Plaskett fire has swept through more than 5,900 acres in Monterey county and remains un-contained, says Cal Fire

A fire in California’s Big Sur region doubled in size overnight, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents, in a coastal region where firefighters have battled another blaze for weeks.

The Plaskett fire, which sparked on Tuesday, had swept through more than 5,900 acres (2,400 hectares) in Monterey county as of Friday, and remained un-contained, according to Cal Fire. Its cause is under investigation.

• Junior taken to hospital after first-quarter emergency

• Division II season opener suspended and later canceled

• School plans vigil for Barnett and his family

William Jewell College running back MicahJo Barnett had a medical emergency on the sideline during ⁠the school’s season opener on Saturday. and the school later announced his death.

Barnett, a junior, ⁠reportedly experienced seizure-like ⁠symptoms during ​the first quarter of the Division II contest against Fort Lewis College. The game was played ⁠on William Jewell’s campus in Liberty, Missouri, about 20 miles northeast of Kansas City.

Axios reports: Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology... The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad. It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works. BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions. What they're saying: "Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the plaintiffs write in the 48-page complaint. They also claim that Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works... More details from The Verge: The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount... The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.

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• Serb hopes to take advantage of wide-open men’s draw

• Elena Rybakina has eyes on No 1 world ranking

Novak Djokovic said he was as prepared as he could be for the US Open as he attempts to take advantage of the wide-open men’s draw and battle for a potential 25th grand slam title.

Djokovic arrived in New York having competed only once after his semi-final run at Wimbledon, losing in his opening match of the Cincinnati Open to Thiago Agustín Tirante while struggling with the humidity. However, he now sees the silver lining in that defeat, which he believes gave him the time to make sure he was in optimal shape for the US Open. “I don’t like early losses anywhere, to be honest, but it gave me time to be prepared for US Open in a most adequate way,” he said. “I had almost a few weeks, actually two weeks, to really train and get my body and mind into the right state, prepared for what’s coming up.

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• ‘The flood took everything I have’: survivors grieve for relatives and homes swept away in Nepal

• Chinese rescuers find ‘nothing but ruins’ at border crossing as Nepal seeks help to ID and store the dead

Outside the army camp in the Nuwakot district of Nepal, people run their fingers down the sheets of paper pinned to the wall, scanning the growing list of those reported missing for news of loved ones. Nepali authorities said nearly 3,000 people are missing, while China reported more than 550 people unaccounted for.

Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, has appealed for international support to help rebuild the country after the floods, saying reconstruction efforts could run into “billions of dollars” AFP reports.

William Jewell running back MicahJo Barnett, a junior majoring in business administration, died Saturday, the school said.

The Los Angeles Times first calls Ridley Scott's newest movie "a postapocalyptic thriller that trades zombies for pandemics and asks whether hope can outlast catastrophe." But besides The Dog Stars, Scott is also working on an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" starring Hugh Jackman, and is thinking about turning one of his past films into a musical. ("I can't tell you which one because they're being difficult.") The common theme, they suggest, is a director who allows his stories to "speak through evocative, immersive images rather than unnecessary exposition." The British director says it's because he got his start in advertising after attending the Royal College of Art in London. After 1982's neon-coated sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," Scott notably made the iconic Apple Macintosh computer ad "1984," a memorable Orwellian-themed clip that contained suggestions of the dystopias that would continue to fascinate Scott in his filmmaking. "Advertising in England at that point became a competitive art form," he says, pointing to the notorious "Adland Five," a group of directors that included Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Scott and his brother Tony. "I've got a show reel which is 50 years old which would entertain the s — out you. Hasn't aged at all. Our visual drive changed the face of how films looked." That's apparent in Scott's latest, "The Dog Stars" (in theaters Friday), a film about survival after the end of the world. It's based on Peter Heller's 2012 novel and set in Colorado 10 years in the future after an aggressive flu has decimated much of the population. Those remaining alive use any means necessary to stay that way, resulting in instability, brutality and, more hopefully, connection... These days, Scott develops movies with his production company, Scott Free, which he founded with his late brother Tony in 1995. Before that he says he struggled to find good scripts. And rarely has someone handed one to him. "I've only ever had three films land on my desk," he says. "One was 'Alien,' which I was fifth choice for after Robert Altman." He makes a face. "Can you imagine offering Robert Altman 'Alien'? How stupid can you get?" Another was 2015 space adventure "The Martian," which Scott says had been sitting on a shelf for two years before it was sent to him. Scott's grounded, semi-comedic take on Andy Weir's novel resulted in seven Oscar nominations. The third screenplay to materialize was "The Dog Stars." "I read it and I was blown away," Scott says. Deadline notes that Scott is already re-writing the third prequel to Alien, citing Scott's comments to French outlet AlloCiné. "The one that just came out [2024's Alien: Romulus] was OK. I think it needs some help. So, I've gone back in." Scott continued, "I've already got a footprint for the next Alien.... I'm picking up where we left off in Covenant with Micheal Fassbender, who now thinks he's Ozymandius." With the sequel bringing back Fassbender's futuristic AI droid, Scott sees an opportunity to explore the repercussions of artificial intelligence in our current world. "I like the fact that AI has gone off the rails," said Scott of where the character is at the end of Covenant. "If we go AI, the moment we discover it's off the rails is too late. It could switch every digital thing off in the world like that. You'd have fucking chaos. It's that kind of stuff that's scary." Scott tells the Los Angeles Times that the malfunctioning AI character fascinates him, and in the movie will be creating a "brave new world for himself... AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb..." So far, Scott says he hasn't implemented AI technologies into his filmmaking. He holds up his "Treasure Island" Ridleygrams [hand-drawn storyboards] and shakes them at the camera. "I can compete with an AI without any problem making images," he says. "But it's coming, inevitably." Scott was not involved in the forthcoming Prime Video series "Blade Runner 2099," out in November. "I can't blame my lawyers and my agents at that time, but somehow we let 'Blade Runner' go," he says. "And when you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." (He was more involved in Noah Hawley's recent "Alien: Earth" series, which he calls "pretty damn good....") Does that mean he thinks about his legacy as a filmmaker? He does, but not often. "When you think of your legacy, you're too near the end," Scott says. "I'm not near the end." He looks up from his drawings. "I've had a riotous time," he says. He corrects himself: "I'm having a riotous time."

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Matt Bradley and crew assaulted while interviewing woman who said settlers had driven family out of home

A Palestinian woman and an NBC News team are reported to have been attacked and injured by masked Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday, amid worsening confrontations in the area.

Benjamin Netanyahu said he condemned the violence committed “by a handful of rioters”.

The judge delivered a victory for Stanford University's student newspaper, which said some international students were afraid to speak out because of the deportation threat.

CNN reports that "A one-time snip of a key gene lowered heart-clogging cholesterol by about 50% over an entire year with no adverse effects, scientists have reported." The overwhelmingly positive results were found in four people who had taken the highest dose of the experimental treatment during a pilot study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in November 2025. That study was extremely small — only 15 patients with dangerously high cholesterol that did not respond to medication. The research was designed to test the safety of five different doses of a gene-altering infusion delivered by CRISPR-Cas9, a biological scissor which cuts a targeted genetic location to modify or turn a gene on or off. "If you'd asked me 15 years ago if we could have done something like this, I would have thought you were crazy," senior study author Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told CNN previously. An update on the study, published Friday in NEJM, appears to answer a key question: Does the intervention last? "Is something like this truly a one and done? That was always the question," said lead study author Dr. Luke Laffin, a preventive cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic's Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. "This new data is essentially saying that the decreases in LDL cholesterol and triglycerides we saw at 60 days after treatment have lasted over a year," Laffin said. "In people who took the highest dose, the reduction seems durable and safe...." If larger clinical trials show similar results, the procedure could be a game changer for young people with severe disease, preventive cardiologist Dr. Ann Marie Navar, an associate professor of cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told CNN previously. "If you're 20 and you have really high cholesterol, it may make a lot more sense to have a one-time treatment that doesn't require you to have to take a pill every single day or shot every two weeks for the next 60 years," said Navar, who was not involved in the study. "The potential for this is just enormous." Being born with this mutation naturally "drastically lowers or even eliminates a person's risk for heart disease," the article points out. And the study's senior author adds "now that CRISPR is here, we have the ability to change other people's genes so they too can have this protection."

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Amid an ongoing trade war​ between Canada and the United States, President Trump last week sought to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" by executive order.

Greenlee County’s high school football teams found the win column Friday night, with Duncan controlling Fort Thomas 28-14 and Morenci grinding out a 14-7 road victory over Tanque Verde.

The $4.3 billion telescope is expected to discover tens of thousands of exoplanets while probing the nature of mysterious dark matter and energy.

The Washington Post shares this tip for car buyers. Electric vehicles "are not driving the recent growth in recalls warning that vehicles could erupt into flames at any time, even when parked and turned off." A Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall notices found that conventional gas and diesel vehicles made up the vast majority of vehicles covered by the "park outside" label since 2021. Last week, The Post wrote about an alarming surge in these so-called "park outside" recalls... A total of an estimated 3.4 million vehicles currently have outstanding recalls of this kind, according to vehicle history provider CarFax. Safety experts say the surge in "park outside" recalls appears to be caused by other changes to modern gas and electric vehicles, such as the additional technology in everything from transmissions to seat warmers.... [It's a messy mix of things that "doesn't lend itself to simple description of what's happening," says Sean Kane, president of auto safety-analysis firm Safety Research and Strategies. "But it boils down to growing electronic systems and the number of components."] They're known as "key-off fires," said Frank Borris, a former NHTSA investigator who now works as a safety consultant. "The engine is off," he said, "but the circuits are still hot and they stay hot all the time." Earlier this year, Kia needed to recall 463,000 Tellurides because of the risk that the front power-seat switch could overheat and ignite the seat. That was the second time Kia had issued a recall for that one defect. The first recall, in 2024, didn't fully address the problem. More than 66,000 Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators from the 2021 model year were recalled due to circuit boards in the battery junction box that could short out. At least 16 fires were blamed on the problem, which often ignited when the vehicles were parked and turned off. NHTSA has issued 93 "park outside" recalls since 2021, according to a Post analysis. Nearly half — 44 recalls — covered vehicles exclusively with conventional internal-combustion engines, while 38 recalls were just for EVs or hybrids. So the number of campaigns were nearly equally divided between gas and electric or hybrid vehicles. But gas vehicles pull away when comparing the size of the recalls. Gas-only campaigns covered a combined 4.6 million vehicles with "park outside" recalls over the past five years, compared to only about 662,000 vehicles that were EVs or hybrids... Other countries have provided limited looks at the EV fire issue, such as an United Kingdom government review of data from Norway finding that gas and diesel vehicles had a fire incidence rate that was four times higher than EVs from 2016 to 2021. Just in 2026, U.S. authorities have announced 17 new "park outside" recalls covering 1.7 million vehicles, according to the article.

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Reporting season shows how consumers are responding to cost of living pressures and how retailers are responding

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Australians are buying less pizza but more weight-loss drugs. They love “dupes” but don’t enjoy writing letters.

Here are five key takeaways from the August reporting season that show what consumers are buying as cost of living pressures reignite, and how retailers are responding.

Bill Lee says he favors proposal to rename Nashville’s international airport after legendary country singer

Bill Lee, the Tennessee governor, on Friday said he favored a proposal to rename Nashville’s international airport after legendary country singer Dolly Parton, who died three days earlier at age 80.

In a statement, Lee said he and the managers of the airport in Tennessee’s capital city – where Parton resided – wanted to create “a lasting tribute to her indelible legacy and the generations of people she inspired”. He said he had spoken previously to the 11-time Grammy winner and her team, who were “touched by the idea”.

Jose Carlos Hoyoz-Munoz was arrested after a family altercation and restrained for ‘combative’ behavior

A cadre of Los Angeles police officers beat and restrained a handcuffed man in July, minutes before he was found dead in a jail cell, according to newly released body-cam footage.

On 15 July, Jose Carlos Hoyoz-Munoz, 58, was found unconscious in his cell at the Van Nuys regional jail. At the time, the LAPD said two use-of-force incidents had occurred, without specifying the nature. In the video released on Friday, the department said three use-of-force incidents occurred.

The discussion focused on the Melania Trump Foster Youth to Independence program, which offers vouchers to young adults 25 years old or younger who are still in foster care or have recently left it.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — A fuel supplier alleges that a distributor connected to some Freedom Fuel Network stations received nearly $4 million worth of gasoline without paying, offering a possible explanation for prices President Donald Trump publicly praised as unusually low.

Mansfield Oil Company filed a federal lawsuit Aug. 19 against KRSM Inc. and its president, Syed Kazmi, alleging the company obtained more than 1 million gallons from a Pennsylvania terminal between May and July but failed to pay for it. Court records confirm Mansfield is suing KRSM for breach of contract.

Mansfield says some of the fuel ultimately reached at least 10 stations affiliated with Freedom Fuel, which gained national attention after selling gasoline for $3.47 per gallon. Trump praised the network in July, saying its operators were lowering prices because they “love the U.S.A.” The White House also promoted the stations on social media.

KRSM denies wrongdoing, calling the case an accounting dispute involving incorrectly priced or duplicated invoices. Freedom Fuel itself is not named as a defendant and has not been accused of stealing fuel.

The lawsuit states that KRSM’s failure to pay enabled it to offer unusually cheap fuel. A federal judge Friday ordered KRSM and Kazmi to maintain at least $2.75 million in a bank account while the dispute proceeds.

Sources

• The Washington Post – MBFC Rating

The post Trump-Praised Discount Gas Network Linked to $4 Million Unpaid Fuel Dispute appeared first on News Facts Network.

The Washington Post looks "a growing number of Americans who have had their private conversations with AI chatbots made public in court," calling the chatbots "custodians of a fast-growing trove of intimate data that can be sought by law enforcement, or companies or other opponents in civil litigation." A Washington Post review of public records and local news stories found that chatbot logs were cited in 12 court cases over the past two years. It's hard to know how often chatbot material is drawn into investigations and legal proceedings more broadly, because police, and parties in civil cases, don't have to present in court all the evidence they obtain... In some cases, AI companies have reported people on their platforms to the FBI, leading to prosecutions and at least one conviction... OpenAI has said the company uses software to scan conversations for signs of dangerous behavior and flag them to human reviewers. If a reviewer determines a chat indicates "an imminent and credible risk of harm to others," they report the user to law enforcement, the company said in an April blog post. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to disclose how many times the company had reported users to police.... Data released by OpenAI shows requests by government agencies and law enforcement for user data growing rapidly. In the second half of 2025, the company disclosed data from more than 80 accounts, an increase of more than four times as many over the same period the year before... When police ask someone to open their phone during questioning or after an arrest, they often do so, allowing officers to scroll through the apps they use, [according to Michael Price, the litigation director for the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers]... In general, the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures of their property, provides the right to refuse a search of the contents of their phone unless police have a warrant. "The short answer is that most people consent," Price said. "They shouldn't, but they do..." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that conversations with chatbots should receive special legal protections, similar to conversations between clients and their attorneys. Special legal protections aren't recognized by courts today, the article poitns out. A financial executive who became the subject of a federal criminal investigation for fraud asked Claude about potential defense strategies, then asked a judge to disallow the conversations from the prosecution's case, according to the article. "But the judge said that protections for conversations between clients and their attorneys did not apply: Claude is not a lawyer, and the executive's attorneys did not ask him to talk to the chatbot." The article includes quotes from three ChatGPT conversations that later turned up in court proceedings: "I deleted a email a year ago from my yahoo account. Can yahoo still retrieve the email?" "How f----d am i bro. What if i smahsed the s--- oitta mutlipls cars." "My dad Said that I'm will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar." "As AI becomes a bigger part of everyday life, its use as evidence and in trials is likely to become more prevalent," the article points out — especially with the growing popularity of agents that take actions for users.

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Ecstasy pills shaped to look like President Trump contain a high concentration of the chemical PMMA, which could potentially be lethal, a Dutch institute said.

Phoronix reports on Greg Kroah-Hartman's recent slide from his upcoming talk in Paris at Kernel Recipes 2026 (September 21 to 23): With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3... Fortunately, most often they end up being lower priority vulnerabilities and often within old/obscure driver code, so the impact is often minimal.

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Milo Yiannopoulos, who is British, was accused of overstaying his visa after entering the country legally in May 2019.

Bill Belichick’s North Carolina Tar Heels held off the TCU Horned Frogs in a low-scoring affair at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on Saturday in the first major college football game of the 2026 season

• College football is booming, chaotic and more confusing than ever

The Trump supporter turned critic was flown to the United Kingdom.

Ex-Breitbart editor has vocally supported immediate deportations for anyone who can’t prove US residency

Far-right British media provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the US after being detained on Thursday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New Orleans in connection with what the agency said was expired authorization to be in the country and a deportation order.

Yiannopoulos’s deportation to the UK occurred on Friday, said a statement on Saturday from a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE.

Tulshi Patel says mother Hemangini Jitendra Patel and aunt Hema Sunil Amin were last seen at Friendship Bridge on Nepal-China border

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

The daughter of a woman missing in Nepal has told how she traced her mother’s location through a TikTok video posted hours before the devastating flash flood hit.

The catastrophic flash floods that hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and sweeping away entire villages, have killed at least 675 people, while more than 3,000 remain missing.

Rockstar Games has released a 26-minute "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI, due for release November 19th. After one day the video had nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and when Netflix streamed the footage, "some viewers had to refresh the page after receiving error messages, indicating high usage levels," reports CNBC: "Some members briefly experienced an issue accessing Netflix, but we quickly recovered," the company told CNBC. Game streaming platform Twitch, where many viewers were posting their reactions, also experienced bandwidth issues when the trailer was released, according to analysts at Wells Fargo. CNBC notes predictions the game could become one of the most profitable entertainment products of all time, while the Washington Post predicting it's "about to be the biggest pop media event of the year, if not the decade." The data backs this up. The latest evidence arrived Thursday, when Netflix viewership surged for the long-awaited first look at gameplay footage, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm estimates "GTA VI" has already received about 4.6 million preorders. Box office blockbusters like "The Odyssey" take weeks to hit $1 billion. "GTA V" famously did it in three days. Analyst firm Newzoo projects the new game could generate between $3.3 billion and $5.2 billion by the end of its launch week in November... The influence of the series, created by Rockstar Games, extends beyond sales records. In 2025, "GTA V" accumulated 1.89 billion hours watched despite being a 12-year-old title, according to Stream Hatchet. Much of those hours are spent watching people role-play in "GTA Online," particularly through role-play servers managed by studio Cfx.re, which was acquired by Rockstar in 2023. By 2024, the studio said more than 20 million players used its platforms. GTA role-play involves players pretending to be cops, robbers, hapless retail workers or any functioning member of society within the online game... The game can lift up music sales and streams. Tom Petty's 1989 song "Love is a Long Road" saw stream numbers increased by nearly 37,000 percent on Spotify after it was the soundtrack to the debut "GTA VI" trailer in 2023, according to Universal Music Publishing Group. Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief and co-founder of analysis firm The Game Business, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that GTA 5 is still in the top five bestselling video games every year, despite being released 13 years ago, reports CNBC: The response to Thursday's gameplay debut indicated that leaks of the content in advance would not impact the launch commercially, he continued. Rockstar Games, which makes the GTA franchise, had called the leaks "heartbreaking...." The GTA 6 preview follows a mixed reaction from players to the news that GTA 6 would only be released as a digital download, with no physical disc. The alleged source of the leaked content has claimed the leaks were a protest over Rockstar's release strategy, and Sony's plan to end to new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Speaking on the last earnings call on Aug. 7, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said discs did not make sense to the consumer, adding that its business was "well over 90% digitally distributed." Data from Circana shows the sale of physical game discs in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level on record, with spending at $85 million.

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Image generated via ChatGPT

The Lindsay Clancy trial jury​ will resume their deliberations Monday. It could be days before they reach a verdict, a legal expert says.

Shadow minister for housing, communities and local government to resign with immediate effect

James Cleverly has resigned from the shadow cabinet to run for mayor of London.

The Tory heavyweight, who was once home and foreign secretary and is shadow minister for housing, communities and local government, told the Sunday Times he will resign with immediate effect.

"Sunday Morning" presents its annual edition touching on all aspects of design, hosted by Jane Pauley.

Austin, Texas — Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered Texas state agencies to stop using state funds for Flock Safety cameras as scrutiny grows over privacy concerns and alleged misuse of the automated license-plate reader network.

Abbott’s office confirmed the order Friday, saying agencies were clarifying that state money could no longer be used for Flock cameras. The decision came as The Texas Tribune was preparing an investigation showing that a state authority had devoted at least $30 million to expanding the network.

Since 2023, the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority has helped state and local law enforcement install at least 3,200 Flock cameras. The system uses artificial intelligence to capture license plates and other vehicle details, including make, model, color and visible markings.

The network has faced growing criticism after reported cases of improper searches. In Lufkin, a police officer was indicted on 100 counts related to alleged misuse of Flock data.

Flock Safety defended its technology as an important law-enforcement tool and said it supports stronger privacy and accountability safeguards.

Abbott’s move does not amount to a statewide ban. Cities can still purchase the cameras using local or federal funds, and many already operate them independently.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Abbott Halts Texas Funding for Flock Surveillance Cameras appeared first on News Facts Network.

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen receive Congressional Space Medal of Honor

The Artemis II astronauts who flew around the moon in April received the US’s highest space honor on Friday.

Donald Trump presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the three Americans and one Canadian whose lunar flyby for the US space agency Nasa set a new distance record for humanity.

A new survey on police license plate cameras found that "more Americans oppose these surveillance cameras than support them," reports TechCrunch: According to a new YouGov survey of 20,000 people across the U.S. that was shared exclusively with The Washington Post, 46% of respondents opposed the company's surveillance cameras in their communities, while 38% supported them. This is a reversal from last year, when the majority of survey respondents said they were in favor... The survey also reported that more respondents said the surveillance would not make them feel any safer. TechCrunch reports that Flock CEO Garrett "faces a growing public outcry around concerns that Flock's surveillance cameras, drones, and license plate recognition technology could be misused." Responding to reports of police abusing Flock's system, Langley told CBS News " I don't think that Flock created police abuse. I think we're the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it." But Futurism notes that "a grand jury in Ohio declined to bring felony charges against a man accused of destroying a Flock camera earlier this month — perhaps the clearest sign yet of the country's overwhelming hatred for the surveillance gadgets." And Newsweek documents more of the backlash: Flock Chief Executive Garrett Langley recently became the subject of a doxxing campaign after his home address was circulated online by opponents of the company's technology, underscoring how deeply divisive the issue has become. TechCrunch reports Flock's CEO is now calling for new laws — at the state level — regulating not Flock's cameras but the police officers who use them: Langley has said that state regulators should "pass bills that make [the illegal use of Flock data] a criminal offense." And during his Fox News interview, he pointed to the changes the company has already made, while also saying, "Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there's no regulation. There's no accountability, and we think that's wrong." But Flock has its supporters. One local police department used a 3D printer to create a fake "decoy" camera, then monitored it for five days until they arrested a Florida man for knocking it down. 404 Media suggests that because the man told officers he believed it was a camera worth between $1,000 and $5,000, he was charged with three felonies including "grand theft" and criminal mischief of property damage worth over $1,000, plus property crimes against computer equipment supplies. Ironically, days earlier the City Council was already considering a resolution to end their city's use of Flock cameras altogether...

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Ex-House intel committee chair, now running against Abdul El-Sayed, instead saw photo of Osama bin Laden’s body

In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.

“When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared online by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now with Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”

Three vessels and a helicopter deployed to monitor four ships travelling through the North Sea to the Channel

The Royal Navy spent three days tracking Russian vessels as they passed through UK waters, it has emerged.

The “intense” 72-hour operation took place last week, with radars used to monitor four ships that made their way from the North Sea through to the Channel.

Nepal requests foreign ⁠help in identification and storing of bodies, DNA testing and rescuing people from tunnels

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

The number of people killed in the floods in Nepal has risen to at least 675, the country’s disaster authority has said.

Seven have also been confirmed dead in Tibet by Chinese state media, taking the total killed when a glacial collapse unleashed a deadly torrent through river systems in the Himalayan mountains to 682.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A common sweetener used in products such as chewing gum, toothpaste, jam, yoghurts and ice-cream has been linked to an increased risk of strokes, heart attacks and death. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol present in some natural foods in very low amounts. It is also added -- often in amounts 1,000 times higher -- to artificially sweeten foods, beverages and oral care products. Despite its growing use, the long-term health impacts of xylitol have never been widely studied. In the largest study of its kind, researchers found high blood levels of xylitol were associated with an increased risk of major adverse cardiovascular events. The findings were presented in Munich at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual congress, the world's largest heart conference. Researchers looked at 17,710 people and compared the 25% with the highest levels of xylitol in their blood against the 25% with the lowest. Those who had the highest amount were 57% more likely to die or suffer a heart attack or stroke, than those with the least, within six years. Even after 30 years, they were still 18% more likely to have suffered one of these cardiac events. Taken with data from the middle quartiles, the results from both cohorts suggested a dose-dependent relationship: the higher the xylitol blood levels, the higher the cardiovascular event rate. Furthermore, the researchers showed that there was consistent increase in cardiovascular events with xylitol irrespective of baseline characteristics, such as age and sex. The researchers also highlighted that the association was independent of underlying factors such as body mass index, hypertension, diabetes and lipid levels, which might predispose people to low-calorie products.

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President Xi Jinping is targeting officers affiliated with previously ousted leaders, analysts say, even as Beijing seeks to project power across the Indo-Pacific.

Mansfield Oil Company of Gainesville claimed in a federal lawsuit this month that it was never paid for more than a million gallons of fuel from a terminal in Pennsylvania between late May and early July — nearly $4 million worth.

Former Duchess of York moved to Swiss chalet during fallout over her friendship with convicted child sex offender

Sarah Ferguson will return to the UK after relocating to a Swiss chalet amid the fallout over the friendship between her and her ex-husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to reports.

The pair were stripped of their royal titles in October over the scandal of their relationship with Epstein. According to the Sun, the former Duchess of York, 66, is renting a six-bedroom gated property in the home counties.

Philadelphia police are investigating an officer who failed to help a person in the street who was killed in a hit-and-run in Olney.

Bureau to still dismiss those with encounters within past 10 years, three or more times or while in public safety capacity

The FBI is dropping a categorical hiring ban on applicants who have had sexual encounters with sex workers and will instead consider in a more holistic manner at least some candidates who have engaged in the practice in the past, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move away from an automatic disqualification falls along a continuum of evolving recruitment standards within federal law enforcement and at the buttoned-up bureau, which several years ago relaxed its approach to candidates’ past marijuana use and has drawn more recent concern among some current and former agents about a perceived loosening of recruitment requirements as it seeks to replenish its ranks.

Family members pin photos of Nepal’s missing to hospital wall as people try not to give up hope on loved ones

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

Posters of missing people line the wall of the hospital, the glue still fresh beneath. A schoolgirl smiling in her uniform; a beaming, chubby-cheeked baby; a couple smiling on their wedding day; a young man, hands on hips, atop a mountain peak; a young girl with flowing hair, peaking out from behind a door.

These faces are just a fraction of the thousands who have not been seen since deadly flash floods coursed through the Himalayas and wiped away entire villages. By Saturday morning, the toll of the missing had risen to almost 3,000, in both Nepal and Tibet.

The post Trump Pushes Citizenship Proof Rules as Noncitizen Voting Claims Face Scrutiny appeared first on News Facts Network.

Washington, D.C. — The FBI is ending its blanket policy automatically disqualifying job applicants who have previously paid for sex, allowing some cases to be evaluated individually under revised hiring standards.

Under guidance issued this spring, applicants will still be rejected if they engaged in prostitution within the previous 10 years, did so three or more times, or participated while holding a position of trust such as public safety employment. Other applicants may now receive further consideration depending on the circumstances.

The FBI said the change is intended to account for unusual situations, including military personnel who encountered legal prostitution overseas or applicants who experienced sexual abuse. The bureau stressed that criminal sexual conduct remains disqualifying and said its background checks continue to include interviews, financial reviews and polygraph examinations.

The shift comes as the FBI and Justice Department seek to replenish personnel following retirements, resignations and dismissals. Some current and former agents have questioned whether recruitment standards are being relaxed too far.

Retired FBI agent Daniel Brunner told the Associated Press that the revised policy could indicate difficulty attracting qualified applicants. Other former officials said context matters, particularly when questionable behavior occurred many years earlier.

The FBI previously relaxed restrictions involving past marijuana use and has expanded pathways for other federal law-enforcement personnel to become agents.

Sources

• Scripps News – MBFC Rating

The post FBI Eases Hiring Rules for Some Applicants With Past Prostitution Encounters appeared first on News Facts Network.

Ukrainian prosecutors open investigation into why munitions were stored so close to residential buildings

At least 37 people have been killed after a Russian drone struck a warehouse near Kyiv’s western suburbs that was storing “explosive objects”.

The attack damaged at least 50 residential buildings, including a care home for elderly and disabled people, and sparked a huge fire and explosions in the Bucha district of the Kyiv region. The regional governor, Tymur Tkachenko, said a further 42 people, including four children, had been injured in the strike.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Gabriel Perez wagered on Kalshi about words president used in speeches

A White House teleprompter operator who left his post amid accusations that he used inside knowledge to make bets on Donald Trump’s speeches on an online prediction market has been fined $172,000, according to federal regulators.

Gabriel Perez illicitly exploited “material, nonpublic information” that he gathered through his work for the president in order to place wagers on the Kalshi platform “for his personal benefit”, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) maintained in a news release on Friday.

Bridget Phillipson says government would not have to consider releasing prisoners early if Tories had created more capacity

Cells to hold newly arrested people could run out without the early prison release scheme, a minister has said.

Bridget Phillipson defended the plan to address the prison capacity crisis in England and Wales by releasing thousands of prisoners early, which has been criticised by domestic abuse charities, bereaved families and probation officers among others.

In deep red South Carolina, the president helped stoke apprehension of a deeper red surge ahead of November’s US midterm elections

After casting his vote in South Carolina, a man who introduced himself as Chestnut was unwilling to give his full name. “You don’t have a need to know,” the air force veteran declared. He was, however, happy to share his views.

“I’m a true American. I believe in the USA,” said the man, outside Christ the Servant Lutheran church in Conway. “And I don’t believe in communism or socialism.”

You must file a claim before the Sept. 1 deadline.

The vessel, which was in international waters near Ecuador, was allegedly used as a floating refueling station for drug boats belonging to the Los Choneros organization.

Nominated in three previous years, the rambunctious standup – one half of The Delightful Sausage – wins the prize for his show Rewilding while Marty Gleeson is named best newcomer

The annual Edinburgh comedy award has been won by the standup Chris Cantrill, two years after his comedy partner Amy Gledhill – in the raucous northern double act The Delightful Sausage – won the same prize.

Cantrill, 42 and from Bradford, received the so-called “Oscar of live comedy” for a show, Rewilding, about his new life in rural Northumberland, where an act of vandalism shocks the local community – and a spoof whodunnit ensues. It builds on the foundations laid in 2024 by Easily Swayed, which documented his move to the countryside and secured what was then Cantrill’s third nomination (but first as a solo act) for the award.

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy suggested warehouse near a residential area hit by a Russian strike was used to store ammunition.

As the war passes the six-month mark, neither side showed any sign of backing down.

A Nepali Army spokesperson said early Saturday that helicopter operations were on hold until weather conditions improved.

Avoiding US goods and services – from tech to whisky to air travel – has forced many to find a new way of living

For William McDonald, 38, a diesel mechanic from Thunder Bay, Ontario, “Canadian is always the first choice,” even if it means his weekly bills are higher.

“As soon as Trump started putting those tariffs on in February [last year], I started boycotting US goods,” he said. “Avoiding American products has driven my costs up, and I’m still happy to do it.

Grammy award-winning American artist selected as 13th person to submit written work to Oslo-based project

The next manuscript by the American artist Laurie Anderson will remain unseen for 88 years, as she becomes the 13th figure to contribute to the Future Library project.

Anderson joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which have been locked away until 2114.

There’s little optimism about treasury secretary’s ability to handle Trump’s tariffs, Iran sanctions and colossal US debt

History remembers Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe during the second world war, for his role in the D-day invasion of Normandy. Whether Scott Bessent will achieve similar posterity as the face of the “economic D-day” in Iran remains to be seen.

The US treasury secretary, already trying to manage a $40tn national debt pile, this week took charge of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse-engineer his war of choice. Whereas the US would typically take on an adversary with diplomacy, sanctions and military force, in that order, the US president started with a six-month bombing campaign and now hopes that economic isolation can finish the job.

Ignore Iran, the Epstein files, and your wallet – not to mention Trump’s plummeting approval ratings

Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or “affordability”, which, as Donald Trump recently said at a rally, is a word that was “never used” by the media before he took office. Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people or embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Recent deadly water-related incidents amid heatwave leads National Park Service to issue water-safety reminders

As a heatwave continues to bake the western and central US, officials are urging swimmers to be cautious when seeking respite from the summer heat, especially amid a score of recent deadly water-related incidents.

Each year, from April to September, drowning deaths rise nationwide, according to 2018-24 data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even after judges rejected the same ploy, the Trump administration is going directly to social media and telecommunications companies

The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight.

In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.

Ahead of Apple’s Sept. 9 launch event, I retested the iPhone 17 to see if it can retain the “best iPhone for most people” title for another six months.

Marc Gaudisosi thought his symptoms were caused by a sinus infection. Then an urgent care told him to go to the hospital.

Cookout dessert gets easier with 17 options ranging from fruit pies and chilled bars to ice cream, cupcakes, sorbet, and a viral Dubai Chocolate Strawberry Cup ready to finish the table.The post 17 cookout desserts with a viral Dubai Chocolate…

These 15 finger foods bring enough flavor and substance to make dinner easy to overlook. Expect smoky bites, flaky pastry, hearty dips, loaded potatoes, and snack-board favorites made for sharing.The post 15 finger foods that make the main course feel…

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Searching for exoplanets and clues on planet formation, the Roman telescope will lift off Sunday morning in Florida

A $4.3bn space telescope that Donald Trump tried to kill is set to lift off from Florida early on Sunday as Nasa embarks on the next stage of its quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope survived two rounds of proposed White House budget cuts, and will embark on a million-mile journey into deep space from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center at 7.26am ET, barring late technical issues or intervention from Florida’s notoriously capricious summer weather.

By linking progressive politics with nominally Arab American issues, organizers are building winning coalitions

Abbas Alawieh initially thought the uncommitted movement of 2024 had failed.

The insurgent group, which he helped co-found, had gotten more than 700,000 Democrats to vote “uncommitted” on their 2024 presidential primary ballots to pressure the US government to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. But when the group pushed for the Democratic party to add an embargo on arms to Israel in its platform, it didn’t happen. And when they asked to have a Palestinian American speaker address the Democratic national convention, it was also a no-go.

SpaceX is significantly reducing Falcon 9 launches from Florida this year, ending the Space Coast's decade-long run as the world's busiest spaceport as more missions shift to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The slowdown is expected to continue until Starship begins flying regularly from Florida. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: A Falcon 9 launch early Tuesday was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida, according to Kiko Dontchev, the company's vice president of launch. For at least the rest of the year, and maybe longer, this means the launch rate at the Florida spaceport will drop from eight or nine per month to perhaps two per month. It wasn't long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication of just how quickly SpaceX's launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida's east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015. "From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship," Dontchev wrote on X. "The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg." "Yep, that'll be louder -- but everybody knows the real action will be in Louisiana, starting in 2029 or so," writes schwit1. SpaceX on Tuesday announced plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." Further reading: Musk's other unstated reasons for shutting down Falcon 9 in Florida (Behind The Black)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a 1931 exhibition, Jackie Mitchell silenced the greats back-to-back. It sparked still-ongoing debates over legitimacy and opportunities for women in baseball

The Sultan of Swat sounded exasperated. “I don’t know what things are coming to,” Babe Ruth sighed during spring training in 1931.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,” he elaborated to reporters. “Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball everyday.”

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.

• Early primary voting to begin Wednesday
• Legislature’s property assessment working group to convene 
• Sussex Council to vote on forest preservation rules 
• State planners to review ChristianaCare expansions, Georgetown pallet village

Early primary voting begins Wednesday

Early voting for this year’s primary election is set to begin Wednesday morning. 

Delaware’s primary will not officially take place until Tuesday, Sept. 15, but voters who are registered with the Democratic and Republican parties can begin casting their ballots as early as 7 a.m. Wednesday. 

Delaware operates under a closed primary system, meaning that voters must be registered with either of the two major parties in order to participate. 

The deadline for most residents to affiliate with a party has passed, but voters who were automatically registered at the Department of Motor Vehicles without choosing a party can still participate by designating their affiliation in person at their polling place. 

Early voting will take place from:

• Sept. 2 through Sept. 5 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Sept. 8 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Sept. 9 through Sept. 13 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

There will be no early voting Sept. 6-7 in honor of Labor Day. 

A full list of early voting polling places can be found online at the Department of Elections website.

📍 Early voting will at 7 a.m. Wednesday at polling locations across the state. For more information, click here.

Property assessment working group begins

The General Assembly’s property assessment working group, created earlier this year as part of a larger slate of reforms, will convene for the first time Monday morning.

The working group will be tasked with developing statewide standards for conducting property assessments. Those standards could include establishing requirements for how property data is collected and maintained, among others.

The group was created through House Concurrent Resolution 150, sponsored by Rep. Cyndie Romer (D-Newark). According to HCR 150, legislation created by the working group could prevent counties from certifying their tax rolls should their assessments not meet the to-be-determined state standards.

While Romer said she usually bristles at the idea of creating working groups that can prolong direct action, she realized there is not a quick fix to address the multiple issues that occurred during New Castle County’s property reassessment. 

Those issues led to results that confounded Romer. Those included the results of a Spotlight Delaware analysis that found properties in some of Wilmington’s poverty-stricken communities saw some of the largest percentage increases in median property value across the state. 

So she set out to correct the assessment process, and to ensure the new property reassessments do not create the same fallout as their predecessors. 

“I didn’t feel like we could do nothing,” Romer told Spotlight Delaware earlier this year. “We needed to fix this problem, even though we realized it was going to take time to truly fix it.”

📍 The property assessment working group will meet at 10 a.m. Monday inside the House Majority Hearing Room at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.

Sussex forest preservation vote

Sussex County Council on Tuesday will vote on whether to require builders to preserve a portion of the trees that sit on their land. 

Developers would have to preserve between 30% and 50% of the existing trees on their properties, depending on whether the land is in an area where officials want to direct development. 

The proposed rules would also allow developers to clear trees beyond the proposed limit if they plant at least twice the amount of trees they cut down, either on the same land or nearby. That could only happen if the developer proves they don’t have another option. 

County Council considered allowing developers to pay a fee instead of planting new trees, but the majority of council members appear to be against that proposal.

Under the current proposal, the rules would go into effect in six months, but Councilwoman Jane Gruenebaum argued developers could cut down trees during that time. The council will likely debate when the effective date should be on Tuesday. 

📍The Sussex County Council is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday inside the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.

State planners to discuss ChristianaCare expansions, Georgetown tiny homes

State planners on Wednesday morning will review both ChristianaCare’s plans to expand into Kent and Sussex counties, and Springboard Delaware’s proposed tiny home community in Georgetown.

The Preliminary Land Use Service (PLUS), made up of planning officials across multiple state agencies, reviews proposed development projects and provides comments before those projects are further reviewed by local officials. 

This week’s meeting will include the review of two proposed hospital expansions by Delaware Healthcare giant ChristianaCare. 

The healthcare system previously announced plans to build new facilities in both Camden and Georgetown. 

PLUS also will review a proposal by Springboard Delaware, which currently operates a transitional housing community called the pallet village, to build a larger tiny home community in the Sussex County seat. 

Tiny homes writ large have been an ongoing subject of controversy in Georgetown, with local officials currently reconsidering their previous decision to allow tiny homes to be built within town limits. 

📍 PLUS will meet at 9 a.m. Wednesday inside Haslet Armory, located at 122 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.

The post Get Involved: Early voting, assessment reforms, statewide planning updates, more  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

For more than 50 years, he explored Palestinian life and history in his paintings. His work became increasingly political after he spent time in jail.

Minnesota wants Texas to turn over an officer charged with shooting an immigrant. Such extraditions are usually routine, but in this case politics loom large.

Fighters in legal limbo after accepting ‘total peace’ plan of Petro government just days before hardliner Abelardo De la Espriella took over

In mid-June, 99 guerrilla fighters were flown by helicopter to a small settlement in a rural area of southern Colombia where they lined up and, one by one, handed their weapons to government officials: rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers.

They also stripped off their heavy tactical vests, field packs and camouflage uniforms, which were each piled into a bonfire to mark the beginning of a new life away from an armed conflict that has claimed nearly half a million lives in the last six decades.

The Trump-ordered name change was the talk of the docks on both shores of Lake Ontario. But neither American nor Canadian sailors seemed to be taking it too seriously.

“This is where I feel most at home,” one of the friends said as the group reunited in East Tennessee after Dolly Parton’s death.

I start all my Flock research with this database, and you should, too.

After Hurricane Helene, a group called Latinos Aventureros covered more than 4,300 miles crisscrossing Western North Carolina, spending 650 volunteer hours delivering food, water, medicine, and other supplies to an estimated 1,700 people.

It was a departure from the group’s typical mandate: helping Latino families get outside in natural areas like Wilson Creek, a popular summer recreation site in the forest stretching north of the mountain-flanked city of Asheville, where President Donald Trump will welcome G20 leaders on Saturday. Since the devastating 2024 hurricane — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina — North Carolina has received just a fraction of the disaster aid it’s sought from the federal government. Short on federal dollars, local volunteers like Latinos Aventureros tried to fill in the gaps. “We didn’t wait for permission. We didn’t wait for funding,” said Vivianette Ortiz, one of the group’s leaders. “We just showed up.”

The Trump administration has pointed to Asheville’s recovery as a marker of success, and its selection to host the international economic summit “reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to the revitalization and resilience of western North Carolina,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But the view from the ground tells a different story. Damaged roads and infrastructure remain; some residents are still living in trailers; and empty lots mark where homes and businesses stood before Helene. And instead of receiving still-needed federal assistance, earlier this summer, Western North Carolina got Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Related

Trump “National Police Force” Built on ICE Partnerships With Local Agencies Like… Wildlife Commissions?

ICE agents, U.S. Forest Service personnel, and Caldwell County sheriff’s deputies arrested 13 people at Wilson Creek on July 26. Among them was a father there with his partner and their 4- and 10-year-old children, who had to watch their dad be taken into custody. ICE claimed some of those arrested had criminal records, but it hasn’t said who or how many.

To Ortiz, there was “a real sense of betrayal.” Volunteers with Latinos Aventureros had helped clean the recreation area, where the organization encouraged families to swim, hike, fish, and picnic on public lands. Families have since said they are afraid to use outdoor spaces because they fear encountering immigration enforcement.

“A huge part of our work has always been telling Latino families: These public lands belong to you, too,” Ortiz said. “If people are afraid to walk through that gate, then meaningful access has already been damaged.”

It takes just an hour by car to reach a different reality, where finance ministers and central bank governors representing the world’s largest economies are rolling into town for a meeting of the G20, the international economic forum whose members account for roughly 85 percent of global economic output and two-thirds of the world’s population.

They’re meeting up at the Grove Park Inn and Spa, a luxury resort overlooking Asheville and largely removed from the destruction Hurricane Helene left along the region’s rivers and valleys. Federal contracting records show the Treasury Department awarded Omni Hotels Corporation, the hotel’s owner, a $1.03 million contract to use the space. A separate Treasury planning document names Grove Park as the event’s “primary place of performance” and calls for gifts representing Western North Carolina and cultural programming highlighting the region’s “history, culture, and character.”

The city awaiting G20 delegates offers only a partial picture of recovery, said Jaime Byrd, a local resident and art gallery owner.

“They will get that beautiful experience of being at the Grove Park Inn, most likely, and maybe a couple of them might make it downtown, which looks completely normal,” Byrd said. “It’s unfortunate.”

Beyond Asheville’s tourist corridors, Helene remains written into the landscape. Debris left along rivers and roads has disappeared beneath nearly two years of vegetation, while damaged infrastructure remains. Elsewhere, recovery resembles absence: Buildings swept away by the storm have left empty ground where homes and businesses once stood.

Byrd’s gallery, located in Asheville’s River Arts District, took roughly six feet of water during Helene, destroying much of her artwork and causing at least $80,000 to $100,000 in losses, she estimates. Across town, roads near her home washed out, largely cutting off the neighborhood. Without electricity to power their wells, residents collected drinking water from an open spring on a neighbor’s property. They laid rocks and large pieces of metal across damaged roads to make them passable. Helicopters eventually arrived with “meals ready to eat” and evacuated residents who needed medical care.

“Most of this help came from self-help and community efforts,” Byrd said.

Federal assistance covered about 20 percent of the repairs needed at her home, Byrd estimates, but she received no Federal Emergency Management Agency help for her gallery. She launched a GoFundMe, spent her own money, and salvaged what artwork she could. Her collectors bought every recovered piece, which helped her keep the business alive.

Two years later, she said one of her neighbors still lives without water, while others remain in trailers.

In East Asheville, Linda Tetens said flooding and fallen trees effectively turned her neighborhood into an island, while residents cleared roads and helped one another through days without power or reliable access to food and water. Tetens relies on a CPAP machine to breathe while sleeping and said that after about 10 days without electricity, the effects of going without it forced her to leave Asheville for a motel in Greensboro.

FEMA initially approved the hotel stay, Tetens said, but later denied her reimbursement. She spent nearly a year repeatedly submitting documents before receiving roughly $1,400.

“It was like a full-time job, trying to negotiate with FEMA,” Tetens said. “I understand why people gave up.”

Tetens points to damaged roads and residents still awaiting government buyouts as evidence of how much work remains.

“We’re not even close to being back,” she said.

Nearly two years after Helene, billions of dollars sought for North Carolina’s recovery remain outstanding. The state had received $7.8 billion in federal disaster aid as of March 31, according to state recovery data cited by the local newsroom Asheville Watchdog, compared with $25.6 billion requested after the storm. In June, Gov. Josh Stein traveled to Washington seeking more than $10 billion in additional federal funding for housing, infrastructure, and small businesses; on Thursday, FEMA announced an additional $137 million for North Carolina disaster recovery.

Related

Trump’s National Killer Police Force

The fear of immigration enforcement could bring additional anxiety to a region struggling to recover, Asheville officials warned in 2025. “Our community is still recovering from Hurricane Helene,” Mayor Esther Manheimer and other local officials said at the time. “We do not need additional stress and fear.”

Asked whether those concerns extended to recent immigration enforcement in Western North Carolina, a city spokesperson told The Intercept she would not engage with questions characterizing federal immigration operations as harassment.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called the response part of “the long list of FEMA failures under Biden.” (Joe Biden was in office when Helene hit in September 2024, but recovery efforts have continued into the second Trump administration.)

“Under the Trump Administration, FEMA is mission focused and dedicated to disaster response,” wrote spokesperson Micah Bock, who previously worked for former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C.

For Ortiz, the administration’s decision to showcase Western North Carolina’s recovery to the G20 makes the contrast particularly difficult to ignore. Latino and immigrant families, she said, were among the people who helped the region recover, but their right to belong should not depend on what they contributed after the storm.

“Our community shouldn’t have to say, ‘Look at everything we did after Helene, therefore we deserve to be here,’” Ortiz said. “We deserve to live here, raise our families here, enjoy our public lands, and move through our communities without persecution regardless of whether we drove a relief truck after a hurricane.”

Correction: August 29, 2026, 12:38 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct a misspelling of Jaime Byrd’s first name inserted due to an editing error.

The post Western North Carolina Pleaded for Hurricane Help. It Got ICE Instead. appeared first on The Intercept.

• Aroma wafts over courts from nearby Corona Park

• Katie Boulter: ‘You smell it a lot. I’m not a huge fan’

Britain’s US Open hopefuls thought they had put the grass behind them when Wimbledon finished, but the smell of it is all around Flushing Meadows and they are not happy about it.

Marijuana is legal for adults in New York and while smoking is not allowed on site, the aroma of weed wafts over some outside courts from the nearby Corona Park.

Six more people hospitalised after incident at Big Church festival near Steyning

A 41-year-old man has died and at least six other people have been injured after a large sign fell at a Christian festival in West Sussex, police have said.

The man, from Eastbourne, East Sussex, was pronounced dead at the scene after the incident at the Big Church festival near Steyning on Friday afternoon.

Two sold-out shows in St. Petersburg were scrapped, highlighting wartime ambivalence about Western culture and the rapper’s past antisemitic remarks.

San Jose, California — A federal judge ruled Friday that the Trump administration violated the Constitution by using immigration laws to revoke visas and pursue deportation of noncitizen students based on protected pro-Palestinian speech.

U.S. District Judge Noel Wise found that provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act were unconstitutional when applied to people targeted because of their political expression. The case was brought by The Stanford Daily and a student visa holder who argued that the administration’s policies chilled reporting and advocacy on Israel and Gaza.

The lawsuit followed a series of visa revocations and arrests beginning in March 2025. The administration relied on laws allowing the secretary of state to revoke visas and deem noncitizens deportable when their presence was considered harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Wise wrote that when speech itself becomes the basis for deportation, the government is discriminating based on viewpoint or content. She said First Amendment protections extend to noncitizens present in the United States.

The Stanford Daily said more than 150 staff members had declined assignments involving protests or Gaza because they feared immigration consequences.

The ruling echoes a 2025 decision by another federal judge who found similar Trump administration policies unconstitutional. The State Department and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment on Friday’s ruling.

Sources

• Reuters – MBFC Rating

The post Judge Rules Trump Deportation Effort Against Pro-Palestinian Activists Unconstitutional appeared first on News Facts Network.

In move that could generate millions, Exeter academics to deliver MA at National Defense University in Riyadh

The University of Exeter has approved plans for a “formal partnership” with Saudi Arabia to train senior military officers and government officials, despite long-held concerns about the Saudi government’s human rights record, the Guardian has learned.

In a deal that could generate millions of pounds for the Russell Group university, Exeter academics will deliver an MA in applied security and strategy (also known as an MStrat) to a cohort at the National Defense University (NDU) in Riyadh.

A California couple were in a Nepali village when an avalanche of powerful waters ripped down from the high Himalayas toward them.

Country star came to South Yorkshire town in 2007 for UK launch of the Imagination Library, her book donation scheme

Shane Jarman was up a ladder decorating a Christmas tree at the school where he was deputy headteacher when he got a call asking him to come to Rotherham hospital ASAP. It was December 2007 and Jarman’s wife, Claire, had given birth the previous day to their first child, a girl called Emma, so of course he rushed to the phone. All was well, he was told, but that “everything would become clear” when he got to the hospital.

Once there, his wife told him – somewhat unexpectedly – that they were going to meet Dolly Parton. “And literally within what felt like five minutes,” he recalled, “there were great camera flashes, lots of noise, lots of clicking and in walked this real big bundle of energy.”

President Trump awarded the four-member Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and signed an executive order directing the creation of a new U.S. Space Academy. The proposed academy would train engineers, scientists, technicians, operators, and astronauts for NASA, the Space Force, and the commercial space industry. Houston Public Media reports: The Artemis II crew -- NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen -- retraced history as they flew around the moon and back in April, the first time humans have been in lunar territory since the 1970s. He had previously hosted the crew members at the White House following their mission and called them during the mission while the crew was tens of thousands of miles away. "The one thing that really sticks out to us [from that call] is you said how proud you are and how proud our nation is for the job that we've just accomplished," Wiseman said during Friday's ceremony. "And for us, that is what we set out to do. We wanted to inspire this nation to learn." During the ceremony, Trump also signed an executive order to create the "United States Space Academy." Under the order, a Presidential Commission on the U.S. Space Academy has 120 days to create a report with guidelines for the U.S. Space Academy. The Commission will include NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as its Chair, as well as other NASA and space officials. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president for science and technology. In effect, it allows the Trump Administration to build the U.S. Space Academy to its liking. "It will serve both the United States Space Force as well as NASA and the civilian spaceflight industry," Trump said. "And it will attract, train, graduate the very best that our nation and our nation really has to offer." As for where the academy will be located, Trump said he was "going to be choosing a location very shortly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive: Number of times AI lies, ignores instructions and pursues goals in harmful ways almost doubles in July

Incidents of AIs escaping users’ control to lie, ignore instructions and pursue goals in harmful ways have hit a new high, according to research that also suggests the severity of deception and misalignment is worsening.

Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June, with more than 300 cases in the month, according to the Loss of Control Observatory, which monitors reports made by AI users on the social media platform X.

Moving tariffs will cushion the blow from the October price cap rise and the increase widely predicted for January

With higher energy bills looming and warnings of worse to come in the new year, many households could save up to £173 a year by switching to a fixed deal.

Millions of households in Great Britain will face the highest energy charges in three years after it was announced that the government’s price cap will rise again in October. This will be the second increase in three months.

A plug-in solar kit that costs about $1,000 ‘pays for itself in three years’, one expert says

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Millions of Australians could be saving up to $370 a year on energy bills and doing their bit for the climate crisis if Labor followed the UK’s lead in legalising plug-in solar panels, an advocacy group has said.

Plug-in solar refers to small standalone solar units that could be attached to balconies or used in back yards and plugged into power points, offsetting the energy used by household appliances.

The post Trump Teleprompter Operator Fined $172,000 for Betting on Speeches appeared first on News Facts Network.

Five-day showcase reveals leaps Beijing has made in humanoid tech, but also its limitations as US rivals come up from the rear

With exploding pelvises, enough comic pratfalls for a Buster Keaton show reel and the odd moment of ruthless violence, the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing gripped the world this week with an unsettling mixture of hilarity, trepidation and relief.

The five-day showcase staked out China’s claim to undisputed leadership in humanoid robotics as android martial artists landed knockout roundhouse kicks and robot teams marched into the arena heralded by flag-waving captains astride giant robotic dogs. The games’ blue-riband event, the 100m, did not disappoint when the robot-sprinters ran quicker than Usain Bolt before slamming mindlessly into a padded wall in a blaze of sparks, flames and flying mechanical limbs.

Former PM believes Northern Ireland will leave UK in the long term – but remains opposed to Scottish independence

• ‘I don’t want to be a backseat driver’: Gordon Brown on Burnham, billionaires – and his vision for a better Britain

The former prime minister Gordon Brown has said it is inevitable that Ireland will become united at some point in the future, in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian.

While he added that any union would necessarily be “a long process” and based on mutual agreement, Brown’s comments are notable both because of his vehement opposition to Scottish independence, but also because of his involvement in government in efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

As one of Europe’s biggest consumers of gas the UK may be particularly exposed to heightened price volatility

Europe is on course to enter the cooler months with gas stores at their lowest level in 13 years, which has triggered “winter panic” among energy traders, experts have warned.

The EU’s gas stocks were 63% full in the last week of August, well below the 80% average for late August over recent years and among the lowest levels ever recorded for this time of year.

The ruling marks a blow to the federal government's long-delayed effort to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of developing the plot to crash planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

President Trump announced a deal to grant the U.S. control of more than 60 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves.

Architect of Srebrenica genocide is dead but those scarred by his atrocities say his ideology is still shockingly pervasive

To most of the world, he was and will always be the “Butcher of Bosnia”, a grim epithet but one that still fails to fully convey the evil and horror inflicted on its people by Gen Ratko Mladić, who died in prison on Thursday.

As commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Mladić was responsible for the killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women and children during the savage breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was most notoriously the architect of ethnic cleansing and the genocide at Srebrenica in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered.

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• ‘The flood took everything I have’: survivors grieve for relatives and homes swept away in Nepal

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

More now on the Nepali army’s rescue operation to save about 100 people trapped in a tunnel at a hydropower project swamped by Wednesday’s flooding.

“Two helicopters have been dispatched but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet told AFP.

Relief efforts are also under way to provide the rescued people what they need.

The army is still working to safely evacuate more than 100 people trapped in the same tunnel.

He was placed on unpaid leave from his job at the White House after it was determined he used his position to make bets on what President Trump would say in speeches.

alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy," the team said in a tweet. The posts included content on how AI strains the electricity grid and increases utility prices and "cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense." It's unclear what, if any, action X will take to suspend or delete accounts from the bot farm. One of the reports mentioned in the article estimates that opposition campaigns have delayed or obstructed roughly $45.8 billion in data center projects in Virginia alone. Jim Prosser, a former Twitter communications executive, pushed back on Silicon Valley claims that opposition to data centers is a "Chinese psyop," arguing that Big Tech is using the label to dismiss legitimate local concerns. "If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something, it's probably not a Chinese psyop," he told Axios. Prosser said the industry needs to spend more time listening to affected communities rather than dismissing them from afar: "If you're a [venture capitalist] in Atherton or Menlo Park opining about how somebody in Ohio should feel, and you've never been to Ohio, that's a problem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Authorities say 26 women targeted across four states

• Suspect allegedly used dating apps, fake investments

• FBI believes there may be ‘many more victims’

Federal authorities claim a man posed as a San Francisco 49ers player and scammed more than ⁠two dozen women out of about $1.3m.

The FBI arrested Daejon Love, 35, and his alleged accomplice ⁠Taylor Jamie Chan, 18, on ⁠24 August in Boise, Idaho. They were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud, according ⁠to the US attorney’s office in the District of Oregon. The men remain in federal custody in Boise.

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• Trump arch will alter sightlines of many Washington DC landmarks, report says

• Sign up for the US Breaking News email

A reminder that we are covering the latest out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Kevin Warsh – the new chair of the Federal Reserve – will deliver his first speech as the head of the US central bank at the annual economic policy symposium.

As my colleagues note, Warsh is under pressure to provide clarity on how the Federal Reserve should handle with inflation if price pressures don’t abate.

Salesianum football played St. Joseph’s Prep from Pennsylvania in a preseason scrimmage on August 26, as the program gets ready for the upcoming 2026 season.

Sallies quarterback Brady Nabb receives the snap in Salesianum football’s scrimmage against St. Joseph’s Prep.

Nabb sets and fires to a receiver downfield.

Junior EstherVell Cotton leaps into the air to come down with the catch.

The Salesianum defense lines up against the St. Joseph offense as the ball is snapped.

A Salesianum player makes the tackle, stopping the St. Joseph run play.

A Hawks receiver focuses on making the catch as a Sallies defender attempts to break it up.

Cotton powers through a pair of St. Joseph defenders to complete his run.

A St. Joseph wide receiver tracks the throw from his quarterback as he nears the endzone.

The Hawks receiver completes the catch while falling in the endzone.

Cotton breaks a Hawk tackle and runs into the endzone for a Sallies touchdown.

Nabb loads up and fires a deep pass to a teammate downfield.

Senior Tysir Jones catches the pass behind the Hawk defenders.

Jones stretches out for the score.

Salesianum senior Michael Brock breaks on the pass hoping to breakup the connection.

A Salesianum player advances toward the first down marker. The Sals will start the regular season with a matchup against Springside Chestnut Hill Academy on September 3.

All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo

The plan involves the United States taking more direct control over Venezuelan reserves as crime and steep logistical challenges discourage private investors.

Delete my addictive social media apps? There’s no fun in that.

On a path in Austin, Texas, a chance meeting changed the lives of two men with one thing in common.

The international airport in Nashville, Tennessee, would be renamed for Dolly Parton under a proposal by Tennessee's governor.

Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States has reached an agreement with Venezuela giving U.S. interests majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of the country’s proven oil reserves.

Trump said the arrangement was negotiated with Venezuela’s interim government and would come at no cost to U.S. taxpayers. Reuters reported that the agreement is structured as a public-private partnership expected to attract nearly $100 billion in private investment to Venezuela’s battered oil industry.

The deal follows the removal of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and represents a major expansion of U.S. involvement in the OPEC member’s energy sector.

Venezuela holds some of the world’s largest proven crude reserves but currently produces only about 1.25 million barrels per day after years of underinvestment, sanctions and deteriorating infrastructure. The administration hopes expanded production can provide additional crude for U.S. refineries and eventually help ease pressure on gasoline prices.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth helped negotiate the agreement with interim President Delcy Rodriguez, according to Trump.

Several major details remain unclear, including the precise legal structure of U.S. control and how quickly investment could translate into additional production. Reuters noted that analysts also questioned whether political uncertainty and infrastructure problems could complicate implementation.

Sources

• Reuters – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Claims U.S. Control Over 65 Billion Barrels of Venezuelan Oil appeared first on News Facts Network.

US president says US will have ‘majority’ control of 65bn barrels of proven oil reserves

Donald Trump announced Friday a new US oil agreement with Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez, saying the US will have “majority” control of 65bn barrels of proven oil reserves.

The terms of the agreement remain to be seen, but the US president said on his social-media platform that it had been brokered “through a partnership with ⁠private business” by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

That rumored foldable iPhone didn’t come from nowhere. Experts from CNET, PCMag, Mashable, Popular Science, ZDNET and Lifehacker examine Apple’s most important tech reveals.

A major lawsuit has led Meta to change the rules again for young users on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s exactly what’s changing.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Milo Yiannopoulos "chose to overstay his welcome."

The upcoming Democratic primary election for state treasurer has broken funding records this month, with campaign spending likely to top $1 million on two candidates -- Michael A. Smith (left) and Ted Lauzen (right) -- in the historically overlooked race.…

Longtime Slashdot reader belmolis writes: Part of New York City's 911 emergency system was offline from about 3:13 a.m. to 10 a.m. on August 18th due to a software update, according to Medical Daily. Of 5,659 calls to the Bronx call center during that period, about 1,700 calls connected but could not be heard by emergency operators. Some were rerouted to other call centers, but an estimated 400 human callers never got through. The potentially serious consequences of delayed response to emergencies are not yet known. The city did not notify the public and only released information when journalists inquired. How buggy software came to be installed on a running system is not yet known. The early-morning software update was pushed by Motorola, though exactly what it changed or why it caused the failure remains unknown. The city is still investigating whether the update was adequately tested and whether the same software release was deployed elsewhere.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are now 41 Australians missing, and four rapid response team members are expected to arrive in Kathmandu

• At least 93,000 ‘in great need’ after Nepal-Tibet flash floods

• How the deadly Nepal and Tibet flash flood unfolded – a visual guide

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The number of Australians who were reported missing in the catastrophic Nepal flooding disaster has risen to 41, as one family celebrates after an unaccounted-for woman made contact with them yesterday.

It means three additional Australians were confirmed missing overnight – up from 38 who remained unaccounted for on Friday evening.

After the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two cases of measles-related deaths in one county, the local coroner appeared to contradict the account. And in an ongoing spat with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged that a Shapiro staffer may have even “fabricated” the deaths. We’ll lay out what we know.

The saga brings to mind a pandemic-era falsehood that the vast majority of people classified as dying from COVID-19 did not die of the disease, but died of other causes while they happened to be infected. And when two children died of measles complications in Texas last year, Kennedy, along with activists in his former nonprofit, baselessly alleged that the kids did not die of measles, despite evidence to the contrary.

The situation in Pennsylvania is less clear. One of the deaths appears to be of an infant that tested positive for measles and died of a ruptured spleen. It is possible that the rupture was due to infection with measles, but the coroner has said the pathologist determined measles was not involved. There is no information about the second death. Meanwhile, the state has acknowledged that the term it has used to describe the deaths – “measles-associated” – includes cases in which measles infection is detected but “may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death.” 

As we’ll explain, that statement may not mean as much as it appears to, since measles deaths would not be expected to have measles listed as an immediate cause anyway. But without more information about the cases, it is difficult to say what has happened, leading many – including Kennedy – to speculate that the deaths were not measles-related after all.

“Pennsylvania created its own information vacuum and then seemed surprised when someone else filled it,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and an infectious diseases attending physician in Pittsburgh, told us in an email. “The coroner’s account and the state’s account are not necessarily in conflict — they are two offices answering two different questions — but nobody in Harrisburg explained that, so the public was left to choose between fraud and incompetence.”

Timeline of Events

On Aug. 25, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced that it had confirmed two cases of “measles-associated” deaths. Other than noting that the individuals were both unvaccinated and residents of Lancaster County, the department did not provide any further details, citing privacy concerns. The release strongly implied the deaths were at least partially due to measles, referring to them twice as “related” to measles.

“These mark the first deaths related to measles within the Commonwealth in 35 years,” the department’s press release noted.

Later in the day, Shapiro held a press conference with the health department in Lancaster County to share the announcement and to encourage vaccination.

“We hope and we pray that those deaths will be the last,” he said of the two deaths. “I want to be clear. This illness and death from measles is completely preventable.”

Local and national news outlets then picked the story up, with many stating that the two people died from measles. 

Initially, the main story from the press conference was a quarrel between Shapiro and Kennedy about whether the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine contains fetal tissue, and whether Kennedy has spread vaccine misinformation. Kennedy has – and the vaccine does not. (The rubella component of the vaccine is manufactured with and was initially developed with fetal cells derived from an elective abortion in the 1960s. While trace amounts of cell components from the cell strain can persist in the purified vaccine, whole cells do not. The Catholic Church has said the shot can be used “with a clear conscience.”)

But soon, questions swirled about how much the two announced deaths were related to measles.

Josh Parsons, a Lancaster County commissioner, posted on X the day of the press conference that the county coroner’s office was not aware of any measles deaths, although there was one baby that had tested positive for the disease but did not die of it. 

“They have one case where a person died WITH measles, but not FROM measles,” he wrote. “Measles was definitely NOT the cause of death in that case.”

The following evening, Aug. 26, Kennedy had picked up on the controversy, writing on X, “The announcement appears to have been premature, and the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers. The Lancaster County Coroner says that it has no record of any measles deaths. State law requires that all measles deaths be reported to the coroner.”

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Debra Bogen responded to Kennedy on X, saying she had “thoroughly reviewed the case investigation information and sadly can confirm that there were two recent measles-associated deaths in Lancaster County.”

That same day in Florida, Kennedy had also said, citing the Lancaster County commissioner, that “they cannot find any measles deaths in Lancaster County.” He added: “The press is all covering this as if those measles deaths actually happened. But nobody’s doing … the little bit of critical inquiry to find out. We’re trying to figure out, you know, who those deaths were and whether they actually happened, and we can’t figure that out yet.”

Meanwhile, in the late afternoon of Aug. 26, DOH issued a statement that appeared to say that one of the two deaths was the baby the coroner’s office was aware of and gave more information on the definition of “measles-associated.”

“PA DOH uses the term ‘measles-associated’ when laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of measles is present, but the disease may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death,” the statement read. “Not all deaths are referred to a coroner under Pennsylvania law. Accordingly, one of the two measles-associated deaths is under investigation by the county coroner — as confirmed by the Lancaster County Coroner, who stated publicly their office is reviewing an infant death with a positive measles test.”

(Online during this period, a fake screenshot of a news headline circulated a rumor that the two deaths were both men in their eighties. There is no evidence for this, and according to the state’s dashboard, no measles cases have occurred in anyone 65 years or older this year.)

Multiple news outlets have reported more details on the infant case over the last several days. On Aug. 26, the Philadelphia Inquirer said that Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni told them that the child, a newborn who died shortly after birth, died of a spleen laceration, and that the pathologist who did the autopsy “did not feel it was related to measles.” He said the infant contracted measles before birth, tested positive for measles after death based on a test of lung tissue and that the case was still being investigated.

TribLive, a news outlet covering western Pennsylvania, reported on Aug. 27 that Diamantoni said the cause of death was a “traumatic laceration of the spleen” and that the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Wayne Ross, determined that measles was not a contributing factor to the death.

“Diamantoni later acknowledged, however, that measles was listed under Part II of the infant’s death certificate, which reports ‘other contributing conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause,’” the outlet reported. “Diamantoni said he still does not believe that measles contributed to the child’s death, but the disease was listed to offer ‘a broader view of the general health of the child.’”

Another local news source, citing the coroner, said the child that died was a male newborn who died at home and tested positive for measles via a PCR blood sample. An earlier version of the Inquirer story suggested there was a positive antibody test. Diamantoni, a family physician who was elected to his coroner post as a Republican, also told the TribLive that the baby was born with the assistance of a midwife at a birthing center in Lancaster County. He specified to LancasterOnline in an Aug. 27 story that the child died on Aug. 14 at a birthing center in Strasburg Township, and that the mother was alive, contrary to rumors that the second death was the baby’s mother.

As a newborn, the child would not have been eligible yet for routine measles vaccination, which begins at 12 months of age. However, if the baby contracted measles in utero from the mother, it is highly likely that the mother was unvaccinated.

An Information Gap

Much attention has focused on the newborn’s death from the lacerated spleen and whether it was ultimately due to measles infection. Measles is known to cause enlargement of the spleen, which during birth, could plausibly lead to a rupture. 

“Given that congenital measles infection can cause splenic enlargement and thinning of the splenic capsule, it is likely that the child ruptured the spleen during birth,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, wrote in an Aug. 28 Substack post.

A 2024 study of children hospitalized for measles at a Polish hospital found that of the 26 infants under 13 months of age, four, or about 15%, had an enlarged spleen.

The coroner, however, said that the pathologist did not note an enlarged spleen during the autopsy, telling LancasterOnline that measles was not considered contributory because “there was no swelling or enlargement whatsoever” of the spleen and there was “massive blood loss.”

But Offit told the Philadelphia Inquirer that it is difficult to tell whether a spleen was enlarged after it ruptures, and that there should be an explanation for the rupture if it wasn’t caused by measles. The coroner has said the cause of the rupture is still under investigation, but no foul play is suspected.

Adalja said that measles “could be the reason an otherwise survivable delivery wasn’t survivable. It could also be incidental. I don’t think anyone outside that forensic center can say yet, and I’d be skeptical of confident assertions in either direction.”

The coroner’s office did not reply to our request for more information.

It’s worth noting that some of the confusion could come down to different definitions and processes that have not been adequately explained.

For example, Adalja said, the coroner or medical certifier produces the official death certificate, but state epidemiologists look at “deaths for outbreak surveillance under case definitions.” Those definitions are set by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The latter is “a faster, looser standard designed to flag that a death occurred during and plausibly in connection with an outbreak, so the state can act in real time rather than wait months for a final certificate,” he said. “The failure here is that Pennsylvania never told anyone two systems were running, so the coroner saying he had no measles deaths in his log and the state saying it had two looked like a lie rather than two people describing different databases.”

Similarly, DOH’s statement about “measles-associated” deaths not necessarily being assessed “to be the immediate cause of death” is almost meaningless, Adalja said, since almost no measles deaths would list measles as the immediate cause.

Death certificates show a causal chain, listing the immediate cause as well as the sequence of events that led to it, including the underlying cause that started the sequence. In measles deaths, measles is the underlying cause, but the immediate cause would be something such as pneumonia or encephalitis, which are complications of measles, he explained.

DOH’s statement, then, he said, “is technically accurate” but “functionally uninformative. Worse, to a lay reader it sounds like a concession — as though the state were conceding measles is being blamed for something it didn’t do.”

Another major question is the second measles-related death. The Lancaster County coroner has said he doesn’t know who this is, and told LancasterOnline that while there are several reasons why he might not know, by law, it should be reported to him. Kennedy and others have also said that it is state law for the measles deaths to be reported to a county coroner.

DOH, however, has said that not all deaths need to be referred to a coroner. Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, told us that as far as she can tell, the health department is correct. 

State law specifies that one of the conditions requiring a coroner’s investigation is a “death known or suspected to be due to contagious disease and constituting a public hazard” – and both parts of the clause would need to be met.

“This would not be a death that is a public hazard,” she told us. “Measles is spreading unrelated to it, so I don’t see any way to see it as meeting this requirement.”

Offit told us that he had talked to people “high up in the Pennsylvania Department of Health who have said they are comfortable” saying that “because of measles, two people in Pennsylvania died.”

DOH, however, has not shown why it thinks that is the case. The department did not respond to our questions after it sent us its statement. Shapiro’s office also did not respond to an inquiry.

Both Offit and Adalja have said it would be helpful if the department had released more information. 

Offit’s concern is that regardless of what happened in these two cases, the measles outbreak in the state could very well be much larger than is currently known, and could be poised to grow as kids return to school and the seasons shift.

“This outbreak is much worse than they’re saying,” he said. “It’s probably closer to 2,000 cases. And it’s August” – not measles season, which is usually winter and spring. As of Aug. 28, Pennsylvania has recorded 460 measles cases, nearly half in Lancaster County.

Adalja told us he does not see a reason why the state couldn’t have provided more information that still kept private the identities of those who died.

“Secretary Kennedy suggesting the deaths may have been fabricated is inexcusable on its own terms. But he was handed the opening,” he said. “Even if measles is definitively established as the underlying cause in both deaths, this week already taught a slice of the public that when officials say ‘outbreak death,’ they might mean something else. That lesson outlasts the case. In an outbreak, institutional credibility is a consumable resource — and Pennsylvania spent a great deal of it protecting information that Texas released last year without incident.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post What We Know About Pennsylvania’s Two ‘Measles-Associated’ Deaths appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Nearly 600 days after the devastating 2025 fires, thousands of Los Angeles residents are still waiting for more than $15bn in federal funds to rebuild their communities

As thousands of residents in Spokane, Washington, begin to grapple with a long recovery after a destructive set of blazes that consumed hundreds of homes in the state’s second most populated city this month, victims of the Los Angeles firestorm broke a grim record – they have faced the longest delay in modern history for federal aid.

Nearly 600 days since a historic firestorm roared into communities across Los Angeles, reducing more than 16,000 structures to ash and toxic debris, the Trump administration has failed to appropriate more than $15bn in long-term recovery funds that are crucial to rebuilding. The delay in supplying the badly needed funds is months longer than the last record set when victims of the Maui fires had to wait 500 days to receive the support, LAist noted this week.

A federal judge has again blocked President Trump's bid to erase his hush money conviction in New York.

• Report: player posed as nearly two years younger

• Scheme allegedly included fake grave and records

• $2.8m agreement with Guardians was canceled

A once-prized prospect from the Dominican Republic has been suspended by Major League Baseball after a league investigation revealed the player was part of an elaborate plot to portray him ⁠as nearly two years younger than he actually was, ESPN reported Friday.

The age-fraud plot included extreme efforts by the player’s handler such as falsifying school and medical records, faking birth and death certificates ⁠and even staging a gravesite, per ⁠the report.

Juul plans to market the new device under the brand name Juul2, along with updated versions of its tobacco- and menthol-flavored cartridges.

Two of the country’s largest internet service providers are going to court over the use of the word “fiber” in advertising.

New Reds boss Andoni Iraola takes charge of his first EPL game at Anfield.

Nashville, Tennessee — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is backing a proposal to rename Nashville International Airport in honor of Dolly Parton, following the country music icon’s death earlier this week at age 80.

Lee announced the proposal Friday, saying Parton’s life and legacy were deeply connected to Tennessee. He said renaming the airport would recognize her music, philanthropy and long-standing ties to the state.

The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority is expected to discuss the proposed change at its Sept. 17 meeting. Airport President and CEO Doug Kreulen praised Parton’s commitment to dignity, kindness and opportunity, saying those values align with the airport’s mission.

Parton grew up in a one-room cabin in Sevier County as one of 12 children before becoming one of the most recognizable performers in country music. She maintained strong ties to Tennessee throughout her life, supporting scholarships, health initiatives and other charitable causes.

The proposal comes amid a wave of tributes from political leaders across the country. Maine Gov. Janet Mills ordered the governor’s residence illuminated in pink in Parton’s honor, while lawmakers from Tennessee praised her connection to the state and her charitable work.

Any formal renaming would require action by the airport authority before the change could take effect.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Tennessee Proposes Renaming Nashville Airport After Dolly Parton appeared first on News Facts Network.

Cleveland police say a total of 24 people arrested in investigation after crash that killed two officers

Seven more men have been arrested as part of an operation tackling alleged organised crime after the head-on crash on the A66 that resulted in seven deaths, Cleveland police have said.

Officers said four men, aged 21, 25, 35 and 40, were being held on suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life after a vehicle crashed into a house in Steele Crescent, Middlesbrough.

A federal appeals court has ruled that states can regulate prediction markets like Kalshi as gambling, handing state regulators their biggest legal victory yet against the booming industry. "There are still related lawsuits pending across the country, and legal experts believe the matter will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court," reports CNN. "But Friday's ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the largest courtroom victory to date for the states as they seek to regulate prediction sites." CNN reports: The 3-0 ruling came from a panel of three Trump-appointed judges. The case originated from Nevada, where regulators tried to shut down the Kalshi prediction site. [...] "The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's (exchange) is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps," the appeals panel wrote Friday, adding that "Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks betting are unpersuasive." The judges also said it was "disingenuous" for Kalshi to argue in court that its products weren't sports-betting when it previously used that phrasing in marketing materials. Kalshi spokeswoman Dani Lever said in a statement: "Despite the Ninth Circuit's opinion, we still believe the CFTC regulations as written do not prohibit sports contracts, and in any event, the CFTC is working to clarify those regulations. We will be seeking further review." "It's the first ruling against Kalshi at the appellate level, and the opinion seemed to be pretty brutal for the company," said Dustin Gouker, an independent journalist who covers the prediction industry. "This gets us one step closer to an almost inevitable Supreme Court case on the legality of sports event contracts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House said President Trump will "pay tribute to the brave first responders who put their lives on the line."

About 125 firefighters tackle blaze at Neasden waste facility as nearby Amazon warehouse is evacuated

A large fire broke out at a waste facility close to Wembley Stadium in north-west London, disrupting tube and train lines in the area.

Twenty fire engines and about 125 firefighters were sent to tackle the blaze at a mixed-waste facility on an industrial estate in Neasden, less than a mile from the venue.

National Park Service, which backs the 250ft arch, says it is likely to disrupt historical significance of dozens of sites

A new National Park Service report backs Donald Trump’s proposed arch, despite what it says are adverse effects to the sightlines of a host of landmarks in Washington, including the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

The report released on Friday says the 250ft-tall (76-meter) memorial arch is likely to disrupt the historical significance of dozens of sites near its planned location adjacent to the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

Trading of sports event contracts on Kalshi constitutes gambling, appeals court rules in siding with Nevada officials.

Climber, stuck on 6in ridge, had veered off treacherous path and ‘any fall would almost certainly be fatal’

An ill-fated move left a man stranded on a 6in ledge over 10,000ft off the ground for hours in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, before a volunteer rescue team came to his aid.

The climber, who has not been publicly identified, had been scaling the Mendenhall couloir, a gully on the face of Laurel mountain, with a friend on Saturday.

In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel.

The high court could decide to hear the case in the term that begins in October.

A former editor of Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos has also served as an intern for Marjorie Taylor Greene

Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right British political commentator, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In a statement on Friday, a DHS spokesperson said that Yiannopoulos was arrested on Thursday at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans international airport (MSY). The spokesperson said Yiannopoulos “legally entered the country” in May 2019, but that “he chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over a hundred tech companies -- including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft -- have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats. The letter -- which was also signed by prominent cyber firms like CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, as well as prominent financial institutions and internet infrastructure firms -- calls for the adoption of new forms of cyber defense, while also encouraging governments at the "local, national, and international levels" to collaborate on security. "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable," the letter states. "The companies and public services our communities depend on -- from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet -- are at risk." [...] The letter further suggests the mobilization of a "collective response," one in which "new partnerships" are formed "to raise security standards and find new solutions to emerging cyber threats." Several of the AI companies that have signed the letter are still actively developing ever more advanced AI models, highlighting their conflicted position. At the same time, they are also offering programs to use frontier AI models for defensive purposes, including OpenAI's Daybreak program, Anthropic's Mythos, and Microsoft's new cyber platform Perception.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tennessee governor proposed the change after the beloved singer and state native died this week.

If you were one of the 37,000 affected customers, you have until Sept. 1 to file your claim.

There’s potential for a split launch between fall and spring, which makes pegging down the release date harder than usual.

Around 70,000 are expected be at the Nevada desert festival, with it urging attendees to treat “everyone affected by this emergency with patience and care.”

New federal labor figures forecast the fastest-growing U.S. job sectors over the next decade.

Image generated via ChatGPT

(The Center Square) – Many inmates who die in Los Angeles County jails have been behind bars for weeks or months before their deaths, according to a new UCLA study.

Cut through the noise with our round up of worthy Labor Day deals at brands including Caraway, Kiehl’s, Monos and Sony

• College grads share the room essentials that weathered the dorm

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

Labor Day offers one last hurrah for summer, a chance to reset for fall, and if you’re shopping, some choice end-of-season discounts.

No matter your plans for the long weekend, we found sales on products to make the most of it while helping you prepare for the colder months ahead.

"Space is the hot thing," President Trump said at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Rescuers pulled out survivors and helicopters ferried people to safety as Nepal and China raced to respond after catastrophic flash floods​ killed hundreds of people.

(The Center Square) – The Milwaukee Election Commission acknowledged that a team led by its deputy director mistakenly selected and downloaded an audit log instead of election results on five of nine tabulators at its central count facility on the…

Australia's official music charts will no longer accept songs that are largely or entirely AI-generated, requiring eligible releases to be "substantially human made." The BBC reports: The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said the new code would help "promote the human nature of artistry." It follows a controversy around a cover of Madonna's Like A Prayer by Australian DJ Josh Fawaz which recently topped the ARIA dance singles chart and peaked at number 2 on the country's overall chart. The song has become a staple of commercial radio station playlists and been streamed more than 48 million times on Spotify alone. Fawaz later added generative AI credits to the song after a backlash. ARIA said that Australian artists were competing for attention "in the most crowded market in history" and that it was "not interested in promoting or celebrating the success of AI-generated music that does not contain human artistry." Under the new rules, AI assistance can still be used, but humans must have written the song, and have performed the lead vocal and primary instruments. AI can also still be used for mastering songs and, for example, using drum machines and auto tune. [...] Artists will be required to declare AI use when they submit a song for chart consideration. ARIA said that if it later emerged music was largely AI-generated it could retrospectively adjust chart positions, and if the piece topped the charts, it may request that awards given for reaching Number One were returned. Artists and their representatives will be able to challenge their exclusion. ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd said: "These changes reflect our intent to remain dynamic and promote the human nature of artistry in what is, to say the least, a rapidly developing space. Artists already use AI tools in their work, the charts can and should evolve to keep room for that, but music generated wholesale by services built on artists' recordings is a different matter." She added: "A chart that rewards unlicensed AI output would undercut the very basis of the recorded music we exist to represent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crazy Taxi: World Tour brings back memories of a time when all a game needed was an unhinged premise and gameplay to match.

• Man claims he was coached extensively by authorities

• Pennsylvania says recantation is ‘highly suspect’

• Sandusky serving sentence after 2012 conviction

A judge has granted a hearing to explore claims that a man wants to recant allegations of sexual abuse years ago by Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Sandusky, 82, has been serving a decades-long prison sentence since he was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse in 2012. Eight young men testified about what happened to them as boys. He has repeatedly lost efforts to get a new trial, but Sandusky’s lawyers are trying again.

September brings dazzling planets, a harvest moon and the official shift to autumn.

One prominent Texas Republican predicts disaster at the polls if his party doesn't take a harder stand against data centers.

LGBTQ+ people spend much more on health insurance than the rest of the population, according to a new study.

(The Center Square) – Americans need a “quieter” Federal Reserve focused on bringing down 65 months of “sustained elevated inflation,” the central bank’s chair told attendees of the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on Friday.

Trump administration plan to temporarily waive higher tariffs on beef imports has drawn backlash from U.S. cattle ranchers.

TORONTO, Aug. 28, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, announced today that it will establish an advanced photonics research, development, and manufacturing facility as part of Project OPTIMISM, supported by CAD $195 million in federal government funding also announced today. The new facility, named “Inception,” is expected to feature world-class technology to enable scalable production of the components that will power future quantum data centers. Xanadu believes this work will revolutionize quantum infrastructure and strengthen Canada’s position as a global leader in the field.

The support for Inception is part of the largest government investment in quantum manufacturing in Canadian history. The funding is expected to accelerate scaling the photonic hardware required to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing, the crucial milestone for delivering commercially meaningful, real-world solutions.

Designed to be a global facility for the manufacturing, packaging, and assembly of quantum computing components, the 158,000-square-foot Toronto site is being transformed into one of the world’s most sophisticated photonics facilities.

Inception is expected to feature state-of-the-art cleanrooms and equipment tailored for high-precision quantum hardware. Key technical capabilities are expected to include round-the-clock test and measurement facilities and first-of-its-kind heterogeneous integration. This integration process is vital for combining diverse photonic components onto a single scalable chip. These advanced capabilities will leverage Xanadu’s established industry partnerships and integrate specialized tooling from ASMPT, Bluefors, DISCO, EVG, FiconTEC, and MPI. The facility is expected to house Xanadu’s Systems Integration and Operation Centre, where quantum modules are assembled, tested, and verified before being installed into server racks.

“The launch of Inception is a defining strategic milestone for Xanadu and the broader quantum industry,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “We believe that this investment ensures that Xanadu remains at the forefront of the field, providing the infrastructure necessary to transition quantum technology from the lab to commercial-scale data centres.”

Xanadu is on a mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Inception is central to this mission, serving as a world-class facility for building the next generation of quantum infrastructure to meet the global demand for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

About Xanadu

Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Canadian photonic quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using light, with systems designed to operate at room temperature. Xanadu develops both hardware and software, including PennyLane, its open-source quantum computing platform. Xanadu is the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to list on public markets (Nasdaq/TSX: XNDU) and is recognized globally for its breakthroughs in scalable quantum technologies.

Source: Xanadu

The post Xanadu Secures CAD $195M for Quantum Manufacturing Expansion appeared first on HPCwire.

More than 100 companies signed onto an open letter calling for more urgency in fixing bugs and shoring up cybersecurity.

New York, New York — President Donald Trump lost another attempt Friday to move his New York hush money case into federal court, leaving his 34-count felony conviction intact while his state appeal continues.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump’s renewed request to transfer the case from state court, ruling that the arguments presented were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records connected to a $130,000 payment made to adult-film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors argued the records were falsified to conceal the payment’s purpose.

Hellerstein had previously denied Trump’s efforts to move the case into federal court. The latest review came after a federal appeals court instructed him to reconsider the request in light of the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling expanding presidential immunity for official acts.

The judge concluded that Trump had not shown sufficient grounds to revisit the earlier decision and criticized the effort during February arguments as seeking “two bites at the apple.”

The ruling marks the third time Trump has failed to remove the case from New York state court.

Trump continues to challenge the conviction through the state appellate process, where his attorneys are separately seeking to overturn the verdict.

Sources

• Associated Press – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Loses Another Bid to Erase New York Hush Money Conviction appeared first on News Facts Network.

Apple is raising Apple TV's U.S. price to $14.99 per month, up from $12.99, while the annual plan jumps from $99 to $119. It's the service's fourth price hike in four years and means the monthly cost has now tripled from its $4.99 launch price in 2019. Apple One's Individual plan is also rising from $19.95 to $21.95 per month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

–(The Center Square) – While visiting the Johnson Space Cente Friday, President Donald Trump announced and signed an executive order to establish the Space Force Academy.

The claim, made in government filings to the Supreme Court, is contradicted by budget and other records.

Nevada-based Kingsbarn Realty Capital seeks to acquire land to construct private road to development outside park

The Trump administration is reportedly pushing to give a parcel of land inside Yosemite, the country’s first national park and one of its most popular, to a Nevada-based private developer.

Staff with the National Park Service have been exploring how the agency can give a quarter-mile parcel to a company operated by Kingsbarn Realty Capital, the news outlet Notus reported on Friday, citing agency documents and unnamed sources “directly familiar with discussions”.

When The Westin London City was built beside the Thames, excavation for the spa uncovered Roman archaeology beneath the site, limiting how far crews could dig. It is a very London problem: even a brand-new hotel can run straight into…

Official death toll approaches 600, with many of the missing Americans having been on a pilgrimage to a sacred site

At least 90 Americans were still missing on Friday among almost 2,000 people unaccounted for following the catastrophic flash flood along the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday.

With the official death toll creeping towards 600 on Friday and expected to continue rising, there were survivors, victims and missing people from many nationalities.

View of the Thames in old London City. Image Credit: The Westin London City

(The Center Square) – Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers is blasting his opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, over his ties to controversial far-left influencer Hasan Piker.

Relatives ‘really worried, but hopeful’ as they wait anxiously for news in the aftermath of the flash flooding disaster

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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

The families of an Australian defence force member and two Sydney boys who went missing with their parents in Nepal remain hopeful they will be found safe.

Dozens of Australians are missing after devastating flooding on the Nepal-Tibet border. Nepal’s disaster management authority said on Friday that the total number of people missing had risen sharply to more than 1,900 swelled by 933 workers on hydropower projects on the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers where a wall of water powered down on Wednesday morning. The number of people killed is at least 584.

Moving $150,000 into a high-yield savings account for the next year or so could prove to be a lucrative choice.

Your workplace may be easier for a creditor to locate than you think, but there are limits on what happens next.

Four years after her first symptoms, she was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a rare, slow-growing blood cancer.

Virginie Liba with her husband and son. (Leukaemia UK via SWNS)

While not as cheap as it was earlier in 2026, a $40,000 home equity loan opened in September can still be affordable.

Olivia Hannaford with partner Thomas Furnival and son Oliver. (Childhood Eye Cancer Trust / Olvia Hannaford via SWNS)

The Nepal-Tibet flood disaster, Russian strikes in Kyiv, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and tributes to Dolly Parton – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Want to earn more interest on your money starting this September? Here are three ways in which you can do just that.

New York, New York — Elon Musk’s X Corp. lost its challenge to New York’s “Stop Hiding Hate Act” after a federal judge ruled that the law’s disclosure requirements do not violate the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge John Cronan dismissed X’s lawsuit Wednesday, finding that the law requires large social media companies to provide factual information about how they define and enforce policies involving hate speech, extremism, harassment, disinformation and foreign political interference.

The law applies to platforms operating in New York with more than $100 million in annual revenue and requires two reports each year to the state attorney general. X had argued the requirement improperly interfered with its editorial decisions and compelled speech.

Cronan rejected that argument, comparing the reporting requirements to other factual business disclosures. The court also dismissed X’s claim that the law conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The decision contrasts with X’s partial victory against a similar California law, where a federal appeals court previously found that certain disclosure requirements likely violated the First Amendment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has said the law is intended to provide consumers with greater transparency into how major platforms handle harmful content. X can appeal the ruling, but the current decision leaves the reporting requirements in place.

Sources

• Reason – MBFC Rating

The post Musk’s X Loses Bid to Block New York Hate Speech Disclosure Law appeared first on News Facts Network.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision. Lin's ruling barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing Donald Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools and overturned the designation of the company as a "supply chain risk" by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The status, usually reserved for foreign firms, would have blocked government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. The case emerged out of a months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon at the start of the year. Anthropic refused to allow the government to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance, resulting in Hegseth accusing the company of "arrogance and betrayal". Lin put a temporary pause on the government's punitive measures in March, stating that the government's actions looked like an attempt to "cripple Anthropic" for exercising its first amendment rights. The ruling this week makes that temporary suspension permanent, although the government may appeal. "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," an Anthropic spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By: Maakwe Cumanzala, Anyway Chingwete, and Karen Kaunda

These three numbers from Afrobarometer surveys help explain why many across Africa are struggling with rising costs, despite the rosy economic headlines.

The post Why Africa’s economic growth isn’t reaching many households appeared first on Good Authority.

Critics call move to gain long-term access to country’s massive energy reserves ‘predatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’

Reports that the US is preparing to claim a big stake in Venezuela’s massive energy reserves have sparked an outcry, with critics describing the move as “predatory” and a “rapacious” land grab.

Several media outlets this week reported that the Trump administration – which abducted Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, in January and has steered the South American country ever since – hopes to secure long-term access to its oil and gasfields.

Anger over the construction of AI data centers has triggered political leaders to call for bans and moratoriums on the construction of new data centers in recent months. Is this a legitimate reaction to increased utility bills and a deterioration of quality of life, or are the bans and moratoriums going too far?

In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a one-year ban on the construction of new data centers that consume more than 50 megawatts of power. The moratorium is designed to give the state time to develop a “regulatory framework” to protects customers, the environment, and the energy grid.

“As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” Hochu stated in her executive order.

In recent weeks, Republican leaders have joined Democrats in calling for hiatuses on building new data centers, including Texas and Pennsylvania.

Residential electricity costs have risen by 42% over the past five years, per the US Energy Information Administration  (leolintang/Shutterstock)

While Virgina has the highest density of data centers in the country, Texas has been the epicenter of the AI boom, with nearly 250 new data centers proposed to be built over the next few years, according to this article in the Texas Tribune. With plenty of land, affordable electricity, and a reputation for unencumbered free market activity, the Lone Star State has been a draw for AI data centers.

So it was a bit of a surprise when Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, called for a pause in new data centers earlier this month. The cause: Concerns about the 420 gigawatts in new electrical connections to Texas’ grid (ERCOT) from prospective data center operators.

“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Abbott stated in the August 3 announcement. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

A similar dynamic is at play in Pennsylvania, where more than 100 data centers have been proposed to be built, representing a potential increase of 74 gigawatts in peak power usage over the next two decades. Citing “record highs” in power costs, Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also called for tighter rules  on new data centers last week.

Shapiro’s new rules require data center operators in Pennsylvania to gain approval from local communities. They also require data center operators to generate their own power or pay full price for grid connections. The governor canceled all “fast-track” approvals and demanded full transparency with no NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

“These are some of the biggest companies in the world,” Shapiro stated in his executive order. “They can afford to be good neighbors, follow the rules, and do this right.”

Bytes & Pitchforks

Public opinion on data centers has soured in recent months. A Gallup poll from March found that 70% of Americans opposed local construction of new data centers A Politico poll from July found that about 41% of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of their home, up from 28% in January.

(Aleutie/Shutterstock)

Rising electricity costs are being blamed on data centers. And costs have been rising. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential electricity costs have risen by 42% over the past five years.

But are those increases due solely to new data centers? The answer is likely mixed. Electrical connections to data centers do increase the overall usage of electricity and cause local grid operators to buy more power on the wholesale market. Those costs are then spread across all ratepayers.

However, there are other factors are play, including environmental regulations, grid upgrades, and inflation. According to a Lawrence Berkeley Lab analysis, increases in power costs have mostly tracked inflation in recent years, with a small unexcepted bump in 2025. The highest electricity costs are in California, Hawaii, the Northeast, and Alaska, it stated.

Water Consumption

The water consumption of data centers is another concern. Just as rising demand for electricity is causing some increases for ratepayers, an increase in water for cooling data centers is being attributed to rising water bills.

A January report by the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association stated that 75% to 90% of data centers rely on water-based cooling, with the majority of those being open-loop designs that do not re-use the water. About 10% to 25% of water-cooled data centers used closed-loop designs that do re-use water.

The report found that while smaller data centers may use about 100 million gallons a year, large hyperscale data centers can use 1 to 5 million gallons of water per day. For comparison, a town of 10,000 people uses about 1 million gallons of water per day.

About 70% of the water used by a data center is “consumed,” while about 30% of it is re-used as wastewater. Some data centers are using reclaimed wastewater for cooling, including Google, which says a quarter of its data centers are cooled by reclaimed water, while AWS in 2023 said that it has 20 data centers using purified wastewater.

The increased water demand has put the hiatus on some proposed data centers. The city council in Chandler, Arizona blocked a proposed data center last year after residents rose up to oppose it, even though it would have used a closed-loop cooling system in the arid region.  That followed similar moves by local governments to stop other data centers from being built in Oregon, Missouri, Virginia, and Indiana.

A UC Riverside analysis of water consumption published in March found that growth in data centers could collectively require up to 1,400 million gallons per day of new water capacity through 2030, an amount that’s roughly equal to New York City’s average daily supply. The cost of obtaining that supply could rise to $58 billion, they found.

However, the total water consumption by data centers through 2030 is projected to be minuscule–0.6% to 1.1% of total public water withdrawals the contiguous United States, according to the researchers.

In Conclusion

On the one hand, the moratorium on new AI data centers is understandable, as they have increased the amounts people pay for electricity and water. However, the increase in electricity is due to other factors too (environmental concerns, legacy grid replacement), and new closed-loop cooling systems largely will mitigate increase in water consumption.

The boom has also been good for employment, especially construction firms that employ millions of workers. Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang said the US will need “hundreds of thousands” more plumbers and electricians to support the development and management of new AI factories.  The boom has also contributed to a rising stock market, adding trillions of dollars in wealth for shareholders, bolstering the 401(k)s of million of Americans.

To be sure, AI factories will also have negative impact jobs, as corporations look to replace human workers with more efficient AI agents. The pace of this change could accelerate, as the Wall Street Journal recently estimated that Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle collectively made about $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet investments in the AI buildout, significantly more than what is on their books. They are clearly betting on AI being a net gain for their shareholders.

But what about US citizens? Will it be a net gain for them? Some Americans may wish that the AI boom never happened, that they could go back to how things were before ChatGPT walked down the aisle in November 2022. Unfortunately, that’s not possible at this point.

Moratoriums on data center construction are one thing, as local officials get a handle on how large data centers can impact residents in their area. But a country-wide ban on data center construction, as some have Washington, D.C. political leaders have called for, would be devastating to this emerging industry.

Editor’s note: A version of this article first ran in AIwire.

The post Data Centers Are Under Attack. Is the Anger Justified? appeared first on HPCwire.

Guess right and you could walk away with a brand-new Apple Watch.

Moscow recruits an estimated 1,000 people a day but western officials say it cannot keep up with casualty level

Russia is losing about 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit, western officials have said.

While Russia is still acquiring new battlefield recruits at speed, with an estimated rate of 1,000 a day, in the last two months even this has not been sufficient to replace those killed or injured.

David Booth, the founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, says the key to investing — and life — is to stay calm in the face of uncertainty.

Leading cardiovascular health groups reclassify overlooked causes and introduce sex-specific diagnostic thresholds

Doctors have agreed the world’s first universal definition of a heart attack, paving the way for millions of women to finally receive better treatment after decades of being “deprioritised”.

In one of the biggest procedural shake-ups in a generation, the world’s four leading cardiovascular health groups have signed off on new guidance for healthcare professionals when seeing suspected heart attack patients.

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have ditched their $53 billion pursuit of PayPal, ending a deal that would have been the largest fintech acquisition ever. "Stripe last week agreed to pay $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter, but a source said that the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were operating on independent tracks," reports Axios.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Campaigners say ‘seismic shift’ follows years of pressure to sever ties with oil and gas firm

The London Science Museum has ended its decades-long partnership with the oil and gas company BP in what has been described as a “seismic shift” for the museum.

The Science Museum Group academy, which was established in 2018 to provide training and resources, announced on Friday that it would be ending its partnership with BP. In a statement, the director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, Sir Ian Blatchford, said the partnership had “drawn to a close at the end of the current contract term”.

Experts say imported eggs served in cafes and restaurants may be behind hundreds of infections and one death

Salmonella cases in the UK are expected to rise until the common source is identified, something that is notoriously difficult to establish, experts have warned.

There have been 474 confirmed cases and one death linked to the current outbreak, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), with the latest investigations suggesting it is associated with eating imported eggs in cafes and restaurants.

Defending champion arrives at Flushing Meadows in poor form and with a host of challengers looking to usurp her

Under any normal circumstances Aryna Sabalenka would not have lost her third-round match at the Cincinnati Open last week. For all of her unforced errors, indecisiveness and the obvious tension surrounding her tennis, the world No 1 had led the unheralded Sára Bejlek 5-1 in the first set tie-break and then 4-1 in set two. She gave herself more than enough chances to close out a comfortable win.

Instead Sabalenka returns to New York trying to find a path through her greatest crisis since she first reached No 1 in the rankings more than three years ago. That straight-sets loss in Cincinnati extended a mediocre 17-7 record dating back to the beginning of April during which she has not reached a final. She has just one more chance to turn her fortunes around as she tries to claim her first grand slam title of the year at the US Open, the tournament she has won on the last two occasions.

Walmart settled claims that it filled thousands of invalid prescriptions at its pharmacies at the height of the opioid epidemic.

The Great Lake’s name could change on your map app depending on what side of the US-Canada border you’re on.

Employee attitudes toward AI are closely tied to their age and generational concerns, according to Glassdoor.

Carlos Tellez Sanchez had worked at a car dealership in Dallas during the day and drove for Uber Eats at night to support his family.

The incident happened about an hour after the National Transportation Safety Board released new details​ about a similar incident in early August.

Good Good Golf will no longer sponsor an upcoming PGA tournament, while Callaway said it has ended its partnership with the company.

Fed chief Kevin Warsh said in a closely watched speech that inflation remains a concern, while praising the broader U.S. economy.

A social media post viewed by more than 100,000 accounts claims that North Carolina “processed” more than a million voter registrations. 

“Governor Josh Stein won North Carolina by 828,187 votes. North Carolina processed 1,031,350 duplicate registrations,” Shiloh Marx, president of the Integrity First Alliance, said in a July 20 X post. 

Integrity First Alliance advocates for state elections leaders to update and clean voter rolls. Marx’s post referenced North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein’s margin of victory over Republican Mark Robinson in the state’s 2024 gubernatorial election.

In response to the post, some social media accounts questioned whether people voted twice. 

The post raised two key questions: Did North Carolina election officials really “process” a million duplicate registrations? And, if so, did it have any bearing on the state’s 2024 elections?

Not exactly.

The figure in the post — 1,031,350 — comes from a recent report published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent government agency that provides election administration guidance. The report described how the 2024 federal general election was administered and how voters cast their ballots.

The statistic represents the number of registered North Carolina voters who submitted new registration applications that contained no changes to their personal information, said Kristen Muthig, a spokesperson for the commission. 

“These can be registrations submitted by people who did not realize they were already registered to vote or who submitted multiple registration transactions through different modes (e.g., submitted a registration with the exact same information through the mail and online),” Muthig said in an email. She referred specific questions about North Carolina to the state’s elections board. 

Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the state board, said North Carolina often receives duplicate registrations when someone who is already registered fills out a new form at the Division of Motor Vehicles, or as part of a voter registration drive. 

North Carolina isn’t alone; the commission found duplicate registrations in other states too: California had nearly 2.2 million; Michigan had nearly 1.9 million; and Virginia had about 1 million. The report notes: Some of the registration transactions processed by states do not result in the creation or the update of a registration record.

Between 2023 and August 2024, county elections boards in North Carolina removed more than 747,000 ineligible registration records from the state’s voter rolls. The state board noted in September 2024 that, although election officials regularly check voter rolls for accuracy, some ineligible registrations take longer to identify. Official death records may not reach election officials until weeks after a voter dies, for example.

Eventually, though, list maintenance processes catch up and those ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, the board said. It also noted that the mere presence of ineligible individuals on the rolls doesn’t mean voter fraud will occur.

While North Carolina’s DMV might “process” duplicate voter registrations, Gannon said the duplicate registrations in North Carolina were never added to the state’s rolls. That means the duplicate registrations Marx referenced had no bearing on the 2024 elections, Gannon said.

Here’s how it works:

• When a county elections board receives registration forms from the DMV, local election officials log them into a statewide voter registration database. 
• The state’s database scans the person’s information — their name, date of birth, address, and driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number — to see if they are already registered. 
• If the system finds two records that might belong to the same person, election officials investigate the records to determine whether they actually are the same person. If an application comes from someone who is already registered, the old registration is removed. 
• In the unlikely event that a voter is registered twice, the state has numerous checks to prevent someone from voting twice. Electronic pollbooks with information about who has already voted are used at every early voting site. If a voter who has already voted tries to check in again, they will be prevented from casting a regular ballot and would instead be offered a provisional ballot. County election workers would then research the voter’s registration status on Election Day to determine whether the ballot should count. 

The bipartisan state elections board certified the 2024 contest results unanimously, and post-election audits across the state haven’t found evidence of widespread fraud. 

“These duplicate numbers have absolutely no relationship to the difference in vote totals for candidates in a contest,” Gannon said in an email. “Unfortunately, this post will serve only to mislead unsuspecting readers who don’t understand the process and hurt voter confidence in elections.”

Marx didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Our ruling

Marx said North Carolina “processed 1,031,350 duplicate registrations,” noting that Stein won the 2024 gubernatorial election by fewer votes. The comments left some people with the impression that some voters had the ability to vote twice — and that Stein may have benefitted from duplicate registrations. 

More than 1 million North Carolinians who were already registered to vote filled out a second registration application prior to the 2024 elections, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Those applications were technically “processed” but that doesn’t mean voters were added to the voter rolls a second time. They were not. State election officials say their applications had “absolutely no relationship” to the gubernatorial race, or any other of the state’s 2024 elections. And, to date, election audits haven’t found evidence of widespread fraud. 

The post is partially accurate, but it leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.

(The Center Square) – President Trump’s order to change Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America is getting mixed reactions in Wisconsin from Republicans and Democrats.

Roblox is restricting games that reward younger players for endlessly consuming autoplaying media feeds. The new restrictions are specifically targeting Roblox experiences like "Steal an Egg," which encouraged players to watch TikTok-style clips for in-game benefits. "Roblox's official alert does not expressly mention SAE, but the new policy is most certainly targeting the viral game first and foremost," reports TechSpot. From the report: The company said games that reward ongoing media consumption are now unavailable to players with a Roblox Kids (ages 5 to 8) or Roblox Select (ages 9 to 15) account. The policy will affect games designed to combine media feeds, autoplay, infinite scrolling, and systems that reward players for doomscrolling through TikTok videos of questionable value. "Steal an Egg" fits perfectly into this new category. The game tasks players with raising eggs, but they can also steal eggs from other NPCs. Players are incentivized to increase their characters' speed either by spending in-game currency (Robux) or by watching a video feed on a virtual treadmill. "Steal an Egg" was recently removed from Roblox but is now back in the store without its troublesome video-feed feature. [...] Roblox also highlights that the new anti-doomscrolling restriction does not apply to the rewarded video ads feature, which rewards players for watching a short clip but does not include autoplay or other infinite-scroll-like design choices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fears of further flooding complicated recovery efforts, as authorities searched for people missing after floods struck the Himalayan border between Nepal and China.

Federation says it fears death toll of nearly 600 will continue to rise as rescuers reach cut-off areas

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

The Red Cross has said at least 93,000 people may have been affected by Wednesday’s flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, which have killed nearly 600 people, left another 1,900 missing, and triggered a huge rescue operation that is being hampered by fears of new flooding.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the world’s largest humanitarian network, said it feared the death toll would continue to rise as some of the hardest-hit areas remained inaccessible after roads and bridges were destroyed by the torrents.

Norwegians gather to remember monarch whose death comes amid scandal over links between crown princess and Jeffrey Epstein

Norwegians have gathered in their thousands to pay their respects to King Harald V, Europe’s oldest reigning monarch, who has died, aged 89, in Oslo. He was succeeded immediately by his son, King Haakon VIII.

The new king thanked “the government and Norwegian people for their support and sympathy for the royal family at this time”. A period of national mourning was announced as crowds left wreaths and messages outside the royal palace in Oslo.

In the latest escalation of the Trump administration’s war on the left, the U.S. government’s designation of a popular antifascist webhosting provider as a terror group could shutter a swath of radical websites in the U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that they were targeting the Italy-based A/I Collective with terror sanctions. Federal law gives the Treasury Department broad discretion to apply the terror label to foreign groups.

A wide array of anarchist, antifascist, and far-left groups in the U.S. and abroad use the privacy-minded collective’s offerings, including an anonymous email service and its popular noblogs.org blogging platform.

The practice of designating an internet platform and service provider as a terror group — rather than those pursuing violence themselves — has “huge” implications for the future free speech on the internet, warned Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“They are going after the messenger,” York said. “I don’t think that the members of the group would necessarily condone the actions of the people that they hosted. What they do condone is the freedom to host, the ability to be anonymous, the ability to be private.”

The A/I Collective told The Intercept that it is exploring its legal options to fight the sanctions, which block U.S. citizens and companies from providing the group with financial support.

In an unsigned statement, the group said that it denies the U.S. government’s allegations. 

“Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism,” the group said. “Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.”

The U.S. government’s move could have ripple effects far beyond Italy. 

Groups using the A/I Collective’s services range from an anarchist radio show in Asheville, North Carolina; to a blog documenting attacks on anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” under the Jane’s Revenge moniker; to the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair. The bookfair warned Wednesday that its website “will most likely go down soon because of US sanctions on Noblogs.”

Related

“They Want People Scared”: Former Palestine Action Member Blasts Trump’s Terror Sanctions

The State and Treasury Departments justified the designation by alleging that the A/I Collective, also known as Autistici/Inventati, has provided services to foreign terror groups, including anarchists who have launched attacks on railroads and pipelines in Europe, and by domestic left-wing groups that have employed violence.

“A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services — including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools — to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere,” a State Department spokesperson said in a press release. “These tools are specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks.”

It is unclear how many groups in the U.S. could be forced offline, or to shift their providers, because of the terror designation. The A/I Collective said it could not provide an estimate of U.S-based groups that it hosts, because it does not ask its users for any private or personal information.

Nor was it immediately clear whether simply hosting a site using the collective’s services would be illegal if no money changes hands. Still, the collective says that it relies heavily on voluntary, suggested donations, and many U.S.-based groups appear to be scrambling for alternative hosting providers.

The A/I Collective was sanctioned under the Treasury Department’s authority to label groups specially designated global terrorists. U.S. citizens convicted of violating those sanctions can face stiff penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

If U.S. groups continue to use the collective’s services, the U.S. government could use that affiliation against them, said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. The Treasury Department can even label U.S.-based groups as specially designated global terrorists, although they have more standing to challenge that designation in court.

The designation of the A/I Collective as a foreign terror group is the next step in a sequence that began with Trump’s designation of antifa as a “domestic terror organization” last September, said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University who wrote a book about antifascism.

Where the Trump administration goes next is the “million-dollar question,” Bray said.

“It seems to be they’re playing a bit of a long game,” he said, “where they try to establish the existence of a supposed violent, left-wing terror network — which they have had trouble doing, but they have tried. But then, of course the way they make that affect the left more broadly is to criminalize those who they claim are aligned with it.”

The post Trump Goes After Anonymous Email Provider in Italy. The Real Target Is Free Speech in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Nepali and Tibetan communities plan vigils and work to raise funds for recovery in ‘devastating’ time

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Australia’s Nepali community plan to host vigils to remember the victims of the Nepal-Tibet flood disaster to coincide with a day of mourning, as the number of people killed continues to rise.

As Australia’s Nepali diaspora wait for the full scale of the disaster to become clear, community members are desperately waiting to hear from missing relatives and friends.

Nepali authorities said on Friday that the death toll had risen to 579, with the number missing rising sharply to more than 1,900, after massive flash floods and landslides tore through the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river basins on Wednesday.

However, Kevin Warsh didn’t say if interest rates would change in coming months, as inflation remains stubborn

The US Federal Reserve is not done fighting high inflation, its chair, Kevin Warsh, said in his first major speech in the role on Friday, emphasizing that it was “the Fed’s job to deliver stable prices”.

Warsh did not indicate where the Fed will take interest rates in the coming months, despite US inflation remaining stubbornly above the central bank’s 2% target amid the war in Iran. But his speech was taken by markets as a signal that rates may rise in the coming months, a move that may put him at odds with Donald Trump, who has aggressively called for rates to be cut.

An undated photo of Tyrin Johnson.

Desperate relatives trying to reach loved ones last seen in area where entire villages have been swept away

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

Families are rushing to Nepal to search for the 33 British nationals who are still missing, as fears mount over the risk of a second wave of flooding in the region.

The catastrophic flash floods that hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and sweeping away entire villages, have killed at least 538 people, while more than 1,500 remain missing.

Another update for Meta glasses aims to shut down recording when the light’s off, and an ad campaign is trying to address the pervert concerns.

PARIS, Aug. 28, 2026 — Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, has announced the composition of the Board of Directors of Pasqal Holding SA (the combined company), following the completion of its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II. The combined company’s ordinary shares are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “PSQL” on August 28, 2026.

The Board comprises nine directors and is chaired, in a non-executive capacity, by Pasqal co-founder and 2022 Nobel laureate in Physics Alain Aspect. It brings together senior industry leaders, including Barbara Dalibard, Chair of the Michelin Supervisory Board, alongside Michel Combes, who serves as Lead Independent Director of the combined company.

The directors are:

• Alain Aspect, Non-Executive Chair of the Board. A co-founder of Pasqal and Chair of its Scientific Advisory Board, and a co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a professor at the Institut d’Optique, Université Paris-Saclay, professor emeritus at École Polytechnique, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Technologies.
• Nicolas Berdou, Director, serving as the permanent representative of Bpifrance. He is a Senior Investment Director at Bpifrance Investissement, leading venture investments in technology, deep-tech, and defense.
• Michael Blitzer, Director. He is the Founder and Chairman of Inflection Point Asset Management, a leading financial sponsor of strategically important assets. He is also the Executive Chairman of USA Rare Earth and a Director of Intuitive Machines.
• Wasiq Bokhari, Chief Executive Officer and Director. Chief Executive Officer of Pasqal, having previously served as its President and Executive Chairman. His earlier roles include leadership positions at Amazon and Google.
• Michel Combes, Lead Independent Director. Chief Executive Officer of Lambda, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brightspeed, and formerly chief executive of SoftBank Group International, Sprint, Altice, and Alcatel-Lucent. He is a board member of F5, Philip Morris International, and e& (formerly Etisalat).
• Barbara Dalibard, Director and Chair of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. Former Chief Executive Officer of SITA and of SNCF Voyageurs, and former Chief Executive Officer of Orange Business Services. She is the chair of the Supervisory Board of Michelin and is a Director of Rexel.
• Andrew Gundlach, Director and Chair of the Compensation Committee. President and Chief Executive Officer of Bleichroeder LP and Director of WellTower and Air Global Plc.
• Jean Raby, Director and Chair of the Audit Committee, serving as the designee of EIC Fund. He is a Partner and Chief Client and Business Development Officer at Astorg, and a former Chief Executive Officer of Natixis Investment Managers. He previously served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Legal Officer of Alcatel-Lucent and Partner at Goldman Sachs.
• Georges-Olivier Reymond, Director. A co-founder of Pasqal and its Chief Strategic Alliances Officer, and its founding Chief Executive Officer from 2019 to 2025.

A majority of the Board is independent under applicable SEC and Nasdaq rules, with Jean Raby chairing the Audit Committee, Andrew Gundlach the Compensation Committee, and Barbara Dalibard the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.

“As we begin this next chapter as a public company, we are fortunate to have a board that combines scientific leadership, operational experience, and capital-markets expertise. We expect their guidance to help us scale neutral-atom quantum computing and deliver value to customers and shareholders over the years ahead,” said Wasiq Bokhari, Chief Executive Officer of Pasqal.

About Pasqal

Pasqal (Nasdaq: PSQL) helps organizations tackle problems that are difficult or impossible to solve with conventional computing methods alone. Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research, Pasqal builds and operates neutral-atom quantum computers, delivered with a full software stack, for industry, science, and governments. Pasqal’s production-ready systems are available both on-premises and through the cloud, enabling organizations to harness quantum computing without requiring in-house quantum expertise. A single hardware platform supports analog workloads today and is designed to evolve toward fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.

Headquartered in France with operations globally, Pasqal’s quantum computing systems are used by customers across energy, financial services and advanced materials to address complex challenges. Pasqal’s customers include Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB, LG Electronics and supported by partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network).

Source: Pasqal

The post Pasqal Announces Board of Directors for Combined Company Following Its Nasdaq Listing appeared first on HPCwire.

Social Security may face a funding shortfall in 2032, but these options could help you prepare your finances now.

Critics say painting looks more like a zombie but artist Chris Ashmore says ‘touch-ups’ are still to happen

A street artist has defended his mural of the snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan in Sheffield after critics suggested the world champion looked like a zombie.

Chris Ashmore was commissioned to produce the artwork featuring the former seven-time world champion for the back wall of the Spot On snooker club, the BBC reported.

President faces criticism over plan to import up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef without charging higher tariffs

Donald Trump has pledged to allow cattle ranchers and farmers to process their own food amid a backlash from the US agricultural sector over his decision to pause US tariffs on foreign beef.

The US president has been sharply criticized, including from members of his own party, since announcing the US will temporarily import up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef without charging higher tariffs in an effort to bring down prices.

An AI agent, Anthropic’s Claude, developed and validated the control logic for the laser system in a QuEra quantum computer, recovering it in seconds versus an expert needing minutes, and holding it steadier than a specialist’s manual tune. QuEra plans to extend the approach to other subsystems.

BOSTON, Aug. 28, 2026 — QuEra Computing has announced results from its work in the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) research preview, in which an AI agent, Anthropic’s Claude, performed one of the most expert-dependent jobs in operating a quantum computer: keeping its laser system on target. The agent wrote and validated its own control software, which now recovers the system in seconds with no manual intervention, obviating the need for manual work that previously required a specialist on site.

Quantum computers are moving from laboratory instruments to products customers buy and operate themselves. That transition depends less on physics than on whether a machine runs reliably without the people who built it standing next to it. QuEra’s systems use lasers held at precise frequencies to control atomic qubits. Those lasers drift, and when one drifts far enough the machine stops until someone with deep and specific expertise brings it back. Every generation of machine carries more lasers than the last, and every machine at a customer site sits further from the engineers who know them best.

Automating a Critical Subsystem

QuEra has automated recovery from common laser disturbances for years, and Aquila, its 256-qubit system on Amazon Braket, runs with uptime above 99%. The more complex laser failures are rarer and more severe, and have resisted automation to date because recovery calls for human expert judgment rather than a fixed sequence of steps.

A QuEra team of four specialists spent two to three weeks writing a recovery script by hand, and it handled only the failures its authors thought to list. The team then gave the same problem to Claude, working through the MHS, a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing. MHS started as a collaboration between Anthropic and HHMI Janelia Research Campus and is currently in a limited research preview, in which QuEra is a participant. MHS let the agent run its own experiments on a dedicated testbed and propose a fix, try it, read the result, refine. It ran that loop continuously, including overnight, covering hundreds of failure cases that no team of specialists would have time to work through by hand.

Engineers set the scope, reviewed every step, and decided what counted as proof of success. The software the agent produced is a conventional, fully inspectable program, not a model making decisions at runtime. And the work stayed safe by design: devices declare bounds, interlocks, and emergency stops in the standard itself, and AI agents inherit and operate within them by default.

What the Pilot Proved

• It recovered reliably. Given no information about what had gone wrong, the controller returned the system to target in 695 of 700 timed trials across seven fault types, and never reported success when it had not succeeded. The five misses traced to a rig condition rather than the software.
• It recovered in seconds. Most faults cleared in under six seconds and the hardest in roughly 10 to 14 seconds, against five to 10 minutes for an expert.
• It handled real faults, not only test cases. The testbed sits in a working lab with ordinary foot traffic and real environmental sources of error. Over the pilot the AI agent recovered every time without help, regardless of the cause.
• It improved on expert tuning. Asked to improve the quality of the lock rather than recover it, the AI agent cut residual noise by a factor of five and stopped the system dropping out during unattended runs. Measured afterward on an independent instrument it could not influence, its settings matched an experienced specialist’s manual tune and corrected a flaw the manual tune had left behind.
• It transferred. Pointed at a second laser wavelength, the AI agent worked out the settings from scratch in one unattended overnight run, a job that normally takes weeks of hands-on commissioning.

Why It Matters for Deployment

Prior to this pilot, every laser used to carry a standing claim on scarce human expert time. On-site recovery was required at any hour, taking up to half an hour per tuning session, and commissioning a new operating point took weeks. Given the increased number of lasers per computer and additional deployments in the field, manual expert labor becomes a limit on how many systems can be deployed and properly supported, and a barrier to fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale.

“For years the hardest part of scaling quantum computers wasn’t the physics, it was the people driving at 2 am to fix a laser lock. We built a solution using the Model Hardware Standard to fix that: the lock recovers itself in seconds, verified every time, catching noise that’s easy to miss by hand. We’re building quantum computers that fix themselves,” said Sergio H. Cantu, Vice President of Quantum Systems, QuEra Computing.

After the pilot, little or no expert guidance is required. For an HPC center or national laboratory installing a system on-premises, that is the difference between needing a resident neutral-atom laser specialist and needing very little of one’s time.

Why QuEra Partners

The laser in this pilot is one of many subsystems in a quantum computer that are precise, fragile, and demanding of expert attention. QuEra expects the same AI automation approach to apply to others, and the pilot leaves behind the safety practices and measurements that enabled the second campaign to take one night where the first took weeks.

“We are among the best in the world at developing and operating quantum computers, and even for us, the cost of keeping these machines at peak performance is high,” said Takuya Kitagawa, President of QuEra. “A customer expects the entire computer, and thus every subsystem, to hold itself together without a specialist in the room. This is why the results from the MHS research preview and Anthropic’s frontier AI models are so meaningful. We are making it far easier and cheaper to keep our computers running at their best.”

QuEra works deeply with a small number of companies chosen for strategic capabilities: Amazon Web Services for cloud delivery of Libra on Amazon Braket in 2028, HPE for on-premises HPC integration, and NVIDIA for accelerated computing. QuEra’s participation in the Model Hardware Standard research preview, applying AI agents to the control of quantum computing hardware, is an early example of AI partnerships.

About the Model Hardware Standard

The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) is a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing. It started as a collaboration between Anthropic and HHMI Janelia Research Campus and is currently in a limited research preview, with access by application while the safety design is validated. Devices declare bounds, interlocks, and emergency stops in the standard itself; AI agents inherit and operate within them by default.

About QuEra Computing

QuEra is putting quantum to work. As the scientific and commercial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, we help enterprise innovators leverage quantum to gain competitive advantage, support HPC centers as their users tackle classically intractable problems, and enable government programs to build national and sovereign capabilities. We do this by combining our quantum systems, available on-premises and via the cloud, with application co-design and collaborative research. Born at Harvard and MIT and still advancing together, QuEra builds neutral-atom systems on a public, peer-reviewed path to fault tolerance, and operates globally from Boston, New Mexico, Tokyo, Zurich, and the United Kingdom. As quantum computing moves from “one day” to “Day One,” QuEra delivers practical impact today while leading the path toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems. See what’s possible at www.quera.com.

Source: QuEra Computing

The post QuEra Uses Anthropic’s Claude to Automate Quantum Computer Laser Recovery appeared first on HPCwire.

Remnants from tropical storm could cause heavy rainfall on Leeward Islands and affect Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola

Remnants of Tropical Storm Dolly, which has been downgraded to an “open tropical wave”, were moving still across the Atlantic Ocean toward the Leeward Islands, and could bring heavy rainfall to parts of the Caribbean this weekend, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Friday..

Dolly, which formed on Thursday, had maximum sustained winds of near 40mph (65km/h) with higher gusts on Friday morning. Later on Friday, forecasters said that Dolly was no longer a Tropical Storm, and had “become an open tropical wave”.

State to offer up to 5,000 trappers chance to snare reptiles whose numbers have risen to 3m from fewer than 100,000

The first recreational alligator hunt in Louisiana in more than half a century is about to commence in the swamps of that state, with up to 5,000 hopeful trappers facing strict rules in order to snare a reptile.

The state’s fish and wildlife commission banned alligator hunting in 1962 to allow the species to recover after decades of unregulated killings for meat and hides dropped numbers there to below 100,000.

Tropical Storm Dolly was the fourth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Brazil has failed to prove compliance with EU rules on use of antibiotics in cattle and poultry farming

The UK’s leading farming organisations and animal health experts have called for an urgent ban on imports of Brazilian meat, in light of concerns over the safety of imports.

The National Farmers’ Union in England and its sister organisations in the devolved administrations wrote to the government on Friday warning that public health was at risk.

Government says Green leader’s proposed moratorium on ‘energy-guzzling’ AI projects would be disaster for economy

Labour has rejected calls to pause construction of major AI infrastructure in Britain after the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, said it was time to “slam the brakes on these energy-guzzling, water-guzzling datacentres”.

The government hit back at the opposition party’s proposal of a “moratorium other than [for] local-scale datacentres for the local community”, saying it “would be a disaster for jobs and national security”.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is reportedly considering new tariffs on semiconductors used in the U.S., as tech giants race to beat China in the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. The duties will be imposed on an expanded range of tech products made alongside chips, including laptops, data center servers and gaming hardware, eight people familiar with the matter told Politico in a report published Thursday. The measures, which are still in the early phases and subject to significant changes over the next few months, will be introduced via a staggered rollout period, according to the report. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC, but told Politico: "Reshoring semiconductor manufacturing is a top priority for President Trump, whose policies have already secured hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in this key sector." The tech industry is pushing back on the tariffs, warning they could raise chip costs, slow data-center construction, and undermine the very AI expansion the administration wants to promote. "This may be the single dumbest way imaginable to pursue American dominance in AI," said one tech official from a major industry group that also served in the first Trump administration. "It's like kneecapping yourself at the starting line." Lobbyists say they have repeatedly urged officials to "tread carefully" because U.S. demand is surging while domestic chip capacity remains far too limited. The industry argues that factories take years to build and current domestic production cannot come close to satisfying demand. One tech representative said "the math literally just does not work," noting that proposed duty-free allowances "wouldn't cover the hyperscalers alone." Meanwhile, the Computer and Communications Industry Association warned that higher costs and uncertainty could put the massive data-center buildout "in jeopardy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police hunt two suspects after historic 200-carat piece is snatched from Austrian museum during opening hours

Austrian police are hunting two men alleged to have stolen a 200-carat platinum necklace encrusted with 673 diamonds that was on loan to a museum in Vienna and once belonged to Egyptian royalty.

Authorities in the capital released pictures of the suspects captured by security cameras during the heist at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), amid a rash of spectacular smash-and-grab thefts from European cultural institutions.

A price hike has also hit Apple One, affecting subscribers in the US.

Exclusive: PM also warns his ministers against trying to influence vote when bill returns to Commons next month

Andy Burnham has told Labour MPs that he will not cast a vote when the assisted dying bill returns to the Commons next month to avoid influencing the debate.

While the move was welcomed by supporters of the measure, No 10 officials said the prime minister had no wish to affect the process in either direction, and was just doing what he thought was best to allow MPs to reach their own collective view.

Stella Parton said her sister Dolly told her "that if there was no hope for her, she would still allow her medical team to try experimental drugs in the hope of helping others in the future."

Scale of devastation emerges in Nepal as reporters reach disaster area, but Chinese state media focus more on rescue efforts

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

In the days since an enormous glacier in the Himalayas snapped away from a mountaintop and cascaded into the valley below, the true scale of the devastation caused by the flash floods in Nepal and Tibet is still unfolding.

But the picture is emerging far more quickly in Nepal than in China, where strict controls on the flow of information from one of its most sensitive regions are hampering the public’s understanding of events.

The Powder Yard closed Aug. 24 to allow contractors to work safely with heavy equipment and complete several projects that would be difficult to undertake while visitors are present. The remainder of the museum remains open.

While the historic Powder Yard is temporarily closed, visitors can still explore the du Pont family home, gardens and the museum’s “Nation of Inventors” exhibition through Sept. 4.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Hagley Museum and Library is offering half-price admission through Sept. 4 while crews complete preservation and maintenance projects in the historic Powder Yard along the Brandywine.

The Powder Yard closed Aug. 24 to allow contractors to work safely with heavy equipment and complete several projects that would be difficult to undertake while visitors are present. The remainder of the museum remains open.

Visitors can continue to explore the Visitor Center and “Nation of Inventors” exhibition, as well as the historic du Pont family home and gardens. The Museum Store also remains open.

The temporary discount gives visitors an opportunity to experience major portions of Hagley while paying 50% of the regular admission price.

Work protects historic industrial site

The two-week closure allows Hagley to address several infrastructure and preservation needs across the Powder Yard, the industrial heart of the museum’s 235-acre property.

Crews are dredging the mill race inlet to remove accumulated silt and debris and maintain the flow of water into the historic power system. The race once directed water from the Brandywine to the mills and machinery that helped operate the powder works.

Other work includes replacing the roof of the Millwright Shop and stabilizing sections of masonry along the mill race. Those repairs are intended to protect historic structures from weather, water erosion and further deterioration.

Hagley also is removing hazardous trees in the Powder Yard and Crowninshield areas. That work requires road closures to protect visitors, employees and contractors.

Additional preventive maintenance is being completed during the shutdown, allowing Hagley to coordinate multiple projects within a relatively short period.

More than a museum

Although the work may be easy to describe as routine maintenance, preserving Hagley carries unusual significance for Delaware.

The property is the site of the original DuPont powder works, established along the Brandywine in 1802 by Éleuthère Irénée du Pont. The business grew into one of the world’s leading manufacturers of black powder and became the foundation of the DuPont company.

Its success influenced Delaware’s economy, workforce and identity for generations. The company’s later expansion into chemicals and materials science also helped establish Delaware as an important center for research and innovation.

The Hagley site tells that larger story through its mills, mill race, waterpower system, machine shops, workers’ community and Eleutherian Mills, the du Pont family’s first American home.

It was both an industrial operation and a community. Immigrant workers and their families settled around the powder yards, creating neighborhoods and family connections that became part of the history of Wilmington and the Brandywine Valley.

Maintaining the site therefore involves more than preserving individual buildings. The work protects one of the few remaining landscapes where visitors can see how waterpower, manufacturing, immigration, labor and family life came together during America’s early industrial development.

What visitors can see now

The Powder Yard is one of Hagley’s signature attractions, but visitors still have access to other important parts of the museum during the closure.

The “Nation of Inventors” exhibition examines the people and ideas behind American innovation. It draws on Hagley’s extensive collections to explore how inventors identify problems, develop solutions and bring new products and technologies into everyday life.

The historic home and gardens offer a different view of Hagley’s story, introducing visitors to the du Pont family and the domestic life that developed alongside the industrial operation.

Together, the open attractions provide an opportunity to understand both the personal and innovative sides of the site while the Powder Yard undergoes needed work.

The Powder Yard is scheduled to reopen after Sept. 4.

To Go

• What: Hagley Museum and Library
• Temporary closure: The historic Powder Yard is closed through Sept. 4 for preservation and maintenance work.
• Admission: General admission is 50% off during the Powder Yard closure.
• What remains open: Visitor Center, “Nation of Inventors” exhibition, historic home and gardens, and Museum Store.
• Location: 200 Hagley Creek Road, Wilmington
• Learn more: Visit hagley.org.

X2 ride at Magic Mountain has been closed for a month after one rider experienced brain compression and another remains in coma

An infamous Six Flags Magic Mountain rollercoaster, long favored by intrepid theme park goers, has been closed for more than a month after two people say they experienced brain injuries after riding it, according to a new CNN investigation.

The X2 rollercoaster sends riders plummeting and twisting hundreds of feet, reaching up to 76mph (about 122km/h) as the seats rotate 360 degrees. On the southern California theme park’s website, it’s advertised as a rite of passage for daredevils.

The post RFK Jr. Fuels Measles Dispute After Pennsylvania Confirms Two Deaths appeared first on News Facts Network.

Helipad relocation led in part to incident where Marine One, carrying the president, had close call with passenger jet

Safety officials say the relocation of a helipad amid Donald Trump’s multi-project White House reconstruction led in part to an incident earlier this month in which a military helicopter carrying the president came too close to a passenger jet.

A preliminary report published on Thursday by the National Transportation ⁠Safety Board (NTSB) blamed “communication issues” for the failure of the crew of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, to give the required three minutes’ notice to air traffic controllers that they were about to take off from the White House.

Jesse Malin, Craig Finn and Tommy Stinson will perform Aug. 29 at The Queen during a benefit for Donate Delaware honoring state Rep. Debra Heffernan.

WILMINGTON — Three prominent rock musicians will take the stage at The Queen on Saturday, Aug. 29, for an evening designed to turn the energy of live music into support for Delaware families.

The Queen Jeans Ball will feature Jesse Malin, Craig Finn and Tommy Stinson while raising money for Donate Delaware, a nonprofit that helps recover, restore and distribute medical equipment and other essential resources.

The annual event also will honor state Rep. Debra Heffernan for her public service and contributions to Delaware.

Doors will open at 7 p.m., and the concert will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $50.

Rock music with a Delaware mission

Organizers describe the Queen Jeans Ball as a high-energy rock ’n’ roll benefit bringing together Delaware’s business, civic, nonprofit and music communities.

Proceeds will support Donate Delaware’s work helping individuals and families obtain medical equipment and other resources they may otherwise struggle to afford or access.

“The Queen Jeans Ball represents the very best of Delaware — people coming together through great music to help neighbors who need us,” Donate Delaware founder Dave Tiberi said. “Every ticket and sponsorship will help Donate Delaware recover, restore and deliver critical medical equipment to families across our state.”

Tiberi thanked event co-chairs Brian and Megan McGlinchey, The Queen, the participating musicians and event sponsors. He also said he was proud to recognize Heffernan for what he called her “extraordinary lifetime of public service.”

Tiberi, a former professional boxer and longtime civic leader, founded Donate Delaware to connect usable resources with people who need them. Its work includes collecting and distributing medical equipment and assisting Delawareans facing other critical needs.

“Brian and I are honored to serve as co-chairs of this year’s Queen Jeans Ball, which supports the crucial work of Donate Delaware and our friend, Dave Tiberi,” Megan McGlinchey said. “We can’t wait to share an amazing night of music at The Queen with the Wilmington community.”

A notable rock lineup

Malin will headline the concert, bringing a musical career shaped by New York’s punk and rock scenes.

Known for personal songwriting and energetic performances, Malin began his career as the frontman of the punk band Heart Attack before leading the rock group D Generation. He later established a solo career built around songs that blend punk urgency with character-driven storytelling.

Finn is best known as the frontman and principal songwriter for The Hold Steady. His lyrics frequently follow complicated characters through nightlife, relationships, mistakes and attempts at redemption. He also has released an extensive collection of solo work.

Stinson brings decades of rock history to the lineup. He joined The Replacements as a teenager and played bass in the influential Minneapolis band. He later performed with Guns N’ Roses and led his own bands and projects, including Bash & Pop.

Together, the performers give the benefit a lineup rooted in punk, alternative rock and narrative songwriting.

Heffernan to be honored

The evening also will recognize Heffernan for her years of public service.

Heffernan represents the Bellefonte, Brandywine Hundred and Edgemoor areas in the Delaware House. During her legislative career, she has worked on issues including health, environmental protection, children and families.

Organizers said the tribute fits the broader purpose of the Queen Jeans Ball: celebrating people who serve Delaware while encouraging others to help neighbors facing difficult circumstances.

A night out with an impact

The concert offers attendees an opportunity to see three established rock artists in one show while supporting a Delaware-based charitable organization.

It also reflects the role The Queen plays in Wilmington as both a performance venue and a gathering place for community events. Located on Market Street, the historic venue hosts national touring artists, local performers and nonprofit benefits throughout the year.

In this case, the night’s impact is intended to continue after the final song, helping Donate Delaware place essential equipment and resources in the hands of people who need them.

To Go Box

• What: Queen Jeans Ball featuring Jesse Malin, Craig Finn and Tommy Stinson
• When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 2026. Doors open at 7 p.m.; concert begins at 8 p.m.
• Where: The Queen, 500 N. Market St., Wilmington
• Admission: Tickets start at $50
• Benefiting: Donate Delaware
• Honoring: State Rep. Debra Heffernan
• Tickets: Ticketmaster
• Sponsorships and host committee information: Contact Brian McGlinchey at brian@queenjeansball.com
• Learn more: Donate Delaware or The Queen

Vegas proved, once again, it’s more than a casino floor and a spectacle.The post Michelin just dropped its first Southwest Stars, and Vegas stole the show appeared first on Food Drink Life.

Speech part of effort to strengthen National Rally party’s international ties before Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid

The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella is to give a speech at Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham next week as he attempts to boost international ties before Marine Le Pen’s bid for the French presidency next spring.

Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) is high in the polls and she is predicted to reach the final round of the French presidential race in May.

Anti-vaxxers are spreading conspiracy theories after two recent measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania

Anti-vaccine activists are trying to track down the families of two people, including at least one newborn, who died after contracting measles in Pennsylvania, as Governor Josh Shapiro tangles with Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “inaccurate and misleading claims”.

Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), suggested late on Wednesday that the deaths in the state may have been “fabricated” after a Republican coroner – an elected political office in Lancaster county – claimed one of the measles-associated deaths was unrelated to the virus, although the given cause would be consistent with measles.

Fall mocktails keep ending up sweet, thin and forgettable, even when the spice rack is doing everything right. Zero-proof drinks have conquered summer on citrus ... Read moreThe post Spirit-free cocktails are booming, but fall mocktails keep falling flat for…

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A Republican ad attacking Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson in Maine says under his “failed leadership” the state’s high schools “dropped to dead last” in the country, according to annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report. But that’s not the whole story.  

A major reason Maine fell to last in those state rankings is because it stopped giving U.S. News access to Advanced Placement performance data for Maine high schools — a key part of the methodology the media organization uses to rate the schools. 

It’s unclear why the Maine Department of Education declined to grant access to the statistics, and a spokesperson has not responded to our request for comment. But, like Maine, other states that have not authorized U.S. News to use their high schools’ AP enrollment and exam data have fallen to the bottom of the rankings.

Update, Aug. 28: After our story was published, the Maine Department of Education said in a statement: “Since 2020, at the recommendation of the Maine Attorney General’s Office, the Maine Department of Education has not authorized the College Board to share student data out of concern that it could be made available for commercial use. In fact, the College Board has paid fines in New York – one of four states that is not currently providing data to the College Board – for the illegal and improper sale of student data. The Maine Department of Education takes student privacy seriously. Assessment results have no bearing on this decision.”

The ad blaming Maine’s descent on Jackson, a former state Senate president and majority leader, is from Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ campaign, and it has aired on broadcast and digital platforms since Aug. 17, according to AdImpact. Jackson is challenging Collins for her U.S. Senate seat in the toss-up race.

“Maine schools used to be among the best, but under Troy Jackson’s failed leadership in Augusta, our high schools dropped to dead last,” the ad’s narrator says, while a citation for U.S. News’ 2025-2026 state rankings appears on screen.

The Collins campaign confirmed to us that was the source for the claim.

Last year, Maine did place last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on the review of its high schools. The state came in 51st again in the rankings for 2026-2027, which were published Aug. 17.

But the ad doesn’t mention a major reason for Maine’s consecutive last-place finishes. That is, the Maine Department of Education did not authorize U.S. News to have access to College Board data showing how Maine high school students performed on the AP exams for the college-level classes they completed. (The College Board is the nonprofit organization that runs the national AP program and administers the tests.)

In fact, Maine has now been last or next to last each year since the 2020-2021 rankings, when it first denied U.S. News access to its AP data. In 2019, the last time it permitted U.S. News to use its AP data, Maine placed 11th.

Maine was 1st in the U.S. News state rankings for high schools in 2014, and it was regularly in the Top 10 through 2018. But the methodology for rating states and high schools was different at the time.

Jackson was the state Senate majority leader from July 2013 to December 2014, and president of the state Senate from 2019 to 2024.

Since 2019, U.S. News has ranked all the states and D.C. based on the proportion of their schools that make it into the top 25% of high schools as determined by the media company. “That level of achievement is a valid indicator of the relative performance of a state’s high schools compared with other states,” U.S. News said in a post about this year’s rankings. 

The high schools, meanwhile, are ranked based on six criteria, including “college readiness,” which accounts for 30% of a school’s score, and “college curriculum breadth,” which makes up another 10%. Participation in, and performance on, AP exams, as well as International Baccalaureate, or IB, exams, is a key factor in both categories. 

Not having that exam information affects a school’s ranking.

“As with the 2026-2027 edition of Best High Schools, the Maine state education department declined to provide AP data for the 2025-2026 edition, which explains why Maine had the lowest proportion of schools placing in the top 25% last year,” a U.S. News spokesperson told us in an email.

The spokesperson said not allowing the use of the AP figures does not guarantee that a state will rank last, as the methodology “includes adjustments so that schools without AP or IB exam test-takers do not score significantly worse than those with very few test-takers.” But it does make it much more difficult for states to have high schools with higher rankings.

“While the adjustment prevents non-AP schools from automatically landing at the absolute bottom of national rankings, rising into the top 25% of high schools nationally without any AP/IB data is extremely challenging,” the spokesperson said.

And the reality is states that do not permit U.S. News to use the AP data often fall to the bottom of the standings.

For the 2025-2026 rankings, Maine was the only state not to allow the College Board to provide its AP data and it ended up last overall, with just four, or 3.6%, of its high schools ranking in the top 25%.

In the 2026-2027 rankings, Maine was joined at the low end of the rankings by Vermont (48th), Colorado (49th) and New York (50th). Those three states also declined to allow U.S. News to access their AP exam scores this time and their rankings suffered.

The previous year, when they allowed their AP data to be included in the calculations, New York placed 9th, Colorado was 10th and Vermont was 21st on the list.

The Jackson campaign pushed back on the ad’s claim.

“The ad blames Jackson for the U.S. News ranking of Maine’s public high schools. The truth is Maine ranked lowest in U.S. News’ 2025 report because the state did not give U.S. News permission to use its data,” a campaign spokesperson told us.

We asked U.S. News why Maine stopped granting access to the AP data, and the spokesperson directed us to the state Department of Education, which has not responded with an explanation. (Update, Aug. 28: We received a response after publication and have included it near the top of this story.)

The Collins campaign told us that lack of cooperation is telling.

“Maine’s lack of willingness to be transparent with its standardized testing demonstrates just how terrible the state of education has gotten under Troy Jackson’s leadership in Augusta — according to U.S. News, 51st place out of 51,” Blake Kernen, communications director for the Collins campaign, said in a statement. “The metrics that are available, including NAEP scores, depict a dire situation that has gotten drastically worse in recent years,” she said, referring to the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. (NAEP is administered by the U.S. Department of Education.) 

In 2024, the most recent data available, Maine’s 4th and 8th grade students, although not last in the nation, had some of their worst NAEP scores in math and reading in about two decades. That year, Maine’s 4th grade average math score ranked below 39 other states and its 4th grade average reading score was below that of 40 other states. Maine’s 8th grade average math score was below 25 states and its 8th average grade reading score was below 30 states.

“Even the Biden Administration recognized how Augusta leaders were failing Maine’s students when it penalized the state in 2023 for violating the federal law that helps schools with high numbers of students from low income families — which is the vast majority of Maine schools,” Kernen said about a financial penalty the federal Department of Education gave Maine for not meeting required academic achievement standards. “As the second highest ranking official in the State of Maine, Troy had the power to do something about this alarming trend — but under his leadership, it’s only gotten worse.”

While the decline in the math and reading scores of Maine’s elementary and middle school students may be cause for concern, the Collins campaign ad specifically mentions the performance of the state’s high schools, and cites Maine’s ranking by U.S. News in particular.

That ranking is questionable since it is affected by the absent AP data.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Collins Ad Attacks Jackson on Education Using Questionable U.S. News Ranking for Maine appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Image from the State of California.

Tennis fans walking into Flushing Meadows this year will smell something new before they ever hear a ball hit. Cosme, Miznon and Salt Hank’s, three ... Read moreThe post A single US Open cocktail brought in more money than the…

Marcus Beal

The Federal Reserve is much more powerful than it was 20 years ago, which has prompted calls for a reset in how it answers to Congress and the public.

Jamie and Amy Shinneman are teaming up for their fifth marathon, with him on foot and her in a racing wheelchair.

Remember that fake Joe Biden robocall? That likely won’t be the last AI deepfake we see during election season.

Chair Allan Leighton says lower prices and an improved online service are attracting more shoppers

Asda has heralded its first trading growth in more than two years as the supermarket’s boss said it was attracting more shoppers with lower prices and an improved online service.

Allan Leighton, the executive chair of the UK’s third-largest grocer, said a 0.2% rise in sales at established stores, excluding fuel, in the seven weeks to 18 August was “a huge milestone” that was “psychologically important for the business”. In the preceding three months, sales had fallen 2.3%.

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

The Gotham striker said she was stepping away from the sport, but then signed for Al Qadsiah. The move sparked questions over professionalism and raised concerns of LGBTQ+ fans who have disavowed the Saudi league

A recent World Cup winner joins a historically downtrodden club, immediately leads them to their first championship, praises the level of play in the league, speaks fondly of living in the club’s market, extends her contract with the club, leads the club to another championship, is named a league MVP finalist, and breaks the club’s all-time scoring record. That’s the fairytale of Esther González and Gotham FC – a story that ended abruptly, just nine days after that scoring record was set. On 27 July, Gotham announced that they had mutually parted ways with the striker as she “temporarily steps away from soccer to attend to personal matters in Spain”. The announcement of her departure was full of gushing words going both directions, and was met with understanding and support from the women’s soccer world.

But less than a month after González left Gotham, Al Qadsiah, a club in the Saudi Women’s Premier League, announced her as their newest signing, on a one-season contract with an option to extend for a second. NWSL journalist Jenna Tonelli soon reported, “League sources tell me that Gotham did not expect Esther to sign with another club this soon.” Questions swirled: did she actually intend to take a break from soccer when she left Gotham? And why would a player who just had a child with her female partner choose to play in Saudi Arabia, a country where same-sex relations are criminalized?

Caused by parasites spread via Anopheles mosquitoes, malaria can cause symptoms including nausea, headache and intense waves of fever and chills.

Iceland will decide whether to restart talks on joining the European Union in a referendum on Saturday, with President Donald Trump's threat to annex Greenland a motivating factor.

More than 1,300 people are missing in Nepal and in Tibet after catastrophic flash floods swept through the region, killing at least 469. Plus: Six months of the war in Iran

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Good morning.

Rescue operations have resumed in Nepal and Tibet after a pause when a lake at the border began to overflow. The lake was formed when a wall of mud and debris hit the hub of Gyirong in Tibet on Wednesday, causing catastrophic flash floods that thundered down valleys and obliterated villages.

What could have caused this deadly flash floods? Satellite imagery suggests a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas was the primary cause, raising concerns that the climate crisis is destabilizing the geology of mountain and polar regions.

This is a developing story. Follow our live coverage here.

What did Kennedy purportedly lie about? A Guardian analysis of newly obtained documents found that the US health secretary had lied when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

Tim Cook is having a wild last week on the job.

Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump offered his own assessment of presidential greatness Thursday, and the suspense was limited: he placed himself alone in the top category.

Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social ranking 34 presidents across six tiers, from “The Greatest” to “Failures.” Trump occupied “The Greatest” by himself, while Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were placed one tier below as merely “Great.”

Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk made Trump’s “Near Great” category. Bill Clinton was among those judged “Average,” while Calvin Coolidge and several others landed in “Below Average.”

Trump reserved the “Failures” category for Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding.

The ranking was also notable for who did not make the cut. Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were among the presidents omitted entirely.

Trump provided no methodology explaining how the rankings were calculated or why some presidents were excluded.

The post quickly generated reactions from both liberals and conservatives, some of whom questioned the unusual placements and omissions. Trump has frequently used Truth Social to promote his record and criticize predecessors, particularly Biden and Obama.

Sources

• Newsweek – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Crowns Himself America’s Greatest President in Personal Ranking appeared first on News Facts Network.

A judge barred the Trump administration from enforcing a set of rules aimed at cutting off Anthropic from the federal government, ruling the administration had unconstitutionally punished the AI company for protected speech.

Smuggling gasoline and diesel from the U.S. into Mexico and reselling it tax-free is a huge money-maker for organized crime gangs, including drug cartels.

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing its new requirements for mail voting for the November midterm elections.

The post New Jersey Posts Worst Monthly Job Loss Since Pandemic Shutdowns appeared first on News Facts Network.

Apple’s super-thin iPhone didn’t sell like crazy, but it helped set the stage for something bigger: the long-rumored foldable.

Terrified of being seen as a loser, Donald Trump is nonsensically lashing out – even against our old friend Canada

I’m still grieving Dolly Parton. I never met her and always wanted to. She was almost exactly my age and my height and had values I deeply admired. Her death leaves a hole in the firmament.

Which brings me to the person whose values are as far from Dolly Parton’s as any human could possibly be and still claim to be human. I’m referring, of course, to the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Decision to rescind ‘roadless rule’ opens more than 45m acres of national forests to roads, drilling and logging

More than 400 endangered animal and plant species could face accelerated extinction after the Donald Trump administration’s decision to rescind a rule that has protected old-growth forests for more than two decades.

According to a new report from the Center for Biological Diversity, the rollback of the Bill Clinton-era “roadless rule” could put 7.4m acres (3m hectares) of endangered-species habitat and nearly 1,800 miles (2,900km) of protected rivers and streams at risk, while opening more than 45m acres of national forests to roads, drilling and logging.

Average cost of petrol reaches 161.6p a litre, while diesel costs average of 183.4p, according to the AA

UK petrol prices have hit their highest level since 2022, piling more financial pressure on motorists before the bank holiday weekend.

The average cost of petrol has reached 161.6p a litre, while diesel costs an average of 183.4p a litre, according to the breakdown company the AA.

Rolling coverage of the latest events in global financial markets, the economy and major corporate moves

In the metals market, supply fears have pushed the zinc price up to a four-year high.

Zinc, which is used to galvanise steel, hit $3,955 a metric tonne this morning, its highest since May 2022.

LME [zinc] inventories have been drawn sharply lower, mine and smelter disruptions have restricted refined availability, and supply outside China has become notably tight.

With consumers facing a thinner pool of immediately available units, relatively modest buying has produced a larger price response than elsewhere in the complex. Copper remains supported by the same availability concerns.

Labor Day appetizers are easier to plan when the table mixes chilled dips, make-ahead bites, sliders, grilled seafood, and warm finger foods that can be prepared and served in stages.The post 15 summer appetizers to shortlist now for the Labor…

As well as being quieter, cheaper to run and easier to clean, induction cookers can cut kitchen temperatures by up to 10C

Leaping flames, searing heat, copious sweat and scorchingly inventive swearing – restaurant kitchens are never a place for the faint-hearted, but this summer they have been sweltering in successive heatwaves to a dangerous degree.

Some restaurants, cafes and bakeries in the UK grew so hot that they were forced to close, or reduce their hours, for the safety of their staff. There is still no maximum working temperature, despite calls from the TUC, and tens of thousands of kitchen staff are thought to have carried on working in “furnace-like” conditions.

Unpopular new policy comes as midterms loom and control of Congress could be decided by several Michigan races

Every day $1bn worth of goods crosses the river dividing Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, two largely blue-collar US and Canadian cities that have come to act as one in the creation of North America’s auto industry.

News this week of Donald Trump’s escalating trade spat with Canada has everyone worried. Political and economic leaders and observers labeled the move an act of “hubris” , blamed Trump’s “ego”, and called the escalation “insanity”.

Lawsuit alleges sound is nuisance for up to one mile around datacenter as residents experience noises from DataOne

It’s a sound Steve Brown, a 63-year-old Vineland, New Jersey resident, literally hears in his sleep: BGRRRRRRRRRRR.

It drones, oscillates, growls – these are machines at industrial scale. Are they generators? Pumps? Fans? Brown does not know what equipment causes the sound or why. He only knows two things: he’s tired of it, and it’s coming from DataOne – a 350MW datacenter under construction a little more than a mile from his home of 25 years.

When another birthday cake sounds predictable, these 13 cookie recipes bring chocolate, caramel, fruit, mint, cinnamon, and bakery-style options that are easy to pass around and stack on a dessert tray.The post 13 cookie recipes the whole family started requesting…

You only have a few more days to experience cosmic dread, zombies and one Big Walk on PlayStation Plus at no additional charge.

Google is adding an "Expert Intelligence" feature to Gemini Notebook (formerly known as NotebookLM) that lets users cite and work directly from more than 100,000 books they own through Google Play Books. Those books can be used as sources for things like quizzes, infographics, and Audio Overviews. Digital Trends reports: For now, Google is offering one free book to users in the US as part of the launch campaign, with a caveat -- "while supplies last." At the moment, Expert Intelligence is only available in the Gemini Notebook app and its web dashboard, but down the road, Google says that it will also appear within the core Gemini app and AI mode in Search. The broad idea behind expert intelligence is to combine what you can already do with Gemini, and expertise sourced from your favorite books. So, if you're asking Gemini to create a meal plan that is based entirely on chicken and spinach, you can ask the AI assistant to look for relevant recipes in one of Martha Stewart's cookbooks that you own. You can use these books as a source and turn them into Infographics, Audio Overviews, and Quizzes, among other formats. Google has partnered with select authors on Featured Notebooks that provide extra insights and context beyond their books. It's also worth noting that access is still tied to book ownership, so anyone using a shared Gemini notebook must own or purchase the book to fully use the feature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zambia's 2026 election: A test of democratic resilience 22 September 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 28 August 2026 Online

Discover what the election aftermath means for politics, policy and investment.

Discover what the election aftermath means for politics, policy and investment

Zambia’s Electoral Commission announced that President Hakainde Hichilema had secured a second term after winning 60 per cent of the vote. Despite a peaceful polling day, counting was paused because of security concerns and questions have since emerged over reported discrepancies between presidential and parliamentary turnout figures. As leading opposition candidate Brian Mundubile weighs a legal challenge amid controversy surrounding court closures and the arrests of opposition figures, the aftermath of the election is shaping debate over Zambia’s political trajectory, economic policy and investor confidence.

• How could the election aftermath affect Zambia’s political environment?
• How might uncertainty affect economic policy and investor sentiment?
• What do the reported tallying discrepancies mean for confidence in the result?
• What options remain open to opposition candidates seeking to challenge the outcome?
• What do the arrests of opposition figures reveal about the state of democratic accountability?
• What steps could strengthen trust in future electoral processes?

Elina Valtonen, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland, on whether Europe can compete in the age of AI 3 September 2026 — 11:00 TO 12:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 28 August 2026 Chatham House and Online

Hear from Finland’s foreign minister on how Europe can innovate, build strength and compete in artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping economic competition, security and political power at a pace that is testing existing institutions and assumptions. As the US and China race to secure their technological advantage, Europe faces growing pressure to strengthen its capacity and competitiveness. There is debate about how Europe can protect its interests while preserving the values that underpin its political and economic model.

This event discusses:

• Can Europe be competitive in the age of AI?
• How to balance openness, regulation and competitiveness?
• What role should governments play in shaping AI development?
• What does strategic autonomy mean in an era of technological competition?
• How can Europe strengthen industrial capacity and innovation?
• What would a more confident European approach to technology and economic security look like?

King Harald V of Norway, Europe's oldest monarch, has died, the royal court says. He was 89.

Risk of fresh flooding had forced rescue teams to withdraw as residents rushed up hills to escape possible river surge

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

Rescuers searching for survivors of deadly flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border have resumed their efforts after suspending operations when a debris dam burst its bank on Friday, increasing the risk of fresh flooding.

Residents in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, on the border with Tibet, were seen rushing up hillsides ⁠on Friday to escape a possible surge in the river, ⁠according to witnesses. Fears of another flood came as authorities in Nepal and China said that at least 543 people had been killed in the disaster.

Sales of beans, lentils and soya bean derivatives on rise while Britons buy less real and fake meat

British shoppers are munching more beans, lentils, tofu and tempeh – while cutting back on real and plant-based fake meat – to save money and improve their diet.

The amount of beans, pulses and soya bean derivatives sold in the UK increased by 7.3% in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, led by a rise in cheap dried lentils, an analysis has found.

Boston, Massachusetts — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked key parts of President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, finding that the U.S. Postal Service likely lacks authority to impose new election requirements on states.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order preventing implementation of a Postal Service rule requiring states to provide voter lists and use federally specified, barcoded ballot envelopes. States that failed to comply could have faced refusal by USPS to deliver their ballots.

The decision comes days after the Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s earlier injunction, ruling that challenges to Trump’s executive order had been filed prematurely. The justices did not rule on whether the order itself is constitutional. After USPS issued a formal rule implementing Trump’s directive, Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups filed new challenges.

Talwani said states lacked sufficient time and resources to redesign ballot materials, modify computer systems and train election workers before ballots begin going out for the November midterms. She also cited the potential for eligible voters to be disenfranchised.

The administration argues the requirements strengthen election security, while opponents contend that the Constitution assigns election administration primarily to states and Congress.

A hearing on whether to extend the injunction is scheduled for Sept. 3.

Sources

• Associated Press – MBFC Rating

The post Judge Again Blocks Trump Executive Order Restricting Mail-In Voting appeared first on News Facts Network.

The post Election Deniers Seek Secretary of State Offices in Swing States appeared first on News Facts Network.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What does Dolly Parton’s life of perseverance, generosity, and joy ask of each of us while we still have the power to do good?

• South Carolina Republicans Choose Fealty to Trump Over Knowledge: How a family name and Trump’s blessing now substitute for knowing the job.

• Our War Secretary Is a General Failure: Pete Hegseth’s purges and feuds have left critical military leadership rudderless just when competence matters most.

• Trans Republicans Evicted from Log Cabin: Gay Republicans turn their backs on transgender people while enjoying the rights that others earned.

• Life on Our Planet, narrated by Morgan Freeman: Visually dazzling evolutionary journey offers a fine crash course in spite of too many elegies.

• Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, “After the Gold Rush”:
  I say goodbye to Dolly with her trio’s version of Neil Young’s strange environmental dream song that both haunts and soothes the spirit.

  ---

Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”
– Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Roman emperor and philosopher

“I always ask God to work through me and let me be a light of some kind and help in this world.” – Dolly Parton (1946-2026), singer and philanthropist

When you live your life in the public eye, people think they know you. And they have opinions. As I have written many times, when I was a young man, people often thought I was unfriendly, surly, angry; and maybe there were times when I was. I had success on the basketball court, I had friends, I found a religion that made sense to me, I had a love of music and books—and with all that going for me, I was still prone to obsess on the negative, and that was the vibe I too often gave out. I looked at the world around me, the war and the assassinations and the way Black people were treated, and I didn’t see a lot to be happy about.

I found myself thinking these thoughts today as I contemplated the wonder that was Dolly Parton. I never met Dolly, but, maybe like you, I felt I knew her. Her story was widely known: she grew up in a one-room shack in Tennessee with eleven siblings and no heat; her father was an illiterate laborer and her mother—well, she had 12 kids by the time she was 35. She was a preacher’s daughter and she loved music. She passed that on to Dolly, who was singing in her grandfather’s church by the time she was six.

By eight, she could play guitar, and by ten, she was on the radio. Her first single, “Puppy Love,” came out when she was thirteen. That same year, she made her Grand Ole Opry debut, where she was introduced by Johnny Cash. She wasn’t an overnight success: she worked nonstop, honing her craft, honing her songwriting, but it took her more than a decade to score her first number-one hit in 1971. Imagine how many people came and went in that decade. A lot of one-hit wonders; a lot of no-hit wonders. The Beatles’ entire recording career came and went during the long stretch between Dolly's first single and her first number-one hit. That’s serious perseverance. But then, who wants to go back to a one-room shack?

Once she made it to the top of the charts, she stayed there. She refined her look, put on an exaggerated dumb blonde act, and because she was in on it, she never let the dumb blonde jokes bother her. As she said, “I know I’m not dumb. And I know I’m not blonde, either.” That was part of her charm: she always had a zinger ready at the right moment. She was always happy, or so it seemed. Her smile could light up a theater, a movie screen, or, according to so many who met her, a simple interaction between two people.

Her voice wasn’t technically perfect, but it conveyed enough warmth and honest emotion to overcome any limitations. As a songwriter, she conveyed that same warmth and honesty, and she wrote some of the most indelible country songs of all time: “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” and, of course, “I Will Always Love You.” I wasn’t a country music fan when Dolly was in her early prime, and I have to admit I didn’t know “I Will Always Love You” was a Dolly Parton song when I first heard Whitney Houston sing it. I was simply astonished by its raw emotion and that soaring melody. Later, when I found out it was a Dolly Parton song and I heard her version, I saw that the blueprint was all there before Whitney sang a note. She gave it a different accent and her band played some different instruments, but the song itself didn’t change a bit. It was perfect then, and it’s perfect now.

For all her success, Dolly’s greatest achievement was her philanthropy. In the early 1990s, her Dollywood Foundation promised seventh- and eighth-graders $500 if they graduated from high school, helping to reduce the dropout rate for those classes from 35 percent to six percent. Her Imagination Library has given more than 300 million books to children worldwide since its founding in 1995. In 2007, she gave a million dollars to Sevier County’s LeConte Hospital, including a new cancer center and the Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services. When East Tennessee suffered devastating wildfires in 2016, her My People Fund distributed $12.5 million to families affected by the fires. In 2017, she donated one million dollars to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in honor of her niece, who was treated there for leukemia. When Covid hit, she gave one million dollars for coronavirus research at Vanderbilt University, which helped fund Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. The list of good deeds, and lives she improved, goes on and on.

When people talk about a life well lived, this is what they’re talking about. I’ve tried to give back to society over the years, but when I see all that Dolly did, I know there’s always more I can do. As I said, I never had the chance to meet her, but I will miss her. Goodbye, Dolly.

Read more

Roadmap for increasing department’s share of GDP will be deferred until next year’s review

The chancellor will delay setting out when the UK will meet the target of allocating 3% of GDP on defence until next year’s spending review, the Treasury has confirmed.

John Healey resigned as defence secretary in June under Keir Starmer’s leadership, accusing the prime minister of being “unable” and the Treasury “unwilling” to “commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country”.

The president senses a crisis in his cult of personality. He believes the path to victory is through unwavering devotion

Donald Trump has framed his theme for the midterm elections. It has come to him as naturally and inevitably as staring into the mirror, beyond any logic or argument, his definitive answer to no specific issue, providing no understanding of any particular problem, but transcending all of them. His political theme is more primal than programmatic, more instinctive than analytical, a heartfelt expression to protect his greatest romantic attachment, his obsessive fixation, his idealized object: himself.

Trump’s campaign theme is unrequited love. Unlike the pollsters, media consultants and pundits, he alone has grasped the magnitude and the source of the existential crisis threatening his politics. He has identified the problem for the Republicans as the faltering measure of complete devotion to him. His demand has nothing to do with mutual affection. It is a ploy to reassert his slipping control, a manipulative test to prove loyalty to him, or else. There can be no absolute rule without an absolute ruler; no absolute ruler without absolute submission; no absolute submission without the expression of absolute love. His sadness at its fading gives way to anger, paranoia and greater acts of retribution. He equates the fear he instills as a form of love. Trump accepts subservience, from whatever motive, as affection or its closest equivalent. He cares nothing about sincerity, so it’s all in the show. The less love displayed, the more fear required. Yet there is no rebound, but only deeper rejection.

Survivors begin receiving letters with payment amounts months after $305m settlement agreement was struck

Survivors of child rape and other sexual abuse within New Orleans’s Roman Catholic archdiocese learned that $641,000 or so is the most they can individually get under a settlement approved in December to resolve a years-long bankruptcy protection case.

Those amounts were communicated in letters that hundreds of clergy abuse survivors participating in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy began quietly receiving on Tuesday. The figures are well below a $2.4m jury verdict awarded to an unrelated Louisiana religious sexual abuse claimant in June 2025 after the state’s legislature temporarily eliminated filing deadlines for such cases.

When ProPublica recently investigated a rape crisis that surged through Syracuse University in the 1980s, we found evidence that the school had taken steps to suppress news coverage of the assaults. The university responded by portraying itself as a changed institution today, “committed to supporting the students who come forward and being there for them at every step of the process,” as a school spokesperson put it.

But the university’s recent actions in a lawsuit filed by a former student who was attacked on campus during that period appear at odds with that commitment. After the Syracuse Police Department agreed to provide old records to the victim, lawyers for Syracuse University intervened, seeking to block the victim’s access to many of the records. The school argued in legal papers that the subpoena sent to the police department was “overbroad” and suffered “from fatal geographic overreach” that rendered “it unreasonably burdensome and irrelevant.”

New York state court Judge Joseph Lamendola ruled in the university’s favor in February, dramatically limiting the records the victim could obtain to make her case that the school should have beefed up security in response to escalating crime in the area.

In June, her attorneys appealed that decision, sending the matter to a state appellate court.

“It smacks of the 1980s when SU quashed media coverage of sexual assault. It’s that all over again,” said Andrew Stengel, a former Manhattan prosecutor representing the victim. He accused the university of “retraumatizing” his client “by pretending sexual assault wasn’t a problem on campus and in the surrounding area.”

Stengel and his client, referred to as Jane Doe in legal filings, are suing the university under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a one-year exemption from the statute of limitations for survivors of long-ago sexual assaults to pursue legal claims against alleged abusers and negligent institutions.

Sarah Scalese, Syracuse University’s vice president of communications, said in an emailed statement that “we do not comment on active litigation.” In response to ProPublica’s earlier story, Scalese said the university “has a robust structure in place to support those affected by sexual and relationship violence,” including “confidential counseling, advocacy and investigation and resolution services to students.”

Doe was attacked by a man with a knife inside a bathroom on the third floor of the university’s music building at about 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 27, 1987. Her assailant had entered the building through an unlocked door, according to her lawsuit, which contends that the university administration offered her “zero support” after the assault. The music program director, the complaint alleges, told her, “Men get raped, too,” and advised her to get “back on the horse.” (The director is deceased.)

Hers was one episode in a brutal saga of sexual violence that unfolded in and around the Syracuse campus throughout the decade. The scourge of assaults became so pervasive that it eventually inspired student protests, drew national press attention and contributed to the passage of federal legislation that now requires universities to publicly report crime statistics.

Read More

“That Guy Is Still Out There”

ProPublica’s earlier examination — rooted in the wrongful conviction of Anthony Broadwater for the rape of Alice Sebold, an author who wrote a bestselling memoir about being attacked on the last night of her freshman year at Syracuse University in 1981 — found that more than a dozen women, many of them students, reported being raped or attacked by strangers in a half-square-mile area near the campus over four years. Sebold’s was the third such attack in Thornden Park, which runs alongside the campus, in about seven months.

Some of the police reports from this time period were marked “NO PRESS,” which, according to the testimony of a former Syracuse detective, meant that the university had used its influence in the police department to “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.”

Last year, Stengel asked the police department for all police calls and reports tied to a variety of crimes from 1982 to 1987 within the ZIP code that contains the university, Thornden Park, various businesses, and a mix of student and nonstudent housing.

Emails filed as an exhibit in Doe’s case show that a lawyer representing the Syracuse Police Department suggested that Stengel focus his search on that ZIP code. The two of them agreed on the terms in August 2025, and the police department began gathering the records shortly thereafter.

A month later, the university filed a motion to “partially quash” the subpoena. Relying on case law that applies only to central and western New York state, university lawyers argued that it had standing to limit the request, even though it was not the recipient of Stengel’s subpoena. The university asserted that the subpoena would create unnecessary work for the police department, unearth irrelevant documents and waste the time of everyone involved.

The police department then reversed its earlier position and joined in the motion, estimating in a February brief that it would take 845 hours and $50,000 in staff time to provide the documents Stengel had asked for and the police department lawyer had initially approved. (A spokesperson said that “the City of Syracuse does not comment on ongoing litigation.”)

At a hearing, John Powers, an attorney hired by the university, seemed to play to Lamendola’s previous role as a lawyer for the city of Syracuse, reminding the judge that the city is “inundated with [Freedom of Information Law] responses and subpoenas, and it’s incredibly burdensome on the city, I think, as you know in your experience as well.”

The records were too old to be digitized, Powers told the judge, adding that, just as the judge once did, Powers represents the city in other matters. City employees, he said, would have to find them “the old way, Judge, the way we used to do it, crawling around in the dusty storeroom … trying to determine what ZIP code’s involved, looking at the crime. A lot of boxes, a lot of files. Very burdensome, very expensive for the city.” (Powers declined to comment, citing the litigation.)

Lamendola was persuaded. Under his ruling, none of the rapes that took place in Thornden Park or in the student apartments near it will have to be disclosed. The police will have to disclose only reports of crimes that took place on the campus itself, and not reports concerning burglary, larceny and other offenses, which the judge deemed irrelevant. He also directed Syracuse University, the defendant in the case, to assist the Police Department in identifying cases that occurred on its campus.

Doe’s team filed a 37-page appellate brief in late June that argues that the court’s decision to limit the disclosure to university buildings is “hard to justify” given that the campus is interwoven with the city. The brief, authored by appellate attorney Michael Steinberg, also takes issue with the decision to allow university personnel to act as “gatekeepers,” authorizing them to review the police files and decide for themselves which meet the judge’s criteria and which don’t. That, the appeal contends, presents a conflict of interest that would “give the defendant the power to control the evidence it will have to contest at trial.”

The university has until Sept. 23 to respond to the appeal.

Legal filings also show that university lawyers have sought to reduce its liability by raising the name of a onetime suspect in the case, Michael McKinney.

At the time of Doe’s rape, McKinney was on parole after attacking a woman in a downtown parking lot. According to police reports, two witnesses saw a man matching his description running out of the Syracuse music building the night of the attack. Doe later picked him out of a photo array.

Days later, police went to his home. Officers learned from his wife that he owned a Miller beer hat identical to the one the suspect was said to have been wearing at the time of the crime. She also said he had left abruptly, for another state. Police put the case in the “inactive file,” a common occurrence for rape cases in Syracuse at the time.

Months later, McKinney turned up in New York City. By then he had come under scrutiny for the violent robbery of another Syracuse woman. According to a newspaper article from December 1987, he was eventually found guilty of that robbery and given an unusually lengthy sentence of 20 years to life, with the judge noting his repeated crimes against women. McKinney was never prosecuted in the Jane Doe case.

McKinney served 30 years in prison on the 1987 robbery charge, records show. Then, in March 2025, he was arrested for the rape of a 46-year-old woman earlier that year. A grand jury indicted him in June 2026. He has pleaded not guilty.

While McKinney was in jail, Syracuse University lawyers filed a civil complaint against him, arguing that if the university is held liable in Doe’s case, McKinney should “contribute to any award in an amount equal to his equitable share” because of “his own culpable conduct.” Because McKinney did not respond to the suit, the university lawyers have asked the judge to find him in default. This could eventually affect a jury’s decision on the financial responsibility owed to Doe by the university.

Reached by phone, Donald Kelly, McKinney’s court-appointed lawyer in the new rape case, said, “It’s concerning that the university would serve a third-party complaint upon a prisoner to try to avoid liability,” noting that McKinney has “empty pockets.”

Reiterating that McKinney was never charged in the 1987 rape of Doe, Kelly added, “Either the university was negligent or it wasn’t.” (Kelly declined to make his client available for an interview.)

Jonathan Cardi, a Wake Forest University law professor who specializes in civil litigation and has researched negligence claims for rape, said it was not especially unusual for a defendant to try to quash subpoenas of third parties or to shift liability to others.

“These are litigation tactics,” he said. “But, at the end of the day, the university is the client, and very frequently a client’s business interests or morals dictate what they say their attorneys can and can’t do. If a university is trying to turn over a new leaf, they can tell their attorney that even though this might be the best litigation practice, this is not who we want to be.”

The post Syracuse University Seeks to Prevent Campus Rape Victim From Obtaining Police Records appeared first on ProPublica.

The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is up. Attendance for this year’s WNBA All-Star Game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star Game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream set a single-game record. 

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, the focus has been on two retired NBA players, including Enes Kanter Freedom, who showed up courtside at an August 23 Chicago Sky–Indiana Fever game wearing a T-shirt that said “Woman: noun. adult human female.”

“I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue,” says Angela Perry, a WNBA content creator, tells The Intercept Briefing. “There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Perry and journalist Katelyn Burns about how the premier women’s professional basketball league has found itself at the center of a right-wing manufactured panic.

“The right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind,” says Burns who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast. 

“We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies,” continues Burns. “They are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.”

“This is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote,” says Perry. “This isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled.”

“The bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually,” warns Perry. “Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because ‘I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.’ But it will impact you.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

AL: Jessie, in typical August fashion, it feels like things have kind of slowed down somewhat with Washington in recess amid the final days of summer. I’m personally looking forward to having a little space to catch our breaths, as we enter the final midterm stretch before everyone turns their attention toward November. But there’s still plenty to cover.

ICE announced a record high in July arrests and deportations, and the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to expand its attacks on legal immigration. Nobody fret: Democrats are still melting down over Hasan Piker, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met recently with Jared Kushner. A majority-Black town in Indiana went without power — and very little news attention — for two weeks. Dolly Parton died. And as we close out the sixth month of the Iran war, the Trump administration made a big show of announcing an “economic D-Day” with new sweeping sanctions and claiming, yet again, that this would end the war.

What have you been hearing on those fronts this week?

JW: I have to say: The second Trump administration is the only time in history where this could be considered a slow news cycle. But yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. 

So with ICE, we have really been seeing a huge surge in detention and deportations. What I’ve been hearing from advocates on the ground is that it’s also coincided with an increase in violence. We’re seeing ICE use tactics like car kettling, even putting pepper spray and pepper balls into vehicles on the road. There’s a lot of dangerous activity happening with ICE — and a lot less coverage than we saw in January and February. 

In regards to Gary, Indiana, I think it’s been heartening and disheartening of a news cycle, in the sense that at first people really were not paying attention. So for those who don’t know: Thousands of residents in the predominantly Black community [were] without power for two weeks after a storm caused massive outages. There’s a lot of anger right now because people are simultaneously being squeezed by these exorbitant electricity bills, but then they also don’t have power to meet their basic survival needs — for their medical equipment, for their refrigeration of food.

It’s a story that we keep seeing repeat. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, residents of the also predominantly Black community, have been plagued for years by both expensive water bills and years of water shut-offs and boil-water notices. We just keep seeing people squeezed at both ends. You somehow don’t have access to the resources you need to survive, and you’re practically paying a second mortgage for the pleasure.

AL: Jessie, you’ve also been reporting this week on the fallout over the fight regarding trans rights in sports. This is not my wheelhouse. Can you get us up to speed on what happened, and where does the fight stand now?

JW: I had a great conversation with Angela Perry, a content creator who covers the WNBA and women’s basketball, and Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice — she also co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast — about how the WNBA, a league with no trans women in it, found itself at the center of a right-wing culture war on transgender rights.

The right-wing outrage machine started off focusing on perceived racial grievances, claiming WNBA star Caitlin Clark, who is white, had been unfairly targeted because of her race. Media Matters recently documented Fox News spending over 13 1/2 hours of its summer coverage on the WNBA, largely focusing in on race and, more recently, trans inclusion.

Then enters WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, who has become a darling of the right, earning the moniker “MAGA Barbie.” Cunningham first started getting attention for these high-profile moments of her defending her teammate Clark on the court. Both Cunningham and Clark are white and straight in a league that is predominantly Black and LGBTQ+ inclusive. And these moments quickly became fodder, as noted, for a racist, right-wing backlash fueled by Fox News and other outlets against Black players, who were called overly aggressive and were subject to racist harassment.

Related

Sophie Cunningham Is the Anti-Trans Right’s New White Woman Mascot

Then in a July interview, Cunningham told ESPN that she wanted to “protect young girls in a locker room” from “biological men.” Her comments brought yet another round of hate to the doorsteps of the WNBA, leading to protests at the games over transgender participation in sports.

In August, two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, announced that they were declaring for the 2027 WNBA draft, in a transphobic stunt to force the league to have a policy on transgender female athletes, even though there are no transgender women in the WNBA. Here’s White and then Kanter Freedom arguing on Fox programs that they should qualify.

Royce White: I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball. So I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well.

Enes Kanter Freedom:  Article 13 in Section 1 says if you identify as a woman, then you’re allowed to play.

Laura Ingraham: So you are identifying as a woman tonight? 

Enes Kanter Freedom: Sure. I identify as a woman. Sure. Yes. So I can play. 

JW: Kanter Freedom was later kicked out of a [August 23] Chicago Sky game for disrupting the game and for now has been banned from Wintrust Arena. 

But the project is bigger than just one sports league. 

We get into how the right is attempting to use transphobia and racism to roll back Title IX and women’s rights more broadly. This isn’t just a fight about sports — the Supreme Court, state attorneys general, and the Trump administration are actively coming for transgender rights as well as women’s rights and, frankly, all of our rights.

AL: It sounds like I have a lot to learn about this, so let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Joining me now is Angela Perry, a content creator who regularly delivers hot takes on the WNBA and women’s basketball, @arperry01. You can find her on TikTok, Instagram, and across all social platforms.   

Angela, welcome to The Intercept Briefing

Angela Perry: Thank you, glad to be here. 

JW: Also joining us is journalist Katelyn Burns, who writes for the independent newsletter Burns Notice and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast. Katelyn, welcome to the show. 

Katelyn Burns: Hi, thanks for having me. 

JW: The WNBA is having a moment. Viewership is way up. Attendance for this year’s All-Star WNBA game surpassed the NBA’s All-Star game. Games and events can be viewed in a record number of places, from broadcast to cable and streaming. And just this week, Angel Reese of the Atlanta Dream team set a single-game record.

But the stories about the WNBA capturing national attention in recent weeks are about none of that. Instead, two retired NBA players have captured national headlines, including Enes Kanter Freedom. Freedom showed up courtside wearing a T-shirt that said, “Woman: noun. adult human female.” Angela, you shared a really incisive take on social media. I want to start with you. What is going on here? 

AP: I think when we remove the WNBA, and we look at the political climate in America, there’s an attack on trans people. So I think that’s something worth noting because trans men and women have not been an issue in the WNBA or in the MNBA, ever. But because this has been something that a political side has used over the last few years, it has now infiltrated itself in the WNBA. 

The person that you mentioned, I refuse to learn his name, has used this as a tool. I don’t believe that he’s being genuine in any realm, in order to create this mass hysteria of sorts for an issue that’s actually simply a non-issue. There are no trans women in the WNBA; there are none attempting to be in the WNBA.

What we find here are just cis men who are trying to capitalize off of the discourse and create what looks like hostility. It’s just disheartening because it’s taking the focus away from things like you just said, Angel Reese breaking records. There’s a lot of people breaking records: Olivia Miles, Caitlin Clark. There’s so much actually happening, and then what we end up talking about the next day is this person who’s trying to take the headlines into a dark place.

And the people who aren’t watching the WNBA — that’s all they’re going to hear, that’s all they’re going to see. They don’t know what’s going on. And then they will be in my comments section, saying, “Well, he looks like he’s standing up for women!” So they actually have it completely wrong, based on getting the snippets and the sound bites from that person. So it’s pretty disheartening.

JW: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about even in talking about this on the podcast is, are we giving this more attention? But it feels like we have to talk about this because they’re distorting this issue so much. Katelyn, I want to get your thoughts as well here. 

KB: This is such a frustrating conversation. Specifically, this issue is about trans women. And the frustrating part for me as a trans person, as a journalist, is that trans women have essentially been driven out of sports at any level beyond high school in a handful of blue states. I hate to say it, but politically, it’s a settled issue. But the right has made such hay out of trans women in women’s sports that they need to keep inventing controversies in order to keep this issue front of mind. 

We have a midterm election coming up, and to be frank with you, the only thing that the right has done besides terrorizing immigrants is banning trans women from women’s sports. It’s at the center of almost all of their policies. So what you’re seeing now is they are inventing controversies about trans people in sports where there are no trans people involved.

Angela made the point: There are no trans women in the WNBA. There’s never been an out trans woman in the WNBA before. There are no out trans women college players. More than half the states in the country ban trans women from playing high school basketball, so there’s no pathway to make it to the WNBA.

This is a conversation about something that is not going to happen anytime soon, that is being drummed up for completely political purposes, just because the league has vague wording in their collective bargaining agreement over who is eligible to play. What you are seeing is just the exploitation of that gray language in the CBA to drive negative attention on the league as a whole.

JW: I want to get into the league’s response and how they’re dealing with all of this. Katelyn, you had written about what the league should say, but I also want to just ask what they are saying. Can you talk a little bit about what you think their strategy should be going forward and what their strategy has been so far?

KB: The league’s not doing itself any favors with all of this. I think that they are too afraid to take a stance in tamping down these protests and the antics of these men who are trying to intrude upon the game.

It started with suspending a Seattle team co-owner who confronted some anti-trans protesters who were at a game. Then it escalated again with Enes Kanter Freedom at this latest game, getting into it with a player on the court. He was escorted out of the building, but now they’re saying they’re not going to ban him from all of the WNBA games. So he’s just free to show up and harass another player on the court.

How you protect women out of harassing women basketball players doesn’t add up to me, but I guess it makes sense in the bizarro world of the anti-trans movement. They have come out and ruled that neither of these players — by the way, Royce White was running for office when he pulled his stunt, and then he got his ass kicked in his election, so that was really funny.

But, they’ve come out and said that neither of them are eligible to play because, clearly neither of them identify as women, which is the current language of the rules in the league. My proposal was, just go back to how sports used to treat trans women in sports: establish a testosterone limit and regular testing and prove that you’ve suppressed it for an extended period of time, and then allow somebody to play.

Studies have shown that there is no biological advantage from trans women, no broad-based biological advantage for trans women. None of these grifters can intrude upon the game that way. That was my proposal. Enes Kanter Freedom is not going to go take estrogen just to continue this stunt. It’s just not going to happen.

That was my idea. I think, in general, the league should take more of a stance of protecting their own players — because the more you allow this to fester, the more you’re going to start seeing, “Oh, this player on this team that beat us is more muscular than a woman should be. Maybe they are trans.”

Related

The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

We’ve seen this before with the Olympics, with Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won a gold medal and was the subject to a worldwide witch hunt over her gender, despite the fact that she was born female, raised as a girl, and happened to get into boxing. 

JW: It is this crazy world where you’re seeing the kind of trans-vestigating now of WNBA players. As you’ve both mentioned, there are no transgender women in the WNBA, and yet we’re seeing people now say, “Well, this person is trans, this person is trans.” And it is mostly coming along racial lines, from what we’re mostly seeing, this is mostly targeting of Black women.

[Break] 

JW: Angela, I’m curious, how do you think the league could protect players right now?

AP: Just like Katelyn mentioned, the fact that he was only banned in one arena, I think that we have to send the message. In the MNBA, when there was an irate person in the crowd — that person was banned for life. And it sent the message that this was unacceptable. It also makes me think the people who are doing it are part of the reason that the punishments aren’t that harsh as well.

Like Katelyn mentioned, this is not necessarily about trans people. This is about policing women, in general. Because there’s masculine women, and it’s a way for the powers that be to try to say, “I don’t know if that person deserved to win because they’re stronger, so now let’s investigate if they are actually a woman.”

What does that mean? What are we going to do? Start examining women, girls, even? That’s the thing — this side that talks about protecting girls, you want your 11 or 12-year-old girls to be examined by who because they want to play baseball or softball or whatever have you.

So the bigger issue is that the people who think that they’re protected, it’s always going to get to the protected class eventually. Right now, the focus is trans, and people think they’re safe because “I’m not trans. I’m a cis woman and I’m protected.” But it will impact you. 

I think the bigger picture is Title IX. I think the bigger issue is the men that are on the other side of this, they don’t care about women’s sports in general. So to them, if there was just no WNBA, they don’t really care. So that’s the bigger picture, is protecting women means protecting masculine women that don’t subscribe to social standards of what they’re supposed to look like. To me, there shouldn’t be any standards, but of course, we live in a society where there just are.

And then just protecting the women that are, like you said, already in the league. Why are we protecting this man who showed up, and treating him with any type of dignity, when they are the employees — the WNBA players. 

And that’s not just with this trans conversation. It’s also with racism. The WNBA came out with the “No space for hate” almost as a joke —because I have not seen anything implemented from that the entire season. I haven’t seen Cathy [Engelbert] since the All-Star Game; she’s supposed to be the leader of this league. It’s almost like she’s afraid to speak up because she’s afraid to lose the fan base of racist and transphobic people, which is honestly insane.

But in America, in a capitalist society, a dollar is a dollar — and they don’t care if that dollar is coming from a racist or a true fan. In my opinion, if they would invest in the true fans, you would get more true fans, and you wouldn’t have to take money from racist people or transphobic people or homophobic people. The list goes on and on.

To me, that’s not a safe space in the WNBA for the fans or the players.

JW: To your point, Angela, Media Matters recently reported that Fox News spent “13 and a 1/2 hours waging a WNBA culture war this summer,” gravitating between perceived racial grievances and trans inclusion.

I should note that the WNBA did issue a statement saying, “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA, and we strongly denounce the bad faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

Related

Even the Liberal Supreme Court Justices Ceded Ground in the Fight for Trans Existence

But because you brought up Title IX, and I think that’s really the crux of what this is about, let’s get straight into that. So shortly after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold state laws banning transgender girls from participating in school sports, the Heritage Foundation published a paper calling Title IX — which bans sex-based discrimination in schools, including in school sports — a “failed experiment.”

The sports and culture site Defector pointed out that the author of the paper is Boise State professor Scott Yenor, who once called career-oriented women, “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He argues Title IX has led to “male-normed women’s sports” that are failing at “celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace, and character.”

Katelyn, can you tell us what is the end game here?

KB: Oh, God. It’s not great. This attitude was parodied in “A League of Their Own,” a movie from like 1992, I think. Don’t quote me on that, please. There was a whole storyline and arc and a couple of scenes like mocking people who thought that women playing professional baseball would make them unfeminine.

So they’re trying to build a world where women are literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I wrote about this Heritage Foundation memo that went out — or policy paper, I’m not quite exactly sure what they labeled it, off the top of my head — but it’s terrifying. 

I have thought a lot about the intersection of gender and sports. I was a three-sport athlete growing up, and I was deeply in the closet, so I played boys’ sports. I grew up in a time where teenagers didn’t have the option to come out and transition. We didn’t even know what being trans was sometimes back in the ’80s and ’90s when I was growing up. I can’t imagine if I had found out that there was a way for me to transition but I had to give up the sports that I loved.

Related

Pete Hegseth’s Crisis of Masculinity

I am really sad that’s the position that we’re putting trans people in now, and I’m really upset that people have not thought all of this through. First of all, they don’t educate themselves about what hormones do. Everybody has hormones in their bodies — and no offense to the cis people who are listening, but you don’t even know what your own hormones do. You should because it’s an important part of your body. So they are using these bigoted stereotypes of trans women to scare you into rolling back gender politics 80 years. 

“A League of Their Own,” it was made in 1992, but it was about the ’40s when World War II was happening. Angela mentioned, what are we going to do — inspect girls’ genitals maybe? Yes, that’s exactly what the Republicans and the right and the anti-trans movement are proposing. 

I have to say, as somebody who writes about trans issues, who reads a lot about history, there’s a great podcast called “Tested,” which is about the struggle for intersex equality in athletics, and I highly recommend, if you’re interested in this topic, to go listen to that.

But also, the idea of sex testing originated with the 1936 [Berlin] Olympics that was hosted in Nazi Germany. And that shocks people when I say that. These are legacies of literal Nazis that we’re, like, trying to reestablish here in the 2020s.

So what kind of world are they building? Not one that I want to live in. 

JW: If they can define what is a woman, and they can say that transgender women are not women, then they can tell you, “This is how you have to be a woman. You cannot sue your boss for sex-based discrimination. You cannot have equal funding for your sports teams because you’re a girl.” And that’s the final play, and it’s sad that to get there, they’re going to bully a bunch of little girls, essentially. That’s the start, and then the end is to take away everyone’s rights. 

Angela, I want to get your thoughts about this as well. Is this also just about sports, or is the goal to really target the entire anti-discrimination framework?

AP: Oh, no, this is about women in general. They’re already talking about not wanting women to have the right to vote. That is being said out loud, on — I wouldn’t say legitimate news stations, but they have channels — who are people currently in positions of power. 

Related

Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination

So this isn’t just about sports. There’s a political party trying to scale us back to what they perceive was a time where things were better. But really, it was when women were more controlled. And unfortunately, there’s men in this country that don’t like for women to have a voice because they realize that they’re losing in that, I would say, game of life.

Men are losing without the inherent control that they had for centuries. We’re in the first, I would say, 20 to 30 years where women have not been forced, essentially, by society into marriage. Yes, we’ve had a choice, but as far as having our own credit cards, being able to purchase our own homes — things like that have been critical in order for women to live their own lives, not choose marriage, children, so forth and so on, which means that there are men who have not learned essentially life skills without a woman doing it for them.

They’ve not been shown that because their father had it, their grandfather had it, and they don’t know what to do. So what they’ve decided is to go and try to change the landscape of America through laws and restricting what women are able to do. So yeah, I think this is much bigger than basketball.

Of course, I’m a women’s basketball content creator, so I talk about basketball and the intersections of it, but I’m well aware that this is scary times. I just went and voted in my local election two weeks ago, and I’m like, “Is this going to be allowed in five years?” 

KB: I think that there are people who assume that if they are not trans, then they don’t need to care about non-discrimination protections for trans people.

But I have to say that when there are legal protections for trans people, it also protects everybody else from discrimination based on the assumption that you’re trans. What you’re seeing is that the conservative side of the political aisle is trying to build an apparatus where they can just simply accuse somebody of being trans, and then they can do whatever they want.

They can sex discriminate to their heart’s content as long as it’s against a trans person or somebody that is assumed to be trans. The only way out of it is a very invasive process of you have to verify the sex that you were born with. I don’t think that’s a society that most people are prepared to accept, but it’s one that is quickly forming.

So I wanted to say to those people who are like, “Oh, this is a complicated issue that I don’t really know how I feel about,” you should have feelings about it, because anybody, any day, could come along and say, “Hey, I think you’re trans. You shouldn’t be doing that.” Then you’re in a big mess that you have to get out of somehow. The only way to do it is by revealing deeply personal information about yourself. 

JW: Talking Points Memo reporter Kate Riga writes, “It’s been clear for weeks that right-wing media, eager to distract from its leaders’ woeful unpopularity and resulting fears about November’s midterms, struck gold with its anti-trans, anti-WNBA crusade.”

She goes on to say, “[Sophie] Cunningham, white and willing, has been the protagonist the right needed to unfurl its narrative. But the anti-trans campaign, the grousing about professional basketball players being fouled, it’s all in service of a grander mission. In the white Christian nationalist nation the Trump administration is openly trying to foist on the American public, a sports league where Black, gay players are celebrated and (recently, to a degree) paid well is a distinct danger.”

Angela, I want to start with you. What are your thoughts? Do you think that this white Christian nationalist grift is working, or do you think people are getting sick of seeing this stoking of hate and this fear? Or is it having the impact that they want it to have? 

AP: I think people are getting sick of it. I don’t think the Christian nationalism of it all is actually going to win. So I think it’s a dying side that they still try to reignite over and over. It’s going to get clickbait because we are people of habit. It’s the internet. Even, I sometimes click on things just to see, what are they talking about now? But I don’t think they’re going to win overall.

It really does look like there is a tide turning. It doesn’t look to be beneficial to those particular people. And so it looks as though as a whole more fans are for cohesive playing, more diversity. Especially in general, the WNBA fan is just a more open-minded fan, in my opinion as a person who’s been watching the league for 30 years.

You go to a game, and it’s just every type of person. You get on the elevator, you’ll have someone who’s 60 all the way down to the 5-year-old, from white male to young Hispanics. It’s just too much of a melting pot for them to try to get everyone out of it, and so I don’t think it’s going to win. That’s my thoughts.

But if it does, you have Unrivaled, you have some of these other leagues that have not so far allowed the same type of hate and rhetoric to infiltrate it, that the W could lose out on a really huge fan base. I think at the end of the day, they may do the right thing only because of money, not because they’re trying to do the right thing. It’s going to come down to money.

JW: Yeah, no, I could see that. To me, white Christian nationalism is just the soup that we all swim in. My theory of everything is white Christian nationalism, when you get to the end of it. But I think they start to lose when you start to show your hand in really obvious ways.

I think it’s hard to say, “Huh, you’re protecting women by throwing sex toys at female athletes while they’re doing their job.” I think that’s when people start to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe this is not a movement of people that really care about women.”

But Katelyn, I want to know what you think. Is this working, or have they hit their kind of limit of ridiculousness where the public says, “Wait a minute, you’re trying to say that people who protect trans people are ridiculous, and now we can clearly see that you’re being ridiculous” — or is it working? 

KB: I think it’s working in that it keeps getting attention.

We’re here doing this podcast, so in a lot of ways, that is something that they want to have happen. I do think that the two men who tried to jump on this train are widely known as being losers in a way, and so they’re getting the loser stank on everything, which is kind of funny. I think that that has a bigger impact than we think.

Riley Gaines is a swimmer who is known for tying for fifth place with trans woman Lia Thomas in a college race, and she has turned that into a very lucrative career. But she’s also going to be known as a loser. I think that ultimately is where everything is headed. 

If you look at what voters actually care about, they really don’t care about trans issues. There’s 10 people who base their vote on what a candidate thinks about trans issues, and they’re all going to vote for Republicans pretty much, at least on the anti-trans side. We’ve seen exit polling over and over again showing that trans issues are the lowest salience issue in the minds of voters.

People care about the economy. People care about gas prices, grocery prices. They care about housing prices. They care about another foreign war. Nobody’s going into the midterms thinking, “Oh, I have to vote for the anti-trans candidate.” I shouldn’t say nobody. There are people who will do that, but they’ve already made up their minds.

So I don’t think that you can convert even more people over to that type of thinking, nor do I think that you can win people back from that line of thinking. So I think that a lot of the time and effort spent trying to persuade people on this is really a sunk cost for those who are doing it.

And I have pretty high hopes that in the end, justice will prevail, fairness will prevail, and the liberal order will not fall to Christian nationalism. 

JW: I’m pretty happy to leave it there. Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are losers, and we will not fall to white Christian nationalism.

Thank you both so much for joining. Really appreciate having you on The Intercept Briefing. 

AP: Thank you so much for inviting me. 

KB: Thank you, thank you.

JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us 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 do not 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 Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The controversial data center plan near Delaware City was the largest proposed in the state, sparking a backlash against the industry that resulted in new local and state regulations. Many residents expressed concerns about the facility’s potential impact on energy costs and the environment. Now the proposal appears to be at a dead end.

Plans for a massive data center to be built near Delaware City appear to be at a dead end, at least in their current form. 

Earlier this year, the development, dubbed Project Washington, faced its first major setback when Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson ruled that the plans would violate the Coastal Zone Act — a landmark Delaware law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines.  

The data center project’s developer, Starwood Digital Ventures, then appealed the decision, but it was subsequently upheld by a state board. 

Starwood then appealed again to the Delaware Superior Court. But in early July, the company voluntarily withdrew the appeal with no public acknowledgment. It came two days after the state legislature passed several bills imposing new, stricter regulations on the data center industry. 

Gov. Matt Meyer signed those into law earlier this week. 

Since there are no other challenges to Patterson’s ruling, the proposed data center project is not allowed to move forward under its current design.

Still, the company’s data center aspirations in Delaware are still alive. In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Starwood spokesman Jim Lamb said the company “is continuing its work with state and local regulators, labor, and the entire community to find a pathway forward” for the project. 

In the statement, Lamb did not specify how the project could move forward. Nor did he say whether the state’s new laws regulating data centers influenced Starwood’s decision to withdraw its appeal.

Delaware’s decades-old regulation

The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s environmentally sensitive shorelines by prohibiting new heavy industry from them.

In his decision on the Starwood proposal, Patterson pointed to the data center’s proposed use of 516 backup diesel generators, which would operate in the case of a power outage or other emergency situation, as a violation to the Coastal Zone Act. 

Together, those generators would rely on 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling. 

While Patterson pointed to the generators, many opponents of data centers in Delaware have pointed their ire at the electricity they could pull from the power grid.

Starwood’s proposal would have consumed the same amount of electricity as nearly 1 million homes, according to expert estimates, prompting fears that it could cause power bills to surge. 

Similar concerns also have resonated nationally in recent years as the data center industry has been among the fastest growing in the country, providing the physical infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence systems.

Since Starwood submitted its plan last summer, several other data center proposals have come to the state. 

A proposed data center near St. Georges, which would be built near the land that currently hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland, is still in preliminary stages. 

It also would fall under regulations outlined in the Coastal Zone Act, but it is unclear if the law would prohibit it from moving forward. That would likely depend on how the project were to be powered.

Separately, developers behind a plan for a data center near Newark paused their project recently, according to New Castle County Councilman Tim Sheldon. He said they did so after he brokered an informal deal with them. 

Meanwhile, a smaller data center proposal also recently met its demise in Harrington, after residents rallied against the project.

Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of the environmental group Sierra Club Delaware, said he and others who have been critical of Project Washington are happy that Starwood decided to withdraw their appeal. 

But he said since data centers are not explicitly named in the Coastal Zone Act, data center developers could try to build in coastal areas again. 

He said the state and local governments need to pass laws restricting where data centers can locate, how much water they can use and how much noise they can make. 

“We need consistency across the state on those types of protections,” Thompson said.  

The post Project Washington pulls appeal, data center won’t proceed under current plan appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Exclusive: Michael Boren, a senior official overseeing the US Forest Service, is accused by Democratic senators of ‘inappropriate interference’

Donald Trump’s administration is facing calls to launch an investigation into allegations that Michael Boren, a senior official who oversees the US Forest Service, pressed agency staff to deploy additional resources to fight a fire burning near his Idaho ranch.

Three Democratic senators accused Boren of “inappropriate interference” in a letter seen by the Guardian, demanding answers from Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary. Boren serves as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment.

A 2019 California law expanded the time frame for child sex abuse victims to sue. Now schools and cities are struggling with the financial fallout from settlements.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
A national debate has been ongoing for years about whether school resource officers increase safety in schools or if they simply direct kids into the criminal justice system. Earlier this month, the Christina Board of Education joined the conversation when it voted to phase out school resource officers in middle schools.

The Christina School District will phase out its use of school resource officers at middle schools, and replace them with constables. 

Following a heated debate at a meeting earlier this month, the Christina school board voted to retain school resource officers (SROs) at middle schools for just six months, giving the district the time to hire constables as replacements. The officers will remain at the district’s three high schools for the full school year. 

The decision was the result of two votes by the school board. The first would have renewed the school resource officers’ contracts with the Christina School District. Five members on the seven-person board voted against it, including Amy Trauth, Celita Cherry, Stephanie Ingram, Doug Manley and Lauren Swain.

A subsequent vote approved replacing SROs with constables, who are direct employees of a school district rather than a police department. They would serve as armed security for the schools but wouldn’t have the same power to arrest individuals.

The measure was meant to be a compromise, balancing some board members’ concerns with having armed officers in schools and the need for school safety. 

But not every board member was satisfied.

“Since the police officers are required to be armed as part of their contract, I cannot support these contracts,” Manley, the only board member to vote against the compromise, said during the board meeting.

School resource officers are sworn police officers who work in schools but remain within the law enforcement chain of command. While supporters say they can effectively respond to dangerous situations, critics have increasingly argued they cause students to be arrested for actions that in the past would not involve law enforcement. 

News reports from across the country in recent years have highlighted the critiques of SROs. One report from Iowa said Black students and students with disabilities are more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement than other students. In Texas, reporters have found thousands of use-of-force incidents in recent years.

It is not immediately clear if those trends hold true in Delaware. 

Spotlight Delaware requested data from the Delaware State Police regarding incidents such as arrests or detainment of students in the Christina, Brandywine, Red Clay Consolidated, and Colonial school buildings that did not fall under Wilmington Police jurisdiction, but was told the information would require a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request. 

By contrast, the Wilmington Police Department did provide data. A department spokesperson said its officers made one arrest during the past year at the Maurice Pritchett Academy and one arrest at the Bayard School. Both schools serve Christina students in first through eighth grade. 

There were seven arrests made at the Howard High School of Technology and 15 made at Brandywine’s P.S. duPont Middle School, the spokesman David Karas said. 

“The vast majority of these charges were not physical arrests, but rather an SRO issuing a summons or a juvenile civil citation,” Karas said in a statement. 

Karas also said that an officer would take other measures that would not involve “a formal criminal charge” during incidents that warrant immediate intervention, such as fights. 

An ongoing conversation

The Christina school board’s August meeting did not mark the first disagreement between board members about whether to renew SRO contracts.

During a May board meeting, Christina Superintendent Deirdra Aikens and Harold “Butch” Ingram, the assistant to the superintendent, presented three options for school safety. 

The first would be to make no changes. The second would be to keep SROs only in the high schools and replace them with constables in the middle schools. The third option would be to replace all SROs with constables. 

Though the board voted three months later to move ahead with the second option, some members say they have not received comments of concern from community members regarding the presence of SROs in schools. 

Board President Monica Moriak said the board did not have conversations with the Christina community regarding their thoughts on SROs in schools. She also noted that the last school year was “a very traumatic year, especially for Pritchett.”

Last October, a shooting took place near the Maurice Pritchett Academy in Wilmington’s East Side community, which is part of the Christina School District. Both victims attended Newark High School, as reported by the Newark Post. 

Moriak said she wants the board to hold follow-up listening sessions with community members, but does not know what those will look like yet. 

Manley also said he has not had community members approach him with concerns relating to SROs’ presence in schools. 

Instead, Manley said most of his conversations are about “educating them that constables and police officers are different.”

Balancing safety and accountability

For some board members, the conversation about school safety cannot end with whether a school has SROs. 

Board Vice President Y.F. Lou said the root causes of incidents, such as why students may be fighting or why there are “violent encounters,” must also be addressed. 

“That’s always where my guiding principle is: Can we prevent this? What can we do to prevent this? And what resources do we have to make sure that you know that preventative intervention is in place?” he said.

For other board members, the crux of the concern regarding SROs is whether they can be held responsible for any incidents that may occur, especially because they are armed. 

During the August meeting, Manley said he was against hiring “contracted police officers” because SROs “are not employees of our district; they are employees of their police troop.” 

As contracted police officers, SROs fall under the Delaware Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, also known by its acronym LEOBOR.

Manley told Spotlight Delaware there is “zero transparency and accountability” for SROs because of LEOBOR. Advocates have tried for years in Delaware to reform the blanket protections for law enforcement officer’s privacy, but efforts to date have resulted in only partial transparency into the disciplinary issues of officers.

Manley also referenced the recent shooting of 19-year-old Kadir Skinner in Wilmington, which he said police did “for no reason.” 

The City of Wilmington police department has asserted that Skinner had pointed a gun toward a crowd of people prior to the foot chase, during which an officer shot the teen. 

The post Christina to replace police officers with constables in middle schools appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
While independent libraries in Sussex County often serve as hubs for community resources, they are also strapped for money. In the wake of a failed campaign by library leaders to increase the county’s library tax, an outside consultant has been hired to study the budget woes. It remains to be seen, however, whether the study will result in a funding increase, and what say the libraries will have in the process. 

Following nearly a year of pleas from independent libraries in Sussex County for more government financial support, county officials have hired an outside consultant to examine the libraries’ funding structure and role within their communities. 

The study comes in response to a failed effort earlier this year by independent library leaders to lobby Sussex County Council to raise the county’s library tax rate — its share of the libraries’ funding structure. 

As it currently stands, the funding structure almost always leaves large gaps in the independent libraries’ annual budgets — deficits of anywhere from 13% to 52%.

Council members opted against the libraries’ requested tax hike, pointing to resident blowback from the property tax increases spurred by last year’s property reassessment and budget requests by other departments. 

Instead, county leaders hired consulting group Berry Dunn to more thoroughly study the problem before making any changes.

“Any request to increase taxes is something the county takes seriously and believes should be carefully evaluated before making a decision,” Sussex County Finance Director Gina Jennings wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware. 

Consultants began working this month and will continue through early 2027. 

Independent library directors said the study is a step in the right direction, but they are skeptical that the county-initiated study will give the libraries a sufficient opportunity to share their experience and share their funding needs. 

“I do worry that because these studies don’t get done very often, they’re not going to get the full picture,” said Philip Hartmeyer, director of the Frankford Library. “If you’re going to do this, you have to do it thoroughly.” 

How are libraries funded in Delaware? 

Delaware has two different funding structures for county-run and independent libraries. 

County-run libraries are funded entirely by taxes collected at the county level, while independent libraries, which operate as nonprofit organizations, are financed through a mix of county funding, state funding and the library’s own fundraising.  

State funds make up about 15% of an independent library’s total budget. While the goal is for county funding to make up the remaining 85%, Sussex County’s library tax typically only covers about half a library’s budget. Directors are then left to close annual funding gaps.

For example, the Selbyville Library had to come up with roughly $200,000 in funds, or nearly 40% of its operating budget, for the current fiscal year, library director Kelly Kline said. 

Eleven of Sussex County’s 14 libraries are independent. 

This spring, they launched a campaign to raise the county’s annual library tax rate from $0.0023 per $100 of assessed property value to $0.0046 per $100, or from roughly $4 to $23 annually to $9 to $46.

This rate increase would have shrunk the funding gap libraries must make up to only about 10% of their annual budget.

While the county council declined to adopt the library tax rate increase as a part of its fiscal year 2027 budget, Jennings said hiring a consultant was the county’s way of addressing the libraries’ request for more county dollars. 

She said the study’s results will determine how the county proceeds. 

“With the recent request potentially increasing the county’s contribution to closer to 90% of [independent library] funding, it raises important questions about the county’s future role and level of involvement in the overall operations and financial oversight of the independent libraries,” Jennings said. 

Library leaders skeptical

While county leaders described the study as a valuable step toward addressing the libraries’ funding difficulties, library directors said they have concerns about how the study is being conducted. 

Berry Dunn, the consulting firm hired to complete the study, will speak to library employees, users and non-library user residents to “evaluate the request for additional library funding and better understand the long-term needs of the countywide library system,” Jennings said. 

The project will cost the county $100,000. 

At the Aug. 19 meeting of the Sussex County Library Advisory Board, County Librarian Rachel Lynch said the consultant will only communicate directly with county staff, who will then give progress reports to the library directors through monthly advisory board meetings. 

Some library directors, though, told Spotlight Delaware they are disappointed that there is not at least one independent library director represented on the project team alongside county staff, in order to better convey the libraries’ experience to the consultant. 

“If [the consultant] is paid for by the county, and the project team is 100% county representation, my concern is for us independent libraries,” Kline, the Selbyville director, told Spotlight Delaware. 

County staff, however, said this structure is typical. 

The county hired an outside analyst to look at volunteer fire departments, and the fire department staff were not directly involved in that study, Jennings said. 

Hartmeyer, the Frankford director, also said there is considerable nuance to the needs of the independent libraries in different parts of the county, like Lewes versus Seaford or Bridgeville, that the consultant will have a hard time understanding in a brief study.  

“My concern is whether they’re going to get the full context of the constituency that is served by the libraries,” he said. 

Nonetheless, the library directors said they view the hiring of the consultant as a step in the direction toward more funding and a better recognition by the county of the role they serve in their communities. 

“If things don’t change, we absolutely will have to start doing less,” Kline said. “I don’t think that’s something our communities want.” 

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 Sussex County hires consultant to study library funding; library leaders skeptical appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The Norwegian ruler's forbidden love story with a commoner who would become queen sparked a scandal but ultimately endeared him to the public.

Soaring demand for services has led to tenfold increase in spending in a year in some areas, says NHS Alliance

NHS leaders have warned that the costs of meeting soaring demand for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism services in England are “running out of control” and have become unsustainable, with spending in some areas rising by as much as tenfold over the course of a year.

The NHS Alliance, which represents health managers, said the rise in demand since the coronavirus pandemic was forcing some to close waiting lists and look at reining in other services they provide.

The jury is considering its verdict in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old Massachusetts mother who strangled her three kids to death in 2023.

Led by the nose from game to terrible game by increasingly disturbing and terrible adverts, I feel like I’m in the cinema scene from A Clockwork Orange

We’re all escaping something when we play video games. Mostly it’s the drabness of real life, where we don’t get to command kingdoms using armies of dragons, win Champions League trophies with our local team, or inhabit the body of an improbably speedy hedgehog.

Sometimes I play them because I want to escape from the version of me that gets paralysed by depression, and boy has the black dog been sniffing at my bits recently, because the Atlantic Ocean is separating me from my wife for a few months. For 30 years she has been the light that banishes that darkness, and I am honestly lost without her. If that sounds pathetic, you haven’t met her. She leaves everybody she meets feeling better. It’s a superpower that warrants a call from the X-Men.

America’s second biggest sporting obsession returns this weekend, which means marching bands, 100,000-seat stadiums, ancient rivalries and, increasingly, the operating model of a sport being invented in real time

Is college football healthy? It’s a seductive question, one that now comes up every year around this time. Actually, it never recedes, so it’s just with the sport all the time. It’s also the wrong question, because whoever answers it is free to choose their own adventure. The television ratings are way up there in the galaxy. Money rains down on dozens of programs and thousands of players. Marching bands continue to march. Yet a lot of teams are stranded by realignment or an economic inability to keep up in a transfer arms race. Their fans – actually any team’s fans – may be exhausted by escalating asks for their dollars.

If you have been checked out of the sport for a while ahead of this weekend’s first set of games, you may feel like your body has been frozen for a few decades. Indiana, (yes, really) are the defending national champs, fresh off a 16-0 season that puts them on the list of the handful of best teams ever. Texas Tech, once likened to Siberia by a former coach who is now a US senator, are the fiercest program in the Big 12. Ole Miss are good for the first time since integration. At least Ohio State and Georgia are still powerhouses.

The site once paired news and scores with distinctive voices. Its overhaul under Sinclair Media is the latest sign that serious tennis writing in the US is becoming endangered

A few weeks ago, as I often do, I went to the Tennis.com site to get an update about a match and to check out the commentary from my fellow tennis journalists. I was taken aback when, instead of the usual colorful graphics and info, I was greeted with a rudimentary-looking homepage that displayed only scores and rankings.

At first I thought it was a glitch of some sort. But sadly, no. As it turns out, Tennis.com, originally the online site of Tennis Magazine, is under a complete overhaul and will no longer be the home of esteemed writers such as Steve Tignor and Pete Bodo, robbing fans of unique and personal takes on the sport. It appears the longest running American tennis-specific publication is no longer alive in any form.

The singer had a serendipitous mixture of humor, humility and humanity. We could all stand to channel it a bit more

The moment that the world found out that Dolly Parton had died, I was in a hair salon in the reddest congressional district in New York state. The neighborhood on the shore of Lake Erie where I move every summer voted solidly for Donald Trump in 2024.

I often pass a lawn sign that has something misogynistic to say about New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, and the mere mention of Kamala Harris’s name can bring derisive jokes. Of course, there certainly are liberals and independents to be found, but on balance the area leans right.

The automaker, one of the nation’s biggest employers, could shed tens of thousands of jobs amid global market shifts driven by electrification, AI and autonomous driving.

The first emergency call about a detainee trying to harm himself came about a month after Camp East Montana — an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas — started to house immigrants. It was 2:50 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12. 

“We have a patient currently in holding who is saying he’s got suicidal ideations, swallowed some foreign object, has refused our basic medical care here,” a nurse told the operator. In the audio, you can hear that someone is moaning and yelling in the background. 

“At this point he is unable to speak and rolling on the floor in agonizing pain, holding his stomach,” the nurse continued. “A preliminary X-ray was done and a foreign object was found. We just need to take him to the hospital that’s closest so that they can verify if the object is currently in his system and possibly to excavate the object.”

I’ve been reporting on Camp East Montana for months. It sits on barren military land and was supposed to be a model for how the Trump administration would carry out mass deportations. Instead, it became an example of what could go wrong. It remains in operation despite claims of inhumane conditions and abuse, which Department of Homeland Security officials have said are “categorically false.” ICE plans to keep the facility running at least through Sept. 30, 2027, The Associated Press reported.

In the span of six weeks between December 2025 and January 2026, three men died at Camp East Montana, making it one of the country’s deadliest detention centers at the time.

In July, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published my investigation into the Jan. 3 death of one of those men, Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national with a history of mental illness. He died after an altercation with guards over his medication, and a medical examiner ruled Lunas Campos’ death a homicide. (The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but Department of Homeland Security officials later said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself.)

We found that Lunas Campos had repeatedly raised concerns about his mental health while detained at Camp East Montana. Records show staff didn’t transfer him to a facility that could better care for him, despite repeatedly saying they were working to do so.

I wanted to understand more about how the facility was responding to such incidents. I obtained, via public records requests, recordings of more than 160 emergency calls, and I spoke with staff, government officials familiar with the facility, detainees, lawyers and advocates who had spent time inside the detention center. 

I asked DHS about my reporting and some of the 911 calls. A spokesperson did not comment on the specific issues identified in the calls, but said the facility provides “comprehensive medical services, including mental health services.” If the detainee requires a higher level of medical care, they are referred to local emergency services as needed, the spokesperson said. The official also said that for many immigrant detainees, the healthcare they get while in custody is the best they’ve gotten in their lives.

Now I want to share some of those 911 calls with you. While they may be difficult to listen to or read about, they offer a glimpse into what’s happening in a place reporters don’t have access to. The calls and my investigation show failures in responding to mental health and medical emergencies that extend beyond those experienced by one man. (Note: In some cases, recordings were edited to remove long stretches where no one was talking.) 

Oct. 12, 2025: “They will not give them medical treatment.”

Two months after Camp East Montana began holding detainees, some were growing so desperate that they were having friends and relatives call 911 to seek medical help on their behalf. A man from North Texas called three times on Oct. 12, trying to get a detainee, whom he identified as his partner, emergency care for his kidney stones. 

“Why isn’t the facility calling?” the operator asked.

“Because they don’t care. They don’t care about any of the detainees. They will not give them medical treatment; they don’t care. … He does not like to go to the hospital. So when he is saying he is in emergent pain at a level of 10 out of 10 and he needs to go to the emergency room, it is no joke; it has got to be very, very serious.” 

In a declaration to lawyers, a 32-year-old Venezuelan man identified by a pseudonym, Xavier, who fits the profile of the man with kidney stones, said he had gone on a hunger strike because he was not getting any information about his case or about a court date. “Being here feels like torture,” he said. “I feel like this experience is finishing me emotionally and physically. I don’t feel like I can survive for another month at this place. They treat us like animals.” 

Nov. 2, 2025: “We don’t have any oxygen for her.”

In some of the emergency calls, the medical providers themselves lamented how little they could do for their patients.

A nurse at the facility dialed 911. She said she had a 46-year-old woman with COVID-19 who was short of breath and whose oxygen saturation was dropping. “But the issue is we don’t have any oxygen for her, especially if she does start desaturating even more,” she tells the operator. “She just doesn’t look good.” 

“OK. Let me request assistance, OK? Just bear with me,” the operator tells her.

“Apparently she’s been sick for the last couple of days and she’s asked to be brought into the clinic and they hadn’t brought her in,” the nurse explains later in the call. “She was just brought in today, bless her heart, so I’m just worried about her.” 

Feb. 28, 2026: “Was this accidental or intentional?”

By late February, three people had died at Camp East Montana. The first one was Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old Guatemalan man who died on Dec. 3, 2025, of liver and kidney failure. Then came Lunas Campos’ death on Jan. 3. Less than two weeks later, ICE reported that Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan who had been detained during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, was found unresponsive and with a piece of fabric around his neck. His autopsy has not been made public. 

Still, the 911 calls kept coming.

“OK, we have a guy who’s overdosed. He’s a detainee,” a nurse told an emergency operator on Feb. 28. 

They didn’t know much about the 60-year-old man who had just arrived at Camp East Montana or about what he had taken about an hour ago, she said. Someone had seen him “popping pills” and stumbling around.

“Was this accidental or intentional?” the operator asked.

“Intentional,” she said.

The post Listen to 911 Calls From Inside an Immigration Detention Center: “We Just Need to Take Him to the Hospital” appeared first on ProPublica.

Flash flooding and mudslides in Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, while convective storms hit western Europe

After an “unprecedented” deluge in Chiba in mid-August, Japan has experienced further extreme rainfall in recent days. Moisture from the Sea of Japan brought relentless heavy rain to the prefectures of Ishikawa and Toyama on Thursday.

In Himi, Toyama, 361.5mm of rain fell in 24 hours, equivalent to half the average annual rainfall in London and Paris. Several rivers burst their banks, triggering flash floods and mudslides, felling and damaging buildings.

A new project called STREAMLINE is using artificial intelligence and supercomputers to solve one of nuclear physics’ hardest challenges — unlocking insights into atomic nuclei, neutron stars and fundamental forces.

Aug. 28, 2026 — At the heart of every atom lies a tightly bound cluster of protons and neutrons — a system governed by some of the most complex interactions in nature. Understanding how these particles behave is one of the central challenges of nuclear physics. Now, a project called STREAMLINE is taking on that challenge using a powerful combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing.

The STREAMLINE project uses machine learning to solve the nuclear many-body problem. Image credit: Jane Kim/Argonne.

A collaboration of universities and national laboratories, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, STREAMLINE aims to solve what scientists call the nuclear quantum many-body problem — the challenge of predicting how many interacting particles behave collectively as a quantum system. It’s the challenge of calculating how dozens of particles influence one another at the quantum level, where the rules of physics differ from everyday experience.

“This project aims to solve the nuclear quantum many-body problem with high accuracy by leveraging machine learning techniques,” said Argonne scientist Alessandro Lovato, a lead investigator on the effort.

The problem is difficult because the number of possible interactions grows exponentially as more particles are added. Traditional methods quickly run into computational limits. Even the world’s most powerful supercomputers can handle only relatively small systems.

STREAMLINE changes that equation. By using machine learning — a form of AI — researchers can approximate these complex interactions much more efficiently. Instead of calculations that grow exponentially, the new methods scale more gently, allowing scientists to study much larger systems than before.

At Argonne, Lovato’s team is pioneering the use of neural networks — computer models trained on data to recognize patterns and make predictions — to represent quantum wave functions. A wave function is a mathematical description of a quantum system that encodes everything scientists can know about it. By replacing conventional equations with flexible neural networks, researchers can model systems that were previously out of reach.

The results are already striking. Where earlier methods could handle about a dozen interacting particles, the new approach can scale up to 100, opening the door to studying more realistic atomic nuclei.

“This was really a game changer,” Lovato said.

The implications extend far beyond nuclear physics. A better understanding of atomic nuclei helps scientists interpret experiments that probe the fundamental laws of nature, including studies of neutrinos — elusive particles that pass through matter almost undetected. It also informs models of neutron stars, the ultradense remnants of collapsed stars, where matter exists under extreme conditions.

In practical terms, STREAMLINE will produce quantities that experimental scientists can measure, such as the size, energy and structure of atomic nuclei. These results can then be compared with data from facilities such as the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), strengthening the connection between theory and experiment. ATLAS is a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne that focuses on nuclear physics.

The project is also highly collaborative. The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University leads the recently renewed STREAMLINE 2 collaboration, which also brings together researchers from DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Florida State University, North Carolina State University, Ohio State University, Ohio University and University of Tennessee, alongside Argonne.

Argonne combines deep expertise in nuclear theory with access to some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers, including systems such as Aurora. Housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), Aurora is capable of performing over a quintillion calculations per second. These resources allow researchers to run the large-scale simulations required to train and apply machine learning models to quantum systems. The ALCF is also a DOE Office of Science user facility.

STREAMLINE also aligns with DOE’s Genesis Mission, an initiative focused on using AI to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation. By integrating AI directly into fundamental physics research, STREAMLINE demonstrates how machine learning can transform not just data analysis, but the way science itself is conducted.

Beyond its scientific impact, the project is helping shape the future workforce. The combination of nuclear physics, AI and high performance computing is attracting a new generation of researchers, equipping them with skills that are increasingly valuable across science and industry.

STREAMLINE represents a shift in how scientists approach one of the field’s hardest problems and a glimpse of what’s possible when advanced computing and human ingenuity come together.

As Lovato said, ​“The neural network doesn’t know anything about nuclear physics — but when we train it, it learns to behave like a quantum system.”

And that, researchers say, may be the key to unlocking the next era of discovery.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne: STREAMLINE Uses AI to Tackle One of Nuclear Physics’ Toughest Problems appeared first on HPCwire.

Expeditioners at research station on Macquarie Island will be evacuated over possible ‘psychological stress’, while 100 dead little penguins found on Tasmanian island

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A dolphin has died from H5 bird flu in South Australia, marking the second native mammal species known to have contracted the virus.

On Friday afternoon, the Tasmanian government said it was assessing the discovery of about 100 dead little penguins on King Island but it was unable to test them for H5 bird flu due to their “decayed condition”.

About 80 people sign open letter to Andy Burnham calling for legislation to protect voice ownership

Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville and Matt Lucas are among a group of actors backing a campaign against artificial intelligence voice cloning.

Save Our Voices Now, which is also being supported by Luke Evans, Jen Brister, Siobhán McSweeney and Pearl Mackie, aims to stop the practice in which AI technology is used to replicate a real person’s voice to say anything it is prompted to.

Problems including derailments have hit network during one of the hottest and driest summers on record

Britain’s railways have faced a string of heat-related problems this summer, including a derailment near Lewes in East Sussex two weeks ago that injured 30 people, and another the next day when the rear carriages of a Greater Anglia train derailed “in an upright position” at Wickford railway station in Essex, with no reported injuries.

The problems came during one of the hottest and driest summers on record, with a series of heatwaves, and drought declared across large parts of England and Wales. Britain’s railways, built for a cooler, wetter climate, have been put under pressure. Network Rail said the summer had “presented exceptional challenges to the railway”.

Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports: While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration's assault on science is behind their departure. "I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world," said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. "And I woke up one day and that wasn't true anymore." He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty. "If scientists don't stand up for truth, no one will," Dr. Zamore said. The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa. "While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we're doubling down on science," Melanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, told reporters at the announcement, in Vancouver, of the new university hiring. She billed it as the world's "largest talent attraction" project. The European Union has made a similar push. "Years from now, we will look back at today's announcement, and we will be able to seize the lasting impact of our choices," Ms. Joly said. Unpredictable decisions about funding prompted Seth Guikema, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, who has specialized in natural hazards modeling at the University of Michigan, to look elsewhere. His work focuses on how climate hazards inequitably affect communities, and that work has become harder to fund, he said. "Every country sets its priorities in terms of what is going to get funded, and I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society," said Dr. Guikema, who will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is polite to reposition a guest’s shoes when they arrive, but the emergency services in one city advise just skipping that part

Etiquette, manners and consideration for others are integral pillars of Japanese society but there are times when they might go a step too far, according to one city’s emergency services.

The fire department in the central city of Kanazawa has urged people not to tidy up the shoes that paramedic crews have taken off when entering a house, warning it could hinder their ability to get in or out quickly, particularly when carrying someone on a stretcher.

Flash floods have killed at least 469 people while homes and infrastructure have been swept away

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• What caused the flash flood in Nepal and Tibet?

The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake ⁠formed at the ⁠site ⁠where the ​deadly torrents occurred ⁠was rising and ⁠at risk ​of ‌bursting.

The catastrophic flash floods that hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and obliterating entire villages, killed at least 469 people and left more than 1,300 missing.

Energy minister says states can apply to use coal and gas supply to power datacentres but must prove it is cheaper than renewables

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Chris Bowen insists federal Labor’s new national laws on datacentre power supply will not include carve-outs for Queensland and the Northern Territory, with states that are eager to use coal and gas required to make their case to the national regulator.

The energy minister told Guardian Australia on Friday the only concession agreed at Wednesday’s meeting of national cabinet was that existing coal and gas supply could be used on the condition it could be shown to be cheaper than renewables.

Collaboration leverages DualityBio's proprietary DUPAC payload platform and early global clinical development capabilities, with Genentech assuming further clinical development and global commercializationDUPAC, one of the DualityBio's four proprietary ADC technology platforms, comprises multiple payloads with novel mechanism of action designed…

The U.S. military this week used a laser to shoot down three drones along the U.S.-Mexico border that were allegedly operated by drug cartels, the Pentagon said.

Other governments could seek similar concessions, while separate legal action is pending in places ranging from Kenya to the Netherlands

In October 2021, Abrham Meareg’s father, a professor of chemistry in Ethiopia’s northern town of Bahir Dar, was shot at close range and died outside his family home. This was in the middle of the country’s civil war.

For weeks, Facebook’s algorithm had actively promoted posts calling for the academic to be murdered, according to Meareg and Foxglove, a nonprofit organisation supporting Meareg’s lawsuit against the company in Kenya. These posts included photos of his father and his home address.

The case for a U.S. military drawdown.

Who will bear the costs of a global trade adjustment?

Anthropic ​argued designation as ‘supply-chain risk’ could cost billions ‌in lost business ‌and reputational harm

A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From "rizz" to "meat proxy," words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and other chatbots followed, the use of certain words and phrases has spiked on the web. The researchers, led by data scientist Samuel Bestvater, studied nearly half a million English language webpage texts in snapshots over the past five years. Not only has AI-written text become more common, but it could also be influencing how people write, such as trying to avoid using the "tells" that have become associated with AI-generated text. Bestvater and his team detected double the number of em dashes, double the frequency of particular words -- such as "delve," "testament" and "interplay" -- and nearly triple the use of a phrasing known as negative parallelisms ("it's not X, it's Y"), as well as a 63% increase in Oxford commas. But while AI labs continually try to tweak their models to generate more humanlike text, the people they're mimicking aren't staying the same. "Human writers might also be changing the way that they write in response to AI. I've seen some anecdotal evidence of people saying, 'Now I avoid em dashes,'" Bestvater said. "If human writers are adjusting their choices of words and phrases and punctuation to try to differentiate their writing from AI-generated text, then you would see a pattern that looks sort of like that in the chart." "You can see changes in people's speech. People are tending to more commonly use these low-frequency words in their speech because they're spending a lot of time listening to or reading AI-generated content," said Roger Kreuz, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Memphis who recently wrote about how difficult it is for people to identify bot-written text.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Renewed scrutiny comes after police officer accused of falsifying records in order to close the cases of people who were later found dead

South Korean police will re-examine about 310,000 missing persons cases closed over the past three years, prompted by a scandal in which an officer was arrested on suspicion of falsifying records to close files on two people who were later found dead.

The case has drawn national attention, with President Lee Jae Myung ordering an investigation into the police handling of it and telling the force to draw up a reform plan.

President’s directive stalls for a second time about a week before the first postal ballots are due to be sent out

A federal judge on Thursday halted – at least for the moment – attempts to implement Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting.

The president’s directive stalled for a second time about a week before the first mail ballots are due to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections. In the US district court, Judge Indira Talwani placed a 14-day hold on the government implementing the order in a case that could be headed back to the supreme court, which on Monday overturned an earlier ruling of hers that had blocked Trump’s order from taking effect.

This live blog has now closed – but our coverage continues at a new blog here

Eyewitness accounts have been emerging from the Tibetan side of the border, with a woman saying she was travelling from Gyirong town towards Nepal on Wednesday morning when her group encountered the flood about 4km from Gyirong port.

“Trees and electricity poles had already been knocked down, and the flood water was bearing down on us. We didn’t dare turn around, so we could only reverse,” the woman, surnamed Fang, told Xiaoxiang Morning News.

I was really scared. My whole body was trembling.

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On Wednesday, Trump officially signed a proclamation on Wednesday that suspends higher tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef imports for 90 days. This comes after backlash to the proposal – designed to lower grocery costs for Americans in the run-up to the November midterms.

Several Republicans – in states with sizable cattle farming industries – have criticized the policy, saying it is a short term solution that will stymie ranchers’ ability to rebuild their herds.

Four leading livestock and agricultural organizations also wrote a letter to the president on Wednesday urging him to reverse course.

“Flooding the market with discounted foreign beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd, strengthen food security, or lower grocery bills in a lasting way,” the groups wrote.

Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington, before traveling to Houston, Texas where he’ll headline a Republican National Commitee (RNC) fundraiser, and help boost Ken Paxton — the state’s attorney general and Republican nominee for Senate.

A reminder that Paxton beat long serving Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary earlier this year after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Paxton is set to face Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico in November.

More than 1,000 people, including many Americans, are still missing along the Nepal-China border after deadly floods and mudflows likely triggered by a glacial collapse.

Decision allows manufacturers to begin shipping doses, but confusion remains about insurance coverage

The US Food and Drug Administration approved updated Covid-19 vaccines on Thursday, allowing manufacturers to begin shipping doses to pharmacies and doctors’ offices across the country.

The FDA approved Moderna, Novavax-Sanofi and Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated Covid vaccines, the companies ⁠said on Thursday, ⁠after ​an advisory panel recommended that the shots should target ⁠the dominant XFG variant.

Albany, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul said New York will continue calling Lake Ontario by its traditional name despite President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the federal government to rename it “Lake America.”

“New York won’t be calling it that,” Hochul wrote Thursday on X, joining Democratic and Republican state leaders who criticized the change.

Trump signed the executive order Thursday amid an escalating trade dispute with Canada. The federal designation applies to U.S. government agencies, maps and documents but does not require New York state or Canada to adopt the new name.

Lake Ontario borders New York and the Canadian province of Ontario and connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway. Its watershed is home to roughly 5.6 million people in both countries, according to the Center for Great Lakes Literacy.

Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott also criticized Trump’s decision, while Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers mocked it by posting a video in which he wrote “Lake Wisconsin” on a McDonald’s napkin as a proposed replacement for Lake Michigan.

The dispute comes as U.S.-Canada trade tensions deepen. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced retaliatory tariffs in response to new U.S. tariffs scheduled to take effect Sept. 8.

Trump previously used an executive order to direct federal agencies to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Hochul Rejects Trump Executive Order Renaming Lake Ontario ‘Lake America’ appeared first on News Facts Network.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan's U.S. Senate race, says now is the time for Democrats to work together ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

A major lawsuit has led Meta to change the rules again for young users on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s exactly what’s changing.

The Kennedy Center's board of trustees voted earlier this month to add inscriptions recognizing President Trump to the building's facade.

The NTSB said tower recordings show controllers never heard Marine One's Aug. 4 calls warning it was preparing to take off, though separate recordings confirm the calls were made.

Two air traffic controllers at LaGuardia Airport left work early on the night of a deadly runway collision in March, a source familiar with the situation told CBS News.

GPU giant Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, an AI model, data, collaboration and platform with more than 13 million registered users, for $12.9 billion, according to a report today in The Information. If the deal goes through, it would significantly bolster Nvidia’s AI model business.

Hugging Face was founded 10 years ago by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf to develop a chatbot for teens. The mobile app used natural language processing (NLP) models to interpret the text or graphical input, and generated a response designed to delight the user–and perhaps even use the “hugging face” emoji (hence the name).

Hugging Face Co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue

When the founders noticed more interest in the AI models behind the chatbot than the chatbot itself, they decided to open source the technology, posting it to GitHub, where the technology was widely accessed and used.

In 2018–a year after Google published the seminal paper on transformers, “Attention Is All You Need”–the New York City company its strategy. Instead of a chatbot, Hugging Face became a repository of open source AI and machine learning models, the data sets they were trained on, and other resources for AI engineers, data scientists, and machine learning specialists to work with the tools.

One of the first models they posted was an open source version of Google’s BERT, an early LLM. The PyTorch-based version was well-received by the community. In 2021–more than a year before OpenAI shocked the world with ChatGPT–Hugging Face launched a project called BigScience designed to help foster the development of LLMs and large datasets in the scientific realm.

Hugging Face was a popular repository for all sorts of AI models before ChatGPT triggered the tsunami of interest in LLMs.  But there’s no doubt the AI boom accelerated Hugging Face’s growth. It crossed the 1 million model threshold in 2024, 2 million models in 2025, and today has about 3 million AI models, as well as half a million data sets. Much of this technology and data is free; the company reported only $150 million in annual revenue.

The company has growth through venture capital funding, which has totaled $395 million over the years. In 2023, it raised $235 million in a Series D round (its last major funding round) at a $4.5 billion valuation. Nvidia was among those Series D investors, along with Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and IBM.

It will be interesting to see how Hugging Face fits into Nvidia’s strategy or changes it. Nvidia and Hugging Face announced a partnership in 2023 that made it easier for Hugging Face users to get access to Nvidia GPUs for training. In late 2025, Nvidia launched its own line of open-weight models, dubbed Nemotron, which range in size from 3.5B to 550B parameters.

The popularity of Hugging Face among AI developers is its biggest asset; with just 2,000 paying customers and a mere $150 million in revenues, the revenue stream is clearly not it. Hugging Face has become the defacto standard place where a generation of AI engineers go to download and play around with AI models.

Open-weight models have surged in popularity in the U.S. this summer, following a surprising improvement in Chinese open-weight models like Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s Kimi, and DeepSeek, which now are nearly on par with the best proprietary models from the big American labs at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue were among the executives who signed the “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” letter last month.

If Nvidia sees a big figure in open-weight AI models, then it couldn’t do much better than acquire Hugging Face, which is where many of these models live.

Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Nvidia to Nab Hugging Face, the ‘GitHub for AI,’ for $12.9B: Report appeared first on HPCwire.

Tariff increases by the US and Canada in 2026 have intensified trade tensions between two of North America's largest trading partners.

According to the report, 64 VPN apps on Apple’s App Store and Google Play contain trackers that collect your sensitive data; the exact opposite of what a VPN is supposed to do.

U.S. officials have confirmed cases of a parasitic illness tied to lettuce in three more states: Georgia, Tennessee and Texas.

Unhappy customers told CNET about their negative experiences with Marley Spoon.

Three employees of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news service, allege they were fired after reporting on USS Abraham Lincoln

Three journalists who were fired by the Pentagon from a US government-funded news outlet sued the Department of Defense in federal court on Thursday, arguing their dismissals were illegal and violated their first amendment rights to free speech.

The three journalists were all employees of Stars and Stripes, which their court filing calls “the U.S. military’s independent news source since the Civil War with a long history of editorial independence, free from news management or censorship by military command”.

ICE has granted a $16.7 million no-bid contract for 6,000 gloves​ that can deliver electric shocks, a new use-of-force tool that the agency claims will help officers control resisting detainees.

Both sides have rested in the murder trial of Duane "Keffe D" Davis, who prosecutors allege orchestrated the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur.

The new space telescope will work in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope to uncover more secrets of the universe.

The post RFK Jr. Downplays SNAP Cuts as Enrollment Hits 17-Year Low appeared first on News Facts Network.

Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and crashes. TechCrunch reports: The company explains that the mobile industry is now facing "significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability," which can then, in turn, affect the consumer's experience with their devices. To address this, Google is now establishing new performance thresholds across several areas, like dynamic memory usage and bitmap usage. In addition, Google is adding code optimization requirements designed to prevent things like app slowdowns and crashes related to performance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Carney rejects attempt to rename lake as did several US governors, with Tony Evers mocking the move

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario, making it Lake America, amid his escalating trade war with Canada.

The order directs federal agencies to adopt the name-change on US maps, documents and databases. But Trump has no authority to rename Canada’s portion of the lake, nor to compel Canada, international legal bodies, international mapmakers or the rest of the world to adopt a new name.

The jury in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial in Massachusetts started deliberations Thursday after closing arguments were presented.

Newly obtained records indicate health secretary lied about Samoa trip during Senate confirmation hearings last year

A senior Democratic senator is calling for a criminal investigation into the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, following reporting by the Guardian that indicated he lied during Senate confirmation hearings last year.

Ron Wyden of Oregon said: “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress.”

A recent DuckDuckGo survey finds that people are sharing intimate details with chatbots without knowing all the privacy risks.

Washington, D.C. — A group of mostly Democratic senators is urging Immigration and Customs Enforcement to abandon plans to spend up to $20 million on gloves capable of delivering electric shocks during immigration enforcement operations.

In a letter Thursday to acting ICE Director David Venturella, the lawmakers said they had “deep concern” about the proposed purchase of the Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, or G.L.O.V.E. They argued that ICE should prioritize de-escalation training and accountability rather than deploy a new pain-compliance device.

The letter was led by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and signed by 15 other senators, including independent Sen. Angus King of Maine and Democrats Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Adam Schiff, Amy Klobuchar and Tammy Duckworth.

The Department of Homeland Security disclosed the plan earlier this month, saying ICE was evaluating equipment that could help officers safely make arrests. A DHS spokesperson previously said the agency routinely assesses what tools officers need in the field.

The senators countered that recent allegations of excessive force and civil rights violations make deployment of the gloves inappropriate. They called on ICE to refrain from using the devices and instead invest in training and oversight.

The letter does not itself block the purchase, and DHS has not announced that the procurement has been canceled.

Sources

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Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new "Persistent mode" for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly "put to sleep," proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product's code base, though it has not been rolled out or officially announced yet. From the report: Persistent mode appears in Codex's "reasoning effort" menu, in which users can select the level of computing power, tokens, and time they want to allow for an AI model to "think" before answering a prompt. It seems to be one of OpenAI's most computationally intensive settings. When users have selected Persistent mode, OpenAI's code base reads that Codex will "continue working until put to sleep." That's a stark contrast to currently available modes, which will stop working on a task after a few minutes or hours, even if it's not complete. In another file in the code base, OpenAI describes a feature within Persistent mode called "proactivity." This appears to be a type of system prompt for agents in Persistent mode, which are told that their work is not done when they finish answering a user's request. Instead, the agent is instructed to proactively create follow-up tasks for itself. The agent is capable of working on those tasks across sessions and using past user interactions and "knowledge of the user" to decide what to work on. It also has a tool to message the user without being asked but is told to send these sparingly. The instructions also set limits for the agent, according to the file. The agent is told that Persistent mode does not expand what it is allowed to do and that altering anything outside the user's own system requires the user's approval first -- seemingly intended to limit how dangerous a persistent AI agent could be. The file sits in the shared core of Codex rather than in the code specific to the terminal, seeming to suggest the proactivity feature is intended for more than the command line tool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(The Center Square) – Twenty-two state attorneys general are questioning taxpayer funding of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine amid what the AGs call the group’s “sham”-like “independent review” of its much debated reference manual’s climate science chapter…

Uganda's final Ebola patient was discharged from hospital care on July 16.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow told CBS News that around 5,000 jobs in Toronto's textile, clothing and leather manufacturing industries could be affected, which "means the price of Americans buying things, the cost will go up."

The new AI Assisted Editor is another AI tool for Adobe’s image editing software.

Organizers expect more than 3,000 people to participate in Saturday’s Youth Day and Sunday’s Big Quarterly.

Wilmington’s historic African American religious celebration concludes with music, worship, youth activities, food, vendors and the traditional Big Quarterly

WILMINGTON — For more than two centuries, the final weekend of August has carried a special meaning in Wilmington.

It is a time for worship and reunion, music and food, reflection and celebration. It is also a reminder that the freedom to gather, worship and build independent institutions was once a courageous act for African Americans.

The 212th August Quarterly Festival will bring those traditions into the present this weekend with three days of events culminating in the Big Quarterly at Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park.

The remaining schedule includes an all-white party Friday evening, a full day of youth and family activities Saturday, and a worship service followed by the main outdoor festival Sunday.

Organizers expect more than 3,000 people to participate in Saturday’s Youth Day and Sunday’s Big Quarterly.

More than a festival

August Quarterly traces its roots to the Rev. Peter Spencer, the founder of the Union Church of Africans, now known as the African Union Methodist Protestant Church.

Spencer was born into slavery in Maryland in 1782 and later gained his freedom. After moving to Wilmington, he became a mechanic, educator, church leader and advocate for the city’s growing Black community.

In 1813, after rejecting white control over Black religious life, Spencer established the Union Church of Africans as an independent Black denomination. One year later, he began the annual gathering that became known as the August Quarterly.

The gathering traditionally took place on the last Sunday in August and served as both a religious revival and a homecoming. Free and enslaved Black people traveled to Wilmington from Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and other areas to worship, sing, share meals and reconnect with relatives and friends.

That made the gathering more than a church service. It was a public demonstration of religious independence, community strength and the right of African Americans to assemble on their own terms.

The festival also became connected to Delaware’s abolitionist history. Spencer supported the Underground Railroad, and accounts of the festival’s history describe Wilmington as a place where enslaved people could make contact with abolitionists and plan journeys to freedom.

A tradition that continues to evolve

The August Quarterly has changed from the multistate religious homecoming of the 1800s into a weeklong celebration combining worship with gospel music, youth programming, cultural education, food and community resources.

Its underlying purpose, however, remains much the same: bringing people together around faith, freedom, family and African American cultural identity.

This year’s celebration began Aug. 23 with an opening service at Mother African Union Church and a memorial wreath-laying at Peter Spencer Plaza. Revival services continued during the week.

The festival now moves into its busiest weekend, giving families several opportunities to participate.

Friday celebration opens festival weekend

The AQ Liberation Fest will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 28, at the Delaware Historical Society, 505 N. Market St.

Promoted as an all-white party, the evening will feature the Pieces of a Dream dance group and music from Best Kept Soul.

The event adds a social and entertainment component to the festival while keeping the celebration in the heart of downtown Wilmington.

Saturday belongs to young people

The AQ Youth and Young Adult Experience will take over Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 29.

The day will feature children and youth performers, bookbag and school-supply giveaways, face painting, games and family activities.

By placing young people at the center of Saturday’s program, the festival connects a 212-year-old tradition with the generation that will be responsible for carrying it forward.

The event also helps families prepare for the new school year while offering young performers an opportunity to appear before a large community audience.

Sunday brings worship and the Big Quarterly

Sunday’s events begin with the August Quarterly Worship Service from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, 815 Shipyard Drive.

The service will feature the Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness and the August Quarterly Festival Choir.

The Big Quarterly will begin at noon at nearby Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park and continue until 8 p.m.

The festival will feature local, regional and nationally known gospel groups performing throughout the day. Food and retail vendors will be joined by cultural, community and health organizations, while a children’s area will offer youth-oriented attractions.

The combination of worship, gospel music, food, vendors and family fellowship reflects many of the elements that have defined August Quarterly throughout its history.

For longtime participants, Sunday is an annual homecoming. For residents unfamiliar with the tradition, it offers an opportunity to experience one of Wilmington’s most important cultural institutions — and to learn why a festival founded in 1814 continues to matter in 2026.

TO GO

• What: 212th August Quarterly Festival weekend
• Friday: AQ Liberation Fest, 6 to 9 p.m., Delaware Historical Society, 505 N. Market St., Wilmington
• Saturday: AQ Youth and Young Adult Experience, noon to 8 p.m., Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, Rosa Parks Drive and Market Street, Wilmington
• Sunday worship: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Chase Center on the Riverfront, 815 Shipyard Drive, Wilmington
• Sunday festival: The Big Quarterly, noon to 8 p.m., Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park
• Information: Visit augustquarterly.org

Hundreds of people, including more than 600 tourists, remain missing after the floods hit the Nepal-China border.

New rules are aimed at protecting people in debt in England and Wales and stopping homeowners being ripped off

A clampdown on “rogue bailiffs” has been launched by Andy Burnham amid concerns that vulnerable people are being overcharged and face aggressive behaviour.

In the latest in a series of “everyday fixes” to ease the cost of living and “make Britain fairer”, the prime minister said he was strengthening the rules that apply to bailiffs in England and Wales to better protect people in debt.

(The Center Square) – California Attorney General Rob Bonta stands by a lawsuit he’s co-leading to stop President Donald Trump's executive order on mail-in ballots.

The plaintiffs say the Trump administration is trying to fire them as a part of its "extraordinary censorship efforts."

El congresista republicano Byron Donalds, candidato a gobernador de Florida, vinculó los brotes de sarampión en Estados Unidos con la inmigración ilegal.

El 23 de agosto, en el programa “Face the Nation” de CBS News, la presentadora Margaret Brennan dijo que Florida se encuentra por debajo de la tasa de inmunización necesaria para lograr la inmunidad colectiva contra el sarampión. Después, Brennan le preguntó a Donalds si recomendaría a los padres de Florida que vacunaran a sus hijos.

“No”, respondió Donalds, “en realidad, mi mensaje para los floridianos y, francamente, para los estadounidenses, es que la razón por la que hemos visto un brote de sarampión en ciertas partes del país se debe a la inmigración ilegal desenfrenada hacia Estados Unidos durante la administración anterior”.

Donalds señaló los brotes de sarampión en El Paso, Texas, y el suroeste de Florida, y dijo que las personas que se encuentran ilegalmente en EE.UU. no han seguido el calendario de vacunación contra el sarampión, las paperas y la rubéola.

Continuó diciendo: “Así que lo fundamental es, en primer lugar, controlar la inmigración en el país. No se puede permitir que todo un segmento de personas — más de 10 millones de personas, viniendo al país sin cumplir con ese calendario de vacunación”.

Es inexacto decir que 10 millones de inmigrantes ingresaron ilegalmente a EE.UU. durante la presidencia de Joe Biden. La administración Biden permitió que unas 4.3 millones de personas esperaran sus audiencias ante las cortes de inmigración dentro del país.

Además, no hay evidencia que vincule los brotes de sarampión con los inmigrantes en EE.UU. Expertos en enfermedades infecciosas le dijeron a PolitiFact que la causa principal de los brotes es el declive de las tasas de vacunación contra el sarampión, las paperas y la rubéola en el país. Alrededor del 94% de los casos confirmados en 2026 son de personas no vacunadas o cuyo estado de vacunación se desconoce.

La campaña de Donalds no respondió a una solicitud de información que respaldara sus declaraciones.

Afirmaciones similares sobre los inmigrantes circularon durante brotes de sarampión años antes de la administración Biden.

George Rust, epidemiólogo y profesor de la facultad de medicina de la Florida State University dijo que, durante décadas, EE.UU. registró casos esporádicos de sarampión que, por lo general, se originaban cuando viajeros estadounidenses contraían el virus en el extranjero y presentaban síntomas tras regresar a casa. 

“Tal vez una o dos personas más se contagiarían de ellos, pero debido a las altas tasas de vacunación y a la rápida respuesta de salud pública, no habría una segunda oleada de casos”, dijo Rust. “Ahora estamos viendo más brotes porque ese mismo escenario se repite en grupos de personas no vacunadas, lo que facilita una mayor propagación”.

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¿Cuál es la situación del sarampión en EE.UU.?

El actual brote de sarampión de 2026 ha superado las cifras récord de casos de 2025, que fueron las más altas desde 1991.

El sarampión es un virus respiratorio altamente contagioso. La infección puede provocar complicaciones graves, como neumonía, inflamación cerebral y la muerte. En 2025, dos niños y un adulto fallecieron a causa del sarampión, las primeras muertes atribuidas al virus en EE.UU. en más de una década. El 25 de agosto, el Departamento de Salud de Pensilvania dijo que otras dos personas no vacunadas, cuyas edades no se hicieron públicas, murieron a causa del virus.

Recibir las dos dosis recomendadas de la vacuna triple vírica (MMR, por sus siglas en inglés), es 97% eficaz contra la infección.

“Es probable que el 90% de las personas no vacunadas que se exponen al virus lo contraigan”, dijo Rust. “Debido a su alta capacidad de transmisión, los brotes de sarampión pueden propagarse exponencialmente en sectores de la población que no están vacunados o no inmune”.

¿Es el sarampión propagado por inmigrantes?

Los CDC no reportan el estatus migratorio de las personas infectadas con sarampión en EE.UU., por lo que resulta imposible vincular de manera definitiva los brotes de esta enfermedad con inmigrantes que se encuentran en el país de forma ilegal. El rastreo de contactos realizado durante brotes anteriores ha mostrado que el sarampión suele entrar en EE.UU. a través de residentes no vacunados que han viajado al extranjero, principalmente a Europa y a la región del Pacífico Occidental.

Estados Unidos alcanzó el estatus de eliminación del sarampión en el año 2000, lo que significa que el virus dejó de propagarse de forma continua dentro del país.

“Cualquier cadena de contagio comienza con alguien que ha viajado”, dijo el Dr. Paul Spiegel, profesor distinguido de práctica y director del centro de salud humanitaria de Johns Hopkins. “La introducción de la enfermedad solo deriva en un brote cuando el virus alcanza a un número suficiente de personas susceptibles y no vacunadas, y los datos sobre casos importados no apuntan en ningún caso a los migrantes”.

El Dr. William Schaffner, especialista en enfermedades infecciosas de Vanderbilt Health, coincidió, diciendo que “la inmensa mayoría” de los casos son “causados ​​por nuestros propios niños no vacunados que viajan al extranjero, contraen el sarampión y luego lo traen de vuelta a casa”. Dijo que solo una minoría de los casos se debe a extranjeros que llegan a EE.UU.

Los brotes de sarampión en la costa oeste de EE.UU. suelen provenir de residentes estadounidenses no vacunados que regresan de Asia, dijeron los expertos, mientras que los brotes en el este y el centro del país generalmente se originan en residentes que regresan de Europa. “Nunca he visto datos que indiquen que se hayan producido introducciones significativas desde el sur de la frontera”, dijo Schaffner.

En El Paso, Texas, a principios de 2026 se produjo un brote de sarampión entre inmigrantes recluidos en un centro de detención del Servicio de Control de Inmigración y Aduanas de Estados Unidos (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés), y en otro centro federal de detención cercano que alberga tanto a migrantes como a ciudadanos estadounidenses. Las autoridades sanitarias atribuyeron la propagación a las malas condiciones de las instalaciones y a la falta de datos federales sobre el estado de vacunación de los detenidos. No está claro cuándo ingresaron a EE.UU. los inmigrantes infectados; ICE detiene a muchas personas que no son recién llegadas.

En el suroeste de Florida, donde reside Donalds, el mayor brote del estado se concentró en la Universidad Ave Maria, en el condado de Collier. La universidad, citando el rastreo de contactos realizado por el departamento de salud estatal, dijo que lo más probable es que el brote comenzó a raíz de un viaje realizado por un estudiante fuera del estado durante las vacaciones.

Algunos de los mayores brotes de este año se produjeron en zonas con grandes comunidades amish y menonitas, que suelen registrar tasas de vacunación más bajas. Brotes anteriores también se concentraron en comunidades similares no propensas a las vacunas.

Vacunación contra sarampión, paperas y rubéola en otros países

Un vial de la vacuna contra el sarampión, las paperas y la rubéola se exhibe en el Departamento de Salud de Lubbock, el 26 de febrero de 2025, en Lubbock, Texas. (AP)

Los países de origen de muchos inmigrantes que se encuentran ilegalmente en EE.UU., como México, Guatemala y Honduras, incluyen la vacuna MMR en sus calendarios de vacunación infantil de rutina.

Los expertos dicen que el problema no es la falta de programas de vacunación en estos países, sino que muchos han visto caer la cobertura de vacunación por debajo del umbral del 95% necesario para detener la transmisión del sarampión, el mismo problema que enfrenta Estados Unidos.

Este año, El Salvador y Honduras han notificado un número reducido de casos de sarampión. Guatemala y México están lidiando con brotes grandes, y la gran mayoría de los casos se registran en personas no vacunadas.

Sin embargo, la epidemia de sarampión en México se originó en EE.UU., y no al revés. El brote en el país comenzó en Chihuahua, México, en febrero de 2025, y se rastreó hasta un niño de nueve años no vacunado, perteneciente a una comunidad menonita, que se infectó mientras visitaba a familiares en Seminole, Texas, justo cuando el brote en ese estado estaba cobrando fuerza.

“Las discusiones sobre migración y enfermedades infecciosas a menudo invierten la relación de causalidad”, dijo Spiegel. “La movilidad humana de todo tipo — turismo, viajes de negocios, migración — puede trasladar un virus de un lugar a otro, pero el desplazamiento por sí solo no genera un brote; lo que lo provoca es la susceptibilidad”.

Nuestro veredicto

Donalds dijo que la “inmigración ilegal desenfrenada” durante la administración Biden es la causa de “un brote de sarampión en ciertas partes del país”.

Por lo general, el sarampión es introducido por viajeros estadounidenses que regresan de viajes al extranjero. Los expertos dijeron que la disminución en las tasas de vacunación contra el sarampión, las paperas y la rubéola en Estados Unidos es el principal factor detrás del brote.

No encontramos datos que señalen a los inmigrantes que ingresaron ilegalmente al país como la causa de ningún brote. Los principales países de origen de los inmigrantes que se encuentran ilegalmente en EE.UU.  también incluyen la vacuna MMR en sus calendarios de vacunación infantil de rutina.

La carga de la prueba recae sobre quien hace la afirmación, y Donalds no presentó ninguna evidencia que respaldara sus declaraciones. Calificamos la afirmación como Falsa.

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Nota del editor: PolitiFact tradujo esta historia del inglés al español usando un servicio de traducción automática. Los periodistas de PolitiFact con fluidez en ambos idiomas editaron la traducción para mayor claridad y precisión.

The Chinese AI company Z.ai has confirmed responsibility for the model, which caught users’ attention on OpenRouter last week.

The unavailability of the phone due to its 2G networking may drive fans of retro-styled phones to look at other options.

• Dos Santos and Russell smash hurdles world records

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Masai Russell and Alison Dos Santos each set a world record while Mondo Duplantis won a historic pole vault on a frenetic Thursday night in Zurich.

The Letzigrund Stadium had a raucous sell-out 25,000 crowd and the still, balmy weather conditions helped the athletes no end.

• MLS club mired in five-match winless run

• González to replace interim coach Guillermo Hoyos

Inter Miami have hired former Argentina international Cristian “Kily” González as the club’s new head coach, according to two sources familiar with negotiations. César Luis Merlo was first to report the news.

The hiring will spell the end of interim manager Guillermo Hoyos’ time in charge of the South Florida club. In fact, he may have already coached his last game; MLS announced on Thursday that Hoyos had been suspended for one game for the club’s “repeated violations” of the late kickoff policy. (Inter Miami have become known throughout the league for delaying their return from half-time.)

Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or "Throw Away the Key Encryption," that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring's copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account information and encrypted footage. The Verge reports: Ring says TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys for your footage, stored in a secure enclave and accessible only under strict conditions -- based on the features you enable on your account. Currently, footage captured by Ring cameras is encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest, and then decrypted for Ring to process for those smart features. With TAKE, the encryption keys change for every five minutes of footage. Ring stores copies of those keys to decrypt the footage, but throws away each copy within 24 hours, "leaving you with the keys and full control of your videos," according to Ring. TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, according to Ring. The company says it is "inspired by the privacy principles of E2EE (end-to-end encryption)," which Ring offers on some of its cameras. However, the two systems work differently. With E2EE, Ring never has the keys and can't process your video for cloud-based features. Both options are available on newer cameras that encrypt on-device, and you can switch between the two. Older cameras encrypt at cloud ingress and only support TAKE. According to a white paper the company published today, Ring's copy of those keys is managed inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, to which Ring's access is restricted by "access controls, cryptography, and hardware isolation." The company claims there is no persistent storage and no way for a Ring employee to access it. The stored keys can only be unlocked by the enclave through cryptographic attestation that proves it's running the exact software image Ring approved. The enclave releases a temporary key when an enabled service requests it. When asked about what happens if Ring is subpoenaed by law enforcement, a spokesperson for the company said: "Where TAKE is enabled, Ring will only be able to provide non-video information (such as basic subscriber information) and encrypted video files in response to the valid legal process. We have updated our Law Enforcement Guidelines to reflect this change."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dolly is the fourth named storm of the hurricane season.

(The Center Square) – The Trump administration will take action to protect parental rights in Kansas after an investigation revealed that three school districts in the state maintain policies to keep hidden from parents if a student asks to identify…

(The Center Square) – The National Rifle Association launched its first national bus tour Thursday as the group tries to get gun owners to vote in the 2026 midterm elections.

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It’s the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can’t exactly overcome physics – laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers – there’s a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you’re a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it’s just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux’ advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop’s speakers.

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EasyEffects’ own description on its GitHub page doesn’t really explain what it does or what it’s capable of, so here’s the description from Wikipedia instead.

EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line.

Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer.

↫ EasEffects’ Wikipedia page

None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs.

What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio – MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more – aren’t magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery.

If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better.

In an ideal world, you’d pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won’t find one, so for most laptops you’ll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I’ve long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I’ve tried it on, but of course, there’s countless other presets for you to try to see if there’s anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better.

Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution’s package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They’ll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly.

There’s obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you’re most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there’s no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I’m talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE’s System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything.

Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I’ve ever tried it on, that I’ve become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you’re already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset.

In fact, I’d take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn’t include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features.

There’s absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning, and yet, very few people seem to actually be aware of this. This needs to change, and I think it’s up to distributions, desktop environments, and Linux OEMs to make this happen.

• Golf giant ends partnership with YouTube group

• Retailers have pulled Good Good products from shelves

• Garrett Clark says controversial skit was in ‘poor taste’

Callaway has ended its relationship with Good Good Golf amid mounting fallout from an advert that many believe made light of violence against women.

The golf equipment manufacturer announced the decision on Thursday, cutting ties with one of the world’s most popular YouTube sports channels effective immediately. Callaway also said it would donate $1m to organizations working to prevent violence against women and support survivors of domestic violence.

Smyrna High School hosted multiple high school field hockey teams on August 26, for a preseason play day to get ready for the upcoming regular season.

Smyrna field hockey takes on Queen Anne’s field hockey from Maryland in a preseason scrimmage at Smyrna High School.

The Smyrna Eagles’ defense attempts to stop a Mighty Lions goal.

Smyrna moves the ball towards its offensive end.

The Eagles pose for a picture after finishing their scrimmage against Queen Anne’s County High School.

Milford field hockey and St. Mark’s field hockey participated in the play day hosted by Smyrna High School.

The Milford defense gets ready to defend its goal against the Spartan offense.

A Milford player sends the ball downfield giving her offense a chance to score.

A Spartan player dribbles the ball down field while the Milford defense pursues.

Players from the Spartans and Buccaneers run toward the ball to regain possession.

The Eagles played a second scrimmage against Easton High School from Maryland.

The Smyrna goalie concentrates on making a save in their scrimmage against Easton High School.

Smyrna’s goalie makes the save and kicks the ball away from the cage.

A Smyrna player shoots a shot toward the cage while avoiding the the defenders in her path.

Smyrna players are all smiles as they scrimmage against Easton High School. The Eagles will start their season on September 9, against Archmere.

A small group of fans take in all the action as the teams ramp up for the start of the season.

All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo

Aug. 27, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Kathryn Mohror has been selected as general chair of the 2027 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, more commonly known as SC27. Mohror is director of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) as well as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.

Dr. Kathryn Mohror, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Credit: LLNL.

“Chairing this conference is not only an honor but also an opportunity to give back to the SC community that has been such a big part of my career,” states Mohror. “I’ve been attending SC and volunteering for more than 20 years. I keep returning because this is where people share the latest, most impactful ideas in HPC and because the community is so collaborative and welcoming.”

Held annually in November, the SC conference hosted more than 17,000 exhibitors, researchers, and practitioners last year. The week-long event is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, and is the world’s largest conference for the high-performance computing (HPC) field. As general chair, Mohror will determine the conference’s vision and lead its operations, working with about 1,000 volunteers and a cadre of contractors.

For Mohror, leadership is service, and chairing SC comes with responsibilities beyond the logistics of organizing a large-scale conference. “HPC innovations are only possible because of the people who design them, build them, and find new ways to use them,” she says. “SC is the place where many of these innovations are born—when people meet and start talking. I want everyone at SC to find opportunities to meet new people, build our community, and get talking to drive those new innovations.”

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are rapidly influencing the HPC landscape, SC continues to be the premier venue for showcasing research from all corners of the field—laboratories, academia, and industry. “SC is like no other HPC conference. People come from all over the world because SC is where everything in HPC happens,” notes Mohror. “I love to see the convergence of traditional HPC, cloud computing, quantum computing, and AI communities at SC. HPC is stronger because we’re leveraging ideas across fields and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.”

Although SC27 plans are still in progress, Mohror says attendees can expect a robust and dynamic technical program along with new community-focused initiatives and plenty of opportunities to connect with others. The theme and host city will be unveiled in a special session near the end of SC26 this November in Chicago.

Mohror’s appointment is another example of LLNL’s ongoing visibility at SC—from research papers and posters to the Top500 list of benchmarked supercomputers, and from speakers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) exhibitor booth to dozens of staff volunteering on committees.

LLNL leaders have held the SC general chair role before, most recently acting principal associate director for Computing Lori Diachin in 2025 and Livermore Computing chief technology officer Bronis de Supinski in 2021.

“The SC27 general chair is a highly demanding and visible role. Kathryn has long been a trusted leader at LLNL and in the broader HPC community, and she is very well equipped to lead another successful meeting,” says Diachin.hin.

“From her start at LLNL as a postdoctoral researcher, Kathryn has consistently exceeded expectations, and I have no doubt she will do so as SC27 general chair,” adds de Supinski, who will serve as SC27 vice chair. “I expect that not only will SC27 set an all-time attendance record, but it will establish new traditions that enhance the supercomputing community, as I know she envisions.”

Mohror joined LLNL in 2010. Her research focuses on HPC portability, input/output performance, and in-system storage solutions through projects such as the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart library and the UnifyFS file system, both R&D 100 Award winners. She has led major HPC standards and software initiatives, including roles on the PMIx Steering Committee, MPI Forum, and DOE’s Exascale Computing Project. A 2019 DOE Early Career Award recipient, Mohror holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University.

Source: Holly Auten, LLNL

The post LLNL’s Kathryn Mohror Named General Chair of SC27 appeared first on HPCwire.

Congressman Jamie Raskin asks president’s son to detail firm’s recent success after he joined 1789 Capital as partner

Democrats on a powerful US congressional committee have launched an investigation into a venture capital firm which has thrived since recruiting Donald Trump’s son.

Donald Trump Jr joined 1789 Capital as a partner just days after his father won a second term in office in November 2024. Congressman Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the US House of Representatives judiciary committee, has asked the president’s son to detail the firm’s recent success.

Thai navy says ‘routine’ visit’ will allow personnel to rest and recuperate amid reports of poor conditions onboard

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is set to make a temporary stop in Thailand next week as it heads back to the United States, Thai navy officials said, after spending more than 250 consecutive days at sea supporting US operations against Iran amid recent reports of poor living conditions and low morale onboard the vessel.

The Lincoln left the Middle East several days ago after being relieved by the USS George Washington, and is now heading home to San Diego. A Thai navy official told Reuters this week that the carrier was expected to make a brief port visit in Thailand next week for the crew to rest and recuperate before continuing their journey home.

Lindsay Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children and said she was suffering form postpartum psychosis. A jury is deliberating.

The Ross wildfire has burned more than 80,000 acres across Palo Pinto and Jack counties, forcing evacuations, closing roads and disrupting schools.

Aug. 27, 2026 — Since announcing Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first custom inference chip, the company has been testing the chip and the system built around it. The results show a significant performance advance: Jalapeño can serve more AI work per unit of power while also returning responses more quickly. Jalapeño delivers both higher throughput and lower latency with one architecture, where existing hardware systems often have to make a tradeoff between the two.

Credit: OpenAI

For customers, that can mean faster responses, more responsive agents, and more reliable access as demand grows. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. These gains will help make increasingly capable AI more affordable and more broadly available.

OpenAI models also accelerated Jalapeño’s development. Earlier generations helped the team design and bring up the chip, while the company’s latest models are accelerating how OpenAI optimizes and programs it. Jalapeño’s performance extends across GPT‑OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1, and Kimi K2.5 1T, showing that the architecture works across models developed both inside and outside OpenAI. Across all three, Jalapeño delivered 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt at peak throughput and 1.7 to 3.6 times lower end-to-end latency than the comparison systems. For highly interactive workloads, it delivered 2.1 to 4.1 times higher performance.

Jalapeño is also evidence of a broader full-stack advantage. OpenAI can design models, products, serving software, chips, memory, networking, and systems together, using what OpenAI learns from real workloads to improve every layer of the stack. Jalapeño is working first-party silicon with measured results, and it is the beginning of a multigenerational platform. In the months ahead, OpenAI will ramp Jalapeño to deliver faster, more capable, and more efficient products for customers.

How OpenAI Measured Jalapeño’s Performance

OpenAI evaluates performance at a matched user experience, measuring how much useful AI work each system can complete per unit of power while meeting the latency customers and interactive agents require. This matters especially for agents, which need to complete many steps in sequence, so delays can compound across an entire task.

To understand how Jalapeño performs in practice, OpenAI tested it on InferenceX, a public benchmark from SemiAnalysis that measures the full process of serving an AI request. OpenAI compared Jalapeño with leading commercially available AI systems across the tested operating range, from high-throughput serving to highly interactive, low-latency use. Jalapeño delivered a better combination of throughput, power efficiency, and latency. Although performance is sometimes reported per chip, OpenAI believes the more useful standard is performance per unit of power.

Across all three public models, Jalapeño delivered a better combination of performance per watt and latency across the tested operating range, placing it on the Pareto frontier. To compare the systems consistently, OpenAI normalized the results using each accelerator’s published chip power rating. Jalapeño is rated at 700 watts, although its measured sustained power remained at or below 550 watts on the workloads tested.

Jalapeño performed strongly across GPT‑OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1 670B, and Kimi K2.5 1T. On Kimi, the largest public model OpenAI tested, it delivered approximately 1.5 times higher peak performance per watt and 3.4 times lower end-to-end latency than the comparison system. In OpenAI’s internal testing, Jalapeño’s advantage widened further on frontier OpenAI models, suggesting that the architecture becomes more valuable as workloads grow larger and more demanding.

Architecting for speed and efficiency within a single chip

Jalapeño’s gains come from designing the chip, memory, network, software, and rack-scale system together around real language-model workloads. Language-model inference moves through several distinct phases with different bottlenecks. Prefill, when the system processes a prompt, is compute-intensive, while decode, when the system generates the response token by token, is constrained more by memory bandwidth. Communication can also add latency when data must move between cores and chips, leaving some processing units idle while they wait. A system that excels at one phase can lose that advantage while waiting for data or moving model state between different resources.

OpenAI designed Jalapeño to minimize data movement and communication delays. This means that model state, including the KV cache used while generating a response, can be explicitly placed and kept local while the system activates the right combination of compute, memory, and networking for each inference phase. The network is integral to the architecture. Its large domain allows the entire workload to remain within one connected system, minimizing data movement and helping the complete request stay fast and efficient from beginning to end. The result is a balanced and fungible accelerator that can support changing model architectures, excel at both prefill and decode, and adapt as the balance between them changes, a defining feature of agentic workloads.

OpenAI Used AI to Design the Chip, and Designed the Chip So AI Could Program It

AI played a direct role in Jalapeño’s development, enabling the team to move from initial design to tapeout in nine months by exploring implementations, shortening design, measurement, and verification loops, and continuously iterating on model workloads. AI also helped optimize the chip’s arithmetic circuits, allowing the team to fit more compute performance into the chip on schedule.

Jalapeño was designed as a clear, predictable programming target for both humans and AI. Engineers can describe work through local tensors, explicit communication, and predictable synchronization. AI can then optimize how that work is mapped, placed, scheduled, and coordinated across the system. That clear, predictable structure gives AI a tractable way to tackle the traditionally difficult problem of parallel programming.

Supporting each new model family still requires new kernels and model-specific optimizations. Using Codex with GPT‑Astra, the team brought three open-weight models that were not part of Jalapeño’s original production plan to high performance within two months. This demonstrated both the flexibility of the architecture and the speed at which AI can help with programming. For selected GPT‑OSS attention and mixture-of-experts blocks, AI-generated implementations ran 1.5 to 1.8 times faster than the existing human-expert-written implementations. Those figures apply to the selected blocks, not the full model, but they point toward a powerful new development loop.

The Path Ahead for Efficient, Ultra-Fast Inference

AI infrastructure is valuable because of the useful real-world work it enables. By producing more useful work from the same power and hardware, Jalapeño can help OpenAI serve more demand and lower the cost of delivering a successful result. For OpenAI, that can improve operating leverage by allowing useful work and revenue to grow faster than the cost to serve. It can also support broader adoption and continued investment in better models, products, and infrastructure. Faster inference can enable faster iteration and new use cases.

Jalapeño expands what is possible for efficient, low-latency inference:

• Ultra-fast-mode inference at efficiencies previously available only in fast mode
• Fast-mode inference at efficiencies previously available only in batched mode
• Higher efficiency for batched-mode inference

OpenAI plans to begin deploying Jalapeño within the company’s compute infrastructure by the end of the year. It is the first generation of a multigenerational roadmap: Gen 2 is deep in development, and Gen 3 is taking shape. Each generation will build on what OpenAI learns and further advance both efficiency and speed.

Meeting growing demand for AI will require more compute from every available source. OpenAI will continue to widely deploy accelerators from NVIDIA and other partners for both training and inference workloads. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

As OpenAI prepares for deployment, the company is continuing production qualification, maturing the software, preparing to operate Jalapeño at scale, and validating performance across more models. The results so far show what is possible when the full system is designed together: more responsive, capable, and agentic AI delivered more efficiently to more people.

Source: OpenAI

The post OpenAI Details Jalapeño Inference Chip Performance and Multigenerational Roadmap appeared first on HPCwire.

Under some strange circumstances, Rockstar broadcast the first (official) gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most-anticipated game of the year. Here’s everything you need to know.

Ah yes, it’s a drug den. We’re in familiar GTA territory here: narcotics, smart phones, tattooed gangsters and a police raid. The duo shoot their way out of the room – the gunplay is very familiar to the series – third-person over the shoulder. I’m getting a distinct True Romance/Leon vibe to this chaos.

These closeup slow-motion kill shots are giving me flashbacks to Fallout 3 and its slightly sickening VATS violence.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware. The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site's content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here. "The trust model is broken," Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. "Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don't question them -- and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer -- SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today's guards don't cover it." "An agent doesn't distinguish between a page and a command," the researchers wrote Thursday. "Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction. Which means the entire corpus of published data that agents are now wired to consume has silently become an execution surface -- and almost none of it carries the integrity guarantees we apply to actual code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hospitals, technology firms and other companies could soon be at risk from AI-enabled cyberattacks, according to a new open letter from more than 100 signatories.

The new OLEDs feature budget-friendlier pricing and start at 48 inches.

A $100,000 9-month CD may sound unconventional, but the returns could still be worth pursuing for savers right now.

The latest GTA game is scheduled to drop on Nov. 19, more than 13 years after the last installment was released.

Grand jury declined to indict anyone but said there was a ‘sophisticated scheme’ to use funds for political activity

• US politics live – latest updates

A Florida grand jury has found that the administration of the governor, Ron DeSantis, “misappropriated” $10m in taxpayer money from a Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity with ties to DeSantis’s wife, before the money was reportedly “funneled” into “two political action committees”.

In the grand jury report, which remains sealed but was obtained and published by CBS News Miami on Wednesday, the grand jurors wrote that “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities” but said that they found “insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally”.

Amazon’s Annapurna Labs will be the first to collaborate on NVHBM technology alongside NVLink Fusion.

Aug. 27, 2026 — The next wave of AI is placing new demands on infrastructure. As AI agents and trillion-parameter workloads become mainstream, the performance of AI infrastructure depends not only on compute, but on how compute, memory, storage, networking and software are designed together as a unified system.

Credit: Robert Way/Shutterstock

To help hyperscalers and AI innovators build the next generation of semi-custom AI infrastructure, NVIDIA has expanded NVIDIA NVLink Fusion with NVIDIA NVHBM, a next-generation high-bandwidth memory technology that brings higher memory performance and efficiency to XPUs. It will be validated and offered by leading memory partners, extending this advanced memory capability to NVLink Fusion customers.

Traditional HBM architectures place the memory controller on the XPU die, consuming valuable silicon area that could otherwise be dedicated to compute. NVHBM, built on the same technology that NVIDIA will use for future GPUs, integrates NVIDIA’s custom memory controller into the HBM base die.

By integrating the memory controller into the 3D HBM stack instead of the XPU, NVHBM delivers up to 30% greater memory bandwidth and 15% lower HBM power consumption, and frees up to 25% more area on XPU compute die compared with standard HBM4E.

NVIDIA is establishing a standard NVHBM implementation, available from multiple memory providers. This reduces the engineering effort required to integrate and qualify memory across multiple suppliers — giving NVLink Fusion customers a faster path for bringing custom AI chips to market.

Amazon’s Annapurna Labs will be the first to work on NVHBM as part of its broader collaboration with NVIDIA around NVLink Fusion.

AWS and NVIDIA Continue NVLink Fusion Collaboration

Amazon’s Annapurna Labs will work with NVIDIA on NVHBM technology and the NVLink scale-up architecture to enhance performance and efficiency for AI workloads.

This builds on AWS’s previously announced support for NVLink Fusion. Annapurna Labs will support NVLink Fusion with its next-generation Trainium chips starting with Trainium4, which would allow Amazon chips and NVIDIA GPUs to work together with common rack-scale architecture.

“NVHBM represents a new architectural approach to advancing high-bandwidth memory performance and efficiency,” said Nafea Bshara, vice president of Annapurna Labs at Amazon. “We look forward to this technology collaboration to benefit future AWS infrastructure designs.”

Vertically Integrated and Horizontally Open

NVLink Fusion enables partners to connect custom XPUs and CPUs to NVIDIA’s rack-scale platform.

Partners can access NVIDIA NVLink chiplets, NVLink-C2C, NVLink Switches and NVIDIA MGX systems and racks, as well as a broad ecosystem of CPU partners, ASIC designers, system manufacturers and technology providers.

Offered with each generation of NVIDIA’s rack-scale system architecture, NVLink Fusion allows hyperscalers and AI-native companies to focus engineering resources on XPU innovation while using a proven technology stack for scale-up and scale-out networking, rack-scale systems and software — creating a faster, lower-risk path to deploying semi-custom AI infrastructure.

More from HPCwire: AWS and NVIDIA to Deliver 2M Additional GPUs and Next-Gen Infrastructure for Agentic and Physical AI

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.

Source: NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA NVLink Fusion Expands with NVHBM Custom High-Bandwidth Memory appeared first on HPCwire.

(The Center Square) – It’s been one year since a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in south Minneapolis claimed the lives of two children.

Aug. 27, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering encourages the research community to apply to the NSF Expeditions in Computing program. Expeditions support ambitious, transformative research agendas that look at least a decade into the future and have the potential to drive disruptive advances in computer and information science and engineering.

The program is designed for challenges whose scale, complexity and long-term vision require a deeply integrated, multidisciplinary team, and cannot be addressed through a collection of smaller projects. Research may span areas such as new architectures for intelligence, computing hardware and substrates, theories of learning and generalization, neuroscience-inspired computing, embodied intelligence and robotics, and next-generation communications and networking.

Projects should bring together well-integrated teams within or across departments and institutions, advance foundational or use-inspired foundational research, and create outcomes that could open new scientific frontiers, enable future technologies and strengthen the U.S. science and engineering enterprise. Researchers earlier in their careers are particularly encouraged to participate.

Award Information

• Funding: Up to $15 million per project.
• Duration: Up to seven years.
• Estimated awards: Two to four per competition.
• Total anticipated funding: Up to $60 million, subject to the availability of funds.

Key Dates

• Required preliminary proposal: Dec. 2, 2026.
• Full proposal: July 27, 2027, by 5 p.m., submitting organization’s local time.

Review the full NSF 26-525 solicitation and begin building your team now. Questions may be directed to cise-expeditions@nsf.gov.

Source: NSF

The post NSF Seeks Proposals for Expeditions in Computing Program appeared first on HPCwire.

(The Center Square) — Trump administration officials celebrated legal wins at the U.S. Supreme Court over the past year and looked ahead to the court’s upcoming term.

Representative Mike Collins has been dogged by associations to white nationalism and antisemitism

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The US senator for Georgia Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, has slammed a “disgraceful and disqualifying” report that a former staffer for his Trump-backed Republican challenger Mike Collins shared images online of a swastika and depicting himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.

It is the latest instance of someone in Collins’s orbit facing scrutiny over racist or white nationalist conduct. Ossoff called the report “stunning” and said it “should shock the conscience of every Georgian”.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 27, 2026 — MIPS, by GF, today announced it is now a Premier Member of RISC-V International, with Yankin Tanurhan, SVP & CTO of MIPS, by GF, appointed as Vice Chairman of the RISC-V International Board. The milestone advances GF and MIPS leadership in the open standards and semiconductor technologies required to build physical AI platforms for aerospace, artificial intelligence, automotive, industrial, and intelligent edge applications. GF’s long-standing commitment to open standards is now extended through MIPS, an industry-leading AI platform provider, as both companies work with the RISC-V ecosystem to accelerate innovation in workload-optimized computing beyond the data center.

“AI is rapidly moving from the data center into the physical world, where intelligent systems must sense, decide, and act in real time under strict power, safety, and reliability constraints,” said Yankin Tanurhan, CTO and Senior Vice President of MIPS, by GF. “That shift requires a new class of compute platforms that are open, efficient, configurable, and tightly aligned from software to silicon. By expanding our role in RISC-V International, MIPS is helping define the open standards, processor IP, software-first development tools, and ecosystem foundation customers need to build differentiated physical AI platforms at scale.”

As an active member of several strategic RISC-V International committees, task groups, and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) focused on mission-critical, automotive, safety, security, and AI standards, including the Automotive, Functional Safety, Crypto, Vector, and Documentation SIGs, MIPS is helping define the open architecture foundation needed for physical AI platforms. Those contributions connect RISC-V standards work with differentiated processor microarchitecture, custom silicon solutions, and market-leading software stacks that customers can use to build workload-optimized systems.

Physical AI platforms bring sensing, compute, control, and software together so intelligent systems can perceive their environment, make decisions in real time, and act safely at the edge. These platforms require processor architectures that are efficient, configurable, standards-based, and closely aligned with the manufacturing, packaging, and software ecosystems needed to move from design to deployment.

“GF and MIPS together bring a legacy of RISC-V innovation that will be a valuable addition to the RISC-V ecosystem, and we’re delighted to welcome them as a Premium Member,” said Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International. “We look forward to their continued contributions that will help drive the adoption of RISC-V in high-throughput real-time platforms.”

Customer adoption of AI outside the data center will depend on open, standards-based technology that can be tailored to real workloads. To meet performance, efficiency, safety, and time-to-market goals customers need earlier visibility into how their software will execute on target hardware. MIPS enables this software-first workflow with advanced processor modeling and software tools that expose workload insights, support software and hardware co-design, and use the industry’s broadest RISC-V based processor IP portfolio.

“GlobalFoundries’ decision to join RISC-V International as a Premium Member reinforces that its acquisitions of MIPS and ARC were strategic investments supporting a long-term commitment to RISC-V. The architecture has matured into a proven foundation for semiconductor innovation, particularly in the process nodes where GlobalFoundries is highly competitive,” said Ed Wilford, Senior Research Director, Omdia. “Together, MIPS, ARC, and GF provide customers with an open path from design to fabrication, enabling greater customization, faster development, and stronger supply chain resilience while further strengthening the RISC-V ecosystem by bringing a major foundry more deeply into the standard.”

MIPS partners with leading OEMs and integrators in automotive, aerospace, robotics, and embedded computing markets to help build physical AI platforms from open standards, processor IP, software-first tools, and GF-backed silicon technologies.

About MIPS

MIPS, by GlobalFoundries, develops AI-native and safety-capable platforms for event-driven physical AI systems and embedded devices. MIPS, now combined with ARC processor solutions, is positioned to deliver software-first platforms for automotive, aerospace, robotics, IoT, and other embedded markets. Based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture, the MIPS portfolio spans processor IP, virtual platforms, custom application-specific silicon, and physical AI platforms, backed by GlobalFoundries process technology, packaging, and manufacturing. For more information, visit MIPS.com.

Source: MIPS

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