent, autonomous space systems that can operate reliability in the harshest conditions.
Proven Resilience for the New Space Era
From lunar exploration to the surface of Mars and into the outer solar system, AMD’s space-grade FPGAs and adaptive SoCs have supported some of the most demanding space missions, where onboard processing must operate reliably in extreme conditions with limited communication to Earth. These deployments highlight the importance of resilient, low-power compute platforms capable of autonomous operations.
Across the broader ecosystem, AMD delivers the flexibility and reliability required for long-duration space programs.
Blue Origin, a leader in space technology, recently shared that it’s using AMD Versal AI Edge Gen 2 adaptive SoCs in its development flight computers that are currently flying in the vehicle testbed that will eventually power the Mark 2 lander that will land astronauts on the moon as early as 2028.
And NEC recently announced it is building Japan’s first optical communication satellite constellation with AMD tech. The company will demonstrate high-speed network routing in space using AMD Versal adaptive SoCs to provide high-performance signal processing of data transmissions within the constellation and to help improve connectivity on Earth.
Computing at the Lunar Edge
As NASA shifts toward sustained lunar operations, the distance to Earth creates a critical latency and bandwidth gap. Radiation tolerant, space-grade AMD Versal adaptive SoCs close this gap by integrating programmable logic, AI engines and Arm cores to enable on-board high-performance processing in orbit and directly on the lunar surface.
By moving compute closer to the data source, spacecraft and surface systems can analyze sensor data in real time with reduced latency and dependence on limited bandwidth. This capability is critical for lunar surface operations, where systems must operate with increasing autonomy and resilience.
Reconfigurable Systems for Evolving Missions
NASA’s focus on flexible, iterative mission architectures aligns closely with the strengths of AMD FPGA-based adaptive computing. By enabling on-orbit reconfiguration, operators can address operational challenges in real-time. These include:
This adaptability ensures NASA’s most ambitious investments deliver high-performance long after they have left the launch pad.
Accelerating AI-Driven Insights for Data-Intensive Missions
The NISAR mission, a collaboration between NASA and ISRO (India Space Research Organization), highlights the critical need for on-board, AI-driven intelligence. Generating massive volumes of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, NISAR requires sophisticated on-orbit processing to bypass the constraints of Earth-bound transmission.
AMD adaptive SoCs solve this by enabling on-board processing tasks, such as data-filtering, compression and range-Doppler processing directly on the spacecraft. By ensuring only the most valuable insights are transmitted to Earth, this approach improves mission efficiency while enabling faster insights for climate monitoring, disaster response and environmental analysis.
Reliable, High-Performance Computing for the Harshest Environment
NASA’s ambitious vision for future missions requires hardware that can meet stringent reliability and safety requirements.
Capping a journey of nearly seven months, the NASA Mars rover Perseverance landed on the surface of Mars with several instruments enabled by AMD FPGAs, from navigation to collection and examination of soil and rock samples. AMD’s FPGAs also played a key role in the spacecraft involved in the NASA OSIRIS REx mission, marking the first U.S. mission to collect samples from an asteroid.
Designed and qualified to operate in extreme environments, AMD’s space-grade adaptive SoCs provide:
These capabilities ensure consistent performance across the full duration of complex exploration programs.
Advancing the Next Era of American Space Leadership
NASA’s initiatives represent a defining moment for ensuring American space leadership. By combining proven expertise in high-performance and adaptive computing, AMD enables the intelligent, flexible and radiation-tolerant systems required to meet these ambitions.
From lunar landers to deep-space missions, AMD technologies are the backbone for these extreme environments. By delivering real-time processing, AI-driven insights and mission adaptability, AMD ensures NASA and AMD’s commercial partners can navigate the complexities of deep-space exploration.
As the pace of innovation accelerates, the comprehensive AMD compute portfolio remains central to driving discovery, strengthening partnerships, enabling exploration and advancing the next era of American leadership in space.
Source: AMD
The post AMD Outlines Role in Enabling Edge AI and HPC for Space Exploration appeared first on HPCwire.
Florida police arrested golf icon Tiger Woods on March 27 for charges including driving under the influence. This is the fourth time Woods has been involved in an automobile incident.
He was released later that night.
Social media users claimed President Donald Trump publicly asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to pardon Woods. On multiple social media platforms, people circulated an image of a supposed March 27 Truth Social post from Trump, which read:
"I’ve just been told that Tiger Woods, who is a Great Golfer and even Greater American, was involved in a minor fender bender today, and as a result of a misunderstanding, was charged with a dreaded DUI. This happening as he attempts to return to professional golf. Everyone deserves a second chance, which Tiger never got, if we're being honest. That is why I am calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to IMMEDIATELY AND COMPLETELY PARDON Tiger so he can focus on The Masters and help to Make Golf Great Again!"
We found no evidence that Trump made this post. On March 27, Trump made multiple Truth Social posts, but not on 6:21 p.m. as the supposed screenshot showed. There are no news reports or cached copies that prove the post was real.
We’ve seen only one version of the image; the posts used one image with the same number of reposts and likes. If the post did get 565 reposts and more than 1,400 likes, there would likely be other versions or reports about the post.
On the same day of Woods’ arrest, Trump spoke to reporters in Miami and commented on it, but he did not mention a pardon.
"I feel so badly. He’s, he’s got some difficulty. There was an accident and that’s all I know. Very close friend of mine, he’s an amazing person, amazing man. But, some difficulty," he said.
Trump awarded Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019, and Woods has visited The White House on other occasions.
Trump didn’t urge DeSantis on Truth Social to pardon Woods. We rate this claim False.
Nearly 6,000 people forced to flee, human rights group says, as it criticises ‘abandonment’ from authorities
At least 70 people have been killed and 30 injured during an attack in Haiti’s breadbasket Artibonite region, significantly more than official estimates, a human rights group has said.
Police initially reported 16 dead and 10 injured, while a preliminary report from civil protection authorities suggested 17 had died and 19 were wounded.
Continue reading...March 30, 2026 — Google Quantum AI is identifying a select cohort of research partners to drive high-impact projects on Google’s state-of-the-art Willow quantum processor.
Google’s Willow quantum chip
Selected applicants to the Willow Early Access Program gain exclusive access to this hardware—which is not yet available to the public—to push the boundaries of science and realize their proposal on quantum hardware. To help Google evaluate the scientific merit and feasibility of your project, please follow the submission instructions and eligibility requirements outlined below.
Instructions
Selection Criteria
Follow this page to stay updated on the Willow Access Program. Details and program updates will be posted as they become available.
More from HPCwire
Source: Google Quantum AI
The post Google Quantum AI Opens Willow Early Access Program for Research Proposals appeared first on HPCwire.
The new Infinite AI Wine Refrigerator is only available in South Korea for now, priced at $4,300.
 | Checked my screen at the right time [link] [comments] |
Over the weekend, the U.S. and Israel bombarded two universities in Iran, the Isfahan University of Technology and the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran.
These are not, of course, the first attacks on civilian infrastructure in President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s illegal war on Iran; hospitals, desalination facilities, power plants, and an elementary school have all been hit.
Iranian students and educators received no warning.
The U.S. and Israel claimed that the attacks on the universities were justified, because they said the schools were connected to Iran’s weapons programs.
In response, Iranian authorities said on Sunday that American university facilities in the region would be considered legitimate targets, should the U.S. not condemn the strikes on Iranian educational institutions.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned “all employees, professors and students of American universities in the region to stay at least a kilometer away.”
Iranian students and educators received no such warning. Iran’s university campuses have been closed since the U.S.–Israeli war began last month; the weekend strikes nonetheless severely damaged buildings and reportedly wounded at least four staff members.
Leaving aside the fact that nothing in Trump’s war of choice against Iran is justified, the U.S. and Israel’s purported grounds for targeting Iranian universities are hollow and cynical. It is true that both universities had ties to military research. Would American and Israeli leaders consider their own equivalent institutions fair game? Of course not.
By stated U.S. and Israeli rationale, however, were Iran able to launch airstrikes on American soil, direct ties to the U.S. and Israeli military-industrial complex would make valid targets of at least the University of California, Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Johns Hopkins University, among dozens of other schools.
Numerous Israeli universities, including Technion and Tel Aviv University, have research institutes dedicated to military technologies. And the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has a military base on campus for training intelligence soldiers.
Asymmetric warfare offers powerful aggressors the privilege of hypocrisy. It has long been pointed out that Israel’s justifications for mass slaughtering civilians — that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure — would in turn justify strikes on civilian areas in Israel. The Israeli government, after all, has facilities and even military installations within and near major cities and towns, not to mention the integration of the military into vast swaths of civilian Israeli life.
This is true almost everywhere that commercial and military technologies become intractably integrated, but that integration is especially robust in Israel.
The idea that any site related to military research is a justified target could be used to attack any technological hub.
Indeed, in this grim conjuncture, the idea that any site related to military research and development is a justified target could be used to attack any industrial, educational, and technological hub — which is precisely what the U.S. and Israel are doing in Iran. The U.S. and Israel’s own justifications for the Iranian university strikes de facto legitimize strikes against an MIT or a Technion, but American and Israeli leadership know that Iran and its allies don’t have the firepower to flatten whole campuses.
This is not to say that Iran will not retaliate and attempt to extract a cost from its enemies; this has been the pattern since the U.S. and Israel launched their illegal offensive in late February.
Universities including New York University, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and others have lucrative campuses in the Persian Gulf monarchies, primarily in Abu Dhabi and Qatar. These schools have all already moved to online instruction and most international students and faculty have left countries facing retaliatory Iranian strikes.
These international campuses are not known for housing advanced research labs connected to military and surveillance research, but, as the student-led Gaza solidarity movement made clear, U.S. academia at large is deeply invested in multinational arms manufacturers and U.S. and Israeli military industries. Dozens of American institutions of higher education are deeply involved in the government-funded weapons research that helps make the U.S. military the most potentially destructive force in the world.
Let’s not pretend, however, that the ongoing war on Iran follows any sort of valid justificatory reasoning.
According to Helyeh Doutaghi, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tehran who spoke to Al-Jazeera, the university bombings reflect a “consistent and clear pattern, and that is the systemic de-industrialization and underdevelopment” of Iran’s capabilities.
“The targeting is very systematic,” she said, “and very designed to make Iran incapable of defending its sovereignty by relying on its iedingeounous development and indigenous industries.”
Strikes against civilian infrastructure follow the same genocidal logic that saw every university in Gaza razed to rubble within 100 days of October 7, 2023. In a video shared by members of the Israeli military on social media in 2024, a soldier walked through the rubble of Al-Azhar University.
“To those who say, ‘There is no education in Gaza,’” he says, “we bombed them all. Too bad, you’ll not be engineers anymore.”
The point, that is, is the devastation of a place and a people, foreclosing their capacity to rebuild.
The post What Would We All Say If Iran Razed MIT Because of Military-Related Research? appeared first on The Intercept.
Of course, it was only a matter of time before the time-honoured tradition of the demoscene also got infected by “AI”.
For me personally, generative AI ruins much of the fun. I still enjoy creating pixel art and making little animations and demos. My own creative process remains satisfying as an isolated activity. Alas, obvious AI generated imagery – as well as middle-aged men plagiarizing other, sometimes much younger, hobbyist artists – makes me feel disappointed and empty. It’s not as much about effort as it is about the loss of style and personality; soul, if you will. The result is defacement, to echo T. S. Eliot, rather than inspired improvement. Even in more elaborate AI-based works, it’s hard to tell where the prompt ends and the pixelling begins.
↫ Carl Svensson
A wonderful explanation of the rather unique views on originality, stealing, plagiarism, and related topics within the demoscene, which certainly diverge from many other places.
When Marc Garner joined Schneider Electric’s data center business seven years ago, getting an order for a few megawatts was significant. “We were celebrating two to five megawatt deals at the time,” said Garner, who is Schneider’s Global President of Cloud & Service Providers. “And now we’re talking gigawatts. It’s a fascinating development.”
Clearly, the AI boom has been good to companies like Schneider, the 190-year-old energy solutions giant based in France. Revenues from its cloud and data center business currently makes up about a quarter of Schneider’s revenues, which last year was €38.15 billion (about $44 billion at current exchange rates). However, if Schneider CEO Olivier Blum’s prediction that computers will drive a 60% increase in electricity consumption over the next 15 years is accurate, that percentage will increase considerably.
“It’s phenomenal at the moment. I can’t put a number to it, but the increase we see in demand is significant,” Garner told HPCwire at the recent GTC 2026 conference. “I’m seven years in this industry now, and I’ve never seen the market quite like this. It’s very dynamic.”
ProEnergy’s PE6000 gas turbine engine, which is based on the GE Aerospace CF6-80C2 turbofan engine, can generate 48 megawatts of power. (Image courtesy ProEnergy)
The AI boom is leading companies to completely rethink how they build, power, and cool data centers. With nearly two centuries of experience building industrial electrical systems, Schneider is well positioned to help with several transitions that are occurring simultaneously.
Choosing where to build a data center is one of the first considerations. Rural areas of the United States tend to have more surplus power in the grid, which is one reason why there is currently 6.5 gigawatts of data center currently under construction in Texas, according to IR Pros, a provider of liquid cooling solutions for data centers.
In other areas of the country where the availability of electricity is an issue, bring your own power (BYOP) is the name of the game. Microsoft wants to restart the Unit 1 nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania to power a data center. Other data center operators are looking to convert large turbofan engines that power commercial jets to get the power they need, as IEEE Spectrum recently reported.
Another big transition is the switch to liquid cooling, which is already well underway. Liquid cooling has been used in HPC sites for years, thanks to the intense compute density in supercomputers due to the use of GPUs and other AI accelerators. But now liquid cooling is going mainstream as dozens of gigawatt-scale AI factories are under construction around the world.
NVL72 has a TDP of up to 132 kW
This transition motivated Schneiders’ $850-million acquisition of a controlling stake in Motivair, a leader in liquid cooling for HPC systems, back in December 2024.
Typical computer racks have between two and five kilowatts of power per rack, with some high-density racks perhaps using 10 to 30 kW. But thanks to AI, it’s not uncommon to see racks drawing 100 kW of power. Nvidia’s NVL72, for instance, has a thermal design power (TDP) of 120 kW to 132kW. Future Nvidia systems will sport up to 400 kW, and there is even talk of having a single rack consume one megawatt of energy, which is enough energy to power up to 1,000 homes. Liquid cooling is necessary to deal with all the heat generated by all that electricity.
“When I first started in the data center industry, someone told me that a data center is a great big hairdryer,” Garner said. “You put power in, and hot air comes out. And it’s a really good analogy of what happens there. What we see though now is, because of the density of compute that’s happening within the rack, we need to extract that heat in a very different way. And that’s where the requirement for liquid cooling. That’s why Schneider bought Motivair a couple of years ago.”
The extreme compute density is leading to another big change in how HPC systems are powered: the adoption of 800 Volt DC electricity.
All computers run on DC power, but power from the grid is AC. Each computer or device typically does the conversion from AC power by itself, through the external power supply box.
Nvidia envisions moving large chunks of the data center to 800V DC power, which would eliminate the need to transform power for each device. Feeding GPUs directly with 800V DC would provide advantages in terms of wiring, as higher voltage circuits can use thinner copper wires. Each time you convert between AC and DC also leads to some power losses, which would be eliminated.
We’re not there yet with 800V DC. Nvidia intends to start the conversion with the current Vera Rubin systems, and move to fully native 800V DC with the Feynman generation that follows it. But Nvidia’s partners like Schneider and Vertiv are preparing themselves for the 800V DC future.
Switch is partnering with Schneider to incorporate its data center modeling software into Nvidia Omniverse (Image courtesy Switch)
“A lot of the work that we do is to make sure that we are two generations ahead,” says Anand Sanghi, president of the Americas at Vertiv, which provides power and cooling solutions to some of the largest data centers in the world. “We’re working with the chipsets that are going to be out in two years, because it takes time for people to design and deploy a data center.”
There are all sorts of variations on how 800V DC will be deployed, Sanghi said.
“Some people will say, I will continue to have AC coming into a certain level and then I can do sidecar and then conversion,” he told HPCwire at GTC2026. “Some people are saying, as soon as it comes in from the substation, I will convert it into DC, and have DC the whole way. So there are multiple architectures. Ideally, you’d want to do that conversion once, and then hold it DC for the rest of the way.”
There’s one more big change that will give data center architects more flexibility in how they construct data centers: the advent of solid-state transformers.
Traditional transformer technology has changed much since Michael Faraday developed his “induction ring” back in 1831. He found that by wrapping copper wiring around an iron core, he could change the voltage of electricity. But much more sophisticated solid-state transformers developed from silicon chemistry are starting to proliferate. They’re still more expensive than iron-core transformers, but solid-state transformers have several advantages, including the capability to handle multiple energy conversions, as well as two-way energy flows, which is important for backups.
Schneider’s reference design for AI data centers features two modes for token generation: MaxQ and MaxP (Image courtesy Schneider Electric)
Data center operators are counting on solid-state transformers to handle a variety of tasks, replacing multiple traditional transformers (which can typically only do one thing) and even uninterruptible power systems (UPS) with a single box, thereby simplifying the electrical designs of data centers and freeing up more space for GPUs and networking gear. This possibility has led to solid-state vendors like DG Matrix, Heron Power, and Amperesand raising hundreds of millions of dollars this year.
Having so many moving parts can be overwhelming. This is one reason why Nvidia is encouraging its partner to adopt digital twin technology within the Omniverse DSX Blueprint, to assist with data center design.
“The key piece here is the system-level thinking,” Vertiv’s Sanghi said. “You can do all that modeling, ensure that your architecture is at a system level to deploy the entire AI factory, and you’re able to do it at speed and scale everywhere in the world.”
Schneider, which is also working with Nvidia’s digital twin technology, rolled out its new AI reference design for Vera Rubin NVL72 racks. The reference design supports the Nvidia’s latest requirements, including increasing the per-rack power rating to 480V AC, cold water (45°C) liquid cooling, and support for maximal token generation, MaxP and MaxQ.
“You could buy a chiller from one company, a CDU [coolant distribution unit] from another, and many companies do,” Schneider’s Garner said. “But the integration of that system and the automation of it end-to-end, the system of systems and how it works, becomes really, really important from an efficiency [point of view].
“Almost all the conversations that happen around this industry at the moment [revolve around] the speed and scale. How do we deliver the infrastructure faster,” Garner continued. “The scale of what we’re delivering is at a rate that we’ve never seen before.”
The post Big Changes In Store for Data Center Power and Cooling, Thanks to AI Boom appeared first on HPCwire.
Coach says no contact with Tottenham or Real Madrid
Pochettino committed to US for 2026 World Cup
Mauricio Pochettino once again distanced himself from links to a return to Tottenham Hotspur on Monday, while expressing his confidence that his former club will avoid relegation despite a challenging season.
Pochettino, who led Spurs to some of their greatest successes in the modern era during a tenure from 2014-2019, has often been linked with a return to the club. However, his position as head coach of the US men’s national team has prevented him from taking over this season as Tottenham have floundered. Pochettino will not be available for his next job until after this summer’s World Cup, as his US Soccer contract expires in August.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 554 for Tuesday, March 31.
REDMOND, Wash., March 30, 2026 — Starcloud today announced it has raised a $170 million Series A, at a $1.1 billion valuation. Achieving unicorn status just 17 months after its Y Combinator demo day, Starcloud is now the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. The round is also more than double the size of the next largest YC Series A, and brings the company’s total capital raised to $200 million.
As artificial intelligence drives unprecedented demand for computing power, terrestrial infrastructure is struggling to keep pace. Permitting and building new data centers and energy projects on Earth can take up to five years. Starcloud is bypassing these terrestrial constraints by building data centers in low Earth orbit where they have access to virtually unlimited, low-cost solar energy.
“The AI revolution is colliding with the physical limits of our terrestrial energy grid,” said Philip Johnston, Co-Founder and CEO of Starcloud. “We are quickly running out of places to build new energy projects for data centers on Earth. By moving AI compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck. This funding allows us to rapidly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the massive commercial demand for sustainable AI compute.”
Starcloud has demonstrated a pace of execution previously unseen in the aerospace or tech industries. With just $3 million in pre-seed funding, the company designed, built, and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in a record 21 months. Launched in November 2025, the mission achieved several historic industry firsts:
As part of the financing, Benchmark General Partner and six-time Midas lister, Chetan Puttagunta, will join the board of Starcloud.
“We believe that we are in the early innings of a decades-long buildout of AI infrastructure,” said Puttagunta. “Starcloud is pioneering a solution to the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure on Earth with orbital data centers. Their extraordinary engineering team has achieved significant technical breakthroughs in power and cooling, as well as innovative advancements in manufacturing processes. Most notably, the great team at Starcloud has reached these milestones while remaining exceptionally capital efficient. We believe their technical rigor and remarkable ambitions will enable them to achieve extraordinary scale.”
The new capital will accelerate the design and build of the company’s next-generation Starcloud-3 satellites, the establishment of a dedicated manufacturing facility, critical headcount expansion, and the procurement of future launch contracts.
Later this year, the company will launch Starcloud-2. This satellite will feature the largest commercial deployable radiator ever sent to space and generate 100x the power generation of Starcloud-1. Starcloud-2 will be the company’s first satellite to run commercial edge and cloud workloads for customers, including early customer Crusoe, alongside partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.
The round was split into two tranches, with an initial round led by Benchmark with participation from EQT, and an extension round co-led by both investors. EQT is the world’s second-largest private equity fund, with over $100bn in assets under management, and the owner of more than 70 data centers. Benchmark is the world’s most successful long-running venture capital fund by returns.
The heavily oversubscribed round also saw participation from major global funds and strategic partners, including the world’s largest infrastructure fund, Macquarie Capital ($500bn AUM), NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, and Monolith Power Systems. Prominent angel investors joining the round include Gen. Stephen Wilson, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and former Starbucks CEO and Goldman Sachs board member Kevin Johnson.
About Starcloud
Starcloud is building data centers in space to solve the AI energy bottleneck. Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November 2025. It featured the first NVIDIA H100 on board, which is approximately 100x more powerful GPU compute than has been on orbit before and was the first to train an AI model in space. Founded in 2024, Starcloud is headquartered at 2517 152nd Ave NE, Redmond, WA 98052.
Source: Starcloud
The post Starcloud Raises $170M Series A at $1.1B Valuation Led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures appeared first on HPCwire.
March 30, 2026 — Poland’s NASK (Naukowa i Akademicka Sieć Komputerowa (Research and Academic Computer Network)) has launched a new AI computing cluster. The PLN 30 million (~US$8.01 million) project will allow NASK to conduct research, create proprietary tools, and develop technologies that address the specific needs of Poland and its citizens.
Credit: NASK
Chatbots, image generators, and automated data analysis—these are the things most often associated with artificial intelligence today. Behind each of these solutions, however, lies something the user typically doesn’t see: computing infrastructure. It’s no wonder, then, that Poland’s NASK is investing in it, as it’s this infrastructure that determines whether modern and secure AI systems can be developed.
Expanding AI computing resources today has far more than just technical significance. NASK has launched a new AI computing cluster. This isn’t just an investment in hardware. It’s an investment in the ability to conduct research, create proprietary tools, and develop technologies that address the specific needs of the state and its citizens.
“Training models, analyzing massive data sets, and testing new solutions all require appropriate technical resources. We are investing not only in AI Factories in Poznań and Kraków, but also increasing computing power within the ministry. The NASK AI Laboratory is an investment in implementing artificial intelligence in government, as well as combining research with innovation. We are developing the Polish AI ecosystem,” said Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Dariusz Standerski.
The investment was financed by Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs.
More Than Servers
The new AI cluster launched at NASK is a liquid-cooled infrastructure equipped with 96 NVIDIA B200 cards, over 50 TB of RAM and over 1 PB of All-Flash NVME based on weka.io technology.
As NASK Director Radosław Nielek joked, “In gaming terms, this cluster would allow us to talk about Cyberpunk not at 60 or 120, but at 18,000 frames per second.”
However, in this case, the numbers themselves aren’t the most important thing. Their significance only becomes apparent when one considers the scale of computations required by today’s development of artificial intelligence. Model training, analysis of massive data sets, testing new solutions, and the parallel work of multiple teams—all of this requires a resource base that can’t be replaced by knowledge or ideas alone. Computing power has become one of the prerequisites for true agency: it determines whether one can work faster, more ambitiously, and more independently.
It’s not just about modern infrastructure. It’s about providing the conditions for conducting more complex research and development work, without constantly relying on external resources. The cluster architecture itself also plays a significant role.
More Space for Research, Testing and Development
Most importantly, however, is the practical possibilities the cluster opens up. It’s not just a single project, nor a single direction, but a whole group of tasks that require significant computing power, very fast data access, and the ability to repeatedly test different variants. This includes developing content analysis tools, working on biometrics, investigating anomalies and threats in network traffic, testing model security, and building solutions that must operate on massive volumes of data while maintaining high precision.
Therefore, the new cluster at NASK should be viewed not as a symbol of technological ambitions, but as a concrete work tool. One that provides more space for research, more opportunities to test and compare different approaches, and ultimately, a greater chance of creating solutions.
This tool allows researchers to do more at once, shortens the path from idea to result, and gives teams greater freedom where previously the pace of research was primarily determined by hardware.
A New Stage
The new AI cluster at NASK is not just an infrastructure expansion project, which can be summarized in a table of parameters. Its launch marks a significant increase in NASK’s capabilities – in terms of work pace, research scale, and the courage to undertake new projects. The institute’s teams are now equipped with a tool that allows them to do more, faster, and undertake more ambitious tasks.
“There are investments that are doubly satisfying: firstly because of their impressive scale, and secondly because you can quickly see how much good they can do. This cluster is one of them,” said NASK Director Radosław Nielek.
Source: NASK [Translated from Polish]
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MILTON, Ontario, March 30, 2026 — Schneider Electric, a global energy technology leader, today unveiled new research highlighting a powerful combination of pressures pushing autonomous operations to the top of the agenda for the energy and chemicals sector across Canada and North America.
The study of 400 senior energy and chemicals executives across 12 countries shows a sharp rise in urgency around autonomy. A third of executives (31.5%) say advancing autonomy is a ‘critical’ priority in the next five years, rising to 44% over a ten-year horizon. Fewer than 5% globally view it as a low priority.
Leaders cite strong commercial pressures. They warn that delaying adoption risks higher operating costs (59%), worsening talent shortages (52%), and declining competitiveness (48%). Yet adoption is not without obstacles. Key barriers include high upfront costs (34%), legacy systems (30%), organizational resistance (27%), cybersecurity concerns (26%), and regulatory uncertainty (25%).
Schneider Electric’s Global Autonomous Maturity Report shows the sector at a critical point of transformation as electrification, automation, and digitalization converge. Surging AI demand, driven predominantly by hyperscale cloud and data center growth in North America, is placing unprecedented pressure on energy systems. Electricity demand is projected to nearly double to 1,000 TWh by 2030, intensifying the need for flexible, efficient, and resilient operations.
Within this emerging AI energy nexus, 49% of executives identify AI as the single biggest enabler of autonomous acceleration, followed by cybersecurity advancements, cloud and edge computing, digital twins, advanced process control, and open, software defined automation.
“Across Canada and North America, organizations are already operating at a high level of autonomy, with clear plans to accelerate over the next decade,” said Emily Heitman, President of Schneider Electric Canada. “As AI reshapes both energy demand and industrial performance, autonomous operations are becoming essential to maintaining reliability, safety, and competitiveness. This shift is not about replacing people, it’s about empowering skilled teams to focus on higher value work and operate complex systems more safely and efficiently.”
The momentum is clear, but progress is uneven, with the data highlighting regional differences in readiness levels. While Asia currently leads in autonomous operations maturity, North America is set for the fastest acceleration in adoption over the next five years. This growth is being driven by the region’s scale in energy production and consumption, combined with rapid expansion of data center infrastructure and increasing expectations around performance and resilience.
“Autonomous operations are redefining how energy and chemicals companies manage their facilities end to end,” said Heitman. “By combining automation, power management, and digital intelligence, Canadian operators can gain real time visibility and deploy AI enabled systems that predict, adapt, and self optimize, helping them meet rising energy demand while strengthening safety, reliability, and sustainability.”
Recent deployments illustrate this shift. At Shell’s Scotford Refinery in Canada, Schneider Electric is helping modernize operations through open, software defined automation, supporting more flexible and autonomous operations. At European Energy’s Kassø Power to X facility, the world’s first commercially viable e methanol plant, Schneider Electric technologies are enabling AI supported, self optimizing clean fuel operations with resilient remote monitoring.
The research was commissioned in partnership with Censuswide and Development Economics, supported by insights from Independent Energy Market Analyst, Gaurav Sharma. It captures insights from 400 senior energy executives across 12 countries in four key regions, including North America, Europe, Asia, and the GCC, supported by desk research and conversations with industry stakeholders and commentators across the global energy and chemicals sector.
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. With 160,000 employees and one million partners in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric is consistently ranked among the world’s most sustainable companies.
Source: Schneider Electric
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Washington-based fund says rising energy and food costs will hit economies worldwide and could leave lasting scars
The International Monetary Fund has warned that “all roads lead to higher prices and slower growth worldwide” should the conflict in the Middle East continue to throttle the amount of oil, gas and fertiliser making its way out of the Gulf.
In a stark message that countries on all continents will be affected, the Washington-based organisation said a rise in energy and food costs would harm economic growth this year and could leave lasting scars on the global economy.
Continue reading...President Donald Trump talks endlessly of “peace.” He ran for office promising to keep the United States out of conflicts, claims to be a “peacemaker,” has campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, and founded a so-called Board of Peace. “Under Trump we will have no more wars,” he said on the campaign trail in 2024. Yet Trump has immersed the U.S. in constant conflict, outpacing even other presidential warmongers like Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
The White House and Pentagon won’t tell the American people where the U.S. is at war, and Trump has never gone to Congress for war authorization. But an analysis by The Intercept reveals that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. Due to a lack of government transparency, obscure security cooperation, and carveouts baked into the U.S. Code — like the 127e authority enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the covert action statute that enables the CIA to conduct secret wars — the actual number could be markedly higher.
During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts — in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations forces’ “operators and enablers” are currently deployed in more than 80 countries around the world. And during its second term, the Trump administration has also bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (perhaps also Iceland), and Mexico.
Under the U.S. Constitution, it’s Congress that has the authority to declare war, not the president, pointed out Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
“Congress has not authorized conflicts in this wide array of contexts, and indeed many lawmakers — to say nothing of members of the public — would be surprised to learn that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries,” Ebright said. “Congressional authorization isn’t just a box-checking exercise: It’s a means of ensuring that the solemn decision to go to war is made democratically and accountably, with a clear purpose and goal that the American people can support.”
Despite the fact that the U.S. has not declared war since 1941, its military has fought near-constant wars from Korea to Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century, as the executive branch has come to dominate the government and Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to declare war.
For years, the Pentagon has even attempted to define war out of existence, claiming that it does not treat 127e and similar authorities as authorizations for the use of military force. In practice, however, Special Operations forces have used these authorities to create and control proxy forces and sometimes engage in combat alongside them. Recent presidents have also consistently claimed broad rights to act in self-defense, not only of U.S. forces but also for partner forces.
“Many lawmakers — to say nothing of members of the public — would be surprised that hostilities have taken place in many of these countries.”
The Trump administration has even claimed the full-scale conflict in Iran is something other than what it is. Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby refused to call it a war. “I think we’re in a military action at this point,” he told lawmakers.
Trump routinely refers to the conflict with Iran as a war, but he has also cast it as an “excursion.” Trump has also erroneously claimed that if he doesn’t call the conflict with Iran a “war,” it circumvents Congress’s constitutional authority.
“We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It’s for legal reasons,” he said on Friday. “I don’t need any approvals. As a war you’re supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that.”
EArlier This month, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations that secret-war capabilities were key for the United States.
“This environment places a premium on forces capable of operating persistently inside contested spaces, below the threshold of armed conflict,” he said. “Small footprints are necessary to enable denial strategies, strengthen allied resilience, and contribute to deterrence without triggering escalation, and to counter illicit and malign activity without large-scale military presence.”
Bradley claimed America’s enemies “blur the lines between competition and conflict,” but this is precisely what America has done for decades, including numerous secret wars during both Trump terms. The United States has waged unconstitutional and clandestine conflicts through a variety of mechanisms. The covert action statute, for example, provides the authority for secret, unattributed, and primarily CIA-led operations that can involve the use of force. It has been used during the forever wars, including under Trump, to conduct drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities. It was apparently employed in the first U.S. strike on Venezuela in late 2025 — a prelude to a war, days later, that led to the kidnapping of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by U.S. Special Operations forces.
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and has been stretched by successive administrations to cover a broad assortment of terrorist groups — most of which did not exist on September 11 — has been used to justify counterterrorism operations, including ground combat, airstrikes, and support of partner militaries, in at least 22 countries, according to a 2021 report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
Under Trump, even this signature post-9/11 workaround for war has been eschewed for something more clandestine. Top Pentagon leadership wanted to keep so-called “advise, assist and accompany” or “AAA” missions — which can be indistinguishable from combat — under wraps during Trump’s first term. This led then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to order U.S. operations in Africa to be kept “off the front page,” a former senior U.S. official told the International Crisis Group.
But the bid to keep Trump’s other African wars secret imploded during a May 2017 AAA mission when Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed that Somali forces were out ahead of Milliken — U.S. troops are supposed to remain at the last position of cover and concealment where they remain out of sight and protected — but that fiction fell apart, and the truth emerged that he was, in fact, alongside them.
This was followed by an October 2017 debacle in Tongo Tongo, Niger, where ISIS fighters ambushed American troops, killing four U.S. soldiers and wounding two others. The U.S. initially claimed troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. In truth, until bad weather prevented it, the ambushed team was slated to support another group of American and Nigerien commandos attempting to kill or capture an ISIS leader as part of Obsidian Nomad II, another 127e program.
Under 127e, U.S. commandoes — including Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine Raiders — arm, train, and provide intelligence to foreign forces. Unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims.
During Trump’s first term, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world. Previous reporting by The Intercept has documented many 127e efforts in Africa and the Middle East, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military, also during Trump’s first term, that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities. In addition to Cameroon, Niger, and Somalia, the U.S. has conducted 127e programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and an undisclosed country in the Indo-Pacific region.
“During the global war on terror, the Department of Defense built out its capacity, and secured legal authorities, to operate ‘by, with, and through’ foreign militaries and paramilitaries,” Ebright said, noting that these authorities had been designed for countering al-Qaeda but had led to led to combat against groups that had not been debated and approved by Congress. “These smaller-scale, unauthorized hostilities through or alongside foreign partners may seem quaint compared to the Iran War and other recent public and persistent hostilities, but for years they deepened the perception that the president may use force whenever and wherever he pleases, even without specific congressional authorization.”
For almost one year, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests from The Intercept for information about past and current 127e programs.
“While Trump claims to be the president of peace, he is actually the conflict-in-chief, waging many pointless and deadly wars, ensuring generational animosity towards a rogue U.S.,” said Sarah Harrison, an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs during Trump’s first term. “His actions are not just unconstitutional and in violation of international law, they make Americans less safe and their wallets less full.”
During his second term, Trump has made overt war across the African continent, conducting airstrikes from Nigeria to Somalia. In the Middle East, Trump has left a trail of civilians dead, from a migrant detention facility in Yemen to an elementary school in Iran.
America’s punishing war on Iran has ground on for over a month without a clear definition of victory, a plan for the aftermath, or coherent strategy behind bellicose rhetoric and shifting claims, most recently that the U.S. is fighting a regime change war and will possibly seize Iran’s oil.
“We’ve had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead,” Trump said on Sunday, referring to top ranking officials killed in the war including the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The next regime is mostly dead.”
“We’ve had regime change if you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead.”
Additional U.S. forces are now being sped to the Middle East to augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)
More than 2,000 additional Marines arrived in the region over the weekend, and 2,000 more are on their way by ship. A similar number of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are expected to arrive soon. The influx of troops comes as Trump has threatened to seize Iran’s oilfields.
“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he told the Financial Times on Sunday. In a Monday Truth Social post, Trump threatened to commit war crimes by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of [Iran’s] Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)”
The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the Iran war, and the ultimate cost is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.
The U.S. is also ramping up conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Since attacking Venezuela and abducting its president in January, the U.S. has reportedly undertaken a regime-change operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Trump has also repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba. He has also threatened to annex Greenland (and possibly Iceland), turn Canada into a U.S. state, and carry out military strikes in Mexico.
The chief of U.S. Special Operations Command recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” and said his elite troops “remain postured to provide… support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.” The U.S. claims to be currently at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.
Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. has conducted an illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, destroying 49 vessels and killing more than 160 civilians. The latest strike, on March 25 in the Caribbean, killed four people.
“Trump wants to call DoD’s summary executions on the high seas a war because he thinks that will allow him to kill civilians. And he wants to call the war in Iran a military operation so he doesn’t have to go to Congress for approval,” explained Harrison, who also previously served in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. “It doesn’t matter what imaginary legal constructs Trump comes up with, it won’t protect him or his officials from accountability for these undeniably illegal uses of force.”
The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed “designated terrorist organizations.” “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced earlier this month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region.
“It doesn’t matter what imaginary legal constructs Trump comes up with, it won’t protect him or his officials from accountability.”
Harrison drew attention to the human costs of the raft of conflicts being waged by the Trump administration, remarking on “all the people who are needlessly dying because of one man’s ego and how it makes the U.S. much less safe.”
Successive White Houses and the Pentagon have also kept secret the full list of groups with which the U.S. is in conflict. In 2015, The Intercept asked the Pentagon for “a complete and exhaustive list of the groups and individuals, including affiliates and/or associated forces, against which the U.S. military is authorized to take direct action” — a Pentagon euphemism for attacks. Eleven years later, we’re still waiting for an answer. Asked more recently for a simple count — just the number — of wars, conflicts, interventions, and kinetic operations, the Office of the Secretary of Defense offered no answers. “Your queries have been received and sent to the appropriate department,” a spokesperson told The Intercept weeks ago before ghosting this reporter.
“The proliferation of unauthorized, presidentially initiated conflicts raises profound challenges for our rule of law, democracy, and accountability around matters of war and peace,” said Ebright. “This is true, too, of secret wars that government officials may refer to as ‘light-footprint warfare’ or ‘low-intensity conflict,’ not the least because we’ve repeatedly seen intermittent strikes or raids give way to protracted military engagements and larger-scale operations.”
Bradley — perhaps best known for ordering the double-tap strike that killed two shipwrecked men last fall — recently offered a murky catalogue of “state adversaries, terrorists, and transnational criminal networks” aligned against the United States, including China, Russia, “Iran, its proxy forces, and terrorist organizations,” and other unnamed “state adversaries”; transnational criminal organizations that “continue to attempt to exploit the southern approaches to the United States”; ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates; as well as “terrorists” and “extremist groups” in Africa. The State Department currently counts 94 foreign terrorist organizations around the world, including 13 that were designated back in 1997. Thirty-seven groups, about 40 percent of the list, were added under Trump — 27 during his second term. The most recent addition, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, was designated earlier this month. The administration also maintains a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations which it will not disclose.
For weeks, The Intercept has asked if the White House even knows how many wars, conflicts, kinetic operations, and military interventions the U.S. is currently involved in. We have never received a response.
The post Trump’s Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding appeared first on The Intercept.
Scheme for accusers of store’s former owner Mohamed Al Fayed to close before end of retailer’s internal investigation
Harrods has been accused of being “neither fair nor just” over its decision to close a compensation scheme for survivors of alleged sexual abuse by the luxury department store’s former owner Mohamed Al Fayed.
Kingsley Hayes, partner at KP Law, which is representing nearly 280 survivors, questioned why the scheme was being closed on Tuesday 31 March, before Harrods had completed an internal investigation into what happened and who knew about it.
Continue reading...Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional "tips" into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast." A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection. So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command. The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app. But it is more likely that Microsoft is the one doing the injecting. If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" placed right just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a "tip" that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations. UPDATE: Following backlash from developers, Microsoft has removed Copilot's ability to insert "tips" into pull requests. Tim Rogers, principal product manager for Copilot at GitHub, said the move was intended "to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow." "On reflection," Rogers said he has since realized that letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Michael Rousseau faced mockery for speaking English and not French while addressing fatal LaGuardia airport crash
The head of Canada’s largest airline is stepping down after his video tribute to pilots killed in a fatal collision became a public relations nightmare for Air Canada, prompting a wave of mockery and indignation at him from both the public and politicians for not speaking French.
Air Canada’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026, the company said on Monday. He will continue to lead the company and serve on the board of directors until that time, the carrier said.
Continue reading...Jack Karlson’s rallying cry of ‘democracy manifest’ added to national collection of sound recordings that hold historical, cultural and aesthetic significance
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Thirty-five years ago, when Jack Karlson was hauled into a police car outside a Chinese restaurant in Queensland, he couldn’t have known his bombastic speech would be watched by millions around the world, become a meme and, now, be preserved in Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive.
Karlson’s declaration – “Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest! … What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” – is one of nine pieces of audio that have been added to the NFSA’s Sounds of Australia collection this year, along with a pedestrian crossing signal and Missy Higgins’ 2004 hit Scar.
Continue reading...The Iran war risks triggering a new wave of nuclear proliferation Expert comment thilton.drupal
States may be tempted to pursue their own nuclear weapons as they seek deterrence against attacks amid uncertainty over US guarantees.
The US-Israeli war with Iran is taking place as the global non-proliferation regime is already under significant strain.
New START, the last bilateral nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia, expired in February with nothing to replace it. China is currently expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal. France has announced an expansion of its nuclear programme and closer cooperation with European partners.
Public opinion in several non-nuclear states such as Turkey, Poland and South Korea seems to be shifting towards support for developing domestic nuclear capabilities, as the lessons of the Cold War and the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons fade from living memory.
This comes amid rising doubts over Washington’s ability to uphold its extended deterrence and security commitments to allies. In particular, the US’s reported redeployment of part of its THAAD missile defence systems from South Korea to the Middle East may be cause for concern among US allies in East Asia.
The strains on the non-proliferation regime predate the Iran war and the reported THAAD redeployment. But they risk fracturing the regime at precisely the moment when the international community can least afford it.
There is a danger that many states watching these developments will absorb a straightforward message: nuclear weapons deter attack in a way that conventional capabilities cannot.
This belief was already gaining ground after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which some have interpreted as confirmation that Kyiv relinquishing its Soviet-era arsenal left it exposed. While establishing an independent Ukrainian nuclear deterrent would have faced profound practical obstacles, including questions of operability and command and control, it seems unlikely that Russia would have launched a full-scale invasion if Ukraine had nuclear weapons.
Likewise, Iraq and Libya, which abandoned their weapons programmes, were also targeted with military action. In contrast, North Korea, which has developed nuclear weapons, has so far avoided military action against it.
The US and Israel have justified their strikes on Iran in part as aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon in future. However, observers may take the lesson that Iran would not have been attacked if it had a nuclear deterrent already.
Besides, Iran was also attacked during two active rounds of negotiations – in June 2025, and again in late February 2026. For states weighing whether to engage diplomatically with Washington, that precedent is significant. Dialogue did not protect Iran.
Since the war, prominent voices within the Iranian regime are now arguing that Tehran should quit the NPT and develop the bomb, according to Reuters.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reported to be more hardline than his father and predecessor, who issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons and reportedly pushed back against senior Iranian military leaders who argued for the bomb.
If Iran were to develop a nuclear weapons programme, the consequences for regional proliferation could be severe.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has repeatedly stated his opposition to nuclear weapons but has previously warned, including in a 2023 interview, that the kingdom would seek to acquire a nuclear weapon if Iran does. This could in turn prompt even wider proliferation in an already volatile region.
In East Asia, the picture is similarly concerning. In Japan and South Korea, serious debates about domestic nuclear acquisition have been building for several years. These are driven by China’s sustained nuclear buildup, North Korea’s expanding arsenal and concerns about the reliability of US security guarantees.
The US stationing THAAD missile defence systems in South Korea in 2017 was a visible symbol of its commitment to the region. It reinforced Washington’s commitment to extended deterrence – to defend its allies if they are attacked, including potentially by using its nuclear weapons.
Washington remains committed to defending South Korea under their 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty and retains a strong military presence in East Asia.
But the reported THAAD redeployment signals that Washington may be prioritizing Middle Eastern engagements over its Indo-Pacific commitments. This exposes the limits of US capacity across multiple fronts simultaneously, and risks leaving Washington’s partners exposed to opportunistic attacks while the US is distracted elsewhere.
The Iran war has also sparked questions over the US’s ability to defend its allies. While US defences have shot down many Iranian missiles, Washington has been unable to fully shield its partners in the Middle East from Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
In this context, non-nuclear US partners may seek to develop their own domestic nuclear deterrence capabilities.
None of this makes proliferation inevitable, or strategically rational. The potential costs of pursuing a nuclear weapon remain severe: comprehensive sanctions, exclusion from international financial systems and the collapse of security and trade relationships that took decades to build.
Extended deterrence, when credible, continues to offer a more reliable guarantee than an emerging and vulnerable domestic programme. The path to nuclear deterrence is neither quick nor cost-free – in the interim, a state acquiring a weapon is more likely to attract pre-emptive action than to deter it.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The homeless shelter at the People’s Church of Dover has drawn criticism from city leaders and residents in recent weeks for bringing issues to its surrounding neighborhood. The city’s latest move to require the shelter to apply for zoning approval could shut down one of the few homelessness resources in Kent County.
A month after Dover City Council voted to deny grant funding for the homeless shelter at the People’s Church of Dover, the city has issued a letter threatening to shut down part of the shelter’s operations.
City Solicitor Dan Griffith sent a letter on March 23 to the church’s lead pastor, Derrick Hodge, saying that operating an overnight shelter is not permitted under the church’s current residential zoning designation.
As a result, Griffith wrote, the church must submit an application to the city’s Planning Commission requesting it be allowed to continue functioning as an overnight shelter.
Griffith’s letter comes amid an outcry from nearby residents, who say the church’s shelter has brought drug use, prostitution and blight to their neighborhood.
But Hodge rejects these claims. He said he fears the letter could be the city’s first step toward shutting down the shelter’s overnight operations, as he doubts the Planning Commission would vote to approve the church’s request.
The city’s attempt to enforce its zoning laws and respond to resident concerns could ultimately eliminate one of the few homeless service providers in central Delaware — long considered scarce in homelessness and drug detox resources.
Located on South Bradford Street, roughly a quarter-mile from Dover City Hall, the People’s Church shelter serves daily meals year round and operates as a Code Purple overnight shelter for men in the winter months.
Teresa Campbell Harris, director of the “People’s Community Center” organization — the shelter arm of the People’s Church of Dover — told Spotlight Delaware the shelter has served nearly 500 people since last October. The $47,000 grant request that city leaders denied earlier this month would have allowed the shelter, in collaboration with the Department of Labor, to provide workforce development programs.
But residents of Bradford Street say those same people who the shelter has served are trespassing on their properties, openly using drugs and making their neighborhood less safe.
According to emails obtained by Spotlight Delaware, the city of Dover received more than 15 complaint letters between December 2025 and February 2026 along with one threat of a lawsuit over the shelter’s improper zoning from the company Tidemark Construction, which has an office down the street from the church.
One lifelong Bradford Street resident, Andrew Freud, said he and his neighbors have been watching the shelter increase its offered services since the COVID pandemic, expanding from just a Code Purple overnight winter shelter to also include an afterschool children’s program and more meal offerings.
As these services have grown, he said, the number of people loitering around the church has also increased.
Freud added that residents have tried to respectfully describe their concerns to shelter leadership, but have continuously been ignored. This left them with no choice but to turn to the city with complaints, he said.
“We were trying to get the church to step up and advocate for some of our concerns and respond to those,” he said. “They haven’t done that.”
Hodge said the church shares many of the same concerns as residents about drug use and other issues on Bradford Street. He does not, however, appreciate neighbors blaming the problems on the shelter.
“They’ve targeted us as a convenient way to say, ‘This is all the fault of the People’s Church because they feed people,’” Hodge said.
Freud said he and his neighbors were taken aback when they learned the shelter was seeking roughly $50,000 in city funding to expand its services. They felt compelled to stop the services from growing even more, he said.
Many of the complaint letters sent to the city shared similar sentiments. Residents said they understood the value of the shelter’s services, but they could not endure more blight in their neighborhood.
“We have watched as our beloved neighborhood has turned from a safe, clean and vibrant neighborhood to an open-air drug market, safe haven for human trafficking and prostitution,” one resident, whose name was redacted, wrote to the city on Feb. 4.
Discussions about the People’s Church come directly after city council members spent nearly five months debating a proposal to ban panhandling in Delaware’s capital city. The proposal itself was billed as an ordinance to improve pedestrian safety, but debates surrounding the idea largely focused on poverty and homelessness.
Opponents of the panhandling ban called on city leaders to propose solutions to the homelessness crisis in the city instead of “criminalizing poverty.”
Since the start of that panhandling debate, which began in October 2025, city council members have not introduced any ordinances aimed at providing more resources to combat homelessness and drug use.
Dover City Council President Fred Neil declined to discuss the People’s Church with Spotlight Delaware by phone.
In an emailed statement, however, Neil wrote the city does not have the authority to spend money on “health care, education, or social services.”
“This is not a Dover city problem,” Neil said. “This is a Delaware problem.”
While city council will not have a direct say in the fate of the People’s Church shelter — the final decision on its application to continue overnight operations rests with the city’s Planning Commission — eight members of the nine-member council have expressed concern about the shelter.
“City council, in my view, does not shut down any place,” Councilman Roy Sudler told Spotlight Delaware. “They shut themselves down by not being in compliance.”
The ninth council member, Gerald Rocha, has recused himself from votes on the shelter because he serves on the organization’s board.
The People’s Church has a 14-day grace period in which it can continue operating the overnight shelter before it must obtain the conditional use approval to stay open, Neil said.
Because of the two-week buffer, Hodge, the church’s pastor, said it will continue providing overnight beds until the winter shelter season officially ends on Tuesday, March 31.
The hurdle, he said, will be receiving approval for next winter’s season.
The People’s Church will continue providing daily meals throughout the year, but it only offers overnight shelter for men between Dec. 1 to March 31.
As things currently stand, Hodge said the church’s application to maintain overnight operations would “surely be denied.”
He is hopeful, however, the church can convince city leaders to change their minds about the application by showing “an outpouring of public support” for the shelter.
Nearly 20 people spoke at the most recent city council meeting on March 23, including volunteers at the shelter and individuals who use the shelter’s services, in favor of the People’s Church during a public comment period that lasted an hour and 20 minutes.
Hodge added that courts have “consistently upheld” a religious group’s right to engage in ministry — which he said includes providing community services. That right, he said, supersedes a city’s authority over zoning. He is confident that legal action would end with a victory for the church.
“There is no legal justification to shut us down,” Hodge said.
After making it through the end of the Code Purple winter season, Hodge said he plans to submit a zoning application this summer to allow the church to continue its overnight shelter operations. It remains unclear if the city will approve that application.
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 Dover shelter’s future in question as city challenges zoning appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Doris Coulson remained spirited even as her illness progressed — watching cooking shows on TV, working crossword puzzles and wheeling herself down the hallways of her nursing home to show off her granddaughter when she came to visit.
Coulson had been admitted to Hillview Post Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 2016, after Parkinson’s disease left her at risk of choking when she swallowed. That April, the facility’s operations were taken over by Skyline Healthcare, a New Jersey-based company that was buying up nursing homes across the country.
Medical records for the retired cardiac nurse, then 71, were marked “NPO” — nothing by mouth.
Then that September, a nursing assistant found Coulson unresponsive and hanging off the side of her bed, her skin ashy and her breathing shallow. She was taken to a hospital in a coma and died several days later. The chief cause of death was aspiration pneumonia, according to her death certificate.
“The doctors said they found scrambled eggs in her lungs,” said her daughter Melissa Coulson.
Coulson’s death and the circumstances surrounding it led her family to file a lawsuit against Skyline and its owner, the New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, alleging that cost-cutting at Hillview left Coulson without the care she needed. It was one of several lawsuits tied to patient outcomes as Schwartz’s empire expanded and then unraveled, with much of the chain collapsing by 2018.
Schwartz didn’t contest the case, and a judge in 2020 awarded nearly $19 million in damages. Coulson’s family has never been able to collect. Schwartz had by that time relinquished all of his property in Arkansas, so there was nothing left in the state for the family’s lawyer to try to seize, nor was there enough information about assets he may hold in other states.
Coulson’s civil action was one of several efforts to hold Schwartz accountable for what happened at his nursing homes. In perhaps the most sweeping move, federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged Schwartz with orchestrating a $39 million payroll tax scheme connected to his nursing home empire.
He pleaded guilty last April to failure to pay the IRS taxes withheld from employees and failing to file a financial report for his employees’ benefit plan. A federal judge sentenced him to three years in prison.
But Schwartz served just three months. In November, President Donald Trump granted him a full pardon, negating his criminal conviction — part of a series of clemency decisions in the president’s second term that have benefited well-connected defendants, including political allies with access to the White House and individuals like Schwartz who had spent heavily on lobbyists.
Often overshadowed in the attention around Trump’s decisions is the emotional and financial devastation left behind. Few clemency decisions illustrate that more clearly than the case of Schwartz, who paid himself millions of dollars from his nursing homes while diverting tens of millions owed to taxpayers and employees, and who has failed to satisfy at least three multimillion-dollar judgments awarded to grieving families.
In the Coulson case, Schwartz later claimed he never received key filings and had mistaken the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017, which he believed his insurer had already handled before it was withdrawn and refiled. And he argued the company that took over Hillside and canceled insurance coverage — not him — was the proper defendant. He also said he was representing himself, in poor health and isolating because of COVID-19 risks. A judge denied his request to put the case on hold.
Kevin Marino, a lawyer representing Schwartz and Skyline, said he and Schwartz had no comment. He did not respond to a follow-up email containing a detailed list of questions.
Trump has granted clemency to several figures in major health care fraud cases. In 2020, he commuted the 20-year federal prison sentence of Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home magnate convicted in a scheme that prosecutors said involved about $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims. The White House cited allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, echoing claims from Esformes’ defense that prosecutors improperly invaded attorney-client privilege by reviewing documents seized in an FBI raid. Although appeals courts did not overturn the conviction based on this argument, Esformes had support from two former U.S. attorneys general.
That same year, Trump commuted the sentence of Judith Negron, convicted in a $200 million Medicare fraud case. Trump’s clemency grant said the “ends of justice” did not require her to serve another two decades in prison.
Lawyers for Esformes and Negron did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump has also nominated nursing home owner Benjamin Landa as ambassador to Hungary. The nomination has remained in place even as a facility Landa co-owns faces a federal audit alleging there were more than $31 million in Medicare overpayments. Landa is suing the administration to block repayment. An attorney for Landa did not respond to a request for comment but has previously denied wrongdoing by his client, saying in a statement the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis and that the company was committed to patient care.
Schwartz’s case was highlighted by the far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who had previously worked on other issues alongside the lobbyists Schwartz hired to press his case in Washington. Loomer published a series of posts on X that falsely claimed that Schwartz was not responsible for the tax violations, that he had been unfairly blamed for the collapse of his nursing home chain and that he had paid back “every dime.”
She also accused the judge in the case of antisemitism against Schwartz, who is Jewish, though she offered no evidence. She also said Schwartz was in “extremely poor health” and that prison would be a “death sentence,” though the judge found no evidence that Schwartz was unfit for prison.
Versions of Loomer’s narrative surfaced in the White House’s explanation for the pardon. A White House official said in response to questions from ProPublica that Schwartz “relied on a third-party entity” to manage tax filings, that he paid restitution, that no funds were used for personal enrichment, that the sentence was exceptionally harmful to a 65-year-old man in deteriorating health and that it was “an example of over prosecution.”
But those claims are contradicted by the court record and Schwartz’s own guilty plea, in which he acknowledged responsibility for the unpaid payroll taxes. While he repaid $5 million, that covered only a fraction of what he owed. Federal prosecutors said that under Schwartz’s plea agreement, the IRS could have pursued the remaining balance — an effort that now appears far less likely following the pardon. And his three-year sentence fell in the middle of the range recommended under federal sentencing guidelines.
Asked about those statements and how they square with the court record, the White House did not respond.
Schwartz’s faith also became part of the Trump administration’s public celebration of the decision. Alice Marie Johnson, who has advised the White House on clemency, wrote online that the pardon meant Schwartz could now join his family for Shabbat, and weeks later, he attended the White House Hanukkah party.
Schwartz paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to press the White House, the Justice Department and Congress on his behalf — including on his efforts to secure a pardon — according to lobbying disclosure forms. The White House has insisted that paid lobbyists have no influence on pardons.
Loomer said she was not paid for her advocacy. She said she heard about Schwartz’s case in a group chat with members of an orthodox Jewish outreach movement, who asked her to look into it. She also pointed to her influence within the Trump administration, citing several instances in which she publicly urged specific actions that the president ultimately took. She said Schwartz approached her at the Hanukkah party to thank her.
Melissa Coulson said Trump’s pardon of Schwartz reinforced her belief that justice is not applied equally.
“Apparently he’s got money somewhere,” Coulson said.
Her lawyer hopes to find it.
From the outside, Schwartz’s operation doesn’t look like a corporate empire. The headquarters of Skyline’s fast-growing nursing home network was a second-floor office above a pizza parlor in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey.
Schwartz entered the nursing home business in the late 2000s and formed Skyline to acquire and operate skilled nursing facilities, initially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He sold a Florida-based insurance business in 2015 for $22 million, allowing him to rapidly expand Skyline. By 2017, Skyline and the related companies Schwartz controlled cared for approximately 15,000 residents in roughly 100 facilities in 11 states.
In a 2017 deposition in a wrongful death suit in Philadelphia, Schwartz defended the care at his facilities as “superb” while distancing himself from day-to-day operations by saying he relied on facility-level administrators and nursing directors. The suit was settled without Schwartz admitting wrongdoing.
In the deposition, Schwartz minimized reports of staffing shortages and unpaid bills as simple business “disagreements.” Asked about the facility’s one-star federal staffing ratings from 2010 to 2014 — the lowest possible score under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Five-Star system — Schwartz said he recalled having “a good star rating” and that his nursing homes had tried their hardest to provide as much staffing as possible, insisting that they were “very, very, very, very, very compliant” and that residents were “happy and satisfied.”
The collapse was swift. Skyline facilities failed to make payments for food and medical supplies, and cut hours for nursing home staff. At the same time, Schwartz began to siphon money from multiple sources — overbilling Medicaid and withholding millions of dollars in payroll taxes from workers’ paychecks but never sending the money to the IRS, he admitted later. What’s more, Schwartz paid himself $5 million as what one federal prosecutor described as a “ghost employee” at some of his facilities.
As conditions in the homes deteriorated, health officials in at least six states from Nebraska to Massachusetts seized or transferred control of his facilities or relocated residents. In South Dakota, a vice president who oversaw 18 Schwartz-owned nursing homes began sending increasingly desperate emails to state health officials, according to court records.
Debbie Menzenberg wrote in the emails that Schwartz’s son Louis, an executive officer for Skyline, had called her to say the state “has to do something — there is no money — he told me to discharge residents???”
Then Menzenberg’s emails to the state became more urgent:
“I need water paid at Bella Vista and Prairie Hills today or it will be SHUT OFF — Skyline is SILENT!!!”
“Disconnect notice came today for Pierre May 8 electric.”
“I NEED HELP!!!!!”
“CEO’s are aware of stuff going on!!!”
Neither Menzenberg nor Louis Schwartz could be reached for comment.
A group of employees at Skyline nursing homes across the country later filed a lawsuit alleging that Skyline withheld more than $2 million in health insurance premiums from more than 1,000 workers’ paychecks but failed to provide coverage. That left some of his employees with denied health insurance claims and mounting medical bills.
Schwartz has not defended himself against the claim, and a lawyer for the employees has asked a judge to award a $2.4 million default judgment. The case remains pending in federal court in New Jersey.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, an activities director at a nursing home in Arkansas, said that she was left with more than $50,000 in medical bills after surgery on her back and neck. She said she couldn’t pay the bills and that the debt ultimately wrecked her credit.
“They withheld over $1,000 from my paycheck for insurance premiums and did nothing with them except abscond with them,” said the employee, Margaret Gates.
Under Schwartz’s ownership, residents suffered — and some died.
In a lawsuit against Schwartz, Zelma Grissom’s family said the conditions at Hillview, the same facility where Doris Coulson was living, left residents without even basic care. The mother of six had entered the facility after brain surgery left her unable to move on her own and dependent on staff to turn her in bed.
Grissom’s son, LeVester Ivy, said Hillview appeared chronically short-staffed. One day, Ivy said, a wound-care nurse called the family into his mother’s room and showed them a severe pressure sore that had developed after Grissom hadn’t been turned regularly. Surgeons had to cut away infected tissue, leaving a large open wound. After that, he said, her health spiraled.
“She started getting infection after infection,” Ivy recalled.
During one late-night ambulance transfer, he said, an emergency medical worker quietly told him how his mother had arrived. “She pulled me to the side and told me how dirty and nasty, how wet she was,” Ivy said.
The family’s lawyers said she died of sepsis from the bedsores that Hillview caregivers allowed to become infected.
A judge in February 2023 ordered Schwartz to pay Grissom’s family $15.7 million after neither Schwartz nor any representative challenged the family’s wrongful death claim. Schwartz later tried to overturn the ruling, claiming poor health, lack of notice and that he was merely an investor with no role in operations, but a judge rejected the effort.
Ivy said the family sued Schwartz because “we wanted nobody else to go through the things we had to go through.” Schwartz has not paid the judgment, and the family’s lawyer said in an interview that he does not have enough information about Schwartz’s assets to try to recover the money.
The suffering described in cases like Coulson’s and Grissom’s was not part of the tax case against Schwartz that landed him in prison. But it loomed over the proceedings when he appeared for sentencing in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, last April. Schwartz had pleaded guilty to withholding $39 million in payroll taxes from his employees and failing to send the money to the IRS.
The investigation never determined where the money went. Prosecutors said they were not able to establish that Schwartz had used the money on a lavish lifestyle. But they said they never completed a forensic accounting of his finances, which moved money through more than 200 bank accounts. They said they believed Schwartz still controlled more than $50 million in assets.
His attorneys argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but the result of a businessman who expanded too quickly, fell behind on bills and then made a series of financial decisions — some of them admittedly criminal. But, they argued, he was simply trying to save his company.
Schwartz apologized for his conduct and told U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton that he “always tried to live the right way” and set a good example. But he acknowledged that he’d failed to do so in this instance.
Wigenton said she could not understand why prosecutors had agreed to a sentence of just a year and a day. Even years into the investigation, she noted, it remained unclear where much of the money had gone. And because so many of the letters submitted on Schwartz’s behalf described him as a brilliant businessman, Wigenton said the “number of layers and businesses and LLCs that were created” made it hard to see him as someone who had been fooled or confused.
“Not a single asset is in your name,” she said. “Not one.”
Wigenton said the case was not merely an abstract tax case, citing the collapse of Skyline’s nursing homes and the harm to patients. She said there was a need for deterrence in sentencing.
The judge sentenced Schwartz to three years in prison and ordered him to pay restitution of $5 million — the amount he had paid himself as a ghost employee — which he did. The remaining taxes were not part of the criminal sentence because prosecutors said they were used to fund his collapsing business rather than for personal enrichment. They said the IRS could try to recover the rest through a civil case.
Trump’s pardon wiped away Schwartz’s federal prison sentence — and likely any IRS effort to claw back the rest of the stolen taxes. But it did not affect a separate Arkansas state conviction for Medicaid fraud and tax evasion, in which Schwartz admitted submitting false and misleading information that inflated the Medicaid rates paid to his facilities in the state.
A judge in Little Rock had sentenced Schwartz to one year in state prison, ordered to run at the same time as his federal term. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, who had announced Schwartz’s conviction as a signature achievement, made clear after Trump’s pardon that the state prosecution stood on its own.
Schwartz, Griffin said at the time, owed the state of Arkansas nine months in prison and $1.8 million in restitution. A spokesman for Griffin said last week that, after making some payments — on schedule — Schwartz owed the state about $1.2 million, which must be fully repaid by April 2027.
One of the lobbyists whom Schwartz hired, Joshua Nass, worked to try to reduce Schwartz’s sentence in Arkansas. Nass declined to comment. He was later charged with attempting to extort $500,000 from a client and his son. Although the victims are not identified in the case, the circumstances match those of Schwartz.
Nass was released from federal custody after posting a $5 million bond. He has not yet responded to the charge. Prosecutors said in a court filing they were negotiating with Nass for a plea deal that could resolve the case without a trial.
Schwartz reported to an Arkansas prison on Dec. 29, creating an opportunity for the lawyers representing families who had won judgments against him. At the height of Skyline’s expansion, the company controlled nearly 1 in 10 nursing home beds in the state. But by the time families won their cases, Schwartz had relinquished or sold his Arkansas facilities, leaving no clear assets for lawyers to pursue.
Because Schwartz was in state custody again, lawyers could serve him with court papers and ask a judge to compel him to answer questions under oath about his finances — requiring him to disclose bank accounts, companies and other assets and to turn over financial records. Those proceedings are often the first step in tracing money and identifying property that might be used to satisfy a judgment. From there, attorneys could ask courts in other states to recognize and enforce the Arkansas judgments so they could pursue assets located elsewhere.
John Landis, an attorney for Reddick Law, which represents the Coulson and Grissom families, said he and another attorney representing yet another client with a judgment against Schwartz, contacted the state prison system to set up depositions of Schwartz. But the window proved too brief. The Arkansas parole board released Schwartz after just three weeks.
Before they could ask a single question, the chance to follow the money was gone.
The post A Nursing Home Owner Got a Trump Pardon. The Families of His Patients Got Nothing. appeared first on ProPublica.
When Ubokobong Amanam lost his fingers in an accident he teamed up with his brother John, a special effects artist, to design a prosthetic that suited him – now they run a thriving business
On a humid morning in Uyo, Nigeria, Ubokobong Amanam shows off the lifelike prosthetic where his fingers once were. The skin bears tiny wrinkles, and the nails are naturally shaped. Seven years ago, he was badly injured in a firework accident. Doctors could save him, but not his fingers.
The prosthetics available at the time were clumsy, poorly fitted and designed for bodies nothing like his.
Continue reading...Other commenters helped me diagnose the problem. When I couldn’t afford the solution, someone I knew only by his handle offered to pay
Read more in the kindness of strangers series
As a pensioner, money is always tight, so I was distraught when the secondhand car I’d recently bought began overheating. I took it to three or four different mechanics, none of whom were able to diagnose the problem.
Desperate, I searched online for solutions. On car forums, several commenters suggested tackling the potential problems that would be cheapest to fix, in a process of elimination. Having replaced the thermostat, radiator coolant, engine oil and filter, and transmission fluid, the principal suspect was down to the radiator. So I contacted my carmaker, who quoted me $1,200 for a replacement – way more than I could afford, as I only had $500 left in the bank. I was hit with the sinking feeling that I had just blown my life savings on a lemon.
Continue reading...Aggressive strategy and loss in the trial highlight a problem for tech firms: a widespread distrust of social media companies
When Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, sought to defend itself in the landmark social media addiction lawsuit alleging its products caused personal injury to a young user, it went on the offensive. The mental health problems that the 20-year-old known as KGM suffered since she was a child were not the result of exposure to harm on Instagram, Meta’s lawyers and public relations team argued, but instead linked to her mother’s parenting and her offline social problems.
In a bench memo filed before the trial began, lawyers for Meta quoted excerpts from KGM’s teenage text messages, personal writings and social media posts complaining about her mother. They combed through therapy notes and called on doctors to testify to examples of personal conflict. Throughout the proceedings, Meta’s communications team sent reporters repeated updates from the trial and quotes from testimony that highlighted her familial issues. Far from causing harm, they alleged that Instagram offered a helpful respite from the real world.
Continue reading...Holding protest signs and chanting pro-democracy slogans, a crowd gathered on the University of Delaware Green on Saturday afternoon for the third iteration of the nationwide “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration.
Mother Nature didn't make it easy, but in the end, kids left Newark's annual Easter egg hunt happy – many taking home prizes donated by local businesses.
Sudan’s volunteer-led aid network receives 2025 Chatham House Prize News release eoboko.drupal
Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), visited Chatham House to receive the prize they were awarded last year
Sudan’s volunteer-led aid network – the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – were handed the Chatham House Prize 2025 at a special ceremony on 26 March.
The ERRs were recognised for their vital work in delivering humanitarian support during the devastating conflict in Sudan.
Since the start of the war in April 2023, over thirteen million people have been displaced from their homes, with more than thirty-three million requiring humanitarian assistance, making Sudan the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Emerging from Sudan’s local traditions of mutual aid, the ERRs provide lifesaving essentials such as food and water to communities across Sudan’s 18 states, as well as providing medical assistance, education and responding to gender-based violence.
The grassroots movement has been recognized by several international bodies particularly for their impartial nature and their aim to provide aid for all parties caught up in the war, despite facing harassment and attacks from the conflict’s warring sides and members being killed and injured.
Four members of the network represented the ERRs at the prizegiving event: Alsanosi, Alaa, Abdalla and Khalid.
In her opening remarks at the ceremony, Bronwen Maddox, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House, said:
‘[The Emergency Response Rooms] have meant the difference between life and death for many Sudanese. They provide food, clean water and medical supplies in areas that are often inaccessible to international organizations. They help maintain and repair infrastructure, from power lines to water systems. They organize evacuations from areas under bombardment and siege. They design and implement projects that support women, children and other vulnerable groups. They pay attention not only to immediate survival, but to dignity and social cohesion.’
During the event a message from King Charles to the ERRs was read by Sir Simon Fraser, Chatham House Chair.
Accepting the award, Alsanosi, who is a volunteer member of the external communications committee of the ERRs said the Prize belonged to the 26,000 ERRs volunteers, ‘who refuse to be victimized or disappear in the face of war.’
He added that:
‘This Prize is also a reminder of responsibility that recognition must not stop at applause. Sudan’s civilians continue to face famine, displacement, and violence. Emergency Response Rooms volunteers continue to operate with minimal resources, immense risk, and shrinking civic space. We see this award as a call to all of us to protect civic spaces in times of war; so that they remain the baseline to rebuild and transform Sudan.’
After the event, Alaa, who drives the ERRs gender-responsive support in Sudan’s North Kordofan, said:
‘This award is recognition that the voice of Sudanese women has been heard. It tells the world: Sudanese women aren’t victims; they are fierce leaders. We have been fighting, resisting and speaking out for a long time. I am working to promote women’s leadership because I want Sudanese women to not return to the shadows after this war.’
Abdalla, who is a volunteer coordinator for the ERRs’ committee said:
‘This award represents an opportunity to bring Sudan to the forefront of international attention. We hope it will help shine a greater light on the daily humanitarian efforts carried out by the Emergency Response Rooms. We dedicate this recognition to every volunteer who continues to serve despite the challenges.’
Khalid, who co-founded the ERRs in Sudan’s South Kordofan said:
‘Winning this award is global recognition of the efforts and courage of the Emergency Response Rooms volunteers, and a tribute to the Sudanese community. It serves as an incentive to continue protecting civilians and upholding their dignity, and to emphasise the role of local leadership in bringing about change.’
The Chatham House Prize 2025 was generously supported by Dr Mo Ibrahim, Open Society Foundations and Quadrature Climate Foundation.
The Chatham House Prize is voted for by Chatham House members, following nominations from Chatham House staff and presented to ‘the person, persons, or organization deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations.’
The Prize was launched in 2005. Previous recipients of the Prize include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sir David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
A new community group is looking to make an impact on the community, and do so in an efficient manner.
Customers of Sapporo Soul Sushi & Ramen soon will be able to enjoy sake, Japanese beer and other alcoholic beverages with their meals.
Spectator, beneficiary, player: Russia’s strategy in the Iran war, from oil to drones Expert comment jon.wallace
Carefully calibrated involvement in the Middle East amplifies Moscow’s leverage from Havana to the frontlines in Ukraine.
‘Speed is necessary, and haste is harmful,’ said Russian Marshal Prince Alexander Suvorov in The Science of Victory (1765). That captures a tension that has remained embedded in Russian strategic culture: how to combine long-term endurance with timely opportunism.
Russia is often portrayed as a ponderous bear. But in practice, it frequently resembles a more calculating predator – patient, adaptive, and inclined to strike when the cost-benefit ratio turns decisively in its favour.
Those instincts are clearly visible in Moscow’s conduct since the outbreak of the Iran war. Rather than committing decisively or remaining aloof, Russia has calibrated its engagement to extract advantage while limiting its exposure – mindful of the risks of pushing Washington too far.
Nowhere has this calibrated approach been clearer in recent years than in Russia’s relationship with the Mullahs. Moscow has provided sustained diplomatic backing, expanded military-technical cooperation, and deepened economic coordination between their two heavily sanctioned systems. A strategic partnership, alongside collaboration in nuclear energy and defence-industrial sectors, reflect a convergence of interests shaped by opposition to Western pressure.
Yet this support has been deliberately bounded – with no mutual-defence commitment. That has allowed Russia to avoid direct military involvement in Iran’s confrontation with Israel and the United States (US).
This is not hesitation but design. Tehran is valuable to Moscow as a partner that complicates Western strategy and reinforces a sanctions-resistant axis. But Russia is not willing to incur open-ended risk on Iran’s behalf.
President Vladmir Putin’s objective is to remain close enough to shape outcomes in the war, but distant enough to preserve freedom of action.
As strikes between Israel and Iran intensified, Moscow issued public condemnations and stepped-up diplomatic engagement with Tehran. And some discreet forms of support, including intelligence exchanges, have likely taken place. But no additional Russian forces were deployed, no air defences activated on Iran’s behalf, and no direct attempt made to challenge Israeli or US operations.
Meanwhile, Russia maintained deconfliction channels with Israel and a limited posture in Syria, insulating its assets from the conflict. The result is visible alignment without operational exposure – enough to retain influence in Tehran, but not enough to become a belligerent.
A Financial Times report of 25 March suggests Moscow may be providing drones to Iran. If true, this would represent a shift in Russian calculations – perhaps based on Iran’s continued resistance to US pressure – and raise the level of strategic risk Moscow is willing to take in the conflict. But this support would be hard to prove: some Russian drones are copies of Iranian models. And it would fall far short of the kind of military backing the US has provided to Ukraine.
A similar logic underpins Russia’s posture in the Western Hemisphere, particularly towards Cuba.
As President Donald Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Cuba this year, Russia has despatched oil shipments as ‘humanitarian aid’ and provided political backing to the regime.
But such steps can be achieved at relatively low cost. Unlike Soviet commitments, current Russian support to Cuba is limited, reversible, and primarily symbolic. Recent Russian oil deliveries are modest and intermittent in nature.
Russian actions do not really alter the regional balance of power. But they introduce friction into the US strategic environment and serve as a reminder: that geopolitical competition can never be geographically contained, and that Moscow retains options beyond its immediate theatre.
From a US perspective, Russia’s behaviour over the past weeks appears opportunistic, if not deliberately provocative. Moscow has combined diplomatic backing for Tehran with continued oil flows to Cuba, while simultaneously benefiting from tighter global energy markets.
This undermines the premise that Russia can be effectively isolated. And it reinforces Moscow’s claim to relevance across multiple theatres.
Perhaps more importantly, this posture exploits a moment of US overstretch. Washington continues to bear some share of the political, military, and financial burden of sustaining Ukraine’s war effort, albeit significantly smaller since the return of Donald Trump. Simultaneously it is responding to escalation in the Middle East and maintaining commitments in the Indo-Pacific.
Russia’s approach has been to act selectively within each theatre without triggering direct confrontation. The objective is not to confront the US everywhere, but to demonstrate that it cannot be excluded anywhere. The effect is cumulative: each calibrated action reinforces a broader narrative of Russian resilience and indispensability, to which Moscow knows Trump cannot stay insensitive.
The last three weeks of conflict in the Middle East have undeniably strengthened Moscow’s hand, albeit unevenly. Disruption in the Gulf has tightened global energy markets, increasing demand for Russian crude among those buyers willing to operate within or around sanctions constraints.
At various points, the now traditional discount on Russian oil has narrowed, and in some cases disappeared. This has translated into higher export revenues for Moscow and a short-term improvement in Russia’s fiscal position.
However, these gains should not be overstated: economic fundamentals remain constrained by structural factors. Russia is still dogged by limited access to technology, labour shortages, and ongoing fiscal pressures linked to the war in Ukraine.
Growth has slowed, and the government continues to reduce non-priority expenditure. Planned cuts to civilian and administrative spending will likely go ahead, to preserve fiscal space for defence and strategic sectors.
The Middle East crisis has therefore provided a tactical windfall rather than a strategic transformation. It has enhanced Russia’s room for manoeuvre but not resolved its underlying vulnerabilities.
These dynamics ultimately converge on the war in Ukraine. Under Donald Trump, US policy has shown a greater emphasis on transactional outcomes and visible leverage.
In this context, Russia’s ability to demonstrate resilience under sanctions, maintain influence in energy markets, and project strategic reach strengthens its relative standing.
Recent US decisions to ease certain restrictions on Russian energy flows are primarily aimed at stabilizing global markets amid disruption caused by the war. They are not intended as support for President Putin. Nonetheless, by being forced to alleviate pressure on Russia’s most critical revenue stream, Moscow’s economic resilience is reinforced to Washington.
Ukraine, by contrast, risks being framed less as a US strategic partner than as a protracted liability that is resistant to rapid resolution. The longer external crises sustain elevated energy prices and divert political attention, the more credible Moscow’s argument becomes that it is the more durable and consequential actor.
The implication is not necessarily a reversal of US commitments, but a shift in emphasis. If Washington moves from seeking to weaken Russia to managing it, the balance of pressure may increasingly fall on Kyiv to accept compromise. In this sense, Russia’s gains in the Middle East are not peripheral to the Ukraine war; they feed directly into the diplomatic and strategic situation.
Russia’s approach to the Middle East war is best understood as selective engagement structured across three layers: spectator, beneficiary, and player.
By avoiding full entanglement and intervening only where the returns justify the risks, Moscow has positioned itself to extract maximum advantage without assuming proportional costs.
The Iran war highlights the creeping use of AI in warfare Expert comment thilton.drupal
The war in Iran has added to concerns about the risks of using AI to select targets during armed conflict.
The US-Israeli war with Iran has amplified long-standing concerns over the adoption of AI-supported targeting in warfare.
These concerns came to the fore in the aftermath of the 28 February strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, which Iran says killed at least 168 people, most of whom were schoolchildren.
The Trump administration initially blamed Iran for the strike, though it did not provide any evidence. The US says it is now investigating the bombing. The Washington Post has reported that the school was on a US target list.
US Senate Democrats have written to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seeking information about the attack, including clarification on any use of AI in target selection. So far there has been no confirmation of whether or not AI was used in planning or executing the strike on the school.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the US commander leading the war in Iran, has confirmed the use of ‘a variety of advanced AI tools’ to sift through large amounts of data in the conflict, without naming any tools in particular. He said these tools allowed leaders to make ‘smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react’ and sped up processes from taking hours or days to seconds. Admiral Cooper also stated that: ‘Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot, and when to shoot.’
Iran is not the first war to incorporate AI systems, but it signals AI-supported targeting is becoming the norm in warfare. While militaries may embrace the potential for increased efficiency, significant risks remain.
AI allows for rapid processing and analysis of information from a variety of different sources and customizable data access. Its adoption across the military domain has the potential to increase situational awareness, facilitate real-time information sharing and enable more informed decision-making in military operations.
A 2024 US Department of War release outlined how the AI-enabled Maven Smart System helps frontline soldiers identify and strike military targets, and assists chain-of-command approval for strikes. NATO also acquired a version of Maven Smart System from Palantir in 2025. The US military is now reportedly using its own version of Maven to help provide targeting information for its military operations in Iran. But it is unclear exactly how and to what extent Maven and other AI tools are being used in Iran.
In the war in Ukraine, both sides are using AI for data processing and target selection. Ukraine’s deputy defence minister said last year that AI analyses more than 50,000 video streams from the front line each month, which helps to ‘quickly process this massive data, identify targets, and put them on a map.’
The New York Times has reported that Israel used AI as part of its process of identifying potential targets for air strikes targeting Hamas in Gaza. The IDF has said that ‘information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.’
Additional uses for AI technology across the military domain include the training of military personnel through virtual simulations, the automated scheduling of logistical supplies or the identification of equipment maintenance needs via image-recognition systems. These are just some of the potential uses.
Many countries will want to invest in tools that give them an advantage over adversaries, in line with the search for asymmetry, which has been a constant throughout the history of warfare. But the use of AI in complex high-stake environments such as armed conflict also comes with serious risks.
Part of the concern relates to the development of AI technology itself and how it could impact on the system’s performance. For example, an AI model could be trained with faulty data, or with material that is different to what it encounters when deployed in the real world. This could lead it to generate inaccurate information or malfunction when used outside of the training environment.
AI large language models work by predicting a sequence of words, based on statistical probability – they will likely get it right most of the time, but they won’t get it right all of the time.
In practical terms, this means basing decisions on AI-generated information contains an element of risk and inaccuracy.
AI-supported targeting decisions are a high-risk case in point. If AI tools are being employed extensively to generate targets with minimal human oversight, it’s not difficult to imagine how errors could occur.
One core issue highlighted by the use of AI in war is that there is a difference between what AI-enabled systems can do and the procedures or rules about how humans use those systems.
The Iran war suggests that AI tools are set to be increasingly used in armed conflict. While the laws of war apply to all conflicts, there is a growing debate about whether AI is introducing a new dimension that requires additional rules. For example, concerns have been raised over how AI reduces the space for human judgement required for international humanitarian law determinations.
A binding international framework is unlikely in the short-term. Nevertheless, it is in militaries’ own interest to develop rules for using AI. This would help them mitigate against the risk of over-relying on AI-supported targeting, which could reduce errors that lead to the wrong targets being hit and cause civilian deaths.
City council on Monday agreed to rezone a property on South Chapel Street, clearing a path for a developer to build what could be one of the tallest student housing complexes in Newark.
Thousands of brightly colored plastic eggs — many containing prizes — will be up for grabs Saturday as the Newark Parks and Recreation Department hosts its annual Easter egg hunt.
Newark Councilman Jason Lawhorn said farewell Monday, his last city council meeting before retiring after eight years representing District 5.
A man suffered a seizure while working atop scaffolding at a Newark-area church Wednesday, necessitating a rescue by specially trained first responders.
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