Commentary: I love the Galaxy Z Fold 7, but Samsung needs these upgrades for the Fold 8 Ultra to earn a permanent spot in my pocket

Two Tennessee National Guard members fatally shot a man in Memphis who turned toward them with a gun during a downtown pursuit, authorities said.

Europe's soccer governing body and prominent commentators have criticized the decision, which allows Folarin Balogun to play against Belgium.

Updates from Monday’s play at the All England Club
Osaka stuns Sabalenka | Sinner through | Mail Daniel

“I feel like I still cannot process this happening,” says Kostyuk, also noting how hot it is. “The longer you stay on this surface, the worse you feel.” She adds that the court wasn’t easy given the heat and wind, especially against an opponent on a roll having played 17 consecutive matches on grass – more than Kostyuk in her entire career. So it was very difficult and she still can’t believe it.

She was struggling to break the whole match so is really happy with the last two service-games she faced, and then thanks the crowd for their contribution.

While millions of Americans across the Northeast experienced record-setting temperatures, thunderstorms in the Midwest downed trees, ruptured power lines and made transportation treacherous.

I wore this robot exoskeleton in the Grand Canyon to see if it could help me manage my spinal stenosis and keep pace with my athlete daughter.

Reform UK leader claims he is victim of ‘hit job’ as parliamentary standards commissioner investigates £5m donation

On the subject of Andy Burnham, the Financial Times is running a story today saying the access talks his team is holding with senior civil servants, intended to help Whitehall departments get ready to implement the new PM’s policy agenda, are being hindered by the fact that Burnham has not decided who will do the top cabinet jobs.

In the story, Lucy Fisher, George Parker and Anna Gross say:

Talks have not yet formally started with the Treasury and Burnham’s refusal to nominate a chancellor has complicated transition planning.

One Labour figure complained Burnham’s operation was “skeletal”, adding: “Access talks require a shadow cabinet. Burnham needs to nominate key people in advance or he cannot have meaningful talks” ….

Yes. And look – I’m not going to go into what we discussed privately, but everything I’ve seen from Andy publicly suggests that he knows that welfare reform is absolutely necessary … [because] it’s fundamentally about the life chances of a whole generation of young people.

And if we think the best option and best opportunity that we can gift as a country to a generation of young people is a life on benefits – are we serious?

My sense is that the appetite, both within the parliamentary Labour party and the new administration, will be absolutely up for doing this.

One of those is how we support young people. I will not defend an education system that is overly focused on the university route and does not lay out paths to technical qualifications for our young people. Too many young people get to year 10 at school, and they can’t see where school is taking them, because the system isn’t focusing on those young people.

And then, at 16, I believe we need the guarantee of a work placement for 16 to 18-year-olds, apprenticeships for every 16 to 18-year-old who wants one, and what I’ve done in Great Manchester is something that might be looked at more broadly, free bus travel for 16 to 18-year-olds, so that they can access those opportunities.

Candidate Abdul El-Sayed emerges as the party’s frontrunner in the primary campaign after Mallory McMorrow withdraws

Donald Trump lobbied Fifa to lift the US striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game ban for a red card received in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina, preceding Sunday’s stunning announcement that he would be available for the cohosts’ last-16 clash against Belgium in Seattle on Monday night.

Sources have told the Guardian that Trump made three calls to Fifa, starting from Wednesday, to ensure that the change was made.

Burglars stole millions of dollars worth of jewelry from the museum of luxury glassmaker Lalique just months after a stunning gem heist at the Louvre.

Google was ordered to pay almost $2 billion this week to Pricerunner, reports Bloomberg: The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment on Wednesday, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2 billion, in the wake of a European Union antitrust crackdown... The Swedish price-comparison website argued that Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service over competing portals for more than a decade. Wednesday's award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google's preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, [Pricerunner owner] Klarna said in a statement after the judgment... A Google spokesperson said the company doesn't agree with the court's decision and will consider its legal options. [The ruling can be appealed.] Changes implemented in 2017 to Google's platform are working and generating growth and jobs for hundreds of comparison shopping services operating more than 1500 websites across Europe, according to the statement. The litigation is linked to a 2017 decision by the European Commission to fine Google €2.4 billion for illegally leveraging its search dominance to give its own shopping service an edge. The EU decision unleashed a wave of so-called follow-on suits, which were delayed for years as Google appealed the EU fine. Two years ago the EU's top tribunal confirmed that the company did violate antitrust laws — meaning EU-based plaintiffs no longer have to prove that in court. A Berlin court last year ordered the tech giant to pay €573 million in damages to two German price-comparison websites, a ruling Google appealed. Similar cases are pending across Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The firm’s share price has risen 80% under Allison Kirkby’s leadership – but pressure remains for her to deliver further growth

• Business live – latest updates

If timing is everything, then Allison Kirkby may have judged it perfectly.

Since becoming BT’s first female chief executive more than two years ago the company’s share price has climbed 80%, an investor-pleasing turnaround that has seen Kirkby well-rewarded with a pay and bonus package of £5.6m last year, the largest for a boss of the telecoms company in well over a decade. However, there are questions over how much credit Kirkby can take for the apparent revival of the business.

China's military test-launched a long-range ballistic missile from a nuclear-powered submarine in the South Pacific, drawing protest and concern from countries in the region.

Ukraine’s president makes plea ahead of summit this week in Ankara as strikes leave 117 injured in capital city

Meanwhile, the UK has just sanctioned Russian actors involved in researching, developing and producing the novichok nerve agent and the lethal toxic Epibatidine, used in the Salisbury attack and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Among those sanctions are SC Signal, a Russian state scientific research institute, as well as three individuals researching novichok and Epibatidine.

“Russia’s repeated use of chemical weapons is a sickening violation of international law and a direct threat to global security.

From the use of novichok nerve agents in Salisbury to Epibatidine in Siberia, poisoning Dawn Sturgess and Alexei Navalny, Russia continues to use barbaric tools to inflict death and suffering on innocent civilians, including in Ukraine.

FCA’s review into how tech will reshape financial services warns about amplified risks of cyber-crime and fraud

• Business live – latest updates

Ministers have been urged to toughen the City regulator’s powers to protect consumers against the potential risks of AI, according to a landmark review.

The Mills review by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which looked at how AI will reshape financial services from 2030 onward, found that companies are already starting to shift from human-led activities towards AI-enabled services for everyday consumers.

All the ballistic missiles launched by Russia struck their targets, underscoring Kyiv's need for more U.S. Patriot interceptor missiles, Ukraine officials say.

More than 200 arrested in raids, comedian and journalists jailed, gay-friendly cruise turned away and protests banned

Authorities in Turkey have widened a crackdown on public life, arresting more than 200 people during raids across Ankara last month, jailing a comedian and blocking a cruise ship carrying LGBTQ+ passengers from docking in the run-up to the Nato summit in the capital.

The arrests followed a ban on demonstrations in Ankara that was put in place until 10 July. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this was evidence of Turkey’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”. The watchdog group said the Nato summit, which starts on Tuesday, was taking place in the context of intensifying violations of basic rights, “including far-reaching restrictions on the main political opposition party, the media, and freedom of expression in general”.

Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion

AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.

As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases – some leaning distinctly rightwing, others more liberal, according to a study from Oxford and Potsdam universities.

Workers proud of their efforts to grow renewable energy say US president pursuing ‘personal vendetta’ at their expense

Donald Trump has blamed everything – from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer – in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.

Since taking office for the second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6bn in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.

Babies exposed to higher levels of neurotoxin more likely to have difficulty controlling impulses later, research shows

Exposure to common air pollution may cause childhood obesity because it affects children’s ability to control impulse, new first-of-its-kind peer-reviewed research finds.

Particular matter 2.5 (PM2.5) is a neurotoxin that has been linked to obesity, and Mt Sinai researchers say they have for the first time identified impulse control as a potential pathway. The study found that babies exposed to higher levels of PM2.5 during their first year of life were more likely to develop difficulties with controlling impulses later in childhood.

New report details slew of ventures between private equity and nonprofits and calls for greater government oversight

A watchdog group is calling for greater government oversight of joint ventures between private equity firms and non-profit healthcare providers, arguing that the arrangements could present “risks” to “patients, payers and employees”.

In a new report, Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), a vocal critic of the industry, detailed more than 500 joint ventures between private equity and nonprofit healthcare providers – ranging from rural hospitals to major religiously affiliated health systems to hospice care providers. The group argued those risks could include extraction of profit and a decline in quality of care.

Millions join funeral procession in capital of Tehran to mourn Khamenei who was kiled in US-Israel airstrikes in February

Several officials who haven’t been seen since the start of the war have made a rare public appearance for the funeral procession.

Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seen during the day in what seems to be his first major public appearance since fighting broke out with the US and Israel.

Handmade creations distributed to raise funds for charity prompt complaints to police

At first, the cute paper hedgehogs seemed like a kind gesture. An older man had crafted the little creations from donated books to raise money for charity, handing them to children in local shops.

But on closer inspection, some parents were horrified to discover the hedgehogs had been made from the pages of an erotic novel.

An estimated 15 to 20 million people, along with foreign dignitaries and religious leaders, were expected to take part in the ceremonies, which will last for several days.

Fresh row erupts over Duke of Sussex’s trip, the buildup to which has been overshadowed by security dispute

Just as it seemed there might be a period of peace, yet another row has broken out between Prince Harry and his family, with one party saying he had accepted an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace and the other countering within minutes that he would no longer be welcomed.

The Duke of Sussex is to visit London and Birmingham for a series of charity engagements including promoting the Invictus Games. The ‌buildup to the trip has been overshadowed by a dispute with the government over security, and a spokesperson for the prince saying on Sunday that the Duchess of Sussex and the couple’s children would not join him in London, but could do later when he visited Birmingham.

Balogun's reinstatement came after President Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino last week to ask whether the organization was going to review the situation, sources told CBS News.

Quasars — the brightest objects in the universe — are powered by supermassive black holes at the heart of early galaxies.

Launch comes just hours after Australia and Fiji sign defence agreement as expert says timing not a coincidence

China has conducted a long-range missile test in the South Pacific just hours after Australia signed a defence agreement with Fiji, sparking condemnation from Canberra and regional leaders.

The Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, said the missile test was “destabilising” to the region, while her New Zealand counterpart, Winston Peters, described it as “deeply concerning”.

Tour de France spectator ban as country along with Spain, Portugal and Greece faces ‘powder keg’ after heatwave

• Europe live – latest updates

Wildfires raging across southern Europe have forced thousands to flee their homes and prompted officials to ban spectators from a stage of the Tour de France, amid warnings of “powder keg” conditions after a record-breaking early summer heatwave.

Hundreds of firefighters are tackling blazes that have burned through almost 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres) in Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. Strong winds are forecast to fan the flames and temperatures are expected to rise again this week.

I used to think my phone helped me to relax. But setting strict limits on my usage has improved my mood and my relationships

I am a psychotherapist who works with frazzled, snappy parents, and spend my days writing about why we struggle to find calm. I also used to pick up my phone hundreds of times a day, failing to realise that it was making me a snappier, more irritable, less present mother.

My phone was my office, my income, my means of communication. Every time I checked it, there was something to action, a notification of something new, something that told me I was useful and productive, giving me dopamine hits that motherhood didn’t offer. It had become my coping mechanism.

The president has made dangerous inroads in his push toward autocracy. Yet the prospects for his success are dimming

How do we commemorate America’s democracy as Donald Trump undermines it? By embracing his opposition. The United States was founded by breaking from a monarchy. Trump wants to become king. An imperfect yet powerful system of checks and balances is being deployed to prevent him. The resistance is worth celebrating.

This is hardly the first challenge to US democracy. The early nation had no rights for Black people and no vote for women. It survived Jim Crow, the McCarthy era, and the “war on terror”. Yet there is no denying the seriousness of the threat posed by Trump.

Documentary No Country for Mothers details how US moms lack support, paid leave and childcare help – and hopes to inspire push for action

When Reshma Saujani set out to make a documentary, she was clear from the outset: it would not be released on streaming platforms, or at film festivals.

Instead, No Country for Mothers – a new movie about how moms across the US are being failed – is being screened by hundreds of the subject themselves, nationwide, in person.

Collegiate sports organization led by Charlie Baker banned trans athletes from women’s sports after 2025 Trump order

The president of the US’s top administrator of collegiate sports on Sunday said his organization does not anticipate adjusting its rules on transgender athletes after a recent federal supreme court decision allowed states to ban them from participating in school athletics.

In an interview with CBS News’ Face the Nation, Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, alluded to how his organization in late January 2025 had effectively banned transgender athletes from women’s sports by closing off those programs to athletes who were assigned male at birth or were taking testosterone therapy. There are no restrictions for participation in NCAA men’s sports, which Baker referred to on Sunday as “the open network”.

For the first few weeks after he arrived at the immigration detention center in Winnfield, Louisiana, 18-year-old Elder Chavez was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaky sounds of the bunk beds and to voices of dozens of men, also sleepless, around him. He suffered terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m. — just when guards would begin to summon the detainees for breakfast. Then he’d sleep for most of the rest of the day.

He had developed the schedule of an owl. And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over. Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Chavez offered to show them documents that proved he wasn’t living in hiding. Immigration authorities had granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status because, as a toddler, he’d been abandoned by his parents in Honduras and had come to this country on his own when he was 14. His sister, who’d migrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, offered to help take care of him. A lawyer was helping him pursue permanent residency. 

“I’m legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers. But the officers, he said, weren’t having it. One of them told him, “Your papers are of no use to me.”

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on a path toward deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said during a video call from detention. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chavez is hardly alone. A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office. In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed. 

Before Trump returned to office last year, Chavez would have likely been given a ticket and allowed to return to his sister. But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has moved to systematically roll back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country. Those policies were based on laws that had been implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed unaccompanied immigrant minors — ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults — are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation. 

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and are able to prove in family court that they had been abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home countries.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands. To make its case, his administration points to the record 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden. 

Neither those children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, say Trump administration officials. As a result, administration officials say, some of the children became victims of abuse or exploitation. Alarming numbers of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk for trafficking, injury and wage theft. 

Other minors, the administration has said, became criminals. It put out a July 2025 government report that said since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners were found to have criminal arrest records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sex offenses. The administration says the best way to stop such abuses and criminality is to disincentivize immigrant children from coming in the first place. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage Biden did.” Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided via Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated with outside experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data. 

Advocates argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to cast all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light. They say that some of their clients who have been living in the U.S. for years, including those, like Chavez, who have since turned 18, face serious risks if sent back to their home countries. The majority of the unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States in the last decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic turmoil, violence and political upheaval. Some came from families riven by poverty and domestic violence. Some, like Chavez, have no parents to go back to. 

“These children have been through incredibly harrowing and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal defense organization. “And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s claims that its policies are aimed at protecting minors, he said, “If you’re worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them.”

ICE Is Detaining and Deporting More People in the Country Who Entered as Unaccompanied Minors

A growing number of immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors without parents or legal guardians are being arrested in the country’s interior and removed via deportation or voluntary departure orders.

Sometimes the deportation orders issued in immigration court have been coming so fast that lawyers say even they have a hard time explaining them to their clients. Within a span of three hours on a single morning in April in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning. Some of the hearings were only a few minutes long, and some of the minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ. The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case. But Sponzo ordered the girl to be deported anyway. 

In another case, an attorney pleaded for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum petition for her client from Guatemala. The attorney said her client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it hard for her to gather information she needed for the case. Sponzo politely denied the request, saying, “I empathize and thank you for your efforts.” Then she ordered the child deported.

A high school senior from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with side-swept black hair and wearing a short sleeve athletic shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with piled-up clothes on the bed and an American flag tacked on the wall. He stayed on mute while his lawyer asked for more time for his applications for SIJ and asylum to be processed. Sponzo said no and ordered him deported. His lawyer said in an interview her client is now afraid he could be picked up by ICE at any time.

At the end of the day, several of the attorneys said they felt blindsided by the judge’s rapid-fire denials. Although they all said they would appeal her rulings, which could buy their clients some time to stay in the U.S., one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.”  

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile dockets in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, there was widespread recognition that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum petitions to work their way through the backlogged system. For SIJ recipients, getting a green card often takes years. Judges typically gave minors that time. Now the authorities overseeing immigration courts have instructed them not to do so. Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of the more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office. Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believe they were pushed out because the administration saw them as not aligned with its agenda. But they also say they’ve received no official explanation for their firings. Sponzo was also fired recently. She could not be reached for comment. 

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

Since the Start of Trump’s Second Term, Immigration Courts Have Averaged More Than 10,000 Removals of Minors Per Month

It’s not just the overhaul of the immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant kids. Early on in Trump’s second term, officials moved to curb funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. It also put an end to a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action,” which protected minors who had been granted SIJ from deportation. SIJ on its own does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover those with SIJ until they could get their green cards.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal assistance and access to deferred action for SIJ recipients. Despite those rulings, some legal advocates say they still have not been paid what they’re owed. And earlier this month, several groups said federal agents appeared at their Washington-area offices, seeking to look at client files, even though they didn’t have warrants. The advocates said they saw the move as an attempt to intimidate them. 

As for granting deferred action, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would do so only under “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.” DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having SIJ “does NOT confer lawful status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.” The agency did not respond to a question about the agents who visited advocates’ offices.

Over the last year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 of the unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden in order to check on their well-being. The majority of all the minors who entered the country in recent years had been released to one or both parents in the United States or to other close relatives. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June press conference that some of the welfare checks found minors were doing fine with their families. But he asserted that he’d also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals. “We start digging into these cases and you start hearing absolute horrific things,” he said. 

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond. A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and had previously been charged with crimes including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they’d indicted less than a handful of people on charges of smuggling or exploiting immigrant minors.

No officials from DHS or the Justice Department explained what had become of any of the children connected to those indictments. As for immigrants who had entered the U.S. as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the process of sending them back.”

Soon after Chavez arrived in detention, one of the men in his cell recognized the teen’s pattern of sleeping through the day as a silent cry for help. Carlos Della Valle, who had migrated to the United States from Mexico, was attuned to Chavez’s struggles because he had a son around the same age. Even in detention, Chavez, with a head full of  tousled black hair and big brown eyes, had an easy laugh and smile. Della Valle worried that Chavez was “losing valuable time that he’s never going to get back.”

Winn was a tough place, advocates and detainees said. Two migrants died there earlier this year. One of the deaths was reportedly caused by cardiovascular disease, and authorities have not determined a cause for the other.  

A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General described unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Winn, including leaking ceilings, dirty food prep areas and an incident in which a guard put a detainee in a prohibited choke hold. A DHS spokesperson said that the agency is working to address the issues raised in the report, adding, “our death rates are lower than most state prisons.” 

Della Valle began nudging young Chavez out of bed in the mornings and put him to work helping keep their cellblock clean. 

Detainees were given an hour a day outside, sometimes less than that. Della Valle told Chavez that keeping himself busy, in whatever constructive ways possible, was the only way to make it through the monotony with his sanity intact.

Chavez briefly took a job in the barber shop that paid the standard wage for someone in detention —  $1 a day — but he said that giving haircuts to around 80 men in a shift was so grueling that he only lasted a month. Instead, Chavez and Della Valle pored over passages from the Bible together. They sat together for most every meal. Chavez learned to mix packets of powdered juice just the way Della Valle liked it.

Della Valle offered to help Chavez navigate the immigration system. He knew it well. In 1997 he’d twice illegally entered the United States. He was deported the first time but illegally entered again, married a U.S. citizen soon after and settled in Pennsylvania. 

Because of his reentry, which is a felony, he has been ineligible to regularize his status. But he lived underground with little worry. Immigration authorities generally avoided targeting immigrants with long ties to their communities, like him. Not anymore.

Authorities intercepted Della Valle when he and his wife were returning from a Virgin Islands vacation, though they released him on bond at the time. Months later, however, he was taken into ICE detention. By the time he met Chavez, he had spent months being transferred among close to a dozen holding facilities. He worried about what detention might do to Chavez. Other men in his cellblock, who nicknamed Chavez “El Niño,” worried too.

“It was hard to see him, you know, because he’s just a boy. He’s not a grown man,”  Della Valle said. “I had to do whatever I could for him.”

While the administration has made progress bending immigration courts to its will, there’s evidence that federal courts, where tens of thousands of immigrants have challenged their detentions as illegal, are pushing back. 

The National Immigration Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, tracked the cases of 263 immigrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors and SIJ applicants. The group found that federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 of them since the start of the second Trump administration. In March, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown issued a scathing rebuke in one such case, writing, “The laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” 

The administration can set policy, he wrote, but he added that “it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws — a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.”

Among those recently released was 20-year-old Fredy Martinez. Born in Honduras, he was a teenager when he crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. He had graduated from high school in Texas and was delivering a DoorDash order on his bike when he was detained, according to court documents about his case. He was held for eight months at a sprawling and deeply troubled tent detention camp in El Paso, Texas — which has seen a measles outbreak and detainee deaths, including one ruled a homicide — before a federal judge found his detention was illegal and ordered him released. DHS did not respond to a question about the center.

Another teenager named Carlos from Guatemala said in an interview that he was detained on his way to work at a car wash in Rockland County, New York, when he was 18, despite having been granted SIJ and deferred action. He was flown over 1,000 miles to a detention facility in Louisiana, though not the same one as Chavez. Carlos asked to be identified only by his first name because of his ongoing immigration case. 

After his arrest, he said, “I was just thinking that I would never see my family again.” Carlos was held for more than two months before a federal judge set him free.

The DHS spokesperson did not answer questions about any individual cases. They said federal court rulings against the administration “should come as no surprise,” since “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate.”

Six months into his detention, Chavez is on his own. He was ordered deported but is appealing the decision and filed a habeas petition. 

Della Valle has been released, thanks to his wife’s outspoken advocacy. His release was bittersweet for Chavez. But Della Valle has not forgotten him. 

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, have helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, to pay off his outstanding traffic tickets and prepare his defense. The couple started a letter-writing campaign for him. They’ve passed out flyers with a picture of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it in and send him messages of encouragement. 

Della Valle said he feels pangs of guilt about leaving Chavez behind. He still speaks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but worries his words don’t carry the same weight now that he’s out. Della Valle tries to convince himself that Chavez will be OK, saying, “I think me being out might be good for him because he knows that there’s hope.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has been moved to different cells multiple times. One had only a single functional shower for dozens of men. The video call system often malfunctioned. Someone stole his small notebook, where he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in touch with outside. One night he dreamt he was free. When he woke up and realized he was still in detention, he panicked and had trouble breathing. 

He said he has been trying to keep up the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each passing week makes it harder.

In a series of interviews from detention, Chavez worried about losing half his junior year of high school. He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he is unclear if he will be able to make the assignments up to be able to graduate on time. His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments he worries it will all be for nothing. He missed the birth of his new nephew, and he is unsure if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined.”

The post These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. appeared first on ProPublica.

Your desk deserves a smart upgrade. This is the tech that makes the biggest difference for me.

The National Weather Service is hiring hundreds of entry-level employees after losing about 15% of its staff to federal cuts last year.

• Decision is ‘incomprehensible and unjustifiable’

• Belgium appeal against striker’s availability for tie

Uefa has hit out at Fifa’s decision to lift USA striker Folarin Balogun’s suspension for Monday’s last-16 tie with Belgium, describing the move as “incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and accusing world football’s governing of crossing “a red line”.

Europe’s governing body made no bones over their opposition to the shock call, one Belgium have been granted an appeal against. There are no guarantees, however, over when that decision will be made or whether Fifa’s reasoning for lifting Balogun’s’ suspension will be made public.

Spain, Portugal, France and UK face spell of high temperatures, while Super Typhoon Bavi barrels through north-western Pacific

• Europe live – latest updates

Another surge of heat spread across western Europe at the weekend, with Spain, Portugal and France already sweltering and southern parts of the UK joining them on Monday.

Temperatures are once again forecast to climb to 10-15C above average, with highs approaching 40C (104F) in the hottest parts of France and Spain, while the UK is expected to reach the low- to mid-30s celsius.

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

Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.

• Red Clay considers interim superintendent
• Dover leaders discuss new fees
• State leaders attempt to tackle homelessness

New Red Clay superintendent?

The board of the Red Clay Consolidated School District is likely to appoint an interim superintendent Wednesday, two weeks after its prominent leader announced he would move to Pennsylvania.

The decision comes at a critical juncture for Delaware’s largest district as its funding and operations could be reshaped in the coming years by two school reform initiatives. 

After an approval by lawmakers last month, state officials will begin implementing a new education funding model that will send more dollars to public schools with high numbers of low-income or multi-language students. 

Lawmakers also have been mulling a dramatic redistricting proposal that would combine all Wilmington-area school districts into one. 

Prior to last month, most believed that Red Clay’s current superintendent, Dorrell Green,  would be in charge during the reforms. Green is the reigning Delaware Superintendent of the Year.

But last month Green announced that he accepted a parallel position in Norristown, Pennsylvania. 

In response to the announcement, Red Clay school board president Victor Leonard said his board has “a huge task in the next few weeks in finding a leader that will guide our district through some troubling times.” 

He said the most pressing issues include declining enrollment, low student proficiency rates, and a “looming” school district consolidation plan.

📍 The Red Clay Consolidated School District Board of Education will meet 7 p.m. Wednesday to discuss regular agenda items. Prior to the meeting, the board will hold a closed-door executive session. The meeting will occur at the Cab Calloway School of the Arts located at 100 North DuPont Road in Wilmington. To attend the meeting virtually, click here. To view the agenda, click here.

Dover leaders talk new property fees 

After working to overcome multiple budgeting challenges this year, Dover leaders are set to introduce a new measure on Wednesday to help create long-term financial stability within the state’s capital city.

The Dover City Council will host a Special Legislative, Finance, and Administration Committee Meeting on Wednesday to introduce a new $1-per-square-foot service fee on large-scale, tax exempt properties within the city. 

Leaders outlined a list of 20 tax-exempt properties larger than 50,000 square feet that would be subject to this new service fee, including Delaware State University and Bayhealth Hospital. 

City leaders argue that because so much of the geographic footprint in Dover is made up of tax-exempt properties, it creates a “structural injustice” within the city’s tax base.

In a 51-page proposal outlining the new endeavor, city leaders preemptively argue against critiques of the proposed service fee, saying that a property’s tax-exempt status would not prohibit it from being charged a service fee.

It is unclear how the leaders of state, healthcare, and educational institutions that would be subject to paying this new fee will react to the proposal.

📍 Dover’s Special Legislative, Finance, and Administration Committee will meet at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside City Council Chambers, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.

Housing discussions continue

Affordable housing and homelessness have dominated the public debate across the state over the past year. During that time, state officials from various departments have been holding regular meetings to discuss the issues. 

The interagency collaborative will meet again this week to discuss transitional and supportive housing measures. Such measures have been a key to efforts to help unhoused individuals find stable housing.   

📍 The state’s Transitional and Supportive Housing Subcommittee will meet virtually only on Tuesday at 10 a.m. Click here for more details, including sign-in information.  

The post Get involved: Red Clay’s superintendent, Dover talks new fees appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Healthcare in Delaware is costly not only for patients, but also state taxpayers. This year, lawmakers took aim at those costs with multiple bills targeting how patients are billed, and how high a hospital can charge for both inpatient and outpatient procedures. 

Delaware healthcare faced a reckoning in 2026, as legislators approved a number of bills that could dramatically reshape access and the price of care for patients.  

Proposals on how much hospitals can charge patients for both inpatient and outpatient services, broadening federally mandated free and reduced care requirements, as well as easing regulatory approvals for hospitals all passed the General Assembly and are headed to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk to be considered, if they haven’t been signed already.

Lawmakers debated these changes as healthcare spending in Delaware has grown unchecked in recent years, and outside taxpayer injections helped to pay the medical debts of thousands of Delawareans, despite hospital policies that could have made those treatments free or discounted in the first place. 

Additionally, Delaware is making legislative changes to create an onramp for hundreds of millions of federal dollars meant to bolster rural healthcare. Those funds were awarded to all 50 states to ease congressional lawmakers into voting to gut billions of dollars in Medicaid funding in 2025. 

Here’s what to know about the most important healthcare bills that passed this year, and what they could mean for costs in the coming years. 

Primary care reforms

One of this year’s most contested healthcare bills, introducing hospital price caps and deeper investments in primary care, led to fierce debate in the State Senate.

Senate Bill 1 aims to rein in healthcare costs to consumers, which have exploded in Delaware in recent years. 

By capping how much a healthcare system can charge for services, while incentivizing investments in primary care, legislators hope to force a reset in how healthcare is approached in the state: If patients can be seen in low-cost primary care settings, they may avoid more costly emergency care later.

The challenge is that virtually all of Delaware’s healthcare services are tied up in just a few major hospital systems, whose budgets are largely dependent on sending patients through a variety of primary, specialty and surgical care.

Disapproval from the state’s hospital systems led to extended closed-door negotiations between lobbyists and legislators over amendments to the bill.

The bill’s prime sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark), filed two substitute versions of his original bill — changing some of its most controversial provisions.

Those changes would delay the implementation of price caps on hospital procedures, limit some state oversight in setting those caps, and completely exempt some hospitals from the regulations altogether.

Lawmakers unanimously passed the amended bill and sent it to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk early Wednesday morning.

Free and discounted care 

Another bill filed in early May expands the pool of patients eligible to receive free and discounted care from the state’s nonprofit hospital systems. 

Senate Bill 13, sponsored by Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear), examines a program already required by the federal government for nonprofit hospitals to receive tax breaks. 

Nonprofit hospitals are mandated by the Internal Revenue Service to provide a “community benefit” to earn their tax-exempt status. Historically, that benefit has been offering free or discounted care, sometimes called “charity care.”

The legislation comes months after a Spotlight Delaware investigation called into question the charity care practices at the state’s largest healthcare system, ChristianaCare. 

The new legislative push also follows a separate effort last summer in which the state paid off medical debts for thousands of Delawareans, despite hospital charity care policies that could have mitigated those costs.

In October, Spotlight Delaware reported hospitals had to provide free or discounted care to patients living at or below 350% of the federal poverty line, or about $55,860 annually. 

Under the new proposal, the state’s nonprofit hospitals would be required to provide free care to patients living below 300% of the federal poverty line, with large discounts for patients in higher percentage brackets. 

• Below 300% of the FPL ($46,950 a year) – Full discount
• 300-350% of the FPL ($46,950 to $54,775 a year) – 75% discount 
• 350-400% of the FPL ($54,775 to $62,600 a year) – 50% discount

Separately, the legislation allows people living at 500% of the federal poverty line — $78,250 a year — to seek out a 50% discount if billed expenses are greater than 10% of their income.

The bill also requires the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board, an embattled regulatory board, to establish rules surrounding what information hospitals are allowed to request when determining eligibility for free or discounted care. 

It also says the board will establish those regulations “with input from the Delaware Healthcare Association,” the state’s hospital lobbying group.

Senate Bill 13 faced little resistance in the Delaware Senate, but almost all of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the bill. Lawmakers sent the bill to Meyer’s desk on June 23. 

Mental health insurance protections

Separately, lawmakers passed legislation that would ensure people in need of mental health and substance use treatment receive fair treatment from insurers, and that they are not denied care required for their recoveries.  

Senate Bill 22, also introduced by Townsend, would bolster mental health and addiction treatment by requiring insurers to improve the number of providers in their networks. The bill also includes language hamstringing insurers’ ability to deny covering care.

Delaware’s proposal aims to strengthen what is called “mental health parity,” a federal rule created to ensure patients had equal access to mental health and medical services.

And while SB 22 looks to improve access to mental health treatment in the state, there are still questions about its impact on the quality of care. Delaware relies on inpatient facilities to fulfill many of the state’s most acute mental health needs.  

But Spotlight Delaware has recently reported on two of the state’s largest inpatient mental health facilities, and how some patients felt they left treatment worse than when they entered.

SB 22 now sits on Meyer’s desk. 

Hospital oversight board changes

Nearly two years after the state formed a hospital oversight board with the ability to modify and veto budgeted spending by private hospitals, lawmakers had to pass a bill repealing much of that board’s power. 

Senate Bill 213 was introduced in late December as part of a proposed legal settlement between ChristianaCare and state officials. Lawmakers passed the bill in January and Meyer quickly signed it into law.

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by ChristianaCare in 2024 that challenged the state’s formation of the oversight board, also known as the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board.

As part of the settlement, ChristianaCare agreed to dismiss the case as long as the state removed the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board’s budget veto powers.

Before SB 213, the Diamond State Hospital Cost Review Board’s oversight would have followed a four-step process. 

Hospitals would submit detailed financial documents, which board members would review. If they deemed hospital spending to be too large, they would put the facility on a “performance improvement plan.” 

If a hospital failed to correct its overspending, the board could then modify or veto its budget. 

Now that SB 213 has been signed into law, the board no longer has the power to modify or veto the budgets of hospitals they deem to be too extravagant.

Instead, the oversight board can require hospitals to follow compliance plans outlining how they intend to lower costs that are deemed to be too high.

The law also introduces “meaningful cost containment arrangement” plans, which are described as “contracts between hospitals and payers” meant to hold the hospitals responsible for controlling health care spending in a specific area. 

Hospitals can enter these agreements and be exempt from compliance plans for one year, the law said. But it does not exempt them from the financial reporting requirements outlined in the law, like sharing budget information and labor costs.

Hospital approvals 

House Bill 17 eases regulatory approvals for healthcare providers looking to expand their campuses or buy new medical equipment. It comes as other states have repealed this regulatory requirement, and the state agreed to reform its own process to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government. 

The legislation updates the state’s certificate of public review program, in which an oversight board governs additions to Delaware’s health care ecosystem by requiring approval for equipment purchases and campus expansions. 

Prior to HB 17, the Delaware Health Resources Board would field applications from the state’s health care providers and determine whether they can introduce new services or facilities into the state. 

Under the new law, providers would still need to receive approvals from the Delaware Health Resources Board for equipment purchases and large capital projects that cost more than $5.8 million. 

The new law also maintains regulations that require state approval when a hospital requests an increase in bed capacity greater than 10%.

The board is meant to act as a watchdog to ensure the state does not become oversaturated with one type of service, and to vet both programs and providers wishing to offer care in Delaware.

It has long been targeted by Republicans as an example of over-regulation that spurns free market investments in the health care sector. A dozen states, including Pennsylvania, have removed their certificate of need laws in recent decades.

In a letter signed by the entirety of Delaware’s legislature, lawmakers said they would “reform” the certificate of need process “in areas where current rules may limit access or innovation, particularly in rural and underserved regions.”

The letter came as the state began to pursue federal funds through the “Rural Health Transformation Program,” a new $50 billion nationwide program meant to bolster rural health care.

The post Delaware General Assembly roundup: Healthcare pricing reforms appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

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

The Wilmington City Council failed to override a mayoral veto of a housing ordinance Thursday that would have established a dedicated fund for affordable housing construction, homeless services, and first-time homebuyer assistance.

The vote marked the latest in a months-long battle over the city’s housing strategy between Wilmington Mayor John Carney and several City Council members. While both sides say they support expanding affordable housing, they are divided over whether the city should establish a permanent housing fund or focus on funding housing items directly in the city’s budget.

The vote came two weeks after Mayor John Carney vetoed the ordinance, stating in a letter to City Council that it “lacks a funding mechanism and does not advance Wilmington’s strategy to create more affordable housing in a meaningful way.” 

He also said the proposal would create an advisory committee that duplicates the work of an existing housing committee in the city. 

During Thursday’s meeting, the bill’s sponsor Councilwoman Shané Darby pushed back, arguing her advisory body would serve a different role because it would be a permanent body responsible for overseeing the trust fund, studying housing issues and making recommendations about how the money should be allocated.

Darby also said City Council could identify revenue sources for the trust fund in the future through city appropriations, state funding or developer fees. 

“If the concern is that the fund needs more revenue, then our next policy discussion should be identifying additional revenue sources, not rejecting the framework altogether,” Darby said.

Darby needed nine council members to override the veto of her ordinance. The final vote was 8-5, leaving Carney’s June-18 veto in place.

Prior to the vote Thursday, Councilmembers Michelle Harlee, Maria Cabrera, Nathan Field and Latisha Bracy, said they support the creation of a housing trust fund but echoed Carney’s critique, saying the city should first determine a funding structure and ensure it aligns with the affordable housing initiatives already approved in the budget. 

They also argued that moving forward without the mayor’s support would make the trust difficult to implement.

“We could pass this, we can overturn the veto, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean that the administration would have to implement it. I would like to see something that we can implement,” Cabrera said.

The discussion led to a heated back and forth after Bracey asserted that more collaboration with the administration was necessary to put the measure in place.

“We don’t have an enforcement mechanism to make the mayor and his administration do anything, so it behooves us to actually work across the hall with them and make sure that we have a housing trust,” Bracy said.

Darby pushed back, saying she had worked with the mayor’s office throughout the ordinance’s development and met repeatedly with Carney’s staff. She added that she emailed the administration twice after the veto but never received a response.

“To sit here and act like I wasn’t collaborative, you are a liar,” Darby said to Bracy.

Asked about the comments, Daniel Walker, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, confirmed that Darby contacted the mayor’s office after the veto but only to share why she disagreed with Carney’s veto, to relay questions from other council members, and to ask if Carney had other concerns outside of the initial veto letter. 

“Our letter was clear, and we had nothing new to share. Both of those communications are included here. She never asked for a meeting to specifically consider an alternative proposal,” Walker said to Spotlight Delaware.  

Walker said the mayor’s office is still open to working on legislation that creates “opportunities that complement the existing housing plan.”

Months of past deliberations

Darby first introduced the housing trust fund proposal in February, pitching it as a permanent fund for affordable housing construction, homeless services, and first-time homebuyer assistance.

A month later, Carney unveiled his proposed city budget for 2027, which included a $20 million housing package. Nearly $17 million of that proposal was earmarked for subsidies to developers building affordable housing. 

But the subsidies sparked criticism from City Council members who argued it was too costly and would do little to address residents’ immediate housing needs.

By May, a faction on the council rallied behind a new housing agenda that had Darby’s housing trust measure as a centerpiece. Housing advocates also urged the council to approve the measure, arguing it was needed to address the city’s growing affordability crisis.

Carney later scaled back his housing proposal to an $11.8 million package, which the City Council largely preserved in the final budget. 

And two weeks later, the council approved Darby’s housing trust ordinance, setting the stage for the mayor’s veto and Thursday’s unsuccessful override attempt.

The debate between the council and the Carney Administration over how the city should invest in affordable housing has also unfolded just as the city was facing ongoing criticisms over its response to homelessness, particularly at a city-sanctioned encampment at Christina Park.

Carney issued his veto letter to the council on June 18, which Darby publicly criticized. In a June interview with Spotlight Delaware, Darby said she believed Carney vetoed her housing trust measure because he’s “not a fan of me.” 

More from the council debate

The arguments raised during Thursday’s debate, prompted frustration from some council members who criticized the body for stalling efforts to address affordable housing.

Councilman Coby Owens noted that his colleagues had rejected an alternative proposal during budget negotations that would have set aside funding for the housing trust.

Now, he said, some of those same colleagues were arguing the trust should not be created until a funding source was identified. 

“I’ve heard so much double talk tonight. It’s insane. Can’t we come together as a council and do one thing together?”

Those who voted in favor of overriding Carney’s veto included Darby, Johnson, McCoy, Harlee Owens, Christian Willauer, Alex Hackett, and Council President Trippi Congo. 

Voting against the override were councilmembers Bracy, Field, Cabrera, James Spadola, and Zanthia Oliver. 

The post Wilmington City Council fails to override Carney’s housing veto appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

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In pushing Fifa to reverse Folarin Balogun’s suspension, the president did the most American thing possible: assert unasked-for power to get his way

The story of Garrincha’s red card in the 1962 World Cup is the stuff of legend. The Brazilian great was sent off in the semifinals for lashing out at an opponent, but back then, Fifa had no automatic one-match suspension in place. So a disciplinary committee convened the next day to decide his fate for the final.

As the story goes, the assistant referee who had the best view of the offense was paid off and disappeared, and the president of Chile, the tournament’s host, put in a call to Fifa, urging them to decide against any additional suspension. He did so for the sake of keeping one of the tournament’s most entertaining players on the field. Garrincha emerged scot-free, and Brazil won their second World Cup days later.

The abandoned house next door meant a lot to Christina Kary. For years, she tended to it, planting purple flowers, removing weeds and picking up trash. She attached locks to the doors to prevent trespassers from entering. 

She had considered buying the property, located on the Cadillac Heights block where her family built the first houses in the early 1900s. Several years ago, she learned that the small home with a front porch was owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which manages the city’s vacant properties. Kary, 86, said she told a land bank inspector she wanted to purchase it but didn’t follow up, thinking she would eventually hear back.

Then, one morning in 2024, she heard a commotion as heavy equipment squeezed through the alley. Kary watched from her backyard as the house was demolished, her feet vibrating beneath her. She marked the day in yellow highlighter on her paper wall calendar where she records other notable events like birthdays, doctor appointments and Bible study meetups. She would later learn that the city had sold the home to Crown Enterprises, a real estate firm owned by members of the Detroit area’s wealthy and politically connected Moroun family.

Over the last seven years, Crown has obtained dozens of parcels in Cadillac Heights and secured permits to demolish more than 20 structures. In all, the company now owns more than 160 lots in the neighborhood, most of which are barren. It also has erected a concrete-mixing plant just across the street from Kary’s home, creating clouds of dust, noise at early hours of the day and late into the night, and industrial lights that pierce through the area. 

The company’s takeover of the southeast section of the neighborhood has marked the end of the community Kary and her neighbors knew — a process aided by the decisions of city officials. First, the city turned over dozens of properties to the company as part of a historic land-swap deal in 2019 and then gave it first dibs to purchase other lots, including the one next to Kary’s home, until 2034. 

The city has also enabled the company in other ways, providing latitude on permitting and neighborhood maintenance. For instance, although city inspectors have repeatedly ticketed the company for violating rules limiting the spread of dust, the city also set up a system under which the company’s fines were dismissed.

As Detroit rebuilds from the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, major construction has reshaped the city: the first new skyscraper in 50 years, new hotels and sports complexes, repaved roads, and the renovation of Michigan Central Station, which had sat empty for decades while owned by the Moroun family and became a symbol of the city’s decline.  

To meet the demand, at least three new concrete facilities have opened in the city since 2019. One is by a park, and two are in residential neighborhoods, including the plant in Cadillac Heights, called Kronos. The state also approved a permit for a new cement grinding plant that has not yet opened in an industrial area of southwest Detroit. Other proposed operations have been blocked after residents protested. 

The new concrete plants are producing materials needed to help rebuild parts of the city while creating a bitter irony for residents such as Kary. She said Detroit’s decision to turn so many properties over to Crown “guarantees the death of this area.” 

In written responses to questions from BridgeDetroit and ProPublica, company representative Kenneth Dobson called Kronos “a good neighbor.” He said the company complies with all permitting requirements and city ordinances, and that it properly mitigates dust. 

Dobson said having a concrete supplier within the city helps support rebuilding and broadly improves the lives of Detroiters. Without concrete facilities in Detroit, “not only would there be less jobs and less City tax revenue, but the cost of both public and private infrastructure development would go up,” wrote Dobson, vice president of the Detroit International Bridge Company, another Moroun-owned business. 

Dobson said Crown has invested $10 million in the neighborhood. When asked what that has funded, he cited costs related to the Kronos development: demolishing homes, obtaining permits and equipment to operate, and taking measures to control dust and monitor air quality.

Messages sent by ProPublica to email addresses linked to Matthew Moroun, who oversees the family business, didn’t receive a response. Dobson said the email was forwarded to him and he responded on Moroun’s behalf.

With City Help, Crown Moves In  

Cadillac Heights’ most recent transformation began in May 2019, thanks in part to a vote by Detroit City Council to approve a nearly $267 million multipronged land swap orchestrated by former Mayor Mike Duggan.

The deal delivered ownership of dozens of lots in Cadillac Heights to Crown. In exchange, Crown gave up land in another part of the city, which allowed automaker Stellantis to open the first new car plant in Detroit in three decades, with the promise of 5,000 new jobs. 

Duggan declared the day the land swap was approved as the “greatest” day he had had as mayor. 

“Today was historic,” Duggan, who served for 12 years and recently gave up his bid for governor, said at a press conference. “Detroit was the city that built the middle class in America, and today we started to rebuild the middle class in Detroit.”

The news that day focused on the promise of Stellantis, not on what the deal meant for Cadillac Heights. Duggan spokesperson Andrea Bitely said the mayor did not know that Crown would put a concrete plant in the neighborhood and that doing so would ultimately drive out residents. 

At its prime in the 1960s, Cadillac Heights had been full of local businesses and community life. The neighborhood attracted a predominantly working-class community of Black families who lived in modest single-family houses. 

Buddy’s Pizza, famous as the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza, was founded there and drew crowds from across the city. Cadillac Heights also was home to Simpson’s Records, one of the city’s longest-running record shops.

But over several decades, Detroit declined under the weight of the crack epidemic, massive population loss and disinvestment. City historian Jamon Jordan said some neighborhoods saw more problems than others, but Cadillac Heights “had all of those things.”

By the time of the 2019 deal, roughly a third of the homes that were left had been abandoned, according to census data, and the streets were lined with empty storefronts. The remaining residents, many of whom, like Kary, had lived in Cadillac Heights for decades, said they tried to keep the neighborhood clean and enjoyable.

The Moroun family, too, had owned property in Cadillac Heights since the 1960s and operated a trucking depot there, which residents also found bothersome, but less so than the concrete facility. (The family also owns the Ambassador Bridge to Canada and more than 1,000 properties throughout Detroit, and has tried to block a competing bridge to Canada.)

Crown gradually acquired more land in Cadillac Heights and had about 80 properties at the time of the land swap, records show.

The deal gave Crown 34 more parcels throughout the neighborhood and the first rights to purchase others if they end up in the Land Bank by repossession due to tax foreclosure or other reasons. So far, Crown has purchased seven parcels under this option and demolished three homes, including the one next to Kary’s. 

Detroit officials made other decisions, some in violation of city rules, that enabled Kronos to operate by summer 2022, before the company obtained a permit. The city ordered that operations stop. It then issued the permit without fining the company, and the concrete plant was reassembled. A city spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the company wasn’t fined.

The city issued a permit even though Crown had unpaid tickets for blight violations, which should have disqualified it from getting the approval to move forward. Crystal Rogers, a manager in the city’s Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, attributed that to “human error.” 

The company also accrued tickets between when it first applied for the permit and when the city approved it; Rogers said checking whether a company has pending tickets during that time period would “slow the development process.” 

The tickets also should have prevented Crown from purchasing property from the county’s tax auction, according to city law. Yet records show the company was able to purchase a four-bedroom, single-family house in Cadillac Heights in October 2022 while it had unresolved blight tickets. Crown said it had disputed some of the tickets. The city acknowledged the tickets but said they were resolved by the time the sale was recorded months later.  

After the concrete plant opened, the company acquired additional property from homeowners who decided to leave, further transforming the neighborhood. Dobson said the company is buying properties to create a buffer around the plant.

Martin Murray, a University of Michigan urban planning professor, said what’s happening in Cadillac Heights follows a similar pattern to other U.S. cities undergoing redevelopment. Businesses “can promise jobs, they can promise a tax base, and the city will go along with that, because it makes them look better and they’re willing to sacrifice residents,” he said.

City Council President James Tate Jr. and member Scott Benson, who represents the Cadillac Heights neighborhood, voted in favor of the land swap. Tate said he thinks the arrangement benefited the city overall, but that officials should have questioned how Crown would use the properties before they approved the deal.  

“Knowing what I know now, there are some additional protections and questions that I would ask,” he said. “I would never sacrifice one neighborhood to satisfy another, but there are times when you have to look at deals, and there may be some unintended consequences.” 

Benson declined to comment on his decision to approve the deal and said he has advocated for zoning changes that would make the area less industrial.

“They Could Taste the Dust” 

Since the Kronos plant opened four years ago, residents have filed about 80 complaints to both city and state environmental offices, according to records obtained by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. They have sent photos, videos and pleas for help. 

In complaints filed with the state, they described “literal whiteout conditions” and “dust clouds.” They said the dust was blanketing their neighborhood and irritating their eyes. They said they had to stop doing yardwork, go inside and shut all their windows.

“They could feel grit and debris hitting their eyes, that they tried not to inhale but they could taste the dust,” according to a state inspector’s summary of one complaint. The state’s environmental division repeatedly has recommended that Crown spray the site with water to minimize dust, which the company says it does every hour the plant is operating. Inspectors also told Crown multiple times to reduce the speed of its trucks to limit the spread of dust.

Josef Stephens, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said that while the state has noted dust at and around the Kronos site, it has not been opaque enough to warrant a violation.

City officials, too, are aware of residents’ concerns. In 2024, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring companies to control the spread of dust or face penalties. The city set up a hotline and email address so residents could submit complaints. 

Nearly half of the complaints submitted to dust@detroitmi.gov have been about Kronos,  according to city officials. 

Dobson, the company representative, said readings from its air monitor have never exceeded the city’s pollution limits and that the facility is “fully compliant.”

Matthew Tomasz, who lived across the street from Kronos, filed complaints with the city and also ended up in a legal battle with Crown. The company sued him for trespassing on its vacant property next to his home. He countersued, claiming the company had violated the city’s dust ordinance when particles from the concrete facility traveled onto his property, calling it an “invasion.”

“Each day that dust from Kronos or the vacant lots lands on Mr. Tomasz’s property, a new trespass occurs,” according to the complaint. The lawsuits settled in February, but the terms were not made public, records show. 

“I feel like I’m staring into a wasteland every day,” Tomasz said in an interview late last year. He said dust from the plant was so thick that he couldn’t see 10 feet in front of him. “There’s no peace to be had at my house.” 

The city required that Kronos develop and adhere to a plan to limit the amount of dust. But despite five violations since Kronos agreed to adopt a plan, only once has the city’s environmental department fined the company for its failure to comply. The city last month dismissed two tickets issued to Crown, totalling $2,500, for the company’s failure to keep dust from traveling into the neighborhood.

The company has been excused from the dust-related fines, as well as tickets for other reasons, because of an agreement it signed with the city in 2022 after the plant opened. That first-of-its-kind property maintenance agreement gives Crown up to 30 days to fix nonemergency building and environmental violations — and up to 10 days to address overgrown weeds and trash — before it is assessed fines. The city has since entered into similar agreements with two other concrete businesses and a developer.  

The agreement with Crown came after the company racked up blight tickets across the city. At the time it was signed, the city’s law department acknowledged it didn’t know the number of outstanding tickets but agreed that the company could pay $50,000 to resolve all the past violations before the new agreement kicked in. 

One ticket that was excused last year came after Detroit resident Jahdante Smith emailed a complaint to city officials in July with a video showing a cloud of dust blowing near the facility. “This is a ridiculous everyday occurrence,” Smith wrote.

A city inspector issued Crown a $500 ticket seven weeks later for failing to mitigate dust, but the city’s environmental department dismissed it under the agreement. 

The city also waived a $1,000 ticket issued to Crown in October for exceeding state and city requirements to limit dust opacity. The company temporarily suspended operations and agreed to sweep and spray water on the streets daily to control the dust, and the ticket was dismissed, Rogers said. 

City inspectors also alerted Crown to code violations at other properties in the neighborhood, including a vacant lot littered with garbage and another with overgrown weeds and broken tree limbs. An abandoned home was unsecured, leaving it open to trespassers, a city inspector found. 

Because of its agreement with the city, Crown was not issued any fines after it addressed the issues with the three properties. The vacant home has been demolished, and the other lots are now barren. 

However, a recent visit to the neighborhood showed that similar issues have resurfaced: Another home that Crown purchased in January had missing first-floor windows and no front door, allowing anyone to enter. The lawn was covered in tall weeds and grass, and trash littered the yard. Crown plans to demolish the home but is waiting on the utilities to be disconnected, said Dobson, the company representative.

Dobson said the property maintenance agreement has worked because the company responds to concerns and fixes “the potential violation.” Conrad Mallett, the city’s top attorney, who negotiated the agreement, said it is “working well from the perspective of both parties.”

But residents and advocates have continued to protest, speak out at City Council meetings and collect hundreds of signatures to shut the plant down and get the area rezoned to be less industrial. Councilmember Benson asked the city’s law department about legal avenues the city could pursue to close Kronos.

The department, in response, said officials have no legal authority to interfere because the plant is properly permitted and complies with zoning regulations and city rules. And even though the city is considering rezoning some parts of Cadillac Heights to make them less industrial, the plans stop just short of the lots owned by Crown, records show.

The Moroun family continues to expand its concrete supply business, called Hercules Material Holdings, which now has seven locations in Michigan. Other facilities are expected to open in Toledo, Ohio, and Windsor, Ontario, where the Morouns have been purchasing properties for decades.

Residents Move Out  

Some Cadillac Heights residents say they can’t coexist with the concrete plant. 

They recently turned to the Wayne County Commission for help. At a May county committee meeting, advocate Sharon Buttry told commissioners that residents are frustrated that Crown hasn’t been ticketed more.

Commissioners voted to pass a resolution urging the state and city to further monitor the site and revoke permits if there are violations. “Our neighborhoods should never have to sacrifice their health and peace of mind for industrial operations that create ongoing public nuisance concerns,” county Commissioner Martha G. Scott said in an interview. 

The county is paying a local air monitoring company, JustAir, to track and analyze air quality near Kronos. The company found the quality was “measurably worse” during the six days of the week when Kronos operates.

Separately, Mayor Mary Sheffield, who took office this year, directed the city’s environmental agency to install four monitors near the plant so residents “knew that the administration is taking their concerns seriously,” according to city spokesperson John Roach. He said the monitors have not measured pollution that exceeds moderate levels. (Sheffield voted against the land swap when she was on City Council.) 

Kronos representatives, meanwhile, have worked to build public support. The company has said that it has hired Detroiters to work at the plant, donated food and backpacks to community groups, and paved a new parking lot for a neighborhood church. A few years ago, it published renderings online showing how it would improve the neighborhood with paved sidewalks, mature trees and 6-foot-tall grassy hills to create a buffer from the plant.

Those images don’t match what the neighborhood looks like. Sidewalks are missing or cracked. Barbed wire hangs from fences over debris-strewn lots. Water sprayed to control dust creeps into the streets, creating small pools of green liquid. Lots are barren and gray after being treated with herbicides to prevent weeds.

Dobson said Crown hasn’t been able to carry out the improvements because the city hasn’t signed off on its plan. Roach said the city won’t grant permission until the company addresses code violations, including an unpermitted chain-link fence and inadequate screening to hide operations. 

If Crown doesn’t make the improvements soon, Mitchell Gross, who lives across the street from Kronos, said he’s going to plant evergreen trees himself “to filter the dust.” 

He said he keeps his windows shut and that his son and his two young grandchildren, who used to live with him, have left Detroit to protect their health. “They’re in a nice place and getting good air to breathe,” said Gross, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 50 years.

Some of Cadillac Heights’ longtime residents aren’t sticking around to find out whether things will improve. At least 16 residents who lived in the area closest to the Kronos plant have sold their land to Crown since the land swap, according to records reviewed by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. The sellers have received “a windfall,” with an average 2024 purchase price of $114,000 that has been “increasing,” according to Crown representative Dobson. 

Bitely, the spokesperson for Duggan, said that having so many private sales to one entity “had never happened before in Detroit.”

Samantha Flowers was among the first residents to fight against the concrete operation. Last year, she texted BridgeDetroit and ProPublica a video of the plant, taken at 6:15 a.m., to demonstrate the daily noise and bright lights residents are accustomed to. “Typical morning in the neighborhood,” she wrote. 

Flowers sold her home and five other parcels to Crown in January for $125,000, according to the county’s online records. Tomasz, who had filed a lawsuit against the company, gave up his hope of buying the lot next to his and instead sold his home to the company for $150,000. Dobson said the property will be used to create additional buffering from the plant.

Kary, however, plans to live out her final years in her family’s home. She pays for grass seed to maintain the Crown-owned vacant lot next to hers so she can look out her windows at something nice. 

“It’s home,” she said. “I’m not leaving.”

The post Left in the Dust: How a Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant Took Over a Detroit Community appeared first on ProPublica.

A Florida man thought he had carefully planned for a seamless switch between health plans. It was anything but.

Prosecutors will present their case this week against Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Authorities say death toll likely to rise after second assault on Ukrainian capital and surrounding region within days

• Europe live – latest updates

A wave of Russian missiles and drones has struck Kyiv on the eve of a Nato summit in Turkey, killing more than a dozen people and heavily damaging apartment blocks and other buildings.

“In total, 14 people have died and 117 have been injured in Kyiv,” the office of the attorney general said on Monday morning.

Elbit Systems supplied Tzayad digital army programme to map people, vehicles and other objects in real time

Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon with its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country’s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems.

A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military’s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London.

"A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs," remembers the Wall Street Journal.But "For the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking a more optimistic tone." In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman — who has long predicted that AI will lead to seismic shifts in the workforce — said during a conference, "We've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications." Soon after, he told CNBC, "Our industry underestimated how much we're going to be able to keep people at the center of everything." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned in May 2025 that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level jobs, a year later highlighted more positive scenarios for AI-adopting businesses: "They can do the same thing with less resources, and that leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources. But that requires creativity...." Is the sunnier outlook a move to win back customers and the public who are souring on AI's world-upending promise? Or is the role of AI in the workplace now just better understood...? Collectively, the narrative has shifted from worker-light doomsday scenarios caused by AI to a future in which workers keep their jobs — and get a productivity boost. The sentiment change isn't limited to tech leaders: A survey by EY-Parthenon found that the percentage of CEOs who believe AI investments will result in significant reductions in head count fell from around 46% in January 2025 to just 20% this May. "They may have noticed that the labor market is genuinely not changing (i.e., imploding) as rapidly as they expected," said David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They may have realized it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy." The article notes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos "has a history of predicting that AI will create new jobs," and in June said AI could even lead to a labor shortage. "When asked on CNBC in May about people being afraid of AI taking jobs, he said the reason they're afraid is because 'all these smart people keep saying that.'" The article then adds that "Fewer people are saying it now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crowds swelled through Tehran as mourners dressed in black carried flags proclaiming: ‘We will rise’

A crowd of millions assembled on Monday for the funeral procession of Iran’s assassinated supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

The scale and depth of the march, however engineered, represents an extraordinary turnaround for a country that only seven months ago was gripped by street protests at which thousands of people were killed by government security forces. Many will say the assembly was a monument to a misconceived war launched on Iran by Donald Trump in February.

Suspicions grow in Lanarkshire that local people have been misled on supposed benefits of the huge development

• Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise

• What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?

The promise was that a Scottish community would be transformed by massive investment and empowered to chase “the jobs of the future”. Instead, local people in Lanarkshire fear they may have to sell their properties and lose green belt land because of the errors of a badly planned AI datacentre complex, even as those jobs and investments never arrive.

Late last year, representatives of Oakes Energy Services began to knock on doors in Newarthill, a village east of Glasgow. In letters reviewed by the Guardian, they invited residents to individual meetings. They told them about plans for a solar farm, say local people, and made offers: free solar panels, tree planting, or even cash for their properties.

Exclusive: Government and developers privately acknowledged Lanarkshire datacentre site had power provision ‘issue’

• ‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre

• What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?

A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found.

When it was announced in January, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita – would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.

A decidedly unremarkable Brazilian team had looked tentative at this tournament. A sixth World Cup title looks a long way off

Brazil were 1-0 down. At first, a few yellow jerseys wandered up the aisles and out to the concourse, writing off the small fortunes they had invested in being here, never mind the chances of their nation lifting a sixth World Cup. Then it was a steady stream of Brazil fans heading to the exits.

They knew how this was going to end. That Brazil would be eliminated here in the last 16, knocked out at the earliest stage since 1990. That they would have gone six World Cups without lifting the trophy, their longest title drought.

Premium Bluetooth noise-cancelling cans combine comfort with extensive connectivity and a user-replaceable battery

Sennheiser’s latest Momentum Bluetooth headphones build on the German audio specialist’s renowned sound quality with improved noise cancelling, exceptional comfort and a user-replaceable battery to keep pace with rivals.

The Momentum 5s cost £330 (€400/$400/A$749) and directly replace their three-year-old predecessors, facing strong competition from Bose, Sony and Sonos.

Epping footballer Nathan Fitzgerald, 27, remains in hospital after hitting his head during a game in Lalor on Saturday

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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

A suburban Melbourne footballer is receiving “end-of-life” care in hospital after a horror head clash saw him fall to the ground and hit his head on a covered cricket pitch, his club says.

High school teacher Nathan Fitzgerald, 27, was taken to Royal Melbourne hospital on Saturday after the incident during an Australian rules football game in Lalor, in Melbourne’s north. His club has since raised concerns about the covered cricket pitch on the oval, where Fitzgerald was injured.

Little-known abroad, Andy Burnham has a chance to define a new era of US-UK relations. Should he seek to charm or bargain with the bully in the White House – or treat him ‘like a poorly informed constituent’?

If, as expected, Andy Burnham becomes the British prime minister later this month, one of his first telephone calls is likely to be with Donald Trump.

Trump’s mother was Scottish and he has a nostalgic fascination with Britain. But managing a relationship with the erratic, transactional and demanding US president has been a diplomatic minefield for Burnham’s predecessors.

USA Today reports on a Facebook post from a Washington state sheriff's office: Four residents of Clallam County, a coastal region west of Seattle along northern Washington's peninsula, lost more than $673,000 in just three days, according to the Clallam County Sheriff's Office... The smallest amount lost was $3,500, which someone purchased in Apple gift cards for a scammer posing as an employee with Microsoft technical support, the sheriff's office wrote. Another person lost $50,000 after they clicked on a malicious email and unwittingly granted the scammers access to their financial accounts. The local Peninsula Daily News reports another scam involved a 64-year-old resident who attempted to contact Coinbase after seeing their account displayed shown as closed: "Believing they were speaking with a legitimate Coinbase representative, the victim was told there was fraudulent activity on the account and was instructed to download a 'rescue' application," the [sheriff's] release states. "The application allowed the scammer to remotely access the victim's phone." They then convinced the victim to transfer approximately $200,000 worth of cryptocurrency to what was described as a secure wallet. The funds were instead transferred to the scammer and could not be recovered... In one scam, reported Monday, an 84-year-old Clallam County resident believed they had received an email from their daughter with a photo. After opening the email, a fake Microsoft security alert appeared on the computer directing the victim to call a support number, according to the release. "The victim was transferred to someone claiming to represent the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and was falsely told they were under investigation in a child pornography and money laundering case," the release states. "The scammers instructed the victim not to contact local law enforcement and claimed local banks were also under investigation. The victim was told their bank accounts were in danger of being seized and was instructed to purchase gold to protect their assets." In three separate transactions, the victim purchased approximately $420,000 worth of gold and gave it to an unknown man waiting at the end of their driveway. "Only after speaking with bank officials did the victim realize they had been defrauded," the release states. USA Today offers this advice from the sheriff's press release. "These criminals are professional manipulators who prey on fear, trust and urgency. We encourage everyone to pause before sending money, purchasing gold or gift cards, or transferring cryptocurrency. A simple phone call to a trusted family member, your bank or local law enforcement can prevent a life-changing financial loss."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America’s dominance depends on getting local communities on board.

Washington dismisses NATO’s value at its own peril.

Has the success of the US men’s team – and hosting the World Cup – finally made Americans fall in love with football? With Guardian US soccer correspondent Jeff Rueter

For decades, the US has been unmoved by the charms of the beautiful game. As Guardian US soccer correspondent Jeff Rueter, a boyhood fan of the sport, explains, football in America was a ‘ramshackle’ affair – unloved, boring, a little alien.

But, Helen Pidd hears, things are beginning to change. The US men’s national team is thriving in the World Cup they are hosting, and Americans are being won over by travelling football teams and fans, from the Scots in Boston to Algerians in Kansas

"Hundreds of freedom lovers are rallying behind a US Air Force engineer" who's been accused of damaging over a dozen AI-integrated surveillance cameras last year and even knocking down their poles. Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this article from Futurism: According to local channel WAVY, Virginia-based Air Force engineer and mechanic Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 counts of destruction of property, as well as six counts of both petit larceny and possession of burglary tools related to the destruction of Flock license plate cameras... [Wavy reports the cameras were sometimes pointed in the wrong direction or thrown to the street.] Armed with garbage bags, spray paint, and even chainsaws, a not insignificant number of privacy vigilantes have taken the fight to Flock, using any means to free their neighborhoods of the ominous surveillance poles. On a GoFundMe page to raise money for his legal defense, the 41-year-old Sovern explained that this kind of privacy-minded vandalism has far more support than would outwardly appear... Sovern kicked off the campaign late in December of 2025, where he encouraged his supporters to "reach out to the local governments and demand that these systems are taken down." The Virginia resident initially set his funding goal to $8,500. As news of his case has spread across the web, the amount of support has far outpaced those already-hopeful aspirations. [Two hours ago the legal fund stood at $23,326 from over 680 donors].

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was more than two years ago that TypeScript's creator Anders Hejlsberg announced plans to rewrite its compiler in Go. This week Microsoft announced its first Go-based release candidate for TypeScript 7.0, reports InfoWorld: TypeScript 7.0 is often about 10 times faster than TypeScript 6.0, Microsoft said, thanks to native code speed and shared memory parallelism... Unlike TypeScript 6.0, TypeScript 7.0 performs many steps in parallel, including parsing, type checking, and emitting, Microsoft said. Some of these steps, such as parsing and emitting, can mostly be done independently across files. For that reason, parallelization automatically scales well with larger codebases with relatively little overhead. However, not every step in a TypeScript build is easily parallelizable, Microsoft said. Microsoft plans to release TypeScript 7.0 within the next month, the article points out, but developers can try the new compiler by installing it from the typescript package on npm: npm install -D typescript@rc

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Race to develop ‘embodied AI’ focuses on creating dextrous hands to transform humanoid robots from gimmicks into useful products

Human hands – nimble, nerve-filled appendages that are the most flexible part of the human skeleton – are exceptionally complex. Many tasks that most people can do largely without thinking, from tying a pair of shoelaces to buttoning up a shirt, in fact require a complex set of neurological instructions and precise choreography. In thousands of years of human history, no machine has been able to truly replicate human’s greatest tool.

But now, as artificial intelligence (AI) races forwards, some companies think they are close to surpassing this final but most difficult hurdle in robotics. Most of them are in China.

A seaplane carrying at least eight people made a hard landing in New York City's East River on Sunday, officials said.

"Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch," writes The Verge. While it's not available for downloads in most locations, Meta's Pocket will allow people "to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts," writes TechCrunch. They're called "gizmos", and Pocket "also offers a scrollable feed where you can play with gizmos others have made." Some context from The Verge: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea... It follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called Gizmo, as Business Insider reported in March. On a help center page, Meta also describes a gizmo as a "playable AI-generated experience," and when you post one, Meta says you can choose to let other people remix them. "Based on the app's screenshots in Google Play, there are many similarities to Gizmo's original app, which is still listed," notes TechCrunch. "Pocket is another example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools more mainstream, extending its earlier efforts, which included AI-generated images created via its Meta AI app and AI videos created with its app called Vibes. It has also added AI features across its social platforms... " Given that Meta has not officially announced Pocket's debut, it's likely that Pocket is still in its initial experimentation phase. Its counterpart Gizmo, however, had generated 635,000 lifetime installs across both iOS and Google Play, according to Appfigures, which noted it had a 98% positive sentiment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Analysis finds services cheaper but country ranks 57th in network performance and 70th for download speeds

British holidaymakers watching online videos while they sit on a European beach this summer are likely to be pleasantly surprised: the signal should be better than at home.

Mobile coverage in the UK is worse than in any of the 27 EU member countries, and every other member of the G7 group of large economies, according to analysis by consumer group Which? of data from Opensignal.

Measures to be announced to make funding more transparent amid new revelations about Reform UK leader

Ministers will launch a crackdown on large political donations on Monday, as Nigel Farage faces a possible second investigation into gifts he received from a convicted fraudster before becoming an MP.

The government will announce a series of measures to make political funding more transparent, including restrictions on donations from foreign-based benefactors.

Report says current network of buses, trains and stations effectively locks 2.8m people out of workforce

Investing in the UK transport network to make it fully accessible to disabled passengers could boost the economy by £176bn by helping millions more people into work, according to a report.

Making the economic case for an inclusive transport network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said the current system was inaccessible to almost a quarter of the working-age population.

Dan Jarvis, who wants to stay on as defence secretary, says he is confident PM-in-waiting values national security

The new defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, has called on Andy Burnham to increase defence spending dramatically from 2030 and “evidence the trajectory” towards a Nato target that would mean £25bn a year more for the military by the middle of the next decade.

The former paratrooper said he was confident that the prime minister-in-waiting valued national security, as he openly lobbied him for cash that would probably have to come from cuts elsewhere.

Inquiry co-chaired by David Blunkett uncovers loss of focus on fighting crime, plus low standards and need for reform

Police leadership in England and Wales is plagued by “nepotism and bias” and too many chiefs have lost focus on fighting crime, a government-backed report has found.

The inquiry, co-chaired by former home secretary David Blunkett, found a reset was needed at all levels, with scores of top officers facing misconduct inquiries.

Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole dreamed of making baseball livelier and more fun. Now the team is taking its dances, acrobatics, and trick plays to sold-out stadiums across the U.S.

The exhibition baseball league Banana Ball focuses on entertaining people of all ages – including "Bananas Foster," a nonprofit that honors foster families.

The Trump administration is working with a U.S. company to challenge China's dominance over rare earth elements. The metals are essential for components in smartphones, robotics, fighter jets, and drones.

London black cab drivers, who are required to memorize thousands of streets to get their license, are being tested in a new way. Several companies are trying to bring robotaxis to the city's streets.

One untapped resource to meet the rising need for rare earth elements: recycling what's already been used.

In a heartfelt sign-off, Cooper reflects on the stories, risks, adventures, and human connections that defined his two decades with television's most iconic newsmagazine.

Bavi, a massive cyclone approaching the Mariana Islands east of the Philippines, was forecast to strike Rota early Monday morning local time.

• US striker was shown red in last-32 match

• Fifa announced suspension of ban earlier on Sunday

• Belgian FA ‘astonished’ by decision

Donald Trump lobbied Fifa to lift the US striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game ban for a red card received in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina, preceding Sunday’s stunning announcement that he would be available for the cohosts’ last-16 clash against Belgium in Seattle on Monday night.

Sources have told the Guardian that Trump made three calls to Fifa, starting from Wednesday, to ensure that the change was made.

• Rudi Garcia likens decision to April Fools’ Day joke

• Belgian FA says it will investigate all potential options

• USMNT reaction to Fifa flip: ‘Thought it was AI at first’

As a Fifa media officer read aloud the statement confirming the governing body’s shock reversal of US striker Folarin Balogun’s suspension on Sunday, Belgium coach Rudi Garcia and goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois put their poker faces to work. Garcia stared straight down the aisle of the press conference room at Seattle Stadium. Courtois’s eyes fluttered about, perhaps masking some rolls as he faced a press pack eager to make sense of an unexpected World Cup twist.

Balogun’s reinstatement came across as a joke to the Belgian boss, though he hardly seemed ready for a laugh.

"Companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed," writes TechCrunch. That's the conclusion of new report tracking AI spending from Ramp's corporate card/bill pay data as well as Revelio Labs' workforce records from 21,599 U.S. firms: According to the report, "high-intensity adopters" — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%. Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data isn't as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily toward tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. "This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs," the paper's authors admit, "but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses." It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry-level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%... "For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development," the report reads. "Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team." But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don't tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources — like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones that will see the largest gains. CNBC argues another AI "narrative" was challenged this week: that open source can't make money. "The assumption was that giving your model away for free meant no business. That's breaking too, as open-model companies start posting real revenue and enterprises move from renting AI to running their own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interim president says unrest will not break out despite anger at official response to the 24 June disaster

Venezuela’s interim president has defended her country’s emergency response to the twin earthquakes that have killed more than 3,000 people, vowing the country would not descend into social unrest.

Many Venezuelans have expressed anger at what they see as the US-backed government’s inadequate response to the 24 June disaster before international teams arrived.

After you get that alert, can you choose “close ride” in the top, and then look for what the “build version” is?

Also feel free to DM me your Floaty JSON file here or on discord and I can take a look as well.

Exit leaves primary voters to choose between progressive Abdul El-Sayed and centrist Haley Stevens in must-win seat

Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan Democrat, has dropped out of a contentious US Senate primary campaign, setting up a straight fight between the party’s progressive and establishment wings – represented by Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, and Haley Stevens, a congresswoman.

McMorrow’s retreat marks the end of a center-left bid to hold the seat being vacated this year by the Democrat Gary Peters. The three-way primary contest was a close one earlier in the campaign, but polls indicated that McMorrow’s support had plunged in recent weeks, as El-Sayed raced past her and Stevens to emerge as the frontrunner for the party’s nomination.

Wherever in the world you go, the smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and while this has always been problematic, recent events have made the dependency on two American tech giants for what is probably our most personal computing device even more problematic than it already was. We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it’s also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US.

Here in Europe, there’s been an awakening lately, with governments, companies, and people alike finally realising that having our entire digital infrastructure controlled by foreign, adversarial interests is a terrible idea. Sadly, breaking free from our Android and iOS chains is not so easy. The most ideal solution would be a truly open source alternative smartphone operating system, but that’s a hard sell for 99.9% of smartphone users who need the applications required to do their finances, talk to their friends, or interact with their governments. The cold and harsh truth is that with very few exceptions, these applications simply do not (yet) exist for smartphone operating systems that aren’t Android or iOS.

The only viable alternative at this point in time is to take whatever’s left of the Android Open Source Project, remove anything that ties it to Google and its services, fill in the gaps with alternative services and applications, and sell it as a Google-free or de-Googled Android platform. There’s several projects in this space, and with Europe drunkenly stumbling out of the technological hole it dug itself into, it’s no surprise that two of the more popular alternatives to Apple or Google-controlled smartphones come from Europe (and from the same country, no less). Today, we’re taking a look at one of these: iodéOS.

Iodé is a company based in Toulouse, France, which focuses on offering a Google-free Android called iodéOS, either preinstalled on phones you can buy, or as a ROM you can install yourself on supported devices. As a company, iodé makes its money through selling devices with iodéOS preinstalled, through an optional premium subscription (that I didn’t take a look at), and through donations, and all of their code is published as open source on their Gitlab instance hosted in France.

Iodé loaned me a Fairphone 6 with iodéOS preinstalled, one of he many smartphones and tablets they sell through their online store for review. This isn’t going to be an Android review; you already know what Android is like, and there’s no need for me to rehash any of that. Instead, I want to focus on the things that make using de-Googled Android different from using Google Android.

Don’t be afraid of microG

There are various ways to go about making a de-Googled Android variant, and iodéOS chose the LineageOS route, with microG installed on top. For those unaware, microG is a project which aims to replace the various proprietary parts of Google Play Services, required by many Android applications, with open source reimplementations. While it doesn’t offer 100% compatibility, it works exceptionally well, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find applications just don’t work at all with microG. IodéOS updates its microG installation through a dedicated F-Droid repository that’s obviously enabled by default, so you don’t have to do anything yourself.

Using microG instead of Google Play Services doesn’t mean you have to rely solely on whatever’s available in F-Droid, since there are a variety of alternative Play Store frontends available. IodéOS ships with the Aurora Store, which is an open-source frontend to the Play Store that can be used with or without a Google account. If you use it with your Google account, you’ll gain access to whatever applications you already own, including paid ones, but you won’t be able to buy applications inside Aurora. You can, however, buy an application on the Play Store website, after which it will show up in Aurora as well, assuming you’re logged in with the same account.

Aurora also comes with something something called FakeStore, which is sadly an important part of the puzzle; it’s a stub application that has the same package name as the real Play Store. Some applications check whether the Play Store is available before working properly, so this is sadly needed to ensure maximum compatibility. The only issue I sometimes ran into with Aurora is that it would load up its listings, but then any application I tapped on said it was unavailable. When this happened, reloading the Aurora application always fixed the issue. Annoying, but not gamebreaking.

A few things did not work for me when using microG on iodéOS, and they’re exactly the things you’d expect not to work. If you have a WearOS device, you’re out of luck; WearOS devices simply do not work when using microG, but there is a bounty to add support for it. If you want to use a smartwatch with iodéOS, there are various options available, such as Garmin devices, which is what I used during my testing and it worked flawlessly.

Another feature from “regular” Android that simply won’t work is RCS. There’s only one RCS client available on Android, Google Messages, and as you can imagine, Google is in no rush to allow devices without Google Play Services to register for and use RCS messaging. Tying to register with Google Messages will fail, and there are no other RCS clients available (save for a few China and India-specific clients). There’s a microG bounty for this, too, but no luck so far. Of course, there are countless messaging platforms that work just fine on iodéOS – regular SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and so on – and especially if you’re European, it’s unlikely RCS support matters to you at all.

I just don’t ever think or care about RCS.

The big question mark hanging over everyone’s head when they consider moving to a de-Googled Android ROM without Google Play Services is, of course, banking applications. Personally, I’m lucky in that my bank’s application works just fine without Google Play Services, and the same applies to the various related applications and services here in Sweden, such as the BankID verification application (used to verify your identity for banking, government logins, etc.) and Swish, a popular Swedish payment platform.

While I think the problem of broken banking applications is a little bit overblown, it’s still a real issue and you should do some research before making the jump. Even if your specific bank’s application is listed as broken, though, you can usually still access the same functionality through your bank’s website, even if that’s probably a little less smooth and more cumbersome. Look, nobody said ditching Google wouldn’t come with difficulties and annoyances.

While my banking situation was fine on iodéOS, the same can’t be said for NFC payments. I use Google Wallet to pay with my phone and smartwatch at stores, and it won’t come as a surprise that Google doesn’t make its Wallet application work without its Play Services installed. If you’re in the same boat, you may be able to circumvent this problem through your bank’s application, as some banks offer NFC payment functionality of their own. If not, you’re out of luck – unless you happen to have a Garmin watch with Garmin Pay, which works without Play Services or even a smartphone at all, like I wrote about extensively a year ago.

The worry about losing access to banking applications and NFC payments is probably the biggest worry people have when considering switching to a de-Googled Android ROM like iodéOS, and while that worry is valid, I do think most people will be surprised by just how many banking applications work just fine even without Google Play Services. Before making the jump, some online searching will yield several maintained lists of working and broken applications so you know what you’re in for.

That being said, this is not an ideal situation, and one that most likely needs remedying in a regulatory manner. Access to basic and often mandatory services like banking, online government ID systems, messaging, and more should not be predicated on buying a locked-down, user-hostile American device.

Relying on the community

Usually, custom Android ROMs, de-Googled or not, ship with some Chromium browser by default, but iodéOS does things a bit differently by opting for a branded Firefox fork instead that has telemetry, trackers, and so on disabled. For its other Google application replacements, iodéOS relies on various proven open source applications, like CoMaps, Thunderbird, Fossify applications, and more. The end result is a complete offering where everything you’d find on a Google Android phone has been replaced by solid, capable, non-Google offerings from the open source community.

Of course, this is Android, so you can install whatever other maps, mail, or application you want if iodé’s choices aren’t to your liking.

An important feature of iodéOS is that it ships with an operating system-wide analysis tool that provides insight into with to what and whom, exactly, your phone and its applications are connecting. A system-wide adblocker is part of this, as well, with sensible defaults sourced from various open source blocklists. Of course, you have full control over what is and is not blocked, including the ability to block entire applications or websites if you so desire. While I personally didn’t try out their optional Premium subscription service, this service provides even more control, such as various parental control features.

IodéOS also has some nice, smaller touches that I really appreciated. During the first boot and initial setup, it showed a screen where you could select which default applications to remove, something I’ve never seen before. Sadly, many of the supposedly removable applications ended up only being “hidden”, which is Android speak for system applications that can’t be removed. I’m not sure what the exact reasoning is to make some applications system applications, but I would definitely prefer if all of the preinstalled applications, or at least most of them, were actually removable. This would seem to more closely align with iodéOS’ stated goals and values.

The default installation also comes with what is essentially a really barebones, basic changelog application. It shows nothing more than a list of recent updates with includes fixes changes, and additions, and it’s really nice to have this information easily accessible. I’m quite tired of the modern trend of empty or entirely missing changelogs, so it’s nice to see iodé putting this front and centre. The application itself could use some touching-up, but at the same time, I understand why this is probably not high on the list of priorities. It shows a changelog; it doesn’t need to win design awards.

Speaking of updates – during my use, iodéOS was never more than one month behind on Android’s security updates, which is not a bad showing compared to many much larger big-time Android OEMs. Still, I would prefer the monthly Android security updates to be available within the same month, so this is an area where iodéOS can improve and put themselves even farther ahead of most OEMs. People who are most likely to switch to a de-Googled Android are probably also going to be people who care about being up-to-date and as secure as possible.

Boring is good

Beyond the well-documented problems with WearOS, RCS, and some banking applications that are outside of iodé’s control, using iodéOS is simply boring and uneventful, and in this case, “boring” is exactly what they should be aiming for. For the vast majority of people, switching from Google Android to iodéOS will not be a particularly jarring experience, as all their favourite applications will still be available, running on the same underlying operating system they’re already used to. IodéOS does an excellent job of being inoffensive, unobtrusive, and frictionless – exactly what you want from something that aims to be a drop-in replacement for Google Android for as many people as possible.

IodéOS offers a solid Android experience to those who want to de-Google, and assuming you’re not deeply dependent on WearOS and/or RCS, it’s easy to recommend. It’s really “just Android”, and if you’re already used to Android – and statistically speaking, you are – buying a phone with iodéOS preinstalled is no different than buying any other Android device, just without all the Google baggage.

And as we realise a little bit more every day, that’s a massive value-add over Pixels and Samsung phones.

Hello.
I want to buy a onewheel for my boy 8 years and around 30kg.
Is pint enough or is better to find a pint X ?
I will try also (88kg) but if I find this good I would perhaps by amocher one for me.
Thanks
Gildas

In Iran, the school deaths have become a symbol for U.S.-Israeli brutality and an unjust war. The Washington Post is reporting from the country under restricted conditions.

The ASC student cluster competition returned to Wuxi, aka “The Pearl of Taihu” for its 2026 edition. Competition fans will remember Wuxi from 2017 when students got the chance to run on what was then the largest supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight.

As usual, 25 student teams representing top universities from around the world gathered, this time hosted by Wuxi University. The picture above is the registration table at the hotel with 150 bags ready to be handed out to students, coaches, and visiting HPC/AI dignitaries.

While the university has a beautiful and modern campus, I was a little concerned about the cluster stadium. It was about half the size of
the usual competition venues, and I wondered if 25 GPU crammed clusters and upwards of 200 people coupled with the hot and humid Wuxi spring weather might overwhelm the A/C. The thermals were fine, which was great, but the noise was incredible, as you can see in our upcoming team interview videos.

Usual Stuff but Some New Wrinkles

The basics remain the same, university teams compete to optimize a fiendish selection of HPC/AI workloads and benchmarks. The goal is to achieve the highest performance while staying under the 5,000 watt power cap.

The system hardware is provided by ASC organizers, which makes it much easier on the teams. Students do need to bring their own GPUs, but AMD is supplying W7900D GPUs as part of their sponsorship.

For the first time, the ASC is hosting a job fair in conjunction with the competition. Ten companies including industry giants AMD and Tencent, plus systems, robotics, and a variety of AI firms manned booths in an effort to attract the best and brightest new talent.

The group competition, where five teams of five schools collaborate to optimize an application, was extensively reworked for 2026. In the past, group competition results didn’t have an impact on individual team scores – not true this year, it’s worth 8 points for the winning teams. There is also a sweet 20,000 CNY (~$3,000 US) bonus for the winning teams.

The judging process was also changed for 2026. Rather than teams presenting to a crowded room of judges, each team manned a display board showing their poster explaining the competition apps and how they dealt with them. The judges then circulated around and conversed with each team before submitting their evaluations. It worked well. The judge evaluation is worth 10 points.

The Challenges

HPC Benchmarks: The first task for the students is to successfully run the hallowed HPL and HPCG benchmarks, as is tradition. Shouldn’t be a big hurdle for the teams as they’ve probably practiced these over and over during set up. Weight: 5 points each.

Embodied World Model Inference: If you’re building a robot or something else that will interact with the physical world, they’ll need some sort of mental map to simulate the result of its actions. That’s what the this app is all about. Weight: 18 points.

AMSS-NCKU: Worried about black holes? If so, this is the program for you. AMSS-NCKU simulates black holes and can track their development while calculating gravitational waves. If your robot is going to interact with a black hole, then you’re going to want the ability to simulate black holes and the massive gravitational waves associated with them. In the competition, students were simulating three black holes, not an easy computational task at all. Weight: 18 points.

QiboTN: Building large quantum computers isn’t possible yet despite the hype. But we do have quantum simulators like Qibo that run on hardware available today. QiboTN adds tensor network capability to make it possible benchmark and develop hybrid machine learning models that can be used in areas like quantum chemistry and industrial optimization. Weight: 18 points

LeWorldModel: This is the 2026 mystery application and, I think, the newest app ever used in a cluster competition.  Introduced in March 2026, it’s a JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture) based learning model that maps a series of images, like video pixels, in order to learn the laws of physical environments. LeWorldModel solves a big problem in existing JEPA models by keeping the AI from getting lazy and simply repeating the same mapping over and over. Coming in at 15 million parameters, it’s slim enough to run fast even on small configurations. Nice job. Weight: 18 points

With the stage set and the course laid out, it’s now time to meet the teams, which, conveniently, is next up….stay tuned.

The post ASC26: The Wuxi Rumble appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft is investing $2.5 billion in a new group "assisting clients with AI implementations," reports CNBC: [Microsoft] said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that's become known as forward deployed engineering [or FDE]... The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1 billion behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms. Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results. The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant has yet to gain anything approaching ubiquity in the business world, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent has ceded market share to newer players. Microsoft's stock has slumped 21% this year, by far the worst performance among the mega-cap tech companies. One concern on Wall Street is that AI models that quickly compose code might threaten mature software companies... Microsoft has for years provided support and implementation services to customers. The company generated about $2.1 billion in revenue from enterprise and partner services in the March quarter, up 2.5% from a year earlier.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Colour me positively surprised, as I had no idea Alpha emulation had progressed this much.

As you might know, I’m involved a bit in the OpenVMS community and the Alpha emulation side via AXPBox. AXPBox (github) is a fork of the es40 alpha emulator by Camiel Vanderhoeven (who is now Chief Architect at VSI, the company that makes OpenVMS, for x86 nowdays). There have been many forks of es40 in the past and recently a new one has popped up with some great new features. Like speedups via a JIT compiler, S3 graphics port from MAME and ARC support, resulting in the ability to run Windows 2000 for the DEC Alpha.

↫ Remy van Elst

Not only can you run the unreleased Alpha version of Windows 2000 on this forked emulator, it’s also capable of running OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX. In fact, both OpenVMS and Tru64 can run their full X11 CDE desktops on the emulator as well, which is incredibly cool and a huge milestone. As the name of the original emulator implies, it’s emulating an AlphaServer Es40 from the turn of the century, which should be fast enough for enthusiast use.

The last AlphaStation ever made, the ES47, is still very high on my list of computers I desperately want but will never have – they are incredibly rare, and whenever they do come up for sale, incredibly expensive. If you have one, consider yourself lucky, and please, write about it! Tell the world!

The sides meet Monday for a World Cup quarter-final spot, and the USMNT’s main goal threat is able to play after a shock reversal. Here’s what to know

After a few days of preparing for the World Cup’s last 16 without their top scorer, the United States were dealt a surprise Sunday when Fifa rescinded Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension for Monday’s match against Belgium.

Belgium’s own preparations have now been scuppered as they go from planning to face an alternative – likely either Ricardo Pepi or Haji Wright – to trying to contain one of the World Cup’s most in-form forwards.

LineageOS, the de-Googled Android ROM that serves as the backbone for pretty much the entire custom Android ROM community, has published an article about what the Android developer verification changes mean for them. I really like the factual tone of their article, especially this part:

Critics such as F-Droid, EFF, and “Keep Android Open” point out that this also happens to route every install path through Google-controlled infrastructure, hands Google a kill switch over any app or developer worldwide, and arrives shortly after Google’s antitrust lawsuits.

Both things can be true at once: real fraud is a problem and the restriction of developers is a convenient side effect of solving it this way – and we’re not in a position to pretend we know Google’s internal reasoning. We’re just telling you what they’ve said and what it changes; you can weigh the “why” yourself.

↫ Nolen Johnson on the LineageOS website

For LineageOS, these new verification measures don’t really mean much, as they don’t affect the project’s work or software. The developer verification infrastructure is a separate application that is part of Google Mobile Services, and LineageOS does not ship GMS nor does it ever intend to. As such, they don’t have to do anything, as this won’t be an issue unless LineageOS users choose to install a GApps package that happens to include the developer verification infrastructure.

If Google were to move the developer verification infrastructure into Play Services in the future, LineageOS makes it clear they’ll disable it globally, as they have done with a number of other “annoying Play Services-provided over-the-air update implementations“. There really isn’t much more they can do; the rest is up to users and projects that use LineageOS as their base.

State Sen. Mallory McMorrow announced on Sunday that she is suspending her campaign for Senate, narrowing the Democratic field ahead of the competitive August primary.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 6 No. 1,121.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 6, No. 1,843.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 6, No. 855.

The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design. But there’s something else about it. The picture is a bit… wobbly. Well, over composite video anyway. Let’s dig in and learn a little big more about the nitty-gritty of composite video.

↫ Nicole Branagan

As usual, the information density in this article by Branagan is kind of remarkable, especially when you consider it never overwhelms you. Such a great read.

Have you ever needed a Linux application which only exists in the Windows world? Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM writes: Windows does have a lot of useful app (but smaller than "power apps"). Some of these are closed source, some are open, but they're not all available in Linux yet. My list would have to contain Gimp Tookit versions of: IrfanView image manager, which I think is unequaled in Linux (though it does work to some extent under Wine). I also miss the full version of 7-Zip, because of its better compression settings, which File-Roller does not provide, though the Linux port p7zip is available (though unnoticed by common distributions). Lastly, I think that Notepad++ would be a good addition to Linux. That last one drew some pushback from long-time Slashdot reader jesco. "If there's one area where Linux shines, then it's the availability of high-quality text editors. Last time I looked Kate was still pretty nice, and there's Emacs, Vim and Neovim" if you're partial to command lines. But are there any daily-drive apps you still find yourself needing? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Which apps aren't available on Linux?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Haiti is a failed state’, says Carlos Giménez, congressman and Miami Cuban exile, after controversial court ruling

Carlos Giménez, a Republican congressman from Florida, broke with the Trump administration on Sunday, calling on the White House to reconsider its push to eliminate temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian migrants.

Returning some 350,000 Haitians to their chaotic, dangerous homeland following the US supreme court’s ruling that the Trump administration can cut off temporary legal protections, would be a grave error, Giménez said.

All the latest news from Sunday’s live action at SW19
Swiatek and Rybakina go out | Order of play | Mail Sarah

I can’t wait to see Naomi Osaka’s look today, she has been using fashion to express herself and represent her heritage across all of the slams. So far at Wimbledon she has been wearing a white kimono and she told the BBC about it:

When I think about Wimbledon, it’s obviously the all white. There’s obviously the tradition of it all. In my head, when I think about that, I think about my cultures, my heritage, which is Japanese and Haitian.

Then, if I dive deeper into Japanese culture, I think about the most iconic silhouette, which for me is a kimono. You don’t have to see the colour of a kimono to know that it is a kimono.

Exclusive: Foreign secretary warns of combined risks of AI, climate crisis, irregular migration and foreign interference

Artificial intelligence poses a “Hiroshima”-style risk to humanity if governments do not agree to curb how it is developed, the foreign secretary has warned.

Yvette Cooper urged countries, including the US and China, to agree international rules for AI, telling the Guardian she believes the issue will dominate foreign policy over the next two years.

More than 20 states reported temperatures above 100F as heat dome sits over eastern US during holiday weekend

At least two dozen people have died amid the perilous climate crisis-driven heatwave that has scorched swaths of the US with record temperatures.

As a huge heat dome sits over the county’s eastern half, extreme heat gripped millions of people in the days leading up to the US’s semiquincentennial on Saturday – and beyond it. More than 20 states experienced stifling temperatures more than 100F (38C), marring celebrations. And more than 140 million people remained under active heat alerts across the US on Sunday.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with Reps. Adriano Espaillat, Democrat of New York, and Carlos Gimenez, Republican of Florida, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 5, 2026. The interview was taped on July 2, 2026.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Carlos Giminez join Ed O'Keefe.

Agreement in principle with Castlelake follows several rejected offers and means UK’s biggest low-cost carrier will be taken private

The airline easyJet has said it intends to accept a £5.5bn takeover offer by the US investment firm Castlelake that would take Britain’s biggest low-cost carrier private.

The companies announced an agreement in principle on Sunday evening in a statement, and requested an extension to a deadline to complete the deal formally. The agreement came after weeks of negotiations and several rejected offers.

Both incidents were reported near the port city of Hodeidah, which is under control of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the U.S. is "very much in a space race right now" against China, as the two countries vie to land astronauts on the moon and secure a near-permanent presence.

Authorities overseeing the firefight against the week-old Willow Fire west of Leadville issued new evacuation and pre-evacuation orders Sunday morning after the blaze grew by nearly 1,000 acres in 24 hours.

England endured a tumultous buildup to their match in Mexico City, while Trump thanked Fifa publicly for overturning Folarin Balogun of the USA’s red card

Kylian Mbappe has pulled level with Lionel Messi at the top of the Golden Boot charts. Both icons have seven after the Frenchman tucked away the winning penalty against Paraguay.

Erling Haaland (5), Harry Kane (5) and Vinícius Júnior (4) all have the chance to close the gap in the next 24 hours. And also look out for Spain’s Mikel Oyarzabal (4) creeping up on the rails.

A "purple" air quality alert was issued for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas, meaning pollution reached levels considered "very unhealthy."

America's Justice Department and FBI teamed joined Finland's National Bureau of Investigation to arrest a teenager they say is part of one of the world's biggest cybercrime syndicates, reports Tom's Hardware. The "Scattered Spider" syndicate has extorted over $100 million in ransom payments, according to Department of Justice figures: 19-year-old Peter Stokes is a dual U.S.-Estonian citizen who was trying to board a flight to Japan from Helsinki, when law enforcement caught up with him. [T]he main criminal complaint against Stokes stems from a May 2025 attack on a luxury jewelry dealer based in the United States. The attackers apparently called the company's IT helpdesk using Google Voice, posing as employees. They were able to convince the help desk into resetting their credentials, which allowed them to infiltrate three accounts, two of which had admin privileges. From there, the group, allegedly including Stokes, stole important data and held the jeweler at ransom, demanding an $8 million payment in crypto. The company ultimately regained access to their infrastructure and avoided paying the ransom, but the operational disruption still caused a purported $2 million in losses. This served as the spark that led to Stokes' eventual arrest in Helsinki, as the prosecutors slowly followed the paper and digital trail laid by the attackers. Microsoft played a key role in the process by providing GDID [Global Device Identifier] data to the FBI to help them apprehend the alleged criminal... [I]t's a unique identifier assigned to every Windows install that tracks device-specific telemetry. It's the reason why sometimes changing a major component in your PC can revoke your Windows license... [T]he court documents from the case reveal that Stokes used Windows, from which investigators were able to link his physical hardware to specific internet activity and locations... Stokes' web activity, videogame history, IP addresses, tool usage (including Ngrok), Azure status, and more were logged with timestamps, and were provided to the investigators by Microsoft... Stokes was carrying two hard drives full of incriminating evidence with him when boarding his flight to Japan... His real identity has actually been known since 2024, but since he was a minor living across Estonia and the UAE at the time, he could only be monitored until the time was right. The official criminal complaint even includes a selfie photo that Stokes posted on Snapchat (hiding his face behind dozens of hundred dollar bills). It then notes that behind Stokes the wallpaper, carpet, and furniture match New York's Empire Hotel — and that Stokes had visited the hotel's web site in Germany before then flying to New York... "Following the arrest, Stokes was extradited to the U.S., where he appeared in front of a federal court in Chicago for the first time on June 30, 2026, and he remains in custody," adds Tom's Hardware. "The accused is now awaiting trial, having been charged with conspiracy, cyber intrusion, and fraud..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Magazine invites readers to judge Vance’s ‘assessment’ of Trump, whom he called ‘cultural heroin’ during first term

The Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin” exactly 10 years earlier, bringing back to the fore his evolving from a critic of the president to his vice-president.

In an editor’s note, the magazine said it was republishing the essay on the occasion of its 10th anniversary – and the US’s semiquincentennial – “so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment [of Trump] … has stood the test of time”.

Former CDC chief medical officer Dr. Debra Houry warned the "scientific integrity" of federal health agencies are at risk.

The following is the transcript of an interview with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 5, 2026.

Agency says drones had been caught across all 11 US host cities in restricted airspace since tournament began

More than 600 drones flying over restricted World Cup airspace in the US have been seized since the tournament began in June, the FBI said on Saturday – including 99 captured flying in Miami, 77 in Atlanta and 32 in Kansas City.

In a statement on X, the law enforcement agency said that drones had been caught across all 11 US host cities by FBI and the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

"A story widely accused on social media of being written using AI has gone on to win the overall Commonwealth short story prize," reports the Guardian. In mid-May the story had been selected as a regional winner, but with critics on X and Bluesky "claiming it showed 'obvious markers' of AI use." In the wake of the controversy, the Commonwealth Foundation conducted a review of the regional winners, which it said involved looking at drafts, time-stamped documents and notes. "We are satisfied with the testimonies of our writers and their confirmation that AI was not used in their writing," said foundation director-general Razmi Farook... Judging chair Louise Doughty described Nazir's piece as "an original, poetic and deeply moving story...." In a film released by the Commonwealth Foundation on Tuesday, Nazir... adds that he wrote six or seven drafts of his prize-winning story, and also speaks about his use of speech-to-text software, explaining that he could only see three or four lines of text on his phone screen at any one time, so he would perfect each line before moving on, which is how his story ended up being "highly polished"... Initial social media reactions to the Commonwealth Foundation's announcement of Nazir's win were negative, with one X user writing: "immensely disappointing and disheartening. it feels like they wanted to stick to their guns after the entire GenAI uproar. I might think twice now before submitting my stories here". After Nazir was announced as the regional winner in May, some social media users reported running his story through AI-detection software. "Pangram flags at 100% but also, come on, if you know you know", said Wharton professor Ethan Mollick. However, the reliability of AI-detection software has been called into question. In a statement to the Guardian, Farook said that "rather than surrender our judgment to AI-detection software, we asked our winners to show their working drafts, outlines, the evidence of an artistic journey. That software, it must be said, is not infallible: it returns inconsistent verdicts and, in doing so, corrodes the very trust on which a prize depends." "When the machine's default voice is the metropolitan one, the writer who does not fit the expected mould is the first to fall under suspicion," she added. "The more startling her gift, the more her unfamiliar brilliance unsettles, the more readily she is accused of being a machine. A young writer in Kingston or Kolkata, in Kuala Lumpur or Kigali, must now prove not only her talent but her very humanity." Nazir's story beat 7,806 other stories, the video points out (adding that their prize "demonstrates that in a world increasingly driven by algorithms, the human voice still matters.") The Guardian notes that the winning story "includes multiple 'not x, but y' constructions and lists of three, which some consider to be signs of AI use," and that critics also drew attention to particular lines like "Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument" and "Marsha lived two bends down." In a new interview with the Times of India Nazir says "Now I'm frightened about publishing new work because the attacks haven't stopped." Q: Which passages attracted the most criticism, and why do you think they were misunderstood? Nazir: People criticised a line where I wrote: 'She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.' That's magical realism. Think Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's a literary technique. In my story, the character 'Zoongie' believes she is so beautiful that even when no men are around, she imagines the benches becoming men who admire her. It exists only in her imagination. People interpreted it literally. There was another line about light reflecting from a sink. That came directly from my childhood. Our kitchen faced east, and my mother liked to keep everything spotless. We used to polish the sink, and when the morning sun hit it, it glittered brightly. People claimed that the image must have been AI-generated. But it's from my lived experience... I've lived with diabetes for 62 years, which has damaged the nerves in my fingers and feet, and I'm currently undergoing chemotherapy. That's why I began using speech-to-text on my Android phone... I hope this episode leads to a better understanding of the difference between assistive technology and AI-generated writing... Q: Many acclaimed writers like Ursula K Le Guin, Mary Shelley, and JRR Tolkien have also been falsely flagged by AI detectors. Where does this leave writers? Nazir: What these AI detectors are saying is that if a piece of writing is too polished, it must have been written by AI. I refuse to accept that. AI was trained on human writing. Large language models, to me, are tools, much like a word processor. They don't replace the human spirit behind creative writing. Ask an AI to write a prize-winning story on its own and see what it produces. You still need human imagination and judgment to create literature. Nazir added, "What I don't understand is why people continue to question the judges' decision."

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In a speech delayed by a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall due to severe weather, President Trump mixed politics with history.

A Delta Air Lines flight landing in Chicago was hit by a firework as it was coming to land at Midway International Airport on Saturday.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with former CDC chief medical officer Dr. Debra Houry, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 5, 2026. This interview was taped on July 1, 2026.

The U.S. military said it has suspended the search for a missing sailor who was aboard a helicopter that went down in the Arabian Sea last week.

McCartney reportedly played Beatles No 1 hit at star-studded reception at Madison Square Garden

Paul McCartney performed the beloved Beatles No 1 hit I Want to Hold Your Hand for the first time in 60 years at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding.

McCartney performed the number at the star-studded reception at Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday, People magazine reported. The track was the Beatles’ first American No 1 hit, sparking Beatlemania in the US and the wave of British bands’ success nicknamed “the British invasion”.

"The internet is filled with fakes," writes Gizmodo. "A court in India is setting out to address the problem by requiring more transparency from domain registrars to make it easier to crack down on fraud. And while the intentions might be good, Reuters is reporting that major American domain registrar GoDaddy is sounding the warning bells that the court's decision could fundamentally reshape the internet well beyond India's borders." GoDaddy argues the move would even make the internet less safe, reports Reuters : [Online fraud] is a key challenge for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, which last year received 2.4 million complaints of alleged cyber fraud amounting to $2.4 billion. Starting in 2019, lawsuits were brought by dozens of Indian and global firms — Amazon against fake shopping sites trading on its name and McDonald's complaining against bogus sites offering franchises. [More than 20 companies filed a complaint, the article notes, including Microsoft.] In December, an Indian court blocked more than 1,100 such websites. The New Delhi judge however went further, ordering sweeping new measures that tech experts say have rewritten rules of internet governance: Domain sellers should not offer buyers free privacy protection by default, the buyer's details should be released to anyone with a "legitimate interest" within 72 hours, and website addresses that are variations of protected brand names must be prohibited. U.S.-based GoDaddy has challenged the directives before a larger bench of judges at the Delhi High Court, according to a Reuters review of non-public filings. It says the ruling will affect legitimate businesses that have names similar to big brands. Stopping privacy-by-default features, GoDaddy said, will result in public disclosure of name, address, telephone and email of legitimate website owners, exposing them to "foreseeable privacy and security risks" such as stalking and harassment. As domain names operate globally, not locally, the order could force GoDaddy to regulate website addresses across the world, it said. On the court's order imposing a 72-hour deadline on companies to provide registration details to anyone with "legitimate interest", GoDaddy argues it has no wherewithal to assess who has legitimate interest or not. The "commercially destabilising" directives may force domain name companies to "exit India", said one of GoDaddy's appeal documents that ran into 5,121 pages... GoDaddy rivals, Arizona-based Namecheap and Netherlands-based Hosting Concepts, have also challenged the New Delhi ruling, court records show, although Reuters could not ascertain details of their appeals... GoDaddy argues that diluting the privacy feature will run contrary to India's data protection law and the European Union GDPR law which mandates a "privacy by default" approach. Farzaneh Badii, a New York-based researcher on internet governance, criticised the New Delhi ruling, noting that Europe redacted such details because publishing them had been abused by harassment and targeted phishing. "The people exposed will be journalists, activists, small business owners, and private individuals. The brand impersonators will not," she said... While the sweeping December directives were issued by a court, they followed government's submissions, documents showed... The judges will hear the appeals on July 16. GoDaddy manages 80 million domains and serves over 20 million users, the article points out, with annual revenue over $5 billion.

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‘Nothing to see here,’ says the man who once overruled council planners in favour of Richard ‘Dirty’ Desmond

How unlucky can one man get? You have to feel for Nigel Farage. Why does it keep happening to him? There he is, just minding his own business, trying to make a decent living – those five houses won’t pay for themselves, which is why other people may have done – and yet there’s always someone trying to drag a good man down. Isn’t the “Man of the People (TM)” entitled to have a few multimillionaires as friends to bankroll his lifestyle? Who hasn’t pined for crypto and gold bullion?

First there was the £5m from the British-Thai crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, revealed exclusively by the Guardian. Months later, the stench won’t go away. Even Nige has been at a loss to explain what exactly he was given the money for. Unsure whether it was a payment to cover security or just a little “thank you” for a lifetime’s work in the service of making the country an easier place for grifters to make money. Even now, Nige has gone to ground as he tries to get his story straight.

NCAA President Charlie Baker said he hopes to "dramatically limit" prop betting at the collegiate level and beyond.

Neo-fascist group Patriot Front parades banners, including Confederate flag, chanting ‘Reclaim America’ in US capital

Hundreds of masked men carrying banners, including the Confederate flag, marched through Washington DC on the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of the US’s inception.

The group appeared to be led by Thomas Rousseau, founder of the neo-fascist, white supremacist organization Patriot Front. Members of the group wore white masks and gathered in front of DC’s Union Station. They later marched towards Capitol Hill, WTOP reported.

IRGC warnings force ships to turn back as Tehran uses passages from Qur’an to send messages to Gulf delegations

The diplomatic and military contest for control of the strait of Hormuz has intensified alongside the dramatic scenes of mourning for the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, with some claiming Khamenei’s legacy ultimately depends on Tehran’s grip on the waterway, and so the global economy.

Over the past 48 hours, as crowds have swirled in Tehran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appeared to have started to plug a gaping and growing gap in their monopoly control of the strait.

Fireworks, parades and celebrations in photos from around the country.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with NCAA President Charlie Baker, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 5, 2026. This interview was taped on July 1, 2025.

Company seeks redress for contracts it says it has lost as a result of programme’s claims about its business practices

The parcel delivery company Evri is suing the BBC for £1.2m over a documentary it claims caused it serious financial loss.

Evri has filed particulars of claim at the high court which state that it lost prospective clients after the broadcast of the Panorama documentary Evri: Where’s my parcel?

With voters embracing leaders who brazenly monetise public office, experts say an ethical code is breaking down

Donald Trump came to office in 2017 after decades of bankruptcies and business failures. Yes, he was rich, but his latest financial disclosure, published this week, suggests he will depart billions richer.

In the first year of his second term, he made more than $2bn from Trump hotels, Trump golf courses, Trump cryptocurrency, Trump watches, Trump cologne, Trump Bibles and more.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's semi-autobiographical book series, which inspired a classic 1970s TV show, is returning to screens this summer in a new adaptation.

President Trump held separate calls with Russia's Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss ending the war.

Do you have the "right stuff" when it comes to barbecuing? Lots of people believe they do, and they're more than happy to share their wisdom with you, even if unsolicited. Luke Burbank is not one of those people.

Incident took place late in the evening on Independence Day, reports say, with woman said to be in critical condition

At ⁠least eight people, including four children, were shot and wounded on Saturday during the Fourth of July holiday in New York City’s Coney Island section, according to police.

The shooting happened ​at about 10.35pm on the Brooklyn neighborhood’s West 30th Street – not far from a boardwalk where a fireworks display had been set less than an hour earlier.

The Oscar-winning "Whiplash" star talks about being a character actor; his new mob series "The Westies"; and the difficult early days of his career – and an unexpected kindness from an actor friend.

Exclusive: Prof Simon Baron-Cohen says his language was misunderstood and it is a myth that autistic people lack empathy

The scientist who pioneered the “extreme male brain” theory of autism has said he regrets characterising the condition in this way because the phrase lends itself to misunderstandings.

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autistic people tend strongly towards systemising over empathising has been hugely influential in shaping the popular perception of autism over the past two decades. The underlying science had stood the test of time, he said, but he now views the “extreme male brain” label as unhelpful.

Exclusive: University moves and falling exam entries fuel concerns about opportunities for working-class pupils

Cutting language courses at universities and schools risks undermining social mobility and vocational skills, former education secretaries and experts in the UK have warned.

More than 70 languages academics were among 500 staff at the University of Exeter to be told last week they were at risk of redundancy as it seeks to cut 150 full-time posts, predominantly in the humanities. The announcement followed the proposal by the University of Nottingham to become the first Russell Group university to offer no language degrees.

Though the Lake Tahoe region has rates higher than the state average, residents are addressing a shortage of services

Every year, about 2 million people come to the outdoor paradise of Lake Tahoe, which offers snowy ski slopes in the winter and sunny lakeside activities in the summer. At more than 6,000ft in elevation, the alpine community centers on the stunningly blue lake, which spans the California-Nevada border and is often called “the jewel of the Sierra”.

But beneath this idyllic scenery lies something known as the “paradise paradox”. As in many US resort areas, the suicide rates in the Tahoe region, including the city of Truckee, are far higher than the state average – and these communities don’t have enough resources to deal with the issue.

Digital music gave us the technology, and the freedom, to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want. But more and more people are going back to older, analog ways of listening.

Les Rouges brought moments of joy to their nation. But there are plenty of questions around Canadian soccer as the tournament moves on

It was standing room only in Toronto’s oldest bar, The Wheatsheaf, on Saturday lunchtime. For some, the wake had already begun. Nestled in the corner was a group of sullen Irish GAA fans, who had just witnessed Cork’s demoralizing defeat to Galway in the All-Ireland Hurling semi-final. Resplendent in their red and white as they gazed despairingly into the middle distance, at least they had another team to root for.

It was an odd scenario. Canada is co-hosting this tournament but, due to the team’s second-place finish in the group stage, they were playing Morocco far to the south in Houston, Texas. But The Wheatsheaf was a sea of red and white as Canada fans gathered for the last-16 clash. Some guy even dusted off a vintage Manchester United 1999 jersey with ‘Beckham’ on the back. Anything for Canada. And that sense of collective patriotism soared when Wayne Gretzky – the once Great One now derided in his native land for cosying up to Donald Trump, amongst other curious missteps – popped up on TV screens and was booed mercilessly and enthusiastically by the crowd.

The newspaper for the American military has long taken pride in its editorial independence. But under the Trump administration, restrictions have been imposed, and the Pentagon's chief spokesman has vowed to rid the paper of "woke distractions."

Paul Pelosi could face misdemeanor charges over crash in California that left car with ‘major’ damage, authorities say

The husband of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a hit-and-run car crash in California that left a parked vehicle with “major” damage, authorities said on Saturday – and he could face misdemeanor charges.

Paul Pelosi was driving his brown convertible on Friday in Yountville, a town in the heart of wine country, when he struck a legally parked car on the side of the road, briefly stopped and then drove away, the Napa county sheriff’s office said in a statement. No injuries were reported.

The remains of the submerged village of Derwent in Derbyshire were exposed in the 1976 heatwave.

Incidents involving California state senator Scott Wiener and New York congressman Dan Goldman underscore Israel-Palestine conflict’s role in US elections

Two recent incidents involving US congressional candidates on opposite coasts have blown up into major controversies, underscoring how the Israel-Palestine conflict has transformed US elections – and illustrating how aggressive protest tactics can spark backlash that overshadows the issues activists meant to highlight.

Scott Wiener, a gay Jewish state senator and trans rights advocate who is currently the frontrunner in the race to replace the longtime representative Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th district, said he felt forced to leave last week’s annual trans pride march in San Francisco after a group of people ran up to him at a local park where the event was taking place, surrounded him and screamed at him over his positions on Israel’s war on Gaza.

In dueling speeches this weekend, the New York mayor faced a ‘nation of contradictions’ while the president offered a stump speech

If Donald Trump’s address on 3 July from Mount Rushmore will be remembered at all, it will be because that was the day of competing speeches, and competing visions, of the United States. Earlier on 3 July, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered a speech that was about half as long as Trump’s 28-minute address, but one that offered a far different assessment of the challenges facing his city and our nation.

“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” Mamdani said, while seated at George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized American citizens. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world – one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York

247,000 miles on an EV battery? So says the owner of a U.K.-based used-car sales company that specializes in Evs, who tells the Wall Street Journal EV batteries keep performing well even after several hundred thousand miles. "They are proving themselves to be exceptionally reliable." After five years on the road, the average EV will still be able to drive up to 95% of its original range, according to Recurrent, a data-science company that provides a battery-monitoring tool for EVs — better than many in the auto industry expected... Potential new car buyers' fear of having to pay for a battery replacement is the number one reason they choose to steer clear of EVs, according to a 2025 survey from industry research firm AutoPacific. When early EVs hit the market, buyers' concerns were well-founded. Roughly one in 12 EVs built from 2011 to 2016 have had to have battery replacements. But new data shows that more modern EVs are doing better so far. Among EVs built from 2022 on, 0.3% have had battery replacements, according to a 2025 study from Recurrent. As battery technology has advanced, EVs have avoided problems like the ones that plagued the original Nissan Leaf when it hit the market in 2010, for example. Those cars lacked the battery-cooling technology that is in newer EVs, and they made headlines for wearing down quickly. Buyer perception hasn't quite caught up, according to Scott Case, co-founder and chief executive of Recurrent... The newest battery-powered EVs have lifespans comparable to internal-combustion-engine vehicles, even when driven more miles, according to Viet Nguyen-Tien, a research officer at the London School of Economics who focuses on Evs. Improvements in car batteries' chemical contents, battery-management systems and thermal regulation have been the difference in making batteries last longer and cost less, Nguyen-Tien said. Battery prices have fallen more than 90% since 2010, according to a BloombergNEF report from late last year. Industry analysts say battery-replacement costs are also improving as more EVs are designed for repairability in the long-haul. An out-of-warranty battery replacement can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $16,000, depending on the manufacturer, according to Recurrent. But many EV manufacturers have shifted to allow smaller components of their battery packs to be repaired, which can allow owners to avoid the full costs of a battery replacement, Case said. EV batteries aren't without their challenges, though. A battery that is frequently fast-charged with high power loses its range, on average, at twice the rate of a battery charged at a lower power, according to telematics company Geotab. Frequently charging a battery to 100%, or letting it rest at 0% for extended periods, can also reduce range long-term. And EVs regularly deliver less range in extreme cold or heat. The article also includes two new projections on EV adoption: "The share of new EVs sold is expected to nearly double to 11% of new-car sales in the U.S. by 2030, according to industry consulting firm AlixPartners." "Globally, EVs already make up 15% of new-car sales and are expected to form nearly a quarter of the global market by 2030, according to AlixPartners."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 21-year-old woman is in critical condition, and 4 of the injured are children between the ages of 6 and 14, according to he police.

New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei still absent from public view as his three brothers stand beside father’s coffin

Beside the coffin of the assassinated former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei at a packed prayer hall in Tehran on Sunday there were calls for the killing of Donald Trump.

Iran is staging a week of mass funeral processions ⁠for Khamenei, who was killed along with other members of his family on the first day of the US and Israeli war on 28 February. The funeral was delayed because of the war.

Americans celebrated 250 years of independence this Fourth of July, although severe weather put a damper on the proceedings in several parts of the country.

From Russia's YotaPhone and the first foldable to square Blackberrys and phones for crypto bros, I've seen a lot of weirdness.

I reduced my storage subscription fees and learned a valuable lesson in how to back up priceless memories.

These tools are similar but aimed at different audiences and workflows. Here's how they compare.

I tested some of the top exercise bikes. These were my favorites.

A new dental robot is being developed that could reduce the number of visits needed to receive a dental crown.

Experts say Ratepayer Protection Act ‘posing as a consumer protection measure’ and will raise prices on working people

The bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, designed to shield individuals from soaring electricity prices amid the datacenter boom, would fail to meaningfully protect the public from the centers’ true costs, consumer advocates warn.

The bill, backed by some in big tech such as Microsoft, moved through a House subcommittee in mid-June, and a vote in full committee scheduled for 1 July was delayed. Its measures are largely voluntary, meaning the state utility commissions that set electric rates can ignore the law altogether.

The party colors are a surprisingly recent tradition. But do they really represent the diversity of Americans’ beliefs?

Color has long played a role in US politics.

In 1867, US suffragists Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted the yellow color of the sunflower – Kansas’s state flower – during their campaign for women’s voting rights in the state. By the 20th century, suffragists added white and purple to their political “uniforms”: white dresses, standing for purity and moral authority, became the most notable marker of the movement.

Finding that Norfolk butterfly has been distinct subspecies for 200,000 years could transform conservation approach

The endangered swallowtail butterfly Papilio machaon britannicus, which is only regularly found breeding in Britain on the Norfolk Broads, has been a distinct subspecies for at least 200,000 years, according to a study.

Smaller, darker in colour and much rarer than the continental swallowtail, britannicus was previously considered to have developed its distinctive form during its confinement in the wetlands of eastern England over the last 8,000 years, after the flooding of Doggerland.

Michael Phillips says he suffers from micropenis – but he’s now fundraised enough to increase his member’s girth

A US man who has staked the uncontested claim of having the smallest penis in the world says he has booked a procedure to enhance his member at least somewhat after soliciting the online public’s financial support for that purpose.

In a brief interview on Saturday, 38-year-old Michael Phillips described himself as “really thankful and surprised” over the GoFundMe platform users who supported his campaign for help to pay for the procedure in question.

Valve's Steam Machine is pricier than expected (thanks, RAMageddon), but there's a way to get most of the experience on your own PC. Here's how.

Alex Scheel, a veteran, is running an anti-war campaign to unseat Rep. Marilyn Strickland. He’s also a longtime member of the DSA in Washington state.

America’s founding 250 years ago was a warning cry against leaders like Trump. Our past is a guide for how to handle our present

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, marking the official birth of the new nation, it is worth remembering some of the reasons the document offers as just cause for making war on the British monarchy.

“No taxation without representation” is the slogan that is best known as the core complaint of the colonists, a reference to the colonists’ objections to the 1765 Stamp Act and a series of taxes levied by the British crown thereafter over which Americans had no means of objecting in parliament. But such taxes were not the only provocation to war.

Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick says Farage accepted staff, security and accommodation from George Cottrell before becoming an MP

Nigel Farage did not declare gifts and benefits provided by a crypto entrepreneur who has previously been convicted of fraud, Reform’s economic spokesperson has admitted.

Robert Jenrick said on Sunday that the Reform leader had accepted staff, security and accommodation from George Cottrell, but claimed they were personal gifts provided before he became an MP and so did not need to be declared.

A friendship between presidents Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and a need for weapons production, has changed how other NATO countries treat Turkey.

America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and men are having a particularly hard time making social connections. Some are turning to speed-friending events to fill the void.

A musical “block party” in Los Angeles offered a striking contrast to the July Fourth celebration in Washington, D.C., anchored by the president.

Would we get a 21st-century Gettysburg address? Or YMCA, gripes about his legal woes and boasting about Iran?

The astronomer Carl Sagan once described Earth as a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” he wrote.

Donald Trump took the stage on Saturday night imagining himself the master of the universe, not the temporary custodian of a country born around the same time as the hot-air balloon. The last decade was proof that “divine providence” had made Trump president for America’s 250th anniversary of independence, his aide Stephen Miller posted on social media.

CNN reports: Prehistoric human relatives, nicknamed "hobbits" due to their short stature, may have been scavengers, rather than skilled hunters capable of taking down big game or building cooking fires, according to new research. The study adds to growing evidence that Homo floresiensis, which had a brain only slightly bigger than that of a chimpanzee, wasn't as advanced as scientists previously believed.... The researchers believe that much like how Komodo dragons hunt water buffaloes today, they were using their venomous bite to take down Stegodons — and after the scene was clear, Homo floresiensis swept in to cleave meat from what remained... The new study reinforces a long-held suspicion that Homo floresiensis is not a dwarfed form of Homo erectus but a descendant of a more primitive Homo habilis-like or Australopithecus-like form that arrived on the island more than1 million years ago, said Dr. Chris Stringer, a research leader specializing in human origins and paleoanthropology at London's Natural History Museum.

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A parish entry reveals an argument that proved pivotal to the abolitionist cause, at a time when an estimated 20,000 Black people were living in the country

When the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gave a sermon in 1787 at Manchester Cathedral – during the city’s first mass meeting against the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans – he saw a “great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit”.

However, little is known about Black Mancunians in the Georgian era, which makes one recently rediscovered entry in parish records at Manchester Cathedral particularly significant.

In late-night campaign-style speech in Washington DC, US president vows to take the US ‘to new levels’

Donald Trump has hailed the “unmatched achievement and unlimited potential” of the US in a triumphalist address marking the country’s 250th anniversary.

In a late-night campaign-style speech in Washington DC on Saturday, the US president claimed his country was “just getting started” as he vowed to take it “to new levels”.

Training document used to teach inspectors updated after campaign by celebrities including Chris Packham

Ofsted, the body responsible for safeguarding in education in England, has dropped guidance for inspectors that linked autism and extremism after an outcry from celebrity campaigners.

An education minister has disclosed that an updated training document “no longer includes reference to children with autism” after claims that it was “offensive” and “clumsy” discrimination.

Farage is under pressure over £5m gift, byelection losses and rise of rival Restore but allies say exit speculation is ‘wishful thinking’

“Of course he’s tired. He’s just done two months campaigning every day on the road, it would be weird if he wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit,” says one friend of Nigel Farage who has spent time with him in recent weeks.

Westminster has been ablaze with rumours that Farage is growing weary in the job of leading Reform UK after the bruising scandal around his decision to accept a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. He is now also facing further questions about whether his lifestyle has been partly funded by George Cottrell, his close friend and a convicted fraudster.

Cooling down has become political amid record highs, as experts say row is distracting from work of protecting lives

As the afternoon heat rose to a dizzying 41.7C (107F) in eastern Brandenburg on Sunday, taking German temperatures to unprecedented highs, Mario, 65, took precautions but did not panic. Two years ago, a fierce heatwave had prompted him to buy a powerful device that few Germans own: an air conditioning unit.

“The summers are slowly getting warmer,” says the retired handyman in Neuzelle on the German-Polish border, whose bungalow is now among the 6% of German homes with fixed air-conditioning. “And as you get older, the heat gets harder to endure.”

In a political wasteland dominated by billionaires, war criminals and mega-corporations, the head of the Catholic church is a rare figure of moral leadership

What do Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu have in common? Answer: a chronic inability to tell right from wrong. The three leaders currently causing the most harm in the world share a predilection for violence, a chilling lack of compassion, and extraordinary self-regard mixed with paranoia. Yet the characteristic linking them most closely is their rejection of – or failure to grasp – basic moral standards. Worse, these men typically behave, in their public lives at least, in ways that are fundamentally immoral. And that’s a problem for everyone. Their moral malaise is contagious.

Ideas about what, in absolute terms, constitutes right and wrong are always contentious, as moral philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have shown. Pope Leo, leader of the world’s Catholics, warned recently that “we are living in a time when it is becoming difficult even to recognise what is truly good for everyone”. Yet most people, most of the time, observe a personal moral code held in common with others. There is broad agreement, for example, that it’s wrong to kill, steal, cheat and lie. In an ostensibly secular age, 76% of people worldwide identified with a religion in 2020 – a potent expression of individual and collective morality.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace? With the tagline "Group project, but make it 1776," the ad depicts a largely unseen Thomas Jefferson mid-draft when he gets a nagging text from Ben Franklin, leading to a very Google-centric collaboration process. Edits are suggested in Google Docs, a meeting gets scheduled in Google Calendar and conducted remotely via Google Meet (with every single attendee apparently turning their camera off?), then the whole thing is finalized with e-signatures; cue the fireworks. Of course, since this is an ad from a tech company in the year 2026, AI has a role to play. The fictionalized founders use Google's "help me visualize" AI tool to try out different animals on the national seal, Gemini takes notes on the meeting, and the founders also ask the chatbot for advice before declining King George III's document access request. TechCrunch call it "very tongue-in-cheek," noting that at one point Samuel Adams even asks, "Can we settle this over beers?" And they argue that "the AI evangelism is relatively discreet when compared to many other recent ads."

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CBS hosts a primetime special celebrating America's 250th birthday on Saturday, July 4, with exclusive performances and the largest fireworks show in history.

Ezra Jin, founder of Zion Church, lands in the US and reunites with family who are ‘overwhelmed with joy’

The founder of one of China’s most prominent underground churches has been released from prison and reunited with his family in the United States.

Ezra Jin, the founder of Zion Church, landed in the US on Friday evening. He was one of dozens of church members who were detained in a sweeping crackdown on Christians in October.

Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is suspected of crashing into a parked car and driving away from the scene Friday afternoon in Northern California.

Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers. They've all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments "are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs." In Germany, powerful associations representing private companies and municipal utilities have pushed back against new standards for physical protection, warning they could spell financial ruin. New Zealand's government has faced resistance from industry groups over a proposal to fine critical-infrastructure companies and their directors for cybersecurity breaches... A sign of how lines are blurring: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 32 countries last year agreed that as part of a pact to spend 5% of economic output on defense and security, 1.5% would go to military-adjacent needs including protecting critical infrastructure and networks. Spending targets range from cybersecurity and industrial capacity to railroads, bridges and ports needed for military logistics... "We need a wide concept of defense — defense is no longer just military," said Italian Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO's top military adviser. Adding to the complexity, companies now need to protect the data networks that serve as gateways to critical infrastructure. Hackers increasingly target not just computer files to steal information but also systems managing vital functions like building access and factory control, remotely causing physical damage or enabling espionage. U.S. authorities in April warned that Iranian hackers were trying to disrupt American drinking-water systems by targeting computer equipment that connects hardware with software. A year earlier, suspected Russian hackers remotely manipulated valves on a Norwegian hydroelectric dam... Another challenge will be parsing jurisdictions and liability for assets that cross international waters or are damaged in combat — such as subsea data cables or energy pipelines. Turf battles between law enforcement and militaries are already complicating efforts... "The private owner can invest in redundancy, monitoring, and repair capacity, but only governments and militaries can really deter, patrol, attribute, or respond to hostile state activity," said Marc Glasser, who worked on cybersecurity and infrastructure security for three decades at the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security.... Companies say they need greater clarity from governments on what protections they will provide and subsidies to help them defend privately owned assets that provide a public good. Most governments don't provide incentives for companies to invest more than the minimum legal resilience requirements. The article notes that in May the chief executive of California's Port of Long Beach "launched a cyber-defense operations center to thwart tens of thousands of cyberattacks daily, which jeopardize computer systems and all equipment connected to them." The article also points out that the EU adopted new regulations requiring countries to reduce vulnerabilities, and new laws proposed in the U.K. now "seek to increase penalties for subsea sabotage, updating codes that date to when telegraph cables were first laid in the 19th century."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the nation’s sweltering capital, white supremacists and liberal activists marched, each demanding their country back. Officials ordered thousands of people to evacuate the National Mall after a severe weather warning that delayed President Donald Trump’s speech.

• Belgium play Americans in the last-16 on Monday

• US have enjoyed strong support at home at the World Cup

A raucous, pro-US crowd is expected in Seattle for the Americans’ last-16 match against Belgium on Monday, but the Red Devils say that they don’t fear the atmosphere that will await them.

“I think we just have to … show balls on the pitch,” left-back Maxim De Cuyper said on Friday. “Try to play your own game. If you play against 80,000 supporters or with 80,000, you have to try to do the same.”

After the pope's visit to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, the U.S. Embassy said the ambassador to the Holy See gave Leo a commemorative baseball, an apple pie and a U.S. World Cup jersey.

New Pekin’s ‘oldest’ Fourth of July celebration brings people home and bonds a changing Indiana town.

South Carolina's pine forests "have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself," reports CBS News: In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smith have been studying the site for decades, but recently, they made a shocking discovery: The sandy soil was home to several sets of remains buried in shallow graves. Metal buttons suggested the men had been Continental soldiers, but there was no other identification... About 2,000 Continental soldiers were killed, wounded or captured, and some men never returned home. Their families could only guess at their fates. But Legg and Smith's discovery, paired with an explosion in DNA technology, is changing what's possible. A set of remains, previously known only as 9B, has been identified as John Pumphrey, a young man from Maryland who enlisted in the Continental Army's 7th Maryland Regiment as young as 13... Pumphrey likely marched more than a thousand miles with the regiment. The unit fought in battles with then-Gen. George Washington in New Jersey and Pennsylvania... The Pumphrey family still exists today. The DNA that helped identify Pumphrey's remains came from three women: Pam Donahue, Karen Pumphrey Etchison, and Nancy Pumphrey White... In late June, members of the extended Pumphrey family came together to hear his story and say his name for the first time in centuries. His remains are interred in South Carolina, where he and the other soldiers were discovered, but the tombstone, once marked "Unknown," will soon have his name carved on it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update in England expected to reach about 200,000 patients over the next year as part of £10bn package to overhaul NHS systems

The NHS will begin using AI on its app to direct patients to the appropriate services, it has been announced.

The tool will be used to triage patients and to ascertain if they should be allocated a GP appointment. Some may be advised to attend a pharmacy or their local A&E department instead, depending on the severity of their condition.

Looking to upgrade your AI chatbot? Here's what your money will get you.

Kelsey Pfendler set out to become first US woman, youngest woman and fastest woman to solo over 2,400-mile journey

A Grand Canyon river-rafting guide who aimed to become the first US woman to row solo across the mid-Pacific has completed a record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.

Hundreds of people gathered to cheer on Kelsey Pfendler as she pulled into a Honolulu harbor on Friday night on her 21ft rowboat, Lily, after nearly a month-and-a-half at sea, local media reported.

Guardian staff contributed

As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat. That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending with a heatwave that is blanketing much of the country, including in Philadelphia where the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade that had been set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to Philadelphia ABC station WPVI. Elsewhere, America's Independence Day Parade, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on July 4 in downtown Washington, D.C. was canceled by organizers late Friday evening due to the extreme heat in the District of Columbia... Amtrak announced it will be canceling a number of trains due to heat-related conditions. The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages). CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well-preserved fourth-century quarters reveal details of daily life, urban development and economic activities

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a well-preserved Byzantine-era city in the western desert.

The fourth-century quarters had residential and religious structures, including a basilica-style church in the Dakhla oasis. Archaeologists also found coins, pottery fragments and tools.

The Russian president donned military fatigues as he tried to counter a narrative that Moscow is stumbling in its war after Ukrainian drone strikes set off an acute fuel shortage.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 5 No. 854.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 5 No. 1,120.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 5, No. 1,842.

Canada battled hard but Morocco had too much quality as the co-hosts journey came to an end

The prize on offer today is a quarter-final against either Paraguay or France. There’s a cheap strikethrough gag begging to be made there, and goodness knows we’re cheap and jaded enough to usually do it. But nobody’s taking anything for granted after Argentina’s scrape with disaster against the heroic and inspired Cape Verde. Here’s how last night’s instant-classic antics went down in Rotterdam, where six of the Blue Sharks were born.

It’s the big pennant showdown … and it’s as good as a walkover for Morocco. Achraf Hakimi will hand over this uniquely shaped artefact that almost literally drips with beauty. The Arabic script translates as Royal Moroccan Football Federation, so there’s no detail anywhere of today’s fixture and opponent; unfortunately that’s one point docked. However two bonus points are awarded for the sheer elegance of Arabic script. Total score: 11 out of 10.

Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.") But in 2026 the EU now requires a country-by-country compliance report, and the New York Times notes that Microsoft "was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply..." Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones. The report showed the sometimes absurd results. Microsoft said it had generated almost 40 percent of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3 percent of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1 percent of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2 percent of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe... [In Luxembourg Microsoft said it had $283 million in pretax income with only 34 employees.] [America's] Internal Revenue Service is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion4. The company has said it disagrees with the I.R.S. and said in a securities filing that it "will vigorously contest" the proposed tax bills. This week a Microsoft blog post offered their own "context," arguing that tax is "one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one. "Our investments, partnerships, infrastructure, and long-term presence in countries around the world also reflect a commitment to helping strengthen the economies and communities where we operate, today and for the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

St Petersburg governor reports no victims after ‘large-scale’ overnight attack that also hit Baltic port of Vysotsk

Ukraine launched a big overnight drone attack on St Petersburg and the surrounding area, hitting the city’s oil terminal and port infrastructure in the wider region.

The St Petersburg governor, Alexander Beglov, said the city had been subjected to a “large-scale” drone attack that had hit its oil terminal. He said there were no casualties and the aftermath of the attack had been dealt with.

At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update: We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phones supported by the Lineage project, an Android-based volunteer-led mobile phone operating system with much free software already in it. Our current, primary focus is on the radio blobs that control WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and cellular communications. The software freedom issues with mobile computing have been around for a long time, with the most challenging issue being the baseband/modem firmware that relies heavily on proprietary software. This creates a technical and legal maze that is nearly impossible to break free from, but that doesn't mean we should ever stop working to create free systems. It certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't liberate the software that we know can be free software. Now, half a year into this project, lead developer Rob Savoye has extracted firmware from over 200 Lineage install packages, processed 85GB of files, and imported the results of these analyses into a PostgreSQL database for cross-device comparison... [M]uch of the software and blobs we need to work through are shared across multiple devices; this means even greater strides for mobile phone freedom... As insurmountable as it may seem at times, every blob we manage to free up will be progress. The FSF has proven time and time again that it can bring the free software philosophy to life, not just by advocating for it, but by making it so. The bulletin also describes how waves of botnets from "aggressive LLM scrapers, vulnerability scanners, poorly optimized CI/CD servers" inspired the FSF to create a new free-as-in-freedom automated monitoring tool: In our efforts to combat the botnets, we optimized several detection rules to ban abusive behavior. We found the upper limit of fail2ban and replaced it with reaction, an efficient alternative with our configuration that uses ipset. We also split several monolithic machines into many separate machines so that when a web service is overwhelmed the other functions of the service do not go down with it... We found quite a few ways to respond to and prevent botnet attacks, but still faced a significant related challenge: communicating when a website or service is down... Uptime Kuma is a human-readable, automated monitoring addition to our systems... You can check out our recently-launched self-hosted Uptime Kuma instance at https://status.fsf.org/. When you see the page, you will also likely say, "Wow! The FSF and GNU sure do run a ton of services!" and you would be right... If you maintain websites and services, and are looking for a simple way to communicate publicly with your users, consider using Uptime Kuma or another free software solution instead of choosing a proprietary monitoring solution." There's also an article on the state of free-as-in-freedom videogame console emulators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 35,000 people from about 600 groups made their way from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall via Piccadilly

Tens of thousands of people marched through central London for the annual LGBT+ Pride parade.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, joined the crowd as they proceeded through the capital on Saturday afternoon.

"The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday," reports the Associated Press: The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol "BSP" on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $25.2 billion. Among the company's well-known holdings are the event creation and ticketing company Eventbrite, and the video hosting service Vimeo... AOL itself went public in 1992 and was a vanguard of technology and communication. It reached a market value of $164 billion in 2000 shortly before merging with Time Warner. It then crashed along with the rest of the industry following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. It has been bought and sold several times over the last two decades... [Italy-based Bending Spoons] was founded by three friends in 2013 following the failure of their first attempt at building a technology startup. It has since grown by buying more than 50 companies. The acquired companies are reorganized, and AI technology is often a key tool in the redesign. The focus remains on subscription-based revenue from the portfolio of businesses. The company said it had net income of $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million during the first three months of 2026. It had more than 500 million monthly active users and 9 million monthly paying customers as of March. The company has debt of just under $4.4 billion. It plans to use proceeds from the offering to invest in new acquisitions. The article notes that in the company's prospectus, it says they chose the name Bending Spoons because "We were about to attempt to create a world-class company with $40,000, a team of five, and a track record that read 0 for 1. A touch of irony seemed appropriate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meghan and his children may eventually join him on the rest of the trip outside London, the source said.

Mt Olive Pickle Company says it was unaware image of flag was included in exhibit, and cites value of ‘human dignity’

A leading vendor of the US delicacy that is the pickle has withdrawn from the Great American State Fair in Washington DC after North Carolina’s booth displayed a video containing a Confederate flag.

The Mt Olive Pickle Company, which is located in eastern North Carolina and bills itself as the “#1 bestselling brand of pickles, peppers and relishes in the US”, told local news station WNCT it had been unaware that an image of the flag would be included in a video as part of the state’s exhibit.

The rugged Boom 3I looks and sounds great, and you can snag it for $35 off right now at Amazon, as long as you like the color green.

EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... under which EchoStar agreed to sell about 50 megahertz of its nationwide spectrum for $23 billion." Some context from Deadline.com: Charlie Ergen, who co-founded EchoStar and Dish, recently returned as chairman and CEO to steer the company through its recent challenges... Even prior to the merger, Ergen had been working to pivot from the pay-TV business, where Dish now has just 5 million subscribers and streaming sibling Sling TV has another 2 million, toward wireless telecom. With wireless spectrum hitting the market due to the Sprint-T-Mobile merger and then Elon Musk's Starlink looking to ramp up in the sector, it seemed more attractive than the cord-cutting-ravaged pay-TV business. But it is still entails plenty of risk, especially given how tightly regulated the spectrum is due to security concerns. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our writers with the latest news and reaction as the last 16 stage begins

Australia lost to Egypt on penalties in one of the more disastrous shootout cock ups. Changing goalkeepers is a bold move, especially when Mat Ryan made a right Shilton of himself.

Jonathan Wilson was there.

The remains of a Revolutionary War soldier were identified as a young man from Maryland just before America's 250th anniversary.

Serena Williams cited a knee injury behind her decision to withdraw from a doubles match at Wimbledon.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled over the Islamic Republic of Iran for 37 years, was killed along with several family members in an airstrike in February.

Officials rescued seven other people after a sudden storm led to a boat sinking on Geneva Lake

Three children died after a boat capsized on Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake during inclement weather on the eve of the US’s semiquincentennial celebrations, and seven other people had to be rescued by emergency responders, according to officials.

A recreational motor boat with 10 passengers, including four children, sank on Friday afternoon as the boat “attempted to navigate to safety as weather conditions deteriorated” amid an intense, sudden storm, the city of Lake Geneva police department said in a statement.

A decade in the making, the 1976 bicentennial had a cathartic impact on the wounded national polity

• Americans: how do you feel about the country’s future after 250 years of independence?

It felt like a proper jamboree – a coming together of diverse peoples who thought they had something to celebrate. But the defining moment of the 1976 bicentennial, the US’s last epic birthday celebration, came two years before.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in his presidential inauguration speech of 9 August 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands in repositories, README files, Makefiles, or other content consumed by AI agents. If executed — particularly in auto-approve or CI environments—the commands can steal credentials, compromise developer systems, or enable software supply chain attacks. According to researchers at Adversa AI, the 11 popular open source AI coding agents tested, only one successfully blocked all of the Bash trick techniques.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fourth-century residential city in the western desert is one of two major archaeological finds announced by Egypt on Saturday.

• Knee injury sustained in singles loss on Monday

• ‘I’m heartbroken to have to withdraw’

Serena Williams will not compete with Venus Williams in the doubles after she was forced to withdraw from their first-round match due to the knee injury sustained in her singles return at Wimbledon.

Williams had been in a race to be fit to face Camila Osorio and Solana Sierra on Saturday afternoon. But she has not recovered from twisting her knee in the first set of her opening-round singles match against Maya Joint, which she lost 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3.

El Obeid becomes key battleground in war between Sudan’s armed forces and their paramilitary enemies, the RSF

Fatima has lost count of the number of drone attacks on the besieged city of El Obeid in Sudan, but said the attacks this past weekend were the most violent so far.

The drones hit schools and fuel stations, killing more than 20 people, including students, she said. “Over the past few months, seeing 40 or 45 drones is the norm. You can literally count them,” said the aid volunteer, whose name has been changed for fear of retribution.

Guardian analysis of X feed shows how keen world’s richest person was to air his views and ‘interfere’ in British politics

Elon Musk posted about race and immigration in the UK on his social media network X twice as often as he did about SpaceX, which he also owns, in the run-up to the aerospace and AI company’s initial public offering.

A Guardian analysis of Musk’s posts, replies and reposts between 31 May and 12 June has shown the extent to which the social media activity of the world’s richest person, who lives primarily in the US, has focused on UK politics.

Officers found body of 34-year-old man in luxury rental home in Pattaya area, local media says

A 21-year-old British woman has been arrested in Thailand after allegedly fatally stabbing her boyfriend, according to local media reports.

The Bangkok Post reported that on Thursday morning local time, officers found the body of a 34-year-old man, who operated a cannabis farm, in a luxury rental home in the Pattaya area, a beachside region two hours from Bangkok known for its large expat population and nightlife.

Voters disillusioned with Starmer’s Labour were tempted by the Greens – but Polanski’s party fears the affable, left-leaning Burnham could win them back

The shift was notable. A week after Keir Starmer said he would resign, YouGov polling showed Labour up two points and the Greens down by the same amount. Might an Andy Burnham premiership mean a rethink for Zack Polanski’s party?

The short answer is it is too early to know, particularly in an era of unprecedented political volatility and the seesawing poll numbers that come with it. This year alone, a five-point Labour lead over the Greens has become a similar margin in favour of the Greens, and then a seven-point advantage for Labour.

Heat health alerts in place in most regions of England from Sunday to Saturday with mercury also rising in Wales

Another heatwave is on the way across parts of the UK with peak temperatures of 34C forecast.

Temperatures in the south of England could reach 28C on Saturday, according to the Met Office.

The Verge argues that researchers "have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it's just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public's imagination." And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028: The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing... Researchers have improved the qubits themselves, so they hold onto information longer. When they hold onto information longer, you can fit in more operations and do more complicated algorithms. Last November, Andrew Houck of Princeton University and his colleagues reported that they'd made a superconducting qubit that can hold onto information three times longer than the previous record holder... And in the last two years, researchers have made substantial strides in what's known as quantum error correction... In addition, researchers have developed algorithms to correct errors while the quantum computer operates... Microsoft claimed, which experts dispute, that it made an object made of electrons known as a Majorana particle [which should make fewer errors and be easier to scale up]... "We 100 percent stand behind our results. We stand by our roadmap," Microsoft's quantum lead, Chetan Nayak, responded in an interview with The Verge. In an email statement, he added that Microsoft's "papers do show that we are creating and controlling Majorana [particles]... Microsoft's supporting evidence is unconvincing [according to [Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic]Rnqyq. What it claimed as evidence of a Majorana particle, he says, could actually be due to quantum dots forming in its device. Quantum dots are electron-containing objects that are not useful for Microsoft's quantum computer. It also bases its claim on data from a single device, says Legg. He wants to see Microsoft replicate the results in multiple chips. "If you repeatedly try and find Jesus in your toast, eventually you'll find Jesus in your toast," he says. "But that one piece of toast doesn't mean you had some kind of epiphany." "While we appreciate the religious fervor, our data maintains the strength and consistency of our roadmap, as we have for the past several years across previous milestones. We look forward to delivering the world's first quantum machine and sharing the energy of our achievements with the world," wrote Nayak in response. Past spurious work from Microsoft-affiliated researchers adds to the doubt. In 2021, the journal Nature retracted an article from Microsoft-affiliated researchers in which they'd claimed strong experimental evidence that they'd created a Majorana particle. "Even hopeful experts have varying opinions about when a quantum computer will demonstrate something useful," the article acknowledges. But quantum computing lecturer Eleanor Crane of King's College London predicts researchers will have demonstrated a useful scientific simulation on a quantum computer by 2028. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pardons issued to nine people charged with violating Clean Air Act as extreme heat smothers much of US

Donald Trump on Friday issued pardons to 11 men – two convicted fraudsters and nine charged with having violated the federal Clean Air Act by disabling or otherwise modifying trucks’ emissions controls.

Those executive pardons – coming amid US semiquincentennial celebrations blanketed in extreme heat exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions – were among a broader wave of acts of clemency from Trump during his second presidency, chiefly for those he considers to be aligned with him.

Google's Learn About is impossibly easy to use.

Deputy Labour leader says No 10 must become more meritocratic as party’s female MPs press Burnham on gender balance

Andy Burnham will change a “boys club” culture of factional briefings at No 10 which silenced critics, according to the deputy leader of the Labour party.

Lucy Powell said she had experienced “unpleasant” briefings in Downing Street, which left people afraid to speak out or challenge Downing Street’s position.

National Weather Service issued an extreme heat warning as high temperatures have paralyzed the east coast

Organizers of Saturday’s Independence Day parade in Washington DC abruptly canceled the event late on the eve of the event, with sweltering temperatures in the nation’s capital and on the east coast wreaking havoc on celebrations of the US’s semiquincentennial.

The event, hosted by the National Park Service (NPS), was scheduled to begin at 10.30am on Saturday. But organizers said they canceled the procession due to an extreme heart warning issued by the National Weather Service (NWS).

Thousands of police deployed to Erfurt in central Germany as party holds conference on key Nazi date

Riot police have clashed with opponents of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on the streets of Erfurt in Germany, where thousands met to block roads and prevent AfD delegates from attending the party’s biennial national conference to elect its leadership.

Police reported 20,000 protesters were demonstrating in the eastern city, where Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla are expected to be re-elected as the party’s co-leaders in the run-up to crucial regional elections in which AfD could win power at state-level for the first time.

The oil giant’s sponsorship deal with Fifa has featured prominently at matches in Houston. But 100 miles away in another Texas city, residents say the firm’s refinery is exposing them to poisonous gases and long-term health problems

The street is wide, its grass verges thick and scruffy after a week of rainstorms. Jamal Johnson will walk home straight down the middle carrying his plastic shopping bag, a jot of motion through the stillness. He lives in one of the modest wood-panelled houses spaced out on each side, most lovingly kept and passed through at least two generations. There is nobody else in sight, but a freight train breaks the silence, grinding left to right along the line flanking the north-facing gardens. The west side of Port Arthur, Texas, could be any lower-income neighbourhood in the southern states if it were not for the looming menace on the other side of the track.

This is a sad, unsettling place. “I’ve got a load of friends and family who’ve had weird diseases,” says Johnson, his face contorting at the thought. He lists a grandfather and aunt who died of cancer, the latter at a young age after relocating here to care for other relatives. An uncle died with complications from ALS (motor neurone disease). “You know what I’m saying? Man, they’ve let off all these poisonous gases; it’s like that all the time. It’s fucked up.”

When you’re looking for a new pressure washer, it’s easy to focus on the wrong specs. These are the ones that matter.

Up to 30 million people expected to attend delayed events for Ali Khamenei, killed at start of war with US and Israel

Huge crowds have gathered at the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader after the gates of the sprawling Grand Mosalla mosque in central Tehran let in thousands of mourners who had been waiting through the night to enter the grounds.

Iran is staging mass funeral processions for Ali Khamenei – whose ⁠37-year reign was brought ⁠to an ​end in February by the first airstrike of the war launched by the US and Israel. By 5.30am, the Tehran streets surrounding the mosque were already filling up as Iranians, some travelling for hours and many carrying flags or posters of Khamenei, made their way to an event designed to emphasise the country’s sense of loss at the killing of the supreme leader and desire for revenge. Emotions filled the air as the crowds chanted Death to America and Israel.

Boy who was allegedly thrown into the area at a Cambridgeshire zoo has undergone five surgeries

A three-year-old boy left seriously injured after being allegedly thrown into a crocodile enclosure has undergone five surgeries and faces a long “rehabilitation journey”.

His family, who provided the update, also thanked donors who had raised more than £25,000. His parents said they had been “living at the hospital” since the incident at Johnsons of Old Hurst farm and zoo, in Cambridgeshire, on 18 June.

In Lampedusa, island gateway to Europe, the U.S.-born pope stressed human dignity and told America: "in every generation" immigrants "helped to shape the nation’s character.”

I’m an out-of-shape cycle enthusiast. I tested the Hypershell exoskeleton on a regular bike versus an e-bike and found a clear winner.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were married as they celebrated their wedding with hundreds of guests Friday at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Shopping for a new phone can be a headache. I've tested phones for 15 years so I know what to look for.

Exclusive: £20bn of ‘potential’ £30bn AI investment touted by UK ministers appears to have been hypothetical

It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project – would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.

But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs.

The congressman spent four months mysteriously away from work, but he doesn’t seem to think his constituents should get mandated sick days

The mystery of the missing congressman has finally been solved. Almost four months ago Tom Kean Jr, a Republican, vanished from public view. He missed more than 100 votes, all while continuing to collect his full taxpayer-funded salary of $174,000 along with excellent benefits. The only explanation given for his absence was a cryptic statement from his office in late April saying he was dealing with a “personal health matter”. Kean’s father, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean Sr, further told CNN in May that his son was battling a temporary illness and would be back to work soon.

This week, Kean finally resurfaced and explained that he’d been absent due to inpatient treatment for depression. Why hadn’t he said anything about this earlier? Kean said he was “private person by nature”. Which is great, but maybe don’t choose a job in public service in that case.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

As the US celebrates 250 years, the Declaration of Independence has been curiously absent. Yet its language on the consent of the governed is more relevant than ever

It’s America’s birthday. Ear-splitting pyrotechnics will be heard across the land tonight, as they were a few weeks ago, after the cage fight at the White House. On 24 June, the administration launched the Great American State Fair, with “spectacular flyovers” from fighter jets and stealth bombers. Six 18-wheel “Freedom Trucks” are barreling down the highways, bringing history-lite pop-up displays, mainly to red states. Later this summer, we will hear drivers revving their engines, deafeningly, as they leave skid marks around the National Mall during the Indy car race scheduled for 22 August. It’s gonna get loud.

But one guest is apparently not invited to the party. The Declaration of Independence, the reason we are convening, has been curiously absent from the lead-up. That feels strange for a document that essentially rewrote world history.

Eric Dillon thought the pain in his shoulder was a minor injury. It took two years to get the real answer.

When the sun goes down on Independence Day, the skies of Washington, D.C., are expected to fill with a record-setting 850,000 individual fireworks for a 40-minute spectacle like no one has seen before.

Guardian reports after the disaster told of 5,000 deaths, much of the capital being razed, and doubts about Mexico hosting the finals

Mexico last hosted the World Cup in 1986, but the competition was almost cancelled several months before the start when an earthquake struck the capital, Mexico City, leaving at least 5,000 people dead, 30,000 homeless and much of the city flattened, in one of the worst earthquakes to hit the country.

To this day, the death toll remains disputed, with some estimates putting it as high as 40,000.

The president kicked off America's 250th anniversary celebrations with a speech at Mount Rushmore where he warned of a resurgence in communism.

Pope Leo urges Americans to live up to ideals of Declaration of Independence in first key address to US

Pope Leo has used his first key address to his home country to praise the US history of ⁠welcoming migrants, urging Americans to live up to the ideals put forward in the ⁠Declaration of Independence.

In his latest implicit rebuke to Donald Trump, the first US leader of the Roman Catholic church said the word “America” had become ‌a “byword for freedom” across the world because of the way the country welcomed migrants.

Cornell Lab for Ornithology plans data linkup between app and population monitoring on eBird platform

The Merlin bird ID app will allow users to feed real-time bird identifications into one of the world’s biggest citizen-science biodiversity projects in an update it is hoped will aid conservation of at-risk birds.

Since 2021, the free Merlin app, created by the Cornell Lab for Ornithology, has used machine learning to provide an almost instantaneous sound-identification service for birdsong, along with an image for each bird identified. In future, the detections of bird species recorded by people will be automatically collected on the global online database eBird, which contains more than 2bn bird observation records.

Oasis tune has been sung from Texas to Massachusetts and soon in Mexico City – and the players have joined in too

It has become England’s World Cup anthem more three decades after it was first released, being belted out by fans from Texas to Massachusetts.

Wonderwall by Oasis will soon be heard in Mexico City too, where the Three Lions will face the tournament co-hosts Mexico on Sunday evening – or at 1am on Monday for fans singing along back home.

Instead of a UFC event and poorly attended state fair, how about ditching the electoral college and a new season of Game of Thrones?

I hate birthdays, especially my own, which is ominously arriving next month. I used to love them, back in those days when I had something tangible to look forward to: getting my first car, graduating high school, my first legal alcoholic drink, a new Star Wars film that’s actually good. That time is long gone. I can do all those things I listed, plus I haven’t seen a good Star Wars movie in more than 20 years. What am I even celebrating at 42? A slightly paunchier waistline? A larger bald spot? If the present you’re getting me isn’t a free Turkish hair transplant, I don’t want it. I don’t relish being 42, but imagine if I were 250?

America (the country, not the band) turns 250 this weekend, and we’re all meant to celebrate that fact on the Fourth of July. Millions of dollars have been poured into marking the occasion, though few of the events hold much appeal for me. I didn’t watch the UFC event; I have no desire to watch a bunch of cars driving around in circles, and the PragerU Freedom Truck hasn’t even come to my town. I couldn’t even get to finally see Vanilla Ice live in concert. Like every birthday, a lot of money has poured into a day where no one has any fun.

Guardian readers on celebrating on Independence Day every year – and especially this year

This Fourth of July, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its independence from Britain, a milestone that the Donald Trump administration is commemorating with a series of events and celebrations across the National Mall.

The anniversary arrives against a backdrop of civil rights rollbacks, immigration crackdowns and strained international relations. For some Americans, however, the date carries an added layer of significance: it is also their birthday.

Not quite a desktop tower or a mini PC, the AtomMan G1 Pro ends up with some of the drawbacks of both designs.

Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their spokesperson said: "We expect the power generation portion of the system to be available as early as 2027, with the nuclear module being available to customers about 2030 based on regulatory approval." From the report: Founder and CEO Brian Matthews revealed the prototype microreactor, which features a fully 3D-printed silicon carbide reactor core and pressure vessel. "This next-generation nuclear core and pressure vessel sets the foundation for factory-built, mass-produced nuclear energy," Matthews said. "The advanced technology and additive manufacturing used demonstrate a clear commercial path for new nuclear technology coming to market in an accelerated manner." His company is developing a subcritical, solid-state, factory-built thorium-based nuclear reactor. Subcritical means the fuel cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction on its own, which prevents a runaway power excursion. Ampera uses "solid-state" to describe a design with solid rather than liquid fuel. The proposed fuel uses tristructural isotropic, or TRISO, particles, consisting of a fuel kernel containing thorium, surrounded by multiple ceramic and carbon layers. [...] "Thorium is the future for ultra-safe, clean power production," Matthews said at the time. "By producing TRISO thorium kernels in the United States, we can ensure ample access to the needed fuel supply as we scale up and also minimize price volatility risk." Ampera also describes the heart of the reactor as as a spherical monolithic gyroid core. A gyroid, as far as we can fathom, is a complex shape that provides a massive surface area relative to its volume, making it well-suited for heat transfer. Its complexity makes it difficult to produce using conventional manufacturing methods, which is where additive manufacturing comes in. The core is 3D-printed using silicon carbide and designed to operate for up to 30 years without refueling, the firm claims. Ampera says its planned systems will provide 15 or 30 MWe, depending on the configuration, enough to supply a typical datacenter. Larger configurations are planned. Matthews said that his company expects to be the first to industrialize factory-built nuclear power with near-term deployment timelines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shifting demands and political ideology have left the industry vulnerable to global competition from cheap Chinese cars

Earlier this month, an intriguing new Detroit-based electric vehicle startup hit the market – Slate Auto, a Jeff Bezos-backed venture offering something US buyers rarely see these days – a pick up truck billed as “affordable”.

Its base price is $24,950, making it one of the lowest-cost autos in the US market and close to half the price of the average new vehicle. But as the US contends with sharply rising auto costs, even Slate may be getting left behind in the global electric vehicle (EV) transition. The global EV industry is entering a golden age powered by cheap Chinese cars that can be bought for as little as $10,000.

Prime minister holds no ‘personal animosity’ toward likely successor and stresses he has a platform to build on

Keir Starmer has said Labour “should go on to win the next election” under his likely successor, Andy Burnham, based on what the prime minister had already achieved.

In his first interview since he announced he would stand down, Starmer also said he held no “personal animosity” toward Burnham, who is expected to succeed him.

Exclusive: Anger at union’s decision to put 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy

The British Medical Association is threatening to axe up to a third of its entire workforce to help it tackle a significant cash crisis.

The doctors’ union has placed 200 of its 600 staff in England at risk of redundancy. That has triggered anxiety and fury among staff, who have accused the BMA of appalling behaviour and “hypocrisy”.

Savings plans for children born between January 2025 and December 2028 launched as president seeks electoral boost

Trump accounts, a savings vehicle named after the US president and authorized by congressional Republicans, are set to go live on Saturday, offering American parents a new way to save money for their children by investing in funds managed by major Wall Street firms.

All accounts established for children born between January 2025 through December 2028 – nearly the entirety of Donald Trump’s second term – will receive $1,000 from the government. Parents, friends and employers will be able to deposit as much as $5,000 a year into the accounts.

Commentary: Netflix's Worst Neighbor Ever is the latest true crime installment from Blumhouse and explores riveting, heartbreaking real-life horror stories that hit close to home.

These six presidential speeches are some that have most reverberated through the ages, and whose impacts are still felt today.

Scholars will someday wonder how the richest country in history chose to throw it all away. But the crisis has been there since the beginning

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has arrived at a moment of some embarrassment for the Republic. The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own. America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak.

In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fuelled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.

A History of Violence

I’ve lived through the last 51 of America’s 250 years. For much of it, I’ve believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it deserves to be. It’s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past, and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.

Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome such a legacy.

Still, many Americans broke their bodies and laid down their lives trying to atone for the sins of the founders and those that followed them. Ordinary people pressed and struggled to gain some measure of the liberties, equality, and the chance at happiness promised, but not delivered, at America’s birth. In return, they faced terror, truncheons, and tear gas. Year after year, people denied supposedly inalienable rights faced down, for themselves and their neighbors, white-hooded nightriders and bayonet-bearing troops and robber barons and monied interests and hateful bigots and vicious police and craven politicians and foolish experts and infinite hordes of functionaries and good-German-type neighbors willing to do the bidding of oppressors or just look the other way. But because of all these shattered skulls and cracked ribs, endless abuse and arrests and incarcerations, there was a chance for redemption.

You could almost see it if you squinted hard enough. That fleeting moment when a panoply of rights movements appeared ascendant, and that long arc of the moral universe was straining hard toward justice, and the volunteers of America — an unarmed army of the better angels of our nature — were on the march. For an instant, it was there: a shining wave of promise about to swamp the forces of America’s decrepit order. Maybe you glimpsed it in the raucous joy of an occupied campus or park or city block, on a graffiti-scribbled wall, in the smoke of a burning tire, in the frenzied talk of a comrade, in the pages of a banned book, wherever; you sure knew it if you saw it.

But that shimmering wonder crested, collapsed, and consumed itself. Now you need to crane your neck and strain your eyes to see the bare trace of that high-water mark — the cruel evidence of the last, best hope for America’s redemption just before it was swept back into the depths. We’ve been drifting ever further from it since. 

If the question of which America would prevail hadn’t been settled earlier, the reelection of a megalomaniacal, racist, war-mongering, bigoted, vulgar, anti-democratic, authoritarian, inveterate liar, and would-be tyrant to preside over America’s semiquincentennial seemingly resolved it.

America is the “greatest, strongest, and most exceptional nation the world has ever known,” said President Donald Trump recently in celebrating the country’s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall. He added that it was “superior to any nation that’s ever been built no matter how many years it took.”

While Trump’s demented, deteriorating mind might not recall George Orwell’s warning in 1984 — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — he or his minions certainly understand the concept on some level. Immediately upon taking office last year, Trump began efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history to match his boasts. An executive order issued last March took aim at a supposed “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” 

Related

Trump Could Use Sacred Native Land for a Monument to… Christopher Columbus

It’s Trump, however, who has been rewriting history to comport with his claims. For months, to take one example, Trump has fought a pitched battle to censor the history of his presidential predecessor George Washington, whom he calls “our foremost American hero.” For his exploits at Trenton and Valley Forge, for his leadership in the turbulence of the Revolution’s wake, the capital bears Washington’s name and in it a giant obelisk stands in his honor. Most Americans have literally, if not figuratively, long embraced his visage since his face adorns the quarter and the dollar bill.

In January 2026, crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the President’s House site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, where Washington and his wife Martha lived in the 1790s — when the city was briefly the nation’s capital — with nine of their slaves. On orders from the Trump administration, the workers pried off panels discussing the ownership of people by our foremost American hero, details about the lives of those enslaved men and women, and information about the broader history of slavery. Recently, a federal appeals court discarded an injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, allowing the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit. “It is an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful,” wrote the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display.

No country can be great, much less the “greatest,” if it’s afraid of its own people knowing the story of their nation. Trump looks at America and sees an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” according to that executive order. He claims that malevolent forces have “reconstructed” America’s past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” fostering “a sense of national shame.” But no one need rewrite U.S. history to foster a sense of unrelenting disgrace. It’s everywhere, if we have the courage to call it out.

In 1779, for example, Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples, to bring about the “total ruin” of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” he told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages.

Such sins of America are legion. Given the time and space, one could name 250 or 250,000 or 2.5 million of them. On this Fourth of July, it’s worth recalling some of those inconvenient truths that Trump would rather you forget and future generations never know.

• Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district led more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on November 29, 1864. In what he called “an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on a sleeping village at Sand Creek. For almost four hours, they slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children. Many Native women were also raped, and Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia were taken as souvenirs. In a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington stated: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”
• In 1914, striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security company opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car that the miners called “the Death Special.” Those miners fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered in federal troops. Almost 200 people were killed, according to some estimates.
• A two-day attack by white mobs on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921 began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching. Rioting white people, in response, killed hundreds, and more than 30 city blocks were destroyed, including a community known as Black Wall Street. Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor, recalled piles of bodies in the streets and watched a white man execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
• During the 20th century, coerced and forced sterilization became a method of controlling “undesirable” populations: disabled people, immigrants, people of color, the poor, unmarried mothers, those with mental illness, and others. This included federally funded sterilization programs in 32 states. Over 70 years in California, for example, approximately 20,000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions, often without their full consent.
• From 1932 to 1972, 399 black men, many of them sharecroppers and poor, in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Despite the availability of penicillin beginning in the 1940s and the fact that syphilis can damage the heart, brain, and other organs, government officials ensured the men received no medical care while telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” 128 of the men are estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications.
• In a horrifying echo of the Tuskegee syphilis study, U.S. government and Guatemalan doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections — chancroid, gonorrhea, and syphilis — to study potential treatments. The researchers also paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. Left untreated, all three can be fatal.
• The U.S. government conducted thousands of radiation experiments on Americans, including children, from 1944 to 1974. They included the injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air to track their movement or effects.
• U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not hundreds of thousands of rapes in Europe during and after World War II. Around 190,000 German women alone were raped between the U.S invasion of Nazi Germany and 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty, according to one estimate. In reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945, the youngest victim mentioned was a 7-year-old child. The oldest was a woman in her 60s.
• On August 6, 1945, the U.S. launched the world’s first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.
• The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program targeted the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among others in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1976 Senate report, it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.
• On March 15, 1968 in South Vietnam, U.S. troops were briefed by their commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina. The Americans were told they would find enemy troops in the village of My Lai and, as one unit member recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” When the troops arrived, they encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nonetheless, Medina’s order was carried out. More than 500 civilians were slaughtered over the course of four hours. The soldiers even took a break to eat lunch amid the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, and systematically burned homes.

There is no way not to view these “historical milestones in a negative light.” Nor the sins of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the global war on terror and the countless crimes they spawned. In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars. We’ve also watched as Black women and men were murdered in cavalier fashion and anti-ICE protesters were gunned down in the streets. We’ve seen immigrants deported to foreign prisons, war zones, and human rights-violating pariah states for spite, and rights disappeared as if they were panels detailing historical truths.

“There has never been anything like the United States of America,” Trump said recently. It’s lucky for the world. Because for every landing at Normandy, there is a massacre at Bear River or Sand Creek or Samar or No Gun Ri or My Lai or Le Bac 2 many times over. I’ve spoken with hundreds of survivors of these types of atrocities. I know the story of America’s impact abroad better than most.

Trump believes that he resuscitated the U.S. “A short time ago we were a dead country,” he said during semiquincentennial festivities. “We were dead.” Those comments about America’s death resonated with me — even if I don’t think they’re true — because the other side of that coin is rebirth. While I don’t believe this country can be redeemed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be reborn.

Washington isn’t the only predecessor Trump loves. He’s also besotted with, as he put it, “the late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important Founding Fathers.” Although in Trump’s version of history, Jefferson was a “principal writer of the Constitution.” (He actually authored the Declaration of Independence — the anniversary Trump is celebrating these days.) Perhaps if Trump knew what Jefferson, another slaveholder, actually wrote, he would be less enamored. Whatever his grave faults, Jefferson offered a prescription for an ailing nation. What country “can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” he asked in a 1787 letter. Noting the necessity of “rebellion,” he continued, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Two hundred and fifty years in, during the presidency of a sick-minded, wanna-be despot, and despoiler of history, it’s worth considering the endless sins of America, its sheer brutality, its staunch resistance to reform, and how one of Trump’s favorite founders thought about sending a message to “rulers.” A country that won’t face its crimes and instead tries to disappear them can’t be saved. Even rebellion, at this late date, might be only a half-measure. But if there is any wisdom left in Jefferson’s words, it could be somewhere to start. 

The post The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History appeared first on The Intercept.

In speech at Mount Rushmore, US president claims resurgent ‘communist menace’ poses threat to country

Donald Trump has kicked off the US’s 250th birthday weekend with an extraordinary partisan attack on the “communist menace” in the US, framing its supporters as “the enemy of July 4th 1776”.

The US president spoke for half an hour on Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the milestone anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence from Britain.

Sony's Japanese Reon Pocket Pro Plus is now shipping in the US. These are my thoughts after days of testing.

Donald Trump has kicked off America’s 250th birthday weekend with an attack on the 'communist menace' in America. The US president spoke for half an hour on Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the milestone anniversary of the US declaration of independence from Britain

• Trump launches America’s 250th birthday celebrations with partisan attack

Group, whose constituencies have derelict or at-risk pools, are campaigning to make outdoor swimming available for all

Cooling, blue expanses of water have been a lifesaver for many lucky enough to live near a lido during the recent UK heatwave.

Now, a group of 20 MPs, along with the Fabian Society, are calling for this relief to be made accessible for all by getting water companies to fund the reopening of the country’s lost lidos.

We assess the standing of the nations who played in the tournament’s last 32 before the next round of games begins

Les Bleus look unstoppable – all six of our judges ranked them No 1. Sweden did their best to cope with the French front four but were blown away by the slickest operation in town. Even when an opponent is feeling comfortable, Michael Olise or Kylian Mbappé can produce genius without notice, ripping apart the best-organised defences. “I did say that I wanted to enjoy this World Cup to the fullest,” Mbappé told reporters after the Sweden game. It is hard to imagine the fun stopping any time soon.

There are plenty of reasons for Americans to feel discomfort about the behavior of their country. But sports have a way of bringing joy and unity

The US men’s national team are on the verge of history. One win away from matching their best-ever run in the World Cup’s modern era, they are playing with more verve and quality than they ever have before at this stage. Wednesday’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina has begotten a rarity: American soccer, in the spotlight, in America.

To longtime US soccer fans, the question of whether to support this particular team at this particular time is barely a question. Or if it is one, it’s vaguely along the lines of “should I breathe?”

“Dear You,” a Teochew-language family drama and migration story, has raised fraught questions of identity among some Chinese communities abroad.

The tragic deaths at the girls’ camp grabbed headlines for months. But other people who lived through the ordeal have dealt with a quieter trauma.

Labour has approved a wave of renewable energy projects, but turning plans into power remains slow. Why is that?

Labour has a race on its hands if it is to lock in its promise to achieve a virtually zero-carbon electricity system by 2030.

Britain’s next prime minister will have to move fast: the climate emergency is raging, high energy bills are driving up the cost of living and the reactionary right is threatening a fossil fuel push if it wins power.

The programme, aimed at keeping 1m girls in school across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, withdrawn after aid cuts

A leading higher education programme, aimed at keeping 1 million girls in school across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, has been axed by the British government just two years after it was announced.

The scheme, Strengthening higher education for female empowerment (SHEFE), which was unveiled with some fanfare two years ago by the outgoing Conservative government, had a £45m budget to increase access to higher education for 1 million students worldwide. It has now had its tender withdrawn, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said.

As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine writing, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT

Three paragraphs, from three different hotel reviews. Can you tell which, if any, were AI‑generated?

“The hotel is in a great location for everything. Lots of places to eat and drink. The hotel itself is always abuzz. The tavern located on the ground floor is definitely a must. Food, service, prices and atmosphere were great.”

Annie’s lawyers argue that prosecution was so badly executed it breached her human rights

At her kitchen table, in a village in southern England, Annie* sits with a blue folder stuffed with court documents, witness statements and correspondence relating to the trial of her stepfather, whom she had reported to police for alleged childhood abuse.

As she prepared to tell her story for the first time, she was flooded with emotion when a photograph fell from the folder. The square Polaroid showed a young girl standing in a field beside a pony, dressed in jodhpurs and a riding hat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies' refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivists to build legal repositories. Sony's announcement that all PlayStation games will be digital-only from 2028 onward has sparked concern that titles will become harder to preserve and more easily vanish, since the company's servers will become the sole point of distribution. In an official statement, Cifaldi noted that the end of physical PlayStation games has surprisingly little impact on the Foundation's efforts because the majority of games from the last two decades are already digital-only. According to the Foundation, most games nowadays are not released for consoles, let alone on physical discs. Furthermore, many discs for major titles require downloading updates before they are playable, although the DoesItPlay database reveals that, even today, most are playable offline out of the box. Cifaldi claimed that the true reason piracy remains the best option for preservation is that the Entertainment Software Association, which lobbies for game publishers, has closed off other routes. For example, in 2018, the Association opposed efforts to grant copyright exemptions for museums, libraries, and archives to retain copies of abandoned online games for research. This is the same organization that recently helped defeat a proposed California bill to preserve premium-priced online-only games by falsely claiming that community servers are illegal. The Foundation accused the ESA of repeatedly blocking attempts by cultural heritage institutions to reform DRM legislation. Cifaldi also described the Library of Congress' outdated software preservation process, which currently only requires tiny snippets of source code. For example, Capcom once asked the Foundation to provide the LoC with "the first and last ten pages of code" for a Mega Man game. Unable to discern where digital records began and ended, the group simply chose random segments. Platform holders' habit of closing online storefronts and removing media from users' accounts is also unhelpful. "What continues to baffle us is what the industry expects institutions like ours to do about it," the Video Game History Foundation said. "If platform owners are deciding to eliminate physical media and older digital storefronts, then we'd also like to see trade groups like the Entertainment Software Association offer meaningful solutions for archives and museums to legally preserve digital-only content and make it accessible for research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Politicians brace for constitutional turmoil if Nigel Farage’s party end up in government – or even as a strong opposition

The rise of Nigel Farage has prompted political leaders across Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to game the unthinkable: the breakup of the United Kingdom.

Unionists who wish to save the union and nationalists who wish to end it are bracing for constitutional turmoil if Reform UK emerges triumphant – with Farage as prime minister or official leader of the opposition – after the next election.

‘Home fee’ qualification ends in 2028, leaving those hoping to study in UK not now eligible for British loans

British teenagers living in the EU could be priced out of UK universities in two years’ time as a Brexit rule change means they face the double whammy of paying costlier international fees, while losing access to student finance.

British passport holders living in the EU still qualify for “home fee” status at UK universities. But this will no longer be the case when the grace period ends in 2028, meaning the first wave to be affected are starting their A-levels, or equivalent, this autumn.

From the gold rush to civil rights, the moon landing to 9/11, the US has always understood, mythologised and sold itself through the power of the still image

The United States was founded in 1776, but did not begin to see itself until the autumn of 1839, when daguerreotypes, the first form of photograph, reached American cities. You could argue the US began again on the morning it could look at its own face.

At first photography seemed to answer the democratic promise of 1776. A portrait was no longer reserved for the rich; almost anyone could now leave a trace of their existence. The gold rush became one of the first great American dramas to find the camera: ordinary diggers squinting into the lens, looking beyond it for gold. A more emblematic American scene can scarcely be imagined: what would be called the American Dream, a lottery everyone plays and very few win. The myth was not that they all found gold – it was that the search itself made them American.

Three children died on Geneva Lake in Wisconsin after a boat capsized during a severe storm Friday, Lake Geneva police said.

The Empire State Building lit up in blue for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding Friday night.

The couple were married in a star-studded ceremony at Madison Square Garden

• Full report: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce marry at New York City’s Madison Square Garden

Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities -- a dispute that highlights the frantic race between the U.S. and China to take the lead in artificial intelligence. [...] Anthropic said last month that it had suffered a strike by Alibaba, which it described as a "distillation" effort that involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one. The distillation helps accelerate China's ability to reach Anthropic's advanced Mythos Preview capabilities, it said in a letter seen by Reuters that was sent to two U.S. senators. Alibaba's ban comes just days after developers said Claude Code contained mechanisms that inspected user environments, including timezone and proxy-related information, and inserted subtle markers into prompts sent to Anthropic's servers. An Anthropic employee wrote on Tuesday on X that the feature was "an experiment we launched in March" intended to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protect against model distillation. The person who spoke to Reuters about Alibaba's ban said that Anthropic's restrictions targeting China were difficult to enforce on individual users who can deploy servers in the United States and make traffic appear as if it originated there. But companies were more aware of legal and compliance risks, the person added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The couple invited an array of celebrity guests to the wedding, including Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper, while Adam Sandler officiated their nuptials

• In pictures: Fans and A-list stars gather for the wedding
  

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are officially wed. The couple hosted their wedding celebration on Friday in New York City, nearly three years after first meeting.

The ceremony was officiated by Adam Sandler, a Swift spokesperson said in a Friday statement confirming the nuptials.

Rishi Sharma started his journey 10 years ago by driving around his Southern California neighborhood to record interviews with veterans and later expanded his outreach.

Prime minister also speaks of his ‘intensely personal decision’ to step down in first interview since resigning

Keir Starmer has warned his likely successor, Andy Burnham, that it will not be possible to spend less time focusing on international affairs.

Speaking during a BBC interview, he also spoke of his “intensely personal” decision to announce his resignation last month after two years as prime minister.

A fight between two groups of young people who knew each other escalated into gunfire, police said

A shooting altercation between two groups of young people at a shopping mall in Dearborn, Michigan, left two people dead and a third injured over what is typically the most violent weekend of the year in the US, police said.

The shooting occurred as the US began celebrating the Fourth of July, historically a holiday weekend that sees higher rates of gun violence across the country. In 2024, the Gun Violence Archive reported more than 500 shootings over Independence Day weekend.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration in a speech marking America's 250th birthday.

Attendance had been thin to Trump’s ‘unbelievable’ event before an increase on Friday – and then the high temperatures swept in

Even by Trumpian standards, the event was promoted with intense hyperbole: nothing short, the US president suggested, of the “the most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen”.

“It’s gonna be great,” Donald Trump proclaimed on the opening night of the Great American State Fair, the centerpiece of the US 250th anniversary celebrations. “It’s gonna be unbelievable.”

A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6.

The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on. It’s unclear how long it will take ReactOS to become compatible with Windows Vista software, but it took Microsoft around half a decade to develop Vista after the release of XP and marked a major upgrade, even if it didn’t land well with users at the time.

↫ Paul Hill at Neowin

It’s a milestone for sure, but not one that’s going to make a huge difference for ReactOS at this moment in time. Still, it’s a sign of things to come, even if the very nature of the ReactOS project means that whatever things are coming tend to take a while to arrive.

Parasite cyclospora spreads through produce and water contaminated with feces and causes the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis

The US Centers for Disease Prevention has been working to find the source of a parasitic illness that causes “explosive”, watery diarrhea, with more than 400 cases of the sickness reported across 18 states.

The parasite, cyclospora, spreads through raw produce and water contaminated with human feces – and it causes the intestinal illness cyclosporiasis, whose symptoms include cramps, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, low-grade fever and vomiting. The most commonly reported symptom is “watery diarrhea with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements”, according to the CDC.

As we commemorate the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, Americans are asking familiar questions. Who were the founders? What did they believe? How did this nation begin?

But there is another question that deserves just as much attention: Where do I fit into this story? For many people, the answer begins with family history.

Genealogy is often thought of as a personal hobby or a search for long-lost relatives. But it can also be a powerful way of understanding American history itself. Every family story is woven into larger stories of migration, community, work, faith, conflict, aspiration, and civic life. Exploring where we come from can help us better understand not only our own identities but also the nation we have inherited together.

Recent historical research suggests that genealogy played a much more significant role in the founding era than is commonly recognized. Many founders, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, carefully documented and studied their own family histories, viewing genealogy as a way to better understand their inheritance and their place in a changing world. Family relationships influenced inheritance, citizenship, political power, religious life, and legal standing. Rather than being a side concern, genealogy helped shape the very structure of the society the founders were building.

Across early America, people of diverse backgrounds preserved their histories in countless ways: through family Bibles, letters, oral traditions, quilts, gravestones, church records, court documents, and stories passed from one generation to the next. Enslaved families fought to preserve family connections despite systems designed to erase them. Indigenous communities maintained rich traditions of kinship and ancestry. Immigrant families carried family histories across oceans and into new communities. Genealogy has always been both deeply personal and profoundly civic.

That insight feels especially important as we celebrate America's 250th.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that all people are created equal and speaks of "one people" coming together to dissolve the political bonds that once tied them to another nation. The Constitution begins with three simple words: "We the People." Those ideals have always been aspirational, inviting each generation to expand the circle of belonging and help the nation live more fully up to its founding promises.

Genealogy offers another way into that ongoing work It also reminds us why primary sources matter.

When we explore our own family histories, we rarely rely on secondhand accounts alone. We search for birth certificates, naturalization papers, census records, death certificates, marriage licenses, letters, photographs, family Bibles, and other documents created by the people who lived those lives. These records allow us to move beyond inherited stories and encounter the past on its own terms.

The same is true of our nation's history. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, letters between the founders, petitions, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and court records are, in many ways, America's genealogy. They are primary sources that reveal who we were, what we believed, what we debated, and how our constitutional democracy came to be. Just as discovering an ancestor's signature on a naturalization record can make family history suddenly feel real, reading the Declaration in its own words or encountering the voices of ordinary Americans who petitioned for greater liberty and equality can make our national story feel immediate and personal.

Whether we are exploring our family's genealogy or our nation's constitutional history, primary sources invite the same habits of mind: curiosity, close observation, empathy, and the humility to recognize that every story is richer and more complex than we first imagined.

Looking into our family histories often reveals journeys across oceans and borders, service to country, moments of hardship and resilience, and efforts to build new lives and communities. Sometimes we uncover histories we never knew. Sometimes we encounter difficult truths. Often, we find both. In every case, we are reminded that American history is not distant or abstract. It was shaped through millions of individual lives, each contributing another chapter to a story that continues today.

That perspective makes this a particularly meaningful moment to explore family history. Starting on July 4, 2026 and running through the end of August 2026, visitors to the National Constitution Center can experience The Stories of US Discovery Center, presented by Ancestry, where historical records and interactive experiences invite people to discover connections between their own families and the broader American story.

The experience also reflects a broader commitment to preserving our shared history. Through Ancestry's partnership with the City of Philadelphia, approximately 20 million historical records, including birth, marriage, death, naturalization, and property records, will be digitized over the next two years, expanding access to the stories of the people who helped shape both Philadelphia and the nation.

These efforts are about more than preserving the past. They invite us to see history as something we inherit together and continue to write together. That idea is at the heart of the National Constitution Center's Our Story Continues campaign, which encourages all of us to recognize our place in the nation's ongoing constitutional story.

Understanding the past helps us better understand one another and ourselves. It reminds us that every family has a story worth telling and that every community has helped shape the nation we have inherited.

Civic learning begins with connection. Sometimes that connection starts with reading the Declaration. Sometimes it begins with visiting a historic place. Sometimes it starts around a family dinner table. And sometimes it begins by discovering the name of a great-grandparent in a centuries-old record.

As Americans gather in Philadelphia during this historic anniversary year, I hope they will not only reflect on the nation's founding documents but also ask what stories brought their own families to this moment.

Because the American story has always been written not only by the extraordinary figures we remember, but by the countless ordinary people whose lives became part of something larger than themselves.

Julie Silverbrook is the Chief Content and Learning Officer of the National Constitution Center.

Singer and fiance Travis Kelce have been coy but festivities are getting under way at Madison Square Garden

The streets of New York City and the first-class lounges of Heathrow and JFK airports were crawling on Friday with celebrities on their way to attend the wedding of the year.

Taylor Swift had kept fans guessing about whether it was her nuptials that had caused the closure of 11 streets in midtown Manhattan and the endless deliveries of flowers, food and decorations to the huge Madison Square Garden arena.

CBS News previously reported President Trump was weighing pardons of a slate of people convicted of emissions and clean air-related violations.

The Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., are deemed a "national special security event," which is the highest possible designation.

As Americans endure another bout of extreme heat, experts say small thermostat adjustments and other energy-saving steps can help reduce soaring cooling costs.

For the surviving Iranian regime, the funeral offers an opportunity to project power after withstanding months of war with Israel and the United States.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 4, No. 1,841.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 4, No. 1,119.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 4, No. 853.

Valve has open-sourced the design for a customizable e-ink front panel for the Steam Machine, dubbed the "Inkterface." "All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, which goes over everything you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine," reports GamingOnLinux. From the report: They're now calling it the "Inkterface" and there's a good few things you'll need to make it including: 1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM. 1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend. 1 x Adafruit 5.83" Monochrome eInk Panel. 13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws. 4 x 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/16" Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT. Valve even provided a video on the GitLab showing it being put together [...].

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People gather outside Madison Square Garden despite security keeping them from seeing anything noteworthy

Taylor Swift’s fans gathered in the heat outside New York’s Madison Square Garden on Friday for her wedding – or at least the celebration of it – to Travis Kelce, and the sense of being close to the superstar singer-songwriter and her NFL champion groom on their big day.

Whether or not Swift and Kelce have already tied the knot, which has been at the center of contradictory reports, fans said they were thrilled at the union – and the location.

• Striker’s one-match ban will not be increased

• Balogun says yellow card would have been fair

• Pepi and Wright among options against Belgium

Folarin Balogun fielded questions on the morning of his 25th birthday, though the cards being discussed weren’t filled with kind notes and two-dollar bills.

Per Fifa rules, the striker was unable to speak to the media following the United States’ World Cup last-32 triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he opened the scoring in a commanding 2-0 win but was sent off after receiving a red card in the second half.

Here's how to row better by fixing these errors.

The gift comes months after Belgium's diamond industry won the removal of U.S. tariffs on diamond imports.

Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, the aftermath of the earthquakes in Venezuela, a brutal heatwave in Europe and Harry Kane at the World Cup – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Judge says evidence indicates attack on Pouria Zeraati outside home was carried out on behalf of Tehran regime

Two Romanians who took part in a “targeted” knife attack on a television journalist in London “on behalf of the Iranian state” have been jailed.

Pouria Zeraati, who worked for the Persian-language channel Iran International, which is critical of the Tehran regime, was left bleeding in the street after being stabbed three times outside his home in Wimbledon.

Republican Liz Murrill was indicted for the alleged intimidation of New Orleans elected officials

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Louisiana’s highest court has granted a stay of the proceedings in a criminal indictment targeting the state’s attorney general, in the latest twist of a high-stakes political battle between Republican state leaders and Democrats who govern its most famous city, New Orleans.

Liz Murrill, a Republican who is Louisiana’s first female attorney general, was slapped with a 16-count indictment on Thursday by a New Orleans grand jury charging her with intimidation and malfeasance. The charges effectively accused her of trying to intimidate New Orleans officials who fought a law passed by Republican legislators to overhaul the city’s courts.

Federal safety regulators are urging consumers to stop using the recalled fireworks and return them for a full refund.

As imaging tools become more sophisticated, online predators are using images of children to make extreme pornography

• UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears

The two photos started out as typical teenage selfies: looking into the mirror, fully clothed. But once online predators had got hold of those pictures and ran them through an AI imaging tool, they had become the basis for extreme pornography videos.

These examples come from the Report Remove service, which allows children who have had explicit pictures of themselves distributed without their consent to flag the image confidentially and have it blocked or taken down from social media. Due to breakthroughs in AI, and the wide availability of AI models and nudification apps, some under-18s are becoming victims without even being in contact with criminals.

Exclusive: National Crime Agency and safety watchdog issue guidance amid rise in explicit material online

• AI prey: why watchdogs are telling parents to protect children from nudification apps

Parents should not put photos of their children on public display online, according to landmark guidance issued to tackle the rise of AI-generated sexual abuse material.

The recommendation has come from the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation, which fear that most people are unaware of the dangers posed by paedophiles and criminal networks.

They suggest that parents and guardians make their social media accounts private or share pictures of their children through a “close friends” group. The NCA and the IWF stressed they were not telling parents how to behave online, but said they should be aware of the problem and how to tackle it.

But the satellite internet company has a long way to go to catch up to established rival Starlink.

Party had justified plan to hang flags in Nottinghamshire on basis that local businesses would foot £75,000 bill

A £75,000 scheme by a Reform-led council to hang union flags at sites across the county, which the party said would “not cost the taxpayer a single penny” as it would be sponsored by local businesses, has failed to attract a single sponsor, it has emerged.

The plan to attach the flags to brackets on about 180 lamp-posts and other places was agreed in the autumn by Nottinghamshire’s council, won by Nigel Farage’s party in last year’s May elections.

Hundreds of Guardian readers expressed concerns over greed in the White House and a billionaire president unconcerned with high gas and grocery prices

Donald Trump has earned more than $1bn from his crypto businesses since returning to the White House, according to recent financial disclosures.

Amid questions of conflict of interest, more than 400 Americans expressed feelings of outrage, disgust and despair at their president. They answered a Guardian call for their views on Trump’s fortune.

The latest news, reaction and build-up as the last-32 stage draws to a close

⚽ Player guide | Bracketology | Knockout draw | Email us

Julian Nagelsmann is set to resign as Germany coach, according to reports in the newspaper, Bild.

It was reported ⁠on Friday ​the 38-year-old had agreed to leave following talks with senior German soccer ⁠officials, ⁠a three-hour “secret summit” on Thursday at the German ​Football Association (DFB) headquarters in ‌Frankfurt.

That pundit was Ange Postecoglou, and now, Asia’s No 1 team need him to not just talk the talk but walk the nation to the top level of the global game. The federation in Tokyo should do all they can to get his signature on a lengthy contract as he is going to be in demand this summer.

On July 3, 2026, the National Constitution Center awarded the 38th annual Liberty Medal to His Holiness Pope Leo XIV in a ceremony in Philadelphia just steps from Independence Hall.

“Dear friends, I am honored to accept the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in this year that marks the 250th of the founding of the United States of America with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,” said Pope Leo XIV.

Pope Leo XIV delivered his live acceptance remarks virtually from the Vatican, which were livestreamed to those gathered at the National Constitution Center and to audiences worldwide.

“As a son of this great country founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God's blessings upon America's future that the lofty ideals enshrined at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence may continue to guide the flourishing of the nation in unity, justice, and peace,” he said.

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the ceremony brought together civic and faith leaders, as well as visitors from Philadelphia, across the nation, and around the world, to reflect on how the promise that individuals may worship freely, speak openly, and live according to their own convictions has strengthened civic life in the United States and inspired movements for human dignity and freedom around the globe.

“We honor Pope Leo XIV today in recognition of his lifelong work for promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience around the world, ideals enshrined by America's founders in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” said Vince Stango, Interim President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

Watch Full Video of the Event

His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Francis Prevost on September 14, 1955, in Chicago, Ill., is the first pope from the Order of Saint Augustine and the first U.S.-born pontiff. He was elected supreme pontiff on May 8, 2025, after decades of pastoral leadership, missionary work, and service in the global Catholic Church.

The Liberty Medal, established in 1988 and hosted by the National Constitution Center since 2006, recognizes and celebrates individuals of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe.

The medal’s distinguished roster of recipients includes U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy; world leaders Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Mikhail Gorbachev; U.S. congressional leaders Senator John McCain and Representative John Lewis; and U.S. cultural influencers Muhammad Ali and Ken Burns.

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is a private, nonprofit organization with a congressional charter “to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a nonpartisan basis in order to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.”

For more information about the Liberty Medal, visit https://constitutioncenter.org/about/liberty-medal

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope launched network after being repeatedly assaulted by partners while unconscious

Two women who were drugged and raped by their partners while they were unconscious have said hundreds of people – including about 80 in the UK – have come forward to an international support group for victims of the crime.

Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope, who were both repeatedly assaulted by their partners while unconscious, are calling for tighter laws to stop men sharing images and videos of sexual assaults and rape online.

The US superstar golden couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are finally tying the knot in a rumoured major event in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The couple – who got engaged 10 months ago, announced via an Instagram post that received 14m likes in its first hour online – held an intimate rehearsal dinner at MSG with a rumoured guest list of 1,000 for today’s ceremony and construction of a custom-made fairytale castle inside.

But with tight security, NDAs and New York streets on lockdown – what do we know? Lucy Hough speaks to Guardian writer Elle Hunt

Tesla said Michael Butler disabled his car’s self-driving mode before it plowed into Martha Avila’s home in June

A man whose Tesla Model 3 was allegedly in self-driving mode when it crashed into a home near Houston and killed a 76-year-old woman inside recently has been jailed on a count of manslaughter.

Michael Butler’s arrest in the 19 June death of Martha Avila was announced late on Wednesday in a Facebook post by the sheriff of Harris county, Texas, Ed Gonzalez.

A year after President Trump signed the sweeping tax and spending package, its effects on households, businesses and federal programs are increasingly evident.

New York mayor’s speech cut ideological counterpoint to policies of president, who will deliver his own remarks later today

New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency.

Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk in the White House, Mamdani was surrounded by naturalized citizens like himself as he listed the waves of immigrants who shaped the city.

On paper, the US constitution is a thing of beauty. But the would-be emperor in Washington has revealed its great weakness

America’s big birthday has come at a bad time. On Saturday it will be a divided nation that marks 250 years since 13 North American colonies declared their independence from the Great Britain of George III. Many will be anxious that the republic they established that day is fragile – not least because of the would-be emperor in the White House.

Some will console themselves that hope and angst have always been intertwined in the American story. From the very start, confidence in a bright, exceptional US future was combined with foreboding and doubt. At the close of the 1787 constitutional convention, a woman approached one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to ask if the delegates had established a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Jonathan Freedland 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.

Avoiding traditional questions and stilted broadcast clips, PM-in-waiting has evolved his style of media management

He is due to become prime minister in just over a fortnight as parliament begins its six-week summer break. But at a marquee speech this week, he took precisely zero questions. So is Andy Burnham, as the opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, claims, dodging scrutiny? His allies say no: he is simply going about it in his own way.

The former Greater Manchester mayor is very obviously a different type of communicator from Keir Starmer, and therefore always likely to convey his message in methods beyond Starmer’s traditional questions after a speech and the occasional stilted broadcast clip.

A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.

Prince William will appear on the podcast hosted by Jason and Travis Kelce just hours before Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift's anticipated wedding.

President Trump hasn't committed to a firm number of people who will receive clemency — he's scheduled to have a meeting on pardons Friday afternoon, sources said.

Commentary: Sugar is a sharply written tribute to classic movies, featuring lush visuals and a cool soundtrack. Now in its second season, Colin Farrell's stoic performance makes this series another win for Apple TV.

Only 330 car club vehicles available for rent after big provider left British market, data reveals

The number of car club vehicles in London has fallen by a “catastrophic” 89% since Zipcar ended its service in late 2025, with former users being pushed to consider buying or leasing.

Car clubs allow drivers to use vehicles parked around a city, using apps to book and unlock them. Zipcar dominated London’s car club market before the US company’s shock decision to pull out in December 2025. That left a gap that has yet to be filled for Londoners without a car.

Port expansion and protections for whales part of BC and Alberta plan to expand country’s presence overseas

The governments of Canada and the province of Alberta will move forward on a major new oil pipeline after the pair announced a plan to ease concerns of British Columbia and First Nations on the Pacific coast.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, shuttled between British Columbia and Alberta on Thursday to announce more than C$150bn in new investments in both provinces, part of a broader project of reducing trade with the United States and expanding his country’s presence in overseas markets.

Family of woman who died after being hit by a bullet as she observed rioting in Derry say justice system has failed her

Three men from Derry have been found not guilty of murdering the journalist Lyra McKee in 2019.

Her family said the verdict at Belfast crown court meant the justice system had “completely failed” them and McKee.

Exclusive: Shabir Ahmed, jailed in 2012 for rape, abuse and trafficking of girls, was deemed three years ago to present ‘high risk of sexual offending’

The leader of the Rochdale grooming gang was deemed to pose a “very high risk of serious harm” towards children just three years ago, the Guardian can reveal.

Shabir Ahmed, 73, was freed from HMP Leeds on Thursday despite three failed attempts to secure parole, the most recent of which was in October 2024. One document, relating to a previous review in 2023, shows Ahmed was seen to present a “high risk of sexual offending”.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code. The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It's compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target's login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server. [...] PamStealer shows a native password prompt designed to resemble a system authorization request. Text that appears with the prompt says: "Maccy wants to make changes. Enter your password to allow this." As noted earlier, once a target complies, the malware validates it locally through the PAM API. "This check is done entirely through PAM: there is no call out to dscl, security, osascript or any spawned process to verify the password, as many commodity macOS stealers do," [said Jamf, a security firm for macOS users]. "The result is a quieter routine that keeps only a verified password, and one fewer process chain for defenders to detect on." If the validation fails, PamStealer displays the prompts again until it receives the correct one. Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss. The malware uses tactics to maximize the information it can steal. One tactic is to request the target grant full disk access to the fake Maccy app. It also contains code designed to access ethereum accounts. The various techniques -- particularly the Script Editor lure, a self-contained JXA dropper, a Rust-based second stage, and local validation of credentials through PAM are all noteworthy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emails sent between MP Anoulak Chanthivong’s staff take cautious approach to AI giant arriving in Sydney – despite the government’s encouragement

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The NSW technology minister’s office removed a reference to being “absolutely thrilled” about OpenAI opening a Sydney office after staffers joked a dystopian Skynet could be headed for the city within five years.

Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI announced its first Australian office in August last year, before opening in December.

The government said it had to react to England’s progression in the World Cup, which was only confirmed on Wednesday

Downing Street said it would continue to use X after the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, announced she would stop using the social media platform.

Nandy said yesterday the culture and media department will also stop using X because the site “now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate”.

It is for individual departments to decide what is right for them in this regard.

Our full focus remains on making sure X is following the law, cleaning up its act and ensuring it is safe for women, girls, children and people right across the country.”

‘Hugely significant’ race for Manchester mayor will give clues on whether PM-in-waiting can turn tide against Reform UK

Andy Burnham was delivered to the steps of Downing Street after one of the most consequential parliamentary byelections in recent British history.

But it is the race to be his successor as Greater Manchester mayor that could reveal far more about the mood of the nation than the historic – and unique – contest in Makerfield.

The mayor of Venice says the city is seeking government approval to introduce a form of dynamic pricing to deal with tourism costs.

Antitrust regulators suggested that state attorneys general could assist in investigating unlawful conduct by companies.

Deal including ‘national priority’ policy brings prospect closer of countrywide agreement between parties

The prospect of a national coalition between Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party has drawn closer still after the two groupings sealed another deal that will allow the PP to continue ruling the southern region of Andalucía.

The PP, which has governed the former socialist bastion for the past seven years, lost its absolute majority in May’s regional election, forcing it to look to Vox to help it stay in power in Spain’s most populous region.

Country’s leadership vows to never surrender as memorial on grand scale aims to relay message of resistance to world

In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran, as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years.

Khamenei was killed aged 86 in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the final farewell ceremony is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. By Thursday, knots of mourners carrying flags and blankets were already gathering along roads festooned with banners showing the red fist, the symbol of the funeral, alongside the slogan: “We must rise.” Many were heading to special hostels being set up across Tehran for the pilgrims. In Revolution Square a giant statue of a clenched fist was being installed.

A new batch of A24 films, including Everything Everywhere All At Once and Lady Bird, arrives this July on free streaming services.

The New York City mayor delivered a speech on Friday morning from behind George Washington’s desk in New York City Hall to mark the US’s 250th anniversary

Burnham should use a ‘Makerfield Test’ to ground UK foreign policy in real places Expert comment jon.wallace 3 July 2026

An international form of Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ could strengthen UK foreign policy by making it inseparable from outcomes in UK regions.

Foreign policy in Britain is often discussed as if it were a distant theatre, detached from the everyday realities of people’s lives. Yet the past decade has shown repeatedly that global shocks land first and hardest in the towns that have the least insulation from volatility. Energy price spikes, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions and investment flows reverberate through UK towns like Leigh and Wigan, Motherwell and Port Talbot, long before they appear in Westminster briefings.

Andy Burnham, newly elected as MP for Makerfield, steps back onto the national stage after nearly a decade as a metro mayor – and as the UK Labour Party’s near-certain choice to replace Keir Starmer as UK prime minister. Burnham describes his politics – shaped by the lived experience of Greater Manchester’s towns – as ‘Manchesterism’: an attempt to deliver ‘good growth in every British postcode’, nurtured ‘from the bottom up’, using ‘public intervention where necessary’ – driven by higher ambition for UK regions and towns. 

This outlook, core to his local election success, also offers a distinctive way of thinking about Britain’s international posture: an approach that I describe as ‘International Manchesterism’. That is, a place rooted internationalism that treats global forces as inseparable from local outcomes. 

International Manchesterism begins with the recognition that global shocks are experienced locally. The manufacturing clusters of north-west England, and other UK regions, have felt the real world consequences of supply chain fragility more acutely than the financial districts of London. When international energy markets convulse, households in older housing stock across Wigan and Leigh face disproportionate hardship. And when geopolitical tensions disrupt investment flows, regeneration projects in Greater Manchester stall.

I propose that International Manchesterism should be applied to UK policy through a ‘Makerfield Test’: a disciplined framework a new Burnham government can use to assess its international priorities. 

Rather than judging foreign policy by summitry, diplomatic choreography or doctrinal positioning, the Makerfield Test would ask a simpler and more demanding question: do Britain’s international choices tangibly improve life in the communities that forged Burnham’s politics?

Recasting foreign policy through this lens offers a way to reconnect global strategy with domestic renewal. It can also rebuild public trust in the value of international engagement. So what elements make up the Makerfield Test?

Economic security 

Economic security is the first pillar. For towns like Makerfield, global economic shifts are not abstract phenomena; they determine job stability, wage levels and household resilience. A credible foreign policy agenda must show how Britain can better shield its industrial and service sectors from volatility.

That means strengthening supply chain resilience for regional manufacturing, ensuring trade agreements reflect the needs of sectors outside London, and developing a strategic approach to critical minerals and inputs. 

This would recognize that these issues are not technocratic concerns but questions of fairness. Foreign policy must stabilize the economic foundations of Britain’s towns, not merely enhance the country’s global profile.

Energy resilience 

The Makerfield test would insist on energy policy that is understood through the lived experience of households, not the abstractions of international negotiations.
England’s northwest has been particularly exposed to international price spikes.

And the experience of the past few years has made clear that Britain’s energy diplomacy cannot be judged solely by its alignment with global climate summits. It must be judged by whether it lowers household bills and creates industrial opportunities in places like Leigh, Ashton and Wigan.

That requires diversified gas supply, expanded storage, deeper cooperation on renewable energy including offshore wind and hydrogen, and a commitment to ensuring that global energy transitions generate regional jobs rather than bypassing them.

Rebalancing investment

A third element of the Makerfield Test concerns international investment. Foreign direct investment has long been concentrated in London and the southeast of England, reinforcing regional inequality. But Burnham’s mayoralty has demonstrated that targeted international engagement can attract capital to regions historically overlooked by national strategy.

The Test would require a foreign policy agenda that champions regional investment corridors, strengthens ties with countries investing in advanced manufacturing, and reforms the UK’s investment promotion machinery so that regional assets are systematically showcased abroad. In this framing, international investment becomes a tool for rebalancing the geography of opportunity.

Skills, mobility and global opportunity

Globalization has often been experienced as insecurity rather than possibility, particularly in towns with limited access to global networks. The Makerfield Test would ask if government foreign policy is helping to reverse this dynamic.

Doing so would mean developing international skills partnerships in digital, green and advanced manufacturing sectors; expanding mobility schemes for young people outside major metropolitan centres; and aligning migration policy with regional labour needs. 

The Makerfield Test would demand policy that positions global opportunity as something that must be distributed, not captured by a narrow geography.

Reimagining Atlanticism 

For decades, successive UK governments’ Atlanticism has been framed as a strategic reflex – a doctrinal commitment rather than a practical question. 

The Makerfield Test would judge the government’s US related policies by their ability to deliver concrete benefits for Britain’s towns: stable jobs, secure energy, resilient supply chains and access to global markets. This requires a shift from rhetorical alignment to purposeful cooperation. 

The UK and US already share interests in critical minerals, semiconductors, green manufacturing, and energy security. Applying the Makerfield Test would drive policy that deepens collaboration in these areas, in ways that underpin the economic resilience of regions like Greater Manchester. 

It would treat joint investment in battery technology, aerospace, life sciences and hydrogen as central pillars of a shared industrial future with the US. And it would draw on US experience with community college systems and regional workforce development to strengthen Britain’s own skills infrastructure.

China and the Global South

The UK occupies a space increasingly defined by middle power dynamics, in which countries exercise influence through coalitions, issue based partnerships and strategic agility rather than through unilateral leverage.

The Makerfield Test would demand global strategy that seeks to convene, coordinate and shape rules across multiple domains in a way that delivers tangible benefits at home.

This is particularly important in navigating the evolving US–China relationship. The Test would require policy that avoids binary alignment with either side and instead focuses on protecting British economic security, maintaining access to critical technologies and ensuring that global competition does not undermine regional industries. 

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It would support deep cooperation with the US on supply chain resilience and green industrial transitions, while maintaining selective engagement with China in areas where cooperation is essential – such as energy transitions, global health, scientific research and regulated trade.

The Makerfield Test would also apply to policy on the Global South, seeking partnerships capable of delivering investment, technology and market access to Britain’s regions. That requires moving beyond paternalistic development narratives and instead building reciprocal, interest based coalitions that reflect the realities of a multipolar world.

By applying the Test, Britain would become a connector, a convener and a problem solver – a country that leverages its diplomatic networks, regulatory influence, scientific capacity and development expertise to shape outcomes that matter both globally and locally in the UK. 

Foreign policy as domestic renewal

Ultimately, International Manchesterism challenges Westminster to rethink how foreign policy is conceived, communicated and assessed. It insists that international engagement be judged not by elite indicators but by its impact on UK communities. And it aligns global strategy with domestic renewal, offering a language for explaining foreign policy in terms that resonate with everyday experience.

If Burnham can articulate an international agenda that passes the Makerfield Test, he will not only redefine Britain’s foreign policy conversation. He will demonstrate that global strategy can be rooted in the lived realities of the places that shaped him.

A version of this article also appeared on the LSE British Politics blog.

Suspect seen in Germany after attack apparently targeting tycoon Vadym Iermolaiev

The main suspect in a Monaco bomb attack this week that seriously injured a Ukraine-born business tycoon and two of his family members is a Ukrainian woman living in Germany who disguised herself as a man, authorities have said.

Interpol, the international police organisation, on Friday issued a red notice for Anastasiia Berezovska, aged 39, describing her as German-speaking with dark hair and a tattoo, possibly of a snake, on her right arm from the shoulder to the elbow.

From the lightbulb to the airplane, to medical breakthroughs and the internet age, the past 250 years have been defined by America's intrepid intellect.

Against a backdrop of sweeping rollbacks of civil rights and deteriorating relations with allies, many are feeling cynical

As the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary on 4 July, the country faces a turbulent moment under the Donald Trump administration.

The anniversary coincides with sweeping rollbacks of civil rights, deteriorating relations with traditional allies and growing domestic opposition to the administration’s handling of immigration and free speech. Against this backdrop, many Americans say they feel increasingly cynical about the country’s future.

For how often people invoke it, the concept of “hell” in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I’m glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements.

Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn’t just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it’s the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions.

↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot

Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with “AI” nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called “Win3”, which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can’t run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency.

We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don’t want to use “AI” of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry’s sick, twisted mind to force people into using “AI” with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley’s strength, after all.

At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on “AI”, so I wouldn’t be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something “AI”-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.

Britain’s place in the new world order The World Today mhiggins.drupal 3 July 2026

We are facing a storm of geopolitical instability, economic coercion, AI and climate change – and it’s likely to get worse. But by working more closely with Europe and seeking greater cooperation outside the big trading blocs, Britain can build global alliances to secure the future of its people, writes Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.

The world is more dangerous than it has been for decades, and families across the United Kingdom are feeling the impact. War has returned to Europe, pushing up energy bills at home. A closed strait 3,000 miles away drives up prices at the petrol pump. Cyber-attacks from the other side of the world force British firms to shut down overnight. And criminal smuggling gangs make billions breaching our borders.

Geopolitical instability, economic coercion, technological change and a ravaged climate are creating a perfect storm. Having dealt with these threats on the international stage this last year, it is very clear to me the rapid pace at which that storm is now gathering, and the real risks for the UK if we are not ready to act.

We are not alone in facing these challenges. Across the world, nations are being buffeted by events and feeling powerless to respond. The result is a rising sense of frustration that is straining the fabric of democracies.  

Here in the UK, successive foreign policy mistakes over many years have left us more exposed than we should have been. The world changed around us, but we failed to properly adapt and ducked difficult, but necessary, domestic public debates.  

Since 2024, the Labour government has worked hard to begin turning that inheritance around. But a good start is not the same as keeping pace. Because the toughest tests lie ahead.

Yet, Britain is far from powerless. Ours is an extraordinary country, with capabilities few can match and values that others still look to. As the old world order is remade, we must build our sovereign strengths and put them to work – turning our values into action and convening the agile alliances these challenges demand. Our task is not just to weather the storm but to steer an active course. Our purpose is to shape the world, not to be shaped by it. That is how we make Britain safer, stronger and more prosperous at home.  

Instability in the world

Last month in eastern Poland, I walked with army officers along concrete trenches they are digging for miles along NATO’s eastern flank – a sign of how seriously they take the need to defend against Russian tanks. On the Chad border earlier this year I met Sudanese women, survivors of atrocities in a war the world has failed to end. In the Gulf, I heard from businesses wrestling with how to get supplies moving through the blocked Strait of Hormuz. Time and again in discussions with our closest allies, I have been conscious of how much our focus is on our shared security and dealing with the instability we face.

In 2025, the world had more active armed conflicts than at any time since 1945, with almost 120 million people fleeing their homes. Danger no longer comes only from the battlefield – cyber and hybrid threats now reach us in new and unpredictable ways.

At the same time, the economic order is being reshaped. The rise of China and India is shifting the global economy’s centre of gravity. Tech firms now wield more power than mid-sized nations. The biggest economies have pulled back from global trade rules, with protectionism rising. Openness itself is being exploited through tariffs, chokeholds on critical minerals and, above all, the weaponisation of energy.  

All of this has a direct impact on Britain, through higher food prices, lost jobs, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and illegal migration that erodes public trust.

We should not kid ourselves that this is the peak of the storm. Climate-driven disasters are triggering more humanitarian crises, which will put new pressures on food, energy and migration. Meanwhile, the accelerating pace of technological change brings phenomenal opportunities and new threats. 

Last month, in Shenzhen, China, I saw the extraordinary promise of AI and robotics used for life-saving healthcare. But the same technologies are also reshaping the future of warfare, crime and social cohesion in alarming ways. 

Geopolitics is changing, too. The United States is pulling back from its traditional role as guarantor of global security, and while Europe, including Britain, has begun to step up, we must do more for ourselves. At the same time, China – our fourth-biggest trading partner – poses significant threats to our cyber security. Great power politics is back, and the rules-based order and long-standing alliances that Britain did so much to build are being challenged.

Call it the end of the old world order or the age of instability, but more often it just feels like being at the mercy of forces far beyond our control. And that sense of powerlessness weakens the resilience of democracy, because if people feel that normal politics is failing to solve their problems, they can turn towards something much angrier and more extreme.

Amidst the dangers, the instability is also generating extraordinary opportunities. New technologies, markets and partnerships all play to Britain’s character and capabilities. Strong economic growth across many developing economies has lifted billions out of poverty, creating new openings for British trade and investment. Developments in AI, quantum computing and robotics are giving rise to incredible new possibilities for British scientists. The fluidity in geopolitics and geoeconomics creates chances for the kinds of creative diplomacy that we are good at.  

So, Britain has choices to make. We don’t have to stand by while our security, prosperity and democracy are undermined. But defending them requires a clear-eyed plan to build Britain’s strength and to uphold our values so we are ready for the challenges ahead.

Britain’s strength in the world

In theory, Britain should be well placed to respond to a rapidly changing world.  

We are a leading European military and nuclear power, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with intelligence capabilities and diplomatic reach that span the globe. We are a G7 nation, at the heart of the Five Eyes partnership, part of the Commonwealth of 56 nations, and a global financial centre drawing investment from around the world. We have world-class universities and research institutions, and stand among a handful of countries at the frontier of AI and life sciences. And in our King we have a figure of global standing and respect.

The World Today

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‘Happy vassal’ or ‘strategic hedging’? Europe’s hard choices as NATO crumbles

We are one of the most connected and influential nations on earth, with relationships and standing that few others can match. But, above all, we should not underestimate how important our values are in building trust and strength overseas: our sense of fairness, our multilateralism, our humanitarianism and our respect for the rule of law.  

History shows the difference Britain has made when it deploys those values – we helped deliver NATO and the Marshall Plan, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Geneva Conventions and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the ban on landmines and cluster bombs, the Kyoto Agreement and the cancellation of developing country debt. And over the past year, from Ebola to Hurricane Melissa, we have stepped up. Our values mean we act not only because it serves Britain, but because it is the right thing to do.

How we got here and what we got wrong

Yet we have to be honest with ourselves that in recent decades we took Britain’s strengths for granted and failed to grasp how fast the world was changing. Complacency took Britain from shaping the global rules to standing on the sidelines.

First, we pretended the post-Cold War peace dividend would last forever. In 2010, the defence budget was cut by 8 per cent in real terms. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. And yet the warnings went unheeded for almost a decade before defence spending began to recover. So, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine came in 2022, years of under-investment meant we were much less prepared than we should have been.

Second was how we managed globalization. Over decades, economic integration has delivered faster growth and higher living standards. However, in the UK the benefits were not evenly felt and some communities badly lost out. 

At the same time, we deepened our dependency on a handful of countries for energy, parts and key technologies, with little thought given to the resilience of those supply chains. Now the chickens have come home to roost. Covid and the war in Ukraine sent food and energy prices soaring, while China has tightened its grip over the critical minerals on which our economy depends.  

Third, we grew complacent about our international relationships. We assumed that Britain’s influence was a permanent fact rather than something requiring constant maintenance and determined diplomacy. That confidence was tested when we left the EU. Rather than use that moment to define a new role, Boris Johnson’s government walked away from our closest economic bloc with no serious plan. Our relationships frayed and one of our strongest assets – our reputation for seriousness – was vandalized.  

Finally, successive governments have failed to level with the country about global challenges or to nurture public support for difficult foreign policy choices. For example, David Cameron wanted to keep Britain in the EU but spent years refusing to make a public case for it. The last Labour government made the same mistake. And on defence, we haven’t yet had the kind of public engagement our Scandinavian and Eastern European partners have been through on the choices needed to face growing threats.  

All of this has left the UK more exposed – less prepared to seize new opportunities, less resilient in the face of new threats.  

Since coming into government in July 2024, we have begun to turn that around. We have raised defence spending at the fastest rate since the Cold War, and struck important new trade deals with India, the Gulf, Europe and the US. Keir Starmer has rebuilt our European relationships, brought together the Coalition of the Willing to sustain support for Ukraine, and deepened our role in NATO. We have recognized the state of Palestine and the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.  

In the Foreign Office, we have sharpened our focus on security in every form: national security, economic security and border security. When the NATO alliance risked fracturing over Greenland, we stood firm in defence of the sovereignty of Denmark and Greenland, and worked with allies to ensure the protection of the High North was best delivered through a new unified NATO Arctic mission. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, we assembled a coalition of 40 nations to defend the principle of freedom of navigation and to lay the groundwork for the Multinational Military Mission. Our significantly expanded migration team is now working across the world to tackle illegal migration at its source.

We have strengthened our commitment to international principles and agreements – working across 46 countries to reform rather than abandon the operation of the ECHR so that it better tackles illegal migration. And this spring we supported allies and partners under fire in the Gulf, but we did not provide support for offensive action by the US and Israel in Iran. And at a time when rights are being rolled back internationally, we have made women and girls a specific priority for the FCDO and worked to keep the spotlight on the atrocities faced by the women of Sudan.

Where we go from here

But the challenges we face are set to grow. Meeting them will require action in three areas:

1: Greater strength and resilience  

First, we need to go much further to build Britain’s sovereign strength and resilience.

Delivering modern capabilities and more investment for our armed forces is essential both for our sovereign defence and to maintain our influence and leadership in Europe and the NATO alliance that is the cornerstone of our security. That is why the Defence Investment Plan is vital, and we will need next to quickly establish a clear pathway towards delivering 3 per cent of GDP in defence.

But security isn’t just about military capabilities. At a time when economics is being weaponized, energy and economic security have become the vital underpinnings of trade and growth. Major economies outside the main trading blocs need to work more closely to diversify production in key supply chains such as critical minerals – including on finance, strategic projects and standards. Also vital is our work to strengthen our energy security through the green transition and to build climate security across the world.  

Nor should we underestimate the importance of strengthening our democratic resilience. That means better defending ourselves against hybrid threats, cyber-attacks and information warfare – for example, through the Foreign Office’s expanding capabilities to identify, expose and sanction Russian disinformation factories.  

For me, this is also about using international cooperation to tackle the issues that undermine public trust. Which is why we plan to go further, working with the Home Office and with overseas partners on tackling smuggling gangs, developing innovative return arrangements, reforming global resettlement and preventing illegal migration.  

Most importantly, democratic resilience requires public confidence and honest public debate about the global risks, opportunities and choices we face. We have to make the case that a stronger Britain abroad is better for jobs, security and the cost of living at home.  

2: Determined diplomacy  

Second, we need to be more assertive and agile in our alliances. We may not be a military or economic superpower, but we can be a convening superpower – the country that brings others together and charts a collective way forward.  

The World Today

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Our relationship with the United States remains deeply rooted and deeply valued, and we will continue to work closely with it in NATO and beyond. But we should no longer expect the US to play the role it once did. There will continue to be issues where we disagree. But reduced dependence on any single ally will make us stronger, so that our partnerships rest on what we bring, not on what we need. 

That means working more closely with our European partners, but without trying to turn the clock back to 2016. With economics and security more intertwined, Europe’s future depends on what happens from the UK to Ukraine, from Norway to Türkiye and not just within the EU. We need to develop a new, structured relationship with Europe, leading the development of its new security architecture, with a more European NATO at its core. And we must settle our relationship with the EU as a closer but stable partnership, rather than one based on endless incremental bargaining.

Further afield, we must make a virtue of the fast-moving and fluid world order to build new and agile alliances. Some will be enduring partnerships of like-minded countries, such as AUKUS or our growing engagement in the CPTPP trans-Pacific trade agreement. Others will be convened quickly to tackle a single crisis as we and France have done on Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz. Few other nations can convene in this way.  

But in what may be the greatest security challenge of the next decade, I believe we have to put our convening power to work to tackle the profound new global risks posed by AI. We can only exploit the amazing opportunities of frontier technologies if there is sufficient international consensus on how to approach safety and guardrails. Britain is well placed to lead this debate. We are the third-most developed country on AI, after the US and China, and the leading voice on AI security – a role established by the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and taken forward by this government.  

Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft is designed to capture and boost NASA's Swift observatory back to a safe altitude.

NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that’s about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon.

Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7. The driver (libvulkan_lvp.so, ~17 MB) installs into /usr/pkg/lib, and its ICD manifest (advertising Vulkan API 1.4) installs into /usr/pkg/share/vulkan/icd.d/, so a Vulkan loader on the system can discover it. ldd resolves every dependency cleanly. The entire process — environment setup, dependency builds, the Mesa build, and installation — is automated end to end and reproducible on a fresh install.

↫ vulkan-netbsd GitHub page

It’s important to note that the next step in the process is to port the Vulkan loader, which is required to actually run Vulkan applications. This entire effort is still ongoing and seems to be handled mostly by Dean Howell alone, so expect breakage and incomplete documentation as development progresses. Still, this is a hugely important effort, and seeing it this far along is great news.

The 250th anniversary is arriving among Black communities as a whisper instead of a roar

Not soon after Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, there emerged a viral illustration of four Black women sitting at the top of a building while watching the world burn at a distance. They are observing with coffee cups in hand. An American flag hangs over the edge. If that exhaustion hadn’t been made clear enough, Black people, particularly across TikTok and Threads, have urged one another to “not give them a reaction”.

The “them” is white people who find Black rage exciting and lucrative for their own personal gain. We’re not allowing our anger to become spectacle. We’re not shouting any more. What is most important is to stay alive, take care of one another, and to allow ourselves to step to the forefront for the rights that they have taken for granted as we’ve risked our lives to protect them. There is an old African American proverb: “If you can’t hear, then you must feel.”

Morgan Jerkins is a senior writer, race and equity, at the Guardian US

Investigations into president and corruption charges will get heavy scrutiny if Democrats win majority in midterms

Donald Trump’s presidency is facing investigations and corruption charges from a key House Democrat and ex-prosecutors, involving political and personal abuses of power, which legal experts predict will get heavy scrutiny if Democrats win the House majority in the midterms.

Legal critics call the scandals dogging the president “target rich” for investigations that Democrats will have a “field day” investigating if they win the House majority. Critics cite, for instance, Trump’s damaging the rule of law by weaponizing the Department of Justice (DoJ) to exact revenge on political foes and protect himself from federal investigations, plus Trump moves to profit in radical ways from his presidency with lucrative and new cryptocurrency ventures.

Experts say the Food and Drug Administration is not prepared for the health threat of bacterial contamination

Multiple brands of infant formula have been recalled recently due to bacterial contamination, and experts say the Food and Drug Administration is inadequately prepared to deal with the health threat they pose in the wake of Trump administration cuts.

Last March, the FDA announced the launch of Operation Stork Speed, specifically intended to “expand options for safe, reliable, and nutritious infant formula for American families”. Two months later, Martin Makary, who was FDA commissioner at the time, told Congress that the FDA had lost around 3,100 employees due to the Trump administration’s reorganization and cuts. Makary departed the FDA the same month.

Thousands of volunteers are joined by overseas teams in the hope of finding more survivors in the rubble, reports Tom Phillips in Caraballeda.

Photography and video by Manu Quintero

When twin earthquakes tore through Venezuela’s northern coast last week, Israel Rivas was at home hundreds of miles away in the industrial city of San Félix. As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the 24-year-old knew he had to react. A mechanic and budding photographer, Rivas gathered the money he had been saving to buy a new camera lens and jumped on a bus to make the 12-hour journey to La Guaira, the coastal state that has suffered the most damage.

“I couldn’t eat well. I couldn’t sleep well, knowing that my brothers and sisters from this country are dying, so I … came here and I’m doing the best I can,” he said on Wednesday, exactly a week after the disaster, as he stood outside Residencia La Gabarra, a 12-storey block of beachside apartments that had collapsed into a jumble of reinforced concrete and bricks with at least three children inside.

People across the country are pushing for moratoriums, and electeds who approve projects are being punished

Lenoxdatacenter.com went live in May, promoting what it called a “proposed advanced technology and data center campus” in Michigan. The site did not state who wanted to build the center. Lenox Township officials denied anyone had applied to build one.

Emails obtained by residents through an open records request showed, however, that developers had contacted the township supervisor and deputy supervisor asking for their support to build a datacenter.

This weekend marks 250 years since the signing of the declaration of independence, but Donald Trump is making the celebration all about himself. As the anniversary approaches, Jonathan Freedland talks to the Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum about why so many Americans are feeling less patriotic these days

Why Should Delaware Care?
As America marks its semiquincentennial on July 4, Delaware can be remembered for its service in the statesmanship and military service in the founding of the nation.

On July 1, 1776, Caesar Rodney was in Dover, questioning British loyalists when he received the fateful word from counterparts in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress.

His vote had become crucial, and his presence in Philadelphia was necessary the next day.

That stormy night was the culmination of weeks of change across the American colonies and in Delaware in particular. Less than three weeks prior, there was no Delaware to speak of.

After a decade of increasing British taxes, nationwide boycotts and a crackdown on colonial dissent, war broke out in Boston in 1775. The occupation of one of America’s key cities convinced the colonies of their need to assert their independence. 

Within a year, each colony would craft its own constitution to declare themselves an independent state. In June 1776, Delaware was still considered “the Lower Counties” of the Pennsylvania colony.

But state delegates met in New Castle on June 15, 1776, where they declared Delaware’s independence from both Great Britain and Pennsylvania.

Rodney casts historic vote

After expending significant political capital to secure what Rodney thought would be a successful vote for independence, the third member of Delaware’s congregation, George Read, had decided to vote against separating from the British

With fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean voting in favor, Read’s dissent would leave Delaware – and potentially the nation – in a stalemate. The Continental Congress intended to declare national independence unanimously or not at all.

With the nation’s independence sitting on a razor-thin margin, Rodney embarked on his famous midnight ride to break the tie and swing the Delaware delegation’s support for independence. 

For 18 hours overnight, he trekked the 80 miles to Philadelphia on horseback and by carriage through thunder and rain, as detailed in a letter Rodney sent to his brother, Thomas, on July 4, 1776 — the only such letter recovered from a Congressional delegate from that day. 

Aside from the national implications of the watershed moment, Rodney’s ride was an act of personal courage as well. He hailed from southern Delaware originally, where the population held more sympathetic views towards the British — Rodney’s grandfather was even an Anglican minister — though his family believed in the revolution. 

As put by Ciro Poppiti, the New Castle County Register of Wills and reenactor who recently completed a horse ride from Dover to Philadelphia to honor the anniversary of Rodney’s journey, the statesman also knew he was “riding to the gallows.” 

In the midst of a raging war, Rodney was potentially exposing himself to targeting by the British as one of the deciding votes for independence. Additionally, at the time of his ride, Rodney was battling facial cancer that had left his cheek and nose deeply scarred, a significant disfigurement which Rodney concealed with a scarf.

The cancer would claim Rodney’s life nearly eight years to the day of his momentous ride. 

Delaware had a conflicted populace

Rodney’s ride is perhaps the most notorious single piece of Delaware lore in relation to the American Revolution. But thanks to its location, resources, and an apprehensive and divided population, the state played a significant role in the struggle for America’s freedom from the British kingdom.

During the Revolutionary era, Delaware was viewed as a valuable strategic spot, particularly given its coastline and proximity to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital and largest city at the time. The territory’s largely rural environment further made it an agricultural hub, meaning it was also a popular supplier of food for the American armed forces to the north.

The state – second smallest with just 37,000 residents in 1776 – was a melting pot of cultures, including English, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French, along with native tribes, enslaved Africans and free Blacks.

Similar to today’s political partisanship, the state’s geography also played a role in residents’ opinion of the Revolutionary movement. The Wilmington area was primarily a Revolutionary stronghold, along with cities like New Castle, Dover and Lewes. 

Sussex County was more sympathetic to the British, even drawing the presence of American forces at times to quash small-scale rebellions, while Kent County was split. 

As evidenced by the division that necessitated Rodney’s ride, the state’s population had the same misgivings about independence as anywhere else, even as the war intensified after the Declaration. 

British Loyalists in Delaware continued to organize against the revolutionaries during the war and after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and in response, roving “committees of inspection and observation” were established. 

These committees acted as a kind of secret police force dedicated to snuffing out British-sympathetic activities among citizens, according to Ryan Schwartz, of the Lewes Historical Society, largely achieving this through intimidation as opposed to violence. 

Many British Loyalists living in Delaware ended up fleeing to Canada as the war continued and after it ended, finding Delaware to be an increasingly inhospitable place to sow dissent. 

Patriots fight in the war

Despite its location and festering opposition, Delaware’s native sons also raised up a respected regiment of soldiers known as the “Delaware Blues” for the color of their uniforms – there was no standard uniform in the Revolutionary War as each state outfitted its men how it could.

They would fight at some of the war’s earliest battles, including Long Island and White Plains. They crossed the Delaware River with Gen. George Washington on Christmas night 1776 for an attack at Trenton, New Jersey.

Their founding colonel, John Haslet, would be killed in January 1777 during the Battle of Princeton.

The state of Delaware only saw one major battle during the war, which took place at Cooch’s Bridge near Newark, though there were smaller skirmishes throughout the state. 

But Delaware narrowly avoided potentially becoming another main theater of the war, Schwartz said. The British were focused on toppling Philadelphia, and with previous attempts to do so via land proving futile, their plans in the late summer of 1777 turned to a naval advance on the capital via the Delaware River. 

Stymied by the Delaware River’s shoaly terrain and further deterred by strong American defenses established along the body of water, the British instead decided to land at nearby Elkton, Maryland, just beyond the Delaware border. 

That then led to the Battle at Cooch’s Bridge on Sept. 3, 1777, which saw the undermanned Delaware battalion of 1,200 men, officially formed just a week before the battle, temporarily hold off a group of 16,000 British soldiers before eventually retreating north to join Washington’s forces. Casualties are unclear, but a British officer commented at the time that the fighting at Iron Hill was the worst they faced on their march to Philadelphia. 

While the battle is recorded as a loss for the Americans, Joe Sullivan of the Delaware Public Archive said the battalion’s efforts derailed the British advance to Philadelphia for an additional five days after the fighting had ended. That gave Washington additional time to gather troops and prepare for the oncoming British forces. 

Despite the apparent setback, the Delaware battalion had fulfilled Washington’s Sept. 2 directive: “Give them as much trouble as you possibly can.” 

Days later, the Delaware soldiers would fight at the Battle of the Brandywine, just over the state border in Pennsylvania. It would be a humiliating defeat for the Americans as British Gen. William Howe outflanked Washington’s army.

Following their victory at Brandywine, the British forces would decamp to Wilmington, where they occupied the city and tended to their wounded for about a month before advancing up to Philadelphia.

Along the way, the Delaware Blues would fight at the Battle of Germantown, where they suffered significant losses, including the wounding of their second leader Col. David Hall.

Delaware’s soldiers would head south in 1780 and 1781 to fight in five more battles in the Carolinas before the end of the war.

An American victory at Saratoga generated enough optimism that the French then decided to support the revolutionary effort militarily. This forced the British to expand their fight on several international fronts, diverting resources from their troops on American soil and opening the door for the Americans to emerge victorious from the war. 

Rodney’s ride would not be for naught. 

The post Delaware held vital place in America’s founding 250 years ago appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What does it say about America that Frederick Douglass’s disappointment still rings true in 2026?

• Trump wants to SAVE Republican control no matter who it harms: When a party can’t win fairly, it starts calling voter suppression election integrity and hopes no one realizes the difference.

• Trump’s Birthday Grift for America: Nothing says democracy like cashing in on the nation’s 250th birthday with a glorified campaign rally and VIP donors.

• Senator Jim Banks of Indiana Calls Clarence Thomas the “Greatest Living American”: I say potato, and you say potatoe—Jim Banks proves himself worthy of comparison to Indiana legend Dan Quayle.

• Unforgivable Blackness: As told by Ken Burns, the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, is a quintessential tale of American greatness and intolerance.

• “American Tune” Rhiannon Giddens & Paul Simon: Rhymin’ Simon finds a new partner to make one of his greatest songs a more inclusive anthem for a country still trying to tell the truth about itself.

Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), abolitionist, author, and statesman

Every July, all across this nation, fireworks explode over crowds of people who have agreed, at least for one evening, that they share the same inheritance, the same dream, and they call it America. The speeches hit the same notes. It’s a kind of collective fantasy—not exactly a denial of all the times we have failed to live up to our ideals, but a fairy tale we tell ourselves in which the shining princes and princesses of America have stood up to the dark forces aligned against us and emerged victorious. For one day every year, we pretend those ideals are historical facts and not merely aspirations. We allow ourselves to be dazzled by the fireworks and blinded to all the places where we have come up short. But in the last decade, the last eighteen months, the last week and a half, it has become almost impossible to deny the darkness in those corners the fireworks don’t light; to deny that the dark forces we dreamed of defeating now occupy center stage in our national story.

Frederick Douglass was never under any such illusions. An escaped slave from Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in the Northeast. He gave his most famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. It was one of the most precise acts of rhetorical surgery in American history. Standing in front of a predominantly white abolitionist audience, people who considered themselves allies, he described their country to them with words so sharp his voice must have felt like a scalpel.

What strikes me most, though, is not the anger of Douglass’s words, but the sadness. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.” Anger is easy to dismiss. Sadness does something different: it implicates. The grief in his words carried its own argument. I see this clearly, and what I see makes me grieve for you as much as for me. That is a much harder thing to walk away from than fury. The people in that room could not accuse him of losing control. They could only reckon with what he was describing.

The argument embedded in those words, that the brighter the celebration of freedom, the more visible its denial becomes, has proved to be a running thread through more than two centuries of Black American writing. Langston Hughes made it in 1935 when he wrote “Let America Be America Again.” Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead are some of the authors who have carried it forward through the decades that followed. Can we look at that unbroken line of writers making the same essential argument across two centuries and still conclude the issue has been fundamentally settled? In the summer of 2020, five of Douglass’s descendants read the words from his 1852 speech for an NPR video project, and they landed like they were written that morning. That is either a tribute to how timeless great writing is, or a sobering commentary on how durable this particular problem has proven to be.

The distance Douglass named in 1852 has not been closed. It has been reduced, in fits and starts and with enormous effort; and to deny that progress would dishonor everyone who bled for it. But “reduced” describes something different than “closed,” and the Fourth of July, of all days, is a good time for all of us to sit with that distinction. Selective national memory is a comfortable place to inhabit. Douglass kept insisting we step outside of it. In his vision, the Fourth of July could not be a celebration without a reckoning. That would be a gift to anyone who wished to ignore or minimize the moral failures committed in the guise of freedom. He refused to give his opponents that gift. That refusal strikes me as the most serious form of patriotism available to any of us.

Read more

Why Should Delaware Care? 
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the legacy of contentious Revolutionary War era Delaware figure and slaveholder Caesar Rodney once again comes into view. Six years after a Rodney statue was taken down in Wilmington during a national era of racial reckoning, Delawareans still have a range of beliefs about how Rodney’s legacy should be interpreted, and what should be done with his statue.   

A statue of one of Delaware’s most controversial Revolutionary figures is on display in Washington for America’s 250th birthday, after spending the past six years in storage.

As time ticks until Caesar Rodney’s return to Delaware following the Fourth of July celebration in D.C., state leaders still are not sure what should be done with the statue of his likeness, and, more broadly, how to reckon with Rodney’s complicated legacy as Founding Father and a slaveowner.  

Rodney is most famous for trekking 80 miles from his Dover home up to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to cast the tie-breaking vote to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 2, 1776. 

But he also enslaved at least two dozen people throughout his lifetime on his family’s Kent County farm, known as Byfield. 

A number of prominent Delaware establishments are named for Rodney, including Wilmington’s main public square, a Kent County school district and a conservative public policy think tank. 

Defenders of Rodney say he deserves to be recognized for his contributions to the nation and the state — in addition to being a delegate to the Continental Congress, Rodney also served as governor and a state Supreme Court justice. They say the past cannot be erased by hiding the statesman from public view.  

“Any person of influence had slaves,” said Delaware Republican Party Treasurer Brandon Brice, who has been an advocate for reinstalling the statue. “There’s a good, a bad, and an ugly to history, and I think if we’re going to tell history, we have to tell all of history.”

But, in a state where about one in four residents are Black, others are skeptical as to whether substantive conversations about Rodney’s slave-owning past ever took place, and some question whether he really is a Delaware figure who should be highlighted. 

“I don’t think the people’s voice has changed because conditions haven’t changed, history hasn’t changed,” said Hanifa Shabazz, who was the Wilmington City Council president when the statue was taken down in 2020.  

The statue of the man was taken down from Wilmington’s Rodney Square in 2020, during national protests over the police killing of George Floyd. When then-Mayor Mike Purzycki made the decision to remove the statue, he promised that an “overdue discussion about the public display of historical figures and events” would take place. 

Community leaders say they have had plenty of informal conversations since 2020 about Rodney’s legacy and representation in Delaware. 

But when asked by Spotlight Delaware, Wilmington city and state officials could not provide specific examples of any formal discussions about Rodney that have taken place.

Gov. Matt Meyer’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment about his thoughts on the statue. 

There has also been a push in recent months by a group of Wilmington residents to reinstall a statue of Christopher Columbus, which was simultaneously taken down in 2020.

Rodney’s complicated history

Some facts about Rodney’s biography – including his personal beliefs about slavery, and his famous ride to Philadelphia – are debated by scholars. 

Rodney lived his whole life at Byfield, an 800-acre Kent County farm owned by his family, and held a number of political positions both in Delaware and in the Continental Congress. 

The commonly told story is that Rodney heroically rode the 80 miles from Delaware to Pennsylvania on horseback, through a thunderstorm, to arrive in Philadelphia in time to cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Declaration of Independence. 

However, historians now say it is more likely that Rodney did most of the ride up to Independence Hall in a covered carriage, because he was battling facial cancer. 

And undoubtedly more controversial than how Rodney got to Philadelphia is a dispute over how  many people Rodney enslaved, and his views on the institution of slavery. 

It has been widely reported, including in the Delaware Public Archives, that Rodney owned more than 200 slaves. 

A recently completed research report on Rodney’s slave-owning past commissioned by former Mayor Purzycki and obtained by Spotlight Delaware, however, estimates that Rodney enslaved at least 26 people during his lifetime. 

Some Delawareans also have argued that Rodney was an early abolitionist. One such individual is Charlie Copeland, former chair of the state Republican Party and director of the namesake think tank, the Caesar Rodney Institute.

Copeland cited a proposal Rodney made to the Delaware legislature in 1767 that they forbid the importation of more slaves into the province as evidence of his beliefs.

Both the report initiated by Carney’s office and Delaware historian Dick Carter, however, say they would not go so far as to call Rodney an abolitionist. 

Carter told Spotlight Delaware Rodney’s view of slavery was “sufficiently complex,” but he does not believe Rodney was “a strong supporter of the institution of slavery.” 

A semiquincentennial reenactment

Adding to the conversation surrounding one of Delaware’s Founding Fathers, and what to do with the statue of his likeness, was a recreation of Rodney’s ride from Dover to Philadelphia last month. 

Ciro Poppiti, a Delaware lawyer and the New Castle County Register of Wills, donned a Rodney costume and undertook the two-day journey by carriage, traversing back roads to make it to Independence Hall on June 13.  

Poppiti said the ride was substantially more complicated to pull off in 2026 than in 1776, because Delaware roads are far busier now, and many are not safe to travel by carriage. 

To Poppiti, though, it wasn’t just a whimsical opportunity to wear 18th century garb – the ride was also a chance to espouse some unity among Delawareans for the country’s 250th anniversary and reflect on Rodney as a part of Delaware history, he said. 

Poppiti’s ride included stops at some spots in Rodney’s life, such as Christ Episcopal Church in Dover, where Rodney attended services. A participating group conducted a penance service recognizing that Rodney owned slaves. 

Riding alongside Poppiti in the carriage were some of who he called the “unheard voices” of Rodney’s story – actors portraying people he enslaved and prominent Delaware women of the time. 

“How do you think Caesar Rodney had time to be a hero? It was because of those patriots enslaved and working at his farm at Byfield,” Poppiti told Spotlight Delaware. 

He said he hopes this nuanced representation in the Rodney reenactment will help inspire discussions about how to fairly display the statue in Delaware again. 

Complicated statue conversations

The bronze statue of Rodney, depicted heroically on horseback, was erected in Rodney Square in Wilmington in 1923.

As protests over the death of George Floyd took place in Wilmington in the spring and summer of 2020, then-Mayor Purzycki and the Wilmington City Council decided to put the controversial statue in storage, vowing to initiate conversations about its future. 

According to a number of people with knowledge of the situation, however, those discussions never fully took place. 

Shabazz, the city council president at the time, said Wilmingtonians saw the statue being removed as a victory, but there were so many other issues to be addressed that there wasn’t ever time to revisit the statue’s future. 

Yasser Payne, a University of Delaware sociology professor, said he was a part of community meetings about the statue, but he does not recall conversations with city or state officials. He described elected officials’ support for actual introspection about Rodney as “tacit.”

Ivan Henderson, executive director of the Delaware Historical Society, said his organization tried to work with the city and other groups to have public dialogue about the statue in 2024 and 2025, but nothing came to fruition. 

A spokesperson for Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s office said the city has been engaging in “extensive conversations with historians, community leaders and cultural institutions” since 2020 about Rodney’s life and legacy. 

The spokesperson did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s follow-up questions about what those conversations have entailed. 

In 2024, as Carney campaigned for mayor, he told Spotlight Delaware that he was in favor of renaming the city’s main square after its most famous modern leader, former President Joe Biden.

State Sen. Eric Buckson (R-South Dover) has been pushing publicly for Rodney to be put back on display for several years.

Spotlight Delaware first reported in November 2025 that Buckson had secured a deal with the federal Department of the Interior to transport the statue to D.C. and display it as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration in the nation’s capitol. 

The Rodney statue was placed in the so-called Freedom Plaza, along with statues of other Revolutionary War-era figures, in late April. Rodney’s statue is slated to remain in D.C. for the next six months, Buckson said. 

What’s next for Rodney?

While the Rodney statue is scheduled to stay on display in D.C. until the fall, state leaders do not appear to have a plan as to where it will go when returned to Delaware. 

Buckson wrote a resolution in June calling for the city of Wilmington, the state and Kent County leaders to work together on finding a suitable location for the statue in Kent County – Rodney’s home – by November of this year. It was never considered by legislature before it concluded this week.

Wilmington is not being considered as a place for Rodney to be displayed once again, he said. 

“It’s a victory for Delaware and the country to tell the historical significance of his ride,” Buckson said. “When that guy comes back to Delaware, Delawareans can decide where best to display the statue and how best to display it.” 

Buckson said he is proposing the state stand up a committee made up of a diverse group of Delawareans to decide how to best display the statue “in its full context.” 

He also said his current ideas for where to best place the statue include Legislative Mall and the John Dickinson Plantation, both in Dover. 

A spokesperson for Carney said he is in support of Buckson’s proposal, but the plans “are still taking shape.” Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen said he is strongly in favor of returning the statue to Dover. 

Other Delawareans on both sides of the debate, however, still have concerns about the status of the statue. 

Copeland, the Caesar Rodney Institute director, said he is disappointed that “our current political environment” means the statue likely won’t return to be displayed in Wilmington, where it would get the most foot traffic from out-of-town visitors.  

Payne, the UD professor, said he views the push to reinstall the statue now as a reflection of a step backward from the progress made during the George Floyd years and a reflection of the country’s current “conservative spirit.”

But to Poppiti, the historical reenactor, months of studying Rodney’s life and trying to embody his character left him with a different conclusion. 

He said he believes Delawareans are putting too much emphasis on the statue and what will be done with it, when Rodney himself would not have cared about the statue. Rather, Rodney would have urged us to carry on the legacy of the Revolution, and of national unity. 

“What he’d say is, ‘Let’s not lose the incredible gift that we were given 250 years ago,’ which is the opportunity for self-determination,” Poppiti said.  

Transparency Notice:
Brandon Brice serves on Spotlight Delaware’s Advisory Council. Advisors have no role in the editorial decision-making of Spotlight Delaware. For more information, see our Ethics Policies page.

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 250 years since his ride, how does Delaware reckon with Caesar Rodney’s legacy? appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

A noise demonstration that took place outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas one year ago has resulted in decades of prison time for the anti-ICE activists involved. Federal judges sentenced eight defendants, who the government cast as antifa operatives, to between 30 and 100 years in prison for terrorism-related charges last week; seven more people were sentenced this week.

“There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge, who has been covering the Prairieland case and was present at the sentencing. “It’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.”

“There’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism,” says Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” “There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Daniel Sanchez [Estrada]: 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Bray and Sledge about Prairieland as a test case in Trump’s war on dissent, and why the administration is determined to convince the public that antifa is a domestic terrorist organization.

“I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that ‘Communist’ was used in past generations, antifa is used now,” says Bray. He and Sledge point out that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration became much more aggressive in its targeting of the left and dissent in general.

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Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines

“You had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged, and then the government really ups the ante against them by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences. And I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere,” says Sledge. “It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.”

“What that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement,” says Bray. “I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Matt Sledge: And I’m Matt Sledge, also a politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: Matt, it’s really great to have you back on the show. Today, we’re going to talk about some really important reporting you’ve been doing on the Prairieland case.

Last week, judges sentenced eight protesters to between 30 and 100 years in prison on terrorism-related charges for their participation in a July 4 protest last year outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. 

Matt, as you wrote in your piece, Judge O’Connor handed down a 30-year sentence to a man, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was not present at the protest and whose only alleged crime was moving a box of anarchist zines for his wife.

His wife, Maricela Rueda, who was present at the anti-ICE protest but left early, received one of the harshest sentences — 70 years — because she asked her husband to move her zines. 

You were at the sentencing. What was the room like when people heard that they would be spending, for some of them, the rest of their lives behind bars for attending a protest?

MS: I would say it was very somber, but also strangely reserved. I think many of the defendants and their supporters went into the courtroom expecting very long sentences. At the same time, some of them held out a sliver of hope that the judges who were sentencing people in two courtrooms at the same time might listen to their pleas for downward variations from the sentencing guidelines, might do something to attempt to distinguish between the different roles of the people who were at the protest and the one person who wasn’t there, Daniel Sanchez Estrada. And that essentially didn’t happen.

They all got really harsh sentences, and the judges made it clear that they were trying to send a message.

JW: Matt, we talked about this a little bit offline before the podcast, but it’s hard to imagine that the jurors who handed down these convictions could have imagined that they would be sending people to prison for these enormously long sentences, could have imagined that someone would spend 70 years in prison for a nonviolent act. What do you think is going through these jurors’ heads now?

MS: It’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s heads, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re surprised. Because even though some of these charges had various serious-sounding names like “riot” and “material support of terrorism,” jurors almost never know the sentencing ranges that come with charges.

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Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury

And in this case, probably did not know or expect that federal prosecutors would seek — and the judges would apply — these very harsh terrorism sentencing enhancements that really raised the sentences for all the defendants.

JW: Can you tell us what happened outside of the Prairieland Detention Facility and how this case came to be in the first place?

MS: There were a group of people, generally from the kind of lefty scene in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, that wanted to stage what they termed a “noise demonstration” protest outside this ICE facility, a show of solidarity, they later said, with the people detained inside the facility. This is one of these facilities that saw a huge increase in the number of people detained under Trump. 

There had been a daytime protest outside this facility earlier on the day on July 4, 2025. This group of people, around a dozen people, went that night, much later around 10:30, wearing all black, carrying fireworks, and in some instances carrying guns — which is legal to do in Texas.

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Texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes On Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE

They set off some fireworks. One of the people who was there described it as actually a kind of festive environment. Then the police were called, as you might expect, and some of the demonstrators there were already gone by the time the gunfire erupted. A responding local police officer was left with a gunshot wound to his neck. And then the person later convicted of shooting the gun that left the police officer injured, Benjamin Song, escaped that night and was on the run for several days, hiding out in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

So there was a large police manhunt. This was a big story in the Dallas–Fort Worth area for days.

JW: Obviously, federal prosecutors have a different spin on who these protesters were and what their connection to each other was. Federal prosecutors have labeled this group of protesters as a “North Texas Antifa” terrorist cell.

What are prosecutors trying to do here by labeling protesters as members of antifa, and what evidence did they actually have to make a case that these individuals were “antifa operatives”?

MS: There’s a stunningly wide gap between what the Justice Department has put in its press releases and what top officials have said, versus the evidence that was actually presented at trial.

I’m not aware of anybody associated with this group ever claiming that there was such a thing as the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” which is what the government has branded this as. Several of the cooperating defendants, the people who helped the government out in its prosecution, said they did not think of themselves as antifa.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody involved in this protest was politically on the left, outraged over the Trump administration’s immigration policies and other things. Some of these people may have thought of themselves as anarchists or consumed antifascist zines, but it’s a real stretch to assert, as the government did, that this was all one coherent group.

In fact, at trial, the government story was a little more nuanced than what it put in its press releases and referred to a smaller planning group and then a larger group of people who had essentially just showed up to this demonstration. But there were two really different spins from the protesters and their attorneys and the government as to the intentions going into this night.

The people on trial said basically to a person that they did not go there intending to hurt anybody, they were just trying to show solidarity. Then the government pointed to things like wearing all-black clothing and bringing guns and ballistic vests as evidence that they were essentially going there looking to attack.

JW: Could you just explain to our listeners why it’s a bit of a misnomer to call antifa a group, or particularly in the way that the government is describing here?

MS: The whole idea behind the ideology or movement, whatever you want to call it, is that it’s very decentralized and is all about individuals or small groups taking direct action against people they view as fascists.

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This idea that there might be a whole movement of people committed to antifascism is a little too complicated for antifa’s critics to grasp. [Laughs] They insist that there is this, like, global network.

There are certainly small groups and larger groups of people who identify as antifascists. They certainly talk to each other. But again, this idea that there was something called a “North Texas Antifa Cell” just doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts.

JW: So Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines, as we’ve already discussed. Elizabeth Soto and her husband, Ines Soto, were sentenced to 50 years for their part in the protest. But part of the evidence used against the Sotos was that they owned a printing press to print zines. Matt, what kind of zines are we talking about here?

MS: Yeah, a lot of the zines and kind of social media feed evidence that the government presented at trial were your standard, off-the-rack anarchist, antifascist zines you might find at any anarchist bookstore or book fair, something like that. Something that would not be surprising at all to someone who has spent time in those spaces.

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The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine

There’s nothing that came close to being directly relevant to plotting either a protest or an attack outside the Prairieland Detention Center. The government stretched and pointed to zines that were from years before and discussed very general tactics.

So it’s stuff that you may have seen before. It’s not some super secret stuff. It’s very typical anarchist, anti-government zines.

JW: So anything I could probably find in a bookstore in Bushwick, is what you’re telling me.

MS: Exactly.

JW: Speaking of, one of the frequent takeaways I’ve heard from this case is that it proves Signal is not as secure as you think.

You’ve extensively covered the trial. What did you learn about digital privacy in 2026 and how people can continue to resist in an era where our digital communications simply aren’t safe?

Matt Sledge: Yeah, there was something interesting that came out at trial, essentially like a glitch in the way Signal worked and the way it interfaced with iPhones. I’m probably oversimplifying or butchering this, but basically our phones store what pops up in the little notification center when our phones are locked. The feds were able to use that to glean some of these communications. 

But you also have to remember they had several cooperating defendants. There were several Signal group chats going on at the same time. So even if Signal is perfectly buttoned down and the government hasn’t found some new hack or glitch to do — your messages with your fellow organizers, or anybody else you want to communicate with in an encrypted fashion, are only as good as the weakest link in the group.

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How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages?

If someone decides they’re going to be willing to cooperate with the government and they’re in your Signal chat, the government’s probably going to be able to get access to it, which is why security researchers say it’s really important to have disappearing messages on and keep groups as small as you need them to be, and so on, common-sense approaches.

But I also just think that Signal is not like some silver bullet for privacy protection; it’s a way of reducing risk. People should think about it that way. 

It was also really interesting at trial, and we’ve seen this in a few of these cases, the way the government treats the use of Signal itself as something suspicious.

I’ve seen this also in government bulletins to local police that using Signal or another encrypted messaging app is a threat indicator — when people who use Signal, including Pete Hegseth, would say it’s just a way of keeping their messages private. But Hegseth is a good reminder that you have to look at who you’re including in your Signal group.

JW: I do appreciate a little Hegseth diss as a part of the Signal explanation, as that was, I would say, one of the more high-profile — “leaks” is really not even correct to describe what happened there. 

MS: Yeah, it’s not a leak when you just send a journalist out of the blue your war plans. [Laughs]

JW: Yeah, really can’t call it that. But I did want to talk more broadly about not just the legacy of this case, but what the administration is trying to do more broadly. The Prairieland protest case came on the heels of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which the Trump administration almost immediately used to justify cracking down on the broader left.

Matt, can you talk about how the administration is trying to silence critics more broadly by labeling all dissent and protests as acts of terrorism, and can you talk about the other active cases the government has against activists?

MS: Yeah, I think it’s important to remember the timeline. The Prairieland demonstration happened in July of 2025, and then Charlie Kirk was killed in September 2025.

Very soon after that, President Trump issued this executive order purporting to designate “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization — not something he can actually do, but so it goes.

Then he issues NSPM-7, this presidential memorandum instructing the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies to really crack down on the president’s enemies on the left.

So you had these Prairieland defendants who had already been arrested and charged. And then the government really ups the ante by bringing material support for terrorism charges against them, which really contributes to these long sentences.

I think it’s a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere. It shows that in this post-Kirk era, the government is going to use the most aggressive charges it can find against people it does not like.

In terms of other cases, you can look to Illinois, where the protesters outside the Broadview facility there, the government attempted to charge them. The grand jury initially rejected it and the government was able to secure charges, and then the case fell apart under government scrutiny.

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More recently, we’ve had [new] charges against some Stop Cop City organizers in Georgia, and charges against protesters in Minneapolis with this aggressive theory about a conspiracy against federal officers, and these folks’ defenders say they were essentially just cop watchers keeping an eye on the federal invasion in Minneapolis.

So the charges may differ from case to case. The exact logic of how these cases work may differ, but the overarching strategy of using the most aggressive charges you can find and painting this all as a big conspiracy is going to continue.

JW: The cases that you just brought up had given some people hope that while the government may be trying to target protesters and dissenters, they didn’t have the power to jail them to the extent that they obviously wanted to and were intending to.

The Prairieland case and these sentences is a really scary wake-up call that the government is incredibly powerful and that these are not just words or prosecutions. This is an intent to really jail Trump’s dissenters and to jail any kind of opposition to this regime and that they have the power to do that in some of these cases.

We’re going to leave it there. Matt, I just really want to thank you for this update and your reporting. To continue following Matt’s work, sign up for The Intercept’s newsletter at theintercept.com.

MS: Goodbye, Jessie. Thanks for having me.

JW: Next, we zoom out with Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

Bray is a history professor at Rutgers University and a frequent target of the right. He also consulted as an expert witness with one of the Prairieland defendants but did not testify. With Bray, we’ll take stock of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on dissent and talk to him about his own experiences being targeted by the right.

[Break]

JW: Mark, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Mark Bray: Thank you for having me.

JW: Mark, we just spoke to my colleague, Matt Sledge, about the details surrounding the Prairieland case. But to start, can you just give us your reaction to the charges and to the sentencing?

MB: Certainly when we look at the Prairieland case and some other somewhat similar cases during this second Trump administration, we can see that there’s a concerted effort to characterize opposition to ICE or opposition to the Trump administration as some form of conspiracy, as an effort to provoke terrorism. I see it in that context. 

There are a number of things that can be said about the various sentences, but perhaps the most obviously egregious is that handed out to Des — to Daniel Sanchez — 30 years for moving some zines, some literature, which is not illegal to possess.

It’s part of this broader effort to characterize opposition as terrorism conspiracy that we’ve seen in various manifestations. It seems like a particularly egregious version of that, when, to my knowledge, many of the people who were at this protest in Prairieland aren’t even accused of firing the weapon that was supposedly fired.

JW: Yeah, you’re right. The fact that Benjamin Song is the only person who actually fired a weapon and that everyone else participated in what appears to be nonviolent protesting — the charges that were handed out are really hard to even contemplate.

I want to get a little bit more personal as well. So The Guardian reported that you acted as a consultant for one of the defendants but didn’t testify. I know your name also came up multiple times during the trial. Can you talk about that, and what that was like for you?

MB: I was in Spain at the time. I had left the U.S. in response to death threats from the far right and my concerns about the political situation in the U.S. So I was unable, unfortunately, to testify in person. I was consulted by the attorneys for Daniel Sanchez, for Des. I think they asked whether I could testify remotely, and I imagine they were turned down because they didn’t follow up on that.

But part of what I did was, they sent me a Dropbox link or some such equivalent to read all of the radical literature that he transported, all of the scanned zines.

I read through a bunch of them; a few of them I was familiar with already. And a few things stood out. As I said, number one, it’s not illegal to own these things. Just because you own a book or a piece of writing doesn’t mean you necessarily agree with everything in it or anything in it. I own a copy of “Mein Kampf” — that doesn’t make me a Nazi. 

Although these folks were accused of being part of some sort of supposed antifa cell, very few of the zines that he transported had anything to do with antifa politics, and one of them was actually a critique of it.

So it just goes to show you that the political claims are intentionally superficial, vague, and minimalist in order to be able to package as much stuff they don’t like under the same kind of terrorist umbrella as possible.

JW: I want to get into why you had to flee a little bit more deeply. But before that, we spoke to Matt Sledge about this, but I wanted to get your take as well. Why is the administration determined to convince the public that antifa, a decentralized antifascist movement, is a domestic terrorist organization? What are the motivations here, and what does it mean if they can successfully convince us that these are terrorists?

MB: I guess the starting point is to recognize that I don’t think Trump or his allies really care about antifa per se. It’s a useful umbrella term to craft into a boogeyman scare tactic. In a way that “Communist” was used in past generations, antifa is used now.

Certainly, the FBI have been monitoring antifa groups for years now, and I’m sure they have a reasonably accurate sense of what it is. There’s a number of different groups in different cities that organize against the far right in a variety of ways. None of them are particularly large. There aren’t that many of them in the U.S., relatively speaking.

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But by arguing that antifa is — as a number of far-right provocateurs over the years have argued — like the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, that phrasing shows us how they’re trying to make the case that whatever kind of far-left radical figure is actually just a version of the center-left, and that everyone who is not with us is against us.

That, I think, is reflected in the term “antifa-aligned,” which the Department of Homeland Security promoted as a framework for thinking about this. That, OK, there are antifa groups, there’s antifa-aligned. It’s like different layers to the onion to be peeled back. 

For me, it’s a useful term because it’s poorly understood. It’s associated in the popular imagination with people who cover their faces, who engage in acts of violence. And in that way, it’s a useful linchpin for framing a conspiracy.

Beyond that, we haven’t actually seen self-described antifa groups in the streets opposing the far right in the U.S. since last decade. It’s not particularly germane to what’s going on in U.S. politics, but of course, the reality of it is not particularly important to Trump and his allies.

JW: That’s really interesting. This isn’t just an attack on the left, and I think people on the left can often see it as, “OK, this is an attack on the left.” This is an attack on any kind of resistance, any kind of dissent, any kind of opposition to Trump. And have we seen this in history? You alluded to attacks on communists, but can you talk a little bit about the history of targeting the left and the broader ripple effects?

MB: There are so many cases. One that comes to mind is something I wrote a book about. I wrote this book called “The Anarchist Inquisition” about Spain and France at the turn of the 20th century. In short, there were anarchist bombings and assassinations — actual anarchists who said, “Yes, I’m an anarchist,” who tried and sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed to kill the king of Spain or to kill the president of France.

They didn’t have a ton of allies, and even in the anarchist movement, most disagreed with that strategy. But the Spanish government, and to a lesser extent the French government, used that as an excuse to arrest all sorts of trade unionists and Freemasons and anti-clerical figures and socialists in this big scandal in the 1890s, El proceso de Montjuïc, where these people were put in a dungeon. And it was this effort to create this conspiracy among the left that all these different people were somehow in cahoots to try and overthrow the monarchy.

So there are many cases throughout history around this. You can go forward into the movements of the ’60s. It’s useful for the right to portray all of the left as being the same. Which is actually a useful way I think those of us on the left should remind ourselves — that while there are comparisons between different kinds of right-wing forces, it’s also a mistake to say that all different kinds of fascists and far-right formations are all the same. Because there are differences there too, and understanding them makes sense. Flattening the dynamic can be useful rhetorically on both sides, but it’s usually not accurate.

JW: One thing I have just been thinking about is we’ve seen so many attempted prosecutions of protesters under the Trump administration, and this is their first real victory against, they’re calling it their first real victory against antifa.

Obviously, as we’ve discussed, it’s much more complicated than that. But we’ve seen the administration attempt to prosecute the Broadview Six, who were arrested for protesting outside of an ICE facility in Chicago. Obviously there are sillier instances where federal prosecutors tried to go after someone for throwing a Subway sandwich.

But now that they have their boogeyman scenario for the left, they have sentenced people to prison for the rest of their lives for protesting against injustices perpetrated by their government — does this embolden the administration? Do they learn that they can successfully prosecute people for opposing them?

MB: It certainly emboldens the administration to get this verdict and to get these sentences. Looking back to the fall of last year, when I received threats for my alleged involvement in antifa groups — which is not true, I haven’t participated in any of those groups — the specter of a kind of antifascist Red Scare was looming large.

I think that to a reasonable extent, it kind of faded a bit as the administration focused on a lot of other problems and issues, or created them. It’s come back a bit recently with the Prairieland case, the Prairieland verdicts, also the anti-ICE activists arrested in Minneapolis. There seems to be a bit of a return toward trying to stitch together this alleged antifascist conspiracy.

It’s so Orwellian to think that the antifascists are the bad guys in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian regime, which many scholars of fascism call, to one extent or another, if not fascist, trying to create something akin to fascism. So I do think it emboldens them. I do think it establishes a precedent.

We know that the legal system is all based on different kinds of precedents. And when the administration tried to make the case for antifascism as terrorism back in the fall, they cited a number of different cases which really had nothing to do with it. But what that shows us is that they’re trying to establish a track record, establish the reality of this enemy, this internal enemy they’re trying to combat. This helps them do it because there’s something they can point to. Of course it’s a dishonest intellectual, if you even want to call it intellectual project, to fake evidence and then refer to it as evidence of the thing you’re trying to use as evidence for the evidence. But we know how this administration functions, and it’s not surprising.

JW: As someone who has had to deal with the comms side of the White House, I will say it is not very surprising at all. 

You touched on this already a little bit, but because you’re widely viewed as an antifascist expert and you wrote the 2017 book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” you’ve long been a target of the right, so much so that you and your family had to leave the country.

Can you talk about that experience and how the threats you were receiving escalated over time to the point that you had to make that decision?

MB: When my book was published in 2017, it was rushed to publication and came out days after Charlottesville. It became a bestseller and was really the book of record for talking about what it was that antifa groups did and what they thought and why.

In that context, I received quite a few death threats. I was visited by the FBI. There was a bomb scare at my work. I was denounced by my employer, the president of Dartmouth College, but not fired because I received support from fellow faculty. But over the coming years, that kind of diminished. Antifa was not particularly pertinent to the news, with maybe the exception of a week in 2020 when Trump tried to blame the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd on antifa. It pretty much disappeared. 

Then all of a sudden, with Charlie Kirk’s killing, antifa was back on the radar. It was declared a supposed terrorist organization, although it’s neither terrorist nor an organization.

At first, frankly, I didn’t think much of it because I had received threats in the past. Even when Turning Point USA — the local group on my campus, although they were really fed the initiative by the national organization — crafted a petition to have me fired for writing my book, I kind of shrugged. It changed when some of the threats included my home address, and then my home address was published online on X, along with information about my family.

In a country that’s awash in guns, I was very concerned about something like something that happened to Charlie Kirk happening to me, and I was also very alarmed about the political direction of the country. So my goal was not actually to publicize that I was leaving the country, that leaked, but I was planning on leaving. Spain’s sort of my second home, I’ve done research there over the years. 

Now, going back to your earlier point though, the degree of the kind of onslaught of the Red Scare that I was fearful of did not fully materialize over the coming months. It didn’t — I don’t regret going — but it didn’t fully materialize.

I was concerned about all sorts of progressive activists being rounded up, and fortunately that hasn’t happened. It doesn’t mean that we need to stop our vigilance. That’s why we’re talking about issues like this. But it didn’t fully materialize. I do think it’s picking up again a little bit now, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods, so to speak.

But that was my experience, and I returned to the U.S. last week. I’m going to take all sorts of precautions to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again and to do what I can to keep speaking about these issues.

JW: Why do you think that the energy, the kind of Red Scare energy we had seen pick back up, why do you think it died down, and what do you think brought it back? Do you attribute that to Charlie Kirk’s death specifically? I think a lot of people think that the right used that as an excuse. I’m curious why you think it went up and down in that way.

MB: The killing of Charlie Kirk was obviously an excuse. Even before we knew who had done it Trump was blaming the left.

The effort to frame Tyler Robinson as a leftist is ridiculous if you actually look at all the kinds of convoluted things he believed. Then there was this effort for a few weeks to craft the antifa terrorist threat. Now, why it stopped, I’m not entirely sure. I do think that we live in this social media era where you can make something a big deal very quickly, but just as quickly people move on to the next thing.

I wonder if there was an element of that, particularly in the context where the administration was trying to pursue a number of different objectives at once. I felt, I don’t know what your opinion was, but towards the end of 2025, the kind of authoritarian momentum of the regime started to wane a little. And then all of a sudden January hit, Maduro gets kidnapped from Venezuela, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis grows even more intense. It seemed like particularly with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that there was an effort to get the momentum back going again. In that context, the antifa terrorist threat was almost completely abandoned because Pretti and Good were simply called terrorists. 

So the middleman term between leftist and terrorist was antifa. They took out the middleman term: Leftists are terrorists. They’re coming back to it now. I’m not entirely sure how far they’ll get with it. One of the questions you always have with the growth of authoritarianism or fascism or whatever you want to call it in democratic states is, to what extent can the institutions that are designed to thwart those advances hold up?

I think overall it’s been a mixed bag in the U.S., but certainly you’d have to think that Trump and his allies do not believe that they can simply arrest just anyone and claim they’re part of a terrorist conspiracy at this point or they would have done it. A lot of the arrests that ICE made have not held up, and so I guess they don’t feel fully emboldened.

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But as you suggested earlier, every step they take, every supposed precedent they establish could make them feel more emboldened to take steps moving into the future. The one last thing I’ll say, though, is that I think the real linchpin for these efforts is something more approximating a genuine crisis or emergency, where they can more believably say, “If we don’t deal with these terrorists, our efforts to save the country will be for naught.”

Right now I don’t think that most Americans believe that there is this internal terrorist conspiracy, that’s something they have to be concerned about, especially when the price of groceries is going through the roof, or of gas. But if they get some situation where that’s more plausible, then I’d be more scared.

JW: As you noted, you wrote your handbook just at the start of Trump’s first term. The forward is written by the late Joshua Clover, who recounts pivotal moments in those years in which antifascists were pushing back against the rise of white nationalism. Nearly a decade later, how do you think about this moment that we’re in, and how we’ve gone from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” holding tiki torches, to all of the in between and where we are now?

MB: When I published “Antifa” in 2017, I described the situation we were in as a moment of preventative antifascism that was akin to one extent or another to the post-war European context of trying to organize such that Nazis or fascists couldn’t bring back another horrific regime. We’re not in that situation anymore in the U.S., and I think to some extent we’re in a bit of an unprecedented situation, which I know that’s a term that’s thrown around a lot, but I mean it when I say it.

Whereas you look at the growth of Hitler’s regime in Germany or Mussolini’s in Italy, from the point at which they had the opportunity to take authoritarian power to the kind of consolidation of the regime, there was a much quicker, more straightforward ascension. Hitler outlawed various different political parties and threw their leaders in jail pretty quickly over the months after the Reichstag fire, which provided the context for the Enabling Act [of 1933], which allowed him to centralize his power.

In the U.S., we are not in the status quo, but we’ve not yet fully reached a kind of fascist or authoritarian regime, that we do still have other political parties. You can at least, under most circumstances, protest. So thinking about that in between I think is very interesting, particularly since the kinds of antifascist politics that I wrote about in the book were designed by different kinds of leftists after World War II to stop small and medium-sized fascist groups before they reached the halls of power.

But now, figures like Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and so forth they have their hands on the wheel. So what that calls upon is creating a different kind of antifascist movement, and to me perhaps the most inspiring kind of model or example is the anti-ICE movement, which does not under many circumstances call itself an antifascist movement.

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I would call it an antifascist movement, which ironically is exactly what Trump is trying to get us to call it from a different angle. I think there’s a kind of contestation over language, contestation over images of suffering. I found it shocking when they published the alternate video of the killing of Renee Good in order to essentially — I and many others interpreted it — for us to think that she deserved it because of the context of her partner shouting at the ICE agent.

So contestations over images of violence over words, and I think that this moment is bringing out the best in a lot of people, whether or not they have activist experience or not, in organizing with their neighbors. The best moments of antifascism throughout history have been those moments where it ceases to be some sort of specialty politics, but becomes just a common-sense way of protecting our neighbors, those most vulnerable amongst us, and protecting our freedoms.

That’s what I think is happening now, and that’s what I hope we’ll continue to see, and that could produce really inspiring social movements over the years to come.

JW: To your point, what we’ve been witnessing with these anti-ICE protests is not just organized groups in Signal chats working together, although that is obviously happening as well. We’re seeing everyday people watch their neighbors get dragged out of their homes and standing up and saying, “I won’t stand for this.”

You have to think that the movement of antifascism — separate from how, the Trump administration is trying to describe antifa — but this larger movement of antifascism does have legs if people are willing to stand up for each other, to see their neighbors as members of their family, as members of their community.

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Mark, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thank you so much.

JW: We want to know what issues you are following, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Trump’s Communist Boogeyman Playbook: Charging Protesters as Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent shooting of a 19-year-old has quickly become one of Wilmington’s highest-profile police use-of-force cases in recent years. With differing accounts from police and community members, a Delaware Department of Justice investigation is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers.

On Thursday morning, the family of a teen shot and killed by police in northeast Wilmington publicly demanded that city officials release body camera footage from the shooting. 

Later in the day, the family was shown the video by Wilmington police. Also watching was a family attorney, Harry Daniels, who told Spotlight Delaware the video depicted events on June 24 that continued to raise more questions than answers.

He said the body camera footage, taken from the officer who fired the fatal shot, begins with 19-year-old Kadir Skinner running from a neighborhood dog as police began chasing him. Skinner never turned toward the officer before police shot at him three or four times, according to Daniels.

The Wilmington Police Department has stated that Skinner was struck once by the firing officer.

“He never threatened the officers. He was running with nobody around him,” said Daniels, a Georgia-based civil rights lawyer. 

Skinner was then handcuffed. He later told officers numerous times that he couldn’t breathe, Daniels said. 

“That’s when they decided to rapidly pick him up and take him to the hospital, where he ultimately died,” he said. 

Daniels also sought to refute the city police department’s assertion that Skinner had pointed a gun toward a crowd of people prior to the foot chase. He said the body-camera video showed no crowd of people in the area until after the shooting when neighbors began to gather around the scene. 

Asked about Daniels’ account, Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff to Mayor John Carney, said the footage, which doesn’t show the lead up to the shooting, does not contradict any of the city’s statements to date.

“This footage does not reflect the totality of the investigation, which is still ongoing,” Walker added in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.  

Walker did not respond to the question of why the officer in question made the decision to shoot Skinner. 

Police account under scrutiny

In their first statement, Wilmington PD reported officers were monitoring a large gathering near Jessup and East 24th streets when they saw Skinner leave a home and point a gun toward the crowd.

When officers approached him, Skinner fled on foot, according to police.

On Wednesday, city officials released additional details, saying Skinner was shot once in the buttocks during the chase, and that officers then transported him to the hospital themselves.

Police also said they recovered a .45-caliber handgun but did not say whether Skinner was holding it when he was shot.

The officer who fired the shot, who has yet to be identified, remains on administrative leave, according to police.

The police’s account of the events was challenged even before Skinner’s family watched the body camera footage.

Latiya Greene, who said she witnessed the shooting while visiting a relative in the area, previously told Spotlight Delaware she saw Skinner running with his hands raised as officers chased him.

She said she heard him say something to the effect of, “I don’t have nothing,” before he was shot. Greene said she did not see anything in his hands.

Greene also said she saw an officer collect shell casings shortly after the shooting.

“He came and swooped up all the shell casings from off the ground, put them in his pocket,” she said.

Asked about Greene’s account, city spokeswoman Caroline Klinger referred Spotlight Delaware to an earlier statement from the mayor’s office saying details would be released after state and city investigations conclude.

Klinger has also noted that city officials sent the body camera footage to the Delaware Department of Justice for its investigation.

The DOJ intends to release the body camera footage publicly, department spokesman Mat Marshall said, but it first must blur faces of bystanders and collect supplemental footage. 

Marshall also stated that Attorney General Kathy Jennings has spoken with Skinner’s family and has expedited her department’s investigation.

DOJ officials are asking anyone with video that shows the incident to contact publictrust@delaware.gov

A community backlash

City officials showed Skinner’s family the body camera footage after days of rallies, community meetings and growing criticism of the shooting — and the city’s response to it. 

At a protest on Tuesday, local activist Mahkieb Booker led a crowd of about 50 people on a march from Rodney Square to the nearby Delaware state building. 

Organizers decided to gather at the state’s Carvel Office Building to highlight what Booker said was a lackluster response to the police shooting by the state DOJ. 

Two days later, on Thursday, Skinner’s family held their press conference. While there, his sister Aniyah Clark pleaded for Wilmington officials to provide a more detailed account of what happened.  

“My goodness, it shouldn’t take this much for us to get the closure we need,” Clark said, with her voice breaking. “We already have to bury him and never see him again.”

Also speaking at the press conference was prominent national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has been hired by Skinner’s family.

According to Crump, Skinner’s father had approached officers directly after the shooting to tell them the victim was his son. Officers then maced Skinner’s father, Durrell Dollard, in his face. 

The city did not immediately respond to questions about the incident.

Crump also noted that police took Skinner to ChristianaCare in Wilmington that night. Working at the hospital at the time was the teen’s mother, Rashai Skinner.

Rashai Skinner spoke briefly at the family’s press conference Thursday. With her voice quivering, she noted that Kadir Skinner’s middle name is Assad, which means lion. Then speaking to police, she said “you guys have woken up the lioness.” 

“And I’m not going to stop fighting for my son,” she said.  

Asked if the family plans to sue the city or police department, Crump – who in the past had represented the family of George Floyd, among others – said they “plan on exploring every possible legal parameter to get full justice.”

The post Attorney says police body-cam shows Wilmington teen shot while running away appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

A volunteer at the National Archives in London found the document among other papers seized from an American ship in 1776.

Guards at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, could see a detainee in his cell with one end of a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and the other tied to the door handle. If they opened the door, the sheet would tighten and strangle him. 

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, had been in detention at Camp East Montana for a month by then. The facility itself was still relatively new and had been opened as part of the Trump administration’s plans to house and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time.

Almost immediately after being admitted, the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant began expressing frustration about his care, according to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report. 

The report, reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, includes dozens of notes that detail medical staff interactions with Lunas Campos, who had a history of mental illness and had been previously institutionalized in New York. 

The report and the records it contains offer a rare and disturbing look at how immigrant detention facilities — erected rapidly and with little oversight — manage detainees with serious mental health needs. The records paint a portrait of a man in a crisis and a facility whose staff, on several occasions, discussed transferring him to a facility where he could get a higher level of care. 

According to the records, he complained at least eight times to staff about skipped or late doses of antipsychotic drugs to treat his depression, anxiety and hallucinations. He “expressed frustration regarding his medication dosage,” says a Sept. 9 entry from medical staff. 

They point to moments of exasperation that led to self-harm. He banged his head against the wall after he couldn’t afford to pay the charges to talk with his children in New York. That left him with a black eye. In response, staff simply noted that they spoke with him about “not hitting his head against the wall bc he must take care of his brain and his eyes.” 

The incident with the noose and the doorknob came in early October. A mental health provider eventually coaxed him to untie it. Notes detailing the incident stated that Lunas Campos affirmed he wasn’t suicidal. The notes dismissed what occurred as a “suicidal gesture made to force security staff to release him” from the isolation room where he had been segregated from the rest of the detainees. Hospitalization, the notes stated, was “not clinically indicated at this time based on assessed risk and protective factors.”

Lunas Campos died in detention nearly three months later, after an altercation with guards over his medication. The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but a coroner later ruled his death a homicide. 

The conflicting accounts over the cause of his death have drawn significant media attention and served to rally advocacy groups who have alleged that it is one of the more shocking pieces of evidence of the dangerous conditions endured by immigrants in federal detention facilities. 

But little had been reported about Lunas Campos’ condition and treatment before that day. On Monday, Lunas Campos’ three children sued the companies running the facility at the time of his death. The lawsuit alleged that guards killed him and argued negligence, including missed medication doses and the improper use of force and restraint. The Washington Post on Thursday reported that Lunas Campos had repeatedly sought treatment for his mental illness, pointing to the medical examiner’s investigative report. The companies have not responded to the allegations in court filings and did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed the contents of the report several weeks ago. Two doctors, who are experts on mental health and deaths in detention, also reviewed the report at the news organizations’ request. The takeaway was clear: The detainee asked for help, the facility staff failed to adequately respond.

The news organizations separately reviewed more than 160 emergency calls, as well as records and interviews with staff and government officials familiar with the detention center. They show medical and mental health emergencies beyond those experienced by Lunas Campos, as well as staff indicating they felt ill-equipped to respond. Detainees had little access to recreational activities and time outside, which mental health experts say exacerbates their despair. Staff also ignored warning signs, such as detainees’ previous efforts to harm themselves.

“It’s civil detention,” said Will Horowitz, an attorney representing Lunas Campos’ adult children in the lawsuit. “They’re not in detention because they’ve committed a crime.”  

The White House declined to comment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview and did not answer a list of written questions. The administration has previously dismissed detainee accounts of inadequate medical care and poor conditions at Camp East Montana and other detention centers as “false” and called them “fearmongering clickbait.” Federal officials have repeatedly said that for many immigrants, the medical care they receive in detention is the best in their lives.

In Lunas Campos’ case, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, initially minimized the incident that led to his death, pointing to his criminal history. Later, in response to news reports that the medical examiner planned to rule the death a homicide, a DHS spokesperson said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself. 

Lunas Campos was sentenced to a year in jail after a 2003 conviction for sexual contact with a child under the age of 11, according to The Associated Press. The news organization also reported that he was convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance and sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009.

Horowitz said Lunas Campos’ criminal history is irrelevant to his detention. Lunas Campos’ children declined to comment on the failures highlighted in the medical examiner’s report or on his criminal history, but, Horowitz said, “They want people to know that he was a person like anyone else and that he didn’t need to die.” 

In a report issued after Lunas Campos’ death, DHS officials said he received regular medical and psychiatric evaluations, with staff adjusting his medication as needed. They also contended that he was monitored for suicidal ideation. Investigative records from the El Paso medical examiner show a period during which facility staff checked on him every 15 minutes following his suicide attempt, as required by the federal government. 

But the medical examiner’s report also brings into focus a series of breakdowns in care, according to Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He said Lunas Campos’ case is a model of how such moments compound, creating crisis after crisis with dire outcomes.

“The clinical trajectory documented in his chart — escalating agitation, self-harm, pressured speech, repeated confrontations with staff over medication — is the predictable result of erratic psychotropic medication administration in a patient with serious mental illness,” Basu said.

He pointed to records that show staff didn’t transfer Lunas Campos to a facility that could better treat his mental health, even after noting that they were working to move him as early as Oct. 8. Lunas Campos was also repeatedly placed in segregation cells, separate from the rest of the camp population, which had little more than a bed in them. The government’s own detention standards say staff should generally make every effort to avoid placing detainees with a serious mental illness in segregation. 

Most critically, instead of taking his previous suicide attempt seriously, staff interpreted it as an effort to manipulate them, Basu said.

The records, Basu said, clearly show “systemic neglect.” 

A System Unraveling

Camp East Montana was supposed to be the model for how detention centers across the country would operate under President Donald Trump’s administration. It was near the U.S.-Mexico border and had easy access to a highway and an airfield to quickly transport and deport unauthorized immigrants. Its location on barren, massive Fort Bliss land also allowed for a space that could hold up to 10,000 unauthorized immigrants at a time, more than any other facility in the country.

Instead, the detention center became an example of what could go wrong. 

Within months of the camp’s opening, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the federal government, published accounts from immigrants who said they were beaten by guards, denied lifesaving medication and kept in squalid conditions with sewage at times spilling into their eating areas. Detainees commonly caught measles or tuberculosis. The government hasn’t responded formally to the lawsuit, but in statements to the media a DHS spokesperson said claims of inhumane conditions and detainees being abused are “categorically false.” 

The problems treating people with mental health challenges were not as visible but stacked up in ways that experts said added mental distress and could contribute to more suicide attempts. In the worst cases, they said, detainees unnecessarily died.

The facility was never set up to house detainees struggling with serious mental health conditions, a DHS official and a medical provider who worked there told ProPublica and the Tribune. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government did not authorize them to discuss conditions at the camp. 

Several staffers told the news organizations that they had a lot of relevant information they could share, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements.   

The DHS official said immigrants didn’t have adequate space to read, pray, write or get legal services. They were kept inside windowless cells with nothing to do. Detainees were also granted little time outside, partly because the facility’s outdoor space was not big enough for all of them, a government report later found. The federal government requires detention centers to provide detainees at least one hour of outdoor time per day, but many got only a couple of hours a week, detainees told ProPublica and the Tribune. 

“Recreation and amenities, games, books, TVs, are all lifelines for people in detention,” the DHS official, who did not participate in the report, said. 

Prolonged confinement made detainees more anxious and desperate, at times leading to hunger strikes and fights. Immigrants were only supposed to remain at Camp East Montana for a maximum of two weeks, according to contract documents and statements from federal officials. When Lunas Campos died, the typical detainee had spent 38 days in the facility, according to a ProPublica analysis of government data provided to the Deportation Data Project, which collects and posts immigration enforcement information. He had been there far longer, more than 100 days.

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights who has studied healthcare in immigration detention centers, said that the conditions reported at Camp East Montana signal that it is not a safe place for any detained individual. 

“You’ve been detained. You don’t know what the process is going to be. You don’t know when you’re going to be released,” Peeler said. “It’s really hard to trust people who are in charge to give you accurate information and so, as a result, you’re going to have a lot more despair and a lot more kind of anguish.” 

The situation is worse for people with a history of mental illness, Peeler said. Solitary confinement can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, self-harm and suicide risks, according to a 2024 report that Peeler co-authored with partners, including students and staff at Harvard University. 

“We are creating a mental health crisis that does not need to be there,” Peeler said.

Some detainees at Camp East Montana who showed signs of potential self-harm were placed in isolation rooms that were not suicide-proof. They had doorknobs and mesh ceilings to which detainees who wanted to harm themselves could tie a bedsheet, the DHS official said. 

National detention standards don’t specify the number of suicide-proof rooms needed in each facility but make clear that detainees who are suicidal should be placed in rooms “free of objects and structural elements that could facilitate a suicide attempt.” 

“It’s insane,” said the medical provider who spoke to ProPublica and the Tribune. “If somebody wants to kill themselves, there’s nowhere to put them that’s actually safe.” 

“They Just Didn’t Do It”

Lunas Campos was in such a room when he first tried to commit suicide. By then, staff had reported at least three other suicide attempts to 911.

There were the two calls in September, one about a detainee who lay on the floor holding his stomach in agony and unable to speak after swallowing an unknown object. The other about a man biting his arms and trying to cut his wrists with a piece of cardboard and a comb. 

Another call came in October, the day before Lunas Campos was spotted with a sheet tied around his neck. A man being kept in a medical isolation room to rule out tuberculosis tried to hang himself, the caller told the 911 operator. 

Suicide attempts are warning signs of a larger problem at a detention center, which could include inadequate strategies for observing or flagging self-harm or more general medical issues, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official at ICE who served in the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. 

Out of 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump returned to the White House, at least 10 have been reported as presumed suicides. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for independent investigations into the ICE deaths and expressed alarm over the reported use of solitary confinement.

“You would hope that if you have a number of negative outcomes of problematic incidents like that, that they would do critical incident reviews, figure out what was going on and try to take corrective action,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Last week, DHS’s inspector general launched probes into detainee deaths and whether the department was following its own standards on the use of force, citing a rise in ICE custody fatalities since 2022. 

Other problems were already identified in a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found millions of dollars had been wasted, pointed to gaps in medical care and noted unsanitary conditions at the El Paso facility. The report mentions that in October, ICE officials raised concerns with the contractors running the facility about the lack of windows on some doors in medical holding rooms, which prevented staff from easily seeing what was happening inside. 

The DHS official flagged several other problems that the government could have worked to improve. It could have assigned more ICE agents to help with chronic staffing shortages, created more opportunities for recreational activities and built special tents with suicide-prevention rooms, the DHS official said. 

“There was no lack of money or space and there was an obvious incentive to do it,” the official said, referring to the suicide attempts at the facility. “They just didn’t do it.”

There seemed to be a push-pull between career ICE staff and political appointees, the DHS official told the news organizations. 

“The political side didn’t want to give the appearance that it was so chaotic, they wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening,” the official said. 

Even without the proposed changes, staff at the detention center should have done more to treat Lunas Campos’ mental illness, said Joanne Ahola, a psychiatrist who has spent 17 years evaluating immigrants inside detention centers for Physicians for Human Rights’ volunteer Asylum Network. She also reviewed his records at the request of ProPublica and the Tribune.  

Lunas Campos’ early pleas for help continued throughout his detention. Nearly two weeks after his suicide attempt, he again flagged that he wasn’t getting his medications.

“Pt reported being very frustrated and anxious because he had not received his medication for a couple of days,” a medical note from Oct. 19 read. It noted that Lunas Campos was visibly “irritated and yelling.”

Another note on Nov. 10, said Lunas Campos “had not gotten his medications since Nov. 6.” 

And, on Nov. 11, more than a month after staff told Lunas Campos that they were working to move him to a facility with a higher level of care, shorthanded as HLOC, he was still waiting. “Continues to request transfer to HLOC stating conditions at current facility are adversely affecting his mental health,” according to a note from that date.

Lunas Campos was temporarily moved to another facility, but it was another detention center that experts say did not provide the higher level of care he needed.

On Jan. 2, a day before his death, he returned to Camp East Montana. A note from medical staff at 9:42 p.m. said they “provided emotional support,” “reviewed grounding and breathing techniques to manage anxiety,” encouraged him “to seek ongoing mental health support as needed,” and added his name to the medical sick call for a psychiatric evaluation. 

“This is a man who needed regular medications, a full evaluation, mental health clinicians and, no doubt, re-hospitalization,” Ahola said.  

“Instead, it almost seems like it was brushed off or brushed under the rug,” she added. 

Less than two weeks after Lunas Campos’ death, the health administrator at Camp East Montana called 911 again.

Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan native, was found in a cell with his pants tied around his neck. He was in a room with no windows.The staff found him as they were doing routine checks.

An ambulance was needed, the health administrator told the operator, explaining where emergency responders should go upon arrival at the facility. Without hesitation, he added, “They’ve been out here many times.” 

Díaz, who cooked chicken and washed dishes at a Minneapolis Korean restaurant, had been picked up and flown to Camp East Montana a week earlier. The GAO noted that ICE itself later acknowledged in a report that staff had not properly followed procedures after he “exhibited risk factors for suicide.” Staff placed him in a medical holding room — not a suicide-resitant cell — and left him unattended for periods longer than 15 minutes, the GAO stated. 

His autopsy, which was conducted by the military, has not been made public. 

The post “He Didn’t Need to Die.” How an Immigration Detention Center Repeatedly Failed to Address a Mental Health Crisis. appeared first on ProPublica.

Will the UK’s next prime minister finally have a ‘national conversation’ on defence? Expert comment thilton.drupal 3 July 2026

The Defence Investment Plan recommits the UK to a national conversation on defence and security. The failure to deliver one so far undermines public trust and leaves the UK vulnerable to hybrid threats.

Keir Starmer has released the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which sets out the UK’s military spending plans, ahead of the NATO summit next week. The DIP also contains a commitment to a ‘national conversation campaign on defence and security’. 

However, this plan for a ‘national conversation’ was already adopted by Starmer’s government in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of 2025. The conversation was to focus on the rationale for investing more in defence, the role of the public in support of national security and resilience, and countering misinformation. 

The review recommended it take the form of a ‘two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends’. This has not yet happened. 

Meanwhile, intelligence services have warned that Russian sabotage, hostile reconnaissance, cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns are increasingly directed at the UK, a country viewed as ‘enemy number one’ and a ‘soft target’. The first step in countering these ‘hybrid’ attacks targeting the UK’s political stability is for a new prime minister to inform the public and build a societal response. 

Building trust and consent

The commitment from the Starmer government in 2025 reflects UK and NATO doctrine, which emphasize the ‘central proactive element’ of strategic communications in countering hybrid threats. Increased public awareness can spur civil society action to recognise hybrid threats and address vulnerabilities, acting as a deterrence by denying or reducing the impact of such threats. 

However, the UK government faces a strategic challenge: low public trust. According to 2024 polling, the UK government is one of the least trusted by the public among OECD countries. A ‘national conversation’ could be an important way to improve the public’s trust in the government. 

Allowing the public to feel they are part of a dialogue with authorities and including them in decision-making can build long-term public trust. Communications can foster cohesion through values-led narratives which promote civic unity. 

Sharing more about security also requires government to trust the public. The UK government has been accused of a ‘Stalinist’ culture of excessive official secrecy, with information either not shared due to fear of public and media panic, or a desire to control the narrative of the threat. 

Withholding information on threats can however negatively impact public confidence, especially if the British public perceives allied governments or independent media as offering greater candour than official UK sources.  

In turn, a national conversation that builds trust and explains the level of threat facing the UK will help the government to secure public approval for increased defence spending as outlined in the DIP. This is vital considering that higher defence spending generally requires a combination of cuts elsewhere, tax rises, or borrowing – all options that could prove unpopular with the public if the government doesn’t better explain and justify its decisions. 

What role should the public play?

A key element of the conversation is to engage the public in supporting national security and resilience. To send a clear demand signal to society through outreach activities, the government must first organize and articulate policy on the public’s role.

According to Dr Fiona Hill, a co-author of the SDR, civil aid organizations currently feel ‘there is no green light from above’ and ‘a sense of inaction’ in planning to support emergency responses. While the government is researching policy options on aspects of societal resilience, there appears to be limited political direction or ownership with no single minister responsible. 

Related work

Britain’s next prime minister faces deep foreign policy challenges – whether Burnham or another

The SDR also recommended the conversation should support ‘efforts to counter threats to information integrity as a critical component of national cohesion’. This reflects an online information ecosystem which is becoming easier to manipulate, with impacts offline. Violent disorder has occurred every summer since 2024, fuelled in part by misinformation on platforms including Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Facebook.

Possible calls to action might include asking the broader public to engage in media literacy initiatives, such as those available in libraries and online, for example via civic organizations in Finland and Sweden. 

Given the potential of misinformation to cause polarization and destabilization, the UK government has taken some limited steps to improve resilience, but actions on media literacy are focussed on parents and limited to a government campaign rather than a broader civic coalition. 

Strategic questions

Attempts to destabilize UK society currently exist in a ‘space between peace and war’, with attacks seeking to exploit vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions. 

Europe’s Centre of Excellence in Countering Hybrid Threats therefore recommends a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, using societal resilience as an organizing framework to cohere other disparate policy areas. In Nordic states, this has extended to social, cultural, and constitutional policy, while the German zeitenwende (turning point) shift since 2022 has linked investment in the military with infrastructure resilience and economic development. 

What America’s armed forces can—and cannot—do for democracy.

Dozens were injured overnight in Kyiv during an attack that caused fires and explosions throughout the city.

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The US government’s latest U-turn on Anthropic’s Mythos sends mixed signals on AI governance Expert comment thilton.drupal 2 July 2026

The Trump administration’s approach to controlling US companies’ powerful AI capabilities is volatile. It undercuts global safety and governance at a pivotal time.

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Commerce removed restrictions on two of Anthropic’s new advanced AI models that have prompted security concerns: Mythos 5 and Fable 5. This is a major change in the way the US controls frontier AI and comes after recurring flip-flopping on the issue.

The move, described in a letter by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik to Anthropic, lifts the export control directive issued by the Trump administration less than three weeks ago. That 12 June directive banned non-US nationals from accessing the two models. This ban included foreign employees at US companies and cyber defenders from international partners. In response, Anthropic suspended access to Mythos and Fable for all users a day later.

The administration then partially changed its approach. On 26 June, Anthropic said the US government had allowed it to release Mythos 5 but had reserved access to the model to only a select group of ‘trusted’ big companies and agencies: all of them, unsurprisingly, from the US.

Now, Anthropic says it is coordinating with the government to expand Mythos access to a broader group including international partners. As of 1 July, Fable 5 – which Anthropic says has stronger safeguards than Mythos 5 – is available to public users globally.

A volatile approach

Since Anthropic’s initial limited release of Mythos in April, the model’s apparently powerful cyber hacking capabilities have led to concerns over who has access. Initially, Anthropic had limited access to trusted partners in ‘Project Glasswing’: a select group of companies and agencies that were granted access in order to fix vulnerabilities in their systems and browsers. Since then, the question of access has remained contentious.

Many companies and allies will applaud the US administration’s latest policy reversal. Access to models like Mythos can be helpful for cyber defenders the world over. Information about model capabilities is critical for regulators and officials.

Related work

In the face of growing AI cyber threats, do middle powers have agency?

This latest U-turn on Mythos aside, the bigger picture is that the US government is regulating powerful AI in a way that it previously indicated it wouldn’t. OpenAI’s latest models – GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna – have also recently come under government pressure due to security concerns, and will be initially released to only ‘a small group of trusted partners’.

However, the government’s changeable approach is not a win for security. The policy volatility is concerning. Its unpredictability sends confusing signals to markets and is bad for investors.

It also represents competing dynamics at the heart of the US’s frontier AI strategy, each with global consequences. These include anxiety about China’s access to cutting-edge capabilities, a lack of clarity over what the technology can actually do and how transformative it really is, and distrust in the partnerships required to develop and deploy it.

Deregulation, re-regulation?

This flip-flopping on Mythos is just the latest chapter in the dispute between the Trump administration and Anthropic. Earlier this year, the Department of War (DoW) labelled the company a ‘supply chain risk’ to national security: the first US company ever to receive this designation. The DoW and Anthropic remain in a legal battle. Regardless, Anthropic engineers reportedly help the National Security Agency to use Mythos in cyber operations targeting adversaries.

The administration’s turbulent relationship with Anthropic has global consequences, including for US allies. In early June, Anthropic offered the EU access to Mythos after weeks of negotiations, only for the EU to lose it days later following the export control directive (and now, presumably, regain it). The G7 also saw attempts to re-negotiate a ‘trusted partners’ scheme for access to cutting-edge AI capabilities.