An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The European Commission has ended an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees. The move could reduce barriers for customers considering third-party support for products nearing the end of their vendor support terms, including thousands of large businesses that rely on SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to run their business operations. SAP's mainstream support for ECC ends in December 2027, while customers can opt for extended maintenance until December 2030 by paying an additional two percentage points on their maintenance fees. The most recent figures from Gartner showed that in Q4 2024 only 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers -- from a total of 35,000 -- had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA, the replacement ERP product.
In September last year, the European Commission launched a formal investigation into SAP's behavior in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe. It said it was responding to concerns that SAP restricted competition in this crucial aftermarket by making it harder for rivals to compete, leaving European customers with fewer choices and higher costs. In October, SAP published its response. "SAP's commitments aim at improving the financial attractiveness for customers who wish to reinstate SAP maintenance and support services. Thus, future costs associated with reinstatement will not financially prevent customers from choosing to terminate SAP maintenance and support for a given period of time," the document said (PDF).
SAP has now agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back maintenance fees charged to customers who return to SAP's support after a period of absence, the Commission confirmed. It also agreed to clarify conditions that allow customers to choose different maintenance and support service providers and different levels of support from SAP. The agreement is relevant to customers considering third-party support to extend their use of ECC beyond vendor maintenance. For example, last year, European retailer Kingfisher -- owner of well-known UK brands B&Q and Screwfix -- told a Gartner conference it had chosen Rimini Street to support ECC 6.0 because it saw insufficient value in migrating to SAP S/4HANA. [...] The commitments offered by SAP will remain in force globally for ten years.
Police say suspect is white male, and inquiry ‘moving at significant pace’
Immigration policy (see 9.24am) is just one area where Andy Burnham faces an acute challenge when he becomes PM. Here are some of the other stories around this morning about Burnham and what he might do when he takes power.
Jim Pickard, George Parker and Jennifer Williams in the Financial Times say Burnham is considering having a deputy PM based in Manchester running his No 10 North. The deputy Labour leader, Lucy Powell, is well placed to get this job, they report.
Burnham is expected to spend several days a month in Number 10 North. Caroline Simpson, chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, has been lined up to run the new office.
But the transition team has also raised the idea that the new unit could be given political direction by the next deputy prime minister, who would be based in Manchester, according to people close to the situation.
John Bew, a former No 10 foreign policy adviser, has told the Times that Burnham could face an international crisis within weeks of taking office. Bew said:
I’d say there’s a high likelihood of a series of quite challenging contingencies happening.
One is a horizontal or vertical escalation from Putin over the course of this summer and beyond because the war [in Ukraine] is not going well for him.
Some ministers are lobbying Burnham to keep their jobs. In their London Playbook briefing for Politico, Sam Francis and Megan McElroy have a good summary.
Cabinet auditions continue across Westminster. Business Secretary Peter Kyle was at least direct about it, telling the Guardian’s Richard Partington that “I want to stay, I’ll just stay where I am.” He also declared Britain needs “Manchesterism.” In another not-very-subtle intervention, David Miliband used his foreign policy speech last night to restate his support for electoral reform (he previously backed the Alternative Vote at the 2011 referendum, while still an MP) and back a Burnham-style transfer of power out of Westminster (the Arguably substack has the full script). Just before Miliband spoke, Yvette Cooper revealed to Chatham House that she had spoken to Andy Burnham before heading to NATO — meaning she’s already giving him foreign affairs advice.
Potential candidates will … have four days, from Tuesday 14 July to Friday 17 July at 4pm, to submit their nominations.
Residents not already on the electoral register have until 28 July to apply to vote in time for the byelection, and until 5pm the following day (29 July) to apply for a postal or postal proxy vote.
A 17-year-old girl fell off a truck and died while celebrating France’s World Cup quarter final win over Morocco, emergency services said Friday.
Celebrations erupted across France after the 2-0 win in the United States with hundreds dancing in the streets of Paris, watched by thousands of police on security duties.
The Trump administration is quietly turning a federal program designed to help lower-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health services into an engine for pronationalism, a far-right movement with roots in eugenics that pushes people to have more babies.
On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs published an updated “notice of funding opportunity,” first announced in April, for service providers to apply for grants through Title X, a federal program that provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to roughly 2.8 million people every year.
For months, the federal program had been plagued with uncertainty. Donald Trump eliminated Title X from his 2027 annual budget — and last year suddenly froze a large percentage of funds going to Title X recipients before eventually restoring the funding.
But when providers opened the funding notice in April, instead of being met with relief, many were horrified to discover that Health and Human Services had a new mission in mind for the only federal program dedicated to providing contraceptives: getting women to have more babies.
Grants funded through the program will help “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis” and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on “overmedicalization,” which appears to commend the fact that “reports have shown a decrease in females’ current use of any contraception.”
The notice is a part of a quiet, but significant, push to retool the Department of Health and Human Services into a weapon for a pronatalist movement seeped in the racist history of eugenics — which insists on the supposed biological superiority of white, straight, able-bodied people — and in the denial of women’s bodily autonomy and right to exist outside of motherhood.
Providers fighting back against the new requirements in court argue that this will further cede power over vulnerable communities’ health to far-right actors inside of the administration, like Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, a former penile implant surgeon and anti-abortion crusader who is in charge of administering the Title X program.
“I would characterize it as really a shift toward this Project 2025 MAHA vision of prioritizing having babies over reproductive autonomy,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization, “and really undermining the program from top to bottom.”
The notice had previously included a pre-merits alignment review that would require all grantees to undergo an ideological audit by political appointees based on their commitment to the administration’s priorities, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and gender-affirming care — even though the statute explicitly requires grantees to promote health equity and provide care to transgender recipients. However, it was later updated to remove the alignment review.
Friedrich-Karnik and other sexual and reproductive health experts argue that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is seeking to warp a public sexual health program to advance the goals of the administration’s allies in the pronatalist movement ahead of the November midterms. Pronatalists harbor close ties and, in some cases, overlap with white Christian nationalists who want not only for there to be more babies, but also more white babies.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
The pronatalist movement in the United States is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two categories: traditional conservatives and tech eugenicists.
Tech pronatalists like Elon Musk, a former administration official who is arguably the most prominent member of the movement, advocate for having as many children as possible to create an “elite” human race with more “high-IQ” people. Unlike traditional pronatalist conservatives, best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance, whose focus rests more on the nuclear family and defending “traditional” gender roles, tech pronatalists emphasize the use of technology such as in vitro fertilization to have as many children as possible.
While pronatalists are often not as explicit as avowed white nationalists about their desire for more white children, they often talk about “declining genetic quality” in “the West” and generally oppose immigration, even as they decry the falling birth rate and nearing population decline.
Trump, Vance, and Kennedy have all been closely aligned with the pronatalist movement. Kennedy has repeatedly opined about declining birth rates and teenage boys’ declining “sperm count”; Trump has anointed himself the “fertilization president,” despite the fact that his administration gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s IVF team; and in his first address as vice president, Vance declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
This month, “Trump Accounts” went into effect, providing children born between January 2025 and December 2028 with $1,000 in an effort to boost the population. The president also floated the idea of providing mothers who have six or more children with medals. (After several people noted that the Nazis had done the same thing, that idea seems to be dead in the water.)
But behind the push to have more kids, there is an anti-autonomy agenda at play, said Taylor St. Germain, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now.
“This is a part of the MAHA movement that is really a veneer for an anti-abortion agenda and an anti-bodily-autonomy agenda,” said St. Germain.
“This is a part of the MAHA movement that is really a veneer for an anti-abortion agenda and an anti-bodily-autonomy agenda.”
In June, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents the majority of Title X providers, and others, sued to challenge the notice, arguing that the Trump administration was willfully violating the statute and attempting to rewrite the law through a grant notice.
“We believe that this is truly an attempt by the administration to hijack the program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the NFPRHA.
Although the administration has removed the pre-merits review that would have given additional authority to political appointees to reject providers based on politics before even assessing their ability to provide quality care, there are still concerns about the types of providers who will be brought in to the program with Christine at the helm of the Office of Population Affairs.
Christine has a long history of staunch anti-abortion advocacy, including his support for the expansion of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, deceptively advertised clinics that aim to manipulate people out of receiving abortions. Christine has called the clinics “a model for a post-Roe world.”
The problem with having crisis pregnancy centers fill the gaps of service providers is that they are “not real medical clinics,” said Friedrich-Karnik.
“They do not have the expertise to provide reproductive health care. They often oppose hormonal birth control methods, which is directly contrary to making sure that folks in Title X have access to the full range of contraceptive methods,” she said.
The fact that contraceptives are rarely mentioned in the notice is “a sign that they are decentering the statutory intent of the program,” said Coleman.
“Congress intended this program to help equalize access to contraception,” said Coleman. “The only mention of contraception is that mention in the pejorative, and talking about overmedicalization and side effects, so we just see this as a real throwaway of what the program historically has been focused on and what Congress still intends the program to be focused on.”
The funding announcement stands in stark contrast to how the Office of Population Affairs described the program less than two years ago.
A 2024 OPA handbook reads that the family planning services delivered by the program include “contraceptive products and natural family planning methods for clients who want to prevent pregnancy and space births; pregnancy testing and counseling; assistance to achieve pregnancy; basic infertility services; sexually transmitted infection (STI) services; and other preconception health services.”
While fertility is mentioned, the handbook is filled with references to contraceptives and other reproductive and sexual health services that have nothing to do with increasing the birth rate.
“RFK Jr. is really using this to push an extremist agenda that prioritizes increasing births over ensuring people have the information and health care they need to make their own reproductive care decisions,” said St. Germain.
The attempts to rewrite the mandate at HHS to focus on pronatalism are not exclusively tied to Title X. In June, the administration announced a notice of funding opportunity for an existing program called the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program, which was created to help raise awareness of programs that allow people to receive other people’s unused embryos. In the notice, the agency described an embryo as “a child already in existence.”
“They have defined, for the first time, embryos as children who already exist and are in need of a family,” said Coleman, “advancing this argument for fetal personhood with a certain religious belief that sperm meets egg equals life.”
Coleman said what we are witnessing now is a ratcheting up of the pronatalist agenda, using methods like funding notices that are unlikely to draw much attention outside of conservative circles.
“It’s sneaky,” she said, adding, “It’s quite unusual in my 17 years in this job to do a lot of calls with reporters about funding announcements.”
All week, current and retired judges have spoken out about about physical threats to judges and a rising tide of criticism from politicians and elected officials.
The Trump administration plans to erect new fences outside the White House, in the latest bid to boost presidential security, the Washington Post (paywall) reports, citing three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans.
According to the people, the White House and Secret Service would be able to close the new fences, planned where Pennsylvania Avenue intersects 15th and 17th streets NW, and prevent pedestrian access in front of the White House if they determine there are security risks.
There is just one week to go until the winner of the World Cup is crowned, and it has been a memorable tournament, not least due to the extraordinary intervention by Donald Trump this week that shocked the football world. Lucy Hough speaks to global sports business correspondent Matt Hughes
The scaled-backed Alibaba settlement reflects a broader trend by the DOJ of pulling back on criminal enforcement of corporate cases involving the safety of food, drugs, and medical devices.
A major housing bill will go into effect at midnight on Saturday without Donald Trump’s signature, after the president said he would refuse to sign the legislation because Congress has not approved new restrictions on voting nationwide.
The measure, known as the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, is the biggest change to federal policy for buyers, renters and homebuilders in decades, and Congress approved it with large margins last month after lengthy negotiations between Democrats and Republicans.
Thames Valley police reportedly wish to talk to Virginia Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law about her allegations
Detectives investigating Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor are to travel to the US to speak with the family of his accuser Virginia Giuffre, it has been reported.
Thames Valley police are believed to want to talk to Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law, Sky and Amanda Roberts, about their sister’s allegations of sexual assault against the former Duke of York. The former prince has denied Giuffre’s allegations. Giuffre, 41, took her own life in April last year.
Body of former MP, 78, found with serious injuries at her Dartmoor home on Thursday morning
A murder investigation has been launched after the suspicious death of the former MP Ann Widdecombe at her home on Dartmoor, in Devon, police have said.
Widdecombe’s body was found with “serious injuries” by the ambulance service at an address in Haytor, Devon, at 11.40am on Thursday. The police said officers were searching for a “white male” in connection with her death.
The U.S. military released a new batch of files related to UFOs, including one report from a Navy pilot who said a mysterious object was "unlike anything I had seen" in 28 years of service.
A woman says she saw a fellow passenger on her Ryanair flight get his head and shoulders sucked out of a window that broke during their trip between Greece and Germany.
Range of potential measures announced by Ofcom include reducing risk of accounts being hijacked for scams
Big tech platforms will be required to ban scam advertisers in the UK under proposals to tackle online fraud.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X and YouTube will have to block bad actors who post fraudulent ads and prevent them from creating new accounts in a range of measures targeted at the biggest services.
Exclusive: Resignation comes after abuse survivor said she was devastated her father, who was jailed for 48 years, was interviewed for the Shadow of Doubt podcast
The journalist Richard Guilliatt has resigned from the Walkley awards judging board after the Walkley Foundation dismissed complaints about his podcast and then handed an award to the journalist whose reports were critical of him.
Nina Funnell won a mid-year Walkley for freelance journalist of the year for a series of three articles in news.com.au about a survivor of sexual assault who was abused by her own parents for 14 years.
Telstra has long profited from its reputation of having the largest and most stable mobile telco coverage in Australia, allowing it to charge premium prices.
When its main rival, Optus, suffered a series of operational issues that culminated in a damaging triple zero outage last year, Telstra attracted new customers.
OpenAI's CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role and becoming a part-time adviser after taking extended medical leave for a chronic neuroimmune condition. "Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness I've lived with for seven years," Simo wrote in a post Thursday on X. "During that time, it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated -- and that I needed to focus on it fully." Wired reports: Simo joined OpenAI's board of directors in March 2024. The following year, CEO Sam Altman hired her to take on the product and business organizations so he could focus on research and the company's data center buildout. Previously, Simo was the CEO of Instacart and head of the Facebook app at Meta.
Shortly before starting at OpenAI, Simo experienced a significant health relapse. She was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, in 2019. "For my entire time here, I've postponed medical tests and new therapies to stay completely focused on the job and not miss a single day of work," she told OpenAI staff in a memo back in April, announcing her temporary departure. "It's now clear that I've pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health."
News of Simo's medical leave came amid a larger executive shakeup that saw Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's former COO, transition to a role overseeing special projects. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman took over OpenAI's product strategy. In the months since Simo stepped back from OpenAI, the company further reorganized its product teams, positioning Thibault Sottiaux as head of the company's core products, including ChatGPT.
A Texas Democrat running to become the state’s attorney general has said he will investigate Elon Musk’s SpaceX company if elected, saying it “sure looks like” corruption was involved in a deal he said handed the world’s richest man $110m of taxpayers’ money.
Nathan Johnson made the comment in an interview with the Dallas News on Friday, in which he called for greater legislative scrutiny of state grants funneled to SpaceX for its Starlink satellite program, which provides fast internet access for customers in remote areas.
Direct oversight of ‘critical third parties’ such as Oracle and Microsoft given to ensure resilient cyber-defences and help safeguard UK economy
The Bank of England has been handed powers to regulate important tech firms including Amazon and Google from next week, amid fears that system failures could threaten financial stability and harm consumers.
From Monday, the Bank and fellow City regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be in charge of ensuring that four large-scale providers of cloud and tech services to banks are resilient and actively reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and major outages that could disrupt services for millions of people and businesses across the UK.
The acquisition of Qarnot enhances Scaleway’s portfolio with dedicated high performance computing (HPC) capabilities, and brings together two European companies united by a shared commitment to technological independence, open technologies and a more sustainable approach to compute.
PARIS, July 10, 2026 — Scaleway today announced the acquisition of Qarnot, a European specialist in high performance computing (HPC) for engineering, simulation and research workloads.
HPC has become a critical enabler of industrial competitiveness, powering complex simulations across sectors including aerospace, automotive, energy, manufacturing and life sciences.
With Qarnot, Scaleway adds dedicated HPC capabilities to its Cloud & AI platform, a strategic service increasingly demanded by industrial and financial organizations. The acquisition further strengthens Scaleway’s position as the only sovereign European cloud provider offering cloud, AI and dedicated HPC capabilities within a single platform.
A Shared Vision for Europe’s Cloud & AI future
The acquisition is grounded in a strong common DNA between Scaleway and Qarnot across three key areas:
European foundation: both Scaleway and Qarnot are European companies, with European operations, governed by European jurisdiction, providing their customers immunity to extraterritorial laws.
Open ecosystem: openness and open source are core values for both companies. Both Scaleway and Qarnot use Open Compute Project standards to guide the design and deployment of their infrastructure, from server architecture to operational practices. Together, they promote interoperability, reduce dependency on proprietary technologies and help prevent customer technology lock-in.
Responsible growth: both companies believe cloud, AI and HPC must scale more responsibly. Qarnot brings recognised expertise in waste heat recovery, turning server heat into a useful energy resource for cities and industries, complementing Scaleway’s commitment to efficient and scalable European Cloud & AI infrastructure.
Unlocking the Value of Excess Heat
As cloud infrastructure continues to scale, Europe will inevitably consume more electricity. While the industry is already working to improve compute efficiency, one major opportunity remains under-addressed: excess heat.
Qarnot has built its model around recovering and reusing the heat generated by servers. Using patented direct liquid-cooling technology, up to 95% of the heat produced by HPC servers can be recovered and redirected to district heating networks, public facilities and industrial sites, without affecting computing performance.
This model is already deployed in real-world environments, including cities such as Brescia, Italy, where Qarnot partnered with A2A to connect HPC infrastructure to the city’s district heating network, and wellness and aquatic centres, where Qarnot’s server-generated heat contributes to heating waters.
For Scaleway, this expertise strengthens the ambition to build European Cloud & AI infrastructure that delivers more compute while making better use of the heat it generates.
Trusted by Europe’s Leading Industrial and Financial Organizations
Qarnot’s HPC platform already powers compute-intensive workloads for organizations operating at the forefront of engineering and financial services. By providing a fully integrated solution that makes launching complex simulations seamless, it lets teams iterate on designs faster, turn validation cycles from days into hours, and scale on demand to take on studies that would otherwise be constrained by an internal cluster.
Customers include MaiaSpace, Alpine Racing, Natixis, ATR Aircraft illustrating the growing demand for sovereign high-performance computing across industries where simulation, modelling and data security are business critical.
With Scaleway’s European reach and the backing of the iliad Group, these capabilities will now become available to a broader range of organizations developing the next generation of industrial, scientific and AI applications.
“The next frontier isn’t just more efficient compute. It’s making sure the energy we can’t avoid consuming creates value twice. Tomorrow’s cloud platforms won’t only be measured by the performance they deliver, but by how intelligently they use the energy they consume. Qarnot’s expertise in waste heat recovery helps us move towards that future” said Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway.
“Joining Scaleway gives Qarnot the backing of a major European cloud provider and the iliad Group,” said Clément Pellegrini, CTO of Qarnot. “It gives us the scale, investment capacity and European reach to bring our HPC expertise to more organizations while continuing to build on the principles that shaped Qarnot from the beginning.”
About Scaleway
Scaleway is Europe’s sovereign cloud and AI provider, delivering a secure, transparent, and sustainable platform. We empower organizations of all sizes with open, independent technologies and continuous innovation to build and scale on their own terms.
A subsidiary of the iliad Group, Scaleway combines decades of infrastructure expertise with the agility of a state-of-the-art tech company. With a rapidly expanding network of data centers across Europe, Scaleway offers a comprehensive portfolio of high-performance cloud services, from virtual machines and advanced data management solutions to cloud-native infrastructure and AI-optimized supercomputers. Championing open standards and operating within a fully European framework, Scaleway provides a secure and transparent cloud environment that meets the needs of organizations with the highest digital sovereignty requirements.
‘Minnesota 15’ indicted after opposing ICE crackdown – just the latest attempt by Trump DoJ to criminalize resistance
Days after pleading not guilty to conspiracy charges, Emmett Doyle took the stage at a dive bar in Minneapolis, and performed an Irish protest ballad. “And you dare to call me a terrorist, while you look down your gun,” he sang during his set.
The tune has particular resonance now that Doyle, a musician and carpenter who the US government claims is an “antifa” domestic terrorist, awaits trial for protesting. “That song has been a source of inspiration for me, in finding courage to face this ordeal,” he said.
The British home secretary’s decision to reduce protections for potential trafficking victims to allow the “one in, one out” asylum returns deal to proceed was unlawful, a high court judge has ruled.
The legal challenge was brought by five small boat asylum seekers earmarked for return to France – four from Eritrea and one from Sudan. It related to a change in guidance on the one in, one out scheme, which meant that those denied trafficking protections no longer had the right to ask for it to be reconsidered.
Serbian man reportedly saved by wife hanging on to his legs after window shattered on journey from Greece
A passenger on a Ryanair flight was reportedly almost sucked out of a window after it shattered in mid-air during a journey from Greece.
The man was said to have been lifted out of his seat into the plane’s slipstream and hung headfirst out of the window after an engine failure resulted in parts smashing the acrylic window, according to local reports.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Oil prices have slipped today, but are still set to end the week 6% higher as investors grow uneasy about the situation in the Middle East.
Kathleen Brooks, of the broker XTB, says:
The oil price is falling due to two factors, firstly, news that the US will continue its technical talks with Iran, and confirmation that the US remains committed to finding a diplomatic solution to this crisis, and secondly, reports from the IEA that oil demand is set for its first annual decline since 2020. Global oil stocks also posted an increase in June, their first monthly increase since the war began earlier this year. The UAE also lifted oil production to a record, which suggests that oil supply is rapidly normalizing, and is unlikely to get impacted by the latest flare up in tensions.
News that oil demand will fall this year is interesting, as it is only having a mild impact on growth. The IMF lowered its 2026 global growth forecast to 3%, but growth is expected to bounce back in 2027 to 3.4%. The inflation outlook is less rosy, and the IMF raised its headline inflation forecast by 0.3% to 4.7% for this year, however, inflation is expected to moderate next year.
The New Yorker writer's new book examines how, in 1898, white supremacists staged a coup against Wilmington, N.C.'s multi-racial government – a case study in the sabotage of American democracy.
Over the last six months, activists have ensured the US doesn’t forget enslavement in the nation’s first capital
On an overcast day, Tiffany Cooper, a visitor, snapped a photo of a panel about an enslaved woman at the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The remainder of the brick wall was blank, with bolts serving as the only reminder of the other panels that once stood there.
As a Black woman, Cooper said that she felt a deep sadness at the “incompleteness” of the exhibit. It once detailed the lives of nine enslaved Africans who served George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s.
Eight South Carolina national guard helicopter pilots have been returned to flying duties following a suspension over a low-flying sweep over beachgoers as part of a Fourth of July event honoring service members.
“Effective immediately, the suspension of all involved South Carolina pilots has been lifted,” the Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, wrote on Friday morning on social media. “Carry on Patriots.”
Innocent man lynched by mob in West Bengal as police killing of suspect further escalates tensions
Protests have engulfed the Indian state of West Bengal after the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, the subsequent lynching of an innocent man and the police killing of one of the accused.
Outrage erupted on Sunday after the body of a missing girl was recovered from a pond in a town just outside the state capital, Kolkata.
July 10, 2026 — On June 11, 2026, the University of California (UC) convened researchers and leaders from across the UC system in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the first annual “AI Science at Scale” summit. The summit was planned in recognition of AI’s growing role in scientific discovery and the Department of Energy’s increasing interest in frontier AI which was formalized in the Genesis Mission in 2025.
Attendees of the UC “AI Science at Scale” summit, June 2026.
Backed by a $19 million investment from fee income UC earned from its role managing Department of Energy (DOE) national labs, the UC AI Science at Scale initiative awarded grants to UC faculty and UC-affiliated national laboratory researchers, thereby reinvesting in the scientific enterprise. From a competitive pool of researchers from across the UC system, four multi-campus teams were selected in April 2025, supporting research in AI-driven genomics, quantum materials discovery, geothermal energy, and integrated data platforms.
“We launched the AI Science at Scale initiative because we saw that artificial intelligence is becoming a foundational capability for scientific discovery and national security missions,” said June Yu, vice president for UC National Laboratories. “By strategically reinvesting University management fee income, we chose to accelerate collaboration across UC and our national laboratories, build enduring research partnerships, and develop the talent needed to apply AI to some of the nation’s most complex scientific challenges.”
The summit drew heavy attendance from senior laboratory leadership, including Los Alamos National Laboratory Deputy Director for Science, Technology, and Engineering Pat Fitch, numerous associate lab directors, and Don Haynes, senior director for Los Alamos’ National Security Artificial Intelligence Office, alongside key representatives from LLNL. The presence of Triad and lab leadership underscored the alignment between UC’s academic engines and the rapid deployment of frontier AI models on the world’s most powerful supercomputers, including El Capitan and Tuolumne.
“First, a huge thank you to UC for making this investment and doing so on a short timeline with the full inclusion of priorities and opportunities with LLNL and LANL,” said Fitch. “Second, the value and impact of multi-campus, multi-lab teams really shine, especially through the excitement of students, postdocs and faculty.”
The four selected project teams, led by principal investigators from UC San Francisco, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, are not merely researching AI — they are building the foundational architecture for the future of American scientific competitiveness. By training sequence-to-function models, leveraging AI foundation models to predict subsurface physics and advance materials discovery, and advancing integrated AI-relevant data ecosystems, the teams are operating at the bleeding edge of discovery.
“This initiative highlights the power of partnership between UC and the national laboratories,” added Eric Schwegler, director of the Academic Engagement Office & Science Education at LLNL. “By connecting UC’s research strengths with LLNL’s high-performance computing, AI, and mission-driven science expertise, we can accelerate discovery in critical areas and help prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers for the DOE mission.”
“For over eighty years, LANL and the University of California have joined to apply cutting edge science and technology in the national interest,” said Haynes. “The AI Science at Scale program continues that collaboration, and I was thrilled to learn about the advances made in these important applications of AI and to witness the excitement and passion exhibited by the students and postdoctoral fellows.”
IGCC co-director Neil Narang, a professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, who currently serves as interim Associate Vice President at UC National Labs, was on the ground at the event. Narang leads IGCC’s postdoctoral fellowship on security and technology, a collaboration with the national labs, which support cutting-edge research on a range of emerging technologies, including AI.
Says Narang: “Maintaining U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence requires a scale of collaboration that very few institutions can deliver. This summit made one thing crystal clear: the University of California’s systemwide intellectual firepower, combined with the capabilities of our national labs, makes UC the premier, indispensable partner to execute the DOE’s Genesis Mission.”
Twenty-three people missing and at least four Britons thought to be among those who died fleeing Almería blaze
At least 12 people have been killed and 23 are unaccounted for after one of Spain’s deadliest wildfires broke out in the south-eastern province of Almería as the country endures its second heatwave of the summer.
The regional government of Andalucía said the victims, four of whom are believed to be British, had died while trying to escape the flames near the village of Bédar in the municipality of Los Gallardos.
Trump administration urged to relist a species in ‘very, very serious trouble’ under Endangered Species Act
Climate change is driving a gray whale “catastrophic mortality event” in the Pacific Ocean as melting sea ice depletes food sources and the animals starve, environmental groups warn.
Meanwhile, a range of other issues, like ship strikes, oil spills, microplastic pollution, algal blooms and Russian harvesting are also probably contributing to the die-off that has nearly halved the whales’ estimated population. It fell from 20,000 in 2019 to fewer than 13,000 this year, and the deaths appear to be accelerating.
4-1 defeat to Belgium averaged 33 million viewers on Fox
Mexico v England neared 45 million across platforms
The US men’s national team officially broke the record for most-watched soccer telecast in US history twice in a row.
As disappointing as Monday’s 4-1 last-16 loss to Belgium was for fans, the pregame excitement helped attract 33.086 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media research. The audience peaked at 41.033 million during the 9.15-9.30pm eastern time window.
Tyler Robinson is accused of shooting the far-right activist at Utah Valley University last year
A judge is set to determine whether the case against Tyler James Robinson, the man charged with murdering Charlie Kirk, will advance to trial, as a five-day preliminary hearing comes to a close on Friday.
The US district judge Tony Graf is expected to sift through the evidence presented by the state and Robinson’s defense team in the coming weeks before issuing a ruling.
Microsoft plans to disable and remove OWA Light, the lightweight Outlook Web Access client for Exchange Server, in an upcoming update expected in August 2026. The company says retiring the two-decade-old legacy interface will reduce attack surface and engineering complexity, pushing users to the modern Outlook on the web experience instead. BleepingComputer reports: "OWA Light was an important compatibility experience when the web needed it. Today, the full Outlook on the web experience is the right place for us to focus," the Exchange Team said on Wednesday. "Retiring OWA Light will help reduce legacy surface area, simplify ongoing engineering work, and allow us to continue improving the experience customers use every day."
Microsoft introduced OWA Light roughly two decades ago as an alternative to OWA Premium, offering a simplified web interface for systems that didn't have Internet Explorer 6 or later installed or ran older web browsers. At the time, the company said that OWA Light offered a cleaner look, faster logon times on low-bandwidth Internet connections, and worked in locked-down browser modes (such as kiosks).
Microsoft deprecated OWA Light as of August 19, 2024, and announced this week that the OWA Light experience will likely be removed from Exchange Server (on-premises) next month. "In an upcoming Exchange Server update (estimated in August 2026), we plan to disable and remove the OWA Light experience. After that change is introduced, users will no longer be able to choose or be redirected to OWA Light and should use the modern Outlook on the web experience instead."
After a fun World Cup with a dismal end, the US enters the 2030 cycle with numerous avenues to rebuild the squad
There are massive questions lingering around the US men’s program. Mauricio Pochettino’s contract is up, US Soccer has made an extension offer, but both parties are taking some time. Matt Crocker’s abrupt exit as sporting director to take a similar job with Saudi Arabia before the World Cup begs more queries about the direction of the sport in this country. And while most of the 2026 squad’s core still projects to contend for 2030, four years is a long time.
From now, each year offers a major tournament. This is what the US should hope to clarify at every step of the way.
For progressives too, working-class heroes are bearded, buff white guys. Their treatment of women can be overlooked
Ana Marie Cox’s New Republic profile of the Maine oyster farmer and former Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner begins with an encounter on the shore with a salt in rubber boots. Learning that she’s looking for Platner, the guy says: “Good man.”
In the 2025 article, Cox is charmed by Platner, who’s as voluble as this guy is terse. She’s impressed by the oyster, calling it a metaphor for “how labor, science, and regulation can still stitch together a community and economy.”.
The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is the first to target low-income families led by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi
Three months after giving birth to her son, Amaya Jones moved into a new apartment complex. She knew no one else in the building, but it was a fresh start for her and her two children. One day, someone put up a flyer on her unit’s door, notifying her about a program called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT).
Launched in 2018, the MMT is the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country, and the first to target extremely low-income families headed by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi. With no strings attached, the program provides mothers with $1,000 a month for 12 months.
State hit by new wrongful death lawsuit by family of Jason Wilson, who died in ‘brutally hot, un-airconditioned’ cell
Texas, the state with the largest prison population in the US, is coming under mounting legal pressure to address the ongoing crisis of brutal heat in its cells, as extreme summer temperatures expose inmates to suffering, illness and even death.
The Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ), the state agency that runs dozens of prisons, has been hit by a new wrongful death lawsuit by the family of Jason Wilson. The inmate was found dead in his solitary confinement cell at the Coffield unit in July 2024.
NATO in Ankara: Is Europe ready for a Russian attack?Audiosseth.drupal@c…
In this week’s episode of the Independent Thinking podcast, our experts discuss the outcomes of this year’s NATO summit and what it means for the future of the transatlantic relationship.
This year’s NATO summit brought together the leaders of all 32 member states in Ankara. President Donald Trump’s return to the summit brought renewed controversy, with remarks on Greenland and Iran underscoring the geopolitical tensions that continue to test the unity and purpose of the transatlantic alliance. What happened in Ankara and what does it mean for NATO’s future? If the Ukraine conflict winds down, will Russia pivot to test Article Five? And is Britain doing enough to prepare for a potential conflict?
Bronwen Maddox looks at the summit and NATO’s future with special guest General Sir Richard Barrons – former Commander of Joint Forces Command in the UK, now a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House – plus Dr Marion Messmer, director of our International Security Programme, and Galip Dalay who runs Chatham House’s Turkey Initiative.
About Independent Thinking
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
Disturbances linked to false claims spread online by bad actors ‘tapping into fears within the community’
Scottish police have warned people to factcheck online claims before going to protests, after crowds gathered outside two homes in Glasgow this week, in one case as a result of mistaken identity.
Police Scotland said that several nights of disorder in Scotland’s biggest city had “clearly been orchestrated by individuals who are not from Glasgow”.
Regulators say Facebook and Instagram features such as autoplay and infinite scroll contribute to ‘compulsive use’
EU regulators have accused Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, of failing to tackle the risks of its “addictive design” on the physical and mental health of users.
In an official charge sheet against Meta released on Friday, the European Commission said features such as video autoplay and infinite scroll, which provides an endless stream of content, “shift the brain into autopilot mode, contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use”.
Critics accuse president of ‘fattening the wallets of his cronies’ as working Americans face higher energy rates
The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7bn of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.125bn into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills.
They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.
Exclusive: Move comes as allies of Andy Burnham work on proposals to take water companies into public control
Ministers are drawing up plans to set legally binding debt targets for England’s water companies as they look for ways to avoid another corporate failure such as Thames Water.
Sources say Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, is working on proposals that would force companies to keep their debt below certain levels for the first time or face legal punishment.
Good morning. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were reportedly seeking two people from Guatemala when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the US for 35 years.
Salgado Araujo, who was on his way to work early on Tuesday morning, was driving three other people in a white van. After the shooting, the three men were taken into custody. One of the three men has been identified by advocates as Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the brother of the victim. It was reported that he was still in an immigration detention center.
How have authorities justified the killing? The ICE agents who stopped Salgado Araujo claimed he “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer” who then fired his weapon “in self-defense”, but did not provide evidence to corroborate that account. It is a defense the agency has used in other high-profile incidents, including when Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis, when video evidence later contradicted the description. The officers involved in shooting Salgado Araujo were not wearing body cameras, DHS said.
How is Trump endangering the midterm elections? The US president has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections. The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees, were notified of their terminations via email.
Xavier Niel buys 16% through investment vehicle Vega after Emirati telecoms group sells shareholding
The French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has become Vodafone’s largest shareholder after buying a 16% stake for £4.4bn.
On Friday, the Emirati telecoms group e&, which first took a stake worth £3.3bn in Vodafone in 2022, announced the sale of its entire shareholding for 112.5p a share.
The widow, son and sister of Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda attend his burial service in Santiago, Chile, on March 8, 2024. The former military officer was kidnapped, killed and buried under cement in a slum. Prosecutors have alleged that members of the Tren de Aragua street gang killed him on the orders of the regime of former President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Esteban Felix/AP
When Rafael Enrique Gámez Salas crossed the Mexican border in late 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents first thought he was like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s devastating economic and political crises.
But today the 40-year-old sits in a federal jail in Los Angeles awaiting extradition to Chile, where prosecutors accuse him of being a boss of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan street gang. Chilean authorities say Gámez organized a kidnapping that resulted in the killing of an exiled Venezuelan dissident there. Even more troubling, they believe he acted at the behest of Venezuela’s authoritarian government.
And for the past six months, the Trump administration has been working directly with the powerful Venezuelan official under investigation for allegedly ordering the crime: Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
The unlikely alliance with Cabello began in January, when U.S. special operations forces swooped into Caracas, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. While critics called the operation a blatant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, the Trump administration declared it was restoring law and order in a strife-torn region and began to restructure Venezuela’s ruined economy and exert control over its massive oil industry.
Yet the Trump administration has left Cabello in place — despite longtime U.S. accusations that he has led the repression of political opponents and enriched himself in illicit partnerships with criminal groups. Cabello has had a seat at the table during visits to Caracas by senior U.S. officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for negotiations over issues such as Venezuela’s lucrative mining sector. Before Maduro’s capture, U.S. authorities had charged Cabello and a top leader of Tren de Aragua in the same drug trafficking indictment as Maduro and offered a $25 million reward for him.
Cabello and other U.S.-backed Venezuelan leaders have come under fire in recent days for their response to the devastating earthquakes on June 24 that killed more than 3,600 people, injured more than 16,000 and left thousands more missing. In an internationally televised confrontation, Cabello exchanged tense words with members of a U.S. search-and-rescue team en route to aid victims in a heavily damaged area. Critics of the sluggish Venezuelan response to the disaster, including U.S. congressional representatives in Miami, accused Cabello of interfering with rescue operations and repeated their calls for his arrest on the pending U.S. charges. But a State Department spokesperson downplayed the incident as “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”
Diosdado Cabello, right, in a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez, center, and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, left, in Caracas, Venezuela, in March.Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters
In Chile, authorities are investigating Cabello as the alleged mastermind behind the killing of a former Venezuelan military officer, Lt. Ronald Ojeda, who had unsuccessfully attempted an uprising against Maduro. Chile’s attorney general and other senior officials have said that Cabello became an investigative target based on testimony of captured suspects.
The 32-year-old Ojeda had been granted asylum in Chile. Authorities say they suspect that Cabello paid Tren de Aragua’s top leadership and that they, in turn, commissioned gang members in Chile, led by Gámez, to kidnap the former soldier. Chilean prosecutors believe Ojeda died while his captors were torturing him to get information about the Venezuelan political opposition.
After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials asserted that the killing in Chile demonstrated Tren de Aragua’s ties to the highest levels of the Venezuelan government and the gang’s reach across the Americas. The president designated the gang as a terrorist group and said Maduro had sent it to invade the United States, although some law enforcement officials say the administration exaggerated the threat to justify mass deportations.
As Chile seeks the return of Gámez and prosecutors prepare to bring 20 suspects to trial, the Trump administration has been silent on the alleged role of the regime and Cabello in Ojeda’s death. U.S officials have aided Chilean counterparts with the extradition process, but they have not used the case to press Venezuelan authorities to oust, arrest or hand over Cabello, current and former U.S. officials said.
Asked at a press conference in May if the U.S. still considers Cabello a narcoterrorist, Rubio gave a brief answer. “The policy of the United States on that topic has not changed, and when it changes we will let you know,” he said.
Todd Robinson, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador in Caracas, said Cabello’s continuing power raises questions about whether the stated U.S. commitments to advancing the rule of law in the hemisphere are real or a cover for its interests in exploiting Venezuela’s oil.
“It’s just a horrible, horrible idea to leave him in place,” said Robinson, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2018 after criticizing human rights abuses. “I don’t know what their aim is in doing that, unless it really is about oil, not democratic transition.”
Another retired U.S. diplomat, Brian Naranjo, who served three tours in Venezuela, said the administration seems more interested in appeasing corrupt actors than uprooting them. In addition to controlling the security forces as minister of the interior and justice, Cabello maintains alliances with guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and other criminal groups that make him a danger to political stability, according to Naranjo, other officials, dissidents, and U.S. and Chilean court documents. As a result, critics say, Washington sees Cabello as a necessary evil.
“As long as he figures out a way to keep handing over things the Trump administration wants, I think he endures,” Naranjo said.
In response to a list of questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment on any ongoing investigations. The White House referred questions to the Department of Justice. The State Department and Venezuelan government officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Although Cabello could not be reached for comment, he has publicly denied allegations of involvement in the killing of Ojeda. Responding on his television show in 2024, he said: “Venezuela has nothing to do with this kidnapping. Nothing. Resolve your problems there, in Chile.”
Cabello sometimes wields a spiked club on his television show, “Con el Mazo Dando” (“Hitting With the Club”).Latin America News Agency via Reuters
As for Gámez, ProPublica found no information indicating that the Venezuelan ex-convict had been charged with a violent offense during the nearly two years he lived in the United States. Interviewed by telephone and email from the federal jail in Los Angeles, he said he worked hard at a restaurant and as a deliveryman to support his family in Utah. He denied any role in Ojeda’s death or being a member of Tren de Aragua. He also said he has no connections to Cabello.
Gámez said that, like the dissident whose kidnapping he’s accused of organizing, he left Venezuela in part because he was an opponent of the former regime. He said the governments of Chile and the United States are making him a scapegoat.
“If only I was everything they say I am,” he said. “Obviously any leader boss has money to burn and I don’t have a penny to my name.”
Hundreds of pages of Chilean and U.S. court records paint a much darker portrait of his activities and detail his alleged role in the Ojeda case and other crimes. Interviews with current and former officials from the United States, Chile, Venezuela and Spain; Ojeda’s friends and family; Gámez; and others, along with the court records, provide one of the fullest accounts of the case.
The Crime
On Feb. 21, 2024, a stolen Nissan sedan arrived at an apartment tower in Santiago, the capital of Chile, one of the safest and most prosperous nations in Latin America. It was 3:05 a.m.
Four masked men disguised as Chilean police officers got out. On the 14th floor, three of them broke into Ojeda’s apartment, handcuffed him in front of his terrified wife and son, and dragged him out, according to court documents and security video. He was barefoot and wearing only underpants.
The kidnappers rushed Ojeda to a slum hideout, where they tortured him to death, court documents say. Then they buried his partially dismembered remains in a suitcase beneath a newly laid cement floor, documents say.
Images from security video show kidnappers disguised as Chilean investigative police as they burst into Ojeda’s 14th-floor apartment in Santiago and abducted him early in the morning on Feb. 21, 2024.Obtained by ProPublicaAlleged Tren de Aragua members disguised as police officers restrained Ojeda in the elevator after abducting him in front of his terrified family. Authorities say he died in a gang hideout while his captors tortured him to get information about the Venezuelan political opposition.Obtained by ProPublica
Weeks earlier, the Maduro regime had publicly declared Ojeda a traitor.
In 2017, Ojeda and other young dissident officers had been jailed and tortured in Venezuela. Ojeda alleged in a posthumously published memoir that his ordeal had been ordered by Cabello.
Ojeda in Colombia with former Capt. Anyelo Heredia, a fellow dissident, in December 2023. Soon afterward, they slipped across the border into Venezuela to do reconnaissance for a planned military uprising. Soldiers captured Heredia, but Ojeda narrowly escaped.Courtesy of the Ojeda family
Ojeda took refuge in Chile. But in late 2023, he went to Colombia’s border with Venezuela to try to instigate a military rebellion and narrowly escaped capture. During his final days, Ojeda feared the regime was coming for him, according to his friends and family.
“Ronald and his wife had thought about what would happen if there was a knock on the door,” said his family’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Manríquez. “They had even rehearsed for it. They had agreed to protect their son at all costs by not offering any resistance.”
A tip led Chilean police to Ojeda’s buried remains nine days after his abduction. Fingerprints recovered from the abandoned Nissan had already been traced to a member of Tren de Aragua, authorities say.
In addition to the evidence of the gang’s involvement, Chilean investigators quickly came to suspect a political crime orchestrated by the Maduro regime, which had openly declared the victim an enemy of the state.
“Ojeda had already escaped from them at least once before,” said Héctor Barros, the chief prosecutor in the case. “The regime took that personally. He was a high-priority target.”
Delivering for DoorDash
Before his odyssey across the Americas, Gámez grew up in the Caribbean port city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.
After high school, he fell into petty crime and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for robbery and other charges in a home invasion, according to Venezuelan court records and his own account.
Nonetheless, there is no indication that he became a member of Tren de Aragua until years later, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. It is not clear when and how he joined the gang, Chilean investigators say.
About a decade ago, Gámez left Venezuela as part of what has become the largest mass exodus in the hemisphere. Maduro had been elected after the death of populist President Hugo Chávez. In 2014, the price of oil had plummeted, causing inflation, unemployment and food shortages. In addition to economic necessity, Gámez said he migrated because he belonged to a political party that opposed the increasingly repressive regime.
Gámez spent years in Chile, where he worked in bread and clothing factories and as a barber. There are no indications that he had a criminal record during that period, according to interviews and court documents.
Rafael Enrique Gámez Salas featured his work as a barber on his Instagram account while living in Santiago, Chile. Authorities say he did not have a criminal record there before he left for the United States, but allege that he became a leader of Tren de Aragua after returning to Chile in 2023.Screenshot and redactions by ProPublica
In 2021, Gámez and his family joined a record number of immigrants who headed north to the United States during the Biden administration. They surrendered to U.S. border agents in Arizona and were released pending the outcome of immigration proceedings.
“All the people who came here said there was more work and better quality of life,” Gámez said. “I also thought about the future of my children and their security because I thought this was a safe country.”
The family settled in Salt Lake City. Gámez said he found jobs in a restaurant kitchen and delivering for DoorDash, sometimes working as many as 15 hours a day.
“The whole time I was here I worked,” he said. “I never had a problem.”
Until December 2022, when a Texas state trooper patrolling near the Mexican border pulled him over for driving with expired plates and discovered that his Venezuelan passengers were undocumented. Gámez admitted that he had agreed to take the family of three to Utah, court records say. He told ProPublica he was doing a favor for a friend who is related to the family. But state prosecutors charged him with smuggling of persons and smuggling of a minor, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him back to Venezuela in August 2023.
Although the government declared victory, critics said the authorities had tipped off the top gang bosses, including Hector Rusthenford “Niño” Guerrero, who managed to flee the raid.
Gámez was not involved, and Chilean authorities believe he had already left Venezuela en route back to Chile. But investigators say their later search of his communications found a post after the raid in which he appeared to celebrate Guerrero’s escape.
“They toppled the castle, but not the king,” read his WhatsApp status, according to court documents. “So the game continues.”
Authorities said the message suggests that Gámez may have had contact with the gang during his first stay in Chile or in Utah.
Citing communications and witness testimony, investigators say he was back in Chile about two months after the raid on the prison. The Venezuelan gang rapidly put him in charge of its offshoot in Santiago, called the Pirates of Aragua, according to court documents and interviews.
“There is no way he moves up that quickly when he returns to Chile unless he’s already connected,” said a former U.S. federal law enforcement official.
In early 2024, Chilean investigators say they started hearing chatter about a new gang boss, known as el Turko, who was overseeing a wave of extortion and kidnappings of immigrants.
Angered by public attention to the Ojeda case, senior Tren de Aragua leaders ordered the kidnappers to leave Chile, according to court documents and interviews. Investigators say Gámez also left, spending time in Peru and Colombia as he used his phone to oversee crimes by members of the crew still in Santiago, according to court documents and interviews.
Six weeks after Ojeda’s killing, Gámez was communicating by text with them when they attempted a carjacking that led to a gunfight with an off-duty Chilean police officer, court documents say. The officer and one of the suspected gang members were killed. Recovered text exchanges reveal that an agitated Gámez gave real-time instructions to the accused killers as they fled the scene, according to court records and interviews.
“The clothes you had,” he wrote, according to court records. “Dump them…right away the shoes…everything.”
Police arrested three suspects for killing the police officer and found data in their phones that identified Gámez as el Turko, according to documents. It included a trove of telltale communications in which Gámez, acting on instructions from senior gang bosses outside Chile, allegedly directed the plot to kidnap Ojeda, according to interviews and court documents.
“The order comes from above and they are putting their trust in me,” Gámez told his crew in a text, according to court documents.
By mid-2024, the police knew who they were looking for. But they didn’t know where he was.
End of an Odyssey
On Dec. 30, 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested Gámez after he crossed near Brownsville, Texas.
He was carrying a Colombian passport with an alias to hide his previous deportation and hoping to rejoin his wife and children in Utah, according to officials and his account. But fingerprint checks revealed his true identity.
Gámez pleaded guilty to a charge of being illegally in the country after deportation and received a sentence of 13 months in prison. He also pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the 2022 smuggling case and was sentenced to 120 days, according to court records.
In Chile, the sprawling investigation had gathered momentum. Chilean police tracked down other fugitives abroad with the aid of U.S. and Latin American law enforcement agencies. And a number of witnesses, including accused kidnappers, implicated Gámez and the Venezuelan regime, court documents show. Three of them pointed the finger at Cabello, according to sources close to the case.
Cabello, right, with Rodríguez on Venezuela’s National Civil-Military Unity Day in April.Javier Campos/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“Diosdado Cabello, who is a Venezuelan politician, gave the instruction to do the kidnapping,” said an admitted kidnapper. Cabello allegedly paid Guerrero, the top boss of Tren de Aragua, according to that testimony.
Another alleged gang member testified that one of Ojeda’s kidnappers told him the crime was “ordered by the Government of Venezuela, planned by the leaders of Tren de Aragua, and executed by the members of the gang who were in Chile,” court documents say.
“The money was paid by the government,” the alleged gang member said.
So far, authorities said they do not have other evidence that directly connects Cabello to the crime — like communications between the Venezuelan leader and gang bosses. But last year, Chile took the extraordinary step of going to the International Criminal Court to accuse the Maduro regime of being involved in Ojeda’s death. That case is in the preliminary investigation stage as part of the court’s probe of human rights abuses in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government responded to Chile’s charges with a statement that the case “doesn’t just lack a legal basis, but is sustained by a vicious hate towards Venezuela, showing the desperation to please the agendas ordered by the United States.”
The U.S. agenda in Venezuela has come under increasing scrutiny. Venezuela’s opposition, which has long counted on the United States for support, continues to call for Cabello’s ouster and democratic reforms. But an unspoken bargain between Cabello and the Trump administration prevails, according to dissidents and current and former U.S. officials. The administration exploits the leverage of the U.S. indictment to ensure Cabello’s cooperation, while Cabello shields himself with his power to upend Venezuela’s stability, critics said.
Naranjo, the former diplomat, said Cabello’s willingness to accommodate Washington suggests that he is “going to be around far longer than anybody wants. He’s always demonstrated his ability to react and adapt, operationally and tactically, to the circumstances in front of him.”
In a recent and dramatic sign of the evolving partnership with the United States, Trump announced June 13 that a U.S. missile strike had killed Guerrero, Tren de Aragua’s leader, in Venezuela’s lawless mining region. Trump said the strike had been “coordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are working very well.”
Guerrero’s death will make it more difficult for Chilean investigators to pursue the allegations that Cabello hired the gang to target Ojeda, former officials said. But Ojeda’s family and other dissidents hope that the trial in Santiago will show that the Venezuelan regime, like other authoritarian governments, enlisted organized crime to send a terroristic message to its foes at home and abroad.
“Diosdado Cabello is the person we want punished,” said Javier Ojeda, the victim’s brother.
Chilean authorities say Gámez and other suspected gang chiefs who have been captured could provide further evidence about the alleged links to Cabello. Gámez has consented to extradition, according to court documents, but the process could still take weeks. Gámez told ProPublica he decided to return voluntarily to Chile because he wants to fight the charges against him in the Chilean courts.
Gámez questioned the credibility of witnesses against him, saying one of the admitted gang members “is looking for an escape … by any means, like lying and inventing things.” He didn’t respond to some questions about the voluminous court file against him, including his alleged communications.
Gámez asserted that he’s being set up as a fall guy for political reasons. Both the Chilean and U.S. governments, he said, have exploited the Ojeda case in their persecution of Venezuelans.
Chilean authorities have arrested many Venezuelans “to use that as a strategy so they leave Chile,” he said. “The same as the president here did…everyone they caught they connected to Tren de Aragua to arrest them and throw them out of the country.”
Rule from Mamdani administration bans companies from trapping customers into paying recurring charges and also targets ‘junk fees’
New York City has adopted a new rule that bans companies from using deceptive subscriptions to trap customers into paying for gym memberships, streaming services and other recurring charges, the city’s consumer protection office said.
The new rule, which will start on 1 October, promises hefty fines and aggressive enforcement for violators. Companies that do not provide a simple way to cancel could pay $525 per user subscription, back fees and additional fines.
It comes from his willingness to violate all norms, rules and laws – and leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces
At the Nato summit just ended, Trump lashed out at other Nato members, saying he was “very disappointed with Nato” and asking: “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us?” He reiterated his desire to take over Greenland, blasted European energy and immigration policies, insulted Spain, and worried allies by declaring that the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow “doesn’t affect us”.
Yet throughout the proceedings, Trump was treated by other Nato powers with as much courtesy and respect as any US president has ever received from Nato – perhaps more. “It was a great meeting, there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity,” Trump said when it was over.
Sen. Schiff is launching a congressional inquiry into why the DOJ shuttered a criminal probe into Cronobacter bacterial contamination at an Abbott Laboratories plant that made baby formula.
As the US president swung between threats to take Greenland and promises of help for Ukraine, pledges of a ‘stronger Nato’ were lost in the wind
Nato leaders survived another nerve-racking summit with Donald Trump and the 77-year-old defence alliance lives to fight another day, proving its durability against Atlantic storms. But it will never feel safe as long as the unpredictable, vengeful and ruthlessly transactional US president is in the White House.
As usual, Trump stole all the headlines at the annual summit, with a mixture of Nato-bashing and implausible threats to take control of Greenland and cut trade with Spain. He declared the ceasefire with Iran dead and called Iranian leaders “scum” as US warplanes bombed Iranian targets along the strait of Hormuz. Pitted against such irresistible clickbait, no Nato communique stood a chance of public attention.
Wim T Schippers asked that his 800lb sculpture be spread smoothly and without ‘educational purpose’
A museum in Rotterdam has paid tribute to the idiosyncratic characterofone of the most influential figures in the Dutch arts by spreading 800lb of peanut butter across the floor of one of its galleries.
The hexagonal floor installation, called Pindakaasvloer (Peanut Butter Floor), is a recreation of a work by Wim T Schippers conceived of in 1962 and first exhibited in 1969.
The former CFO of The Epoch Times, a conservative multinational media company, interrupted jury selection at his money laundering trial to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge in a $67 million fraud scheme.
Pokémon Go celebrated its 10th anniversary with a Times Square takeover in New York featuring a special event to defeat the Pokémon species Mewtwo. Nearly 2,000 people played the game together simultaneously in what organisers called one of the largest in-person Pokémon battles in history
British budget airline EasyJet says it's reached an agreement in principle for a £5.7-billion ($7.7-billion) takeover by U.S. private equity firm Apollo, topping a rival offer from fellow American private equity investor Castlelake.
Civil liberties groups say Facewatch system in stores such as Sainsbury’s and B&M is ‘dangerous escalation’
Facial recognition technology in shops will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders, with civil liberties groups warning of a “dangerous escalation” towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector.
Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury’s, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to “alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match”.
Why Should Delaware Care? A large industrial campus of three distribution warehouses has received new life after a local developer bought the project. Prior plans for development there had driven public concerns. Local leaders are now trying to respond to those.
A plan for a massive distribution center near Middletown that in past years raised concerns with neighbors is gaining new traction after a local developer bought the land for about $25 million.
Last month, Newport-based developer Harvey Hanna & Associates acquired the site previously known as Scott Run Commerce Center, as well as its plans for a 1.3 million-square-foot warehousing campus.
Currently farmland, the property located off Jamison Corner Road near the intersection with the U.S. 301 bypass will be developed into multiple warehouses, Harvey Hanna spokesman Jordan Seemans said in an email. Plans for a warehousing complex were first filed there in 2022.
Seemans said the development would generate “meaningful economic benefits, including construction activity, jobs, business investment, and additional tax revenue that supports local services and public institutions, including schools.”
But the property acquisition is also resurfacing residents’ concerns about air pollution, and traffic in a highly residential suburban area.
The 103-acre site consists of one 600,000-square-foot warehouse and two others that are around 300,000 square feet.
Seemans wrote that the company bought the property because it’s an opportunity to develop a commercial site, and that it’s located in an area where “commercial infrastructure demand is accelerating.”
Currently, the only commercial areas near the site are a small shopping center and a couple of fast food restaurants. But plans are pending for two other warehouse developments nearby, including a 2 million-square-foot plan across the road proposed by developer Dermody Properties.
A community adjacent to the site – The Village of Bayberry – has sold more than 1,800 homes with 900 more under development, as of the end of 2025. Other nearby residential areas include the Town of Whitehall and Airmont Acres.
New Castle County approved the site as a business park in 2005. In 2022, developer and then-property owner EQT Real Estate tried to build a logistics center under the business park zoning, which generally allows for that use.
But after neighbors learned of the plans, a backlash emerged. Leading it was Kevin Caneco, a resident of Bayberry who was later elected to the New County Council. At the time, Caneco launched a petition to halt the development, fearing it would change the character of the neighborhood. The petition eventually would garner more than 1,700 signatures.
Now Caneco has constituents who live there.
New Castle County Councilmen Kevin Caneco, left, and David Carter | PHOTO COURTESY OF CANECO OFFICE
Asked about the resurgence of the proposed development with the sale of the property, Caneco told Spotlight Delaware it is “improper planning” to have an industrial site amidst a plethora of residential communities.
He said he is particularly concerned about heavy trucks navigating local arteries, including Jamison Corner Road. He noted that the intersection of Jamison Corner and Boyds Corner roads has a school, a church, and a supermarket. Two other schools also sit near the intersection.
Caneco also asserted the intersection has recently seen an increase in crashes.
“That’s already kind of a disaster right now,” Caneco said.
In response to resident concern, Seemans said Harvey Hanna’s approach is focused on responsible site planning, which includes consideration of buffering and landscaping, lighting design, noise considerations, traffic circulation, stormwater management and building placement and orientation.
“We are evaluating these issues carefully as part of the redevelopment process,” Seemans said in an email.
Middletown-area land use activist Dale Swain speaks during a meeting of the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Land Use. SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NAOMI WEISS
Constituent concern bubbling for years
Bruce Wyngaard, a resident of the nearby development, called the Town of Whitehall, recalled his disapproval of the site’s transition from its original business park plan to a logistics center in 2022.
County land-use officials approved EQT’s request to build the center in 2022, deeming it a “minor change” from the previous plans from 2005. Since the developer planned to use the previously approved business park application, it did not need a public hearing.
“There lies the rub for us,” Wyngaard said. “There was very little voice that we had about that.”
Wyngaard reasoned that a business park would have provided more “diverse jobs” and lighter amounts of traffic.
With the air pollution that trucks would create by idling and moving slowly in the site’s parking lots, Wyngaard is worried about negative health effects for nearby residents like asthma, heart conditions and dementia.
Dermody Properties has sought county approvals for a massive warehouse complex near Middletown for several years, | PHOTO COURTESY OF NCCo.
Wyngaard also pointed out that other proposed warehouses surrounding the Scott Run site, including a 2 million-square-foot Dermody Property warehouse plan. He compared the diesel emissions from heavy trucks accessing the warehouse complexes to “big smokestacks rolling into your community.”
Wyngaard said he believes there should be a formal review of emissions and air quality impact before projects like these are approved.
“We’re not anti-warehouse, we’re not anti-distribution center, but what we believe is that the county has approved these things without consideration to the emissions,” Wygaard said.
The Harvey Hanna site, according to Newmark’s marketing, is approved to have 259 trailer spaces and 233 loading doors.
Middletown-area land use activist Dale Swain affirmed that the site has been a concern for years for residents.
The plans for the Scott Run Commerce Center previously drew neighbor opposition in 2022 and 2023. | PHOTO COURTESY OF NCCO
At a meeting of Citizens Alliance for Responsible Land Use on Wednesday evening led by Swain, a few residents of the nearby communities expressed unease.
Dan Gorman, a resident of South Bayberry, said he is concerned about the traffic issues that could come with trucks using local roads like Boyds Corner Road.
“A lot of those homes, mine included, are 300 feet or less off of Boyds Corner Road,” Gorman said.
Bill Robbins, a resident of a 55+ community in the Whitehall neighborhood that is close to the site, said one of his biggest concerns is air pollution from the diesel trucks.
“No one in the county or the state or the feds want to take responsibility for this mobile source of pollution,” Robbins said.
In an interview, Swain pointed out that there are at least five large warehouse logistic centers in the county that are unoccupied, saying it “makes no sense.”
“Why would they want to build another one instead of buying one that’s already built? That’s odd,” Swain said.
What now?
There’s little to nothing that neighbors can do to stop the project from happening, since it’s permitted under current zoning.
New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter, whose district contains the site itself and some nearby residential areas, affirmed the developer’s legal right to move forward with the project.
He attended the Wednesday evening meeting, where he said the county council is working on legislation to change how minor changes to plans work.
“This isn’t going to happen again, and I’m going to fix it so that we can’t redesign these things,” Carter said.
The councilman said he planned to meet with developers in a month to learn more about the type of tenants they envision.
Carter called Harvey Hanna a “tolerable” developer to work with, and emphasized that it’s locally headquartered in Delaware.
He also noted that site plans show the construction of new turn lanes on local roads.
Seemans from Harvey Hanna said there is no construction schedule yet for the site, but that it is “fully approved and shovel-ready.”
After talking to Seemans, Carter said he believes their goal is to break ground in the fall.
Statue of 1968 Summer Olympics Black Power Protest (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: Who among us can honestly claim enough certainty to decide when another person’s life should end?
Trump Administration Guts Efforts to Prevent Gun Violence: The bloodshed doesn’t disappear just because the paperwork does.
Trans People Are Fleeing Red States for Seattle, Which Can’t Keep Up: When Americans have to seek refuge from their own government, we’re no longer debating policy so much as measuring cruelty.
Olympic Committee Clears Path for Russia to Return to Games: The IOC wants the appearance of principle without the inconvenience.
Death By Lightning | Matt Ross (2025) - Netflix: I’m always drawn to stories about history’s fragile hinge points, and this one is a reminder of how much a nation can lose in a single violent moment.
Bettye LaVette | “Things Have Changed (2018): A late-blooming soul singer takes on the “Voice of His Generation” with a voice, and a mind, of her own.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Fellowship of the Ring
Charlie Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Tyler Robinson (AI illustrations/Kareem Takes On the News)
Every so often, when a high-profile case is in the news, I find myself thinking about capital punishment, and it’s never a satisfying exercise. This week, it was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the trial of his alleged assassin, that had me thinking about the death penalty. From all I’ve read, it seems like an open and shut case of premeditated murder. But when I look at the accused killer, Tyler Robinson, I don’t see an assassin. I see a confused young man who, by all accounts, existed more online than in the real world; and that is a dangerous place to live. Online, there are rarely consequences associated with our actions, and violence can seem like an abstraction. The difference between right and wrong can seem like a matter of personal choice rather than societal agreement. And the difference between violent rhetoric and actual violence can begin to seem ephemeral, when in fact nothing in this world is more concrete.
One thing we know about the death penalty in America is that it is a form of “justice” that is anything but blind. According to the ACLU (and yes, I am a card-carrying member), cases in which a Black man kills a white person are as much as twenty times more likely to result in the death penalty than cases in which the killer is white and the victim is Black. That’s not an issue in this case. But there are other factors that will play into the likelihood of a sentence of death, in particular the fact that, among a certain, conservative segment of the population, Kirk was a beloved icon, while Robinson’s motive seems to have been tied to his relationship with his trans partner. The trial is taking place in Utah, which is a conservative state, and not one known to be accommodating to the trans community. That should be beside the point, but forgive me if I lack faith that it will be.
But even absent issues of politics and bias, I come back to a more fundamental question, which is the one Tolkien was getting at: what gives any of us the standing to decide that another person’s story is finished? Gandalf’s warning to Frodo carries weight well beyond wizards and hobbits, landing squarely on the appetite we all carry for certainty, the itch to sort people into categories of deserving and undeserving without considering the whole context and hearing the whole story. Yet history keeps handing us the same lesson on repeat: the people we were sure deserved condemnation reveal layers the verdict never accounted for, and the people we dismissed prove us wrong. I used to believe having a fast, strong opinion was a sign of conviction. Age, and a fair amount of time spent reading and writing about history, taught me something closer to the opposite. Hesitation is the only honest response available when the information in front of you is incomplete. And the information in front of you is always incomplete.
There’s a real difference between judging an action and pronouncing a person’s entire worth, and it matters which one we’re doing. We have to judge actions constantly, that’s how families, workplaces, and whole societies manage to function without collapsing into chaos. The leap Tolkien/Gandalf warns against is the one from “this was wrong” to “this person deserves annihilation.” That leap almost never relies on the whole story, but once we’ve made it, we can’t walk it back.
So why do we keep making it anyway? Mostly because certainty is comfortable. A fast verdict gives you a clean story, a villain, a tidy resolution, and clean stories are satisfying in a world that rarely offers them. There’s something self-flattering buried in there too. Deciding who deserves condemnation lets us stand on the other side of that line, among the deserving, without ever worrying about our own actions, our own thoughts, our own circumstances. Everybody today is incentivized to skip past caution and go straight to the verdict, because hesitation reads as weakness in a culture obsessed with looking decisive.
Consider how many people convicted decades ago walked free once DNA evidence finally caught up with their cases, years after a jury felt completely certain of their guilt. That’s the sharpest possible illustration of what happens when we’re too eager to deal out judgement: time we can never return, taken from people who never should have lost it.
Writing someone off entirely because of a single moment, a single mistake, a single irrational thought, has become close to a national pastime. We’ve built entire platforms around that habit, and I include myself among the users. In point of fact, assuming he’s guilty, it’s very close to what Tyler Robinson did to Charlie Kirk; perhaps he didn’t write him off over a single issue, but he certainly didn’t know the whole man. Perhaps he despised what Kirk stood for and wanted to punish not only the man but the people who celebrated him. But what about the people who actually knew him: his wife and children and anyone else who knew the man rather than the public figure, and loved the parts of him the rest of us knew nothing about? Tyler Robinson destroyed Charlie Kirk and destroyed a large part of those people as well. Is that what society should do to the people who love Tyler Robinson?
The crossover in the American sports calendar has made for a compelling collision of cultures, from Scots in Boston to a new English folk hero in Atlanta
First they sang for Harry Kane. Then they sang for Michael Harris II.
The Atlanta Braves center-fielder is not someone many Major League Baseball fans would consider a household name. A local kid made good, he has established himself as an above-average, everyday outfielder and at age 25 is enjoying a career-best season, but his face doesn’t dominate billboards and ads in the way of Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge.
Five years after his last fight, the Irishman returns to the octagon. His comeback says as much about the UFC’s appetite for its fallen star as it does about McGregor himself
These days Conor McGregor resembles an ace fighter the way a movie set depicts real life. Passing similarities are obvious but anything more than a quick, squinty glance reveals they are not the same.
For the 37-year-old Irishman, the line between genius athlete and performance artist was already blurred by the time he found himself destroyed in front of Dustin Poirier five years ago, yelping foul-mouthed barbs in the painful aftermath of his fourth stoppage loss in seven fights.
The populist Democrat nominee for Senate in Maine bowed to the inevitable but turned his farewell into a pity party
“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
These were the parting words of Richard Nixon after he was forced to resign the presidency over the Watergate imbroglio in 1974. For Graham Platner on Wednesday, the stakes were somewhat smaller. But when it came to suspending his Senate campaign in Maine, the Democrat had plenty of hate to go around.
The earthquakes that rocked Venezuela last month led to catastrophic damage in the port city of La Guaira — killing thousands and forcing rescuers to scour the rubble for missing people. Here's what we saw.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delmarva Power is the largest energy provider in the state, serving more than 300,000 customers. Those customers will soon see a modest increase on their electricity bills, but that increase is less than what was originally proposed after mounting political pressure placed on the utility.
After months of political pressure over rising electric bills, Delaware energy regulators rebuffed Delmarva Power by approving only part of the utility’s scaled-back rate increase request.
And Delmarva Power representatives say the decision was unlawful.
It was made last week within the confines of a gray government office where newly-appointed members of the state’s Public Service Commission discussed how they could ease the struggles residents face paying their rising power bills.
“There’s a lot of pain out there,” Commissioner Michael Richard said during the meeting.
Just two months earlier Gov. Matt Meyer had appointed Richard and three others as new members to the Public Service Commission, which is in charge of considering rate-increase requests submitted by private utility companies.
Following the appointments, Meyer publicly pressured the commission to freeze electricity rates. Delaware lawmakers also passed a bill last month limiting the amount of infrastructure spending that Delmarva Power — the state’s largest utility company — could pass on to customers.
Gov. Matt Meyer speaks about electricity rates during a press conference in June. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
The politicians’ moves followed more than a year of growing antipathy among Delaware residents toward rising power bills. The mood was palpable to regulators and to Delmarva Power itself. Even before the governor began his pressure campaign, the utility company in early June cut its recent rate hike request in half.
But Public Service Commission members said the utility didn’t go far enough. During a July 1 meeting to discuss the rate increase, Richards noted that Delaware was about to enter “a huge heat wave.”
“So it’s particularly cruel for people to not only wonder how they are going to survive this … but then also think about the electric bill that’s about to come,” Richard said during the meeting.
Ultimately, the Public Service Commission determined it could not fully freeze Delmarva Power’s rates, but decided to approve only part of the company’s reduced rate hike request.
The decision came despite arguments from the utility’s lawyers that the regulators did not have the authority to do so.
Delaware Public Service Commissioner Regina Iorii | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE PSC
“My suggestion is, if you don’t like it, appeal it,” said Commissioner Regina Iorii, also a new appointee, in response to those objections.
On Wednesday, Delmarva Power spokesperson Matthew Ford maintained that regulators “did not have discretion” to cut back the rate hike as much as they did. He did not say whether the company would appeal the order.
Last week’s Public Service Commission decision on the rate increase is only a part of the ongoing proceedings to determine how much money Delmarva Power will ultimately be able to recoup from its infrastructure expenses, including building substations and burying power lines.
While the decision will allow Delmarva Power to increase electricity bills for the average Delaware home by just under a dollar, there could be additional increases in the coming months as part of this case.
Still, the commission’s vote shows a shift in the body’s public rhetoric.
Representatives of the Public Service Commission declined to comment, but said the body will issue a written order from the rate decision on July 15.
A fight over recouping costs
Regulated utilities like Delmarva Power make money by recouping the costs of infrastructure upgrades — plus up to 10% profit — through electric rate increases.
The debate over whether to approve that request is still ongoing. But while it happens, utilities can temporarily increase consumer costs to make sure the company can pay for those upgrades without borrowing too much money.
If the Public Service Commission decides the infrastructure upgrades were not necessary, customers would be refunded for that temporary rate increase.
Delmarva Power initially asked for $44.6 million in new revenue from base rates, as well as moving $23.2 million from a temporary price hike known as a Distribution System Improvement Charge into the base rate, making those costs permanently higher for customers.
That request would have raised the electric bill of an average user by $6.42 per month, or 4.13%, according to Delmarva.
But after political pressure, the utility voluntarily lowered the request in June to $28.6 million, reducing the average rate hike to $3.39 per month.
“We hear our customers loud and clear that we need to be very careful and make sure that we’re getting the most impact for the dollars that we are investing,” Delmarva Power Regional President Marcus Beal said.
Unsatisfied, the Public Service Commission opted to only approve half of the revenue request and also cut in half the requested Distribution System Improvement Charge.
Delmarva will be able to raise rates further after Dec. 9 if the rate case is still ongoing, based on the provisions of the recently passed legislation that limits the amount of infrastructure spending the utility can pass onto customers.
In a filing submitted Tuesday, Delmarva Power agreed to again lower the requested new revenue, this time to $22.7 million, reducing the average rate hike even further to $2.51 per month.
But the filing appeared to be inconsistent with the Public Service Commission’s order, since it kept the Distribution System Improvement Charge the same.
Beal said he could not comment on the latest filing because the commission has not yet issued its written order.
To some of Platner’s most influential backers his swaggering, reckless and casually brutish masculinity was understood not as a liability, but as a virtue
Graham Platner was accused of rape on Monday, and it quickly became clear that he will never be a United States senator. After days of delay, he finally suspended his campaign in a long and grievance-filled video on Wednesday night. The prospect of his victory was doubtful even before Monday, when a woman he once dated, Jenny Racicot, went on the record to Politico alleging that in 2021, a very drunk Platner let himself into her house, when she had told him not to come over. Racicot says she realized he was there when she heard strange noises; then, she says he raped her, forcing intercourse without a condom while she repeatedly told him no.
Politico reported that it reviewed emails between Racicot and her therapist about the alleged encounter. The outlet also interviewed a boyfriend Racicot later confided in about the alleged incident, and reviewed messages she shared with another woman warning her away from Platner, long before the start of his political career. Platner denies wrongdoing, saying: “Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.” But he put out a video saying that he would “reflect on the best path forward” for his campaign. Since Platner may have known about the inevitability of this accusation becoming public, one wonders if the best time for such reflection might have been several months ago, when Maine voters still had the chance to select a more worthy and more viable candidate.
Democrats need a candidate who can speak to working-class, inland and rural Mainers. A logger from the North Woods seems like the obvious choice
Maine’s US Senate race was blown wide open by Graham Platner dropping out. Thankfully, a suitable populist is at hand to fill the breach. His name is Troy Jackson.
Jackson was born to a 16-year-old mother in the northern Maine town of Fort Kent. He is a fifth-generation logger, union member and former state legislator. As a teenager himself, he went to work in the woods, and by 1998 he led a union logging blockade to prevent Canadian scabs from working Maine jobs.
Why Should Delaware Care? Since 2019, Dorrell Green has served as the superintendent of one of Delaware’s largest school districts. He has also served in multiple state task forces with the goal of improving Delaware education. On Wednesday, the school board announced that Deputy Superintendent Hugh Broomall will take over following Green’s departure.
Two weeks after Delaware’s largest school district announced the departure of its prominent superintendent, its board unanimously approved a longtime district administrator to fill the leadership vacancy.
On Wednesday night, the Red Clay Board of Education members revealed that Deputy Superintendent Hugh Broomall would become the district’s next top leader, effective July 17, on an interim basis.
His ascension to the post follows the surprise announcement last month that Dorrell Green would leave the district to become superintendent at the Norristown Area School District in Pennsylvania.
Broomall has worked at the Red Clay Consolidated School District in varying capacities for more than two decades, starting as a principal of its Meadwood Program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in 2004.
He has also previously served as the district’s human resources manager and assistant superintendent.
Though Broomall spoke during Wednesday’s school board meeting about the district’s code of conduct and cellphone policy, he did not comment on his ascension to the superintendent position.
During Green’s final report to the board on Wednesday, he said Red Clay’s superintendent position “is like no other superintendency in the state of Delaware,” noting the complexity and pressures of the role. He also said that the district is in a “great position with the leadership that we have, both at the district and the building level.”
Dorrell Green, the superintendent of the Red Clay Consolidated School District, the largest school district in the state, will leave for a superintendent job in Pennsylvania. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Now, Broomall will take over the post, just as state leaders consider advancing the district consolidation plan.
Proposed last year by the state’s Redding Consortium, the plan calls for Delaware’s four northernmost school districts, including Red Clay, to combine into one. Green supported the consolidation plan as a voting member of the Redding Consortium.
Last month in a statement to Spotlight Delaware, then-Red Clay school board president Victor Leonard said board members have “a huge task in the next few weeks in finding a leader that will guide our district through some troubling times.”
What led to this?
There were no mentions of Green’s resignation during a Red Clay school board meeting last month.
Four days after the meeting, the Norristown Area School District announced him as its next superintendent. The announcement quickly went viral on social media with multiple Red Clay employees writing that they had not received notification that Green would be leaving the district.
Among those was Leonard, who indicated that he felt blindsided by the decision.
Green spoke during a Norristown Area School District board meeting in the days following the announcement, confirming that he accepted a parallel position in Norristown.
“They say sometimes when content, you should be content with what you have, but when complacency sets in, you need to change,” Green said during the meeting.
Beyond his work as superintendent, Green has also served on multiple Delaware education committees.
In December, he was part of a presentation to lawmakers by school district leaders across the state that argued that a recent property reassessment, which was spurred by inequities in public education funding, ultimately left poorer districts in the lurch.
Cloak-and-dagger operation delivers 70-metre medieval artwork to British Museum, as gathered diplomats applaud
Like the man whose conquest of England almost a millennium ago it recounts, the Bayeux tapestry crossed the Channel in the dead of night, in as much secrecy as possible, landing on the country’s south coast early the following day.
The artefact’s arrival on Friday marked the first time it has returned to England in nearly 1,000 years, and British Museum staff will begin to prepare it for exhibition during its year-long loan.
Eleven reported dead as flooding also brings danger of snakes, while buildings collapse in Mumbai amid heavy rain
As the first typhoon to make landfall in China for the 2026 season, Maysak has caused devastating damage in southern and central regions. The Guangxi region received intense downpours of up to 280mm in 12 hours, causing rivers to swell and dam walls to break. By Monday morning, flooding across the city of Nanning and surrounding areas had resulted in many people being stranded on rooftops.
Flood waters pose additional threats in China because of the presence of wild and farmed snakes. On Thursday local media reported that hundreds of snakes, including cobras, had escaped from flooded breeding farms. Typhoon Maysak also aided the development of two destructive tornados that swept across central China later on Monday evening. This occurred when warm air from the south, brought up by Typhoon Maysak, collided with cold air in the north.
Exclusive: Senator Ed Markey on why he has proposed legislation aimed at curbing datacenters, automated hiring systems and harm to children
US senator Ed Markey is worried about the perils of unregulated artificial intelligence.
What part? All of it: the costs associated with thirsty, energy-guzzling datacenters, intrusive workplace surveillance, bias in discriminatory algorithms, AI overriding workers’ judgments, and deepening economic inequality – as those who profit most from AI rake in extraordinary windfalls.
Cengiz Yar/ProPublica. Source images: Documents obtained by ProPublica and Getty Images.
Two members of Congress have called on federal officials to address what they described as “a growing and preventable public health crisis” of families refusing the long-standard vitamin K shot for their newborns, which has led to some of those babies suffering uncontrollable bleeding and even dying.
“We write to urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to take immediate action,” two Democrats, Rep. Kim Schrier, from Washington, and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, from Maryland, wrote in a letter last week to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is acting as director of the CDC.
The letter followed a ProPublica investigation that found babies were dying after families refused the vitamin K shot, a critical and inexpensive injection given at birth to help the blood clot, and that federal and state agencies were not tracking vital data.
“Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem: the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency,” Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in the letter.
The vitamin K shot has been routine in the U.S. since the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended it for all newborns in 1961, but some families in recent years have declined the shot — which is not a vaccine — amid a rising mistrust of medical institutions and false information online.
No federal or state agencies track refusal rates or subsequent bleeding.
“It was ProPublica’s reporting that gave us this additional information and led to us writing this important letter, and asking, of course, that CDC take action,” Alsobrooks said in an interview.
She called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to publicly voice his support for the shot. He has previously refused to do so and instead stated that he has never said anything about the injection.
“There are so many who are hanging on the word and advice of a person in his position,” said Alsobrooks, who has called for Kennedy’s resignation. “I think he has a moral obligation to state in clear and no uncertain terms that this is safe and effective, and that families should be giving this shot to their babies.”
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An HHS spokesperson, reiterating a previous comment, said that the CDC recommends that parents allow newborns to get the vitamin K shot within six hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She also said that uptake of the shot has declined in recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics applauded the lawmakers and ProPublica for bringing attention to the issue, which Dr. Andrew Racine, AAP’s president, said the organization has been concerned about for some time.
One function of government, he said, is to provide clinicians and the public with data that will allow them to make informed decisions. If a sick baby comes into a hospital, doctors should know if they are in an area with a high vitamin K refusal rate so they can quickly diagnose and treat them. He likened it to tracking measles cases.
“We depend upon the CDC to let us know about that,” Racine said. “And this is essentially a medical condition that is affecting newborn babies that pediatricians or people who look after children need to be aware of.”
He said, too, that HHS leadership should be vocal in their support for the shot and in communicating what could happen if a baby who did not receive the shot starts bleeding.
“It’s not simply to track it,” Racine said. “It’s to message it.”
Research shows babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can lead to bleeding in the brain. According to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.
A national study of more than 5 million births found a rise in the rate of babies not receiving vitamin K at birth, which topped 5% in 2024. Some hospitals have told ProPublica that their refusal rates have more than doubled in recent years.
Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in their letter that historically there wasn’t a need for robust monitoring systems to track cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding. But now, without a solid understanding of the scope, experts can’t determine the extent of the problem or develop a public health campaign. The CDC, they wrote, has the tools needed to understand and address the crisis and should use them.
“I believe that the best way to set the record straight for parents is to be able to provide modern-day, accurate information,” Schrier said. “Once you stop doing these things that are preventative, cases rise.”
The couple reconnected years after meeting in a Minnesota hospital, and bonded over their experiences: “I’ve dealt with that, sweetie. I understand that.”
Nobel-winning chemist Omar Yaghi is leaving UC Berkeley for China's Tsinghua University, where he will lead a new AI institute focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced materials. "Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world's foremost chemists," reports The New York Times. "The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity 'not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before.'" From the report: Dr. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water. Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook's depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States. Last year, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Dr. Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about Mr. Trump's immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation's system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. "I think it's regrettable," he said of Mr. Trump's nationalism. "We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved," he added. "That's an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the U.S. but the world."
Dr. Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances. He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas -- the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors. He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life -- carbon atoms in particular. While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them. The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Dr. Yaghi's students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialization.
In the interview with The Times, Dr. Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two. That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of emigres can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Dr. Yaghi has longstanding ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines. Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Dr. Yaghi is being named as the head of a new A.I. institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials. Its underlying aim, the university said, is to "overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches" and shorten the usual cycles of discovery.
Unesco report shows children lost out to servicing debt in 113 countries, with 18 spending five times more on loans
Most developing countries spent less on education than they did repaying debt last year, according to the UN, at the same time as global aid to education is predicted to decline by up to 30%.
More was spent on servicing foreign debt than on education in 113 developing countries in 2025, according to research by the UN’s culture and education agency, Unesco. In sub-Saharan Africa, countries spent 3.6 times more on debt than education.
The board of easyJet has given the green light to a possible £5.7bn offer from the US private equity firm Apollo, as the low-cost airline becomes the subject of a surprise bidding war.
The company’s board said on Friday that it was “minded to recommend” the potential all-cash offer, which values the business at £7.15 a share, to shareholders.
The entity that benefited from vast land and property transfers from the Christian Brothers will fight a move by abuse survivors to make it liable for compensation claims, triggering a potentially costly battle that has “high court written all over it”.
The Christian Brothers has a shocking record of clergy abuse – one of the worst of any Catholic church entity – and is facing hundreds of current and future abuse cases estimated to be worth $774m.
SK hynix, a supplier of advanced memory chips, has seen profits skyrocket thanks to the global race to build AI datacentres
South Korean chip maker SK hynix set pricing for its mega US listing on Friday, aiming to raise $26.5bn as it takes advantage of the AI boom in what will be one of the world’s biggest ever stock sales.
The Asian semiconductor giant plans to issue the equivalent of about 18m shares on Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq index later in the day.
Exclusive: Plan to improve skills of thousands of financial sector workers to keep pace with tech revolution
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to announce a new City “skills compact” that will commit firms such as Barclays and Lloyds to retraining thousands of financial sector workers for the AI revolution.
The financial services skills compact will be launched on Tuesday, during what is likely to be Reeves’s final Mansion House speech to City bosses before Andy Burnham’s expected takeover of No 10. The government-backed initiative will commit employers to improving workers’ skills and helping them “keep pace” with significant technological changes that have prompted fears of mass redundancies.
Returning from annual leave, Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady has faced a barrage of questions for the first time since the company's nationwide outage on Wednesday affected train services, payment systems and triple zero calls. Brady says the failure was not the result of job restructuring, insisting that 'people and processes worked as they should have'. She said Telstra would conduct a thorough investigation into the software glitch behind the outage.
An earlier headline on this video incorrectly said Telstra was reviewing executive bonuses in light of the incident
Schwarzman Centre, Oxford Headlong’s take on Karel Čapek’s 1920 tale of romance and robots is rife with timely debates about tech’s threat but at times the philosophical discussions drag on
If our world is currently thinking through the brave new future of generative AI and super intelligence, Karel Čapek’s 1920 play RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots proves the notion of robot consciousness and rebellion is not a new anxiety. So does Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which Čapek’s drama resembles in its philosophical debates and moral warnings, despite its futurism.
Ella Road adapts Čapek’s play for our times in this Headlong and Schwarzman Centre co-production, its science apparently informed by research from Oxford University academics, which gives it a cutting-edge, real-world underpinning.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment -- but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots' movements in a new example of human-robot teamups. The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders from live pigs during a preclinical trial that was published in the journal Nature. If this approach eventually proves clinically ready for human patients, surgeons could use such humanoid robots to remotely perform robotic-assisted surgical care in smaller hospitals and clinics that lack the resources to install specialized but expensive surgical robots.
The experiment used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot made by leading Chinese robotics company Unitree. The cheapest baseline G1 model with effectively non-functional hands has a starting price of $13,500 and shipping costs ranging between $300 and $1,200, whereas adding crucial upgrades such as dexterous robotic hands can easily push the cost beyond $67,000. But such humanoid robots made in China are still significantly cheaper than specialized surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical System, which can cost anywhere between half a million dollars and several million dollars. The specialized surgical robots can also weigh about 1,800 pounds and take up considerably more space in operating rooms. By comparison, the Unitree humanoid robots, standing at 5 feet tall and weighing just 60 pounds, may be more suitable for smaller clinical settings in remote areas.
President Donald Trump has pushed out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the bipartisan agency in limbo as he rushes to remake how elections are run before this year’s midterms.
Trump fired Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks, the Democrats on the commission, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ProPublica, which was the first to report the actions on its social media accounts. Christy McCormick, the Republican, was allowed to resign, the sources said.
Thomas Hicks, center left, and Benjamin Hovland, center right, were fired from the Election Assistance Commission, and Christy McCormick, right, was allowed to resign, according to multiple sources.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The commission’s unprecedented dismantling alarmed voter advocacy groups and Democratic state election officials, who called the move “reckless and irresponsible.”
“The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement, “and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap.”
A White House official wouldn’t confirm the specific actions taken but said in a statement to ProPublica that the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”
“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the official said.
Hicks and McCormick did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Hovland declined to comment on his firing.
The commission was established in 2003 to set standards for state voting systems and to provide funding for upgrades.
Its four-member board is designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, all nominated by the president at the recommendation of congressional leadership and confirmed by the Senate. The fourth commissioner, Don Palmer, a Republican, resigned in April. By dismissing the commission’s remaining members, Trump can try to put forward replacements who may be more amenable to his demands.
In March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that directed the EAC to change the national voter registration form — which serves as the template for the forms in each state — to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Currently, voters in almost all states attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but they are not required to provide proof.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that advocates on election issues, said the departures are a “significant loss for one of the federal government’s few institutions explicitly designed around bipartisan governance.”
The commission has been plagued by partisan infighting and ineffectiveness, as well as chronic vacancies and a lack of funding. It’s made some progress in recent years, however, passing new standards for voting machines and creating new resources and recommendations for election officials. Often, the commission’s decisions were unanimous despite its partisan split.
A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld an Illinois ban on semiautomatic weapons, keeping in place a law passed largely in response to a deadly Independence Day parade shooting.
Last month, deputy editor Tim Carlin stopped by “Beyond the Headlines” to give a preview of what to look for in the final weeks of the 2026 legislative session in Dover. This week, Spotlight’s other deputy editor, Karl Baker, joins the podcast to discuss exactly what happened. He shares how the Spotlight team tried to cover the hectic final days, the process for prioritizing what is of consequence in the “mountain” of bills, and overall themes for the end of session.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The last day of Delaware’s General Assemblies are famous for their late nights. How late were you at Legislative Hall on Tuesday, June 30th?
Well, the sun was up when we left. It was about, I think, just before 8:00 in the morning.
The assembly gaveled out when?
After 6:00 I think, and then we wrote the story.
Give me a level set here. Is that normal for the last night of activities?
It’s not. It’s normal to go late, not usually that late.
I think it was 2016, 2017, somewhere around there, when they stayed until 8:00 or 9:00. So it’s not record-breaking, but it was a late night for sure.
The assembly gaveled out around 6:00, but you and Tim didn’t leave until 8:00. What were you all still doing there at Legislative Hall?
You know, partying.
No, you have to grab people, get some interviews. “What’d you think about what just happened?” That sort of deal.
And then you have to write the story. We went down to the press room and wrote that, published that, as well as edited and published Olivia Marble’s story about the energy bill. It was kind of the sidebar to the main story.
Last year, you and our summer intern, Ethan Grandin, held down the fort on the last night of the session. Our team has grown since then.
On the last night this year, you were there along with Tim Carlin and reporter Olivia Marble, and then three of our summer interns – Ella Walker, Naomi Weiss and Miranda Vasquez-Vergel.
How did you all divide and conquer to provide Delawareans with thorough coverage on the final day?
Tim kind of anchored the Senate proceedings. I was in the House. Olivia was going back and forth and focusing on the energy bills, the data center bills that she wrote her story about. And then for our three wonderful interns, we just kind of directed them to go out and talk to people who seem like they are folks of influence, and ask them how it’s going, introduce yourself, and ask them, you know, “What are the conversations being had behind closed doors?” Try to do some shoe leather reporting about what was happening outside of the obvious, outside of the actual floor of the House and Senate. Because often that’s where the things actually happen.
There was something like, what, 70 bills considered on the last night?
Something like that. I think I said a mountain of legislation in the story.
There’s literally no way that even with five of you there that you can cover everything that’s going on. Which is not great for Delawareans, that we don’t really know what’s going on on the last night of the session.
But how do you all decide of all the stuff that’s going on, what are we going to cover? How do you decide what is the most consequential action?
You try to find the narrative scoops, the through lines between the individual nuggets of information to find the story that connects them all.
This year that was hard to do. I think there were just more individual nuggets that probably were there because we’re on the eve of this campaign season. But there were some through lines. There were the energy bills that we wrote about, and those are connected to organized labor because they’re the biggest institutional advocates in Delaware for data centers. There was also the Project Labor Agreement bill. The bill that would require public school construction to include a certain number of union workers.
So you can look at the different advocacy groups, the different lobbyists, and find out what bundle of bills are they pushing and why. And so you can find those narratives through that, if there’s 90 bills that are being considered, or 70 or whatever, I don’t know the numbers.
Hard to keep track, there are so many.
You can subdivide them into, “Oh, these 10 bills are connected, these five are connected, these two are connected.” And at least kind of reduce the load a little bit that way. And also, in addition to that, when you can find why things are connected, that helps the public understand the mechanisms of government, the machinations of government, a little bit better.
So in your mind, what was the most consequential piece of legislative action to happen on that last day?
Not to state the obvious, but I think it was the bond bill, the capital spending bill. It’s a lot of money, $1.26 billion, for mostly public construction, but some private construction, for the next year.
Headlining that was the $110 million that is being directed to the Port of Wilmington for its expansion at Edgemoor, its planned expansion which does seem like it’s moving forward at this point. It was uncertain for a long time.
That money was part of another pot of money within the bond bill, which came from this very Delaware system called unclaimed property.
Delaware gets a lot of money every year because it has all these companies that are legally domiciled here, and when those companies hold an asset that Delaware says is not yours, but we don’t know where the person who owns it is, we get to get it. We, as in the state, get that money or get to hold that money, and by the way, we’ll spend it while we hold it.
So Delaware gets a lot of that money, and a lot of that went to the bond bill, including to the Port of Wilmington.
If that all makes sense.
Tim Carlin was on the podcast a month ago before the final stretch of the legislative session, and he was trying to highlight some of the top things he was going to be looking for during these last days. The first one was property tax bills.
As most Delawareans know, there was major concern last year about the first in 40 years property assessments and resulting tax increases that were seen by many.
Legislators promised that they would do something. What did they do to try to address this issue?
They didn’t do as much as I had thought. Well, I shouldn’t say they didn’t do as much. It was not as contentious.
The main thing they did was Dave Sokola’s bill, which gave school districts the right to increase property taxes by 2%, or their property tax revenues, I should say, by 2% every year, rather than a lump 10% every five years.
And that five year number is important because they have to do an assessment every five years.
That’s right. We hadn’t done an assessment for, depending on the county, 40 years plus. Now they’re required to do it every five years. So, we get to write about this controversy every five years now.
I think that’s probably the principal direct property tax bill. Now, there also was, back in the bond bill there’s money going to school districts from, again, that unclaimed property pot of money for school construction. Now, that will have an indirect impact on property taxes and such because that won’t have to fund as much school stuff as it would otherwise.
So, they’re freeing up whatever the fungible dollars are within school districts to do other things.
In addition to allowing school districts to raise their rates every year, the legislature also codified this ability to split the tax rates between residential and commercial. Is that correct?
That’s right. They passed a bill that, as you said, officially put into statute that New Castle County districts have this ability to charge different rates.
What they didn’t do was pass a separate bill, introduced by the Senate Pro Tem Dave Sokola, that would’ve allowed them to create additional tax rates for different kinds of businesses – multifamily residential property would have a different tax rate from other businesses, among others.
There’d be mixed-use property, you know, the businesses on the ground floor, or apartments above, would have a different tax rate. That was a bill, as I said, introduced by the Senate Pro Tem, also supported by the governor, who sent a letter to legislators asking for their support of this bill.
The bill didn’t make it out of its committee, or didn’t move on to the Senate or the House floor.
The other thing that Tim said to look out for is legislation around data centers and energy prices. What happened on that front in the last few days?
To my surprise, they passed a bunch of bills on it. They passed a bill that said you have to – you, as in data center companies – have to bring at least a portion of your own energy that you use. You have to generate it yourself.
They passed a bill that would limit Delmarva Power, the state’s largest utility, from being able to recoup dollars it invested on what the state would deem non-mandatory infrastructure investments. Now, that’s interesting because the question I had, and I still haven’t had an answer to this, was what specifically isn’t mandatory or non-mandatory infrastructure investment? Specifically, is infrastructure investment to accommodate a proposed data center that could be coming?
When a data center comes in, I think they have to build new infrastructure, maybe a substation. Would that be considered mandatory or not mandatory? And if it is not mandatory, could that effectively kill a data center proposal?
That was a question I had. In my mind, it’s still lingering. I don’t know that answer. But they passed that bill, and others.
Now, you said you were surprised that happened. Why?
I was surprised because it’s a debate. In legislation, in hotly debated legislation, there’s going to be one side that loses.
And if the one side that loses has a bit of money behind it, it can then use that money to maybe influence an election so that the next time they can try to have a lawmaker who sees more like them. And we are on the eve of a campaign. So I was thinking lawmakers would take a safer route, but maybe in their minds this is a safer route or maybe they were being bold. Who knows?
There was unexpected contention in the final hours regarding House Bill 75, which originally passed in the House actually last year and would’ve removed the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse civil claims, as well as some other things. Can you talk us through what happened there, and why this was a surprising last-day contention?
There was an amendment to that bill. On the surface, it seems like, oh yeah, of course you’re going to pass it. There was an amendment to that bill that, as I understand it, would have effectively allowed the state to remain indemnified, so to keep the state from being able to be sued for claims, past claims, like this.
Now I don’t know if the state has any potential liability. I don’t know of any sexual assault cases that involve the state at this time. But, that was the debate.
The Senate ended up passing the bill with the amendment. And so it came back to the House, and the sponsor, Representative Tim Dukes, said, “Well, let’s just strike it from consideration,” and he kind of indicated he might bring it back again, or the House might bring it back again.
Why did he decide he wanted to strike it?
I don’t think he had the votes, in either the House or the Senate, to undo that amendment.
When I read the article, I was like, “Why would someone want to put in an amendment that would say, ‘No, we’re not going to remove the statute of limitations. We’re going to keep it. You have to report within two years,’ and that we’re going to put a cap on the damages that can be charged here?” It was an odd last-night activity.
Yeah, and just candidly, I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of why these moves are happening. The chatter, and this is chatter, was just that there was a concern that there could be a liability out there for the state.
You’ve referenced that it is a campaign year coming up. Tim pointed out that there are a handful of establishment Democrats who are facing progressive challengers in the primaries this year. These are people like Senator Dan Cruce, Senator Ray Siegfried and Representative Kim Williams. He advised watching to see if any of these kind of traditional Democrat lawmakers would be particularly active at the end of the session.
Did that happen? Was there an attempt at defining action from the establishment wing of the party to try to shore up support against progressive pushback?
There wasn’t really. At least nothing that stood out, nothing that either was controversial or noticeably celebrated. Every one of those representatives had their bills, as they all did, and I think they got some of them through. And I imagine they’ll point to them in the campaign season to point out what they did.
But no, to answer your question, I also was wondering, what kind of, for lack of a better word, performative thing they might do, and there wasn’t.
More broadly from that, this last day of the legislative session was just on a ton of bills that they fairly methodically, and I think they’d say deliberatively, made their way through.
Because whether they were progressive or establishment, they just wanted to have a track record of things to take to their constituents this year and say, “Look, we did stuff.”
I think that’s right.
You’ve been a keen watcher of the dynamic between Governor Meyer and Senate Democrats, particularly the tension that seems to have existed there since Meyer came into office two years ago.
Was there anything particularly noteworthy about Governor Meyer’s involvement during the home stretch of the legislative session?
There wasn’t really. It seemed to me, at least the perception was, he probably made the decision to try to stay in the background a little bit. There was no kind of overt acrimony between Senate Democrats and the governor, or really between the governor and anybody in the legislature.
The Assembly did override Meyer’s veto of Senate Bill 75, which would have prohibited county governments from creating restrictive zoning regulations on legal marijuana shops.
That in itself is interesting that they decided to override that. But I guess going with that, now that all these bills have passed, Governor Meyer has to sign them. Are there any bills you are particularly interested to see if Meyer vetoes this summer?
I’m looking at the data center bills, the energy bills, I don’t know what he may be thinking about those, but those are pretty consequential ones that I’ll be keeping an eye on.
I know Tim also had talked about the budget and that Meyer had submitted a budget that wanted to see a 5% cap on expense increases, and it actually ended up being closer to 7%. He signed that budget happily on the day before session ended.
He did. Once a budget is passed through both chambers, it would be a pretty significant move to push back on it.
Is there anything that surprised you that didn’t get over the line in the last few days of session?
There was this fight over, as we mentioned earlier, what they call the PLA Bill, the Project Labor Agreement Bill, which would mandate that school construction projects have a certain number of union workers on site. Union power in Dover has waned, so the fact that it didn’t pass was not too surprising on its face.
But there was a compromise to it that I was thinking would have ultimately made its way through. And that didn’t happen. I was surprised that even a pared-down version of that bill didn’t pass.
Last question for you, Karl. Is there an overall theme that you pull from this year’s legislative activities?
No. This was a tough one. As opposed to last year, where there were three themes, really, that permeated it and made it actually as a reporter easier to write. When there’s big, clear narratives, it’s fun to write.
This one, it was just a whole bunch of stuff passed.
There were some fun moments – or fun, I don’t know. There were some moments where the House and the Senate were kind of jockeying against each other, to ensure that their preferred legislation passed the parallel chambers. At one point, the House thought that the Senate was moving too slowly, so they just went into recess for about an hour and a half to wait for the Senate to continue passing bills.
But aside from that, or I guess as part of that, the theme was just that there were dozens and dozens of bills that passed in the final hours, ranging from schools to energy to wetlands preservation to the big budget spending bills.
Would that be that chaos was the theme?
Chaos is an accurate term, and it’s unsatisfying. I wish there was one clear through line that I could very cleverly recount to you all, but there wasn’t. It was just a bunch of stuff.
And the listeners will have to decide whether chaos is in their best interest as the voting populace in the state.
I imagine they’ll hear more about [the individual bills] in the coming months as this campaign heats up.
Thank you for helping listeners and our readers try to sort through the work being done by their elected leaders this year in Legislative Hall.
Agents seeking different person when they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Mexican who had lived in US for 35 years
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were reportedly seeking two people from Guatemala when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States for 35 years, the New York Times reported.
Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn has pleaded not guilty to vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
Hearn, 67, from Maryland, was arrested last month after stopping by the pool on a bike ride. He told several outlets that he was detained for almost five hours after he reached into the water to inspect what he described a piece of the blue liner that was partially detached from the bottom of the pool as he was curious what it felt like.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that a Michigan woman who went missing in the Bahamas earlier this year may not have fallen overboard from a dinghy as her husband has claimed.
Bipartisan Election Assistance Commission maintains mail-voter registration form, among other duties
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported on Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic, appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
Plans to build a NZ$3.5bn datacentre in Makarewa in the country’s south has drawn concern about electricity and water use, and potential noise pollution
People living near the site of New Zealand’s first planned AI datacentre are calling for more transparency about the project, especially about how the centre’s huge electricity and water use and potential noise pollution could affect them.
Singapore-based company Datagrid has secured approval to build a NZ$3.5bn (US$2bn) AI datacentre on a 49-hectare site in Makarewa, just north of New Zealand’s southern-most city, Invercargill. Construction is due to begin this year, with the centre becoming operational by 2028.
@puzz360 chiming in a few years later, but happy I managed to maybe track a few of you down who have leaderboard experience: past, present or future.
I’m specifically looking to get in touch with trappedinanelevator. As I have a question about their steak reinstatement. Does anyone have information on this? They had lost their steak in 2022 and managed to get it reinstated. What’s the story.
Recently my sister lost her 5 year 105 day streak due to what appears to be an app glitch.
Pulling teeth to get any reasonable answer out of Future Motion.
Any advice or comments are so welcome and appreciated.
Thank you
Testimony from Lance Twiggs heard in court on fourth day of hearing to determine whether case can proceed to trial
Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old charged with murdering the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk, told his roommate a day after the fatal shooting that he wished “he hadn’t done it”, according to testimony heard on Thursday in court.
On the fourth day of a hearing to determine whether the case against Robinson has probable cause to proceed to trial, the state presented video of a prosecutor interviewing Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s then roommate, with whom he was romantically involved.
Graham Platner's move to suspend his Senate campaign after a sexual assault allegation has prompted a mad dash in Maine, as Democrats position themselves as replacements to take on GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Instagram users should check privacy settings after rollout of new Meta AI image generator, advocates warn
Meta has sparked blowback from privacy advocates for allowing its new AI image maker to generate photos of users with public profiles by default.
Users of Meta’s Muse Image AI tool, released Tuesday, can tag public Instagram profiles and generate pictures that pull from faces of people featured in these social media posts. Instagram users are not notified when their posts are integrated into what the company describes as its “most advanced image generation model yet”.
So I just picked up (another) used GT. The guy had one railguard on. So one side was scrapped up and one side was not (800 miles). I installed a new set and it looks so much better! But you can clearly see the side that did have a rail guard and the side that didn’t!!
Group accused of planning sniper and drone attack on Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show in June
Eight men were indicted on murder and terrorism conspiracy charges Thursday for their alleged roles in a thwarted drone and sniper attack on the UFC cage-fighting show staged at the White House in June.
The indictment, returned in Ohio, charges all eight in two separate conspiracies, one to provide material support to terrorists and a second to commit murder on federal government territory and to murder a federal government official.
Hollywood actor signs recording deal with Decca after decades of composing pieces inspired by his Welsh childhood
Anthony Hopkins says he has achieved his “first desire” of signing a record deal, with his debut single being released on Friday.
The 88-year-old Hollywood actor’s first album, Life Is a Dream, will be released next month by Decca Classics . It is a collection of pieces he has composed over six decades.
Ministers consider bringing e-cigarette laws in line with tobacco as data shows 20% of teenagers have tried vaping
Vapes could be sold in plain packaging as part of a range of proposals to stop them being marketed to children.
The UK-wide plans also include limiting device colours to white, black or grey, and keeping vapes out of sight in shops, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.
Presenter, 77, says ‘for now life goes on as normal and I continue to broadcast’ as he shares diagnosis received in 2025
The longtime radio and TV broadcaster Paul Gambaccini has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The 77-year-old presenter, who has been a regular on the BBC since the 1970s and has one of the most recognisable voices on British radio, shared a statement revealing the diagnosis he received in 2025.
U.S. lawmakers are probing the growing use of Chinese AI models by American companies, citing concerns over censorship, security risks, and whether U.S. firms are turning to cheaper foreign models because domestic alternatives are too costly or restricted. The investigation is specifically looking at companies such as Cursor and Airbnb. "The growing use of Chinese AI models by U.S. companies raises serious concerns," a State Department spokesperson told CNBC. Those "AI models are designed to advance Beijing's narratives, censor dissent, and reflect CCP ideology and values." CNBC reports: The House Committee on Homeland Security and the House Select Committee on China said in April they will jointly investigate the growing adoption of Chinese-developed AI models. An initial step in the probe was for the chairmen of those committees to send letters to Cursor and Airbnb, over their "use of or exposure to these risks" through AI developed in China. "The Chinese Communist Party is no longer just nipping at our heels in artificial intelligence; it is racing to close the gap in some of the exact capabilities that will shape the future of cybersecurity," Andrew Garbarino, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, told CNBC. "Recent reporting that a Chinese open-weight model can match leading U.S. models in certain vulnerability discovery and cybersecurity tasks is highly alarming," said Garbarino.
While some government departments have banned the usage of Chinese AI models including DeepSeek, adoption of them by U.S. companies is not prohibited. Tech chiefs, including crypto company Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and AI startup Lindy's Flo Crivello, have been publicly touting the use of models from China to reduce costs. Cursor, which will be acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX for $60 billion, built its Composer 2 model using Chinese AI model Kimi, which was developed by Moonshot AI. Alongside focusing on the rise of Chinese AI models, the ongoing joint House Committees' investigation is also looking into whether the U.S. is doing enough to tackle their rise. "The Committees are also examining whether the United States has a sufficient open-weight AI strategy to ensure American companies and cyber defenders are not forced to choose between expensive or restricted U.S. models and cheap, capable PRC-developed alternatives," a Committee aide, who asked not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing probe, told CNBC.
[...] The administration could consider the use of federal procurement bans, which would include restricting government agencies and private companies that serve the U.S. government from using Chinese AI models, Kyle Chan, fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at think tank Brookings, told CNBC. "However, it's ultimately impossible to ban China's open-source AI models because their model weights are available freely on the internet," Chan added. "This could enter into first amendment speech issues." [...] Another [approach] could be disseminating findings about risks and vulnerabilities associated with Chinese AI models to U.S. companies. "Regardless, I do expect both the Executive Branch and Congress to communicate their interest not to see U.S. companies adopting these models," [said Daniel Remler, senior fellow, technology and national security program at think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), told CNBC].
In a new motion, the New York Times, Ziff Davis and 15 other media organizations say OpenAI "chose obstruction" on details about how it trains its AI models.
Trailblazing pilot was denied opportunity to become Nasa astronaut but made history on Blue Origin flight in 2021
Wally Funk, a trailblazing aviation pioneer who was denied the opportunity to become a Nasa astronaut and half a century later became the oldest woman to travel into space, has died aged 87.
Funk died peacefully on Wednesday evening at her apartment in an assisted living facility in Grapevine, Texas, city councilwoman and close friend Duff O’Dell said on Thursday. O’Dell, who described herself as Funk’s caregiver, said she was by Funk’s side. Funk had fallen a couple of times recently and had an infection in her leg. “It took its toll,” O’Dell told the Associated Press.
DriveNets AI Fabric connects two WhiteFiber H200 GPU clusters data centers 52 miles apart into a single GPU supercluster, freeing AI infrastructure from single-site power constraints while delivering 111.2 Tbps of bandwidth with sub-millisecond latency
RA’ANANA, Israel, July 9, 2026 — DriveNets, a leader in high-scale networking solutions, today announced the industry’s first commercial deployment of an AI supercluster with long-distance scale-across AI networking. As part of Project Redwood announced today by WhiteFiber, a leading provider of AI infrastructure solutions, the DriveNets AI Fabric connects two WhiteFiber H200 GPU clusters located 52 miles apart into a single logical GPU supercluster, validated at 111.2 Tbps of bandwidth with 0.9ms of guaranteed latency. While scale-across architecture has been widely discussed across the industry, DriveNets is the first to move from concept to a live, commercially deployed network, proven at production scale rather than in a lab.
Addressing the AI Power Constraint with Scale-Across Networking
AI infrastructure buildouts are increasingly constrained not by compute, but by the power and space available at a single site. Scale-across architecture removes that constraint; instead of being capped by one facility’s power envelope, AI builders can extend their cluster to a remote site and operate the distributed GPUs as one unified system, not two separate environments. This allows larger clusters, greater resiliency, and the freedom to build where power is available, without compromising performance.
Stretching a cluster across distance is a harder networking problem than simply running a cable between two sites. The links connecting remote locations typically carry less bandwidth than the fabric inside either facility, leaving little room to absorb sudden bursts of traffic before they turn into congestion. AI training compounds the challenge: rather than many small, steady flows, it generates a handful of extremely large ones that arrive in synchronized bursts, a pattern the load-balancing and buffering approaches built for conventional data centers were not designed to handle. Without a fabric engineered to absorb those bursts and manage congestion in real time, latency spikes and packet loss follow, and a stalled job leaves GPUs on both sides of the cluster sitting idle. Solving this at long distance, without giving up performance, is what makes scale-across architecture – and the switching, buffering and congestion-management technology behind it – so critical to the next phase of AI infrastructure growth.
The First Commercially Deployed Scale-Across Solution
WhiteFiber’s Project Redwood links two geographically separated GPU clusters into a single logical GPU supercluster with the DriveNets AI Fabric solution providing the high-performance network connecting both sites.
“Power availability can be a major limit to AI infrastructure growth, but with this proven deployment, it no longer has to be,” said Ido Susan, co-founder and CEO of DriveNets. “Together with WhiteFiber, we have taken scale-across from concept to commercial reality, showing that two remote data centers can perform as a single high-performance supercluster. This is how we expect many next-generation AI infrastructures to be built.”
“DriveNets’ AI Fabric was critical to proving that Project Redwood could deliver the performance and reliability of a single-site cluster across two locations,” said Sam Tabar, CEO of WhiteFiber. “This milestone shows that geography no longer has to limit the scale of the AI infrastructure we build.”
As part of the validation process, performance between GPU racks within a single site was compared with performance between GPU racks across two sites, with one GPU rack located at the primary site and the other at the remote site. Additional details about the validation methodology and results are available in DriveNets’ white paper.
Lossless Performance Beyond the Data Center Walls
Traditional Data Center Interconnect links were not designed for AI workloads, which generate traffic bursts that cannot tolerate jitter or packet loss. Even small losses during training can delay job completion and waste expensive GPU cycles. DriveNets’ 9300F ,5300R and 5301R switches, powered by its Fabric Scheduled Ethernet (FSE) technology, extend the AI fabric beyond a single data center using cell-based load balancing, end-to-end Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ), and deep-buffer interconnect that absorb AI traffic bursts before they cause congestion. The result is predictable, lossless connectivity between sites that keeps GPU utilization high, as if the entire cluster were under one roof. That combination of the industry’s highest performance and zero packet loss is not incidental but is a direct result of DriveNets’ purpose-built architecture, and it is why DriveNets AI Fabric is the best available networking solution for geographically distributed AI clusters.
To learn more about scaling AI clusters across multi-site deployments, visit www.drivenets.com.
About DriveNets
DriveNets is a leader in high-scale networking software for AI infrastructure and service providers. The company pioneered a disaggregated networking architecture that transforms the economics of large-scale networks while maximizing performance, utilization, and operational efficiency. DriveNets-powered networks are deployed by global leaders, including AT&T and Comcast, supporting more than 30% of total U.S. internet traffic. DriveNets AI Fabric delivers full-stack networking for AI infrastructures, providing the highest-performance, Ethernet-based alternative to InfiniBand. The solution is deployed by hyperscalers, Neo Clouds, and enterprises worldwide.
On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court concluded issuing opinions for its October Term 2025. The session was marked by several landmark decisions and the potential for related cases to come back to the Court.
While the justices will still consider cases on the emergency docket over the summer, the Court resumes hearing arguments on Oct. 5, 2026. The justices have granted certiorari for 20 cases to be argued as of July 9, 2026. They heard 59 cases in the October 2025 Term.
Here are the highlights from selected cases and opinions.
In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “against that backdrop of clear and limited delegations, the Government reads IEEPA to give the president power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs and change them at will. That view would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy.”
In the main dissent, Justice Brett Kavanaugh believed President Donald Trump could use IEEPA “in light of the statutory text, longstanding historical practice, and relevant Supreme Court precedents.”
A divided Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision narrowed the ability of states to use race as a determining factor in creating election districts. The decision focused on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (or VRA), a landmark achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.
In his majority opinion in Callais, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that a Louisiana law went against the purpose of the VRA. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan was deeply skeptical of the majority opinion, which Kagan labeled as the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
Colorado and over 20 other states have laws prohibiting mental health professionals from using conversion therapy on minors because it is considered unsafe and ineffective. The purpose of conversion therapy is to change a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Talk therapy with that purpose fell under Colorado’s prohibition.
In an 8-1 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that Colorado’s law regulated speech based on viewpoint, violating the First Amendment. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Colorado’s decision to restrict a dangerous therapy modality that, incidentally, involves provider speech is presumptively unconstitutional. In concluding otherwise, the Court’s opinion misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable.”
A divided Supreme Court held that state lawmakers can regulate gender identity in scholastic sports competitions, and in particular, block transgender students born as biological men from competing in women’s and girls’ sports.
In his majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that “Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and West Virginia has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females consistent with Title IX.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in the judgment in part and dissented in part. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
In the decision’s aftermath, a challenge is expected, possibly in the next term, to the question of must all states block transgender students born as biological men from competing in women’s and girls’ sports.
A divided Supreme Court struck down a law in Hawaii that prohibited a person with a concealed carry permit from bringing a handgun onto private property open to the public without the property owner’s consent.
Justice Samuel Alito in a 6-3 decision held that the law violated the Second and 14th Amendments. Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said she believed the colonial and founding era laws cited by the state in its arguments “similarly prohibited carrying firearms onto private property without the owner’s affirmative consent.”
A unanimous Supreme Court said that part of a federal law could not be used to prosecute a man solely for possessing a gun and a controlled substance at the same time. The Court upheld a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit bench opinion that struck down part of a federal law, U.S.C. 922(g)(3), that banned anyone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing firearms or ammunition.
In his opinion for the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that “the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani under §922(g)(3)’s unlawful user provision is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.”
Also, on June 30, 2026, the Court accepted a combined case that challenges bans in Cook County, Illinois, and a Connecticut state law on the sale, transfer, and possession of assault weapons. The case will be heard in the Court’s next term.
President Trump removed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position as a commissioner for the FTC. She claimed her dismissal violated the terms of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which said that FTC commissioners could only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that Slaughter’s firing violated a precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935). The Court’s majority officially overturned Humphrey’s Executor in a 6-3 decision from Chief Justice John Roberts that affirmed the president’s broad power to remove executive officials from office.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor worried the Court’s recent decisions in similar cases concentrated too much power in the executive branch.
The Supreme Court faced a decision about a government request to stay a district court ruling preventing President Trump from firing Lisa Cook. She started serving a 14-year term on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2023. Under the Federal Reserve Act, the president can only remove members of the Federal Reserve Board “for cause.”
In his 5-4 decision for the Court’s majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that the District Court’s order should remain in effect pending the conclusion of litigation over Cook’s attempted removal. “The Government has not shown that it is likely to prevail on the legal arguments advanced in its stay application,” he determined.
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority ruling was flawed. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said the Court acted too soon in accepting the case.
A divided Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship and offered a broad constitutional understanding of the right to automatic citizenship for children born in the territory of the United States regardless of their nationality.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “[c]hildren born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority’s constitutional holding, but he concluded that Trump’s executive order violated a federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1401(a).
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, argued that “the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race. Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that federal election laws do not override a state law that permits counting ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days later. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her majority opinion, wrote that “the [federal] Election-Day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito agreed that the defining element of an election is the electorate’s choice of a candidate, but that’s where his agreement ended. “The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” he wrote. “Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days.”
A divided Supreme Court held that a police request to obtain cellphone user location data represents a search and generally requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. A Virginia man, Okello Chatrie, claimed a detective did not reasonably obtain search warrants used to track down his cellphone location data. The government later used this data to convict him of robbing a bank.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a 6-3 decision, said “police conducted a search when they gained access to [Google’s] Location History data,” Kagan noted. Citing the Court’s precedent in Carpenter v. United States (2018), Kagan said, “[t]he Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.”
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, dissented—arguing an expanded definition also included a requirement that “the police must obtain a warrant every time they access any cell-phone location information from a third party.”
A divided Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian and Haitian immigrants. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a 6-3 Court that courts cannot review the decision to end TPS status for the two countries—and clear the way for deportations—when the challengers raise only non-constitutional claims.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that DHS secretaries have repeatedly determined that conditions are too dangerous to permit safe return to Syria and Haiti. “[The] District Court in the Haiti litigation found as well that the plaintiffs had a likely successful equal protection claim, in part because statements made by the President showed that a racially discriminatory purpose had entered into the TPS termination,” Kagan said.
A divided Court also ruled that refugees from Mexico need to be within the United States’ physical border to make an asylum claim instead of an adjacent border location in Mexico. Justice Samuel Alito held for a 6-3 Court that “an alien standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border.” He cited language from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Congress had established “a mandatory set of procedures” to guide the asylum process. “The Court today holds that the Executive Branch may circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U. S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto U. S. soil.”
RENO, Nev., July 9, 2026 — CIQ, the founding commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux and the company behind the Ascender Pro automation platform, today announced that Ascender Pro now closes the loop between detection and remediation across an entire Enterprise Linux fleet, automatically routing the right fix to the right host in the right environment. Operations teams get one system that watches for problems, decides what to do about them, and acts without a person in the middle, no matter how many environments they run. That same investment extends to the collections and containers teams depend on, and reaches beyond Ascender Pro entirely, with CIQ open sourcing the caching layer behind it for the wider Ansible community. Ascender Reaqt, Ascender Registry and Federated Inventories are available now for Ascender Pro customers, with Ascender Galaxy Proxy released today as open source.
Most operations teams generate far more signal than they can act on by hand: a disk filling up, a service that won’t restart, a configuration drift no one caught. Closing the gap between that signal and a fix has traditionally meant a person in the loop, watching dashboards, triaging alerts and logging in to fix each incident one at a time, environment by environment.
Ascender Reaqt closes that gap. Each rule set gets its own endpoint and its own authentication token, so a credential tied to one integration never exposes any other, and a companion web application gives administrators a full UI and API for managing users, teams, permissions, providers, rule sets and listeners, backed by dashboards and metrics. Built as independent Go services and written from scratch rather than adapted from an existing open source project, Reaqt gives CIQ full ownership of the codebase and lets the product evolve on its own roadmap.
Ascender Registry lets administrators create repositories, pull specific collections and versions down from Ansible Galaxy, and host them locally, restricting exactly which collections and versions users are allowed to run. Teams can publish their own private collections the same way, and Registry doubles as a container registry for execution environments, all served through the same API structure as upstream Galaxy, so existing Ansible tooling works without changes.
Federated Inventories solves a problem most teams have learned to work around by hand: a ticketing system, a monitoring tool or a vulnerability scanner typically knows a hostname, not which of a dozen inventories that host lives in. Federated Inventories groups existing inventories together while preserving each one’s own variables and instance group assignments, then automatically determines which underlying inventory a target host lives in when a job runs, splitting one request across as many environments as necessary with no extra setup.
“Enterprises running Linux at scale have been stuck choosing between an automation platform that does everything and one they can actually own and trust. That’s the problem we set out to solve with this release. Ascender Pro gives operations teams a way to detect a problem, control what’s running in their environment, and get the fix to exactly the right host, automatically, all built from the ground up on our own roadmap. Galaxy Proxy solves a problem the entire Ansible community shares, so we’re giving it back as open source. It’s the same principle behind everything we build at CIQ: own your infrastructure, control your own destiny and never be at the mercy of somebody else’s roadmap. Full ownership where it matters, real contribution back to the community that got us here, that’s what building infrastructure the right way looks like,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO and founder of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux.
Ascender Galaxy Proxy started as a fix for a real problem: public Ansible Galaxy responses can be slow or unavailable, and that drags down CI/CD pipelines and project syncs that depend on them. Galaxy Proxy sits between Ansible and Galaxy and caches every response, not just collection downloads, cutting typical wait times by as much as 75 to 80 percent. CIQ is releasing it as open source for any Ansible user, including those running AWX or another Ansible-based platform, while Ascender Pro customers get the full Registry application on top of it.
“For our customers, this release isn’t about matching a feature checklist; it’s about giving operations teams their time back. Federated Inventories alone removes a routing problem that used to require its own tooling or a manual step, and paired with Reaqt’s automatic remediation, a single alert can turn into a fix on exactly the right host without anyone standing in the middle,” said Bjorn Hovland, President of CIQ.
To see the full platform in action, CIQ is hosting a live webinar, “How to run your whole Ansible lifecycle on one platform,” on July 30 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT, featuring Brian Rieb and the engineer who built Ascender Pro, Jimmy Conner. The session walks through what the integrated platform looks like in practice: a fix launching in seconds before a small problem becomes an outage, every action recording itself so the proof exists before anyone asks, and one launch running across the whole estate. Registration is open now.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.
Renewed attacks the largest since an interim memorandum was signed this June, with Trump saying fragile truce is ‘over’
The US and Iran traded retaliatory strikes on Thursday as US president Donald Trump threatened to escalate the conflict unless Iran stopped attacking ships in the strait of Hormuz.
Iran responded to the latest round of attacks by targeting US-allied Kuwait and Qatar and accused the US of striking near its sole nuclear power plant.
Google says the World Cup drove Search to its highest usage in history, with queries per second peaking right after Argentina's winning goal against Egypt. CNBC reports: The milestone comes as the company tries to prove its traditional search engine can keep its relevance in the age of AI, where chatbots have become more prevalent. Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price has more than doubled in the past year and revenue growth in the first quarter was the fastest for any period since 2022.
Google said its top searched query after the game was "argentina vs egypt." Globally, the company also saw people searching for things like "argentina x colombia" and "how many world cup goals does messi have." Additional queries included "what is it called when a player hits another player in game" and "is it messi's last world cup."
Arkansas-based Onterris reported "good" air quality after a giant warehouse fire in Los Angeles. Some experts and activists say the testing is inadequate.
Folks that ride around the city, going into a restaurant or bar or whatever where you might not always be able to bring it in with you, what do you do?
Lock it like a bike, always bring it with you, use a temp storage like bounce?
I have an X7 LR, which is heavy as fuck cause of the pack. It’s like carrying a 45lb plate.
Models show overwhelming chance that this year’s El Niño to rank among largest going back to 1950
El Niño is strengthening and the risks of a historic event with the power to supercharge extreme weather around the world are rising, according to the latest analysis from the US National Weather Service.
Models show there is now an 81% chance that a very strong El Niño “that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950” will develop before the end of this year, forecasters said in an advisory released Thursday. There is almost near certainty – a 97% probability – that the conditions will persist through spring 2027.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent's stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they're happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an "apparatus" that surveilled a user and their surroundings constantly to craft a better workout. "The audible communications may be associated with contextual factors such as time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction," the patent said. "The audible communications may be transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators."
According to the filing, Meta needs to know when a user laughs or sighs, where they are physically, and what objects they're surrounded by. It would even like to know when you've taken your meds. "The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s)," the patent said. "The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user's emotional state or generate other insights about the user [...] in another example, the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user's voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.)." The more data it has, the patent explains, the better it could understand a user's moods. "The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis," it said. "These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices."
The emotional-analyzing AI would need far more than just a user's words to determine moods over time. A longer description of the hypothetical training data for the AI included "attributes of thousands of objects" such as a user's books, personal messages, and newspapers. "In some examples, audible communications may include speech (e.g., voice data), sighs, laughter, or other nonverbal sounds associated with an expression(s), an emotion(s), or ideas. In some examples, the audible communications may include the tone(s) of a voice of a user while making the communication(s)," it said. All this data, Meta says, would be in service of tailoring better workouts. Humans, the patent explained, are simply not as good as a machine for this. "Personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement," it said. "These challenges create a need for a practical approach that uses a single device to observe movement, recommend routines, and provide corrective guidance." "Like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described," the company said in a statement.
Outgoing PM has not ruled out drawing up honours list when he stands down, despite previously opposing it
Keir Starmer has signalled he could hand out resignation honours when he leaves Downing Street, despite pledging three years ago he would not do so when he eventually stood down.
The prime minister twice declined to rule out drawing up a list of honours when he stands down in just over 10 days’ time, to be succeeded by Andy Burnham.
When most of Florida’s Republican gubernatorial candidates gathered in Fortt. Lauderdale recently to debate, they spent a good bit of time discussing the governor’s role in regulating AI data centers — at least, when they weren’t throwing barbs at the one candidate who didn’t show.
The July 2 debate, hosted by conservative podcast host and entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David, brought together Florida Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, former House Speaker Paul Renner and investor James Fishback to make their cases to Florida voters. GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Rep. Byron Donalds declined to debate.
At one point, Renner and Fishback both took aim at Collins, criticizing what they said was his past support for artificial intelligence industry development in the state.
"You’ve said that it’s not possible for the state to regulate hyperscale data centers at the state level. Why do you believe that it is?" Renner asked Collins during the debate. "If you believe that the state shouldn’t be involved, why did you sponsor a bill to give them permanent tax incentives at the expense of everybody watching tonight?"
The typical industry definition of a hyperscale center is one that requires 100 megawatts, whereas a 2026 Florida law defines "large-scale data centers" as 50 megawatts.
Collins responded that Renner was misrepresenting the bill but didn’t explain how.
Although during the debate Collins disagreed with his rivals about banning or instituting moratoriums on hyperscale data center projects, he has campaigned for data center regulations.
We wondered: Is Renner right that Collins sponsored a bill that sought to give these centers permanent tax breaks?
Not exactly.
Before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him lieutenant governor, Collins was the 2025 state Senate sponsor of Florida Senate Bill 1264, a broad, 174-page bill that sought to change business infrastructure and employment rules.
The legislation would have indefinitely extended an existing June 2027 deadline for eligible data centers to apply for certain tax exemptions. But it didn’t automatically make those incentives permanent, policy experts said. It also had no effect on existing facilities’ tax breaks.
Bill aimed to extend data center tax breaks, not automatically make them permanent
For years in Florida, certain data centers requiring 15 megawatts of power capacity or more have been able to get sales and use tax exemptions on their construction, materials and technology. (For reference, a 15-megawatt data center typically draws enough electricity to power around 12,000 to 15,000 homes.)
That offer was due to expire in June 2027, but Collins’ billattempted to extend it indefinitely for new data centers moving into the state.
Avery Bernstein, a research analyst at the Florida Policy Project founded by former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, said the existing exemption is temporary under Florida law but data centers can apply to make their tax breaks permanent later if they meet certain requirements.
"Once a facility receives a tax exemption certificate, the existing statute states it is temporary for up to five years" after construction starts, Bernstein said. The incentive becomes permanent if the facility has $150 million in cumulative capital investment and at least a 15 megawatt load.
The permanent tax exemption certificate is then up for review every five years to confirm the data center still meets the requirements, he said. Collins’ bill didn’t try to alter the length of the tax exemption certificates.
"The only change that Collins' bill would have made to the existing statute was the single line to delete the 2027 deadline," Bernstein said.
Collins described hyperscale data centers as an economic boon for Florida
Collins’ bill died in committee, but when he pushed for its passage, he described data centers as a vital economic investment for Florida.
During a March 31, 2025, committee meeting, Collins said the exemption "entices significant investment in job creation to communities, both directly through the data centers and indirectly through customers they serve, by removing the sunset provision for the tax exemption."
Asked during the meeting about the exemptions’ effectiveness and how many data center projects had been built with the incentive, Collins turned to why he was seeking to remove the sunset, saying Florida needed to remain competitive for data center investment.
A "ton of organizations" were looking to invest in the state, he said, and operators "want to make sure the landscape isn’t going to get ripped out from underneath them."
"If they are going to invest capital and resources into our state we need to make sure it's a stable environment," he said.
In another committee meeting a few weeks later, Collins described his bill as extending availability of the data center exemptions "indefinitely."
"Hyperscale data centers are incredibly large and take a lot of time to reposition to make sure they have the market demographics before they land," Collins said. "It allows them time to go ahead and pick our areas in the state."
PolitiFact asked Collins’ campaign about Renner’s comments but did not hear back.
The data center tax break originated in legislation Florida lawmakers passed in 2017, when hyperscale AI data centers were still part of an emerging industry and lacked the political baggage they have today.
But state lawmakers still passed a companion bill to Collins’ in June 2025, extending the tax exemption through June 2037, and increasing the size threshold for eligible facilities so that only hyperscale data centers of at least 100 megawatts or higher would qualify. (Collins didn’t vote on it).
Renner said Collins sponsored a bill to give AI hyperscale data centers "permanent tax incentives."
Collins’ 2025 bill sought to indefinitely extend a June 2027 deadline for eligible data centers to apply for temporary tax exemptions.
The legislation didn’t try to change how long data centers could benefit from the incentive. Under state law, facilities granted the temporary exemption could later apply to make it permanent if they met certain requirements.
Hyperscale AI data centers benefit from the tax incentive, but Collins’ bill was a large legislative package that wasn’t exclusive to data centers and included several unrelated provisions.
Renner’s statement is partially accurate: Collins’ bill would have allowed large data centers to indefinitely apply for certain tax incentives, opening up an avenue that would allow more companies to eventually seek permanent tax breaks under existing law. We rate this claim Half True.
BOISE, Idaho, July 9, 2026 — Micron Technology, Inc. today announced plans to invest up to $3 billion to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor supply-chain ecosystem and enable the critical semiconductor manufacturing footprint needed for future technology innovation. The investment reflects Micron’s commitment to securing a reliable U.S. supply of critical manufacturing materials, enhancing supply assurance, improving long-term planning flexibility, and supporting the growing demand for advanced memory and storage solutions driven by artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications.
As part of Micron’s planned investment into the U.S. supply chain, the company will provide GlobalWafers Co., Ltd. with $500 million in strategic financing support to advance the development and manufacturing capabilities of its GlobalWafers America 300mm raw silicon wafer manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas. The companies will also enter into a 10-year supply agreement that will provide Micron with access to significant raw silicon wafer capacity to support its long-term manufacturing plans and bolster the critical semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in the United States.
“Securing a reliable supply of critical input materials is essential to supporting Micron’s long-term growth and technology roadmap,” said Ben Tessone, senior vice president and chief procurement officer at Micron Technology. “Micron’s strategic investment in the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem and GlobalWafers’ raw silicon wafer manufacturing facility reflects our commitment to strengthening supply assurance, deepening collaboration with key suppliers, and supporting the expansion of the semiconductor supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure in the United States. Together, these efforts help build a more resilient supply chain that can support future innovation and growing demand for advanced memory solutions.”
“Micron has long been an important partner of GlobalWafers, and we are honored to further deepen our strategic collaboration and jointly support the stable supply of critical materials for the semiconductor industry. GlobalWafers is currently the only raw silicon wafer supplier participating in the CHIPS for America Program that is capable of locally producing advanced 300mm wafers in the United States,” said Doris Hsu, Chairperson and CEO of GlobalWafers. “Through this close collaboration with Micron, we are not only continuing to meet market demand for high-quality semiconductor wafers, but also helping to strengthen local manufacturing capabilities and supply chain resilience, working hand in hand with Micron to support the continued growth of the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem.”
Beyond manufacturing expansion and long-term supply commitments, Micron and GlobalWafers intend to explore collaboration on next-generation wafer technologies and process innovations to support future semiconductor manufacturing requirements.
The proposed transaction remains subject to definitive agreements, customary approvals and closing conditions.
About Micron Technology, Inc.
Micron Technology, Inc. is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), visit micron.com.
George Cottrell’s mother, Fiona, at centre of criminal inquiry over potential evasion of restrictions on donations
Police are investigating donations worth £500,000 made to Reform UK by the mother of a convicted fraudster and ally of Nigel Farage.
The investigation concerns two donations of £250,000 made by Fiona Cottrell, whose son George has often accompanied Farage to Reform events and media appearances. The May 2024 donations are under investigation over whether they were intended to conceal a donation by an impermissible donor.
A federal court ruling enabled some taxpayers to seek refunds tied to COVID-era filing deadlines. But that window expires July 10 — here's what to know.
Wally Funk was selected in 1961 as one of the elite women in the Mercury 13 program, finishing the same rigorous training program given to the Mercury 7 astronauts.
OpenAI has received approval from the Trump administration to publicly roll out GPT-5.6 after an earlier limited preview restricted access to government-approved organizations. The company also launched ChatGPT Work, a new GPT-5.6-powered agent that combines ChatGPT and Codex-style capabilities. "It can gather context from the apps, files, and workflows you choose and create finished materials such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and web apps," OpenAI wrote in a blog post, adding that a "unified plugins directory" allows ChatGPT to connect to tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, calendars, and CRMs. The Verge reports: Mac and Windows users worldwide, including free ChatGPT users, should have immediate access to ChatGPT Work and GPT-5.6 via the ChatGPT desktop app. On mobile and the web, Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users will first get access, while Plus and Business users will receive access "over the next few days," OpenAI wrote, adding that the "rollout is starting globally and will continue gradually toward full availability over the next 24 hours."
[...] OpenAI is hoping that its new product, which is a direct competitor to Anthropic's Claude Cowork (combining its own Claude and Claude Code), will push it ahead in the race. OpenAI is especially banking on Sol, the most powerful of the GPT-5.6 model suite, to set "a new standard for intelligence and efficiency," particularly when it comes to coding, cybersecurity, and science, as well as computer use capabilities. The company is also marketing the model as a lower-cost alternative to competitors' most powerful models, amid complaints of an industry-wide money squeeze and AI lab costs being passed onto customers.
Hey guys, I have a problem with Hi guys, I'm have a problem with the fast charger. The fast charger's LED is flashing red and green. This problem doesn't happen when I charge with the standard slow charger.
PARIS, July 9, 2026 — Cerebras Systems, makers of the fastest AI infrastructure, today announced a major expansion of its European infrastructure footprint. Cerebras will bring its first European data center capacity online by the end of 2026, with rapid build-out across France and the Nordics. The company plans to expand total capacity to 200 MW by the end of 2027, with a portion of that capacity expected to support OpenAI workloads as part of the companies’ existing partnership. The expansion will bring Cerebras’ high-speed AI inference infrastructure closer to European users, helping deliver faster response times for increasingly complex AI workloads.
“We are contracting significant capacity for 2027, with data centers slated for Norway and Finland as we actively build across Europe,” said Feldman. “These deployments will enable us to move decisively on what our customers have been asking for: fast, high-performance AI compute located in Europe.”
Frontier Compute for Europe
As AI models support increasingly complex and interactive workloads, demand for local, low-latency AI infrastructure has surged across European enterprises, research institutions, and governments seeking alternatives to compute capacity concentrated in the U.S. and Asia. Cerebras’ wafer-scale architecture is designed to deliver industry-leading inference and training performance, and the company’s European build-out positions it to serve this demand directly from within the region.
“Our customers don’t just want AI compute. They want it close to home, powered responsibly, and available fast,” added Feldman. “This expansion and capacity plan reflects our confidence in Europe as a long-term growth market for Cerebras.”
Cerebras at RAISE Summit
Cerebras co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman participated on stage at RAISE Summit in Paris, appearing alongside Sachin Katti of OpenAI on July 9.
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) is building the world’s fastest AI infrastructure. The Cerebras team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types came together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention. They believe that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Leading global corporations, research institutes, and governments choose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud. Learn more at www.cerebras.ai.
New storage, software and computing frameworks set the stage for next-generation data tools and research support
July 9, 2026 — As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into scientific workflows, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility continues to improve its computing, storage and software frameworks and develop new tools that enhance the ARM data user experience.
The improvements aim to help researchers access observations and metadata more quickly and easily while reducing the time spent searching for, understanding, downloading, and managing large data sets. This is particularly important because ARM has collected more than 30 years of atmospheric data, totaling over 8 petabytes.
The ARM Data Center has been preparing its infrastructure, including the Cumulus high-performance computing cluster, for artificial intelligence. Credit: ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy
“AI‑ready infrastructure is no longer optional,” says Giri Prakash, ARM’s chief data and computing officer.
Prakash, who manages the ARM Data Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, describes the effort as a phased, incremental approach to enhancing data infrastructure to support ARM’s growing computational demands. “These developments are being added to ARM’s already very capable infrastructure to accommodate the demanding requirements of AI applications.”
Building an AI‑Ready Data Center
ARM began preparing its infrastructure for AI about four years ago, starting with hardware.
The ARM Data Center installed graphics processing units (GPUs) to the Cumulus high-performance computing cluster. Multiple projects used the GPUs, including data quality analysis, radar processing and data product generation.
As AI use intensifies, a more significant upgrade is now underway. ARM is replacing its file server with an AI-ready storage platform that connects directly to the GPU environment. This will enable AI models to access ARM data and metadata at high speed, rather than waiting for slower file transfers.
According to Prakash, ARM is acquiring 25 to 30 new GPUs, including processing units designed to accelerate AI workloads, to meet its computational needs over the next two to five years.
Along with adding and upgrading computing and storage infrastructure, ARM’s cybersecurity and network engineering teams are enhancing controls to manage access to ARM computing, data and AI resources and tools.
The enhanced infrastructure extends beyond hardware. ARM has been developing a software environment that will enable large language models (LLMs) and agent-based systems to communicate with data holdings, metadata and quality records.
As organizations like ARM build AI-ready infrastructure, they are focusing on AI agents that can reason through multi-step tasks, access external tools, and make limited autonomous decisions. Unlike traditional AI assistants that simply answer questions, agent-based systems can retrieve data, interact with software platforms and coordinate workflows with minimal human intervention.
Prakash describes an LLM as “the brain that understands and explains; an agent is the system that uses that brain to access data and get work done. While the LLM provides general reasoning and language ability, agents connect it to institutional knowledge, tools and actions.”
One of the most noticeable changes for researchers in the near term will be the introduction of the ARM Data Advisor (ADA, which is pronounced “ā-duh”), an AI agent that will streamline ARM data discovery and access.
ADA is currently being tested by a small group of ARM staff and users.
According to Wade Darnell, an ORNL software developer and ADA’s lead developer, this new assistant will answer questions, suggest data sets, display data plots, explain data quality and even place data orders — all through a natural-language conversational interface.
Basic data ordering will be available in the initial rollout, but more advanced ordering and data extractions will be added in future versions.
Instead of navigating multiple panels or search fields to drill into data sets, users can tell ADA what they need. For example, users can request data sets with latent heat flux or observations from a specific campaign or instrument. ADA will identify relevant data sets and provide users with context explaining why the data are relevant. With one click, users will be able to order data from within ADA’s interface.
This user-centric approach extends beyond search capabilities. Upon its release, ADA will also provide personalized recommendations for returning users, suggest new datastreams and deliver files in multiple formats suitable for analysis, workflow automation or downstream modeling.
ADA’s conversational interface allows users to easily pinpoint customized search results and deliver the data in their preferred format. Meanwhile, human support will always be available, providing manual oversight and direct assistance.
ADA is expected to be introduced in July 2026, and it will evolve over time. The traditional search tool will remain in place until developers are confident that ADA is meeting the needs of ARM users.
Those interested in participating in ADA testing can contact the ARM Data Center.
The Next Step: ATLAS
To enable AI-ready infrastructure, ARM developers are building a framework called the Agentic Tooling and LLM Augmentation Stack (ATLAS).
ATLAS provides a shared platform enabling AI-driven tools to work together — from data discovery to workflow automation — while upholding ARM’s standards for transparency, security, and scientific integrity.
The purpose of ATLAS is straightforward: accelerate AI and machine learning adoption by offering shared, standardized infrastructure. This includes:
Providing model inference — the process that LLMs use to answer queries — through OpenAI-compatible endpoints (ATLAS exposes model access through standardized interfaces that follow OpenAI’s format and conventions).
Converting information, such as data sets, metadata, documentation and prior knowledge, into a format that captures its semantic meaning, allowing systems to consistently retrieve and use relevant details for more accurate, informed responses across workflows.
Coordinating workflows guided by domain‑specific agents.
Delivering secure, governed access to ARM data and services.
ATLAS provides a common foundation for developing and integrating AI-powered tools used for ARM functions, including metadata generation, data quality analysis and enhanced website search capabilities with a forthcoming digital assistant called Ask ARM. ATLAS also supports connections to multiple model-serving environments that require GPUs, both internally and on external platforms.
One example of an external platform is the American Science Cloud. This DOE initiative, which is part of the Genesis Mission, unifies national lab supercomputing resources into a secure cloud for AI-driven scientific discovery.
Announced in late 2025, Genesis aims to build an integrated platform that connects AI models, curated scientific data, workflows and computing resources across DOE laboratories to accelerate discovery, enable autonomous science, and scale impact across the broader research ecosystem.
A Rewired Research Environment
ARM’s AI-ready infrastructure extends to the representation of data, context, and scientific knowledge. Years of consistent ARM metadata and data quality records provided by ARM’s Data Quality Office, instrument mentors, and translators now form the foundation for retrieval systems.
Over the next three years, Prakash says ARM is expected to add 2 to 3 petabytes of storage for vectorized content — searchable metadata embeddings, guidance pages, instrument handbooks and other supporting materials. To support advanced scientific AI workflows, ARM also plans to transform and chunk scientific variables and observational data into AI-readable contextual representations that can be efficiently indexed, retrieved and analyzed by agentic AI systems.
By leveraging GPU Direct Storage and tightly integrated high performance storage architectures, ARM reduces data movement bottlenecks and accelerates AI model response times. Facility operations teams are now working together on energy, cooling and networking as GPU clusters expand.
Through these efforts, ARM is reconfiguring how computing, storage and software systems interact so AI models can answer questions with grounded, authoritative information from the documentation developed over the years by ARM staff.
What Users Should Expect
In the near term, researchers accessing the ARM Data Center will experience faster performance, more intuitive search results and early conversational interfaces to help with standard tasks.
A broader range of agent-driven tools will become available as ATLAS matures, helping users automate workflows and navigate ARM data more effectively. Prakash emphasizes that user feedback will continue to guide their rollout.
In turn, the ARM development team will incrementally update capabilities to improve their usability and accuracy, as well as their integration with other scientific systems.
“ARM is not simply bolting AI onto existing systems,” says Prakash. “We are rearchitecting our data ecosystem around AI, and the result will be a dramatically improved and more intuitive user experience.”
Building Guardrails, Accelerating Discovery
Although today’s focus on AI seems new, AI capabilities and algorithms have been developed by groups across ARM and integrated at the ARM Data Center for several years. According to Prakash, the difference today is the rapid development of AI technology and its availability to the research community.
As ARM moves forward in implementing AI infrastructure, the ARM Data Center team continues to develop software and plan the required AI infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the AI in ARM Team is finalizing a governance document for the user facility that sets guardrails for the responsible use of AI, defines ethical standards aligned with DOE principles and establishes evaluation criteria and best practices for working with AI.
By aligning ARM’s AI-optimized data flow with DOE’s Genesis Mission, the ARM Data Center team is helping to ensure that ARM’s data sets fuel a unified platform designed to shorten the time between observation and discovery. For the scientific community, this means more than just faster processing. It creates a trustworthy framework in which AI-driven insights remain grounded in high-fidelity observations.
Watch a recording of the AI in ARM webinar, held on April 28, 2026, to learn more about ARM’s AI infrastructure and other AI-focused initiatives.
Chirag Shah, Wade Darnell and Giri Prakash of ORNL made technical contributions to this story.
ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.
This article was originally published on ARM’s website.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
SAN JOSE, Calif., July 9, 2026 — Rambus Inc., a premier chip and silicon IP provider making data faster and safer, today announced its DDR5 9600 Server RDIMM chipset designed to deliver industry-leading memory performance for next-generation data center platforms. Built around the new Rambus 6th Generation Registering Clock Driver (RCD06) with a 20% increase in bandwidth over the prior generation, this complete chipset enables RDIMMs operating at up to 9600 MT/s, unlocking a new level of bandwidth and capacity required by agentic AI, high-performance computing (HPC) and other data-intensive workloads.
Rambus DDR5 9600 Server RDIMM Chipset
The accelerating evolution of AI from model training to large-scale inference and agentic workflows is driving a structural increase in server memory requirements. These workloads are highly iterative and memory-intensive, requiring significantly higher bandwidth and capacity for orchestration and execution. For large language model inference, techniques such as key-value (KV) caching further increase memory capacity and bandwidth requirements by storing and repeatedly accessing contextual data to reduce compute overhead and accelerate token generation. At the same time, CPU platforms are increasing core counts and memory channel density, amplifying demand for faster DIMMs and higher aggregate memory bandwidth. Together, these trends are making memory performance and power delivery critical determinants of overall system throughput. The Rambus DDR5 9600 RDIMM chipset directly addresses these requirements, empowering server makers to build scalable platforms capable of supporting next-generation AI infrastructure.
“The rapidly accelerating adoption of agentic AI and AI inference workloads is driving unprecedented demand for higher memory bandwidth and capacity in the data center,” said Rami Sethi, SVP and general manager of Memory Interface Chips at Rambus. “With our DDR5 9600 RDIMM chipset featuring the new RCD06, Rambus continues to extend its leadership in high-speed memory interface solutions, enabling our customers to deliver the performance and reliability required for next-generation server platforms.”
“As data center architectures evolve to support increasingly complex workloads, memory bandwidth, latency and reliability are becoming critical system-level design considerations,” said Soo Kyoum Kim, associate VP at IDC. “Complete RDIMM chipsets from companies like Rambus address these demands by enabling higher-performance, scalable memory subsystems that can keep pace with next-generation AI and cloud infrastructures.”
The Rambus DDR5 9600 RDIMM chipset is a complete solution designed to support next-generation CPU-based server platforms. In addition to the RCD06, the chipset includes the PMIC5030 power management IC, which delivers efficient, high-current power at low voltage levels to support advanced DDR5 RDIMM configurations. The chipset also includes a Serial Presence Detect (SPD) Hub with an integrated temperature sensor, along with dedicated Temperature Sensor ICs, enabling critical module telemetry, configuration and thermal monitoring functions.
By integrating clocking, control and power management into a cohesive solution, the chipset ensures robust signal and power integrity at high data rates, reducing design complexity for memory module manufacturers and improving overall system reliability. This level of integration is particularly critical as server architectures scale to support higher processor core counts, larger memory capacity and sustained demands of continuously operating AI workloads.
Rambus delivers industry-leading chips and silicon IP for the data center and AI infrastructure. With over three decades of advanced semiconductor experience, our products and technologies address the critical bottlenecks between memory and processing to accelerate data-intensive workloads. By enabling greater bandwidth, efficiency and security across next generation computing platforms, we make data faster and safer. For more information, visit rambus.com.
Minerva Pacumio, 54, said she is facing eviction from her Queens, New York, apartment because the welfare allowance the state provides for rent is so low that it can’t pay for a modest apartment anywhere in the state. She is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against New York last month that seeks an increase in the allowance. Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
New York makes an unusual promise to its residents: Its constitution says the state must provide “aid, care and support for the needy.”
But for at least the fourth time in almost 40 years, the state is being sued for failing to live up to this commitment by putting impoverished families at risk of homelessness.
A new lawsuit filed last month argues New York is failing for the same reason it has in the past: The welfare allowance it provides for housing, known as a shelter allowance, doesn’t come close to the cost of the state’s rents, which are among the highest in the country. The Legal Aid Society and Empire Justice Center, both nonprofits, are demanding that the state increase the allowance and provide enough financial assistance to keep families and individuals housed.
“I don’t want to sleep in the street. I don’t want to go to the shelter,” said 54-year-old Minerva Pacumio, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who is facing eviction. “I don’t want to lose everything.”
New York’s shelter allowance doesn’t cover rent for modest private housing anywhere in the state, according to the lawsuit and an independent analysis performed by New York Focus and ProPublica. The state hasn’t raised the monthly allowance for families with children since 2003 — when it was set at $450 for a family of four in New York City. And the amount has barely budged for adult-only households since 1988.
Pacumio receives a $250 monthly allowance to cover the one-bedroom apartment she rents in Queens for $1,900. She lives with her two adult daughters, one of whom is disabled; Pacumio handles her care herself five days out of the week. The other, Pacumio said, has mental health issues and has been unable to find work.
Pacumio said she owes thousands in back rent.
“When you don’t change your shelter allowance amounts for 40 years for single people and 20 years for families, I think there’s a reasonable argument that could be made that you’re not even really trying to meet your constitutional obligations to provide aid and care to the needy in New York State,” said Pavita Krishnaswamy, a supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Practice Law Reform Unit.
The lack of aid pushes people toward an emergency shelter system that cannot meet the demand of rising homelessness: New York Focus and ProPublica last year found that nearly half of the state’s unhoused families and individuals outside of New York City are placed in hotels with minimal support to help them return to permanent housing. The state regularly pays more to put someone up in a hotel than it would have cost to cover rent for modest housing, the news organizations found.
The Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the agency responsible for setting shelter allowances, has responded to past calls for an allowance increase by saying the Legislature would have to allocate more funding in the state budget. The budget is already projected to run multibillion-dollar deficits in coming years.
Over the past several legislative sessions, state lawmakers sponsored bills that would have pinned the allowance to fair market rent, the federal government’s estimate of how much it costs to rent modest private housing. Those bills have repeatedly failed, and their sponsors say little will change without the governor’s backing.
“The governor controls — any governor of New York state controls — the budget process. We can’t just fund things that the governor would not agree to,” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who chairs the housing committee and repeatedly sponsored the failed legislation in the state Assembly.
The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to written questions. An Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance spokesperson did not respond to questions from New York Focus and ProPublica about whether the agency had ever requested additional funding for shelter allowances. He declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation.
In past litigation, the state has argued that the constitution doesn’t command the state to meet all of poor families’ needs.
A “Kafka-esque Situation”
For Legal Aid, this is familiar ground. This is at least the fourth lawsuit it has filed against the state accusing New York of failing to provide enough welfare assistance for rent. In the late ’80s, the nonprofit filed a landmark case on behalf of Barbara Jiggetts, a single mother of three who was renting an apartment in Queens. Jiggetts was receiving $270 a month to help cover $381 in rent — about 70% of what she owed each month. Legal Aid argued that the state was shirking its obligation to keep her and her children safely housed.
In the Jiggetts case, the court ordered the state to temporarily cover rent for New York City families with children facing eviction until the establishment of “a lawful” shelter allowance that would keep them housed together.
But the state waited until 2003 to raise the shelter allowance, blowing past the court’s original deadline by five years.
The state has also created a permanent supplement to fill the gap between the allowance and rent. But the supplement offered in the city is only available to families with children. So, when Pacumio’s youngest turned 18, she lost the supplement, which constituted the majority of her housing assistance. Outside New York City, that supplement is optional, and just 15 of 57 counties choose to offer it to families with children, according to the Empire Justice Center.
The new lawsuit seeks either an increase in the shelter allowance or a mandatory expansion of the supplement statewide, regardless of household composition — or both.
Since 2003, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has reviewed the allowance four times — every five years, as required. During its last review in 2023, more than 100 comments poured in, many imploring the agency to increase the benefit. Some shared personal stories from unhoused New Yorkers who said the shelter allowances weren’t enough to prevent homelessness, according to the state register.
Pleas also came from the counties themselves. Michael Iapoce, the social services commissioner for Ulster County, wrote at the time that there wasn’t a single habitable apartment available for rent that would be covered by the shelter allowance.
“The shelter allowance is totally irrational and arbitrary,” he said. “There is no reasoned justification to keep the shelter allowance and supplements so low.” His comments on the regulations were attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit.
As it stands, people poor enough to qualify for public assistance and looking for a place to rent find themselves in a “cruel Dickensian or Kafka-esque situation,” said Susan Antos, the managing attorney for public benefits at Empire Justice Center. The shelter allowance is too low to allow them to afford even a modest place, but under the rules, recipients may have their benefits cut if they stop looking.
State Sen. Brian Kavanagh, the Democratic chair of the Senate’s housing committee, said it’s hard to tease out how much it would cost to increase the shelter allowance because of how public assistance caseloads may change over time. As of June 2025, the most recent month for which figures are available, nearly three-quarters of a million people were receiving public assistance.
Kimberly Maldonado is one of the recipients. She has lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn since she was 22. Now 55 and living alone, she said that she was forced to stop working in June of last year because of ongoing health issues and relies on her daughter to cover her rent. Maldonado receives $215 a month to help cover $1,114 in rent, doesn’t qualify for a state supplement because she doesn’t have minor children, and receives no other financial assistance for housing from the state.
Maldonado, a plaintiff in the new lawsuit, told New York Focus and ProPublica she was afraid that the state would never provide the help financially desperate New Yorkers need.
“As long as people are quiet and we don’t try to speak up and get help and get them to change the laws, the rules, or whatever it may be, we’re never going to get help, we’re never going to get nothing changed.”
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation intends to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, a new vendor-neutral home for the Google Open Health Stack project. Google is contributing the project code and assets while Google.org is providing a $3 million grant. The initiative is also backed by Microsoft, Anthropic, and the World Health Organization, with the goal of building open source, AI-ready digital health infrastructure. Will moving the project under Linux Foundation governance accelerate adoption, or is this simply another foundation that most developers will never interact with? The new project will focus on core HL7 FHIR technologies for healthcare interoperability, the Open Health Stack Player deployment toolkit, and AI Commons -- a model-agnostic healthcare AI initiative being co-developed with the World Health Organization.
A notable part of the announcement is its planned Implementer Program, which aims to give startups, small businesses, and local developers in low- and middle-income countries a formal role in governance. In other words, the effort is not just about building healthcare software standards, but about making sure the people implementing them in underserved markets help shape the project too.
Democrats have until 27 July to pick a new candidate to face Susan Collins in November – here are the options so far
A month after he won Maine’s Democratic primary, Graham Platner, the oyster farmer turned insurgent candidate, has suspended his campaign after being accused by a former girlfriend of severely sexually assaulting her in 2021 – an allegation he denies as “categorically untrue”.
Now that Platner has said he will file paperwork to withdraw from the race, Maine Democrats have until 27 July to select a replacement to face Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a race widely seen as pivotal to control of the Senate. The state party said on Wednesday it would hold a nominating convention to pick a new candidate.
Leaders discover what elements will be critical to workforce development and creating supply pipelines that support quantum science
July 9, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory convened leaders from business, government, academia and nonprofit organizations in May for the inaugural Quantum Prairie Economic Symposium, bringing together nearly 100 participants to examine how advances in quantum science could drive regional economic growth, workforce development and technological innovation. Held at Hyde Park Labs in Chicago, the symposium highlighted the laboratory’s leadership in quantum research and its commitment to helping build the partnerships needed to translate scientific discovery into economic opportunity.
Argonne National Laboratory Director Paul Kearns, Chicago Quantum Exchange CEO Kate Timmerman and Argonne Office of Community Engagement Director Robyn Wheeler Grange discuss quantum science in the Chicago area. Image credit: Argonne National Laboratory.
The morning set an ambitious tone, underscoring the laboratory’s long-standing role in advancing quantum research and its growing efforts to connect scientific leadership with regional economic development.
The half-day symposium opened with remarks from Argonne Laboratory Director Paul Kearns, who noted that Argonne leads Q-NEXT, a National Quantum Information Science Research Center, and that in 2023, the lab launched both the Argonne Quantum Foundry and the Argonne Quantum Institute.
Kearns grounded the day’s conversation by highlighting the laboratory’s deep roots, noting, for example, an Argonne scientist was the first to propose a theoretical framework for a quantum computer, and even today, Argonne continues to drive innovation in quantum information technologies.
“We are advancing powerful computing and precision sensing technologies while developing the building blocks of this field, including high-performing qubits. We are also beginning to see how quantum could influence areas such as finance, communication and logistics, while enabling new capabilities that are still emerging,” Kearns said. “It is exciting that Illinois is at the center of this transformation. Our state has a long history of scientific and technological leadership, and quantum is a natural extension of that.”
A Region on the Edge of a Quantum Leap
The keynote address was delivered by Kate Timmerman, CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), a Midwest-based consortium of universities, national labs and nearly 70 industry, nonprofit and international partners.
Timmerman painted a compelling picture of what the quantum future looks like for the Midwest. A 2024 analysis by Boston Consulting Group for the Chicago Quantum Exchange projects as much as $80 billion in economic impact and as many as 191,000 quantum technology jobs in the Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana region by 2035. More than 70% of those positions are projected to be open to workers without graduate degrees.
“I hope participants walked away with a sharper sense of what quantum technologies can mean for the Quantum Prairie over the next decade in terms of jobs, regional economic growth and innovation across a wide range of businesses and institutions,” Timmerman said. “That means we can all play a role in preparing for and shaping this future. This is an exciting, all-hands-on-deck moment for our region.”
Panels: Business, Talent and the Road Ahead
The morning featured two panel discussions that tackled the quantum economy from both sides of the equation — business opportunity and workforce development.
The first panel, “The Business of Quantum,” examined the transition of quantum technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. Panelists stressed the importance of initiating efforts to establish the support systems and frameworks necessary for quantum science to continue to thrive in our region.
Representatives from the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), Chicago-based quantum startup memQ, World Business Chicago and the Illinois Chamber of Commerce discussed business-to-business opportunities emerging from the growing quantum industry and the role of business development in accelerating commercialization.
Harley Johnson is the chief executive officer of IQMP, a 128-acre campus being built along the shores of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. IQMP is a first-of-its-kind project for quantum technology and microelectronics innovation and scale-up. Designed to be a global destination for quantum, the park will bring together a dynamic ecosystem of companies, researchers, manufacturers, suppliers, end users and other partners working to develop and commercialize technologies with the potential to solve the world’s most complex problems. Johnson offered an encouraging message to those who may feel the quantum world is out of reach.
“People also need to be reassured they don’t have to be a quantum physicist to benefit from or participate in this ecosystem, but they can form the partnerships,” he said. “They can realize some of the benefits of those jobs and opportunities for their kids and grandkids, and I hope that they would come away from this appreciating that this is a unique time and place to do that.”
During the panel, Johnson mentioned that the people who will eventually fill many of these initial quantum roles are currently in middle school.
The second panel, “Quantum Leaps in Human Capital,” turned the spotlight on workforce development. Moderated by Emily Easton, director of education and workforce development for CQE, the discussion brought together voices from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, City Colleges of Chicago, Black Tech Jobs and PsiQuantum to discuss how institutions across the region are collaborating to create accessible pathways into the quantum workforce.
According to Boston Consulting Group, the expansion is expected to happen fast, with the number of quantum jobs predicted to grow more than 200% from 2027 to 2030, and then more than 550% between 2030 and 2035, making workforce preparation not just timely, but urgent. Panelists stressed proficiency in mathematics and engineering will be essential for success in these roles.
Discovery Sessions: Going Deeper
Attendees also participated in interactive discovery sessions — small-group discussions designed to go deeper on specific topics within the quantum landscape. Sessions covered quantum business development, state investment, startup opportunities, building talent pipelines and quantum ethics.
“Argonne National Laboratory and its Office of Community Engagement recognize that the advancement of quantum science and technology must be rooted in broad collaboration,” said Robyn Wheeler Grange, director of Argonne’s Office of Community Engagement. “Our commitment is to help support the building of a quantum economy that advances science and delivers positive regional impact, supports economic growth and creates pathways for meaningful participation throughout Illinois and beyond.”
The conversations and connections sparked at the Quantum Prairie Economic Symposium underscored the region’s readiness to lead in the quantum era through scientific breakthroughs and by building a robust ecosystem where innovation, education and economic opportunity go hand in hand.
With momentum building and a shared vision for the future, the Quantum Prairie is poised to become a national model for how communities can come together to shape the next frontier of technology and prosperity.
Source: Courtney Gousman, Argonne Natinal Laboratory
Bipartisan group warns HHS that older adults and people with disabilities risk being pressured to end their lives
Lawmakers urged the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Thursday to establish strict hospice reporting rules to prevent discrimination and coercion in medically assisted suicide.
The bipartisan group of members of Congress warned that older adults, people with disabilities, or those with disaffected caregivers face a particular risk of being pressured to end their lives.
Staggered release of ChatGPT 5.6 follows similar restrictions on rival firm Anthropic’s latest AI models
OpenAI released its latest advanced AI model, called ChatGPT 5.6, on Thursday after earlier delaying the public rollout over US government concerns about cybersecurity. The Trump administration had requested last month that OpenAI limit the release to a small group of government-approved users.
OpenAI complied with the White House’s request last month. The company stated in a blogpost that it had briefed government officials on ChatGPT 5.6’s capabilities and restricted the model to trusted partners at their behest. The product’s wider release came after additional testing by the government’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation agency, according to Axios.
Father Ted co-creator detained by armed officers at Heathrow airport last year over gender-critical posts on X
The Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan has been paid £25,000 in compensation by the Metropolitan police and received an apology after his arrest over his gender-critical social media posts.
Linehan, 57, was detained by armed officers at Heathrow airport last September after a 10-hour flight from Arizona.
The local bike shop, which went out of business 2 years ago, and that I bought my Onewheel Pint from about 5 years ago, has a few Pints left over. He says though the batteries are all dead in them. Looks like Onewheel sells the battery for $300. What would be a fair price for a new Pint with a dead battery? And, is it an easy install?
Ads in the Alaska Senate race are trading competing claims about former Rep. Mary Peltola’s votes on military pay raises.
In late 2023, Peltola, a Democrat, voted in favor of a compromise defense bill that included a 5.2% pay increase for members of the military. Earlier that year, she voted against a House version of the bill that included several Republican amendments she opposed.
TV ads from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and a super PAC supporting him take advantage of that bit of legislative messiness to misleadingly claim that Peltola opposed military pay raises. She didn’t.
Rather, her votes reflect the political reality at the time. The House was controlled by Republicans and the Senate by Democrats (when including the independents who caucused with them). In the House bill, Republicans added several amendments, which Peltola and other Democrats criticized as partisan “poison pills.” Many of those Republican amendments were stripped away in a compromise conference report negotiated between the House and Senate.
Peltola, who served for two and a half years in the House, is now challenging Sullivan for his Senate seat. An open “jungle” primary guided by Alaska’s ranked-choice voting will be held on Aug. 18. The top four vote-getters will advance to the November general election. The race is rated a toss-up by Cook Political Report.
According to the narrator in an ad from Last Frontier PAC, a super PAC that supports Sullivan, Alaska voters “fired” Peltola from the House in 2024 in part because “Mary Peltola voted against a pay raise for our troops.”
Similarly, an ad from Sullivan’s campaign seeks to contrast Sullivan’s service in the Marine Corps with Peltola’s record, saying, “Others sell out, become D.C. lobbyists, and take orders from the lower-48 liberals.” On screen the ad says, “Mary Peltola Voted Against Pay Raise for Alaska’s Troops.”
We reached out to the Sullivan campaign but did not get a response. A spokesperson for Peltola’s campaign said the ads are “lying about her record.”
“As the mother of two coasties, as an Alaskan, and as an American, Mary has always stood with our servicemembers and veterans who sacrifice to ensure our safety and freedom – securing the biggest pay raise for our troops in decades and fighting to expand benefits for servicemembers, veterans, and their families,” the spokesperson said.
Both of the pro-Sullivan ads cite Peltola’s July 2023 vote in the House against a National Defense Authorization Act bill, which included a 5.2% raise for members of the military.
At the time, Peltola called it “one of the most difficult votes I’ve ever had to take.” She specifically criticized Republican amendments added to the bipartisan bill, including one that would have limited abortion access for military personnel.
Photo by Oscar Williams / stock.adobe.com.
“We shouldn’t be pitting pay raises that they [military members] deserve against the reproductive freedoms that they also deserve,” Peltola said in a prepared statement at the time. “That is a false choice, created for purely political reasons, and I look forward to negotiations with the Senate’s version of the bill where this issue will be discussed further. I will advocate strongly to return to the bipartisan, policy-focused bill that came out of committee, and will gladly vote for a bill that fully protects our troops and their families.”
Indeed, some of the amendments Peltola had criticized were stripped away when the House and Senate negotiated a compromise defense bill. Peltola voted in favor of the compromise conference report, which still included the 5.2% pay raise for the military. Sullivan also voted for the compromise bill in the Senate.
Peltola’s Ad
Peltola touted her vote in a recent TV ad.
In the ad, Peltola says she “pushed through the largest pay increase for our soldiers in decades.”
Whether Peltola “pushed through” the pay raise is a subjective characterization. As we said, Peltola did vote for the compromise bill (as did Sullivan), and it included a 5.2% pay raise for military members. And that was the biggest military raise in more than two decades. (Peltola’s campaign claimed that she “helped craft” the bipartisan NDAA, noting that she co-sponsored several amendments — one of which was included in the final law. But none of those amendments was related to the military pay increase.)
As we have explained, military raises are automatically determined by a formula set by law. Federal law mandates that military pay raises be equal to the change in the Labor Department’s annual Employment Cost Index, or ECI. The president can propose a higher or lower pay raise, and Congress can set the figure in legislation, overriding the automatic increase or a presidential proposal if the legislation becomes law. But in this case, the 5.2% raise was in line with the ECI at the time.
Peltola’s campaign pointed us to a Congressional Budget Office report that notes: “Lawmakers have often overridden the formula for service members by temporarily changing the law to specify a different pay raise for a single year through the annual defense authorization and appropriations acts while reverting to current law for future years.” But in every year of President Donald Trump’s first term, and every year of Joe Biden’s presidency, Congress has approved military pay raises in lockstep with the ECI figure.
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Among the consequential decisions of the Supreme Court's current term, one was easy to overlook—the Court's refusal to hear a challenge to a landmark free press ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
On June 29, 2026, the Court issued opinions about late-arriving mail-in ballots, the scope of President Trump’s executive powers, and cellphone data privacy. But that same day, the Court also declined to hear Dershowitz v. Cable News Network, Inc., a direct challenge to Sullivan.
Sullivan has long protected media outlets from defamation lawsuits from public officials or figures, and it is seen by their supporters as an important guardrail protecting the free press. These precedents, however, also have their share of critics, including Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In his petition to the Court, Dershowitz asked the justices to consider overturning Sullivan’s actual-malice test, which sets a high bar for public officials or figures to prove that media caused damage to their reputation. For a case to join the Court’s docket, at least four justices must vote to accept the case at their private conference. Only two justices, Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch (another public critic of Sullivan), indicated in a brief order that they would have taken Dershowitz’s case.
Sullivan and Other Precedents
In March 1964, a unanimous Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan held that public officials could only succeed in defamation cases against the media if they could prove actual malice, meaning that a statement “was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.”
Montgomery, Alabama’s police commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, had sued the New York Times for libel after it ran a full-page advertisement from civil right activists that criticized the police department’s violent treatment of protestors. But many specific statements in the ad were later conceded to have been false.
The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment protected the newspaper from a lawsuit filed by a “public official” such as Sullivan unless actual malice could be proven. In the majority opinion, Justice William Brennan ruled that the case needed to be considered in the context “of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
Two later decisions clarified how far the actual malice standard actually reached . In Curtis Publishing Company v. Butts (1967), the Court held that public figures—notable people who were not public officials—had to meet the same defamation test as public officials under the New York Times precedent. But in Gertz v. Welch (1974), a divided Court declined to extend that test any further, holding that private individuals need only prove negligence to file for defamation, though they cannot collect damages without proving actual malice. “Because private individuals characteristically have less effective opportunities for rebuttal than do public officials and public figures, they are more vulnerable to injury from defamation,” wrote Justice Lewis Powell.
The Appeal from Dershowitz
In his petition to the Court, Dershowitz argued that reporting from CNN about his appearance in Senate impeachment trial proceedings in 2020 against President Donald Trump caused him reputational harm. Dershowitz argued that CNN had edited part of a statement he made to Sen. Ted Cruz. Absent the actual-malice standard from the New York Times case, he contended, the omission would have been considered actionable as defamation in any court. A district court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Dershowitz.
Dershowitz argued that CNN’s later reporting falsely claimed that he had told the Senate that bribery and exortion were not impeachable offenses. Dershowitz also claimed that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling on actual malice conflicted with those of four other federal appeals courts.
In its response brief, CNN pointed to the fact that all courts “agreed that Dershowitz could not survive summary judgment because he had ‘no evidence’ that any CNN commentators entertained serious doubts that they had accurately represented Dershowitz’s statements in the Senate.” It also declared that it had aired the full video of his comments and invited him on air on separate occasions to clarify his positions related to his Senate statements.
The Dissent from Justice Thomas
The Supreme Court denied Dershowitz’s petition with no comment except for a brief dissent from Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch. “Because Dershowitz is a ‘public person,’ our precedents required him to prove not only the elements of common-law defamation, but also that the network acted with ‘actual malice,’” Thomas noted, pointing to the Gertz precedent.
“The ‘actual malice’ standard for public figures bears ‘no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution,’” Thomas said, citing his dissent in Berisha v. Lawson (2021). “Instead, the founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed.”
“I and others have thus called for reconsideration of the actual-malice standard for public figures. I would have granted certiorari to do so in this case.”
The “others” referenced in his dissent include Gorsuch, who also raised questions about the actual-malice standard in his dissent from denial of certiorari in Berisha. In that case, Berisha claimed that he had been falsely linked to illicit arms dealing in a book published by Simon & Schuster.
“Rules intended to ensure a robust debate over actions taken by high public officials carrying out the public’s business increasingly seem to leave even ordinary Americans without recourse for grievous defamation,” Gorsuch wrote in 2021. “At least as they are applied today, it’s far from obvious whether Sullivan’s rules do more to encourage people of goodwill to engage in democratic self-governance or discourage them from risking even the slightest step toward public life.”
For now, the actual-malice standard remains the law of the land, and it continues to be referenced in legal actions. In Trump v. Carroll, the president’s lawyers have argued that Trump was not “speaking with actual malice” when he made comments critical of E. Jean Carroll. When a federal appeals court denied a rehearing en banc of Trump’s appeal, the judges were split on the actual-malice question. Two judges believed Trump “easily met the actual malice standard,” while two others said Trump’s defense never raised the question on appeal.
And a judge on July 2 ruled in favor of the Washington Post against Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which sought $3.8 billion in damages from reporting by the Post in 2023. The judge determined that the “Plaintiff has failed to present evidence that would allow a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence that Defendant published the allegedly defamatory statements with actual malice.”
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Exclusive: Call for ministers to tighten bill amid Nigel Farage funding controversies
Labour MPs are to rebel next week over the government’s reforms to political funding, pushing ministers to introduce tougher measures including a ban on cryptocurrency donations and much lower spending limits.
MPs on the all-party anti-corruption group are canvassing support for four amendments to the representation of the people bill that would significantly tighten the government’s plans.
Reporting suggests FBI involved in seizure of Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada García from Mexican territory in 2024
Mexico has launched an investigation into whether the US lied about its involvement in the capture and secretive transfer of a top Sinaloa cartel member in 2024, in what would be a potential violation of the country’s sovereignty.
The US has long denied it played any role in the operation to detain the drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, a founder of the Sinaloa cartel, inside Mexico. Recent reporting by the local media outlet Pie de Nota, however, suggested that the FBI was involved in his capture.
Cross-party group backs call from science and technology committee to look at alternative options, citing ‘serious mistrust’
A second parliamentary committee has urged Labour to scrap Palantir’s £330m contract with the NHS, increasing pressure on the next prime minister over government deals with the US tech company.
MPs on the health and social care select committee want the NHS to cut ties with Palantir and find a replacement for its system, which is supposed to unify and analyse huge amounts of often highly sensitive NHS health data.
Nvidia is primarily known as a hardware company thanks to the wild success of its GPUs. But Nvidia is also a force in the world of software, thanks to its CUDA programming language that has become the defacto standard for AI and HPC developers. Now a group of CUDA experts at Spectral Compute are looking to unhook the language from Nvidia and allow users to run their CUDA code on other chips.
Spectral Compute was formed in 2018 when a group of four engineers, including CEO Michael Søndergaard, CTO Chris Kitching, Software Engineer Nicholas Tomlinson, and Software Engineer Francois Souchay, decided they had had enough with hardware lock-in with their CUDA code. The founders, who had 60 years of combined HPC optimization experience, were working at an AI firm, but grew so frustrated with the cost of Nvidia GPUs and the poor performance of alternative compilers that they decided to build their own.
The founders developed a product called SCALE, which uses CLang and LLVM compiler technology, to function as a drop-in replacement for NVCC, the Nvidia CUDA Compiler. The company’s first target with SCALE were AMD GPUs, but now it’s broadening its goals to enable users to run CUDA on other AI accelerators. The company also supports Nvidia GPUs, on the theory that Nvidia is leaving software-based performance optimization on the table because it wants to sell more hardware.
CUDA owns about 80% of the market for parallel computing development tools (Image courtesy Gilulo Malitesta)
Spectral is a big fan of CUDA, which it claims represents about 80% of the HPC code in the wild, according to Giulio Malitesta, head of growth for Spectral. “CUDA is basically the de-facto standard of HPC,” Malitesta told HPCwire at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. “We need to accept that as a fact and just do the work as compiler engineers to make it available on different platforms that are not necessarily Nvidia, but also improve on Nvidia GPUs.”
There are other compilers on the market that can make CUDA code run elsewhere, as Malitesta pointed out. AMD created a tool called HIPIFY to translate Nvidia CUDA code into C++ code that can be run on AMD’s ROCm software stack via HIP (Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability). Then there’s SYCLomatic, a open source tool originally developed by Intel to migrate CUDA code to Data Parallel C++ (DPC++). And who could forget ZLUDA, which is a just-in-time compiler once backed by AMD that takes CUDA binaries and runs them on non-Nvidia hardware.
However, most tools have a downside. For instance, HIPIFY–which the Spectral founders worked with previously–essentially ignores Parallel Thread Execution (PTX), the Nvidia assembly language that opens up deep hardware support in CUDA, Malitesta says. SYCLomatic migrates about 90% of code, requiring manual work for the final 10%. And ZLUDA operates on the compiled binary code and acts as a middleware layer, which hurts performance. Legal questions have also dogged various non-Nvidia CUDA compilers.
Malitesta said Spectral Compute is able to surpass the middling performance of these other compilers with SCALE and enable CUDA to take full advantage of the underlying hardware. The company has published benchmarks on its website that show SCALE delivers nearly a 6x performance boost on AMD GPUs compared to using HIPIFY to convert CUDA code to AMD’s own ROCm environment.
Spectral is able to achieve such performance levels because it’s taken a clean-room re-implementation based on a cutting-edge compiler framework, Malitesta said. “We take the approach that’s industry-standard for CPUs, but apply it to GPUs,” he said, adding that it’s “the same approach that enables C++ to run, for example, on AMD and ARM CPUs, where nobody expects a performance gap that isn’t directly caused by differences in the underlying hardware.”
After recompiling the code, Spectral verifies that it’s correct from a numerical perspective. If it matches the normal NVCC output, then the company considers it a successful implementation.
Spectral, which is located in London and raised $6 million last year, is currently working on supporting third-party AI accelerators, which have not yet been named. The company is also working on some proprietary novel compiler optimizations that it says will deliver a major upgrade for customers running CUDA on Nvidia GPUs. Later this month, it’s anticipating releasing support for PyTorch, which will enable its tools to work better with the AI and machine learning framework.
Company employees say what they’re doing is beneficial to the CUDA community, which even Nvidia understands is a good thing at the end of the day. In June, Spectral entered into a formal partnership joined the Nvidia Inception program.
(Image courtesy Spectral Compute)
“We’re on the good side of Nvidia and we’re on a good side with AMD,” said Ruben van Dongen, head of academic solutions and business development for Spectral. “Of course, we want to be friends with the entire industry. We are neutral, truly neutral.”
Spectral already supports the core CUDA product, but there are hundreds of specialized CUDA libraries, such as cuDNN, which supports deep neural networks; cuTENSOR, which supports tensors; and cuDF, which supports dataframes like Polars and pandas. The company is actively working to add support for specialized CUDA libraries.
SCALE has been shipping for only about two years, so the company does not have a long track record. However, the company is growing quickly, as it currently has about 30 employees and is looking to expand. Spectra sells access to SCALE to commercial outfits, and it gives the compiler toolkit away to academic institutions and non-profit entities.
Spectral is working with companies, universities, and labs around the world that would like to unlock their CUDA development on additional hardware platforms. SCALE has even run on Frontier, the exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“The future is looking extremely bright. We are solving a huge problem within the industry,” van Dongen said. “Especially in the field of research, the researchers lack time. Instead of having to rewrite the entire code base or port away from their current existing code base, they can just recompile with our solution and even increase performance benefits.”
As the HPC community comes to terms with the extraordinary events surrounding the AI boom and the rapid popularization of GPU computing, it’s worth taking some time to consider all possible paths forward. Nvidia is an remarkable company that has bootstrapped much of the progress in GPU manufacturing and parallel software development (via CUDA), and it has been duly rewarded by becoming the world’s first $5 trillion company.
Nvidia surely would like to keep all these golden AI eggs in its own basket, but that’s not necessarily in the best interests of HPC and AI customers, nor the computing ecosystem at large. In that respect, Spectral is doing everyone a favor. What is perhaps more surprising is that there are not more companies like Spectral building bridges over the CUDA moat.
Caruana Galizia was killed in 2017 by a remotely detonated bomb placed under the driver’s seat of her car, after writing a series of reports on political and financial corruption in Malta. The government’s handling of the investigation led to mass protests and ultimately to the resignation of the Maltese prime minister, Joseph Muscat.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The [San Francisco international airport] is hoping to build a brand-new terminal exclusively for passengers who pay a premium, gaining access to a luxurious airport experience complete with private security lines and valet service from terminal to tarmac. It will service commercial flights, not business or corporate jets, and the terminal will have its own Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lines for international travel.
SFO is seeking bidders to take on the development, construction and operation of the private terminal, which is planned for a 75,000-sq-ft site located across the runway from all current public terminals. The airport will accept proposals between late September and early October, and is looking to award a contract by early December with hopes of opening the terminal in late 2028. [...]
If SFO is successful, it would become the next major American airport to open a luxury terminal. Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth, Miami and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta international airports all offer a private terminal through PS (formerly known as the Private Suite), a company owned by security firm Gavin de Becker and Associates. Multiple representatives from PS and Gavin de Becker and Associates attended a June conference hosted by SFO about the private terminal, and PS has said it hopes to open a private terminal at every major US airport by 2030. The report notes that access to existing PS private terminals "can cost passengers $1,295 for a one-time experience, or up to $4,850 for a yearly membership."
Local truckers’ association says it may suspend operations, after several eyewitnesses decried Ahmad Esleem’s murder
A Palestinian driver bringing food aid from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) into Gaza has been killed by an Israeli soldier “in a field execution”, according to witnesses and the local truckers’ association, which said it may suspend operations in protest.
Ahmad Esleem was shot in the head on Wednesday when an aid convoy stopped because of a breakdown to one truck soon after entering Gaza, according to three accounts. Israeli soldiers ordered the drivers to dismount and one of them shot Esleem in the head when his hands were raised.
Kuwait’s foreign ministry has issued a statement condemning the Iranian attacks against the country. It reads almost identical to the statement issued yesterday, although emphasises Kuwait’s sovereignty is “a red line”.
“The state of Kuwait reserves its full rights to take all necessary measures to protect its security and preserve its sovereignty,” it said.
It’s a first all-Czech Wimbledon women’s final after Karolina Muchova saved a match point in a dramatic final-set tie-break and Linda Noskova was nerveless against Marta Kostyuk
Gauff does hold a 6-1 lead in their head-to-head, by the way, but I’m not sure we can read too much into that, as none of those matches were on grass. Gauff, arguably the best competitor in the women’s game, has made an art out of “winning ugly” – the phrase made famous by her former coach Brad Gilbert – and has consistently found a way to come through three-setters during this tournament even when she’s not been at her best. She may well need all that fight to combat Muchova’s mix of power and touch – which is so dangerous on grass – especially if Gauff’s serve and forehand wobble, as they sometimes do. Gauff’s backhand, though, is brilliant. Will temperament + backhand or power + hands prevail? It’s going to be so fun finding out.
And here they come to a big cheer from the crowd, not that it’s quite as warm as the red-hot weather, with the current temp around 33C, and not that Gauff can properly hear it either, because she’s got her headphones – and game face – on.
Britain expands heat alerts while estimates suggest June’s death toll could surpass 20,000 across continent
The UK is sweltering through the peak of its third heatwave of the year as countries around Europe struggle to recover from an early onslaught of baking summer heat.
Punishing temperatures pushed higher by fossil fuel pollution have broken records across the continent in recent weeks. Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, scientists confirmed on Thursday, accompanied by high global ocean temperatures that could cause “mass-mortality events” for some species.
Pulisic had been criticized for his lack of availability
Christian Pulisic suffered a microfracture and bone bruise in his leg in the United States’ 4-1 loss to Belgium in the World Cup last 16 on Monday, US Soccer announced.
Pulisic suffered the injury in the second half in Seattle and was removed shortly afterward. He underwent X-ray and MRI scans on Tuesday to determine the extent of the injury, which is expected to keep Pulisic out for several weeks. US Soccer said the federation and Milan are working collaboratively on his rehab plan.
Reform UK presents itself as the people’s voice while opaque digital wealth flows around it. That makes transparency a democratic necessity
Twice now, the Guardian’s questions about Reform UK’s finances appear to have been pre-empted by stories friendly to the party. This paper revealed in April that Nigel Farage received £5m from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne – but an interview with Reform UK’s leader, claiming he needed the cash “for security”, was published hours earlier in the Telegraph. Then, Richard Tice’s suggestion that the National Crime Agency (NCA) had leaked the MP’s bank statements landed on the Telegraph site on Tuesday, just before the Guardian said bankers had reported the £5m donation to law enforcement over money-laundering concerns.
A party serious about probity would have no issue answering questions about such cash. Instead, Reform uses a pliant media outlet to frame scrutiny as persecution. In Mr Farage’s world, the questions become the scandal, not the large undisclosed sums. That is a warning about how an authoritarian nationalist party that aspires to govern treats accountability: not as a democratic obligation, but as an attack.
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As in the Gareth Southgate era, a diverse and passionately committed national team is offering a counter-narrative to the forces of social division
The identity of the worst performers at the men’s World Cup has come as no surprise. In the lead-up to the tournament, the world had seen more than enough of Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino in action to fear the worst once the games actually began. Mr Trump’s lobbying of Fifa to lift a one-match ban on the United States’ star striker confirmed that his bullying will-to-power extends to spheres that he neither cares about nor understands. Mr Infantino’s craven willingness to accommodate it has been an affront to sporting integrity.
From prohibitive ticket prices to the introduction of advertiser-friendly hydration breaks – conveniently replicating the lucrative four-quarter format common in US sports – there have been plenty of other reasons to question Fifa’s overly commercialised stewardship of the beautiful game. But the World Cup still delivers a unique spectacle, as anyone who marvelled at the heroic exploits of Cape Verde, or witnessed Scottish fans’ good‑humoured invasion of Boston, can testify.
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Scientists have relied on HPC facilities to help them process large volumes of data, execute sophisticated simulations, and power large-scale research. However, as AI becomes more deeply integrated into scientific research, the role of HPC facilities may also be starting to evolve.
According to Thomas Uram, Group Leader of the Data Services and Workflows Team at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the next generation of HPC facilities will do more than provide scientists with access to compute.
In his presentation at the ISC 2026, Uram outlined how AI inference services and access to computing resources are transforming supercomputing centers into platforms that actively support scientific discovery. He said that the transformation begins by building AI capabilities directly into the facility rather than treating them as standalone tools.
“In addition to systems like Aurora, we’re also actively developing and deploying systems for AI inference because we recognize that this is an enormous opportunity for the future… Having dedicated systems for inference is one of the key factors that we’re after here.
“Everyone talks about the frontier models and believes that they need the frontier models for their science. In many cases that’s increasingly not true. There has been a lot of discussion this week about smaller models that are sufficient for various problems, smaller models that are faster for the tasks that you’re after. Maybe they can run even on the same machine that you’re using for your simulations. So there’s a distribution here that we can exploit.”
(Source: ISC 2026 presentation by Thomas Uram)
To support that vision, Argonne is building a dedicated AI infrastructure alongside its traditional HPC systems. Uram mentioned several inference-focused platforms, including Sofia (A100), Minerva (B200) and Tara (GH200).
While Aurora is the main compute platform, the others are being added specifically to provide AI inference as a facility service. Researchers can access dozens of open-weight large language models and domain-specific science models through a centralized inference service.
Uram argued that many scientific workloads don’t need expensive frontier models anymore. Instead, researchers can use open models through a shared inference service. They don’t have to build or manage the infrastructure themselves. But inference alone isn’t enough.
For AI to become part of scientific workflows, however, it also needs a way to interact with HPC systems. According to Uram, that requires more than inference. AI agents must also be able to access computing resources, submit jobs, and coordinate work across multiple systems.
“So I mentioned the hardware, and I mentioned the software, which is the inference service, and I’ll mention one other thing, which is, how do agents get access to the systems? We have a variety of different systems at ALCF (Argonne Leadership Computing Facility), and some of them are better for some tasks than they are for other tasks…
“One of them is having a job submission API to the various systems. You have an agent that lives on your laptop or elsewhere, so that it can orchestrate tasks running across different systems… Those things all together, I would say, the hardware, the inference service, and the ability to submit jobs is basically laying the foundation for AI workflows.”
Uram demonstrated how those capabilities are already being applied across a range of scientific disciplines.
At the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne’s synchrotron X-ray facility, researchers automatically transfer experimental data to ALCF as it is generated, run analyses on the facility’s computing resources, and return the results during the experiment itself. The same infrastructure is now being used to apply AI-based image segmentation. This allows scientists to analyze tomography data in near real-time rather than waiting until experiments have concluded and results have been gathered.
(Source: ISC 2026 presentation by Thomas Uram)
He also highlighted similar work supporting fusion research, where researchers have just 20 minutes between experiment cycles to analyze results before the next run begins. AI inference services and automated workflows allow data to be processed immediately. Researchers are now looking to combine those capabilities with digital twins that can operate alongside live experiments.
Looking ahead, Uram described AI agents that can go beyond analyzing results, using drug discovery as one example.
“The reasoning agent plans out how to approach this problem, interacts with the system and runs simulations. And in this closed loop, can explore the results of the simulation and how they factor into the objective, and continue to produce simulations that should be run until the result is achieved.”
“They were able to, one, test a lot of targets, but also by doing this and having it be AI driven, they were able to arrive at targets that outperformed what the targets that humans were able to predict.”
Uram’s presentation highlighted the changing role of HPC facilities. They are no longer just providers of compute, but are now platforms that integrate AI inference, workflow orchestration and programmatic access to support scientific discovery. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in research, that evolution could fundamentally change how scientists interact with supercomputers and how future HPC facilities are designed.
I've tested dozens of inexpensive earbuds to find the best values. These are my current top bargain picks, almost all of which cost less than $100, and some less than $50.
Starting with macOS 28, Apple will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended, or HFS+, volumes. Users will need to decrypt them or reformat them as APFS to keep using them. 9to5Mac reports: In a new support document, Apple explains that starting with macOS 28, "the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted." In practice, this means users who currently rely on encrypted HFS+ external drives or other encrypted legacy Mac-formatted volumes will need to "either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes."
Apple doesn't explain the reason for the change. Still, the move appears to be another step in Apple's transition to APFS, its file system with built-in encryption support, which replaced Mac OS Extended as the default Mac file system in macOS High Sierra. As a result of this change, Apple says that starting with macOS 26, Macs might notify users when they're using an encrypted Mac OS Extended disk that won't be compatible with macOS 28 or later.
According to the support page, "the notification will identify the volume by name." However, Apple says users can manually confirm whether a volume is both using Mac OS Extended format and encrypted by following these steps [...]. Apple adds that "macOS 28 and later will continue to support unencrypted volumes that use Mac OS Extended format," and notes "Mac OS Extended is also known as HFS Plus (or HFS+)."
Progressive groups and lawmakers who rallied behind Graham Platner’s insurgent bid for a US Senate seat are now racing to decide where to transfer their support after his withdrawal from the Maine race following yet another allegation of sexual assault.
The scramble and apparent heartbreak underscores the uncertainty facing the coalition surrounding Platner’s anti-establishment message, and the response from more centrist Democrats to proceed with caution. Organizations, voters, volunteers and elected officials that once saw him as a vehicle for a more populist progressive agenda are now weighing whether to unite behind a successor, or hold back until the party’s replacement process plays out.
Donald Trump's erratic behaviour at the Nato summit in Turkey left his allies guessing. One moment he was criticising fellow leaders over their contribution to defence spending, the next he was praising the alliance's unity.
From Ankara, the Guardian's defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh, explains how Nato emerged from the chaos
Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent on Tuesday in Texas calls for an independent investigation into his killing.
Salgado, 52, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official on Tuesday morning while on his way to work at a construction site. He had lived in the US for more than 30 years and was in the process of obtaining his work permit, according to his family.
Salgado’s family, including his wife and three sons, found out about his death from news reports.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan presented engraved revolvers – with bullets – to his guests in Ankara, causing security concerns
What does a world leader do with a gun and six bullets? That was the conundrum Nato leaders faced after the Turkish president offered them each a revolver after the Ankara summit.
Keir Starmer was the first to mention the highly unusual gift presented by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to his guests. On the flight back from Ankara, where Nato leaders had gathered for two days, the British prime minister said he and others had received a revolver engraved with their names.
President orders investigation after fictitious body given funding, triggering renewed scrutiny of alleged corruption
A fictitious federal entity that was allocated 1.3bn naira (£700,000) in Nigeria’s 2026 budget has precipitated a political storm in Africa’s largest democracy in the run-up to a general election set for January.
The fake agency came to light last October when Femi Gbajabiamila,the president’s chief of staff, wrote to the police alleging that his signature, along with official seals and reference numbers, had been forged by Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who was claiming to have been appointed by the presidency to head the presidential foreign intervention promotion council (PFIPC).
Demonstrations at 18 sites set up as radical transformation plan put to board of Europe’s biggest carmaker
Volkswagen’s proposal to slash up to 100,000 jobs and close factories faced a major test on Thursday as it was formally put to its supervisory board, with protests at the company’s plants in Germany.
IG Metall organised demonstrations involving shop stewards and union council members at 18 sites at Europe’s biggest carmaker, including at its headquarters. The influential staff union told the chief executive, Oliver Blume, that he could not “pass the buck for failures of recent years on to the workforce”.
Andy Burnham has apologised for Labour’s initial response to Israel’s military action in Gaza, saying the party “didn’t get it right” and needs to “do better” under his leadership signalling a significant shift in the UK’s approach to the Middle East.
The prime minister-in-waiting told the Guardian he would put more pressure on the Israeli government, including through further sanctions on individuals and entities, as well as a potential ban on the trade of goods with illegal settlements.
Exclusive: Source close to co-claimant Prince Harry says he is protective of social campaigner and will not ‘see her out of pocket’
Doreen Lawrence, the social justice campaigner, will not foot any of a multimillion-pound bill for the failed attempt to sue the publisher of the Daily Mail, the Guardian understands.
Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, whose case was the subject of a long-running Daily Mail campaign from the late 1990s, was one of seven claimants defeated in court over claims the Mail titles used unlawful methods to source stories.
Three-time Olympian David Hearn was indicted July 2, after he was accused of ripping out a portion of the sealant from the bottom of the Reflecting Pool on June 19.
OpenAI has released GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, "claiming that they sound more natural and can handle turn-taking better," reports TechCrunch. "These are full-duplex models, meaning they can speak and listen at the same time, allowing users to interrupt naturally and enabling features like live translation." TechCrunch reports: The company is also replacing its current Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT with GPT-Live-1 mini by default. Users of paid tiers will be able to access the larger GPT-Live-1 model. The previous model combined a speech-to-text model to transcribe speech, a large language model to generate responses, and a text-to-speech model to deliver the final answer.
The company said in a press briefing that the new models solve issues like interrupting users while they're talking and not having enough intelligence to answer questions. OpenAI's new models will send the query to its latest text models like GPT-5.5 for search, reasoning, or agentic capabilities while continuing the conversation.
OpenAI also showed that the model can stay silent for a long time and absorb the context of the conversation until it's called upon. Plus, as the new voice mode has access to newer GPT models, it can also present some information in a visual format. Other startups like Monogram, which raised $40 million in seed funding from DST and Lux Capital, are also leaning into visual responses to make assistants more interactive.
The company said the new voice mode in ChatGPT is designed to have longer conversations. During the briefing, ChatGPT Voice's product lead, Atty Eleti, said he has had 30- to 40-minute-long conversations with the voice feature during walks.
A 2021 state law allows campus police to own military equipment for civilian safety – students fear it may be used to quash dissent
For many public colleges and universities in California, keeping their campuses safe includes owning military-grade weaponry: AR-15s, stun grenades designed to cause temporary blindness and sonic weapons that resonate so loudly they are known in the armed forces as the voice of God.
According to Californiastate law, campus police can only own military equipment if the college believes there is no other way to uphold civilian safety.
By Alexey Volkov, Bo Li, Ben Chen, Maksym Yezhov, Pete Luferenko, and Volv Grebennikov – Shopify
Machine learning work is full of loops: form a hypothesis, build a pipeline, run it, read the metrics, adjust, repeat. Tangle is already where Shopify’s ML experiments run, giving engineers a shared platform to build and execute pipelines.
Tangent is an autonomous agent that orchestrates ML experimentation workflows on top of Tangle, deciding what to run, running it, and reporting back. Around Tangent we built a Linux-based platform for hosting these agents securely so they can persist, work remotely, and reach the services they need without ever holding a credential. This is done using containerized isolation, a certificate-issuing proxy, and per-instance persistent storage (details below).
What is Tangle?
Tangle is an open source, platform-agnostic ML experimentation platform with a powerful drag-and-drop visual editor. Users drag components onto a canvas, wire outputs to inputs to form a pipeline graph, and submit it for execution locally or in the cloud. A caching layer skips or reuses previously executed steps, including steps still in flight, so iteration is fast and cheap. All pipeline runs are stored forever (including graphs, components, and logs), making pipelines reproducible even after years have passed.
Because runs and caches are shared, teammates can inspect, copy, and modify each other’s pipelines in seconds, with no cloning a private notebook and hoping the environment matches. Tangle has similarities with other OSS tools like Airflow and Kubeflow Pipelines; its caching model and visual editor are what make fast experimentation loops possible. Any containerized CLI program written in any language can be used as a Tangle component, and those components exchange data as files in any format (CSV, Parquet, JSON, etc.).
Tangle composes components the way shell scripts, makefiles, and *nix pipes do. More information about Tangle is available at tangleml.com and you can immediately try it out.
Tangle’s pipeline canvas and architecture.
What is Tangent?
Tangent is an autonomous ML engineering agent designed to accelerate your Tangle experimentation workflows. It follows the pattern Andrej Karpathy recently popularized as autoresearch. Tangent takes that idea from a single training script on one GPU to full experiment pipelines running on Tangle, with a fleet of specialized subagents, gated checkpoints, and persistent memory. You point it at a scenario, a model, a metric to improve, a dataset, and it iterates: it analyzes results, forms hypotheses, modifies pipelines, submits runs, monitors them, and synthesizes what it learned. How much you delegate is up to you. Tangent works interactively, so you can hand it a single step (build this component, debug this failed run, analyze these metrics), or you can hand off the entire loop with one command and let it run:
tangent autoScreenshot of the eight-step loop progressing.
Under the hood is an eight-step loop with gated checkpoints. The agent won’t advance until every item on a step’s checklist passes, and it reloads its instructions and context at each gate so it doesn’t drift over a long run. Memory is persistent and plain-text: a MEMORY.md holds the best-known configuration and hard-won lessons; daily session logs capture the play-by-play, and per-run learnings are archived to object storage.
The Tangent Skill
Tangent’s brain is a skill, written in Markdown. The entry point is a single SKILL.md, backed by a fleet of subagent skills: a researcher, a builder, a debugger, a reviewer, and more. Because skills are just files, they’re portable, reviewable in a pull request, and harness-agnostic, the same skill drives whichever coding agent you prefer.
That portability matters because Tangent runs on open agent harnesses instead of one proprietary client. To add a capability, you write a Markdown file and commit it. There is no binary to build or ship. Markdown was chosen deliberately over a config format or DSL: it’s diffable in a normal PR, requires no schema or parser to validate, and both humans and the coding agent read it natively. The skill file doubles as its own documentation.
# Tangent
A skill is just Markdown. This file is the entry point; each subagent is
its own Markdown file, loaded on demand.
## Commands
tangent <subagent> Read agents/<subagent>.md and follow it.
tangent auto Run the autonomous 8-step experiment loop.
## Subagents Agent file
tangent builder agents/builder.md
tangent debugger agents/debugger.md
tangent researcher agents/researcher.md
tangent reviewer agents/reviewer.md
tangent reporter agents/reporter.md
## Auto Mode - the loop
0 Initialize -> 1 Analyze -> 2 Hypothesize -> 3 Submit ->
4 Monitor -> 5 Evaluate -> 6 Synthesize -> 7 Decide -> (loop)
Each step has a gate. The agent won't advance until every item on the
step's checklist passes - and it re-reads its instructions at each
gate so it doesn't drift over a long run.
Tangent Agent Hosting Platform
Our Tangent Agent Hosting Platform helps users deploy persistent Tangent instances that communicate with Tangle, cloud providers, and other external services. Each Tangent instance is a multi-agent space: a Linux-based VM/container that can host multiple agentic apps (TUI, API, WebUI). Because every Tangent component runs as a standard Linux process inside a container, Tangent inherits mature Linux networking, storage, and isolation primitives instead of introducing a custom runtime. Instance data (like agent sessions and memories) is persisted across restarts. There are also cross-instance shared memories.
Agent Hosting architecture: Tangent Shell and Auth Proxy routing requests without exposing tokens.
Auth Proxy
Agents need access to services, but there is always a risk of agents reading the credentials and leaking them to AI providers. Tangent solves this by adding a system-wide proxy which lives in a separate container. The proxy intercepts and modifies HTTP requests coming from the agentic tools. Auth proxy automatically adds auth headers and can modify request URLs (e.g. redirect api.aicompany.com to some AI proxy). To modify HTTPS requests, auth proxy creates new SSL certificates on the fly. The agent container’s OS and programs are configured to trust those certificates via a generated certificate authority.
Implementation details
In the Kubernetes version, each instance is a StatefulSet: a container Pod running agents, apps, and proxies, backed by a per-instance PersistentVolume and a shared memory volume mount.
Tangent Shell
To work natively with Tangle, we built a custom Agent Host image. The Tangent Shell is an environment where agents run remotely, keep their memory and sessions across restarts, and keep working long after you close your laptop. Tangent Shell orchestrates multiple agents: it splits a request into slices, delegates them to parallel sub-agents, and coordinates results through a Prime agent that owns the session.
Tangent Shell is built to meet the ML expert’s needs. Each session boots pre-loaded with the Tangent skill toolkit and Tangle API tools, instructed to assist with Tangle-based ML experiments: building and optimizing ML training pipelines, testing hypotheses, ablation studies, hyperparameter optimization, etc. With the help of triggers (like webhooks, timers, and schedules), Tangent Shell is able to monitor pipeline executions and implement deep experimentation plans. The agent knows how to operate inside the rich UI, and how to render visual artifacts (Markdown, PNG, HTML).
The Shell is open source. Agent Bundles (packaged sets of prompts, tools, skills, workflows, and triggers) extend it without touching core code.
A real use case
We used Tangent to rebuild a large reranking model end to end. An engineer set the direction (which features to try, what training data to add) and reviewed results at each step. Tangent built, ran, and analyzed the experiments. Working through the loop, it tried a sequence of changes and measured each one against the previous best:
Step
What the agent changed
R@90% prec.
R@95% prec.
R@97% prec.
Previous pipeline
Prior distillation training, standard features & data
67.3%
54.4%
33.6%
+ Standardized pipeline
Migrated onto a reproducible trainer (on par; enables fast iteration)
69.5%
51.9%
35.2%
+ Richer product features
Added structured metadata, taxonomy, text descriptions, and predicted attributes (biggest single lift)
71.3%
58.7%
48.5%
+ More & harder training data
Added search-derived, sampled, and hard-negative pairs
75.6%
60.2%
43.9%
Open source and contributing
Tangle, the Tangent skills, the Hosting Platform, and Tangent Shell are all released under Apache 2.0. Development happens in the open on GitHub, and the projects accept pull requests for new subagent skills, Agent Bundles, and core fixes. Tangle is maintained by its creator, Alexey Volkov, with Shopify as the project’s initial sponsor and infrastructure steward. If you build a subagent skill or Agent Bundle you think others would find useful, we welcome the PR.
I've tested dozens of wireless portable party speakers. Here are my current top picks that can play loud and power your next fiesta, whether it's by the pool, at the beach or in the parking lot pre-game.
An Israeli strike has killed an aid worker who organized World Cup game screenings for Palestinians in the war-torn Gaza Strip, a hospital director says.
Former transport secretary said she was one of several victims of ‘sexist and unpleasant’ press briefs
Louise Haigh has accused Keir Starmer’s allies of briefing “consistently and viciously” against her after she resigned as transport secretary as she spoke openly about her departure from the cabinet in 2024 and her reasons for backing Andy Burnham.
She has helped mastermind Burnham’s likely ascent to power, with the former Manchester mayor expected to be confirmed as prime minister in days.
Hey guys i bought my XR at the start of Covid. Have loved every minute of it. Thousands of miles and tire changes with no issues whatsoever. Unfortunately my board now wobbles at low speeds, I'm talking even at 1 or 2 mph. So I'm a bit perplexed what the issue may be. Tire pressure is around 12-15 which is how i always ride it, so no change there. Any thoughts from someone who has dealt with this issue is much appreciated.
Czech 10th seed clinches a 6-2, 1-6, 7-6 (10) victory
Muchova faces compatriot Noskova in Saturday’s final
She finds a first serve on match point and the contact is perfect: 117mph, punched hard down the centre line, and from the moment her hand receives the message from her strings, she must know this is it. Of course the ball may come back, and indeed the ball does come back, but only barely. And in those few seconds as it arcs over the net, springs back up off the grass and hangs there like a beautiful sweet fruit, Coco Gauff has a Wimbledon final in her grasp.
The afternoon has been hot: viciously hot, sadistically hot, the sort of heat that seems to take years from you. In the crowd, paper fans wave and flutter like butterflies, and this has been a match full of natural beauty, of clean swings and satisfying timing and brilliant shapes set against pale green. And still the return from Karolina Muchova hangs there, high and slow, a sentence demanding a punctuation mark, a piece of Centre Court cinema about to roll the credits.
Residents in southern Iran have described two nights of fear this week after explosions shook coastal communities as the US launched fresh strikes on targets including the port cities of Bandar Abbas and Sirik.
US Central Command confirmed the attacks, saying they were carried out to “further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the strait of Hormuz”.
AI companies want to capture the value created by entire industries. That concentration of wealth and power is society’s greatest risk
Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn’t fallalong party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.
Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs. The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Parents' attachment to screens and smartphones can have negative, long-lasting developmental and psychological effects on their children, according to new research. Caregivers who mismanage their devices can both exacerbate "insecure attachment" and make healthy relationships more anxious and avoidant for children, according to the findings, which were published last month in Frontiers in Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal. The study, which surveyed 600 minors in the US from 12 to 17 years old, found that kids reported feeling marginalized or neglected by parents glued to their screens. "A child with insecure attachment may lack confidence or display a lower sense of self; demonstrate difficulty with interpersonal relationships and intimacy; and possess an unwillingness to take risks necessary to achieve success," reports Bloomberg, citing one of the study's researchers.
This type of behavior has become normalized: 2024 Pew data found that nearly half of U.S. teens say their parents are at least sometimes distracted by phones during interactions. "When parents were asked about their own behavior, far fewer said this was an issue," the report adds. "Still, earlier Pew data from 2020 found most parents feel their phones can interfere with quality family time, with 68% reporting being 'at least sometimes' distracted by them.
A former chief economist at mining company BHP says stronger climate policy by governments is needed to “move the needle” and incentivise tough decarbonisation decisions at major resource companies.
David Hearn is accused of destroying ‘American flag blue’ lining material on the bottom of the reflecting pool
David Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to damaging Washington’s reflecting pool after a $14.7m renovation project.
Hearn, a three-time US Olympian, was indicted last week on a single felony count of property destruction. He appeared in local superior court in Washington DC to enter the plea after he was criminally charged over the incident in mid-June.
‘Highly unprecedented anomaly’ meant 135 people given incorrect scores and wrongly informed of promotions
The air force has canceled the promotions of dozens of service members after discovering what it said was a grading error in a test of their security knowledge.
The “isolated and highly unprecedented anomaly” was announced in a press release on Tuesday, which said 135 airmen and women had been awarded incorrect scores on the security forces specialty knowledge test (SKT) and been wrongly informed they had earned promotion.
We’ve only recently passed the semiquincentennial of the United States of America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, at the moment of its founding, the U.S. was, of course, a slaveocracy. Of its founders, John Adams was essentially an oddball because he owned no slaves. But Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe did own people. So, give our current president Donald J. Trump some credit: At least he isn’t a slaveowner. But that’s about the best that can be said for him.
Once upon a time, if you had described our world to me, I would have thought you mad. Who could have imagined that Americans would reelect the man who shoved aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Duško Marković in 2017 in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of a photo line (because who, in any circumstance, should be photographed more than him)? This is also the same tantrum-prone president who once threw his lunch, ketchup and all, at a White House wall after his attorney general made comments he didn’t like about the 2020 election. The president who, less than two years into his second term, kidnapped Venezuela’s head of state, tried to claim Greenland as the property of the US of A, prepared for a possible future war with Cuba, blown ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, has conducted staggering numbers of airstrikes in Somalia, launched a would-be forever war with Iran (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and … well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples of unhinged behavior to cite. Honestly, a decade ago, I would have thought you were kidding.
So, what would those slave-owning Founding Fathers, memorialized on the Fourth of July just past, have thought about Trump? What would they have said about his boorish behavior, his toddler-esque tantrums, and his endless attacks and wars?
Perhaps those founders, were they alive today, would visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago and share a meal with the odd millionaire, billionaire, or trillionaire (although Elon Musk’s trillionaire status only lasted a couple of weeks!) lurking around the club. Or perhaps they would have been spotted on the White House lawn recently with Trump, first lady Melania, and the Trump kids, not to speak of a legion of blood-sport-loving billionaires watching a mixed martial arts spectacle in honor of Trump’s 250th birthday. (Oops, my mistake, Trump is just a youthful 80, which, when — or is it, if? — he finally leaves office, will make him our oldest president ever but hardly the oldest among the almost 200 world leaders of the present moment.)
“A Nation Unmade by War,” by Tom EngelhardtAvailable at Bookshop.org
Here’s a question that those Founding Fathers might ask about Donald Trump’s America: “What kind of -ocracy is the United States today?” And the answer, of course, would not be a democracy, or even a theocracy (though The Donald does love to be worshipped), but a Trumpocracy: a government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump; a government dedicated to the enrichment of the president and his cronies. And it’s a vengeful one at that. After all, on Truth Social last year, he reposted an AI-generated video of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office (as Trump looks on in glee) before he’s thrown into prison. A Black man seized (in a house built by slave labor, no less) and held in bondage is something of a nod to America’s past — and wouldn’t be unfamiliar to America’s founders.
But honestly, if you were to offer an account of Trump’s America to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, what would either of them have thought? Can you even imagine their reaction? Their dismay? You found a country and just over 250 years later, you have Donald J. Trump running it into the ground.
Perhaps if the Founding Fathers could do it all again, they might have chosen to remain a colony of the British king, George III (whom Donald Trump makes look remarkably good).
Coming from a largely rural land, the founders would undoubtedly find it interesting that Trump’s long solid support in the heartland finally seems to be on the verge of collapse. But then, so much of his world (and sadly, ours, too) seems to be on the edge of ruin these days.
The founders might wonder if the United States could survive another two and a half years. Or if the world can? If, that is, he doesn’t try to remain in power. After claiming to have won the last three presidential elections, Trump asked an Iowan audience ominously: “Should we do it a fourth time?” (George Washington would no doubt be disturbed, having been committed to a two-term maximum.)
In two and a half years, much less six and a half, Trump is potentially all too capable of taking not just this country but also the planet down with him. And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come (as my city recently hit the 100-degree mark on an early July day) and the president who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. Now, I’m sweating and, of course, with Donald Trump at the helm of state, it’s only going to get hotter, and hotter, and hotter.
European NATO has four years to re-establish ‘escalation dominance’ over Russia, conference hearsNews releasejon.wallace
Following this week’s Ankara NATO summit, General Sir Richard Barrons told the Chatham House London Conference that European countries must act to re-establish deterrence in the light of US drawdown in Europe.
Leading voices from policymaking, business and academia gathered at Chatham House’s 2026 London Conference on 9 July under the theme of ‘a route to order in an evolving world’. The event opened with a panel discussing the issues confronting UK defence, the threat from Russia and the war in Ukraine – and strained relations within NATO, following the alliance summit this week in Ankara.
Speaking at the conference’s opening panel, General Sir Richard Barrons, a senior consulting fellow with Chatham House and a co-author of the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), said that the conversation about the US drawdown of commitment to NATO can no longer be abstract.
As a result, he argued, European NATO countries must seek to re-establish a relationship of ‘escalation dominance’ with Russia – that is ‘a certainty that you deter because you are more powerful’. This must be done, he said ‘with far less reliance on the US, inside four years.’
The UK and NATO
Speaking at the same panel, former NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson, another co-author of the UK’s SDR, said that the Ankara NATO summit was in many ways a great success for its ‘ironclad commitment to Article 5 and to collective security…to get all of the 32 countries, including the United States, to sign up to that is crucially important.’
—
Lord Robertson discusses the UK nuclear deterrent.
He also said that agreements on armaments and support for Ukraine showed that ‘suddenly the spotlight has come back onto Ukraine and the necessity for making sure that we win that’.
Addressing the UK position within NATO, Lord Robertson said that, although the UK made good progress with the SDR it had ‘lost a year’ while the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was created, and that the DIP had been greeted with ‘less than rapture’ by UK allies.
He also discussed the hard choices confronting the UK on defence, making the point that 25 per cent of the UK defence budget is accounted for by the independent nuclear deterrent, which crowds out funding for conventional defence.
Yet, he pointed out ‘I can assure you, as somebody who has been in the Kremlin on a number of occasions, who got to know Vladimir Putin…I can tell you that the British independent nuclear deterrent is the one thing that moves the dial inside the Kremlin.’
Gaza and the West Bank
Later in the day, during the closing keynote, UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper addressed other important security issues, including policy on the 20-point plan for Gaza negotiated by the Trump administration, and Israeli settler activity in the West Bank.
‘What I fear now is that that 20-point plan is really in danger of just running into the ground,’ she said. ‘And we don’t even have the humanitarian access and support that was pledged as part of phase one of that 20-point plan.’
Addressing the West Bank, she said: ‘We’ve also seen, obviously…the expansion of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and settler violence increasing and what is effectively in many cases, settler terrorism as well. And so therefore it can feel then as if there’s a risk now that we are going backwards.’
MUNICH, July 9, 2026 — QuantumDiamonds GmbH (QD), one of Europe’s fastest-growing semiconductor equipment companies, today announced the closing of a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology. The financing combines a €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved at the EU level under the European Chips Act.
Credit: QuantumDiamonds
“This is a major step in bringing quantum sensing into fabs worldwide,” said Kevin Berghoff, CEO and co-founder of QuantumDiamonds. “The response from leading chipmakers has been clear: they see our technology as essential for solving yield challenges that today’s systems can’t address. With deployments now live in the U.S. and Taiwan and serial production ramping up in Munich, Europe isn’t just participating in the next chip era, it’s helping define it.”
The non-dilutive funding is jointly provided by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Free State of Bavaria. The €15 million equity round led by World Fund drew significant participation from Bayern Kapital, alongside QD’s existing investors IQ Capital, Earlybird, First Momentum, UnternehmerTUM, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures, and angel investors.
QD is in line to become the sole startup awarded manufacturing funding under the European Chips Act, created to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor supply chain. In doing so, the firm joins established industrial players such as GlobalFoundries and Carl Zeiss.
Co-founded in 2022 by Berghoff and Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier (CTO) as a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich. The company will use the funding to deliver lab systems to leading chipmakers and advance wafer-level capabilities for high-throughput fab inspection. QD, which currently employs 70 people, plans to more than double its engineering team over the next 12 months.
Traditional semiconductor inspection tools slow development and production because they struggle to see buried defects in complex 3D chip architectures, which lowers production yields and raises costs for businesses and consumers. The stakes are high: industry analysis shows that a single percentage point improvement in yield can be worth millions of dollars a week for a high-volume device.
QD’s technology addresses this central challenge in advanced chip manufacturing by leveraging atomic-scale defects in synthetic diamonds to detect magnetic fields with extreme precision: effectively a microscope that can see electricity flowing through chips. Its first commercial system, the QDm.1, enables non-destructive 3D current imaging at the nanoscale, pinpointing the precise location and depth of chip defects.
“We’d been trying to debug this chip for six weeks. You found the defect in under a minute,” said a Tier 1 U.S. chip designer working with the QD technology.
QD has built momentum across regions in quick succession. In March 2026, the company expanded into Asia, establishing a regional hub in Taiwan and appointing industry veteran Peter Lemmens, formerly General Manager Taiwan at IMS Nanofabrication and imec, as Managing Director Asia. The following month, QD installed its first U.S. system at Eurofins EAG Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California, and completed its first Asia deployment at Integrated Service Technology (iST) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, at the heart of the world’s most advanced semiconductor cluster.
Later this year, QD expects to open the first operational section of its new €152 million production facility in Munich. The site will manufacture QD’s current and successor systems, giving Europe a commercial and technological lead in a cutting-edge inspection capability.
“Compute has become strategic infrastructure,” said Daria Saharova, Managing Partner at World Fund. “Europe uses around 20% of the world’s semiconductors while producing only 10%, and that gap is exactly where our strategic power leaks away. QD can become Europe’s next ASML: a first-of-a-kind technology, built and scaled here, in a $104 billion equipment market that the entire AI economy depends on. Backing companies like QD is how Europe stops buying its technological future from others and starts building the leverage to shape its own.”
Mason Sinclair, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “Since our initial seed investment in late 2023, the pace of technical progress at QD has been exceptional. They’ve executed rapidly, assembled a world-class technical team, and built strong partnerships across the chip ecosystem. The technology is strongly resonating, and we’re proud to continue backing their journey.”
About QuantumDiamonds
QuantumDiamonds GmbH, headquartered in Munich, Germany, develops and manufactures semiconductor inspection systems based on quantum sensing. Spun out of the Technical University of Munich in 2022, the company uses nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to map electrical current with micrometer precision inside advanced 2.5D and 3D chip architectures.
Nine of the world’s ten largest semiconductor manufacturers are engaged with QuantumDiamonds, with systems deployed across Europe, the United States, and Asia. The company is investing €152 million to build the world’s first production facility for quantum-based semiconductor inspection in Munich, supported under the European Chips Act.
The Justice Department in May announced it had dismissed criminal foreign bribery and securities fraud charges against Gautam Adani, India's richest man.
George Cottrell was routinely introduced as Nigel Farage’s chief of staff before the 2024 election despite denials that he had any official role, according to a Reform UK candidate who stood aside for the party leader.
Others who have been closely involved in the party have also claimed Cottrell arranged the Land Rovers that ferried Reform’s newly elected MPs to parliament, and that he covered the cost of a fundraising lunch with potential donors before the national vote.
Officials say climate crisis ‘worsening our exposure’ to bacteria as at least 28 people sickened in Manhattan
A New York outbreak of legionnaires’ disease, a rare but severe form of pneumonia, highlights the microbe’s growing and disproportionate impacts in a warming climate.
At least 28 people have been sickened in an outbreak on the Upper East Side, a wealthy neighborhood between Central Park and the East River in Manhattan. Health department officials, seeking to stop the outbreak, have sampled water from nearly 160 building cooling towers to test for the bacteria.
Chris Mufarrige has taken aim at Facebook scams and junk fees, but consumer advocates say he has an uphill climb
As the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau, Chris Mufarrige is the top enforcer protecting Americans against predatory companies.
City seeking bids to build and operate separate terminal, following Los Angeles, London and other cities
Sick of the TSA lines? Tired of playing musical chairs at the gate? Rather sit as far from your fellow airplane passengers for as long as possible, in the comfort of your own private, luxury airport terminal?
Soon you may get your wish. And San Francisco international airport wants to be your genie – for a fee.
This article was amended on 9 July 2026. A previous version said PS was owned by Gavin de Becker and Associates. De Becker is no longer associated with PS.
Seven consumers sue the retailer, alleging it violated consumer protection and false advertising laws
A group of consumers have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Costco Wholesale Corporation, accusing the retailer of selling protein powder “tainted” with toxic heavy metals with no warning to consumers.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Washington state, names seven consumers as plaintiffs. They allege that Costco violated consumer protection and false advertising laws by selling and marketing Orgain Organic Protein Powder as “high quality, clean, and nutritious without disclosing the presence or risk of heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, and arsenic”.
A blistering heat wave persisted in the western United States on Thursday, and temperatures are forecast to reach up to 117 degrees in some desert areas.
Greenland Energy says billions of barrels of crude could lie beneath territory and claims it has permission to bring drilling kit ashore – a claim denied by Nuuk
On 10 June, a snowy-haired American in his 60s addressed the residents of a remote Greenland hamlet. He was there to tell them about a business venture supported by figures linked to Donald Trump. “So,” Robert Price said via an interpreter, “we have a project to drill for oil here.”
The Texas oil company that Price represents, Greenland Energy, hopes to prove that billions of barrels of crude lie underground by bringing in 300 shipping containers of drilling kit.
Some stations in Spain recorded temperatures of up to 44C after western Europe experienced the warmest June on record
A high temperature warning has also been issued for a dozen counties in the Republic of Ireland, PA reported.
Irish national forecaster Met Éireann said temperatures could exceed 27C during the day with overnight temperatures staying above 15C. The agency warned of water safety issues, heat stress, and uncomfortable sleeping conditions as a result.
July 9, 2026 — Quantum computers still face limits when it comes to storing information. Researchers at ETH Zurich are now turning to mechanical vibrations rather than electromagnetic memory. Their new vibrating memory can store significantly more information in a smaller volume. Combined with a suitable computer architecture, it also enables the efficient solution of complex computational problems.
The new quantum chip developed by ETH Zurich physicist Yiwen Chu contains so-called mechanical resonators, tiny components that begin to vibrate when storing information. The chip is approximately 7.5 millimetres long, 2.5 millimetres wide and 1 millimetre high. This makes it roughly as wide as a small fingernail. Image credit: Hybrid Quantum Systems Group / ETH Zurich.
This computer works almost like a guitar. The ETH Zurich quantum physicist Yiwen Chu and her team use tiny mechanical vibrations to store and process information. These vibrations behave much like the vibrating strings of a guitar, which produce musical notes.
What sounds like music is, in fact, quantum physics. The vibrations that Chu and her team work with are far beyond the range of human hearing. They occur deep inside a quantum chip, where they are used to store quantum information.
These vibrations enable Chu’s quantum computer to perform its calculations as efficiently as possible while making flexible use of a working memory. “The interaction between the quantum processor and the quantum memory provides a crucial foundation with a view to establishing quantum computers as a powerful and reliable way to perform computations that are not feasible with conventional computers,” says Yiwen Chu.
The physics professor conducts research on quantum information and quantum computer architectures. Her team recently presented a new approach in the journal Science that separates computation from working memory much more clearly than many existing quantum computing models, which tightly integrate processing and storage.
New Quantum Working Memory Modeled on Digital Computing
To achieve this, Chu and her team developed a new quantum computer architecture that was intentionally modelled on classical digital computers. In these systems, a central processing unit (CPU) processes data that is stored separately in a working memory – known in classical computer science as random access memory (RAM). The computer architecture defines how a computer’s individual components are organised to process data as efficiently as possible.
In Chu’s approach, a so-called superconducting qubit takes on the role of the central processing and control unit performed by the central processing unit (CPU) in a digital computer. At the same time, the information to be processed is temporarily stored in a quantum memory, making it available throughout the computation.
“In our quantum working memory, however, information is not stored electromagnetically – as is usually the case today – but rather in the form of mechanical vibrations,” explains Chu.
To perform a computation, the qubit accesses a piece of information – that is, a vibration – in the quantum memory, processes and modifies it, and then writes it back. “In concrete terms, our quantum chip contains so-called mechanical resonators, tiny components that start to vibrate when storing information,” continues Chu.
Every Vibration Stores a Piece of Information
Like the strings of a guitar, which produce different tones depending on how they vibrate, the resonators can also vibrate in many different ways – physicists refer to these as vibrational modes. In the language of computer science, these modes correspond to the number of available memory slots. In other words: each type of vibration stores different information.
Within the vibrational modes, different vibrational states can in turn be realised. These refer to the specific state of a vibration at any given time, in which information is stored in such a way that it can be flexibly accessed and written back again. From an information-theory perspective, these states correspond to the content of the memory slots.
In quantum physics terms, however, these states represent the crucial difference to a guitar – and also to a digital computer. The vibrations of a string follow the rules of classical physics, which describe our everyday world. In contrast, in a quantum chip, the laws of quantum mechanics apply, which govern the behaviour of the smallest particles.
There, states can exist in superposition and be entangled – a form of ‘both/and’ that does not exist in classical physics. Digital computers likewise work only with two clearly distinct states: 0 or 1.
This ability to place states in superposition or to entangle them opens up additional pathways for quantum computation. The major promise of quantum computers is therefore that, one day, they may solve certain highly complex problems more efficiently than classical computers – or even tackle tasks that conventional computers cannot solve at all.
The Advantage: More Vibrations Mean More Memory
In order that quantum computers can compute and store information reliably, researchers must be able to precisely control and manipulate these states. This is possible when the processing unit and the working memory are strongly coupled.
In Chu’s system, this works as follows: the resonators store the respective information in a specific vibrational state. When the qubit retrieves information from the quantum working memory, it processes and modifies this vibrational state and then stores it again.
Until now, many quantum computing models have combined electromagnetic memory with superconducting qubits, since both – individually and in combination – are well studied and proven. Electromagnetic memory technologies allow quantum states to be read out, modified and controlled with very high precision.
Their drawback: they are relatively large and require a great deal of space – which is likely to hinder the development of experimental laboratory devices into market-ready quantum computers for research and industry. This is where Chu comes in.
Mechanical resonators, by contrast, are significantly smaller and more compact. They also offer greater storage capacity, because they support many different vibrational modes and can therefore store more information simultaneously than electromagnetic memory. In addition, they keep quantum states stable for longer, without the vibrations fading and information being lost. This extends the storage time.
New Computer Architecture Passes Stress Test
In Science, Chu has now experimentally demonstrated for the first time that mechanical resonators can be successfully coupled and combined with superconducting qubits to perform quantum computations. This provides proof of feasibility: vibrating memory systems can represent a promising alternative to electromagnetic approaches. Whether the method will prevail is now dependent on how well it can be scaled. In other words, Chu’s quantum chip must also function reliably in larger quantum computing systems with expanded computational capabilities.
Chu’s team is continuing this line of research. A proof of principle has already been published in Science: their approach of embedding qubits and resonators into a new computer architecture is capable not only of performing simple computational tasks, but also more demanding tasks.
The research group tested the computational capability of their approach using two key problems, which are among the most important computational methods in quantum computing: the quantum Fourier transform and period finding.
“The Quantum Fourier Transform is a fundamental computational procedure required for many quantum algorithms. The period-finding algorithm we implemented served as a demonstration of how this procedure can be used”, explains Igor Kladaric, doctoral student in Chu’s team and co-author of the publication.
Both methods require a quantum computing system to precisely control, store and coherently link many quantum states simultaneously. If this is achieved, a quantum computer is considered fundamentally capable of computation – and this is exactly what Chu’s approach demonstrates.
Foundation for a powerful quantum computer
In principle, Chu’s quantum computing system can perform all basic computational steps that are required to execute any arbitrary quantum computation. This shows that the approach is fundamentally suitable as a general-purpose and programmable quantum computer.
There is still a long way to go before a sufficiently powerful and reliable quantum computer can be used in research and industry. However, Chu’s approach represents a highly promising step forward.
Reference
Yang Y, Kladarić I, Skrabulis M, Eichenberger M, Marti S, Storz S, Esche J, García Bellés R, Kern M-E, Omahen A, Brooks A, Bild M, Fadel M, Chu Y: Mechanical resonator–based quantum computing. Science 392, 972-976 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.aef4139.
US president contested judge’s order to release money after Carroll’s 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him
A Manhattan federal appeals court late on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s latest bid to delaythe payment of more than $5m to E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him.
The US court of appeals for the second circuit made its decision hours after Trump filed paperwork fighting Manhattan federal court judge Lewis Kaplan’s order releasing this money – which has been held in a court-controlled account since June 2023. Trump denies all wrongdoing.
SUNNYVALE, Calif. and MILPITAS, Calif., July 9, 2026 — Flex and Cerebras Systems Inc. today announced an expanded manufacturing partnership to scale production of the Cerebras CS-3, one of the world’s most advanced AI accelerator systems, at Flex manufacturing facilities in Milpitas, California. As demand for AI infrastructure accelerates, the collaboration reflects a significant expansion of advanced manufacturing capacity in the United States.
The expanded operation is expected to increase CS-3 production capacity by approximately 7x through 2026, supported by new production lines, expanded floor space, advanced test infrastructure, and additional skilled manufacturing talent based in California.
At a time when electronics manufacturing is often associated with overseas supply chains, this partnership demonstrates that some of the world’s most sophisticated AI systems are being designed, assembled, integrated, and tested in the heart of Silicon Valley.
“The CS-3 is unlike any computer system ever built, and scaling its production requires an extraordinary manufacturing partner. Flex brings the technical depth, operational rigor, and manufacturing expertise needed to support that scale,” said Dhiraj Mallick, COO of Cerebras. “People often think the entire AI manufacturing and packaging supply chain lives overseas, but everyday across the U.S., teams of American engineers and technicians are building state-of-the-art AI systems that power frontier AI workloads around the world.”
The CS-3 is built on Cerebras’ industry-leading wafer-scale engine architecture, featuring a processor physically larger than any conventional AI chip. The system integrates advanced liquid cooling, high-density power delivery, precision mechanical assembly, and tightly coordinated networking infrastructure into a platform designed for large-scale AI training and inference.
Manufacturing the CS-3 presents challenges rarely encountered in traditional server production. Each system requires specialized handling processes, custom tooling, precision calibration, and extensive system-level validation. Flex engineers worked closely with Cerebras to develop dedicated assembly flows, automated test stations, and new manufacturing methodologies tailored specifically to wafer-scale computing systems.
“The CS-3 does not resemble a conventional server or rack-scale compute platform,” said Rob Campbell, President of Communication, Enterprise and Cloud at Flex. “Every stage of the manufacturing process—from mechanical integration to thermal validation and final system qualification—required deep collaboration between our engineering teams. We thank Cerebras for their partnership in demonstrating what American advanced manufacturing can achieve when two highly technical organizations work side by side.”
To support the ramp, Flex is expanding dedicated manufacturing operations for Cerebras in Milpitas, with multiple new assembly and integration lines coming online through 2026. The footprint devoted to CS-3 manufacturing is expected to grow substantially this year as production accelerates to meet customer demand from AI model developers, cloud providers, and enterprise customers.
The expansion is also contributing to growth in high-skilled manufacturing roles across the region, including manufacturing, systems integration, quality, supply chain, and testing.
Inside the Milpitas facility, production operations span precision mechanical assembly, high-power electrical integration, liquid cooling installation, optical networking validation, and full-rack system qualification. To support growing demand, the site has expanded into a high-throughput manufacturing environment with parallel integration lines, enhanced burn-in and validation areas, additional automated test infrastructure, and increased warehouse and logistics capacity for critical components and finished systems. Tooling and fixtures will enable multiple CS-3 systems to move through integration and testing simultaneously, which is expected to significantly increase throughput while maintaining the rigorous quality and reliability standards required for large-scale AI deployments.
About Flex
Flex (Reg. No. 199002645H) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps leading brands design, build, and manage products that improve the world. With a global footprint spanning 30 countries, Flex delivers advanced manufacturing and supply chain solutions, innovative products and technology, and lifecycle services that support customers from concept to scale. In the AI era, Flex is helping customers accelerate data center deployment by solving power, heat, and scale challenges through cutting-edge power and cooling technology and scalable IT infrastructure solutions. For information about Flex’s intent to spin off its Cloud and Power Infrastructure portfolio, visit: https://flex.com/transaction-resources.
About Cerebras Systems
Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) is building the fastest AI infrastructure in the world. Cerebras is a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types that have come together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention. Cerebras believes that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Cerebras’ flagship technology, the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) is the world’s largest and fastest commercialized AI processor. Fifty-eight times larger than a leading GPU chip, the WSE-3 uses a fraction of the power per unit compute while delivering inference up to 15 times faster than leading GPU-based solutions as benchmarked on leading open-source models. Leading corporations, research institutes, and governments on four continents chose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud.
Measures aim to make it easier for victims to gain compensation, with firms such as Bolt and Lime held responsible for damage
Victims hit by rental e-scooters on German streets will have an easier time gaining compensation from their operators under legislation due to be passed in parliament that would put the vehicles on a legal footing similar to that of cars.
The draft law by the right-left coalition government, which has been welcomed by consumer rights advocates, says that given the rapid rise in the use of e-scooters in recent years coupled with high accident rates, rental operators such as Lime and Bolt should be held liable.
As Trump’s immigration crackdown continues, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death marks another high-profile killing by ICE officers
Early on Tuesday morning, 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo took his coffee and a meal his wife had prepared for him, said goodbye to his dog, and left the house he built. He drove his white van, picked up three co-workers, and headed towards a construction site to work on some houses.
But Salgado never made it to work. During a “targeted enforcement operation”, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed Salgado and arrested the three other men.
QUDORA and QAI have partnered to integrate QUDORA’s ion-trap quantum computer within a Korean AI data center, supporting the development of hybrid AI-quantum computing and strengthening quantum collaboration between Europe and Asia.
BRAUNSCHWEIG, Germany and SEOUL, South Korea, July 9, 2026. — QUDORA Technologies GmbH, a European full-stack ion-trap quantum computing company, today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Korean quantum AI specialist QAI Co., Ltd. to pursue the deployment of QUDORA’s ion-trap quantum computing technology in Korea and demonstrate hybrid AI-Quantum services for a wide range of industries, from enterprises and the public sector to research applications.
Credit: QUDORA
The partnership reflects the growing industrial demand for next-generation computing platforms that combine artificial intelligence with quantum computing. As a first step, the two companies will conduct a feasibility study on deploying of a QUDORA ion-trap quantum computer within AI data center infrastructure operated by QAI in Korea. The study will focus on technical integration and the implementation of hybrid AI-quantum workflows in a real operational environment.
Under the agreement, QUDORA will lead the system construction and technical integration, while QAI will conduct the local feasibility assessment and support market development activities as QUDORA expands its presence across Asia.
Combining Quantum Computing with AI Infrastructure
By combining QUDORA’s quantum computing platform with QAI’s AI infrastructure and application expertise, the collaboration aims to demonstrate practical hybrid AI-quantum services in a real operational environment. The companies have also agreed to cooperate on customer enablement, education, joint technology development, and hybrid AI-quantum solutions. The partnership also includes collaboration on export control compliance and other applicable regulatory requirements, supporting responsible international deployment of advanced quantum technologies.
“The combination of Europe’s leading ion-trap quantum computing technology with QAI’s AI data center and commercialization capabilities will serve as an important springboard for expanding hybrid AI-quantum services,” said Se-man Lim, CEO of QAI. “We will continue to broadly embrace diverse quantum computing technologies and global partners, expanding the practical foundation for quantum utilization across domestic industry, public institutions, and research.”
“We are delighted to partner with QAI. This partnership represents a significant milestone in accelerating the adoption of QUDORA’s ion-trap quantum computing technology across Asia,” said Amado Bautista, CEO of QUDORA. “By combining our leading ion-trap technology with QAI’s capabilities, we will accelerate commercialization, demonstrate utility at scale, and enable enterprise applications powered by hybrid AI-quantum computing.”
Expanding Collaboration Across Asia
With headquarters in Braunschweig, Germany and an established base in Tokyo, Japan, QUDORA continues to expand its presence across Asia. Using Korea as a strategic base, QUDORA and QAI plan to jointly pursue marketing activities, customer engagements, technical workshops, and technology demonstrations across major Asian markets, including Japan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The partnership establishes a framework for long-term collaboration across the region while supporting the broader adoption of practical hybrid AI-quantum computing technologies.
QUDORA Technologies GmbH, headquartered in Braunschweig, Germany, with an additional base in Tokyo, Japan, is an ion-trap-based quantum computing specialist with full-stack technological capabilities spanning quantum computing hardware, control systems, and system integration.
The ion-trap approach is considered, across the global quantum computing industry, to be one of the most stable and practical architectures in terms of quantum gate fidelity, coherence time, and qubit-to-qubit connectivity.
Combined with QUDORA’s proprietary NFQC (Near Field Quantum Control) technology, the company precisely controls qubits using highly integrated microwave-based electronic control instead of complex laser systems — simultaneously extending coherence time while ensuring system stability and control precision. This control architecture is also designed to be compatible with standard CMOS semiconductor processes, giving it a technical foundation to scale toward industrial-grade quantum computing systems with thousands of qubits or more, a point that has drawn significant attention within the industry.
About QAI
QAI is a deep-tech company that combines quantum computing and artificial intelligence technologies to solve challenges across industries. By applying quantum-classical hybrid algorithms, the company delivers optimal solutions to complex problems that are difficult to solve with conventional computing alone — including financial portfolio optimization, drug candidate discovery, and logistics route optimization. Building on strategic partnerships with data center specialists DCK and DCP, QAI has secured hyperscale and edge infrastructure dedicated to quantum and AI, offering a vertically integrated computing environment that combines software and hardware — leading the way into the era of “Quantum Utility.”
Scarlet Lady’s 2,000 passengers told of change as one of those onboard says they will ‘sparkle and spend elsewhere’
An LGBTQ+ cruise ship blocked from Turkish waters this week has been refused entry into Egypt.
The Scarlet Lady’s 2,000 passengers, including the Broadway performer Patti LuPone, woke on Thursday morning to find a note placed under their cabin doors informing them that the ship was urgently looking for alternative ports.
Clark has been on the end of hard fouls during career
Black players routinely receive racist abuse in WNBA
Eleven Republican politicians have written to the WNBA asking the league to protect Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark from “multiple attacks” on court.
Clark has been on the receiving end of hard fouls since she entered the league in 2024 after a stellar college career with Iowa. Recently, the Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas hit Clark in the throat during a game. Thomas was not called for a foul at the time but the WNBA later suspended her for one game. Thomas and her family received racist abuse and death threats after the incident.
Newly endangered animals include desert frogs and snails in extreme ocean depths, both threatened by mining
Life has colonised every corner of the planet by evolving ingenious survival strategies but these are increasingly being overwhelmed by destructive human activities, this year’s red list of endangered species has revealed.
Many snails, limpets and clams have adapted to life at crushing depths in the oceans on hydrothermal vents where water temperatures can reach 450C (842F). But an assessment for the red list found that two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusc species found only on deep sea vents were at risk of extinction because of deep-sea mining.
I have printed a new fender and I'm making a battery backpack to add some range (it's got an owie installed).
I gave it a keyed switch so I can cut off the power button's signal when not in use. Made a little wetbox for the wires coming from the battery box and going to the mounted XT60 (which I still have to solder).
I also had to remake orings, since this board was a donor board and lacked them for both boxes!
It's nearly in working order again ! I'll finally be able to ride again after so long ❤️
Explosions reported in southern Iran in most extensive exchange of fire since interim ceasefire. Plus the complicated legacy of beat poet Allen Ginsberg
Good morning. The US military carried out strikes on Iran for a second day, hours after Donald Trump said an interim agreement to end the war was “over”. Iranian state media reported explosions in the port city of Bandar Abbas in the strait of Hormuz; in Sirik, another southern coastal city; and the south-western Bushehr province, home to Iran’s nuclear power plant complex. US Central Command confirmed the strikes.
On Tuesday, three cargo ships transiting the strait of Hormuz were attacked, leading to the most extensive exchange of fire between the two sides since the interim deal was signed last month. At the Nato summit in Ankara on Wednesday, the US president said: “Anything that happens is going to happen very fast” and that the latest strikes would not result in “long-term” military action. “They are behaving very badly,” Trump said, accusing Iran of launching drones and a missile at ships.
What are the economic impacts of the renewed hostilities?US stock markets fell on Wednesday, and Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, jumped more than 5% to crest $80 a barrel. The International Monetary Fund lowered its global economic growth forecast to 3%, citing conflict in the Middle East. Jorge León, the head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, said: “Tanker traffic through the strait of Hormuz has essentially stopped, which tells you more about risk perception right now than any statement from Washington or Tehran.”
Who could replace Platner? Maine Democrats have until 27 July to select a replacement to face Susan Collins in a race widely seen as pivotal to control of the Senate. The state party said it would hold a nominating convention to pick a new candidate. Troy Jackson, Janet Mills, Valli Geiger and Shenna Bellows are among the names in the frame – with Joseph Gedeon profiling them and assessing their prospects in this piece.
US officials have held talks with Fifa over tournament
Unclear whether White House has been involved
The United States has expressed interest in hosting the 2029 Club World Cup as it seeks to capitalise on the commercial and sporting success of staging the World Cup.
Fifa has held talks with US officials about its plans for 2029, but the World Cup co-hosts have yet to commit to a bid because the details of the selection process have not been confirmed.
CAMPBELL, Calif., July 9, 2026 — Arteris, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor technology for accelerating innovation in the AI era, has announced a collaboration with IC-Link by imec, imec’s design and manufacturing service provider for ASICs and silicon photonics.
Arteris NoC IP will be deployed as part of the ongoing effort to accelerate and simplify the development of next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) chiplets and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). By combining its subsystem expertise with Arteris NoC IP technology, IC-Link is helping customers reduce infrastructure development effort, improve design reuse, and accelerate delivery of increasingly complex custom semiconductor platforms.
As AI and HPC systems continue to increase in scale and complexity, engineering teams are looking for new ways to improve productivity and focus resources on innovation, rather than repeatedly rebuilding foundational infrastructure. By combining its subsystem expertise with Arteris technology, IC-Link provides a reusable, scalable architecture that helps customers reduce integration complexity, lower development risk, and accelerate development of next-generation custom silicon.
“As semiconductor complexity continues to grow, including in AI ASICs, engineering teams increasingly need ways to reuse proven infrastructure and focus their efforts on high-performance differentiation,” said K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris. “The collaboration between IC-Link by imec and Arteris reflects a broader industry shift toward reusable architectures that help improve productivity, reduce risk, and accelerate innovation across AI and HPC semiconductor development.”
“IC-Link’s high-speed I/O subsystem reference design represents a significant step forward in how ASIC developers targeting high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications address the challenges of advanced node design,” said Ozgur Gursoy, director of portfolio and strategy for ASICs at IC-Link. “With each new technology node, design teams typically face costly and time-intensive rework of their I/O subsystems. By integrating Arteris’ industry-leading network-on-chip IP, our reference design reduces risk and enables HPC and AI teams to focus on what matters most: optimizing the accelerator core.”
Modern AI and HPC systems, including AI ASICs, rely on the underlying scalable semiconductor data movement infrastructure that can support growing high-performance requirements, energy efficiency, safety and security, all while managing increasing design complexity. Arteris technology helps engineering teams create efficient silicon for AI data centers, edge AI devices, and physical AI systems. Learn more at arteris.com/ai.
About Arteris
Arteris is a leading provider of semiconductor technology that accelerates the creation of high-performance, power-efficient silicon with built-in safety, reliability, and security. Innovative Arteris products are designed to optimize data movement and help ease complexity in the modern AI era with network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect intellectual property (IP), system-on-chip (SoC) software for integration automation and hardware security assurance. All are used by the world’s top technology companies to improve overall performance and engineering productivity, reduce risk, lower costs, and bring cutting-edge designs to market faster. Learn more at arteris.com.
Kia America is recalling almost 463,000 Telluride SUVs from the 2020-2024 model years that could catch fire while being driven or parked, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says.
Andy Burnham has posted a video on social media confirming that he has nominated himself for Labour leader. Nominations opened this morning. Labour will publish daily updates on how many nominations he has received (it’s an open process, and so names of MPs nominating a candidate are published), and Burnham says we should get the first update at about 7pm tonight.
Al Carns, the former defence minister, has not been in to nominate himself. Last night he confirmed what everyone else already knew – that he would not be standing as a candidate. He said:
I’d hoped a leadership contest would give us the opportunity for a proper debate. But months of internal Labour politics isn’t what the country needs right now. We’ve got to get on with the job.
@AndyBurnham’s earned this and he’s got my full backing.
Palm Beach International Airport officially became Donald J. Trump International Airport on Thursday, but the airport's code won't change for another 40 days.
Maine Democrats are facing a ticking clock to find a new candidate to go up against GOP Sen. Susan Collins this fall, after Graham Platner dropped out of the race following a sexual assault allegation.
Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is suspending his campaign against GOP Sen. Susan Collins, after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her five years ago.
Reform UK activists have been urged to divert from the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection to support Nigel Farage’s “fake” contest 250 miles away in Clacton.
A WhatsApp message shared with party members in north-west England said: “The message could not be more clear. We now need all of our fantastic activists, branch officers and councillors to come and help us in Clacton.”
Versatile Essex-born hitmaker known for Rhinestone Cowboy, It Only Takes a Minute and many more had been living with Alzheimer’s disease
Brian Potter, one of the most versatile and successful British producers and songwriters of his generation, has died aged 87. He had been living with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years, his daughter told Billboard.
Working with American songwriting partner Dennis Lambert, the Essex-born Potter was behind an astounding array of 1970s hits spanning pop, soul, soft rock, country and beyond. The best-known include Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, a US No 1 in 1975; It Only Takes a Minute, a barnstorming disco hit for Tavares and later Take That; Player’s super-smooth Baby Come Back, another US No 1; and Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got), one of the biggest hits for soul-poppers the Four Tops.
Airports have had to use gazebos to shield passengers from sun as they wait to be processed, says Alexander Zinell
The boss of 14 Greek airports has called for a serious overhaul of the EU’s new border checks after having to erect gazebos for passengers queuing outside.
Alexander Zinell, the chief executive of Fraport Greece, joined a growing chorus of critics calling out “fundamental flaws” in the entry-exit system (EES), which requires non-EU passengers to have their fingerprints and photo taken at the start of their trip and verified every time they leave or re-enter the Schengen zone.
Refuge reports ‘staggering’ 78% annual increase in referrals for cases of technology-facilitated or economic abuse
Domestic abuse charities have reported a “staggering” increase in perpetrators using technology and finances to control their victims, with a “concerning” rise in people being coerced into car finance agreements.
Data from Refuge, the UK’s largest specialist domestic abuse charity, reveals a 78% rise in referrals for cases of technology-facilitated or economic abuse in the past year.
Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Alberta, investing $9 billion in a 1-gigawatt facility that can scale to 1.8 gigawatts to support its AI infrastructure needs. The project will rely on new generation and grid infrastructure funded by Meta, including a long-term agreement tied to a new natural gas power facility. The company says it will offset electricity use with clean and renewable energy investments. Reuters reports: Meta has doubled down on AI, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to build large AI data centers in the U.S. The Alberta announcement represents the company's 33rd data center globally. Executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other Alberta government officials, who have spent several years courting Silicon Valley tech giants with the aim of spurring a large-scale investment in the oil-and-gas province. Alberta's technology minister, Nate Glubish, told reporters there are currently several other gigawatt-scale data center proposals in various stages of development in the province. "This is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won't be the last," Glubish said.
Meta, like other tech giants, is facing rapidly expanding power needs due to the growth of AI, and Alberta is rich in natural gas which sells at a significant discount to the U.S. benchmark. The province's cold climate also makes cooling the massive super-computers and related data center infrastructure more cost-efficient. The 20 existing small- to mid-scale data centers in Alberta already pull from the province's energy grid, which is 60% powered by natural gas. The provincial government is giving new proponents the option to build their own power sources to avoid limits on power capacity. Meta said Wednesday it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for its Alberta data center, which will consume about as much electricity as 800,000 homes. Gary Demasi, Meta's vice president for data center development, said the company will offset that electricity use by investing in clean and renewable energy. He also said the data center will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, meaning its total water use will be less than that of a typical golf course.
[...] The company has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline , which announced last week it will go ahead with its Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power-generation facility in Sturgeon County which will be in service in late 2030 and with which Meta has a long-term tolling agreement. Until that project is operational and for the next decade, Alberta-based power producer Capital Power will provide 250 megawatts of electricity for the site using its existing natural gas-fired fleet. The project will require approximately 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina, helping to create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers.
Deaths and injuries up as critics condemn administration’s ‘appalling’ plan to gut federal disaster management system
The number of US chemical accidents is rising just as the Trump administration guts protections against the disasters, a new analysis of federal data by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit found.
The report found the number of chemical accidents, explosions, fires and other emergencies that release chemicals into the atmosphere was up by at least 51% since 2021. Deaths and injuries were up at least 20%.
Crude jokes about the Maga luminary are exploding online – less than a year after conservatives were suppressing any slander against him
Ten months since his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.
Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.
Mauricio Pochettino’s team delivered several thrilling performances on home soil. The way it ended was somewhat less exhilarating
So now what? How are we supposed to think about this supposedly golden generation of the United States men’s national team who have fallen short of expectations at this World Cup on home soil?
How do we come to terms with the sense that this team beat Paraguay 4-1 in their opener – the most impressive performance in the program’s history – but also lost dismally against Belgium by the same scoreline in the last 16?
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
With marriage rates in decline, the appeal of a big wedding that we can live vicariously is stronger than ever
Finally, after decades, I have something in common with Taylor Swift. It feels great to say that out loud, in public. No, I’m not famous, rich, particularly attractive, or a woman. I really, really can’t sing. Like, not even my karaoke is tolerable for human ears (dogs seem to be fine with it). No, our sole point of connection in the cosmic swirl of life is that we’ve both been married. I can’t compare this achievement to winning a Grammy or selling out Crypto.com Arena 16 times, but it has to be on the list somewhere.
My wedding did not come close to the upwards of $50m floated by People Magazine as the cost of Swift’s. We got the venue for free because my wife’s family owned it, which is its own sort of privilege. Lena Dunham didn’t attend, but I certainly sent enough invites. Still, getting someone to agree to tolerate you “till death do you part” is no small feat. Did we get divorced three years later? Of course. I can’t believe she dealt with me even that long. Will Taylor and Travis Kelce beat our record? Depends on how often he forgets to put the toilet seat down in one of their numerous homes across the country. That guy just seems like the sort to make that mistake regularly. Don’t ask me how I came to this conclusion. I trust my own eyes.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Illness surging in Michigan and other US states is rarely life-threatening, CDC says – but it can have severe effects
Cases of cyclosporiasis – a parasitic illness that can cause “explosive”, watery diarrhea – have surged across the United States in recent days, health officials have said, with an abnormally large outbreak of almost 1,000 cases reported in Michigan.
Michigan typically reports about 50 cases a year, making the current outbreak the largest in the state’s history and one of the nation’s biggest in recent years. Ohio has also reported a sharp increase, with 177 cases as of 2 July, since the CDC’s last count.
More than one year after the Supreme Court restricted the use of nationwide injunctions, groups challenging President Trump's agenda have relied on other mechanisms to broadly block his policies.
Why Should Delaware Care? Families have said accessing preschool in the First State can be increasingly frustrating with limited access to high-quality centers. Spotlight Delaware breaks down what parents need to know about accessing preschool and how centers are funded.
By the end of this summer, 3-year-olds across Delaware will be able to begin their preschool journey.
But where families can enroll their children, and whether they can get a spot at all, can depend on how a preschool is funded.
Unlike in K-12 education, Delaware does not provide universal public funding for preschool.
Instead, the state’s early childhood education system is made up of a patchwork of school district programs, state-funded private preschools, and even community programs that require parent participation. Each carries different funding streams and eligibility requirements.
While Delaware government distributes dollars to K-12 schools based on the number of students enrolled, school districts only receive such funding for their preschool programs for special education students. Preschool students who do not have disabilities do not generate those state dollars.
Although they do not receive funding for students without disabilities, school districts still maintain inclusion targets with the Delaware Department of Education that encourage students with disabilities’ participation in regular early childhood programs.
To meet those targets and enroll more students without disabilities, some school districts have used lottery systems for their preschool programs.
One of those is the Cape Henlopen School District. Audrey Dempsey, supervisor of Elementary Education and Early Learning at the district, said she often receives phone calls from families of students without a disability trying to find a spot in the preschool program. But frequently none are available if the family has not secured one through the lottery.
“It’s very difficult to hear their stories and then say, ‘I’m sorry we don’t have space,’ or ‘We don’t have a slot for you at this time,’” she said.
As a result, Dempsey said some families try to get their children evaluated for disabilities to help their chances of being enrolled in their district’s preschool.
“Even though it’s a random lottery, you receive phone calls of, ‘Please, what can I do? I really need this for my child,’” Dempsey said. “Some try the evaluation route…they want support and resources for their children.”
Preschools outside of school districts
Preschools that are not operated by school districts can also partner with the Delaware Department of Education and receive state funding.
The State Funded Early Care and Education Partners program provide services for eligible families of infants, toddlers, and 3 -and 4-year-olds.
Those partners include a range of preschool providers in the state, such as the Kingswood Community Center in Wilmington and the Dover Boys and Girls Club.
The Kingswood Community Center is a lifeline in Wilmington’s Riverside community, offering preschool and childcare services for families. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Families are eligible to apply if their income is equal to or below the federal poverty level, if they have children in foster care, if they’re a family with children experiencing homelessness, or if they’re a family with children with documented delays or disabilities.
Private preschools typically receive funding through tuition paid by families, but can also receive specific federal or state grants.
Is financial assistance available?
Many families expressed to Spotlight Delaware their concerns regarding the high cost of preschool programs. Some parents said they feel like they work simply to pay for their children’s preschool.
But there are some programs that qualifying families can look toward for financial assistance.
Eligible families can then choose from centers that accept Purchase of Care payments, and the state will use available funds to reimburse the provider.
Head Start and Early Head Start programs both support eligible children from low-income families, children with disabilities, and children experiencing homelessness from birth until they enter kindergarten. Early Head Start programs offer services to pregnant women as well.
Some preschool providers also partner with the Delaware Early Childhood Center’s Early Childhood Assistance Program (ECAP). Under the federally funded program, qualifying families have access to preschool for children ages 3 through 5 years old.
What are the pre-K options?
While Delaware does not have universal pre-K, the state Department of Education does provide a list of state-funded private programs that partner with its Office of Early Learning.
Families can also choose to enroll their children in cooperative homeschool groups, which allow parents to take a role in their child’s education.
Instructors often lead these classes, but parents stay on site with their children and participate in activities.
Finally, the following school districts operate preschool programs:
The loss of protections for Haitian and Syrian workers could worsen shortages of nurses, aides and home care workers
The Trump administration may remove the temporary protected status (TPS) of Haitians and Syrians in the US, the US supreme court ruled in late June – a move that will worsen America’s growing caregiver shortage, experts say.
The US is now experiencing its fastest increase in the ageing population in more than 100 years, and more than 20% of the US population will be 65 or older by 2030. But the population of caregivers has not grown at the same pace, leading to staffing shortages.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware does not have universal pre-K, which is publicly funded preschool for 3- to 5-year-olds. As a result, many parents look to local licensed preschool centers or their school districts to help prepare their children for kindergarten. But some parents say access to high-quality preschool is limited and often too expensive.
Ashley Mitchell, a mother of six children who lives in Delmar, has been searching for preschool for two of her children for more than two years.
When she began her search, she was turned away from nearby preschool programs because they would not accept children under 4 years old. She has a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old, and she says both are ready for preschool.
Mitchell later crossed the state line into Maryland where she finally found a Head Start program in Salisbury, Maryland. But she learned there were separate locations for each of her children because they were not in the same age group.
Logistically, it was a nightmare, Mitchell said, because her family would have to make stops at two different locations while fitting it all into work schedules.
Left with no feasible option, Mitchell instead decided to hire a Salisbury University professor to work as a nanny. It was a solution, but only a short-term one, she said. The nanny will go back to the university at the start of the fall semester.
In all, Mitchell called the ongoing search for childcare “a huge disruption.” The lack of access creates frustration for the family, she said.
“If you have multiple children, it’s like there’s almost no point of even working if you have to pay for school, because you would literally just be working just to pay for preschool,” she said.
Because of her ongoing search, Mitchell has considered an alternative. Using her background in education, she plans to open her own at-home preschool and create her own curriculum.
Mitchell’s struggle with trying to find an affordable, high-quality preschool near her home is not unique.
Multiple families spoke to Spotlight Delaware about what they said was a lack of adequate and affordable preschools throughout the state. Many also pointed toward an inability to take their children to preschool because the centers did not provide transportation and the hours interfered with work schedules.
All of the parents stressed they wanted to make the choice that would best prepare their children for kindergarten. But that was often an elusive one.
“Your children are some of the most important people in your life, and when you can’t find stability for them because of the lack of access, it creates frustration,” Mitchell said.
Delmar mom Ashley Mitchell poses for a photo with her family. | PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHLEY MITCHELL
Balancing work and play-based learning
Tuition for preschools in Delaware vary depending on the facility. Some families may pay over $300 per week, while others may pay closer to $100.
That translates to potentially more than $14,000 a year in some places, or about 16% of Delaware’s median gross household income.
Those hefty costs can then double for parents with multiple children enrolled in a preschool.
And even while in preschool, the facility’s hours can interfere with working hours, some parents said.
Preschool operating hours can be a dealbreaker for some parents considering whether to enroll their children.
Michael Brennan, a parent within the Red Clay Consolidated School District, said he pays $575.50 per week for his two children to attend their daycare. Although his family would be able to save some money if the oldest child attended the school district’s preschool, Brennan and his wife did not consider applying because of the operating hours.
Preschool students look for signs of spring in a school garden. | PHOTO COURTESY OF ALL4ED
When no transportation is provided, parents need to find a way to bring their children to the district’s preschool without disrupting their own traditional workdays.
“How does a working family, two people who are working with kids, say, ‘OK, yeah, we can get them there at 9 and pick them up at 3 without other arrangements?’” Brennan said.
Brennan and his wife ultimately chose to have his 4-year-old daughter remain in her daycare, which has its own preschool teacher, for another year until she is ready for kindergarten.
‘Go to work to pay for daycare’
Other Delaware families have had to re-evaluate whether it is really feasible for both parents to work full-time.
When DeJ’a Crippen started looking at preschools near Georgetown for her infant daughter, Raina, she quickly realized few centers would provide services for a 1-year-old.
Crippen said the family was able to find some preschools that would offer services to 2-year-olds, but was told there was a nearly eight-month-long waitlist. Many of those preschools were too expensive, she said.
Crippen said her family is trying to apply to affordable preschools, despite the long waitlists. For now, she has enrolled Raina in a part-time, at-home daycare.
Like Brennan and Mitchell, Crippen noted that daycare is another hefty expense for her family, even with only one child.
“It would be nice to work full-time, but I do feel like working full-time and having her daycare full-time, you just go to work to pay for daycare,” Crippen said.
Still, Crippen said she hopes to enroll Raina in a preschool as soon as availability opens up when she is 2 or 3 years old because she wants her daughter to be as prepared for kindergarten as possible.
‘I thought it was just me’
Meesha Rawley’s son started daycare when he was 1 year old.
Three years later, Rawley said she feels at a “crossroads” between deciding whether to keep her son at his daycare or send him to a faith-based preschool program that would be more strict than what he is used to.
Rawley lives in the Capital School District and feels her only options for preschool, aside from daycares that also offer it, are private centers that she believes would cost her family more.
While faith is important to her family, Rawley said she does not believe it belongs in his school.
Still, she had to determine what would be the best fit for her son, and what would prepare him the most for kindergarten.
“[Children] don’t come with handbooks, so it’s all up to us to figure it out,” she said.
Rawley is not the only parent who has considered enrolling their child in a faith-based program, despite not wanting religion in the classroom.
Although her daughter turns 5 this year, Alli Watkins was unable to enroll her in the Red Clay Consolidated School District’s preschool program. Instead, Watkins’ daughter will remain in her daycare center’s preschool class at a local church.
Watkins, like Rawley, did not want her daughter’s education to be in a religious setting but decided the center was the best option for her family.
Since she has been enrolled, Watkins said her daughter has learned important information like her full name and address, and has also started learning how to read and understand basic math lessons.
While Watkins is confident in the daycare’s ability to prepare her daughter for kindergarten, she said the overall process was frustrating and isolating.
“I thought it was just me experiencing this confusion and frustration in navigating how to get my child into an early childhood education center,” she said.
The president is behaving as if the battleground is the same, but it isn’t. Iran has leverage and knows it
And so to war. Again. After a ceasefire and a hiatus, Donald Trump is now into the second day of a new phase of bombing Iran, with the US military claiming to have struck 170 Iranian targets in the past 48 hours.
This is no surprise. Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara this week, Donald Trump said he believed the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was “over”. He described Iran’s leaders as “evil, sick people” and threatened renewed military action and even a new blockade of Iranian ports, while also leaving the door open to further negotiations.
The plane that French team used after match with Paraguay flew 44 deportation-related flights this year alone
The French men’s national soccer team, whose star Kylian Mbappé is one of the world’s most outspoken athletes against far-right politicians, has been using a charter airplane company that is at the heart of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Images of the team posted on social media and flight tracking data show the French team have used Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX) for at least three domestic flights between their World Cup games and base camp in Boston. That same airline charter company has operated more than half of ICE’s removal flights in 2024 and 2025.
The government agency that collects property taxes in Puerto Rico inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of approximately 1 million people, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and ProPublica learned.
It was the latest cybersecurity lapse for the Puerto Rico government, which in the past three years has seen technology breaches interrupt government services, take websites offline and lead to citizens’ personal information being published on the dark web.
CPI and ProPublica became aware of the vulnerability related to the Municipal Revenue Collection Center’s interactive property map, known as the Catastro Digital, and notified the agency in mid-June.
The online tool provides information, such as size, boundaries, tax assessment, sale price and owner’s name, for every registered property on the island.
While a simple search of the map wouldn’t reveal sensitive information, anyone who understands how websites request data could download unprotected personal information such as Social Security numbers without a username or password.
The news organizations were able to verify the security hole and provided the agency, known by its Spanish initials, CRIM, with a detailed description of the issue that included the specific server and folders that contained the compromised data.
Despite the notification, CRIM has repeatedly denied there were any problems with its system.
“Following a review of the Catastro Digital platform, it was determined that there was NO breach of confidential personal taxpayer information, as the Catastro Digital does NOT contain or display the type of information alluded to,” CRIM Executive Director Javier García Cintrón said.
But a few days after CPI and ProPublica contacted CRIM, the news organizations were able to see that the security holes had been patched.
García denied that, saying there was no need to fix any problem. A Puerto Rico law requires any entity, including government agencies, to promptly notify users if their personal information has been breached. But García said the agency would not reach out to users to tell them that their Social Security numbers were potentially exposed, as “no protected information was at risk.”
CRIM also did not notify the Puerto Rico Innovation & Technology Service, known as PRITS, which oversees all government information technology systems. The government’s cybersecurity protocol requires informing PRITS of “any suspected security incident.”
A PRITS spokesperson declined to answer questions and said they had to be submitted under Puerto Rico’s public information law, which is meant to allow citizens to get government records and not to answer press questions.
So far this year, more than 2 million attempted cyberattacks have been recorded within the Puerto Rico government, PRITS data shows. Half of these were deemed critical incidents, which involve “severe impact on critical operations, the compromise of sensitive data, or an imminent threat to agency security or government data,” according to the agency.
In March, citizens saw their driver’s license and registration appointments postponed after an attempted cyberattack on Transportation Department systems. Last year, Puerto Rico residents could not verify their criminal record status, which they need for employment, for almost a week because of an “unauthorized access” to the local Justice Department’s criminal records database. In 2023, Puerto Rico water utility clients and employees saw their personal information published on the dark web after a ransomware attack.
An increase in attacks prompted Puerto Rico lawmakers in 2024 to approve a comprehensive cybersecurity law, Act 40, which mandated all government agencies implement minimum cybersecurity standards and principles. It also established penalties for noncompliance and required all government agencies to conduct a risk assessment at least once annually.
But three cybersecurity experts said agencies have failed to fully implement the security standards set out under the law, even as attacks become more frequent and sophisticated. Instead of periodically assessing and tackling vulnerabilities that prevent these attacks, agencies are reactive, they said.
A Puerto Rico Inspector General Office report released late last year found deficiencies across 90 local government agencies, with 60% of them failing to conduct vulnerability assessments of their IT systems.
The government would be in “much better shape” if it focused on employee training and implemented tools like multifactor authentication on the front end, said Carlos Pérez, a cybersecurity expert in Puerto Rico who is director of security intelligence at TrustedSec, a company that consults with governments and private companies.
“We are addressing the symptom but not the disease,” he said.
In most cases, the cybersecurity law falls short of requiring unified standards across the government, said a former government IT employee, who asked not be named because he feared professional repercussions. That lack of a single set of standards has allowed agencies to decide on their own how they protect personal data.
García explained that, as part of CRIM’s security measures, the agency uses passwords, usernames and text messages to validate identity. He denied that anyone could access the Catastro Digital database without a password except to conduct individual searches through the public website.
The ability to access Social Security numbers through CRIM’s property map raises concerns given the proliferation of private companies that sell Puerto Rico real estate information, obtained from public databases such as Catastro Digital. Any of those companies could have accessed the data, including personal information.
At least three property listings companies contacted by CPI and ProPublica said they were not aware of any vulnerability and did not access the sensitive data.
Sony’s decision last week to quietly announce the end of physical games production for the PlayStation in 2028 is one of the most perfect PR disasters in recent gaming history – and considering what has been happening with Xbox, that’s saying something.
First, there was the timing. Sony posted the news of its decision on the PlayStation blog, less than a week after admitting that it would be deleting 550 movies from the digital libraries of PlayStation owners due to the end of a licensing deal – thereby perfectly illustrating the dangers of purchasing digital products. (Surprise! You never actually owned them!) The move is in stark contrast with the company’s stance on this very issue back in 2013. When Microsoft was attempting to push Xbox One as a digital-first console with strict controls on the sharing and reselling of its games, Sony brilliantly mocked its rival with a short video on how easy it was to lend physical games to pals on the PS4. Oh dear.
The U.S. began a second night of strikes Wednesday and Iran responded in kind after President Trump declared earlier in the day that the ceasefire was "over."
Local media in Hengzhou report king ratsnakes and cobras among hundreds in flood waters caused by typhoon Maysak
Hundreds of snakes, including cobras, have escaped from flooded breeding farms in southern China as severe storms continue to batter parts of the country.
State media reported that a snake farm in Hengzhou, in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, was hit by flood waters after days of heavy rainfall caused by typhoon Maysak, prompting warnings for nearby residents.
The opposition leader has also dismissed concerns about Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle’s claim that an elderly person died as a result of the outage on Wednesday, after South Australian police initially said they were unaware of any such death.
With the World Cup down to eight teams, our writers assess who’s left, identify the biggest remaining threats to France and make calls on who will lift the trophy
Lionel Messi. As he proved in thrilling style against Egypt, Argentina’s No 10 still has magic in his boots even at the age of 39. While his penalty record of four from eight attempts is much worse than you’d expect, he is clinical when it matters most. EA
A new study proposes using shoebox-sized detector satellites to sniff out nuclear weapons launched by adversary nations. The idea is aimed at addressing fears that a space-based nuclear detonation could destroy satellites across low Earth orbit and make some orbits unusable for years. Space.com shares the findings from a new paper authored by Areg Danagoulian, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: No reliable way currently exists to detect and defuse a nuclear bomb in space. Danagoulian proposes a constellation of small "9U" cubesats, each one about the size of a large shoebox and each carrying a special detector capable of sensing radiation emitted by unexploded nuclear bombs. He explores a scenario in which Russia launches a suspected space nuke into an orbit with an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km). That number is not random. In 2022, Russia's Kosmos 2553 satellite, orbiting at that exact altitude, triggered suspicions it might be testing components for a future orbital nuclear weapon.
Russia claims the satellite just observes Earth. At that altitude, the satellite passes through the Van Allen belt, a region of intense cosmic radiation trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Most of the belt stretches between altitudes of around 600 miles (1,000 km) to tens of thousands of miles, but in some areas the radiation can reach much closer to Earth's surface. The interaction between the fissile material inside the nuke and the energetic particles from the radiation belt would create distinct signatures, Danagoulian said, which could help confirm whether a suspicious satellite carries a nuke or not.
"The thermonuclear weapon would contain a significant amount of uranium," Danagoulian said. "The high-energy protons [in the uranium] would break up when another proton is coming in and shred the nuclei. That would knock out a large number of neutrons. This interaction turns that device into a very intense neutron source that otherwise would not be there." he process is known as proton-induced neutron spallation, which essentially means the ejection of fragments from material triggered by impacts of protons. The detector satellite Danagoulian proposes would have to be able to get quite close to the suspect spacecraft -- a few kilometers.
The inspector spacecraft would carry a sensor combining two types of detectors. At the heart of the device is a neutron scintillator, which detects all incoming neutrons and protons. Around it is a "cage of diamond" detector that detects only neutrons -- not protons. Such a set-up helps filter out the particles present in the environment naturally, said Danagoulian. In addition, by using two "planes of neutron detectors," the sensor can determine the direction from which the neutrons arrived. "If the external diamond detector triggers and gives a signal, you can ignore the particle, because it's most likely a proton and not a neutron," said Danagoulian. "Once you identify those neutrons, by having those two detections, you can back project and find out where the neutron came from."
Danagoulian says such a nuke sniffer would have to be launched into an orbit aligned with that of the suspicious satellite and creep up as close as 2.5 miles (4 km) from it. It would then take about a week to gather enough measurements to confirm whether the object is hiding a nuke or not. A constellation of 10 such satellites could reduce the process to mere hours, Danagoulian said. If a nuke were detected, the military could then try to jam the satellite's communications link from the ground, making it impossible for the adversary to remotely detonate the bomb. There is currently no technology available to safely defuse a nuclear weapon in space. [...] Danagoulian also suggests that high-grade radiation hardening could improve satellites' chances of surviving a nuclear winter in space. The paper has been published in the journal Nature.
The family says the man was walking along the beach picking up discarded fireworks and other trash when he picked up what they described as a "bomb-like device" that unexpectedly exploded.
Low-emissivity windows also keep houses warm in winter, but use on bowed glass can have magnifying-glass effect
Low-emissivity or low-E window glass is a useful green technology for keeping buildings warm in winter and cool in summer … but a rare side-effect can set the neighbours’ property on fire.
The glass is coated with a thin layer of metal or metal oxide which lets visible light through but acts like a mirror in the infrared. Heat from the interior is reflected back in, retaining warmth in winter, while unwanted solar radiation is repelled in summer.
The City of Newark is considering new rules that would require new residential and commercial buildings to be built with electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
Western Europe has been scorched by its hottest June on record, scientists have said, as the UK enters its third heatwave of the year and wildfires ravage France and Spain.
Inflamed by carbon pollution, the deadly June heatwave helped push surface air temperatures for the region 3.06C above their average from recent decades, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water.
While regulators have focused on reining in Pfas in water, the chemicals are widely used throughout the food system, and there was hope that the agency under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously. Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone. [...] The November 2023 petition called on the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in a range of produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread. The agency did not respond within the six-month timeframe required by law, but TEJTF scaled back its petition in 2025 to ask the agency to set advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos, two of the most common and dangerous Pfas compounds, in seafood and milk.
Recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, while independent milk testing found it in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands. The FDA rejected the revised petition, stating it plans to take action on setting standards for Pfas, and there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said it plans to set less non-binding "action levels" that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. "Tolerance levels," or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.
The meltdown in Maine’s Senate race risks the Democrats’ opportunity to turn Trump into a lame duck president.
Two years ago Democrats had one job: stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House. It was the only thing that mattered, but with breathtaking political malpractice, they imploded.
This November Democrats have two jobs: win the House of Representatives and win the Senate to turn Trump into a lame duck president for his final two years. But once again the party, fond of warning that the stakes are existential, is in grave danger of blowing it.
July 8, 2026 — ISC High Performance 2026 began in the midst of a European heatwave. On Sunday, the first conference attendees could already be spotted around the CCH Congress Center in a mix of summer wear and business dress. Over the coming days, their number would grow to more than 3,500. Waiting for them were around 200 exhibitors and a highly diverse conference program. From Monday to Friday, the CCH was a constant hive of activity – fortunately in well air-conditioned halls.
The JSC team at ISC26. Copyright: Jülich Supercomputing Centre / Forschungszentrum Jülich
As in previous years, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre was impossible to miss. The updated JUPITER stood in the foyer prominently showcasing the milestone Jülich had reached since last year’s ISC: Exascale has arrived to Europe.
TOP500 Confirms: JUPITER Remains No. 1 in Europe
Since SC25, the North American counterpart to ISC, JUPITER has been one of the few supercomputers worldwide capable of delivering at least one exaFLOP of computing performance per second – and the first to do so in Europe. The TOP500 list, announced at ISC, confirmed its position: fifth in the world, first in Europe and, moreover, the most energy-efficient system in its performance class.
The striking lightning-bolt logo at the JSC booth was an even greater eye-catcher this year, drawing numerous visitors together with a range of exhibits and interactive tools. Conversations got underway almost immediately, revealing early on just how strong the interest is in the new scientific and technological opportunities opened up by JUPITER and in the future of modern HPC infrastructures. The focus was less on the system’s technical specifications (along the lines of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second) than on the question of how the exceptional performance of an exascale computer can be put to practical use. Topics such as cooling and energy efficiency, memory concepts, scaling large applications across multi-superchip systems, as well as distributed GPU computing and communication between nodes shaped the discussions at the stand throughout the conference.
A Common Thread Throughout ISC: Hybrid Computing Infrastructures
The other areas of the stand were equally popular, including the LLview monitor, which displayed the utilization of all computing systems, including JUPITER, in real time. Once visitors arrived, they tended to stay – there was plenty to discuss. One topic in particular stood out: how high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing can be brought together in shared infrastructures. This common thread ran throughout the entire ISC – from the exhibition floor and conference program to the many networking opportunities.
At the joint GCS stand, the JSC area once again quickly became a focal point for anyone interested in quantum computing, just as it did last year. Numerous technical discussions with visitors from academia and industry, as well as with partners including D-Wave, Pasqal, eleQtron and IQM, revolved around the future of hybrid HPC and quantum infrastructures, technological innovations and the new opportunities for collaboration they create. The new “Meet the Expert” format, which allowed visitors to strike up informal conversations directly at the stand, was also very well received.
JSC at ISC: Active Across Three Exhibition Stands and the Conference Program
At the EuroHPC stand, JSC contributed to a range of European HPC, AI and quantum computing initiatives. JSC Director Kristel Michielsen provided insights into the European quantum projects HPCQS and QEC4QEA while placing them in the broader context of current developments in quantum computing, particularly with regard to Jülich’s quantum computing infrastructure, JUNIQ. Other JSC colleagues presented the JUPITER AI Factory (JAIF) as well as new initiatives such as HPC-TRAIN.
One highlight that easily went unnoticed was the NHR Sofa Talk, “Teaching with Quantum Computers”. Held amidst the bustle of the exhibition directly in front of the NHR stand, it almost felt like a spontaneous gathering. JSC Director Thomas Lippert succeeded in creating an open yet focused atmosphere by actively involving the panelists in the discussion. For the audience, this created the impression of an immediate and engaging exchange between experts that remains memorable.
A Broad Range of Contributions to the Conference Program
Close to the exhibition area, JSC experts contributed their expertise to numerous workshops, poster sessions and community formats. Topics ranged from HPC software and infrastructures to sustainability, emerging architectures, quantum computing and AI. Across BoFs, workshops and poster sessions, key questions shaping today’s HPC landscape came into focus – from user support and software to system architectures, scientific applications and innovative hybrid infrastructures.
JSC colleagues in action. Copyright: Jülich Supercomputing Centre / Forschungszentrum Jülich
Within the System Architecture & Hardware Components track, Estela Suarez played a key role as Area Chair. She organized an invited session on on-chip networks and chairs the panel “Advanced Memory Architecture“, where experts from academia and industry discussed current developments and challenges in future HPC system architectures. The BoF “A European HPC Ecosystem for AI: Challenges and Opportunities“, featuring among others Mathis Bode, was equally well received, providing ample opportunity to discuss how new user communities can be reached, services made more visible and the distinct profiles of the AI Factories further strengthened.
The BoF “Rethinking HPC User Support for the AI and Exascale Era“, organized for the first time by Thomas Breuer and Ilya Zhukov, attracted a particularly large audience and developed into a lively discussion on the future of user support. Sebastian Achilles’ EESSI session – following his tutorial on the same topic earlier in the week – also drew considerable interest.
In the field of quantum computing, the BoF “Quantum Classical Hybridization: Where Quantum Fits in the Continuum“, led by Carlos Gonzalez, highlighted the strong interest in hybrid HPC and quantum approaches. The discussion focused in particular on questions of integration and scheduling concepts.
Beyond these sessions, the JSC program reflected the breadth of the conference as a whole. Contributions on emerging architectures such as RISC-V, the continued development of the JUNIQ infrastructure, benchmarking approaches and the design of future HPC and AI infrastructures – including work related to the JUPITER AI Factory – complemented the program and addressed many of the key topics shaping the future of the field.
Meeting Tomorrow’s Challenges Together
By the end of ISC, one thing was clear: JSC left with many of the same questions from the start. What will the future of scientific computing look like? What roles will exascale systems, artificial intelligence and quantum computing play, and how can these technologies be combined to create powerful, future-ready research infrastructures?
After a week of intensive discussions, valuable insights and rewarding exchanges with partners from academia and industry, one conclusion stood out: these questions can only be answered together. JSC left Hamburg with some answers already in hand – and with many new ideas and impulses for the future. Thank you, ISC26, for once again providing a vibrant forum for discussion, collaboration and exchange, and for demonstrating just how essential both professional and personal interaction remain for the HPC community.
Late on Wednesday Iranian state media reported explosions in the port city of Bandar Abbas in the strait of Hormuz; in Sirik, another southern coastal city; and the south-western Bushehr province, home to Iran’s nuclear-power-plant complex.
Wednesday’s strikes against Iran expected to be greater in number than those carried out on Tuesday, an unnamed U.S. official told Reuters.
Sahar, a 34-year-old teacher in Tehran who uses only one name to protect her identity, said the latest attacks have left families worried about new strikes on the residential areas. “Every night we remain alert, in fear, and charge our phones, keep our packed bags near the doors, and sleep lightly because we do not know when we will have to rush and leave the house,” she said. “People here are tired and fed up; we want peace, dignity, and a normal life, not another unending war decided over our heads.”
Meena, a 29-year-old graphic designer, said the fresh strikes have deepened a sense of uncertainty among young Iranians already struggling with economic crisis and limited freedoms. “My generation has grown up with sanctions, protests, internet shutdowns, and now missiles,” she said. “We are not statistics. We are people trying to work, study, love, and plan a future, but every crisis pushes that future further away.”
I’ve been looking to purchase my first One Wheel. Been looking at the used market but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. My concern is not being able to cruise my neighborhood without technical breaking the law.
I’m in South Jersey. Has anyone had an issue with THE LAW while riding? Are the Police enforcing?
During a bilateral meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Nato summit in Ankara, Donald Trump was asked about Iran, and he repeated his earlier criticism.
On Wednesday, while speaking to reporters alongside Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Trump said that memorandum of understanding signed last month by the US and Iran is “over”, in the wake of the latest strikes.
Works fine, have about 35 miles on it. Just use it to and from work. Left it fully charged, off the charger for about 2 months with out use. Now it just flashes yellow. Everything i see for troubleshooting says my im depressing the foot pads when I turn it on, try again. Zero helpful answers. Has literally been sitting in my closet for 2 months. So I booted up the app. Zero help there just a firmware update. Figured that might fix it. Nope. No water damage. Very light use.
Request for rehearing comes after Fox News report of Texas hospital advertising maternity services in Mexico
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask the US supreme court to reconsider its ruling that the 14th amendment to the US constitution guarantees birthright citizenship in light of what he described as shocking new evidence: a hospital in Texas advertising its services to expectant mothers in Mexico on a pair of billboards.
“Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, with ‘Deliveries starting at $4000’, the president wrote on his social media platform, in what appeared to be a wild exaggeration of a Fox News report on just two billboards.
I (260lb urban street cruiser) just picked up a Pint S (for Grandkids) and immediately modified it with the S-series motor (for Grandpa), I always liked the Pint 😂.
But, it reminded me, does anyone else wish FM had put the charge port on the same side as the carry handle? So that it could more easily be laid on the floor, charge port up, ready to plug in? Seems like a functional miss to me.
Prosecutors revealed that the roommate of the man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk was given "use immunity" in exchange for providing recorded video statements to investigators about the case.
The U.S. military launched another round of strikes against Iran late Wednesday night, U.S. Central Command said, in the second night of attacks as diplomacy between the two countries appears to collapse.
Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, has been accused of trying to influence the process of picking his replacement as frustration mounts that he has not yet withdrawn from the race.
Platner has publicly said he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denied, was published on Monday.
Foreign affairs select committee says Peter Mandelson episode was ‘nothing short of disastrous’ for government
Political selections for ambassador posts should be subject to a veto by MPs, a parliamentary committee has recommended, as it made damning criticisms of how Peter Mandelson became Britain’s top diplomat in Washington.
The foreign affairs select committee concluded that Mandelson’s appointment was “nothing short of disastrous”, “highly damaging” for the British government and “painful and offensive to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein”.
Interim report into Pip found process had systematic and deep-rooted problems and required bold and radical overhaul
A landmark government review of disability benefits has warned “challenging discussions” remain on how to overhaul and pay for a system it concludes is unfit for purpose and too often leaves vulnerable claimants dehumanised and degraded.
The Timms review of the personal independence payment (Pip) concluded the benefit, claimed by nearly 4 million people in England and Wales, suffered from systematic and deep-rooted problems that had undermined public trust in the benefits system.
Ethics and integrity commission chief says overhaul is crucial to help restore trust in standards
All lobbying of government ministers, aides and senior officials should be publicly declared – from WhatsApp chats to party conference meetings – in a fundamental shake-up of transparency laws, the government’s ethics watchdog has said.
A review led by Doug Chalmers, the head of the ethics and integrity commission, has called for a new register to highlight who is lobbying, which policies they are seeking to influence and who in government they are meeting.
Ministers also considering licence requirement and regulator to try to cut bills and increase choice
UK vets may have to have a licence and cap prescriptions for pet medicine at £21 under plans being considered by the government.
Ministers are also considering establishing a regulator for the veterinary sector, including inspections, a mandatory licensing system and published compliance reports to improve accountability and choice. Every vet practice could need an official operating licence – similar to GP surgeries and care homes – under proposals in a white paper.
Telstra customers are still having trouble calling triple zero on Thursday morning as the telecommunications giant confirmed a secondary issue stemming from Wednesday’s national outage continued to impact calls.
Some who tried to call the emergency hotline were receiving an error message and their phones would try to connect to an alternative network, Telstra said.
oumuamua writes: Anthropic researchers have identified an internal activation subspace, J-space, that acts as a functional digital equivalent to the human brain's global workspace. The significance of this discovery lies in demonstrating that Claude's internal architecture satisfies five key cognitive properties of human conscious access -- verbal report, directed modulation, internal reasoning, flexible generalization, and selectivity -- meaning it processes complex, deliberate reasoning within this workspace while routing automatic tasks outside of it. Suppressing this J-space severely degrades Claude's capacity for inference, creative composition, and multi-step logic, while also altering its stream-of-consciousness self-narration.
The tool to inspect J-space, Jacobian lens or J-lens, has profound implications for AI safety and alignment auditing, as it allows researchers to read the model's silent, strategic reasoning, detect situational awareness in "blackmail" scenarios, identify hidden malicious dispositions in reward-hacking models, and observe how post-training installs a self-monitoring "point of view."
Another way to think of it is as an ocean, reports VentureBeat. "If the mind is an ocean, as the paper's authors write in their opening line, they have spent the last year charting its currents in a system that has no biology, no evolution, and no body -- and found, beneath the surface, a structure that looks unsettlingly like the one we use to think."
A member of a federal crime-fighting task force in Memphis shot and killed a man there on Wednesday, the second fatal shooting by a task force member in four days.
MAISONS-LAFFITTE, France, July 8, 2026 – The European consortium ÆTHER today unveiled the composition of its founding members and announced its application for the European Commission’s forthcoming AI Gigafactory call for proposals, to be launched as part of the EU’s digital and industrial sovereignty strategy.
Bringing together leading European players in energy, construction, cloud computing, semiconductors, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence, ÆTHER pursues a clear ambition: to demonstrate that Europe possesses all the expertise required to design, build, power, operate, and scale AI infrastructure.
Two Sites for a European AI Gigafactory Project
AETHER Infrastructures, the project company behind the initiative, announced that it has entered into highly advanced negotiations to acquire two industrial sites in the Strasbourg region, which are intended to host AI computing facilities.
Already equipped with the required infrastructure and administrative approvals, the first data center, FR-SXB1, is expected to begin operations during 2027, subject to the completion of the site’s acquisition by the end of October 2026. FR-SXB2 is expected to follow a few months later, subject to the completion of its acquisition by the end of December 2026.
With a phased deployment, the two sites will initially provide a combined electrical capacity of 42 MW. Within 12 months of commissioning, the objective is to secure an additional 40 MW of electrical capacity across both sites.
The long-term ambition is to reach a total electrical capacity of more than 400 MW, subject to grid availability and the proposals of RTE, France’s electricity transmission system operator, which are currently under review and are expected by the end of July 2026 for FR-SXB1.
Located in the heart of Europe, in close proximity to the European institutions and at the center of the Rhine economic corridor, this dual-campus project is intended to become one of the most advanced artificial intelligence infrastructures on the European continent.
More than an AI Gigafactory, ÆTHER aims to develop a European industrial model that integrates high-performance computing, sovereign cloud services, energy recovery, scientific research, industrial innovation, and regional development.
The Project Is Built Around Five Core Commitments
The first commitment is to ensure a net zero land take policy through the use of existing industrial sites.
Nhood is an international real estate solutions operator committed to urban regeneration. It supports property owners, public authorities, and investors in the sustainable transformation of their assets and communities through an integrated services platform that develops mixed-use, value-creating projects rooted in local development dynamics. Founded in 1861. Demathieu Bard is a leading independent construction and real estate group operating in France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and North America. Equans is a global leader in the energy and services sector, with expertise in the design, installation, maintenance, and operation of multi-technical facilities, including electrical and thermal engineering systems and digital solutions, will build and maintain campuses capable of restoring a productive purpose to existing sites while limiting the environmental impact of these new digital infrastructures.
The second commitment focuses on the reindustrialization of Europe’s high-performance computing value chain.
2CRSi is a European manufacturer of high-performance servers and an Elite Partner of NVIDIA and AMD. Axelera AI is a global leader in AI inference platforms, with its headquarters and engineering operations based in Europe. SiPearl is a European fabless designer of high-performance, low-power CPUs for supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and sovereign data centers, and the consortium’s future technology partners, will contribute to the deployment of tens of thousands of processors and accelerators dedicated to the training and inference of artificial intelligence models. The consortium also intends to provide privileged access to emerging European technologies in order to accelerate their large-scale adoption.
The third commitment is to achieve low-carbon energy across all consortium sites planned in Alsace as an initial step, with the support of the following partners.
ÉS Group (Électricité de Strasbourg), the leading regional multi-energy provider and a mission-driven company, is committed to strengthening the competitiveness, electrification, and decarbonization of the Alsace region through its wide range of energy activities. Socomec is a French family-owned industrial group specializing in the availability and performance of critical electrical power systems. Projex is a French multidisciplinary engineering and critical infrastructure company, specializing in the design and delivery of data centers, as well as in energy performance and building decarbonization. Haffner Energy designs and supplies solutions for the production of electricity, renewable gases, hydrogen, and sustainable fuels from biomass. With more than 33 years of experience, the company has developed proprietary thermolysis and gasification technologies that provide local, cost-competitive, resilient, and lowcarbon energy for critical industrial infrastructure, including data centers, will support the development of energy generation, storage, and management capabilities, as well as the design of the low-carbon infrastructure required for the project. Collectively, these partners aim to demonstrate that the growth of artificial intelligence can be successfully aligned with the energy transition.
The fourth commitment is based on ensuring full sovereignty over data and its use.
ÆTHER’s infrastructure will be operated by European companies. Viridien is a global leader in advanced technologies, digital solutions, and Earth data, pushing the boundaries of science to help build a more prosperous and sustainable future. Viridien specializes in the design, optimization, and operation of highperformance computing infrastructures for scientific computing and industrial-scale artificial intelligence. Dassault Systèmes, through its OUTSCALE Cloud & AI brand, brings to ÆTHER the expertise of a sovereign cloud operator capable of industrializing AI in critical, secure, and fully controlled environments that comply with European requirements, serving regulated organizations, and the consortium’s future partners, will contribute their respective expertise in sovereign cloud computing, simulation, scientific computing, quantum computing, and mission-critical digital services.
The fifth commitment is to fully integrate AI computing centers into their economic, academic, and regional ecosystems.
In this context, local authorities—including the Grand Est Region and the Eurometropolis of Strasbourg—have already confirmed their support and their commitment to advancing the consortium’s vision. With a strong focus on economic development and attractiveness, job creation, regional reindustrialization, sovereignty, technological excellence, they will play a vital role as key partners in the successful delivery of the ÆTHER project, including through their own future use of its capabilities.
“Artificial intelligence represents a historic opportunity for Europe’s reindustrialization. With ÆTHER, we are demonstrating that our continent already possesses all the expertise required to build its own strategic infrastructure,” said Alain Wilmouth, Chairman of 2CRSi and initiator of the consortium.
“By combining SiPearl’s high-performance processors with Axelera AI’s accelerators in 2CRSi’s high-density servers, we will deliver a complete hardware solution capable of handling the most demanding AI workloads—with the added benefit of European sovereignty. We are delighted to play an active role in the ÆTHER consortium, which confirms Europe’s essential position in the global AI race,” said Philippe Notton, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of SiPearl.
The development of ÆTHER’s first campuses already benefits from the support of leading economic and institutional stakeholders across the Grand Est region. This initial deployment represents the first step in a European network of AI Gigafactories designed to meet the needs of industry, research, healthcare, public services, and businesses across Europe.
Against a backdrop of intensifying global competition, ÆTHER is driven by a clear conviction: Europe must not only use artificial intelligence—it must also design, power, host, and operate it on its own soil.
As a candidate for the European Commission’s AI Gigafactory call for proposals, ÆTHER aims to become the starting point for a true European industrial renaissance, driven by sovereign and sustainable artificial intelligence, rooted in local territories, and designed for deployment across the European continent.
About SiPearl
SiPearl is the European fabless designer of secure high-performance energy-efficient CPUs built for sovereign HPC, AI and data centre. These CPUs will help address strategic challenges in the fields of security, defence, medical research, energy, climate and engineering with a reduced environmental footprint. Featuring 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores with 61 billion transistors, SiPearl’s first-generation CPU, Rhea1, will be released end of 2026. Sipearl’s CPUs will equip the two first European exascale supercomputers: Rhea1 will be integrated into the JUPITER machine based in Germany and Rhea2 will be part of Alice Recoque in France. Supported by the European Union and France, SiPearl employs 200 people in France, Spain, and Italy. Following a €130 million Series A, the company has launched its Series B round.
About 2CRSi
Founded in 2005 in Strasbourg, France, 2CRSi designs, develops, and manufactures high-performance computing servers and innovative solutions for artificial intelligence, high-performance computing (HPC), and data storage. Committed to responsible and sustainable practices, the Group operates across multiple continents and provides highly energy-efficient technology solutions to industries including technology, manufacturing, gaming, scientific research, and data centers. 2CRSi has been listed since June 2018 on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (ISIN code: FR0013341781) and was transferred to Euronext Growth in November 2022. For more information: https://2crsi.com.
US president unexpectedly changed plans for flight to England after using Qatari-gifted aircraft to travel to Turkey
Donald Trump flew from Turkey to England onboard the older Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than the new, Qatari-gifted aircraft he used to travel to the Nato summit in Ankara, an unexpected change in plans that prompted questions about security fears.
Trump later boarded the new plane at Mildenhall air force base in the United Kingdom for the trip back to Washington.
July 8, 2026 – Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and a leader in accelerated computing and infrastructure solutions, today announced the expansion of its GIGAPOD AI and HPC infrastructure portfolio, introducing multiple pre-configured POD solutions designed to accelerate the deployment of AI factories, AI training & inference platforms, and HPC deployments.
The expanded GIGAPOD portfolio provides organizations with a comprehensive range of AI and HPC infrastructure configurations, supporting workloads ranging from LLMs and AI-enabled VDI to Kubernetes-based containerized applications. Built on GIGABYTE server technology and integrated with industry-leading accelerators, high-speed networking, storage, and software ecosystems, GIGAPOD delivers a complete foundation for organizations seeking to operationalize AI at scale while reducing deployment complexity and operational risk.
As enterprises scale AI initiatives, they require infrastructure that can be deployed quickly, managed efficiently, and expanded seamlessly. GIGAPOD addresses these requirements through pre-configured architectures, factory integration, and deployment services, reducing the time and resources needed to bring AI infrastructure online.
Highlights of the Expanded GIGAPOD Portfolio
Multiple AI and HPC infrastructure configurations for enterprise, cloud, and service provider deployments
Scalable architectures ranging from small clusters to large multi-rack AI clusters
Integrated compute, networking, storage, power, cooling, and management capabilities
Support for LLM training, RAG, agentic AI, inference, digital twin, and HPC workloads
High-performance networking options, supporting InfiniBand and Ethernet switches
Air-cooled and liquid-cooled infrastructure options
Factory integration, deployment services, validation testing, and lifecycle support
Purpose-Built for Modern AI Factories
Each GIGAPOD configuration combines optimized compute platforms, accelerated networking, enterprise storage, and AI software into a validated solution architecture. Customers can deploy GIGAPOD for:
Foundation model training
Enterprise and agentic AI applications
Large-scale AI inference
Scientific computing and HPC
Digital twin and simulation workloads
Sovereign AI initiatives
Cloud and managed AI services
By providing pre-engineered and validated reference architectures, GIGAPOD reduces infrastructure integration effort and enables faster deployment compared to traditional build-it-yourself approaches. AI factory solutions increasingly emphasize validated, full-stack deployments to streamline the path from infrastructure installation to AI production environments.
Cluster Management
To simplify cluster operations and lifecycle management, GIGAPOD integrates GIGABYTE’s software management ecosystem, including GIGABYTE G-REX and GIGABYTE POD Manager (GPM). G-REX, in a 1U management node, provides centralized power and thermal infrastructure management of a POD, enabling administrators to have a unified interface for seamless integration of CDUs and RDHx. Via IPMI, it can alert administrators if a liquid is detected on one of the sensors throughout the system, including on motherboards, chassis, manifolds, and PDUs. For orchestration, GPM delivers advanced monitoring, provisioning, and optimization capabilities, offering real-time visibility into GPU, CPU, memory, power, and thermal utilization to help maximize performance and operational efficiency. Together, G-REX and GPM provide the management foundation required to deploy, scale, and maintain AI factories and HPC environments with greater reliability, visibility, and control.
You all donated en masse to have me use Windows 11 for a month, and so I did. What was it like for a long-time Linux user to go back and experience Windows as it exists now? Is it really as bad as we’ve collectively made it out to be? Did my month with Windows 11 consist of nothing but pain and misery, or are there good things to say, too? Or, was it an unexpected pleasant surprise? And ultimately, did I stay with Windows 11, or move back to the Linux world?
This year, I’m celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews. This is my full-time job, and since nobody is going to give me any bonuses, stock options, or golden pens, we’re running a big fundraiser to keep OSNews going. To add some spice to the whole thing, I added some incentives, with the first being using Windows 11 for a month. We’re slowly but steadily approaching the next incentive, too, which is a proper video tour of my office, (unique) computers, and massive devices collection. There’s a similar incentive to this Windows 11 one, but for macOS. Yikes.
The rules for the Windows 11 incentive are simple: use stock Windows 11 for a month for my computing tasks (with the exception of gaming – converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly). I wasn’t allowed to use any debloating tools, but as an EU citizen, I do have the ability to remove a ton of Windows stuff thanks to the success of the Digital Markets Act. I also tried to stick to Microsoft’s own applications as much as possible, for that true “ecosystem experience”, and wasn’t allowed to hack my way into a normal local user account. I was all-in.
So what was it like?
Setting it all up
The installation process posed a number of challenges and issues. First and foremost, the Windows 11 installation process is incredibly barebones, and basically assumes no other operating system exists in the world. It has no clue anything other than Windows’ filesystems exist, making it dangerously easy to accidentally damage or outright delete any other operating systems you might have installed. My laptop happens to have two M.2 SSDs in, so I could safely dedicate one of them to Windows 11 without interfering with the other SSD with Fedora installed on it, but if you’re experimenting with Windows 11 on your Linux machine with just one drive, you might want to reconsider.
I also had to perform the first portion of the installation process – the WinPE section – with just my keyboard, since apparently, my trackpad was not supported and did not work at all. Once the system went through its first of what would be many reboots to come and loaded into the phase of the installation where you’re actually already running Windows 11, my trackpad came to life, but without any gestures support – so no scrolling. Not a gamebreaker or anything, but definitely annoying.
A bigger issue was that the Wi-Fi 7 Intel BE200 chip in my laptop was not supported out of the box by Windows 11. This meant that I had to install these drivers during the installation process, which involves going to the Intel website and finding the correct drivers to use. To make this process more obtuse and less intuitive, you can’t use the normal driver installer; you have to specifically opt for the “Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software and Wi-Fi Drivers for IT Administrators“, download the ZIP, unpack it on a different computer, put the unpacked drivers on a USB stick, and point the Windows 11 installer to this USB stick.
Mind you, the BE200 chip was launched almost three years ago, and there’s no excuse for Windows 11 not supporting this chip out of the box – like Linux does.
The remainder of the installation process involved dodging a lot of tracking and telemetry prompts, reboots, a lot of waiting, setting up the dreaded online account, waiting some more, and then finally ending up at the desktop. I then set out to enjoy my EU privileges by removing whatever applications I didn’t need and turning off features I didn’t want, as well as making sure all the drivers were up to date. This mostly involved installing the Intel Driver & Support Assistant and the Intel graphics drivers. Curiously, this is where I hit a returning issue: after installing the Intel GPU drivers for the first time, as well as after every subsequent update, the screen would go black and stay that way, forcing a reboot. Windows’ graphics stack is supposed to be able to gracefully handle driver updates, but clearly, some bug or problem was preventing the updated Intel driver from being reinitialised.
Once those initial setup tasks were behind me, I experienced two more problems. First, sleep/wake was entirely broken and simply did not work. It turns out Windows 11 really doesn’t like S3 sleep, and I had to specifically go into my laptop’s Dasharo Coreboot firmware to switch to S0ix get sleep/wake to work on Windows 11. Windows defaults to something it calls “Modern Standby”, which requires the S0ix state to be enabled. You can also disable Modern Standby which would presumably make sleep/wake work with S3 (?), but this is a whole ordeal and clearly not something Microsoft wants you to do.
Of course, the correct way of handling this would be for Windows 11 to adapt its sleep/wake settings to what the firmware reports, but alas.
Another problem were the laptop’s cooling fans seemingly leading lives of their own, spinning up loudly at entirely random times, irrespective of use. It was so bad and loud I assumed the laptop was damaged somehow, and nothing I tried alleviated the issue. However, a day after installation, a massive Windows update came in that somehow fixed the issue, taming the fans back to the normal levels that I had come to expect while running Linux.
Except for one curious problem that seems to tie the fan and sleep/wake problems together: roughly one out of three sleep cycles, Windows would spin up the fans to maximum blast, for long periods of time before actually going to sleep; on some occasions, sleep would never set in at all, forcing a reboot as the screen wouldn’t come back on either. This seems to be a widely reported problem on a whole slew of different hardware configurations, so I’m assuming Windows 11 is just trash at putting devices to sleep properly.
Note that this same laptop running Fedora Linux has none of these issues; sleep/wake works perfectly every time regardless of whether Coreboot is set to S3 or S0ix, and the fans behave exactly as you’d expect.
One thing I found almost too hard to believe was that Windows 11 apparently does not natively support the “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard layout. Instead, the only option it seems to have for the “US (int’l)” keyboard layout family is the one with regular dead keys, which I personally find unusable. For those that don’t know, dead keys are when you press e.g. ', but nothing happens until you press a letter which then gets the diacritic added to it: ' followed by e will turn into é.
You might spot the problem here: you often need to use characters like ' and " as actual characters, especially when you type a lot of English, but if they function as dead keys you have to hit them twice to use them as individual characters instead. This is incredibly annoying – way more than it seems on paper – so an alternative exists: “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)”. On this keyboard layout, AltGr acts a modifier you need to press to turn certain keys into dead keys. To input é using this layout, you hit AltGr + ' followed by e.
This keyboard layout has been available as an option in every Linux installer and every desktop environment for as long as I can remember, so I never even considered it might not be available in Windows. Luckily, people have created third-party “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” layouts for Windows, so I ended up downloading this one, which works perfectly.
Input crisis averted.
I also ran into a few smaller issues. Windows’ window manager is incredibly limiting and dumb, and won’t even allow you to change things like titlebar actions. By default, double-clicking a titlebar will maximise a window, but I’m a BeOS user at heart and double-click titlebars to minimise windows (I never maximise a window). I kept accidentally maximising windows when I was trying to minimise them, which wasn’t pleasant. The fact that such basic settings virtually every operating system and desktop environment support are unavailable on Windows is indefensible.
Another pain point is Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should, and lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.
A quick non-exhaustive rundown of even more issues: Windows operating system updates are slow, cumbersome, and require way too many reboots. The Start menu desperately needs to be more customisable and adaptable to user needs. The widgets system in the taskbar is useless. The overview/Exposé feature drops frames all the time. I was never given an option to change my home folder’s name. There are way too many useless default folders in your home directory, and most of them you can’t delete (they keep automatically reappearing). Dark mode is still broken, with many dialogs and panels only available in light mode.
I also happened to run into a curious bug in Explorer where the icons in the Quick Access tab were fuzzy. No amount of troubleshooting could fix this. I admit this bothered me way more than it should.
Applications
As part of the incentive, I also wanted to experience proper Windows applications. First and foremost, this means using Microsoft Edge. Like many other browsers today – even Firefox – Edge spams you with useless “AI” nonsense you have to meticulously disable, but once you’ve done that song and dance, Edge is mostly just fine? I even felt like it did a better job of handing online video – less heat, less fan noise – than Firefox did, but I didn’t do any benchmarking or anything so I have no data to back it up.
The email situation on Windows is abysmal. You’re supposed to use the “new” Outlook, which is basically just a web application that also happens to send all your login credentials, emails, and personal information to Microsoft as a requirement before you can use it. While the irony of Gmail users complaining about this isn’t lost on me – email is not, never has been, and never will be a private medium – it’s still just unethical, unpleasant, and wholly unnecessary. To make matters worse, if you don’t have some sort of Office 365 subscription, Outlook even shows you ads. The new Outlook is just a long string of own goals before kickoff.
Nevertheless, I took my assignment seriously, and after choosing to ignore it’s just a website, after sending all my data to Microsoft, and after paying the cheapest possible Office 365 subscription offer I could find to get rid of the ads, I found that the new Outlook is, much like Edge, fine. While I’m sure it falls apart quickly for people with more advanced email needs, it handled my basic personal send-and-receive use case just fine.
If you disregard it’s a website that sends all your emails and personal information to Microsoft and that you have to pay for it even after paying for Windows itself, then yes, it is mostly fine. A ringing endorsement if there ever was one, isn’t it? This whole situation is criminal, and the clearest example of just how much Microsoft utterly despises Windows and its users. A desktop operating system needs to come with a solid, serviceable email client. I consider this non-optional.
Moving beyond Microsoft’s own applications, the application ecosystem on Windows is in a dire state. Anything developed over the last decade or so using the long list of modern frameworks and APIs Microsoft championed and subsequently abandoned is an exercise in frustration; most applications in this category are unfinished, buggy, slow and/or abandoned. Applications with more pedigree from the classic Win32 days feel outdated and out of place, but at least they tend to get the job done. The end result is an incredibly inconsistent, messy, and jarring user experience where every application clearly feels of its time, dependent on which set of frameworks and UI design philosophies Microsoft was pushing at that particular moment in time.
No two titlebars are of the same height. There are countless entirely different designs for titlebar buttons. The modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu. Win32 applications look and behave differently than WinUI 3 applications which look and behave differently than Fluent applications which look and behave differently than Metro applications which look and behave differently than – and so on. No two applications have their important UI elements in the same place, and no two applications seem to be using the same design language. Hell, Win32 UIs use completely different-looking font rendering than “modern” UIs. The word “mess” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
As someone who is used to KDE and GNOME, whose developers still take consistency in both look and behaviour quite seriously, this is the single biggest reason why using Windows 11 was such a frustrating experience for me. It’s like reading a book where every few words, the language and script randomly change. I know UI consistency has been a dirty word ever since the web and then iOS rose to prominence – I lamented the death of consistency in UI design back 2012, which is fourteen years ago! – but the situation on Windows today is particularly dire.
Managing applications is also not as nice and effortless as it is on Linux. Most of the time, you have to manually browse around and download applications (and hope they’re not malware), which use one of an endless variety of different installation wizards, and then update these manually using countless different update services running in the background. There’s also a Windows Store, but its selection is limited. On top of all that, Windows also has its own very limited and basic package manager now, but it doesn’t come with an easy-to-use graphical user interface; you have to find and download one yourself, and it seems UniGetUI is one the more popular ones. It’s a mess of an application – with its own entirely unique titlebar and buttons, as is Windows tradition – but at least it works.
Keeping track of all the individual updaters, the Windows Store, WinGet, and so on is a massive chore, and a huge regression compared to what’s been the norm in the Linux world for a very long time. Desktop Linux solved keeping applications updated decades ago. Microsoft seems to be making it worse every time they add another different application delivery and management framework.
Windows applications are also absolutely obsessed with the system tray. It seems like every single thing you install wants to bury itself in the system tray, even when they’re not actually running. Before you know it, you’ll have a long string of random icons in there competing for your attention, and each seems to operate and behave a little differently than the other. Some open their main window when you click on them once, some when you click on them twice, some open a menu, some only respond by opening a menu when you left-click on them instead.
Of course, the menus that pop up all have different designs, as is tradition.
It’s not all bad, I guess?
There were positive aspects to Windows 11, too. It’s taken them a very long time, but with most of the various settings and configuration panels now moved from the old Control Panel to the Settings application, I think the latter has come into its own quite nicely. If you ignore the various ads for Microsoft’s services – a common tactic in commercial operating systems like macOS, Windows, and iOS these days – I find it quite easy to use. There’s always going to be some arbitrariness to the organisation and hierarchy of the various settings and panels, but overall, I found things relatively easy to find, and performance didn’t seem to be an issue.
Windows 11 also has a combined emoji/symbol picker now (Super + .), negating the need to dive into the Character Map, a horrid application which basically hasn’t been meaningfully updated since Windows 3.x. There’s an actual clipboard manager in Windows too now (Super + v), and it works great as well. These are two relatively recent additions that make some of the menial tasks related to text input quite a bit more pleasant.
I really don’t have much more to add to this measly “positive vibes only” section. Like Linux, Windows 11 found and set up our crappy HP Wi-Fi printer/scanner combo thing without any issues, I guess?
Did I stay with Windows 11?
No. Of course not.
I gave it an honest-to-god try. I put in the time, work, and even some money. I was strict, didn’t allow myself to do any non-gaming tasks on Linux, and truly used Windows 11 exclusively for a month. Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.
Whether I use a KDE or GNOME desktop, things look, feel, and behave consistently. There are no ads for services I don’t want, no online accounts forced down my throat, no dark patterns to trick me into subscriptions I don’t want. Managing and updating applications and the operating system are so effortless you barely even notice it’s happening, and whether I’m using an older machine or something brand new, performance is going to be good, and consistent. Desktop Linux is also going to respect my privacy, and I don’t have to worry about data harvesting.
Windows 11 just cannot compete with any of that, and my month with Windows 11 proved that to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The senior legal counsel to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the principal military adviser to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — is stepping down nearly a year before his term is over, the latest in an exodus of the military’s top leaders and lawyers over the last 18 months.
Brig. Gen. Eric Widmar told ProPublica he did not take his decision to retire lightly and that he did so “for personal reasons.”
“Earlier this year, my wife and I reflected on the demands of this role, which have required me to live apart from my wife for the past two years and created additional challenges for me and my family,” Widmar said in an emailed statement. “After careful consideration, I decided it was time to place my family at the center of my life and focus on our next chapter together.”
Widmar’s departure follows those of Gen. Chris “C.D.” Donahue, head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, earlier this month, about halfway through the typical term; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April, about a year and a half short of the customary four-year term; and Admiral Alvin Holsey, who retired with two years remaining in his term late last year as the leader of Southern Command, which is overseeing the controversial drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Widmar’s exit also follows Hegseth’s firings of top lawyers for the Army, Air Force and Navy last year.
“A person in that position is a rising star,” said one senior ranking former judge advocate, a military attorney, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal. “He’s certainly high-ranking in the legal community and well-thought-of and trusted. It’s a pretty important job.”
Do You Know More About This Topic?
I’m still reporting. If you know more about the JAG Corps or other military legal advisers, please get in touch.
Raquel Rutledge
I’m interested in hearing from government and industry insiders working in aviation who can share their experiences and evidence of safety threats, abuses of power or other injustices. I take my sources’ confidentiality very seriously.
Military experts and current and former senior ranking military officials called Widmar’s early retirement from such a vaunted post a marked departure from military precedent and said it was especially concerning as part of a pattern of well-respected senior leadership exiting under Hegseth with little explanation. Uniformed military leadership, particularly legal advisers, generally remain in place across administrations to preserve the military’s commitment to nonpartisan professionalism.
“That is centuries of high-priced talent that are being cashiered without any explanation for why their service was untenable,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It creates a command climate in which people are hesitant to take initiative. And that’s how countries lose wars.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, said in a statement that Widmar “is deeply respected and admired by all” and thanked him for his “remarkable” service. “We will miss his legal counsel, incredible expertise and experience, and his understanding of our responsibility to always speak truth to power.”
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment from Hegseth.
Experts on military personnel matters as well as current and former senior ranking officers say the departures raise serious questions that Congress ought to be asking of all key leaders leaving in the current environment.
“What is striking is how far Congress has let Hegseth go in shaping the force without demanding a clear explanation of what he’s doing,” said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who has long taught senior ranking officers the importance of not using retirement or resignation to stir public controversy.
A West Point graduate who advised operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Widmar departs after more than 28 years in the service. Prior to his most recent role, he was staff judge advocate for Central Command in support of U.S. interests across the Middle East and Asia.
SAN FRANCISCO and SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 8, 2026 — Parasail and d-Matrix today announced Parasail is deploying d-Matrix Corsair inference accelerators alongside the NVIDIA Hopper and NVIDIA Blackwell architectures to deliver up to 10x faster, more cost-efficient inference services to its customers.
Parasail’s Corsair deployment marks one of the first commercial-scale examples of heterogeneous disaggregated inference in production, where NVIDIA AI infrastructure and d-Matrix’s purpose-built Corsair inference accelerators will operate in concert, each performing computing tasks in which they excel. Using this approach, Parasail aims to improve inference economics for select workloads by combining NVIDIA GPUs for compute-intensive prefill with d-Matrix Corsair accelerators for latency-sensitive decode.
With approvals and construction buildouts of new data centers a multi-year process, Parasail is leaning into a heterogeneous compute approach with d-Matrix to obtain even more value from the NVIDIA AI infrastructure already in its data centers. By pairing Corsair with its Hopper and Blackwell fleet, Parasail is extending fleet performance and passing the gains directly to its customers. For the developers and enterprises relying on Parasail’s platform, the result is simple: faster, more economically efficient tokens, today.
“We’re relentless about delivering the best inference performance per dollar,” said Mike Henry, founder and CEO of Parasail. “Everyone’s focused on the next GPU generation, but we run large Hopper and Blackwell fleets today and pairing them with Corsair lets us deliver our customers the edge they need while also extending the life of the hardware we’ve already deployed.”
“Parasail is proving what we’ve believed from the start: the future of inference is heterogeneous,” said Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-Matrix. “GPUs and purpose-built inference accelerators aren’t competitors; they’re better together. By deploying Corsair alongside their NVIDIA fleet, Parasail is embracing a heterogeneous inference approach designed to optimize each phase of the workload.”
The Technology Innovations Driving Maximum Efficiency
Parasail’s automatic kernel optimization technology plays a critical role in this deployment, dynamically routing workloads to the right hardware at the right time to extract maximum performance and value from each model across a heterogeneous fleet. The result is a cloud-based token service that delivers premium inference economics to Parasail’s customers at scale.
d-Matrix Corsair’s performance advantage stems from d-Matrix’s foundationally unique Digital In-Memory Compute (DIMC) chiplet architecture, which integrates compute with memory on the same silicon. In conventional systems, data must travel back and forth between separate memory and processor chips during inference, which consumes time, power, and cost with every transfer. Corsair eliminates that penalty entirely, enabling up to 10x faster interactive inference and up to 3x better energy efficiency versus traditional approaches. Built on TSMC’s N6 process with organic substrates and LP-DDR5 memory, Corsair’s architecture is designed to support efficient, scalable inference deployments for customers like Parasail.
The companies plan to share detailed performance results and case studies following the first series of deployments and explore expanded integration across Parasail’s global fleet of over 40 data centers in 15 countries.
Availabiilty
d-Matrix’s Corsair inference platform is now available for select, qualified customers. For inquiries and consideration, please visit: https://www.d-matrix.ai/contact-sales. Parasail inference services are available now. To speak with an engineer to learn more, go to www.parasail.io/contact.
About Parasail
Parasail is the Inference Cloud for AI-native startups, built for reliability, performance, and flexibility to scale. Its platform allows developers to accelerate their AI-native products with production-ready model endpoints based on a programmable network that aggregates high-performance GPU supply from over 40 data centers across 15 countries, all in under five minutes with just a few lines of code. Thousands of developers and hundreds of enterprise customers are developing with Parasail, without worrying about model performance or rate limits as they scale.
About d-Matrix
d-Matrix is pioneering accelerated computing for AI inference, breaking through the limits of latency, cost and energy. Its Corsair inference accelerators, JetStream networking accelerators, Aviator software, and SquadRack rack-scale solutions deliver fast, sustainable AI inference at data center scale. Learn more at www.d-matrix.ai.
With July being Disability Pride Month, GNOME’s Sophie Herold published a blog post taking stock of where GNOME stands on this front, progress that’s been made, as well as areas where the project comes short. One particular paragraph from her introduction really hits the nail on the head about accessibility discussions in tech circles:
The reality of tech communities is that they are often ableist and elitist. Probably more so than the average population. If a user or contributor struggles with a tool, blame is shifted to a “skill issue,” if an interface is simplified to make it accessible to more people, it’s “dumbed down”. Assistive technologies are often developed by abled people, without involving and paying disabled people. This also leads to an attitude where contributors expect gratefulness from disabled people for providing them with the most basic needs. All these issues are also not absent from the GNOME community.
Even as someone who isn’t disabled and doesn’t use any tools classically shelved under the “accessibility” moniker, I encounter the attitudes she mentions in the quoted paragraph basically every day. While we can have normal, productive discussions and differences of opinion about accessibility – for instance, I strongly believe robust theming support is absolutely crucial to accessibility, while the wider GNOME community does not – the dismissive attitudes towards people with accessibility needs in the software world is shameful.
Even if you don’t have accessibility needs today, you will definitely be needing them at some point in your life. If accessibility isn’t one of the first words you jot down on your mood board or whatever when you start a new software project, you’ve already done millions of people a massive disservice. Get educated, learn what you can about accessibility, listen to people with accessibility needs, and make your software better for everyone.
Andrew Giuliani claims actions of referee Raphael Claus over US player Folarin Balogun ‘very, very highly suspicious’
Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House’s World Cup taskforce, has defended Donald Trump’s lobbying of Fifa to lift the suspension of US player Folarin Balogun for Monday’s game against Belgium.
The US president claimed that Brazilian referee Raphael Claus, who showed Balogun a red card in the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, was “a little bit suspect, if you check his past”. This was apparently a reference to a match-fixing investigation by Brazil’s senate in 2024 that examined how referees were assigned to games but did not accuse Claus of wrongdoing.
Linux Mint’s Cinnamon is one of the last desktops to still not support Wayland, and is relegated to only being compatible with legacy X11 environments. With the next release of Cinnamon, however, this is finally going to change.
We worked really hard on Wayland and we got to the point where it feels solid and the experience is almost on par with X11. Wayland support will no longer be considered “experimental”. In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.
John Deere has agreed to a 10-year FTC-supervised right-to-repair settlement requiring it to provide farmers and independent repair shops with the same repair resources available to authorized dealers. The deal resolves antitrust claims from the FTC and five states alleging Deere monopolized equipment repair services, contributing to higher costs and delays for farmers. Wired reports: The full statement (PDF) lays out obligations for John Deere's repair services, requiring the company to give farmers and third-party repair shops access to the same equipment and repair resources it provides to official John Deere dealers. This includes software capabilities, such as reading and resetting codes and pairing with other software, which customers have long had limited access to, creating delays when diagnosing equipment problems. Delayed fixes can mean delayed harvests, which many farmers saw as a fundamental threat to their livelihoods.
Under the agreement, John Deere will be required to provide this level of access, equipment, and services for the next 10 years, monitored by the FTC. [...] John Deere has maintained that it already has robust repair resources for its customers, including service manuals and diagnostic equipment. In John Deere's press release, the company says the settlement is in line with what it has been doing all along, saying that "the agreement reinforces Deere's continued innovation toward more flexible repair options, emphasizing increased access and transparency for customers. It formalizes Deere's ongoing commitment to expanding access to diagnostic and repair tools."
I am looking for someone in Philadelphia who is into one wheel and is looking for a one wheel buddy. I like to cruse around 12-15-16 mph ish. Nothing crazy fast. Just looking for a one wheel buddy. Drop a comment or send a message please. Thank you
The 1970s soap parody made a household name of Lasser, who was also known for her collaborations with ex-husband Allen and later films including Requiem for a Dream
Louise Lasser, star of cult 70s sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and early films by Woody Allen (to whom she was married for four years), has died aged 87. The New York Times reported she died “at home in Manhattan”.
Lasser’s role as a satirically conceived housewife in suburban Ohio in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, designed as a parody of daytime soap operas, made her a national star, landing her on the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone. The series lasted a year and a half, between January 1976 and July 1977, but due to its five-days-a-week schedule squeezed more than 300 episodes out of its two season run. Lasser’s Hartman, with her signature pigtails, was preoccupied with domestic minutiae but found herself in unsettling and disturbing situations, including bizarre deaths. The show was intended to explore the changes sweeping ordinary life in the US in the 1970s.
Prime minister in waiting looks to address frustrations backbenchers had with Keir Starmer’s style of party management
Andy Burnham has promised MPs that he will never use party discipline to “stifle debate” and says they should raise problems and policy ideas “without fear or favour”.
Nominations for the Labour leadership will open on Thursday, and Burnham is expected to be the only candidate. On Wednesday night the former armed forces minister Al Carns confirmed he would not seek to enter the race to replace Keir Starmer.
US stock markets fell on Wednesday as the US continued strikes on Iran and the Federal Reserve flagged concerns that would warrant higher interest rates.
Donald Trump’s declaration at the Nato summit in Ankara that the Iran-US ceasefireis over sent oil prices sharply higher on Wednesday. Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped more than 5% to crest $80 a barrel. US stocks fell in step, with the Dow down 1.09%, or 500 points, at closing Wednesday afternoon. The S&P 500 saw a small loss while the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose slightly. Global stocks had fallen earlier in the day, with the UK’s FTSE 100 down 1% as Japan’s Nikkei fell 2.1%.
Kaizer, 5, is expected to make a full recovery after a stray bullet struck him while he rode his bicycle near his west side Detroit home Tuesday evening, his family said.
Meta is rolling out an update that will disable the camera on its smart glasses if the device detects that someone has tampered with or destroyed the privacy LED. "The update is meant to address modders who have taken actions such as physically drilling into the LED light," reports The Verge.
"Meta has previously tried to discourage tampering with the LED light. For example, starting with its second generation glasses, blocking the light with tape or other objects will trigger a prompt asking users to uncover the recording light. However, many modders have found various workarounds for that particular measure."
A Manhattan federal court judge on Wednesday ordered the release of the more than $5m Donald Trump owes E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him. Less than an hour after the judge issued his order, Trump filed paperwork indicating he was appealing the decision.
Trump had deposited this $5m jury award, as well as 11% interest, into a court-held account some six weeks after Carroll’s courtroom victory. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s order directs the disbursement of these court controlled funds, which now total some $5.8m due to interest accrual.
Last week, the US supreme court ruled that Idaho and West Virginia can continue enforcing their bans on transgender athletes playing on girls’ and women's teams in schools. It’s the latest development in the political and legal attack on trans people – and especially trans youth – that has surged in recent years. On the heels of that decision, Kai Wright talks with Guardian reporter Sam Levin, who has been covering the debate over trans athletes in California and speaking with students and their families, and Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project, who is the first out trans person to argue in front of the US supreme court. They walk through the legal and political strategies animating the anti-trans movement, and discuss why this most recent decision could open the door to the erosion of civil liberties for everyone
"48 Hours" goes inside the investigation of the death of the UVA student and the evidence that links her alleged killer to other crimes spanning a decade
Graham Platner during a primary election night event at the YMCA in Blue Hill, Maine, on June 9, 2026.Photo: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The day Graham Platner became Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, he spoke behind a podium bearing his indignant campaign slogan: “They don’t know Maine.” But when sexual assault allegations against the candidate broke this week, supporters and political allies in the state were left wondering instead if they ever really knew Platner — and uncertain about what’s next for the movement that rallied around him.
On Monday, Jenny Racicot alleged in a Politico article that a “deeply intoxicated” Platner broke into her home and raped her in late 2021, while the two were dating casually. In June, Platner faced claims from conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield that he was physically abusive toward her; on Tuesday, Fifield went on the record with the Washington Post to allege that during their relationship, Platner repeatedly removed condoms during sex without her consent.
The oyster farmer-turned-politician called Racicot’s allegations “false” and “categorically untrue” to Politico and deemed Fifield’s new allegation “categorically false and politically motivated” to the Post.
The revelations come on the heels of a long line of scandals that dogged Platner’s campaign, beginning in September 2025 with the revelation that he had a Totenkopf Nazi symbol tattoo from his time in the service. Maine voters and the state Democratic Party have had enough — and Platner’s chances appear to have run out.
Still, the populist politics and campaign style the candidate espoused were highly effective in Maine. He relied on a simple message, delivered at town halls and meet-ups across the state. This retail politics allowed to weather earlier storms and, most importantly, to decisively beat his only serious challenger, 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, who chose to drop out of the race before the June primary election.
But while the message was effective, the cascading scandals that have derailed and effectively ended his campaign reveal a problem for progressives ascendant in the Democratic Party: vetting candidates. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dan Moraff, who recruited Platner to run, spent $6,250 on an expedited risk-assessment memo.
Some centrist Democrats, like Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden, have seized on Platner’s fall as a chance to score political points against the left wing of the party on the heels of its high-profile election wins. In a post on X, Tanden smirked: “Say what you will, but the establishment vets candidates.” She did not, however, address the lack of vetting for establishment candidates like Eric Swalwell or the long list of losses for her wing of the party, showing that this back and forth is ultimately useless and counterproductive.
As CNN reported on Wednesday, Platner could drop out of the race as soon as this afternoon as pressure continues to mount from the Democratic Party and key allies. The campaign team — which includes wunderkind Morris Katz, the Gen Z political strategist who helped Mayor Zohran Mamdani win in New York last year — is reportedly attempting to negotiate Platner’s exit in exchange for some control over the selection of his replacement, although the state party said Tuesday the campaign should have “no role” in that process. On Wednesday afternoon, the campaign sent a poll to volunteers asking for feedback on next steps.
“We firmly believe that the supporters and volunteers who built this movement deserve to have a real role in any nomination process,” Ben Chin, Platner’s campaign manager, said in the Wednesday text blast.
Platner’s leverage shouldn’t be mistaken for having the support of a movement that has swiftly distanced itself from him. Almost every single one of his high-profile endorsers, from Bernie Sanders to the advocacy group MoveOn, have issued calls for Platner to leave the race. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also said it would not spend money on ads in the race if Platner stays in.
It’s far from out of the question for the left movement that backed his meteoric rise to have an outsized say in who takes his place, especially after the political message that Platner ran on resonated deeply with voters.
A reasonable path forward would involve Platner resigning before July 13 — the last day he can drop off the general election ticket — which would give state Democrats until July 27 to nominate a replacement. In a message to party committee members Tuesday, Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson asked for patience. There’s no accepted process in place by law, but however the party proceeds, it “must reflect our Democratic values,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “It should be open, inclusive, transparent, and fair.”
This is uncharted territory, but due to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system, there are a number of potential replacements who just spent months talking to voters for the governor’s race. Of the losing candidates, Nirav Shah, Troy Jackson, and Shenna Bellows are most likely to make a strong case for facing off against Sen. Susan Collins in the fall.
Shah placed second in the final count to ultimate nominee Hannah Pingree but has work to do to appeal to the progressive Democratic base that propelled Platner to his dominant showing in the primary. It looks like he’s already making moves to position himself as a possible candidate, telling one user on X that he would vote against military aid to Israel and is calling the Gaza genocide a genocide.
Jackson, a former state Senate president, is widely seen as Platner’s most obvious successor and the progressive lane darling; he’s already filed paperwork to run in Platner’s place. But due to his closeness with Platner’s campaign, he will have to answer questions about what he knew about the allegations and when — as well as addressing a history that includes opposition to marriage equality and anti-abortion positions that, in fairness, he has done an admirable job of making up for in recent years.
If the decision comes down to a mini-convention or a caucus, Bellows has a good shot. As Maine’s secretary of state, she has visibility and name recognition, she’s pushed back against Trump on the national stage, and she appeals to progressives and centrists alike. Her last time running for Senate, in 2014, resulted in a blow-out win for Collins by more than 35 percentage points; in order to make a strong case for her candidacy, Bellows will have to convince Democrats that this time would be different.
Platner became a political sensation on the back of his ability to articulate a humane, progressive politics to the public. That political message, more than anything about the candidate, was the core to his appeal. For Maine Democrats, the mission is clear: They need to replace Platner with someone who can win. The key is to find a candidate who can embody the politics that lifted Platner to success while moving on from a figure who has lost the moral and ideological right to be that movement’s standard bearer.
Apple says it will spend $30 billion to design US-made Broadcom wireless connectivity chips, part of its broader push to diversify its supply chain and support domestic chip production. CNN reports: The agreement with Broadcom will lead to the production of 15 million chips in United States and allow Broadcom to invest $1.5 billion to expand and modernize its manufacturing facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is part of Apple's commitment in August to invest $600 billion as part of its "American Manufacturing Program" which it said is dedicated to bringing even more of the company's supply chain and advanced manufacturing back to the US.
Shooting death at an extended-stay motel is fourth officer-involved death since initiative began in September
Federal agents killed a man at a Memphis motel on Wednesday morning in a Drug Enforcement Administration operation with the Memphis Safe Task Force, the fourth officer-involved death since the anticrime initiative began in September.
Donald Trump established the federal taskforce by executive order last year, amid a surge of troops and federal law enforcement agents to Democratic-run cities that he claimed were overrun with crime. All four of the deaths have occurred in the last two months.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo worked for 35 years to send all three of his American citizen sons to college, his son said. He was shot and killed by an ICE officer on Tuesday.
Met confirms inquiry after elections watchdog referred allegations that donations in 2024 were from foreign source
Police have launched an investigation into £37,500 of donations to Robert Jenrick’s campaign to become Conservative leader in 2024 after a referral from the elections watchdog.
The Metropolitan police confirmed on Wednesday they were undertaking an inquiry after the Guardian revealed in April that they were assessing the evidence about donations to Jenrick, who has since joined Reform UK.
I have to lift my toes up instead of my heels every time when getting off and it kinda drives me nuts. I'm not gonna return the thing but I would be immensely greatfull if someone showed me how to swap it
MPs demand publication of full report that outlines catastrophic consequences amid concerns for food security
Members of parliament have demanded full publication of an explosive report by the UK’s spy leaders that found the collapse of ecosystems overseas would have catastrophic consequences for the UK’s national security, warning that the UK has “no future” if the findings are not urgently acted on.
Despite growing concerns for the UK’s food security, likely to be worsened by the third heatwave this summer currently afflicting the UK and swathes of the northern hemisphere, the government has refused to publish the full report, which has circulated among defence officials for more than a year.
The president embraced the alliance in a meeting Wednesday, extolling member nations’ defense spending and saying nothing about the Danish territory, officials said.
From high-profile influencers to live ticket-queue tracking, some fear aggressive marketing is ruining championships
From photos of influencers in crisp white linen dresses posing in front of floral displays at Centre Court to videos promising hacks to beat the queues and secure tickets, the hype around Wimbledon has never been bigger on Instagram and TikTok.
The social media frenzy has caused concerns that Wimbledon is increasingly becoming a tourist event rather than a tennis tournament, overrun with influencers using the championship’s iconic aesthetic to build their profiles and attracting attenders more interested in dressing up and taking photos than watching the games.
World is witnessing a turning point, says ministry spokesperson, as Iran seeks to assert independence amid rising tensions
Before a foreign ministry press briefing at the Grand Hotel Tehran, the assembled reporters were asked to stand for the national anthem that duly blared from fuzzy speakers.
At the podium, the ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, claimed the world was witnessing a turning point in the history of Shia Islam. A century from now, he claimed, the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be revered as a second Imam Hussain, the martyred grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Donald Trump, meanwhile, would be seen as a latterday Yazid, the tyrannical 7th century caliph.
In group chats of progressive activists and political operatives concerned with the state of the Senate race in Maine Wednesday morning, a link to an anonymous Google Doc was making the rounds. It disavowed Graham Platner, the disgraced Democratic nominee whose campaign was throttled by a rape accusation on Monday, and called to replace him with Troy Jackson, a recent gubernatorial contender the document deemed “the one candidate who can hold Platner’s coalition together.”
Platner suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday evening, and there is no clear alternative to his candidacy. His campaign’s swift downfall has presented Democrats and his primary supporters with several bad options: The party establishment could pick a candidate and inflame an already frustrated base that scoffed at its efforts to anoint Gov. Janet Mills as the nominee, or it could bend to Platner’s past demands and let him influence the selection of his successor.
In either case, a base already exhausted by months of Platner scandals is at risk of fracturing and failing to consolidate behind a potential replacement — and Democrats are at risk of once again losing a key seat they need to pick up for control of the Senate to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
With so much blame and anger to go around, the fear of poisoning the selection process was on display in the anonymity of the Google Doc pushing Jackson, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed third-placecandidate in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Jackson, who has already been discussed in national progressive circles as a possible ideological successor to Platner, was firstto file paperwork on Tuesday to take the candidate’s place. But the anonymous document, shared with The Intercept by a source who said its origin was unclear, was quick to distance him from Platner.
“In a state where Democrats have hemorrhaged rural support and where Collins has consistently overperformed, Platner has attempted to sell himself as the populist solution. Jackson doesn’t need to sell; his career tells the story,” it says, citing a claim from centrist writer Matthew Yglesias that Jackson is more genuine than Platner.
There are still Platner supporters — and one progressive political operative close to the Platner campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his employer to discuss the race publicly, said they were divided in their reactions to the rape allegation against their once-powerful candidate.
“There are some people who just immediately decided that they believed his accuser and who feel very betrayed and are just like, ‘Fuck this guy, now we’re screwed,’” the operative said. “And then there are some people who don’t believe her, and there are some people who think that he can continue to run, and some people who think he should run as an independent.”
Platner announced he was dropping out of the race in an 11-minute video posted on X Wednesday evening. In it, he claimed the rape and sexual assault accusations against him were false and drummed up by an establishment leading a plot against his rise as an outsider in politics.
“I think it’s really important to understand why this is happening in the timeline,” Platner said, asserting that past scandals that dogged his campaign had broken at key political junctures. “There is a reason that this is happening now. I only have until July 13th until I am officially the nominee. This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. And that’s why this is occurring.”
The Maine Democratic Party announced that it would hold a nominating convention to pick Platner’s replacement, though its exact shape and timeline remain unclear.
The party has publicly feuded with Platner’s campaign, releasing a statement and an unusual video post on Tuesday saying that the campaign had tried “to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” after people close to Platner’s campaign told reporters that he would only drop out if he could ensure that the new candidate shared his ideological and policy stances.
In a mass text sent out before Platner dropped out on Wednesday, his campaign manager Ben Chin claimed that the campaign had been told it would have no role in helping to select a new candidate and that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had sent staffers “to plan a potential nominating process behind closed doors.”
A DSCC spokesperson called the assertion “false” in a statement to The Intercept. “The Maine Democratic Party has made it clear that they are working to put forth an open process to select a nominee. Graham Platner — who was credibly accused of rape — needs to drop out immediately so that Maine Democrats can begin the process of fielding a new candidate and focus on defeating Susan Collins,” the spokesperson wrote.
Platner’s campaign did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Other potential picks being floated to replace Platner include Jackson’s Democratic gubernatorial opponents Dr. Nirav Shah, the former director of the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who came in second in the final round of ranked-choice voting in the June primary, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who ranked fourth.
A source familiar with the matter told The Intercept that outgoing Rep. Jared Golden, a Blue Dog Democrat who represents Maine’s Second Congressional District is not seeking reelection, had been getting calls about running, but on Tuesday night a spokesperson said he had removed his name from consideration.
The progressive political operative warned against the idea that a middle-of-the-road candidate like Golden would be the safest bet to replace Platner against Collins. A “generic Democrat,” the operative said, would find themselves up against a deceptively formidable incumbent, with little chance of mustering the energy that made Platner, for a time, such a threat to Collins.
“People always underestimate Susan Collins, and that’s why I think a lot of us in the progressive movement are saying that you have to give a reason for people to turn out, because turnout in the midterms is everything,” the operative said. “I think a lot of that’s coming from the national Democrats and national pundits who have no friggin’ clue about — I don’t know if I’d say popular — but about how entrenched she is in Maine politics.”
“People always underestimate Susan Collins. … You have to give a reason for people to turn out, because turnout in the midterms is everything.”
Shah said Tuesday that he had few details about what the state Democratic party plans to do.
“This should be a process that is open, robust, and transparent, not something where the torch is handed from one person to another, because that will undermine faith in that nominee,” Shah told The Intercept. He said his campaign has not yet decided if he’ll file paperwork to enter the race, and that while he had received calls from hundreds of supporters urging him to jump in, he had not heard from any national Democrats.
Jackson, for his part, now has to toe the line between seizing the progressive mantle and being publicly tied to a candidate who lost massive public trust. In a statement Tuesday, he called the allegations against Platner “serious, credible, and deserving of full accountability,” and called on Platner to step down for the sake of the movement that supported him. Jackson did not address his own intention to run, but his spokesperson told The Intercept that he was the person to beat Collins.
“Working Mainers need someone who will take on the wealthy and powerful and give them a voice in D.C. It is clear that Troy Jackson is that person,” said Christine Kirby, the spokesperson. “Since the recent news broke, Troy has been flooded with calls to run for U.S. Senate. He is clearly the strongest option to take on Susan Collins and has consistently won in deep-red Northern Maine.”
The document making the case in Jackson’s favor emphasized his appeal among working-class voters, whom Platner had tried to cultivate but lagged with compared to Collins in recent polling.
Platner reiterated his commitment to working-class politics and repeated his assertion that his campaign represented people who’d been locked out of the halls of power in his departure announcement on Wednesday.
“We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish,” Platner said. “That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”
In a statement released before Platner suspended his campaign on Wednesday, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson sought to thread the needle between castigating Platner and courting his voters.
“While we may be frustrated with Graham Platner’s continued efforts to manipulate this process, we are so thankful for his supporters and all of their efforts to defeat Susan Collins,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “They are a vital part of our Party and deserve to participate in an open process to select Platner’s replacement.”
A new candidate has to be submitted to the Maine secretary of state by July 27 to qualify for the ballot.
In Shah’s view, anyone picked by Platner would be dragged down by his baggage, while anyone picked by the state party might not have buy-in from the base that Platner helped activate.
“If there is a torch-passing or anointments,” Shah said, “whoever that nominee is will be hobbled out of the gate.”
Update: July 8, 2026, 8:55 p.m. ET This story has been updated with news that Graham Platner has suspended his Senate campaign.
Alliance leaders, who had feared the worst, will hail US president’s renewed support for article 5 as key victory
An erratic and at times irascible Donald Trump has said he felt a “tremendous love” from western leaders at the Nato summit, only hours after lambasting them over their defence spending and not helping the US in attacking Iran.
The US president’s mixed messaging dominated the final hours of the two-day gathering in Ankara, Turkey, beginning with him publicly calling Iran’s leadership scum and renewing his demand for control of Greenland.
StatCounter's June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft's share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, "one of its strongest recent showings in the company's desktop OS statistics," reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple's desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026, meaning Apple's combined desktop presence remains comfortably ahead of Linux in the global chart. Chrome OS follows with 1.21%.
Of course, StatCounter's numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems. The company calculates its Global Stats from page views across websites using its tracking code, analyzing details such as browser, operating system, and screen resolution. In other words, the figures reflect measured web activity rather than the number of machines actually installed worldwide.
PARIS, July 8, 2026 — Vultr today announced the launch of SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA on Vultr infrastructure, developed in partnership with SUSE. Announced alongside SUSE at the RAISE Summit in Paris, this validated, full-stack enterprise AI platform combines enterprise-grade AI software, advanced GPU acceleration, and global AI infrastructure into a single, production-ready solution.
As organizations look to move AI workloads from experimentation into production, this joint solution eliminates the complexity of building AI stacks from scratch, allowing enterprises to deploy secure, scalable AI applications with ease. The solution combines software and infrastructure capabilities to help organizations securely and reliably advance applications from sandbox development to global production.
Built on an open, Kubernetes-based architecture, the solution supports deployment across cloud, on-premises, edge and sovereign environments. The architecture gives organizations the flexibility to place AI workloads where business, regulatory or performance requirements demand, without proprietary cloud lock-in.
SUSE’s Sovereign AI Factory includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. It includes pre-validated blueprints (e.g., RAG), GPU orchestration, zero-trust security, and unified single-vendor support, delivered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, including NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA NeMo, and NVIDIA Run:ai. Vultr delivers the global AI infrastructure foundation for the solution, spanning cloud GPUs, bare metal, cloud compute, Kubernetes, and optimized networking and storage. Together, these capabilities deliver a production-ready AI platform that enables organizations to build, deploy, and scale enterprise AI with performance, security, and operational simplicity.
“Enterprises are done experimenting. The real work now is getting AI into production fast, without spending 18 months integrating software, GPUs and infrastructure before a single workload goes live,” said Kevin Cochrane, Chief Marketing Officer at Vultr. “SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA on Vultr infrastructure changes that equation entirely. We have built a validated, full-stack platform that brings together enterprise AI software, NVIDIA acceleration and globally available GPU infrastructure. Organizations can now focus on building AI that delivers results, instead of assembling the stack underneath it. That is how enterprises move from pilot to production with confidence.”
“When we first introduced SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA in April, our goal was to deliver a fully governed, open Private Enterprise AI framework, enabling our customers to deploy their intelligence wherever their business demands,” said Rhys Oxenham, VP and General Manager of AI at SUSE. “Our partnership with Vultr takes it a step further by providing a turnkey, validated infrastructure stack. Enterprises no longer have to wait or spend months wrestling with integration – they can deploy a GA-ready AI platform on world-class infrastructure today.”
“Production AI requires more than accelerated compute. It requires enterprise AI software and global infrastructure working together,” said Dion Harris, senior director, HPC and AI infrastructure solutions GTM at NVIDIA. “By bringing SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA together with Vultr’s global infrastructure, enterprises gain a secure, scalable foundation for moving from experimentation to production.”
Steven Dickens, CEO and Principal Analyst at HyperFRAME Research, said: “Enterprise AI success in 2026 is being decided at the infrastructure layer. Organizations need a governed, open substrate that spans from GPU compute all the way up to the inference pipeline, with security and compliance built in from day one. The collaboration between Vultr, SUSE and NVIDIA delivers exactly that. A converged, validated stack that takes enterprises from pilot to production without the integration tax that has held so many back.”
Existing SUSE customers can engage their SUSE account team to evaluate SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA on Vultr infrastructure. SUSE and Vultr will collaborate to scope and deliver a joint Proof of Concept tailored to the customer’s AI workloads. Organisations can also contact SUSE or Vultr Sales directly to request an evaluation, architecture workshop or Proof of Concept. A self-service deployment option via the Vultr Marketplace is planned.
About Vultr
Vultr is on a mission to make high-performance cloud infrastructure easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible for enterprises and AI innovators around the world. Vultr is trusted by hundreds of thousands of active customers across 185 countries for its flexible, scalable, global Cloud Compute, Cloud GPU, Bare Metal, and Cloud Storage solutions. In December 2024, Vultr announced an equity financing at a $3.5 billion valuation. Founded by David Aninowsky and self-funded for over a decade, Vultr has grown to become the world’s largest privately-held cloud infrastructure company. Learn more at www.vultr.com.
About SUSE
SUSE is a global leader of enterprise open source software. By transforming community innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions, SUSE empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere – from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge. Only SUSE also manages many Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, Choice Happens because we prioritize community, interoperability and relentless innovation. Discover how we power mission-critical resilience at www.suse.com.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by agent in Texas while on his way to work, and family found out from news reports
The family of a Mexican immigrant who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent on Tuesday in Texas called for an independent investigation into his killing, as questions swirl around federal officials’ claims and lack of transparency.
“He did not deserve to die,” said Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a press conference led by the League of United Latin American Citizens (Lulac) on Wednesday in Houston, Texas.
The French far-right leader’s presidential campaign is clouded in uncertainty under the shadow of an embezzlement conviction
Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for French president in 2027, despite her legal woes, has drawn comparisons from her opponents to Donald Trump.
Just as the US president felt his voter base cared little about legal investigations against him, the French far-right leader shrugged off the leftwing protesters who shouted “criminal!” as she launched her presidential campaign at a market walkabout in western France on Wednesday. The previous day, an appeal court had upheld her conviction for the embezzlement of European parliament funds.
US president veers from praising the alliance to threatening Iran and confusing world leaders’ names
Having arrived at Nato’s annual summit under a familiar cloud of resentment and grievance, Donald Trump’s farewell message on Wednesday was an unlikely tale of love and darkness.
Addressing journalists in the presence of his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president surprised everyone by directing his affections at an alliance he spent much of the previous day spewing bile over, citing the now well-worn gripe about Greenland, among others.
Lawrence Bishnoi, who is in prison in India, is accused of orchestrating assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in 2023
US and Canadian authorities say they have “dismantled” the leadership of a notorious Indian criminal group, charging dozens of operatives who have “inflicted pain and cruelty on people, victims around the globe”, including a high-profile murder in Canada that strained diplomatic relations between Canada and India.
At a press conference on Tuesday, members of the FBI and Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said as part of Operation Hard Ball – a multiyear federal investigation into murder-for-hire plots, shootings, extortion and drug trafficking – they had charged 37 people, some of whom were already in custody. Authorities are still searching for seven fugitives in the US, two in India and one in Europe.
The PRSM Awards for Excellence in Cable Management have been an institution in student cluster competitions for nearly two years now. Like everything else in tech, PRSM is an acronym, in this case the benefits better cable management provide: Performance, Reliability, Safety, and Maintainability.
(Note: This isn’t an official part of any competition, it’s just something I came up with on a flight.)
I am the sole arbiter of the PRSM awards. I like the sound of that a lot.
ASC26 was a mixed bag on the cable management front. It got off to a bad start with the venue, check this out:
This is how the facility handled the cable runs to the 25 individual student teams. These went behind every both but also crossed the main floor in a few places. They were a constant trip hazard and flimsy as well, as you can see by the duct tape fixes on the right. Rubber mats were the right solution here.
The average cluster cabling looked like the picture on the left. Well, not quite that bad, but you get the idea
Making this all neat and tidy wasn’t a five minute job. The teams had to cope with overly long cable runs to connect their booth to power and network. The winning teams dealt with this and also did their best to eliminate safety problems.
But some of the teams went to above average lengths to handle their cable business. These teams are the ASC26 PRSM award winners.
The Envelope Please…
The Gold medal PRSM winner is, for the second year in a row, the German FAU team. But this was a close decision, they didn’t run away with it.
They did a great job grouping the cables together and securely attaching them to the side rails. Nothing to block airflow. It’s easy to see what connects to what. From this picture angle, it looks like there might be a trip hazard between the cluster and the table, but when viewed from the front, no one is going to try to get through there.
The Silver medal goes to The National University of Cordoba from Argentina. Only in their second year of competition, they managed to fit cable management into the heavy task of optimizing difficult ASC26 workloads.
What really impressed the PRSM judges (me) is how they turned their switch to face out the front of the rack rather than the back. This allowed them to route the network cables to their laptops across the gap between their table and the rack. Zero trip hazard. Great work.
We have two PRSM Bronze medal winners this year (and for the first time ever.) Kasetsart University from Thailand and EAFIT University from Colombia.
Both of these teams were faced with a common cluster competition problem: having miles of cables stranded in their booths. There’s nothing they can do about it, they just have to deal. Here’s how they did it:
Kasetsart on the left made graceful, artistic loops out of the slack. They left plenty of room for airflow, got it up off the floor so no one stumbles on it, and it’s clear what plugs into where.
On the right, EAFIT did much the same thing, looping, tying, looping some more, and attaching to the rack.
This year, there will be physical medals delivered to the teams – just as soon as I can get good looking printed copies out of my little 3D printer. The hidden message there is “don’t hold your breath.”
One Night in Wuxi
Founded 3,000 years ago, the original name of the city was Youxi, which means “lots of tin.” It was later renamed Wuxi, “No Tin” after years of furious mining. Skipping forward 400 years or so, Wuxi hit the big time when the Grand Canal running between Beijing and Shanghai was completed in 609 AD. This made the city a major shipping center for grain and other goods.
ASC26 organizer Fiona, along with our trusty translators Iris (left) and Bruce (right) arranged a Saturday night outing in Wuxi for some of the ASC26 management and observers.
It started with a fantastic dinner that included one of my favorite Chinese dishes, known to me as “Orange Fish.” It was delicious, along with the other items that showcased regional cuisine.
We then went to the oldest part of the city, Huishan Old Town. It dates back 1,500 years or so and is a combination of history, nightlife and commerce in one 5 km strip. And what’s one of the first things I see? One of the estimated 13,000 KFCs in China. In fact, 40% of all KFCs are in China, they’re crazy about those secret herbs and spices.
As we walked along, a woman pitched me a complete fortune telling session for the equivalent of $7 US. We negotiated through Fiona; I was interested in the accuracy and completeness of the fortune – but was assured it was very accurate and very complete. I was in.
She made a call and summoned the expert. He sat me down on the sidewalk and proceeded to closely examine my hands. After 10 minutes or so, I had a full picture of my future, a real price performer for seven bucks, right? One slight miss on his part was that I’d be in the hospital for a week a little while after returning from Wuxi. But maybe pneumonia and sepsis isn’t something that can be foretold? Or maybe I needed to bump it up to $10 US?
After a short walk, we entered the ancient city proper through the gate. It was hard to miss.
It looked like at least half of Wuxi’s 7.5 million people had the same idea as we had. There were people of all ages, families, couples out on a date night, etc., it was just fun.
Up until I saw something that unnerved me.
It was this: A coffee shop that featured cats roaming around.
I’m not a huge fan of cats. And these cats looked skeezy to me, even from street level. They had a stray cat vibe and one even had one of those bite cones strapped to its head.
According to translator Iris, this is a thing in China and these cafes aren’t rare, but mostly popular with younger people (which is almost everyone other than me.)
So drinking coffee and eating baked goods while feral cats crawl all over you is the hip thing to do for China’s young? Go figure. But it was an amazing night, really had a great time. Except for the cats.
Ceasefire appears close to collapse as two militaries target each other after after Iran strikes three commercial vessels
Iran and the US have threatened to reignite their conflict after the most extensive exchange of fire since an interim deal was signed last month.
On a chaotic day at the Nato summit in Ankara, Donald Trump said the US would probably hit the country again on Wednesday evening and renewed his threat to take control of the strategic Kharg Island in the strait of Hormuz - a move that could provoke Iran to hit energy installations across the Gulf states.
PARIS, July 8, 2026 — SambaNova today announced it has completed the first close of $1 billion in strategic financing as part of a Series F round, valuing the company at $11 billion post money. This latest financing round was led by General Atlantic, a leading global investor, with significant investment from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Capital Group. New and existing investors include A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Cambium Capital, Intel Capital, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners and Volantis.
“SambaNova’s platform is differentiated, built for a market where inference has become foundational to enterprise and industry transformation,” said Martín Escobari, Co-President and Head of Global Growth Equity at General Atlantic. “Rodrigo and the team are driving deep technical innovation to achieve growing commercial momentum while demand for inference is accelerating well ahead of supply. We are pleased to lead this round to support SambaNova in shaping the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
“We’re excited to partner with Rodrigo and the SambaNova team as they build a category-defining AI infrastructure platform at a moment when enterprise AI is shifting from training to production deployment,” said Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and Board Observer at SambaNova. “As AI moves into production, lowering cost per token while maintaining performance and efficiency will be critical for enterprise adoption. SambaNova’s purpose-built RDU architecture is uniquely positioned to address that challenge at scale.”
The influx of capital comes at a time of accelerating momentum for SambaNova. In recent months, the company has announced new leadership to support scale, expanded its global customer footprint, advanced its collaboration with Intel on heterogeneous inference, and continued to push the market toward premium inference architectures optimized for agentic AI and enterprise deployment. Earlier this year, SambaNova also unveiled its SN50 chip and announced a $350 million-plus raise alongside a strategic collaboration with Intel.
SambaNova will use the proceeds to expand capacity, accelerate product innovation, and scale deployments for enterprises, neo-clouds, sovereign AI customers, and service providers worldwide. It will grow customer programs and continue investing across chips, systems, software, and full-stack AI infrastructure.
JPMorganChase to Deploy SambaNova Systems as Inference Partner
SambaNova also announced that JPMorganChase has selected the company as an inference infrastructure partner, deploying its SN40 and SN50 systems to power secure, on-prem AI inference for the firm.
“At JPMorganChase, AI infrastructure has to meet a very high bar for performance, control and reliability,” said Darrin Alves, CIO, Infrastructure Platforms, JPMorganChase. “We’re excited to deploy SambaNova’s RDU architecture and looking forward to testing its speed and security for on-prem inference in our demanding enterprise AI workloads.”
About SambaNova
SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, providing a full-stack platform that powers premium inference for enterprises, neo-clouds, AI labs, service providers, and sovereign AI initiatives worldwide. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, California, SambaNova delivers chips, systems, and cloud services that enable customers to deploy state-of-the-art models with superior performance, lower total cost of ownership, and rapid time to value.
July 8, 2026 — Providing independent data – for example, on gas and oil infrastructure in the world’s oceans – or creating and automating monitoring systems for forests: since 2019, the terrabyte collaboration has been supporting science and research across a wide range of projects and has, during this time, generated a wealth of practical knowledge in the modeling and analysis of Earth observation data.
Signed and sealed: Dr Anke Pagels-Kerp, Executive Board Member for Space, and Dr Doris Klein, Deputy Director of the German Remote Sensing Data Center (both at DLR), signed the cooperation agreement on ‘terrabyte’ together with Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Head of the LRZ.
The joint operators are the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This versatile high-performance platform for analysing environmental data from space is now being gradually upgraded and expanded. On July 7, 2026, Dr. Anke Pagels-Kerp, DLR Executive Board Member for Space, Dr. Doris Klein, Deputy Director of the DLR’s German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), and Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of the LRZ, signed the cooperation agreement.
Technology for Environmental Research
As a first step, the data storage capacity will be expanded in 2027. It currently offers a capacity of around 50 petabytes and is consistently utilized at up to 95 per cent. In a second step, the computing power is also set to be further increased from the current level of around five quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or five petaFLOPS. The supercomputer, which specializes in Earth observation, currently comprises 636 Central Processing Units (CPUs) and 188 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In addition to its high processing capacity, terrabyte provides more than 43 petabytes of Earth observation and geodata for immediate access and also offers useful open-source software and tools for their analysis, calculation and modeling.
Since the collaboration began in 2019, terrabyte has become a real success story. Researchers from the DLR and Bavarian universities, in particular, rely on the high-performance platform, which is directly connected to the DLR archive in Oberpfaffenhofen. This allows additional satellite data stored there to be retrieved at a rate of 10 gigabits per second and processed on the LRZ’s supercomputers. Fifteen long-term projects are currently benefiting from terrabyte. The most extensive use case to date is the DLR project Normalise Radar Backscattering (NRB). Its aim is to convert data from radar satellites into ‘analysis-ready data’, thereby eliminating time-consuming steps for users. To this end, the DLR has developed new methods and, using terrabyte, recently generated a dataset of around eight petabytes – equivalent to roughly two million high-resolution films.
For the “ROOT – Real-time Earth Observation of Forest Dynamics and Biodiversity” project, funded by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), an interdisciplinary team at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) developed methods for analysing disturbances and damage in forests. The ecologists, biologists, computer scientists and Earth observation specialists used this research to develop the ROOT software and app, which now integrates satellite and other environmental data in real time and enables companies and public authorities to monitor forests. This helps control pest infestations in trees and also makes it easier to utilize damaged timber.
Digital Sovereignty for Science
With its computing power, specialized tools for data analysis, high and flexible storage capacity, and fast data connections, terrabyte offers an alternative to the world’s largest providers of cloud infrastructure – and is setting a precedent: on the platform, researchers can develop and use their own tools for data analysis, as well as copy calculation results securely and conveniently to their own storage media. In light of current geopolitical trends towards isolationism, the platform also promotes digital sovereignty in science and research. It is no coincidence that the terrabyte team now advises institutions and projects such as the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) and the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) on the development of comparable high-performance platforms for analysing a wide range of environmental data.
Key Figures About Terrabyte
7000 jobs per day
Round about 600 users
3 new users per week
Including 33 institutes of DLR
45 centrally provided data sets
88 millions metadata.
“With terrabyte, we offer scientists all the benefits of innovative cloud services – practical tools and AI tools for analyzing Earth observation data and for efficient data management, as well as interfaces to our supercomputers,” said Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of LRZ. “This service is the result of a trusting, inspiring and outstanding collaboration between DLR and LRZ, which we are now continuing.”
alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items. In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by "SUNHZMCKP," spoons made by "SACATR," and a lamp made by "ROTTOGOON."
In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote "Sorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX." The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who don't use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.
Q: Is President Trump the anonymous 79-year-old man getting a still-unapproved obesity drug via a Food and Drug Administration program?
A: A news article, and subsequently Democratic lawmakers, questioned whether Trump is receiving the Eli Lilly weight-loss drug, which is reportedly being given to one 79-year-old man. However, the White House has said the unnamed man isn’t the president.
FULL ANSWER
When we recently published an article about Trump’s claims regarding access to unapproved drugs for seriously ill patients, several readers brought up the news about the Eli Lilly drug in comments on our social media posts. The readers referred to speculation — or speculated themselves — that Trump was the man receiving the unapproved weight-loss drug.
The White House has refuted the speculation, and there’s no evidence that Trump has received access to the drug.
Photo by Anna Hoychuk / stock.adobe.com
On June 23, STAT first reported that an unnamed, likely well-connected 79-year-old man was the only person receiving retatrutide, an unapproved weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly, through the FDA’s “compassionate use” program. The program enables patients with serious illnesses to get access to unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials, if the drug company agrees.
STAT attributed the news to “three sources familiar with the matter” who “requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals” and said the request for the drug “drew the interest of top health officials, suggesting the person receiving this drug was well connected.”
STAT reported that it was unusual for just one person to receive the weight-loss drug through the compassionate use program. “In interviews, 18 bioethics experts, obesity clinicians, and current and former government health officials told STAT that the application struck them as unusual. One after another, they questioned why Lilly would offer compassionate use — also known as expanded access — for a single patient when obesity is such a widespread condition. Often, drugmakers will establish compassionate use programs for large cohorts of patients,” the story said.
Trump turned 80 on June 14, and STAT reported that the person in question was 79 when the drug was requested in April. This year, the president weighed 238 pounds at his May physical, up 14 pounds from his checkup in April 2025. During a January interview with the New York Times, Trump said that he has never taken a weight-loss drug but “probably should.”
The identity of the 79-year-old patient is unknown, STAT said, but “given the patient demographics and the unusual nature of the application,” the news outlet asked the White House if the anonymous man was Trump. The White House didn’t initially provide a clear answer, but it did after the story was published.
The news article prompted Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Ted Lieu and Sen. Maggie Hassan, to also question whether Trump was the one receiving the drug, despite the White House’s denials.
White House Response
On June 23, the writer of the STAT story, Lizzy Lawrence, posted on X that “I asked the WH if this patient was President Trump, who turned 80 a week ago. I did not get a direct answer.”
In response that same day, White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai posted: “Because this has to be spelled out for @LizzyLaw_, who has proven herself to be an unserious gossip columnist, this application was not for the President.”
White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung also chimed in, telling Lawrence “[y]ou certainly made a name for yourself by completely embarrassing yourself at the expense of being thirsty for clicks and peddling falsehoods.”
Democratic Lawmakers’ Statements
Speaking during a June 24 press conference, Lieu, of California, stated: “What we know is there’s a report saying that one person in America got this special, new drug. It was a 79-year-old person who’s very high-profile, and this drug can only be given to someone under the compassionate use provision, meaning you do that if someone basically has a terminal illness. So we need to know did Donald Trump get this special drug from Eli Lilly, and did he get it under that provision? And if he did, why is that the case? The White House needs to come clean and tell the American people about Donald Trump’s health.”
That same day, Hassan, of New Hampshire, wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., telling him, “I am deeply concerned by new reporting that suggests you may be bending the rules of a federal program, and exerting improper political pressure, in order to provide a well-connected individual with free access to an exclusive prescription drug.”
Like Lieu, Hassan questioned whether the individual receiving the drug was the president, writing in her letter that “reporting clearly suggests that this individual was the President or someone closely connected to him.”
We reached out to Lieu’s and Hassan’s offices to ask why they questioned whether Trump got the drug even though the White House said he did not. In response, Sahil Mehrotra, a spokesperson for Hassan, pointed to our work fact-checking the president’s statements over time. “This President and his Administration have repeatedly misled and lied to the American people, as catalogued by Factcheck.org,” Mehrotra said. “They also have a long record of corruption and self-dealing to benefit the Administration’s friends and family.”
Granting access to the drug in this case “is clearly outside the norm,” Mehrotra continued. Hassan is asking Kennedy “to provide answers about whether the President, another Administration official, or one of the President’s donors or friends is receiving this special access to weight-loss medication as families struggle to pay for prescription drugs. The Administration has thus far refused to respond.”
Lieu’s office did not respond to our inquiry.
What We Know About the Drug
The FDA uses “compassionate use” as an alternative name for the expanded access program, which it calls “a potential pathway for a patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product.”
Compassionate use is different from Right to Try, a law Trump signed in 2018. Under Right to Try, terminally ill patients also can get access to experimental drugs from manufacturers but without FDA approval. As we’ve reported, there’s no evidence for Trump’s repeated claim that Right to Try has “saved thousands of lives.”
The compassionate use program has a high approval rate. For fiscal years 2019 through 2023, the FDA approved 99% of the approximately 18,000 single-patient expanded access Investigational New Drug requests, according to FDA data.
In this case, the drug — retatrutide — has been shown to be effective in clinical trials in helping patients lose weight. In May, Eli Lilly reported that a phase 3 randomized controlled trial found that those taking the once-a-week injectable drug for 80 weeks lost from 19% to 28.3% of their body weight, on average, depending on the dosage level. The placebo group lost 2.2% of body weight on average. In total, 2,339 people were in the trial.
The drug manufacturer subsequently reported that it also found “meaningful improvements” in subsets of patients with knee osteoarthritis pain or moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea. Another trial evaluated efficacy and safety in treating those with type 2 diabetes. The company notes that the drug is only available now for those participating in its clinical trials.
But one person has been given the drug through the FDA’s expanded access program, according to STAT.
The news outlet reported that Ranganath Muniyappa, a National Institutes of Health senior clinician, requested retatrutide under the expanded access program “to treat the patient for refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a severe version of the disease. Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure in the lungs, which can be life-threatening.” As STAT noted, Trump’s latest medical exam memo doesn’t mention either of those conditions.
STAT said that it’s not unprecedented for a high-profile person to get an unapproved drug through the FDA program. In 2020, Trump received an experimental antibody treatment after testing positive for COVID-19.
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Italian designer brings sculptural silhouettes and playful palettes to storied house, while it is hats off to Giorgio’s niece at her second Armani Privé show
The house of Balenciaga takes haute couture very seriously indeed. Cristóbal Balenciaga was so horrified by the rise of mass-produced clothes that in 1968 he abruptly shuttered his brand and retired to his native Spain, announcing that “high fashion is mortally wounded”.
So Pierpaolo Piccioli, who now helms the house, approached the brief of his first Balenciaga couture collection conscientiously, despite having 25 years of experience at Valentino. At a preview, the haute couture war room where he worked on the show for nine months was plastered with images that ranged from a 1961 Balenciaga dress to Spanish golden age art – Zurbarán’s chic saints, Velázquez’s doll-like infantas – and a monumental Hepworth pierced megalith.
And that ends their short briefing, with Trump saying he will be back later, and Rutte desperately throwing in that he will also do a press conference if anyone is interested in it please.
Trump also heaps praise on Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, praising the Turkish military might, and, amusingly, out of nowhere praises China, too.
‘Perhaps it’s all a fever dream,’ suggests parody candidate, expected to be Reform leader’s only challenger for seat
Count Binface had been looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX when Nigel Farage dropped a political bombshell on Tuesday.
Instead, Britain’s hottest new political property said he was left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn when news broke that Farage had resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering the possibility of a byelection in the English coastal constituency he has represented since 2024.
Arthur Fery, a British wilrdcard, devastated Flavio Cobolli, while Alexander Zverev, Marta Kostyuk and Linda Noskova also made the semi-finals
Paolini bursts out of the blocks with as much speed as she shows when charging around the court, racing to 40-0 and taking the game to 15. This match pits two of the best athletes in the women’s game against each other, and while Kostyuk possesses more power than the counterpunching Paolini, it’s Paolini who has the greater experience at this stage of grand slams, having reached not only the Wimbledon final but also the French Open final two years ago. Which could be to her advantage, if this comes down to who handles the moment better.
Three more games, three more holds, but it’s been fairly tortuous on serve for Mertens, who has to save three break points to scramble to 2-2, just as Paolini and Kostyuk make their entrance on Centre. I’m really, really looking forward to this one … Paolini, after losing the opening set of her first-round match 6-0, has been a player transformed, finally rediscovering the form that took her to the 2024 final and made her a fan favourite, while Kostyuk, after reaching the French Open semi-finals last month, has carried her form from the clay on to the grass, and has won 20 of her past 21 matches.
The nominations for the 78th annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced Wednesday morning in Los Angeles, with the final season of HBO Max's "Hacks" setting a new record for the most nominations in a single year for a comedy series.
July 8, 2026 — The National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC Taiwan) proudly participated in ISC High Performance 2026, held from June 22–26 in Hamburg, Germany. As one of the world’s premier events for high-performance computing, ISC 2026 brought together 4,575 HPC professionals and 188 exhibitors from 26 countries, highlighting the latest advances in AI, HPC, quantum computing, cloud technologies, and data center infrastructure.
The NCHC booth attracted active engagement and lively interaction from visitors.
At this year’s exhibition, NCHC presented Taiwan’s latest achievements in HPC, AI, digital twins, quantum computing, and next-generation data center technologies, demonstrating the nation’s continued commitment to advancing national computing infrastructure and scientific innovation.
NCHC’s featured exhibits included:
Nano5 and Nano4 next-generation supercomputers
Efficient Tensor-Network Conversion for Large-Scale Quantum Circuit Simulation
Agentic AI for Quantum Computing – Digital Twin of Taiwan’s FIRST Spherical Tokamak
Agentic AI-driven Inference Services for Scientific Applications
Digital Twin of National Parks for Environmental Sustainability
HPC Workload Forecasting and Scheduler Optimization
Dynamic GPU Resource Orchestration between HPC and Cloud
These technologies demonstrate how NCHC is integrating AI and HPC to accelerate scientific discovery across diverse fields, including quantum computing, fusion research, environmental sustainability, scientific simulations, and intelligent data center management.
As global demand for AI computing continues to grow, NCHC remains committed to building trusted, resilient, and high-performance computing infrastructure while strengthening international collaboration through ISC. Together with partners worldwide, NCHC continues to advance next-generation computing technologies and contribute to scientific innovation on a global scale.
Plans for a mega-resort, backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have spurred broader questions about who politics is serving
For more than a month, thousands have taken to the streets of Tirana to protest against their government, in the biggest outbreak of unrest in Albania since the collapse of communism more than three decades ago. What began with environmental concerns about protecting a nature reserve and the more than 2,500 species it hosts has become the flamingo revolution, questioning the very direction of the country.
Albanians are angered that multibillion dollar luxury developments backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump threaten one of the last wild areas on the Adriatic – Zvërnec, its lagoon and the nearby island of Sazan – and are furious at the lack of transparency surrounding the projects. The government says that deals are not finalised. But videos of bulldozers on beaches triggered the mass protests.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
BENGALURU, India, July 8, 2026 — QpiAI, a globally leading full-stack quantum computing company, today released the QpiAI Quantum SDK as open-source software. Available now at https://github.com/qpiai/quantum-sdk, the QpiAI Quantum SDK gives developers, researchers, and startups an accessible, developer-friendly toolkit to build and run quantum algorithms and to connect their quantum development workflows directly to QpiAI’s 8-qubit and 25-qubit quantum computers through QpiAI-QCloud.
The release is designed to expand access to quantum software development for developers, researchers, universities, startups, and enterprise innovation teams worldwide. By open-sourcing the SDK, QpiAI is giving the global quantum community a practical foundation for building industry-specific quantum solutions across finance, logistics, materials, chemistry, security, AI, optimization, and advanced scientific computing.
The QpiAI Quantum SDK provides a Python-based interface for circuit creation, simulation, algorithm development, and workflow execution. It ships with local state-vector and density matrix simulators, letting developers prototype and validate algorithms locally before running them on quantum hardware. It is also designed for AI-assisted and agentic development workflows, helping users move faster from idea to implementation while prototyping quantum applications.
The QpiAI Quantum SDK gives institutions a ready foundation for quantum computing coursework, research labs, hackathons, capstone projects, and hands-on developer training programs. QpiAI is actively positioning the SDK for use across university programs, research groups, developer communities, hackathons, and quantum application labs, enabling hands-on learning in quantum computing, algorithms, optimization, simulation, and machine learning. Early institutional adopters of the QpiAI Quantum SDK globally will be eligible to join the QpiAI Academic & Innovation Network, giving universities, research labs, and institutions preferential commercial terms on QpiAI QCloud institutional packages.
“India is entering a defining decade for quantum technologies, and open-source software will be critical to building the talent, research, and innovation base that national leadership requires. India being a leader for software in the last decade and globally known for its software capability will aggressively open-source software and enable innovation in Quantum computing across the globe,” said Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja, Founder and CEO, QpiAI. “With this release, we want developers, universities, and startups to build on Indian and global quantum infrastructure and help create a globally competitive, indigenous quantum ecosystem. The convergence of quantum computing, AI, and agentic development will define the next generation of deep-tech platforms — and QpiAI is committed to building that capability from India to our global users, partners, and customers.”
“Quantum computing will scale only when developers can experiment, learn, and deploy without friction,” said Lakshya Priyadarshi, VP – Quantum Platforms & Solutions, QpiAI. “The QpiAI Quantum SDK is a practical bridge between quantum theory, simulation, real hardware, and industry applications. By putting a strong software foundation in the hands of engineers and developers, we want to help build a diverse global quantum application ecosystem. The QpiAI Quantum SDK is the open developer gateway.”
The release also strengthens QpiAI’s contribution to India’s quantum technology ecosystem and complements the broader goals of India’s National Quantum Mission.
About QpiAI
QpiAI is a full-stack quantum computing company building quantum processors, control systems, software platforms, and quantum-AI application solutions for enterprise, education, research, and national-scale quantum programs. QpiAI has built a quantum foundry in Bengaluru to support superconducting, semiconductor, and photonic qubit development. QpiAI is headquartered in Bengaluru, with offices in Helsinki, Finland; Milpitas, California, USA; and Singapore.
Europe's General Court dismissed Apple's challenge to the EU's designation of its App Stores and iOS as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act. The ruling means Apple remains subject to DMA obligations requiring it to allow alternative app stores, support interoperability with rival services, and avoid favoring its own services over competitors. MacRumors reports: Apple took its case to Luxembourg's General Court in 2024 after the European Commission designated its five App Stores -- on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch -- as a single core platform service under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a label that brings with it a set of strict obligations. Designated "gatekeepers" are prohibited from favoring their own services over those of rivals, and are prevented from combining personal data across different services. They also have to give users the option to use alternative app stores.
Apple also challenged the EU's designation of iOS as a gateway platform, a status that requires the operating system allows rival services to interoperate with it. The company also disputed the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS, which would subject the app to EU telecoms rules. But the General Court said Apple's actions regarding the iMessage service are inadmissible.
PM suggests maintaining links with US president will be part of his continued responsibility to UK-US relationship
Donald Trump has agreed to stay in touch with Keir Starmer after he steps down from No 10 despite his increasingly tense relationship with the UK prime minister over recent months.
After meeting at the Nato summit in Ankara, Starmer suggested that maintaining links with the US president would be part of his continued responsibilities to the strategic relationship between the two countries.
With strong showings for newcomers Pluribus and Widow’s Bay, nominations for the 78th Emmys, hosted by Mariska Hargitay, are out ahead of the 14 September show
I need some opinions on if I should get a second onewheel or just stick with what I have.
I got my first onewheel last Father's Day. It's the Pint S. I got all the bumps and bruises and breaks out of the way in the first 75 miles. I broke some things and it totally changed the way I ride. I like riding so much more now. I have about 1k miles without coming off the onewheel.
I exclusively ride on the rode. I used to use it to just get from one place to another. I'm 5'11, 210lbs. I get pushback around 18.5mph. I used to average almost 17mph. I go about 15 miles to a charge. Now I ride slower. Average between 13mph and 14mph. I do as much weaving and carving as I can. I weave everything I see in the road. Lines, manhole covers, debris... it's like a game. The more snakelike the ride, the better.
I know myself enough to know that I'm not into modifying anything. I got my pint from the Onewheel website. If I get another, I'll probably just do the same. I just don't have the time, the patience, or the ambition to modify anything. I work 3rd. I have 2 babies. I do most of my riding early morning before my kids wake up and before there's traffic. The rest of my life is booked solid.
My only complaint with the Pint S is battery life. I have no desire to off road. Faster would be fine but not a priority. Maneuverability is important. I want to surf the roads. Should I stick with what I have... should I just buy a second Pint? Should buy something else?
I just want to enjoy riding longer. But if I have 2, I could already ride longer. Maybe there's a better board for riding the way I do. Any help would be much appreciated.
Meta's aware that its camera glasses are making people worried. A new update aims to prevent tampering with the recording light. But even more is needed.
Donald Trump’s latest effort to delay the release of more than $5m in court-held funds that he owes E Jean Carroll failed on Wednesday.
The US president asked Manhattan federal court judge Lewis Kaplan late on Tuesday not to order the release of these court-held funds, which a jury awarded Carroll in her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation civil trial against him; this money also includes interest. Trump has denied all wrongdoing.
Researchers at ORNL’s Quantum Science Center and across the laboratory will use the 20-qubit Radiance system to help develop a new quantum-HPC ecosystem
July 8, 2026 — With its acquisition of an on-site 20-qubit IQM Radiance quantum computer, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has taken another major stride forward in its research efforts to integrate quantum computing technology with classical high-performance computing (HPC). The new system, named Pathfinder, was launched June 15 in the Quantum Computer Deployment Lab at ORNL’s Translational Research Capability (TRC) building.
ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer delivers remarks during the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the IQM Pathfinder quantum computer. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
“By adding Pathfinder to the array of cutting-edge systems available to our computational scientists, ORNL deepens its commitment to making the U.S. a leader in quantum science and technology,” said ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer. The IQM system was procured through the Institutional Capital Equipment program.
Founded in 2018, Finland-based IQM Quantum Computers is a leading commercial builder of full-stack quantum computers.
“ORNL has been at the frontier of American science for decades. Bringing IQM’s first-ever U.S. on-premises quantum computer here represents a significant milestone for us as we continue to expand our global footprint and put quantum capability into the hands of world-class institutions that can advance quantum adoption,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and co-founder of IQM.
In addition to Quoll, the 6-qubit Quantum Brilliance cluster installed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) last September, Pathfinder will enable researchers at ORNL’s Quantum Science Center (QSC) to develop new applications, algorithms and architectures by using the more powerful quantum-centric HPC (QHPC) paradigm. As a member of the QSC, IQM is supporting the center’s mission to build the next generation of quantum computing. Meanwhile, ORNL researchers, in multiple divisions that span the quantum sciences and technology, will accelerate their work to establish a hardware-agnostic software architecture for merging the capabilities of two very different computing technologies.
“On-premises systems enable us to demonstrate quantum computing concepts that realize our goal of building a scalable, hybrid HPC ecosystem,” said QSC Director Travis Humble. “The presence of the IQM Radiance quantum computer on campus has already accelerated integration with our world-class HPC capabilities. Our research teams are now developing new methods and tools to demonstrate applications in materials simulations, chemistry and artificial intelligence.”
Quantum computing — a technology still in its early stages of development compared to classical supercomputers such as the OLCF’s exascale-class Frontier — utilizes quantum bits, or qubits, to perform calculations. Unlike binary bits used by classical computers, qubits don’t employ only ones and zeros to encode information. Rather, they use a quantum superposition of ones and zeros that may exponentially increase processing power for certain kinds of problems, such as the quantum mechanical interactions of particles. However, many quantum computers today are susceptible to high error rates because their qubits are very sensitive to temperature shifts, electromagnetic noise and even cosmic radiation.
IQM’s Radiance system is based on superconducting technology, which means its qubits must be cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero to remove electrical resistance and maintain fragile quantum states. Pathfinder is chilled by a Bluefors cryosystem with helium compressors that cool the IQM system to 4 kelvin, while a gas-handling system keeps the superconducting internals at a base temperature of less than 10 millikelvin.
ORNL’s TRC building, completed in 2025, was designed specifically for quantum information science research. Its sensitive-equipment laboratories are built on the ground floor to isolate their slabs and the spaces adjacent to them, thereby enabling high local vibration control at 250 microinches. For its use in hybrid computing research, Pathfinder will be connected to HPC systems in the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) Technology Integration Group’s test bed, which is actually located in a different building on the ORNL campus.
Teams of quantum science researchers, in close collaboration with the OLCF, will use Pathfinder and Quoll in their development of an open software stack for hybrid computing that can be used across different brands of computers, which usually have their own proprietary software.
“Our idea is to formalize the interfaces for QHPC so you can have more uniform ways of running applications and integrating different types of hardware without having to change your entire infrastructure every time,” said HPC systems software engineer Amir Shehata, who is leading the IQM integration effort in the Quantum-HPC Group in NCCS. Now, QSC researchers will demonstrate how their Open Quantum-HPC Software Ecosystem operates on real systems as they develop it.
“The work we’ve been doing here so far has been using simulators to take the place of the quantum computers. But now that we have the IQM and Quantum Brilliance machines, we can start trying to see if those architectures that we developed actually work when we couple them to a physical machine,” Shehata said.
The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL that is supported by DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program. The QSC is a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center headquartered at ORNL.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
Breaking a mirror. Walking under a ladder. Spilling salt. A black cat crossing one’s path.
After the events of this week, it feels safe to add one more item to the list of things said to bring bad luck: the support and intervention of Donald J Trump.
State officials call federal demands for voter data ‘truly bizarre behavior’ amid unproven noncitizen voting claims
The US Department of Justice sent letters to election officials in every state threatening potential criminal charges for officials if noncitizens vote, an escalation in an ongoing push by the federal government.
As Donald Trump’s administration pushes to exert greater control over elections, the justice department confirmed letters went out to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, “asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections”.
The Trump administration’s phony ceasefire with Iran is over.
Maybe.
“To me, I think it’s over,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, referring to a preliminary truce inked in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June. That ceasefire, an American capitulation intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil and gas shipping route whose closure by Iran was wreaking havoc on the global economy — never quite took effect. The price of oil spiked to its highest level in weeks following Trump’s Wednesday remarks.
“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” said Trump, referring to Iran’s leaders, as he wrapped up his trip to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They’re cuckoo.” At one point in his remarks, the 80-year-old president claimed that a U.S. warship was attacked by the “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”
The June agreement between the United States and Iran, designed to usher in further negotiations toward permanently ending the war that Trump began on February 28, echoed another faux ceasefire, signed in April, which was also largely a fiction.
Trump’s statement that he “thinks” the ceasefire has concluded surprised one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Shouldn’t he know?” the source said.
That official said the Trump administration had mismanaged the conflict and been repeatedly outmaneuvered by Iran, leading to a “twilight state” between war and peace, which has allowed Tehran to fortify its defenses and reconsolidate power. “He must be trying for the record of how many times you can lose the same war.”
An Intercept analysis found that, despite celebrating the June agreement as a victory, the Trump administration failed to achieve any of its war aims. For weeks, the White House has failed to respond to repeated requests for confirmation that the June ceasefire had collapsed and no goals of the war were reached. The White House did not reply to a question on Wednesday concerning the collapse of the ceasefire nor Trump’s claim of an attack by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.”
The United States attacked Iran on Tuesday, after reimposing sanctions on Iranian oil sales. U.S. Central Command said that it had struck “over 80 targets with precision munitions as an immediate response to Iran’s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” Iran did not claim responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks on commercial ships, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari ship carrying liquefied natural gas in waters off Oman’s coast.
CENTCOM also claimed to have attacked “more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats in and near the strait.” U.S. officials have previously claimed to have completely annihilated Iran’s naval forces. “Their Navy is gone,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 11, just after the first ceasefire was announced and fell apart.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and Parliament speaker, accused the United States of multiple violations of the June ceasefire agreement, in a Tuesday post. “The era of bullying and extortion is over. It leads nowhere. We don’t fold,” he wrote. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement published on state media on Wednesday, that in response to U.S. violations of the ceasefire, it had attacked 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait and also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.
“They’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said during his remarks in Ankara.
During the president’s war of choice on Iran, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes almost unprecedented in modern conflict, according to the civilian harm-monitoring group Airwars. On the first day of the war, the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. In the weeks that followed, tens of thousands more civilians would be killed or wounded in U.S.–Israeli strikes, according to World Health Organization estimates.
The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 426, an almost 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. For months, The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel from the Iran war is a gross undercount, stemming from what another U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known American casualties. The true number exceeds 625.
Trump vowed more attacks on Iran at the NATO summit. “I’ll give them a little warning we’re going to hit them hard tonight,” he said. On Monday, Trump threatened attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure that would “affect 91 million people,” almost all of them civilians.
“The child-killing and terrorist U.S. military in the early hours of this morning openly violated the ceasefire and violated the Islamabad understanding by launching an airstrike on a number of coastal bases and civilian stations,” the IRGC said in its statement.
CENTCOM claimed to have struck Iranian air defense systems, “command and control networks,” coastal radar sites, and other targets and threatened further attacks. “CENTCOM forces remain postured and prepared to hold Iran accountable when the agreement is not adhered to or obeyed,” the command posted on X.
After previously failing to make good on his pledge to ensure Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” since Tehran still maintains its stockpile of enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “de-nuke it.”
The U.S. official laughed when appraised of Trump’s pledge. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked of Trump’s denuclearization statement. The official said Trump had painted himself into a corner. “There is one word that describes this man and this war: a trainwreck.”
Colorado State University has updated its annual Atlantic hurricane forecast, predicting nine named storms and four hurricanes may develop during the 2026 season.
Powered by a Snapdragon X chip, HP's budget 16-inch laptop can run for nearly a day and a half on a single charge. It's also fairly portable for its size and elegant for its price.
BrianFagioli writes: Valve has released Proton 11.0-1, a major update to its Windows compatibility layer for Linux that makes more games playable while fixing a long list of bugs affecting existing titles. The release restores compatibility for many EA games after a recent EA App update, moves classics like Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and SHOGUN: Total War from Proton Experimental into the stable release, and adds support for games including Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, and Deadly Premonition. Valve also fixed crashes in HELLDIVERS 2, restored No Man's Sky VR support, improved Steam Overlay compatibility with EA games, addressed KDE and GNOME desktop issues, and rebased Proton on Wine 11.0 with updated graphics components. The full list of changes can be found here.
Early flight data shows K2 Airways plane crashed into sea with five crew on board south-west of Karachi
Pakistan has located the wreckage of a Boeing cargo plane, the country’s airports authority said, adding that rescuers were searching for the five crew members on board when the aircraft went missing.
The plane was approaching Karachi from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates when radar showed it “rapidly descending” on Tuesday evening after reporting a “navigational system issue”, according to the Pakistan Airports Authority (PAA).
Rachel Reeves ignored Ed Davey’s request to block Reform UK leader’s resignation until conclusion of standards inquiry
For anyone involved in British politics, an invitation to be interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme is the ultimate badge of seriousness. There are probably hundreds of MPs who have never made it onto the programme because they have not been deemed important enough.
But, as if to prove the point that the Clacton byelection really is a “farce” (see 7.59am), this morning Today had an interview with Count Binface, the serial joke byelection candidate who may turn out to be Nigel Farage’s main opposition in Clacton.
Probably not, but then you know my job is to celebrate and defend the wonders of British democracy.
And look at this, eh? The fact that you are interviewing me on the Today Programme, because all the other parties aren’t standing, says more about them than it does about me.
I don’t believe that single-handedly will tackle homophobia, racism or indeed any hate crime. But I do strongly believe that returning power back to people’s hands is a huge part of the role we should all be playing as elected public servants – and it’s how we build trust again.
Brent crude benchmark rose to more than $78 a barrel, its steepest increase since ceasefire began
Oil markets have recorded the sharpest price rise in nearly two months after a series of attacks on fossil fuel tankers near the strait of Hormuz led Donald Trump to declare that the ceasefire deal with Iran was “over”.
Brent, the global crude benchmark rose by 5% on Wednesday to more than $78 (£58) a barrel, the highest price since the US and Iran agreed the ceasefire while negotiating an end to the war last month.
How to hit the 3.5% of GDP defence spending promise would be a matter for ‘the next prime minister’, MPs told
The Treasury has as yet carried out no analysis of the trade-offs necessary for the UK to hit the 3.5% of GDP defence spending promise made to Nato, chief secretary Lucy Rigby has said.
Under robust questioning in a joint session of the Treasury and defence select committees on Wednesday, Rigby repeatedly said that how to fund additional defence spending would be a matter for “the next prime minister”.
"A little birdie told me this, about the fact that we'll give them the right to make Patriots," President Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Suit stemmed from 2023 Post article that said bank with ties to the porn industry helped fund Trump’s media operation
A federal judge in Florida has thrown out Donald Trump’s $3.8bn defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post over an article that said a bank with links to the pornography industry helped fund his fledgling social media operation.
In a brief order granting summary judgment to the newspaper, Tampa district court judge Thomas Patrick Barber, a Trump appointee, said the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) had “failed to present evidence that would allow a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence” that the Post acted with actual malice, the benchmark for such an action to succeed.
John Edwards resigned in June after independent investigation following claims of sexual harassment and bullying
The UK information commissioner who resigned over sexual harassment and bullying claims is understood to be taking legal action against a woman who flagged his conduct.
The science and technology secretary, Liz Kendall, said she was “appalled” by the fact that John Edwards was preparing to serve legal papers on one of the “incredibly brave” women at the ICO who had raised concerns about his behaviour. Edwards resigned from his post as the UK’s data regulator in June after an independent investigation.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: An Australian beach community was confused -- and later delighted -- by the discovery of six metallic-looking spheres that washed ashore last week. The mystery, and the ensuing attention, prompted a bunch of alien jokes from local residents and businesses. But Australia's space agency put the speculation to rest on Monday, saying that the spheres appeared to be rocket debris that had recently re-entered the atmosphere from orbit.
The objects were found on Forrest Beach in the northeastern state of Queensland over the weekend, the state's fire department said. Residents described them as being about twice the size of a basketball. "The recovered objects appear to be pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle," the Australian Space Agency said in a statement, adding that they were "consistent with debris from a foreign rocket body." The agency said that it had identified the likely source of the objects, without providing further details, and was working with international authorities to confirm the vehicle from which the debris originated.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear formally requested an update from Sen. Mitch McConnell amid a weekslong hospitalization that has prompted growing speculation about his health.
An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.
The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.
LEMONT, Ill, July 8, 2026 — Computers have made it easier than ever before to design the perfect material for a given problem: Scientists can create a virtual version and simulate how that material will behave. Building these atomically precise simulations, however, typically requires deep expertise in computational chemistry. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, researchers have developed a kind of shortcut, streamlining scientific workflows using artificial intelligence (AI).
The team leveraged ALCF’s Aurora exascale supercomputer to run the computationally intensive quantum chemistry simulations integrated into ChemGraph. Image credit: Argonne National Laboratory.
ChemGraph is an open-source, publicly available framework that automates some of the steps required when performing calculations for materials science and chemistry. This could help accelerate efforts such as boosting engine efficiency, extracting critical materials and making better batteries. The framework was described recently in the journal Communications Chemistry.
The team developed ChemGraph using resources at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), including the Aurora exascale supercomputer and the ALCF Inference Service, a first-of-its-kind platform that gives researchers cloud-like access to a broad range of large language models (LLMs) on the facility’s high performance computing systems. The ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.
A Team of AI Assistants for Complex Science
ChemGraph’s purpose is to lower the barriers to innovation for both scientists and students. Let’s say you want to design a gas turbine engine that derives more power from less fuel. For that, you need to understand various aspects of methane combustion, such as the exact conditions that will help get the most value out of the gas. Computer simulations will help answer questions about how methane molecules behave as they go through the combustion process.
Running such simulations often requires a doctorate degree’s worth of knowledge and dozens of steps. You need the theoretical background to know which scientific methods to use for a study. You need to identify which software is compatible with those methods. You must then prepare your input file (the data) and navigate the software to get results. Then you will put those results into a separate tool for further analysis, running sequential calculations, fine-tuning parameters and comparing results along the way before arriving at a conclusion. This is your workflow.
Materials scientists and chemists have the theoretical and experimental background to write research papers and carry out real-world experiments, but they may not have the technical savvy or staff to run these workflows. ChemGraph assigns different parts of a workflow to agents, which are akin to assistants that specialize in different tasks, such as planning, executing work or aggregating data.
Argonne’s Murat Keçeli and Thang Duc Pham (seated) review results using ChemGraph, an AI-driven framework designed to streamline computational chemistry and materials science workflows. Image credit: Argonne National Laboratory.
About a decade ago, Argonne computational scientist Murat Keçeli had already been working on automating some of the tasks involved in chemistry through rule-based automation. Computer scientists have long used this strategy to achieve leaps in productivity — at its most basic, think of macros on a computer that can bundle steps together and execute them in one keystroke. In 2017, during his postdoctoral work with Argonne Distinguished Fellow Stephen Klippenstein’s group, Keçeli developed the Quantum Thermochemistry Calculator, a series of coded modules for thermochemistry calculations, before moving on to other projects.
Then ChatGPT, the generative AI powered by LLMs, emerged in late 2022. “When this large language model breakthrough happened, I thought, ‘I should go back to that workflow automation,’” Keçeli said. “Basically, we wanted to put all of our expert knowledge about workflows into an agent-based automation that you could talk to through an LLM.”
ChemGraph uses LLMs to provide a natural language interface to its agent-based automation. A researcher can state the scientific problem in plain language, and the framework maps that request onto a sequence of computational tasks, software tools and analyses needed to produce the result.
Argonne researchers designed ChemGraph to call only the right types of tools and libraries to minimize the risk of hallucination, a well-known phenomenon in which generative AI fabricates answers.
“We don’t want the large language model to just answer the questions,” said Thang Duc Pham, an Argonne postdoctoral fellow and ChemGraph co-creator. “We want it to run physics-based simulations and get an answer for you, instead of just relying on what it knows.” He noted that this capability is also useful in cases where a problem has not been studied yet and new data is needed for a hypothesis.
ChemGraph complements DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to accelerate science through AI. Even when computational chemists run simulations, problems inevitably surface somewhere along the workflow, Keçeli noted. ChemGraph aims to simplify a complicated process and minimize hassle so that scientists can focus on their research goals.
Force Multipliers: AI Agents, Human Collaborators and ALCF
The ChemGraph team, which also included Aditya Tanikanti (a former Argonne computer scientist now at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), initially built the framework with a single agent. But they saw that it began to fail when problems reached a certain level of complexity. They also realized that some tasks could be handled by smaller language models, while others required more sophisticated reasoning LLMs. Multiple agents could do the same job more efficiently.
“If you use only one type of LLM for everything, then you risk wasting money and allotted compute time,” Keçeli said. “We found that we could start with a big model for workflow planning and then revert to smaller models for execution tasks.”
The team used ALCF’s Inference Service to access powerful open-weight models on facility systems rather than through external cloud providers, helping reduce cost and address data-security concerns. They also leveraged the Aurora supercomputer to run the computationally demanding quantum chemistry simulations embedded in ChemGraph, underscoring the complementary roles of AI inference and large-scale high performance computing in the framework.
With its ability to make computational chemistry more accessible, ChemGraph is already seeing interest at universities. Professors can use it as a teaching tool and students can use it to explore their own research questions. Because ChemGraph is open source, it is also adaptable to tasks beyond the ones in the initial release.
“We have already added one new feature to ChemGraph through a hackathon last fall, and as we collaborate with more people, we are hoping to expand ChemGraph’s capabilities beyond our own expertise,” Pham said.
In one recent collaboration at Argonne, researchers adapted ChemGraph for X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) simulation and analysis, helping automate a spectroscopy workflow from user requests through simulation, data processing and curation. In another effort with ALCF researchers, ChemGraph was extended to coordinate a high-throughput materials screening workflow on Aurora, demonstrating a path toward scalable, AI-driven scientific automation on exascale supercomputers.
Ultimately, the goal of any scientific simulation is to obtain results that translate to a real-world advance. This is the promise of autonomous discovery: Better simulations on computers translate to fewer failed experiments in the lab, bringing ideas to life faster.
“Our dream for ChemGraph is to make it available as a service for ALCF users through a chatbot-style interface,” Keçeli said. “In the long run, we hope to make it increasingly autonomous, able to plan, execute and refine complex computational workflows with minimal user intervention, so scientists can focus on the scientific questions they want to answer.”
Work on ChemGraph was supported by DOE’s Office of Science.
Source: Christina Nunez, Argonne National Laboratory
Summer holiday bookings have bounced back recently after the fragile ceasefire in the Middle East, the package holiday operator Jet2 has said.
The company, which flies about 20 million people every year, said its summer bookings are up by 7.1% compared with this time last year and the average load factor – which measures its available seating capacity filled with paying passengers – is up 1.2 percentage points.
There is still a massive amount of people who want to go away. But they have delayed their purchase because they wanted to see what happened with the conflict.
The market is now in good shape, and consumers are desperate to go away and perhaps sleep in a room with air conditioning.
Turkey, Cyprus, eastern Greek islands, Bulgaria and parts of north Africa have rebounded the most in percentage terms, but all destinations have increased.
The governor of the Bank of England has broken his silence about the pressure Nigel Farage put on him to drop a cryptocurrency policy that could be costly for Reform UK’s billionaire backer, saying he is “able to spot” and resist lobbying.
Andrew Bailey’s comments, in a letter seen by the Guardian, come as Farage’s decision not to disclose a £5m gift from the Thailand-based crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne has triggered the biggest crisis of his political career.
Meta said it was working with officials to be a ‘good neighbor’ and drinking water supplies were not affected
Officials in Wyoming said a contractor for Mark Zuckerberg’s tech company, Meta, flushed bacteria-contaminated water into public sewers during construction of a controversial new AI datacenter.
The incident prompted water authorities in Cheyenne to implement strict safety regulations on how wastewater from such projects is disposed of, according to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, which first reported the incident.
ESPOO, Finland, July 8, 2026 — The LUMI AI Factory, led by CSC – IT Center for Science, has selected IQM Quantum Computers to deliver IQM Halocene H4, an advanced quantum computer aimed at accelerating hybrid high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing capabilities.
MI AI Factory selects IQM to deploy advanced quantum computer, accelerating hybrid HPC and AI development.
IQM Halocene H4 is the first and most advanced on-premises superconducting quantum computer of its kind, combining quantum error correction with NISQ qubits. The system will be delivered in 2027, followed by a series of upgrades delivered in multiple phases with an increasing number of logical qubits.
The IQM Halocene H4 and the upgraded systems will enable LUMI consortium users, for the first time, to develop and implement Quantum Error Correction (QEC) concepts on a world-leading system.
The system will be used in joint R&D efforts towards fault-tolerant quantum computing and advancements in hybrid computing. This will support new inventions on the critical path to fault-tolerant quantum computing and to enable new commercialization opportunities.
This forward-looking development path ensures that European users can experiment today while preparing for fully scalable quantum platforms tomorrow. The system will also provide European end-users with the high-performance quantum computing resources needed for research and innovation, and for building national know-how and expertise.
“CSC and the LUMI AI Factory are exactly the kind of partners that define what production quantum computing looks like in practice — world-class HPC infrastructure, a deep commitment to research excellence, and the ambition to lead rather than follow,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder, IQM Quantum Computers. “Delivering IQM Halocene to CSC means Europe’s most powerful quantum computer will sit at the heart of one of the world’s leading research computing environments. This is a milestone for IQM, CSC, for Finland, and for the European quantum ecosystem.”
The system, named LUMI-IQ, will be integrated into the LUMI AI Factory at CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland’s national center of expertise in information technology and home to the LUMI supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
This integration of quantum technologies with AI and high-performance computing opens the door to breakthroughs that classical computing alone cannot achieve. LUMI-IQ will comprise both hardware and software solutions, offering capabilities for research, development, and education.
“As part of the LUMI AI Factory, LUMI-IQ will bring together world-leading AI, data, high-performance computing and quantum acceleration in one powerful hybrid environment. By connecting quantum concepts and algorithms with intelligent software tools and real-world applications, it will open new possibilities for scientific discovery and RDI, from materials and health to energy and fundamental science. At the same time, it will help Europe build the knowledge, skills, and capabilities needed for the next era of innovation, including the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC – IT Center for Science.
“Already the first system delivered in 2027 will come with a state-of-the-art quantum processing unit (QPU) with 150 qubits. This is only the beginning, however. Over the next years, LUMI-IQ will evolve into a fault-tolerant quantum computer through a series of upgrades that increase both qubit count and performance, making the LUMI AI Factory a world-leading European hybrid platform combining AI and quantum computing,” describes Mikael Johansson, Manager for Quantum Technologies at CSC – IT Center for Science.
The LUMI-IQ quantum computer will be jointly funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, Finland, Czechia, Norway and Poland.
As disclosed in IQM’s prospectus on 1 July 2026, the total value of the contract is approximately equal to IQM’s total revenue for the financial year ended 31 December 2025.
This announcement follows IQM’s landmark dual listing on Nasdaq in the United States and the Helsinki Stock Exchange in Finland, making it the first European quantum computing company to be publicly traded.
IQM has sold 23 quantum systems globally — more than any other quantum hardware manufacturer — with its systems integrated into four of the leading supercomputing centers in the world.
About CSC – IT Center for Science
CSC is a Finnish center of expertise in ICT that provides world-class services for research, education, culture, public administration and enterprises, to help them thrive and benefit society at large.
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Quantum Computers (Nasdaq: IQMX) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to enterprises, research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Finland, with major operations in Munich, IQM employs over 400 people and operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM is the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Stock Market.
Mark Gatz was arrested at illegal campsite in June and had faced multiple citations for residing in Tonto national forest
A man in Arizona has pleaded guilty to violating federal fire restrictions and unlawfully residing in a national forest, after authorities said he spent years living at a makeshift campsite surrounded by what officials described as “approximately 1,000 pounds of trash”.
Mark Aaron Gatz was arrested on 25 June at his illegal campsite in Arizona’s Tonto national forest, according to court records. A United States Forest Service (USFS) officer wrote in documents submitted to court that Gatz had been operating an “illegal campsite” with a “hot wood burning campfire” despite fire restrictions and that he had told investigators that he had been living in the forest for about eight years.
Collaboration Demonstrates How Data Infrastructure Is Becoming the Key Lever for Lower Cost-Per-Token, Faster Time-to-First-Token, and Higher AI Factory Efficiency
PARIS, July 8, 2026 — DDN today announced continued progress in its collaboration with Nebul, a European leader in providing sovereign-hybrid cloud solutions, to optimize large-scale AI inference performance through advanced KV Cache acceleration and high-performance data infrastructure.
The collaboration brings together Nebul’s AI inference platform, DDN’s Infinia data intelligence architecture, and NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies to address one of the most important challenges facing production AI environments: maximizing the economic return on AI infrastructure investments through higher GPU utilization, faster token generation, and lower cost-per-token.
As AI adoption moves from experimentation to production, organizations are confronting a new reality: the challenge is no longer whether AI works, but whether the economics work at scale.
Across the industry, enterprises, cloud providers, and sovereign AI initiatives are increasingly measuring success through business outcomes such as GPU utilization, cost-per-token, tokens-per-watt, and time-to-production. In this environment, data infrastructure has emerged as a critical determinant of AI profitability.
“The AI conversation has fundamentally changed,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “For years, the industry focused on acquiring GPUs. Today, the question is how efficiently those GPUs generate value. Inference has become the economic engine of AI, and reducing the cost of every token produced is now one of the most important challenges facing the industry.”
As part of an ongoing proof-of-concept engagement, DDN and Nebul are validating next-generation KV Cache acceleration capabilities designed to support NVIDIA DSX-based AI factory deployments by improving inference efficiency, reducing latency, and increasing utilization of AI infrastructure.
“For years, the industry focused on building larger models. Today, the challenge is making those models economically viable in production,” said Arnold Juffer, CEO at Nebul. “Every organization is looking for ways to generate more value from its AI infrastructure investments. Through our collaboration with DDN and NVIDIA, we are demonstrating how KV Cache optimization and high-performance data architectures can improve inference efficiency, reduce latency, and help unlock the next phase of AI adoption.”
“AI infrastructure is increasingly defined by efficiency at scale,” said Rod Evans, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure at NVIDIA. “As organizations deploy larger models and agentic AI workloads into production, technologies that improve GPU utilization, reduce latency, and accelerate token generation become critical. DDN continues to be an important collaborator in advancing the data and infrastructure capabilities needed to support the next generation of AI factories.”
Recent benchmarking efforts have demonstrated promising early results, including measurable improvements in Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) performance with KV Cache enabled. The collaboration has successfully completed RoCE-based infrastructure validation and continues to expand benchmarking activities across larger inference sequence lengths while identifying additional optimization opportunities within DDN’s Infinia platform.
The project has also expanded to include collaboration with NVIDIA around benchmarking methodologies, scalability validation, and future technical publications.
The Economics of AI Have Shifted
Industry attention has historically centered on model performance and GPU availability. However, as organizations deploy AI into production, a new bottleneck has emerged: data movement and inference efficiency.
Agentic AI workloads, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and large-scale inference environments place unprecedented demands on infrastructure, including networking and storage. Every millisecond of latency and every percentage point of GPU idle time directly impacts profitability.
“Training builds the asset. Inference is where it earns,” said Bouzari. “The next generation of AI applications will be powered by agents that perform meaningful business transactions and decisions. The economics of those systems depend on infrastructure that can deliver data at the speed AI operates.”
DDN’s Infinia platform was purpose-built to address these challenges through distributed KV Cache services, GPU-native data movement, intelligent data orchestration, and high-performance storage architectures that maximize accelerator efficiency.
Accelerating the AI Factory Era
The Nebul collaboration reinforces DDN’s broader vision that AI infrastructure must evolve beyond traditional storage architectures and become an active participant in AI execution.
The collaboration supports the broader NVIDIA DSX platform approach to AI factories, where compute, networking, storage, software, and operations are designed together to improve tokens-per-watt, cost-per-token, and time-to-production.
As organizations seek to operationalize AI at scale, DDN believes the defining metrics of success will increasingly become:
GPU utilization
Cost-per-token
Tokens-per-watt
Time-to-first-token
Time-to-production
Organizations that optimize these metrics will achieve sustainable AI economics. Those who do not risk deploying infrastructure that remains underutilized despite significant investment.
“We don’t sell storage,” Bouzari added. “We help organizations maximize the economic return on every GPU, every token, and every watt. That’s the foundation of the AI economy.”
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across millions of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns. Discover more at ddn.com.
Activist is challenging ruling last year that restored colonial-era homophobic law against same-sex intimacy
Some of the UK’s top judges are hearing arguments over whether a Trinidad and Tobago court had the legal right to overturn a 2018 ruling to remove colonial-era homophobic laws that criminalise anal sex between consenting men.
The country’s “buggery law”, often referred to as its “sodomy” law, was created in 1925 and was written into Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Act. In 2017 a Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist, Jason Jones, challenged the law, and in 2018 a high court ruled that it infringed upon his constitutional right to privacy and equality.
Nearly a quarter of market traders now hold master’s degree, PhD or medical doctorate, research shows
One in five young market traders now holds a master’s degree, PhD or medical doctorate, according to exclusive figures shared with the Guardian, in a sign of how Britain’s markets are attracting an unexpected new generation of highly educated entrepreneurs.
Separate data from Kerb, the street food collective behind some of London’s best-known food markets, points in the same direction. Almost three-quarters of its founders have university degrees, including one in four with postgraduate qualifications. About 95% work in their businesses full-time rather than treating them as weekend side hustles.
Daily realities of healthcare, prices and Gaza driving wave of anti-establishment sentiment among Democratic voters in closely watched contest
In Macomb county, Michigan – a blue-collar Detroit suburb that twice voted for Barack Obama before backing each of Donald Trump’s three runs for the US presidency – residents are exhausted.
Time and again, township trustee Shannon King, a Democrat still making up his mind, hears similar complaints. “You’re going backwards in your paycheck. You’re going backwards in your healthcare,” he said. “You go to work every day. You might have a side hustle. Your significant other has a side hustle, too. And you’re still struggling to do childcare.”
Hotel did not allow two Muslim women to wear full-body bathing suit, which has become bugbear of European far right
An Austrian court has found an alpine hotel’s ban on burkinis discriminatory, a politically explosive ruling in a country where the far right is on the rise.
The full-body bathing suit worn by some Muslim women has become a bugbear of the European far right, which has campaigned to restrict Muslim dress in public spaces.
July 8, 2026 — Energy storage is becoming critical to grid resilience and electricity affordability because battery systems can help balance supply and demand and stabilize power.
High-performance computing helps show how design, operation affect lifespan and savings.
Long battery lifetimes are key to unlocking those benefits. But that requires understanding how project design and operation affect stress on large-scale battery systems over hundreds of cycles — before spending the time and money to deploy them.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are tackling this problem by coupling high performance computing (HPC) with a physics-based modeling framework to rapidly evaluate how different operating strategies affect battery aging over time. The result is a powerful computational tool for designing megawatt-hour battery storage systems so they will last longer and reduce costs.
A full battery pack — what most people think of as a battery — is made up of modules filled with many battery cells. The ORNL modeling framework starts with cell-level aging simulation, then scales up to module- and pack-level performance. This multiscale approach enables optimization of electrical architecture, control strategies and operating schedules.
HPC Speeds Insight into Battery Wear
ORNL’s approach relies on high performance computing for detailed analysis of battery degradation after 500-1,000 operating cycles, delivering results in days instead of weeks, said Srikanth Allu, ORNL computational research scientist. The flexible, reusable framework can simulate more than 10,000 cells at once and accommodate multiple chemistries of lithium-ion batteries, the technology most widely used for grid-scale storage.
Previous approaches for predicting degradation in lithium-ion systems often relied on cell-level studies or simplified assumptions. These did not fully reflect how battery aging is influenced by system-level designs and real-world operating conditions driven by different uses of batteries in the grid.
The ORNL model simulated two common grid energy storage services: reducing energy costs and stabilizing the frequency of changes in electric current flow.
To regulate frequency, batteries receive signals from operators to provide rapid, short bursts of power every few seconds. Momentary swings in supply or demand can destabilize frequency, but batteries quickly provide balancing. This service involves frequent, shallow cycling.
In contrast, when used to reduce energy costs during high-demand periods, batteries draw on stored energy with deeper, more energy-intensive cycles. Researchers found that this operating profile wears down the battery faster.
Battery systems can be used for a single grid service or a combination. ORNL simulations showed that using them for multiple services can balance near-term savings with long-term battery lifetime and replacement costs.
“We found that these two applications drive different degradation pathways within the battery, highlighting how operating conditions influence aging at the material level,” said Allu. “The simulations provide new insight into why batteries may degrade at different rates and point to opportunities to design battery systems that better balance performance, lifetime, and economic return.”
Simulations Show What’s Outside The Battery Matters Too
The model also showed that aging varies among battery cells and across entire battery packs. Because of both inherent design differences and varied operation for different tasks, low-voltage systems showed more aging variation than high-voltage systems. The results highlight the importance of electrical architecture and interconnections in determining how degradation evolves across large-scale battery systems.
Allu said the next step in the research would be to extend the framework to additional battery formulations and more realistic operating conditions, including varied designs, different states of health and a wider range of temperatures. In the future, the approach could also be adapted to study battery performance across a broader range of grid and energy storage applications, such as battery support for AI data centers.
“Simulations at this scale can significantly reduce the need for costly, time-intensive, full-system testing to evaluate battery aging,” Allu said.
The ORNL team used the data from this research as the basis for a foundational model that further speeds up aging analysis to hours instead of weeks or months. This effort supports the DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security, and drive energy innovation.
Other researchers who contributed to the project include Michael Starke, head of ORNL’s Electrical Systems Integration Section, and former postdoctoral researcher Surya Mitra Ayalasomayajula. The team received a Best Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Electrical Energy Storage Application and Technologies Conference earlier this year for their work describing the project. The research was funded by DOE’s Office of Electricity.
By combining leadership-class high performance computing with expertise in battery materials and grid systems, ORNL can model battery behavior from individual cells to full systems, at a range of scale and detail not typically achievable elsewhere.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Nato leaders have informally agreed not to mention the football World Cup to Donald Trump for fear of irritating the US president at a crucial time for the military alliance.
Officials said European leaders had discussed in the sidelines of the summit in Ankara how to keep Trump on side amid concerns he could further destabilise Nato with threats over defence spending.
Political campaigns are increasingly deploying AI and deepfakes to further their messaging, and the scale of spread has experts concerned
From the comfort of his bed, Jonathan Rinaldi, a political candidate for a city council seat in Queens, New York, tinkered away on his iPhone, prompting an artificial intelligence chatbot to mock up fake news hits and endorsements he had never received.
During the campaign last October, Rinaldi shared one of those stories, made to appear real with a CNN logo, on his Facebook and Instagram. It stated that Lynn Schulman, his opponent and an incumbent Democrat, had been “forced to drop out of the race due to a series of critical mistakes”. But Schulman had not quit her campaign, and in November, won by a landslide.
July update projects GDP growth of 1% this year, making UK the third fastest-growing economy in the G7
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has upgraded its growth forecast for the UK, while leaving those for other G7 countries weaker or unchanged, amid hopes the economic impact of the Iran war may be less severe than feared.
In a July update of its World Economic Outlook, which was finalised before the latest outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, the Washington-based organisation projected UK gross domestic product to grow by 1% this year – up 0.2 percentage points from its April forecast.
The Washington-based publication is announcing plans for a new digital subscription product called the Hill Insider
The most-visited digital-first news publication dedicated to politics wasn’t Politico or Axios in May – it was the Hill, a Washington-based outlet that also still publishes a print product three days a week that gets delivered to the office of every member of Congress.
While the Hill is often left out of conversations about the most influential political news outlets, the publication has been quietly chugging along since it was acquired by the television conglomerate Nexstar in 2021 for $130m. Bill Sammon, the Fox News veteran who serves as senior vice-president for editorial content, said the Hill was profitable and had benefited from a surge of interest in the second Trump administration.
Far-right leader plans to take part in 2027 race despite appeal court upholding her conviction for embezzlement
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has launched her presidential campaign after a decision by a court of appeal shortened her ban on running for office, allowing her to take part in the 2027 vote.
Le Pen said voters would decide her future. “I’m a citizen like anyone else, who is using their rights,” she said on Wednesday, attempting to brush aside legal woes that her political opponents said would plague her campaign for next spring’s presidential election.
Hostilities between US and Iran resume as US president lashes out at ‘vicious, violent people’. Plus the fallout from the USMNT’s exit from the Fifa World Cup
Good morning. Hostilities have resumed between the US and Iran. Tehran accused the US of violating the agreement intended to end the war, after the US military launched strikes around the strait of Hormuz and revoked a temporary sanctions waiver for Iranian oil exports. The attacks were the latest in a string of ceasefire violations by the two sides, despite a truce that came into effect in April, and have led to an immediate 3% rise in oil prices.
Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara, Donald Trump said the memorandum of understanding with Iran was over and called the country’s leaders “vicious, violent people” whom he would not deal with because they were, in the US president’s words, “scum”. He nevertheless appeared to indicate that talks would continue. Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, backed the US attacks, saying: “When you have a ceasefire and Iran is basically violating the ceasefire, I think it is totally crucial that the US forcefully react.”
What occurred to break the fragile ceasefire? The US military said that it had hit more than 80 targets in the early hours of Wednesday in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels passing through the strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. Iran responded by launching attacks on US military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said 85 facilities had been targeted.
How could Democrats replace Platner? It is possible for Democrats to select a new Senate nominee in Maine, but the clock is ticking. To have a new candidate on the ballot for November’s midterm elections, Platner needs to end his campaign by 5pm ET on 13 July, according to state law. That would give the Democrats a two-week window – until 5pm ET on 27 July – to pick a replacement.
Team manager Sam Zapatka and US Soccer vice-president of security Frank Pannell weren’t allowed at the match. Fifa has not given a specific reason for the suspensions.
The head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division sent letters to election officials in all 50 states threatening criminal action if they knowingly allow non-U.S. citizens to vote.
Can a Burnham government make Britain a global leader in science and technology?Expert commentLToremark
The next UK prime minister should make it a priority to provide strategic focus for Britain’s science and technology strategy.
Andy Burnham is near-certain to succeed Keir Starmer as UK prime minister. He will inherit a world in which technological leadership increasingly shapes economic prosperity, military capability and geopolitical influence. Emerging science and technology fields including AI, quantum technologies and engineering biology are no longer simply drivers of productivity; they are instruments of state power.
Yet despite successive governments proclaiming ambitions to make the UK a global science and technology power, Britain still lacks a sufficiently coherent strategy to compete in a fast-evolving technological landscape defined by US–China rivalry.
The UK’s challenge is not a lack of ambition, but a lack of sustained strategic focus. Over the past decade, successive governments have produced numerous science and technology-oriented strategies. But priorities have shifted with changes of leadership and ministerial reshuffles, and funding programmes have too often been replaced or redirected rather than developed into long-term national capabilities. Strategic technologies require investment horizons measured in decades, not parliamentary terms.
Britain’s aim should not be to match the scale of investment or technological breadth of the US or China. It cannot. Nor should it aspire to technological self-sufficiency. Its competitive advantage lies in identifying those technologies where it can develop genuine strategic leverage and concentrating public investment, industrial policy and international partnerships accordingly.
Doing so requires a more clear-eyed assessment of Britain’s foreign policy challenges, particularly those posed by China. Beijing is not simply another commercial competitor. Under its policy of military-civil fusion, the Chinese state actively seeks to leverage scientific and technological advances developed in civilian universities and industry for military modernization and national security objectives. As Chinese firms become increasingly embedded within global technology ecosystems, standards and supply chains, the UK’s challenge extends beyond protecting sensitive technologies from acquisition. It must also avoid creating strategic dependencies that could constrain its freedom of action during future geopolitical crises.
With limited experience in foreign policy and national security, Burnham’s approach to China remains largely untested. This creates a potential risk that the strategic implications of engagement with Beijing could be underestimated, reducing the UK’s leverage in managing an increasingly complex bilateral relationship.
Burnham would however enter Downing Street with a well-developed vision for industrial renewal. Throughout his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, he has argued for a more active state role in supporting high-growth sectors, including AI, life sciences, advanced materials and manufacturing. He championed plans to ‘reindustrialize the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and emphasized the need for a broader national reindustrialization strategy that spreads high-value jobs and investment beyond the UK’s major urban centres.
The key question will be whether Burnham can translate this vision into government policy amid fiscal constraints and competing political priorities. His government would also need to balance ambitious industrial objectives against the increasingly important national security dimensions of science and technology policy – in particular with relation to China.
Building a coherent strategy
To ensure the UK remains competitive in coming decades, the next government should focus on three key areas.
1. Prioritize the technologies that matter most
The first task should be to replace fragmented technology policymaking with long-term strategic discipline. Britain’s 2023 national quantum strategy provides a useful model. Rather than setting broad aspirations, it identified areas of comparative advantage, established measurable objectives and integrated economic growth with national security considerations. A similar approach should be applied across other strategically important technologies, particularly AI, engineering biology, advanced semiconductors, advanced communications and advanced materials.
The capacity to turn research and innovation into globally dominant firms also deserves attention. Despite producing world-class research and technology start-ups, Britain has repeatedly struggled to scale innovative firms domestically. Too often, companies developed in the UK are forced to seek overseas capital as they grow, limiting Britain’s ability to capture the long-term economic and strategic benefits of its own innovation. More targeted and consolidated pension fund investment into high-growth technology firms, alongside deeper collaboration with trusted international partners, would help ensure that more of the value created by British innovation can be leveraged for the UK’s advantage.
2. Build strategic foresight into government
The pace of technological change and geopolitical competition means science and technology policy cannot remain reactive. It demands a permanent capability to identify and bolster Britain’s strengths in emerging technologies – before they become strategic vulnerabilities or missed economic opportunities.
A future government should therefore establish a cross-government technology forecasting and horizon-scanning capability within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, working closely with the Government Office for Science and the national security community. Building on the model of the now defunct National Security Technology and Innovation Exchange, its role should be to continuously map and assess emerging technologies, identify areas where the UK can develop competitive advantage, anticipate future technological dependencies, and inform decisions on investment, industrial strategy and national security.
3. Safeguard research security
Britain’s universities are among the country’s greatest strategic assets. They generate world-leading research, attract global talent and underpin innovation across many of the technologies that will shape future economic competitiveness and national security.
But these strengths also make them attractive targets for foreign states seeking to acquire cutting-edge intellectual property, scientific expertise and emerging technologies. This challenge is particularly acute in relation to China. In 2023, the Five Eyes intelligence chiefs issued a rare joint warning about China’s ‘sustained, scaled and sophisticated’ efforts to obtain sensitive research, expertise and intellectual property. Increasingly, knowledge generated through legitimate academic collaboration can be transferred – deliberately or inadvertently – into China’s military, intelligence or strategic programmes.
At the same time, the financial pressures facing UK universities are increasing their exposure to risk. Frozen domestic tuition fees, combined with public research funding that often fail to cover research costs, have left many institutions increasingly reliant on international student fee income. While international collaboration remains essential to scientific excellence, financial pressures can create incentives to pursue overseas partnerships and funding arrangements without fully accounting for their long-term strategic implications.
Two police officers saw possible signs of life, but the child was still taken to the hospital's "cold room" after being treated by staff, according to police documents.
Three families in Los Angeles on the devastating aftermath of ICE detentions and deportations that overwhelmed their city last summer
Last summer, Angelenos began to vanish.
Armed, masked immigration agents plucked people off street corners and out of their workplaces, in parking lots and department stores. Partners and primary breadwinners, grandparents and children, carwasheros and coffee shop regulars were arrested, detained and deported – disappearing from their neighborhoods.
Modern forensic analysis leads to arrest in murder of traveling salesman John Warren, authorities say
Items that were found discarded behind a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Georgia in 1985 have led to charges against a suspect in an Ohio killing committed at about that time, investigators announced recently.
As told by authorities, the case centering on killed traveling salesman John Warren is among the latest in the US criminal justice system to illustrate how the application of modern forensic testing techniques on evidence collected decades earlier can lead to closure of cold murder cases.
Donald Trump has declared that the ceasefire with Iran is over as he arrived at the Nato summit in Ankara, launching an angry broadside in which he complained about the military alliance and repeated his demand for Greenland.
The US president, sitting alongside the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, called Iran’s leadership scum and “sick people”, and added that he was “very upset” with the alliance and even threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in a row over defence spending.
The German car industry has warned of a potential collapse of employment in the sector in Europe unless society and workers accept that “bold decisions” are needed to address competition from the Chinese and other rivals.
Volkswagen is preparing to formally propose up to 100,000 job losses to its supervisory board on Thursday, a move that has triggered a wave of protests.
Virgin Media has been fined £28m by the UK telecoms watchdog for repeatedly preventing customers from cancelling their contracts over a near three-year period.
Ofcom discovered that Virgin Media “likely mishandled” millions of phone calls between the start of 2022 and autumn 2024, with deliberate call-dropping tactics, unnecessary call transfers and putting customers on hold for “no reason”.
Group blames expected £30m loss in first half of year on weakening market and lower consumer confidence
Vistry Group, one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, has warned it will make a loss in the first half of the year, after it resorted to heavy discounting to attract buyers for unsold homes .
Vistry shares fell by 8% after the firm also announced its finance director was leaving.
A preliminary hearing to establish whether there is enough evidence against Tyler James Robinson for the case to proceed to trial enters Day 3 in Utah.
A host of transactions involving Reform UK’s most senior figures and donations to the party caused bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency, a Guardian investigation has found.
On Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed £5m gift provided to the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, by a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election was reported to the NCA.
One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.
Explosions and flames were seen in Iran after the US military launched strikes on targets around the strait of Hormuz in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels near Oman. US officials said the strikes hit more than 80 targets, including air defence systems, command and control networks, anti-ship missile capabilities and more than 60 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps small boats. The US also revoked a temporary sanctions waiver for Tehran to export oil. Iran accused the US of violating the agreement aimed at ending the war and responded by launching attacks on US military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait
Experts warn that some marine species are at risk of ‘mass mortality events’ in ever-warming oceans
UK waters are being hit with an “extreme” marine heatwave, the Met Office has said, as scientists warn that high ocean temperatures globally could result in “mass-mortality events” for some species.
The forecasters said these elevated temperatures have developed rapidly because of last month’s heat dome, during which most of Europe sweltered in its worst ever heatwave that scientists said would have been impossible without the climate crisis.
A Chinese industry regulator warned users of a "security backdoor" embedded in versions of U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic's coding tool, Claude Code.
Climate crisis prompts calls for workplace temperature limits and rights to heat breaks and adjusted working hours
As Europe’s sweltering summer continues, trades unions are mounting a push for new laws to counter deadly heat stress that is linked to an estimated 230 workplace deaths a year.
PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S; Ubisoft Singapore/Ubisoft Ubisoft has removed all the boring parts of pirate life from its fantasy RPG, creating something more focused and fun
Edward Kenway isn’t your dad’s Assassin’s Creed protagonist. Neither sworn to ancient oaths nor given a noble destiny, he’s just a guy who likes coin, dislikes rules, and whose gold-chasing, rule-dodging lifestyle sees him embroiled in an ancient war between Templars and assassins quite by accident. After he’s shipwrecked with a man named Walpole who turns out to be a Templar, Edward assumes Walpole’s identity in the hopes of securing the bounty he mentioned.
Edward wears life lightly. The world around him is violent and chaotic, and those in his vicinity are more obsessed with double-crossings than a Mission:Impossible movie writers’ room. Ed just smiles, undeterred by it all, and gets on with plundering. It’s all just fun and games to him, and he is set on conquering the Caribbean on his own terms. He is a brilliant extension of the player, in that way, and that’s what this remake of the 2013 pirate-themed Assassin’s Creed does so well: the sense of freedom.
Environmental protection agency and independent studies have found food biggest source of chemical exposure
The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas “forever chemicals” in food, marking another setback for public health advocates’ push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds.
The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water.
New Zealand startup Zenno Astronautics has completed the first orbital test of its "Supertorquer," a shoebox-sized superconducting magnet system that uses solar power and Earth's magnetic field to help control a satellite without fuel. The company says the technology could eventually support fuel-free satellite maneuvers, docking, deep-space trajectory changes, and even magnetic radiation shielding for astronauts. Space Magazine reports: The tests began shortly after Mira's launch in November last year aboard the SpaceX Transporter 12 mission and saw the shoebox-size device perform with flying colors, Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky, told Space.com. "It's a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction," Arshavsky said. "The unit has multiple super-conducting magnets that are positioned in different axes. When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth's magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth."
Superconducting magnets are made of coils of superconducting wire that have zero electrical resistance and can therefore conduct much larger currents than normal wires. That larger current translates into a greater magnetic force. There is, however, a catch: Superconducting materials need to be cooled to extremely low temperatures to gain their wonder properties. [...] The unit housing the superconducting magnets is wrapped in layers of insulation and fitted with a heat pump that removes all the excess heat from the system. Every time the satellite needs a push, the superconducting coils power up, drawing energy from a battery charged by the satellite's solar panels.
"It's converting solar energy straight into useful work," Arshavsky said. "Energy is the one thing that is abundant in space, and you can use it to energize the magnet to create a magnetic acceleration device. It gives you acceleration without fuel." In the future, Zenno Astronautics plans to launch larger systems that could enable spacecraft to dock in space or conduct close proximity operations using just the power of their solar-powered superconducting magnets. Arshavsky envisions powerful magnets that could, in the future, propel spacecraft on missions to the moon and Mars using only solar power.
Some officials said the outpouring of grief was intended to show the continuing close ties between Iraq and Iran despite U.S. efforts to hold sway in Baghdad.
The CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., on March 3, 2005.Photo: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images
The Democratic Party is rife with internal caucuses and factions. There’s the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition, the “Squad,” and so on. But since 2019, when Elissa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger first took seats in the House of Representatives, the party has had another, more sinister emerging faction: the CIA Spook Caucus.
In the last seven years, the Spook Caucus has only gained in strength. Both of its core members have graduated from the House to higher office, with Slotkin elected to the Senate in 2024 and Spanberger elected the governor of Virginia the following year. Soon afterward, Spanberger was selected by the Democratic leadership to deliver the rebuttal to Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address, which elevated her to the national stage. Slotkin, meanwhile, has floated the idea of a 2028 presidential run.
And in the 2026 midterms, the Spook Caucus might expand further: In the Democratic primary for Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, former CIA officer Adam Dunigan is running for the opportunity to challenge GOP nominee Anthony Sabio, who is also ex-CIA. But if you happen to care about concepts like “human rights” or “democracy,” this influx of intelligence operatives into our elections is extremely bad news.
Spanberger’s honeymoon period with the Virginia Democrats is already over. Less than a year into her tenure as governor, she has vetoed 31 of the General Assembly’s bills, including “high-profile Democratic priorities” like collective bargaining rights for public workers and protections against ICE agents making warrantless arrests inside courthouses. On the labor bill, local unions say Spanberger betrayed a campaign promise she’d made to them. After vetoing two bills to limit ICE arrests, the ACLU of Virginia said her actions “constitute a voluntary surrender” to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
Union and non-union workers across several industries protest Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s recent veto of a collective bargaining bill in Richmond, Va., on May 21, 2026.Photo: Allyse Pulliam/Times-Dispatch via Getty Images
But this about-face shouldn’t be surprising, because the public doesn’t really know who Abigail Spanberger is or what she believes, deep down. That’s the problem with electing a CIA officer: They’re professionally trained liars. In a 2025 interview with the Washington Post, Spanberger said she used to have five different passports and identities: “I would travel in ‘true name,’ but then I would meet people not in ‘true name.’” The profile explicitly calls this spycraft “interpersonal skills transferable to politics.” In other words, this is someone who was accustomed to saying whatever people want to hear while concealing her true intentions. So whenever she speaks to Virginia voters, they have no way of telling whether she’s “in true name” or not. The unions found that out the hard way.
As usual, then, we have to judge by actions over words. With this spring’s veto spree, Spanberger’s actions are wildly out of step with the wishes of the voters who elected her, who overwhelmingly support unions and are growing more distrustful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Seeing your fellow Americans shot dead in the street will do that.) But the vetoes are perfectly in tune with the interests of the national security state, from the drug enforcement agents who still want to make weed busts to ICE itself. Those are Spanberger’s colleagues, and the former CIA agent has moved to protect their power to surveil and police the people she supposedly represents.
Instead, she’s reserved her harshest attacks for socialists. In 2020, after Joe Biden squeaked his way into the presidency, Spanberger told party leaders, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” a clear shot at rising left-wing leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was an intervention in the ongoing conflict over the future of the Democratic Party, intended to prevent it from ever becoming a truly progressive one — as the Bezos-owned Washington Post also noted with approval.
Hostility to socialists is baked into the institutional culture of the CIA. It’s practically the agency’s reason for existing, and over the course of the 20th century, the CIA and its handpicked dictators massacred countless socialists around the world, from overthrowing President Salvador Allende in Chile, to sponsoring terrorist attacks against Cuba, to the mass slaughter of Indonesian communists via the “Jakarta Method.” Today, though, Spanberger’s anti-socialist stance is directly at odds with the will of Democratic voters, who now approve of socialism at a higher rate (66 percent) than capitalism (42 percent).
What about Slotkin, who now says she won’t rule out a run for president? Like Spanberger, her track record with the CIA is a black box. On her official biography webpages, we’re told only that she chose to join the agency shortly after 9/11, and served “three tours in Iraq alongside the U.S. military” as a “Middle East analyst.” In a 2020 interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, she volunteered that she was specifically an “Iraqi Shia-militia expert.” After that, it was on to a role as a national security adviser for both the late Bush and early Obama administrations, a few years as an acting assistant secretary of defense, and then the House and Senate.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., speaks at a press conference on the introduction of the Drain the Slush Fund Act in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2026.Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images
This raises some nasty questions. Exactly what information was Slotkin “analyzing” in Iraq, and how was it obtained? We know that one of the primary ways the CIA gathered “intelligence” about “Iraqi Shia militias” was by grabbing and torturing people it suspected of being militants at black site prisons like Abu Ghraib. We know, too, that only a small fraction of those people actually had anything to do with terrorism. So it’s plausible that at least some of Slotkin’s “analysis” was based on the supposed “intelligence” gleaned when you subject a random Iraqi farmer to waterboarding, stress positions, or “rectal rehydration.”
Worse, Slotkin graduated to an adviser to the Bush/Cheney administration in its last days. In that role, she might have known about some of the CIA’s abuses before the infamous “torture memos” came out in 2009. She might have had the opportunity to blow the whistle. It feels highly unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure.
The CIA and the broader “intelligence community” needs global conflict, in the same way that cops need crime, priests need sin, and the Orkin man needs termites.
Slotkin’s more recent statements about the Middle East don’t exactly inspire confidence, either. Like many liberals, she’s willing to criticize the GOP’s war-mongering, but only on tactical grounds, not basic moral principle. For instance, she has said the Bush administration “completely misread how difficult it would be to try and be the government for another country.” Similarly, she told Chotiner that Trump’s 2020 assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani might be unwise and provoke a “strong reaction.”
What she doesn’t say is that invading other people’s countries and killing their leaders, and then trying to “be the government,” is inherently illegitimate and criminal. But she can’t, not really, because having worked for the CIA, she’d be condemning her co-workers — and her own record of service.
We can see the same pattern play out with more recent cases of U.S. aggression. When the Trump administration attacked Iran and Venezuela earlier this year, Slotkin moved in lockstep with the majority of the Democratic Party, voting for war powers resolutions against hostilities with both countries. (This, to her credit, makes her more reliable than John Fetterman, who has voted to preserve Trump’s power to attack Iran on multiple occasions.)
But her public statements tell another story. When the Trump administration made a request for $50 billion in additional funding for the Iran war, Slotkin was open to the idea, telling Politico reporters only that “I need to know the goals and the plan. … I don’t rule anything out.” And when Trump deposed and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, she criticized him for working with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez’s “illegitimate government” rather than following through on his promise to “[get] rid of that administration” entirely. Again, there’s no indication that waging regime-change wars is wrong in itself; only that Trump had bungled the job by not going far enough.
China, though, is Slotkin’s biggest bête noire. Like a lot of centrists who have taken the wrong lessons from the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Slotkin has taken to making short-form video content. She calls these videos her weekly “Intel Briefings,” and they’re skin-crawling to watch, like something you’d see on a TV in the background of a Paul Verhoeven movie.
Beating the drum for conflict with China is a constant theme. In one representative “briefing,” Slotkin tells viewers about “an issue that a lot of Michiganders know about: China and the threats that they pose.” (The “threat” turns out to be that China may buy computer chips from Nvidia, which is apparently “the equivalent of President Truman giving Russia some of our best nuclear blueprints.”) In another video, she condemns Trump for putting out a national security strategy that fails to “go hard against China.”
The tone is always slightly condescending: At one point, Slotkin tells us about “the leader of China, Xi Jinping,” as if we’ve never heard of the guy before. The content is pure paranoia, with a new Cold War accepted as a normal and even desirable state of affairs.
To be clear, the American people do not want conflict with China. In the most recent Pew polls from April, only 28 percent of respondents said they considered China an “enemy,” and China’s favorable ratings have been rising since 2023.
But the CIA and the broader “intelligence community” needs global conflict, in the same way that cops need crime, priests need sin, and the Orkin man needs termites. It justifies their existence, and their mammoth, ever-increasing annual budgets. So every week on YouTube, we get a former CIA agent pushing what’s good for the CIA and bad for everyone else.
More basic than any of this, though, is that the concept of “the intelligence community” is elitist to the core. Its first principle is that the American public, unwashed reprobates that we are, aren’t even qualified to know about the most important decisions being made in terms of foreign policy, let alone influence them at the ballot box. Only the “intelligence community” with its experts and analysts should do that, and always behind several layers of official secrecy. It’s a fundamentally anti-democratic notion, and it comes from a set of agencies which have overthrown a long list of democracies over the years. So there’s no reason to expect they’d respect our democratic choices at home, either. If you’re the Democratic Party, you can’t really position yourself as champions of “our democracy” and also embrace the CIA Spook Caucus as an unalloyed good.
As the maxim goes, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” To that end, the purpose of the CIA is to lie, manipulate, torture, and kill, all to preserve the existing global power structures, not to mention the agency’s own power and prestige. That’s what it does; that’s what it’s for. There’s no way anybody, anywhere should trust a former CIA officer within 100 miles of elected office. Personally, I’d vote for a Satanist or my local weed dealer before any member of the “intelligence community.” We should look at would-be Democratic politicians like Slotkin, Spanberger, and now Dunigan with the same horror as if Allen Dulles had run for Congress as a Democrat in 1965. Under no circumstances should we trust these people — and if we offer them our votes, we do so at our own peril.
Estonia, Luxembourg and UK are the top three in biennial Yale University index in tackling pollution and other issues
Much of the world has made encouraging strides in reducing toxic problems such as water and air pollution that have long plagued communities. But there is still a widespread lack of progress among countries in dealing with the climate crisis, according to the latest edition of an influential environmental scorecard.
The biennial Yale University index again ranks Estonia as the best-performing of 177 assessed countries, after strong recent efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and protect its ecosystems. Luxembourg is second, and the UK is third, having moved up from fifth place in the 2024 index.
I can’t blame my patients for turning to its straightforward assessments. But it has real risks – and care may require human messiness
“Chat told me I should break up with him.”
I instructed my face to remain therapist-neutral, but I must have smirked. The truth is, I was annoyed. We had been discussing the viability of this relationship for weeks, and in an instant AI had brought the answer. “How do you feel about it?” She said this had been her gut feeling all along. The following session, her relationship was over.
John Thune says he spoke to McConnell on phone as secrecy over 84-year-old’s health prompts Maga backlash
Republican leaders have moved to quash speculation about Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader in the US Senate, amid a growing revolt over the lack of transparency around his health.
The 84-year-old Kentucky politician, who led Senate Republicans for longer than anyone in history before stepping down last year, was admitted to hospital on 14 June but his office declined to say what he was being treated for.
Even voters who identify as foot soldiers of his political army are increasingly willing to blame Trump for their economic troubles
The political consequences of Donald Trump’s policy mayhem are now coming into view: “Maga” America is getting pissed.
It has been a sight to see how every one of the president’s policy initiatives has sabotaged some core constituency or other. From farmers and rural Americans to manufacturing workers and every American struggling to make ends meet, Trump has torched pretty much his entire political base. For all his efforts to rig the midterm elections in his favor, it’s as if he is daring the Maga faithful to drop him.
Why Should Delaware Care? Rural communities in Delaware are often forgotten in the statewide conversation. A range of legislation relating to gun ownership, agriculture and change to municipal charters will have a direct impact on the lives of Delawareans in rural areas across the state.
This year’s legislative session saw a number of bills that will directly impact peoples’ lives in rural communities across the state, from gun ownership, farmland interests, wetland preservation and changes to town charters.
Bills addressing rural communities tend to be more bipartisan in their introduction and support, as Delaware’s Republican minority largely represents the southern part of the state – and rural areas.
Here’s a look at the legislation chiefly impacting rural Delaware that passed or stagnated in the General Assembly this year.
Firearm dealers, gun practice
Gun-related bills passed by the legislature this year addressed a range of issues, including attempts to clamp down on straw purchases, cleaning up the state’s ghost gun laws and officially reversing a controversial hunting age restriction.
The most controversial proposal was Senate Bill 300, which aims to curb illegal gun trafficking by implementing a more extensive state licensing system for gun shop owners. Retiring Senate Pro President Tempore David Sokola (D-Newark) introduced the bill as one of the final acts of his 30-plus-year tenure in the General Assembly.
The bill drew substantial criticism from gun shop owners, who said it placed undue financial burdens on them, when illegal gun trafficking actually takes place on the underground market – not in gun shops – they argued.
Senate President Pro Tempore Dave Sokola. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Following an extended round of amendments and debate, SB 300 passed both chambers largely along party lines. The final version of the bill decreased the licensing fee for shop owners to a flat rate of $300 and decreased the frequency requirement for background checks.
If signed into law by Gov. Matt Meyer, the provisions will be implemented gradually, beginning in July 2028.
House Bill 418 clarified the state’s regulations for privately made firearms – or ghost guns – which was originally implemented in 2022, and has since faced legal challenge.
The bill creates a more straightforward pathway for individuals who have unserialized guns to become in compliance with state rules, by either having their gun serialized by a federally licensed dealer or making them permanently unusable.
It comes in the wake of Rigby v. Jennings, a federal lawsuit against the state alleging the state’s prohibition on unserialized firearms is a Second Amendment violation, as an “exit path” for sportsmen who currently own ghost guns, bill sponsor Rep. Kendra Johnson (D-Bear) said.
Republican-led House Bill 427 allows 16 and 17 year olds who have a valid hunting license and have completed the necessary education courses to target practice and hunt without adult supervision.
The legislation officially reverses a controversial 2022 law, which went into effect last summer, that required adult supervision for hunters under the age of 21 and was declared unconstitutional by a Superior Court judge.
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman, the bill’s sponsor, described it as an effort to make it more accessible for young hunters to get into the sport.
Conversely, a bill aimed at enshrining Delaware’s culture of hunting, fishing and trapping in the state constitution wound up dead in the water. It passed the Senate earlier in June, but was never formally introduced for a vote on the House floor.
The proposal, which was endorsed by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), was an attempt to prevent animal rights or gun control advocates from being able to outlaw hunting outright in the state, sponsor Sen. Dave Wilson (R-Lincoln) said in January. Wilson wrote in a Facebook post that he plans to re-introduce the constitutional amendment next legislative session.
Farmland, composting and wetlands
As Delaware farmers are increasingly stretched thin financially and the federal government rolls back environmental protections, the General Assembly passed a string of legislation relating to farmland oversight boards.
House Bill 371 removes the requirement that each county establish a farmland preservation advisory board. The proposal passed both chambers unanimously.
Rep. Jesse Vanderwende (R-Greenwood), the bill’s sponsor, wrote in a Facebook post that the county advisory boards were created multiple decades ago to help create agricultural districts. But those duties are now managed at the county planning level, Vanderwende wrote, so the advisory boards are superfluous.
Senate Bill 211 expands the Governor’s Council on Agriculture from seven to nine members, and adds requirements that at least one member of the council be a livestock producer, and another a farmer under the age of 40. The council, which has existed since 1970, makes recommendations to state leaders on farm and food-related policy.
A spokesperson for the Delaware Farm Bureau told Spotlight Delaware the organization strongly supported the legislation, as a way to more fairly represent a diverse range of farm interests on the council.
As fuel and fertilizer prices spiked this spring due to the war in Iran, the legislature also passed House Bill 431, which allows farmers to compost their yard waste and food residuals on property that is zoned for agriculture use.
Unforeseen federal funding allowed Jim Minner to purchase roughly $10,000 in updated parts for his tractors and combines. But the Kent County farmer still faces financial uncertainty amid fluctuating economic markets. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Jim Minner, a Felton-area farmer and president of the Kent County Farm Bureau, said HB 431 will be helpful to Delaware farmers’ outputs because compost improves soil health.
For the first time in decades, state lawmakers also passed a bill to regulate freshwater wetlands, known as the Wetland Stewardship Act.
In the wake of an intensive federal rollback of wetlands protections, the legislation aims to protect ecosystems by extending the permitting process for landowners to include nontidal or freshwater wetlands as small as half an acre.
The bill, which failed to advance in previous legislative years, was a rare show of both bipartisan support and championing by various stakeholders, including environmentalists, farmers and developers.
It has a hefty $1.5 million price tag, as it will require at least a dozen more full-time DNREC employees to implement.
Municipal charter changes
Every year, the General Assembly receives a handful of municipal charter change requests, which are sent to the statehouse for final approval after being passed by a city or town government. Because they amount to a modification to the state constitution, the charter changes require a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers to pass.
A change proposed to the city of Rehoboth Beach charter drew attention from state and local officials in the final days of the legislative session.
Among a series of proposed changes was a provision prohibiting two people in the same household from simultaneously holding office.
The prohibition was seemingly in response to City Commissioner Suzanne Goode, who has sparked controversy with her explosive comments toward other members of the city government, and her husband, Jeffrey Goode, who is also running for office.
In late June, Rep. Claire Snyder-Hall (D-Rehoboth Beach), decided to withdraw the language prohibiting two members of a household from both seeking office.
Snyder-Hall’s decision unleashed more controversy, as the Goodes released a statement crediting House Republicans with removing what they described as an “unconstitutional” clause in the charter change. Snyder-Hall fought back with another statement pointing out what she described as inaccuracies in the Goodes’ claims.
While the turmoil within the oceanside city government continues, the charter change ultimately passed both chambers handily.
The General Assembly also approved a charter change for the town of Smyrna, allowing its government to impose school impact fees on new construction in town limits.
All these bills now await Gov. Meyer’s signature to become law.
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/.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware’s annual Bond Bill funds large capital projects, such as road improvements, new schools and upgraded state facilities. In recent years, it also has featured a litany of more controversial expenditures. Until this year, none of those were vetoed by a Delaware governor.
Gov. Matt Meyer vetoed a controversial expansion of Dover’s Legislative Hall from the state’s capital spending bill on Tuesday.
In a statement, Meyer cited cost concerns as the reason he employed the little-used line-item veto. He claimed the $35 million project to upgrade security inside the statehouse, among other improvements, could “be addressed at a lower cost.”
The comments follow similar affordability themed rhetoric from Meyer over the past year, including last month when he called on state energy regulators to suspend an electricity-rate increase from Delmarva Power.
Meyer also noted that the $35 million – the third largest appropriation of any kind in the state bond bill – was only an initial allocation toward the larger project anticipated to cost upward of $116 million.
The veto could also reignite tensions between the governor and lawmakers within his own Democratic Party that had largely gone dormant in recent months following a contentious first year in office for Meyer.
In a joint statement, Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte) and Sen. Jack Walsh (D-Stanton), co-chairs of the state’s Joint Capital Improvement Committee, condemned Meyer’s veto.
Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte), a chair of the bond bill committee, was angered by the governor’s abrupt veto of a Legislative Hall expansion. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
The Joint Capital Improvement Committee drafts the state’s capital budget each year following an initial proposal from the governor.
Heffernan and Walsh said the expansion would have improved safety and accessibility within the statehouse. The current layout presents a variety of challenges for residents seeking to participate in state government, they said.
“It’s not only disappointing, but frankly perplexing, that the Governor chose to veto the Bond Bill language that would have funded these long-overdue renovations,” the lawmakers said.
Democratic leaders in both chambers, along with House Minority Leader Tim Dukes, also issued a joint statement condemning Meyer’s veto, saying it ignores recommendations made by law enforcement to make “long overdue” security upgrades to the statehouse.
“This is not a vanity project,” they said. “It’s about maximizing public participation in the democratic process while keeping people safe.”
The leaders also said they only learned of Meyer’s veto “within minutes” of his public announcement and are still determining their path forward.
Should lawmakers choose to override Meyer’s latest veto, Democrats could do so without any bipartisan support. A veto override vote requires a three-fifths majority in both legislative chambers – a margin Democrats already control.
But not all Democrats are opposed to Meyer’s veto.
Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton (D-Bear) said the veto was “the right thing to do for Delaware taxpayers.” She said the $35 million allocated to the expansion could have gone to other, more timely projects, like road repairs across the state.
Wilson-Anton, a member of the progressive flank of the legislature’s Democratic caucus, said she has no appetite to override Meyer’s veto. It is not immediately clear how other progressives feel about an override vote, but enough organized opposition could kill the possibility entirely.
Following other high-profile attacks on lawmakers around the country, legislators have sought to improve the safety of Legislative Hall, which hasn’t been updated in decades. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
What would the expansion fund?
Also unclear is whether Republicans would support overriding Meyer’s veto.
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) said Meyer made “some good points” in his veto statement that some Republicans are receptive to.
Rep. Jeff Speigelman (R-Clayton) | PHOTO COURTESY OF DE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
He also said the $35 million appropriation reflects the most costly of three upgrade proposals that legislative leaders considered. He said the other proposals “still take into account the security needs that we have.”
Spiegelman declined to disclose specific details of proposed security upgrades but said the area where Capitol Police screen visitors is too small.
Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives Rich Puffer, who also chairs a committee that recommended the expansion project, compared the security upgrades to the state’s Carvel Building in Wilmington, where the governor and many Cabinet agencies keep offices.
There, glass barriers block visitors from entering the first floor lobby of the building until they clear a security checkpoint.
Last month, Sarah Fulton, spokeswoman for the Senate Democratic Caucus, said the $35 million appropriation would pay for an expansion of the security checkpoint at the entrance to Legislative Hall. She said the plans called for an increase in the size of the area by “three or four times” to allow Capitol Police to conduct more thorough screening.
The money would also pay for enhanced door locks and cameras, among other items, she said.
While the project is a part of a larger plan to renovate the Legislative Hall complex, Fulton noted the $35 million is separate from a $23 million appropriation made last year to fund construction of a new parking garage.
Additional plans for a tunnel to be built between the parking garage and Legislative Hall are not yet funded, Fulton said.
“The parking garage is paid for. This is for more in-building security enhancements,” she said.
The statement further said other “unmet needs, including school construction, housing and community investments, should take precedence over expanding government office space.”
Has this happened before?
There are few historical records of Delaware governors using their line-item veto authority.
Most noteworthy was Gov. Pete du Pont’s 1982 veto of a funding line for a drunk-driving enforcement program. According to newspaper archives, du Pont signed the veto — which reduced an appropriation from $135,000 to $20,000 — in order to keep the state budget within state limits.
The veto resulted in a legal challenge and a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that declared governors may only use a line-item veto for appropriation bills that contain multiple spending items.
Meyer’s veto appears to fall in line with the ruling, though it is unclear if lawmakers will challenge his authority in this instance.
Why Should Delaware Care? Wilmington’s city charter requires that no more than three candidates from the same party be nominated for the city’s four at-large seats. In the liberal city, the rule ensures that one person on the elected body will not be a Democrat. But after the council’s lone Republican switched his party registration to Democrat, questions emerged over whether that requirement had been undermined.
The legal battle over the Wilmington City Council’s ability to remove Councilman James Spadola from office inched closer to a resolution Tuesday following arguments before a Delaware Chancery Court judge.
Filed in May, the lawsuit marks the latest in a political feud between Spadola and his colleagues — specifically Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo — that stemmed from his decision last fall to change from being a Republican to a Democrat.
The legal dispute specifically centers on whether the council has the authority to enforce a Congo-sponsored resolution declaring Spadola’s seat vacant now that he is a Democrat serving in a seat designated for a member of a minority party.
The rule effectively guarantees the election of at least one minority party candidate.
While the arguments Tuesday featured competing interpretations of the Wilmington City Charter, the ultimate ruling from the judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, will determine whether Spadola can remain in office.
Spadola’s attorney, William Larson argued the charter does not list political party affiliation as a qualification for holding office, nor does it state that changing parties during a term creates a vacancy.
Instead, Larson said the charter’s language applies only to a political party’s nomination process in advance of an election. The provision within the charter governs who may run for office, not whether an elected council member may later change political parties, he said.
In his arguments, Larson offered hypothetical scenarios that he said exposed inconsistencies in the council’s reading of the charter. He argued that if two Republican at-large members were elected, the council’s stance would allow one member to switch parties while prohibiting the other — depending solely on the partisan makeup of the council at the time.
“It really becomes unworkable under different scenarios if you follow the defendants’ view here,” Larson said.
Spadola’s attorney also asserted that the council’s attempt to remove his client from office violates his Constitutional rights.
“We are here today because the Congo resolution seeks to remove a duly elected member of City Council for exercising his First Amendment rights, so that council can handpick his successor,” Larson said.
Wilmington City Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo
In response, Congo’s attorney Jane Brady said the intent of the city charter is clearly to ensure a minority party member stays on the council during their term.
“It makes no sense to establish laws that assure the public is able to vote for a member of a minority party, only to have those same rules say we were just kidding about that minority party stuff,” Brady said.
Brady has served in a variety of public capacities in past decades, including chair for the Delaware Republican Party, a Superior Court judge, and Delaware attorney general.
She pointed to another section of the charter requiring all vacancies to be filled by someone from the same political party, arguing it shows the city’s intent was for party balance to continue throughout a council member’s term.
Brady also rejected Larson’s First Amendment argument, saying Spadola’s rights as an elected official are not unlimited and that the city can impose qualifications on those who hold public office.
She warned that ruling in Spadola’s favor could undermine the City Council’s authority to determine whether its members meet the qualifications to serve – a power the charter explicitly grants the legislative body, she said.
“I think it’s not unimportant to remember that by virtue of this provision, people were excluded from participating in the general election in order to reserve the privilege for Mr. Spadola to have a chance to win a seat on council,” she said.
She emphasized that the council is not asking Spadola to switch back to the Republican Party. Instead, she said he forfeited his seat when he no longer met the city charter’s requirements.
McCormick did not ask any questions of or interject either side during the hearing.
Spadola was re-elected in November 2024 as Wilmington’s lone Republican at-large council member, and changed his party less than a year later, announcing it publicly to Facebook in October 2025.
Last fall, Spadola told Spotlight Delaware that he had considered making the move for the previous five years and finally did so because of his disagreement with several policies associated with President Donald Trump, including tariffs, immigration enforcement, and federal troop deployments into U.S. cities.
Wilmington City Councilman James Spadola has rebuffed calls from the council president to step down because he changed his political party affiliation. | PHOTO COURTESY OF WILMINGTON CITY COUNCIL
His decision sparked months of controversy inside the City Council.
In February, Congo sent Spadola a letter urging him to switch back to the Republican Party, warning that he could lose his seat if he did not. Spadola responded publicly on his Facebook, accusing council members of trying to replace him with an “unelected, handpicked successor.”
Many community members attended past council meetings both in favor and against removing Spadola from his seat, including members of the Delaware Republican Party and Wilmington Democratic Committee.
While some residents said they felt disenfranchised by Spadola’s decision, others argued he should have the right to change his party affiliation and that voters supported him for his leadership, not his political party.
The dispute then escalated in April when Councilman Alexander Hackett introduced the resolution seeking intervention by state lawmakers.
Then, in May, the council voted 8-1 on the resolution to declare Spadola’s seat vacant, arguing Spadola “made the choice to disenfranchise the approximately 15% of non-majority voters” in the city.
Spadola cast the lone vote against the resolution, which prompted him to file the lawsuit now before the Court of Chancery.
“I think our counsel made it pretty clear, it’s a fairly cut-and-dry case,” Spadola told the media after the hearing.
If Spadola’s seat is vacated, a new at-large council member would be elected through a process that would allow individuals to send in applications and be interviewed by council who would choose Spadola’s successor. Congo said that the council takes public feedback into account when choosing.
Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. But the Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing.
To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan.
Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments.
“What they have done is lower the standard for everything,” said Ali Khawar, a former senior official at the Department of Labor, which is charged with enforcing the federal law that governs retirement savings.
Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by.
When the 401(k) replaced pensions as the main way Americans fund their retirement, the investment risk shifted from employers to employees. Instead of the promise of a monthly check, the 401(k) participant gets a tax-sheltered account, usually with an employer matching their contributions, but with no guarantees of how that nest egg will grow. Traces of the old system remain, however. Employers are responsible for overseeing the company’s plan. They choose all the financial service providers and have the final say on what investment options are available to employees. But it’s typically workers who pay for those services out of their 401(k) savings. And it’s workers who suffer from diminished savings if the plan has poor options.
There are plenty of pitfalls for 401(k) savers. The “recordkeepers” that administer 401(k)s may attempt to steer workers to their own in-house funds, whether they are the best options or not. They may sell advisory services of questionable value. And then there are the investment fees, which are the main cost to participants. These are charged as a percentage of each investment. Roughly, a 1% fee for a $10,000 investment would result in a $100 yearly charge. Recordkeepers — companies like Fidelity, Principal, Vanguard and Empower — and other service providers often receive a cut of these fees. This means that they have the incentive to recommend more-expensive options.
If employers are lax in their oversight, workers might find themselves overpaying to invest in funds that underperform. Even modest differences in fees or performance can, when compounded over time, make a huge difference in how much someone is able to save for retirement, potentially tens of thousands of dollars at the end of someone’s career. By the Labor Department’s own math, 1% in additional fees can shrink someone’s nest egg at retirement by 28%.
When overseeing retirement accounts, employers have a fiduciary duty to make prudent decisions and put their workers’ interests first. If they allow financial firms to fleece plan participants, they can be held responsible under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, a pension-era law that now governs 401(k)s.
Over the last 15 years, employees have increasingly sued large employers over unnecessarily high fees or inferior investment options. Companies like UnitedHealth, Boeing, Verizon and General Electric, without admitting wrongdoing, chose to settle suits for tens of millions. Aronowitz has called the increased litigation a “con game” that misleads judges, argued that such cases should go before a specialized court and labeled the whole enterprise a “scam.”
Over 90 of these class-action lawsuits against large employers were filed in 2025. To Aronowitz, that’s a big number — his former firm tracked and publicized the rise of these suits as part of its business underwriting liability coverage to employers — but it’s a tiny fraction of the more than 700,000 401(k) plans nationwide.
ERISA says nothing about which types of investments are prudent; it sets a standard of care, not a list of approved options. It’s up to employers to use their judgment, and employers have generally been wary of allowing cryptocurrency, private equity or hedge funds onto their plans because they are more complex than the usual stocks and bonds, often untested and much more expensive. Nevertheless, Trump issued an executive order last year blaming the limited uptake on “regulatory overreach” and “lawsuits filed by opportunistic trial lawyers” and calling for new rules.
Aronowitz, as head of the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Department of Labor office that enforces ERISA, is responsible for following through. His most significant move is a rule to make it far harder for workers to sue. The proposal, which will likely be finalized later this year, outlines a set of factors for employers to consider before approving investments. Just following this process would entitle employers’ decisions to “significant deference” from the courts — a “safe harbor,” or legal shield, meant to guard those decisions from challenge. A company could load a plan with a high-fee private equity fund and be protected from suit as long as it showed it had followed the rule and considered the fees.
To opponents of the change, like Khawar, who was second-in-command of EBSA under President Joe Biden, this is a mere “check-the-box approach,” akin to a teacher awarding a math student an automatic A — even if the answer is wrong — because the student showed their work.
Aronowitz has bristled at this sort of criticism. “Absolutely not,” he said in April at an industry event. “Read the proposed rule. We require a rigorous, objective, thorough and analytical fiduciary process that must be documented.”
At the same time, Aronowitz is also pulling back on policing plans’ investment choices. In April, EBSA released a bulletin updating its enforcement priorities. In addition to announcing that agency staff must now get Aronowitz’s sign-off before any major enforcement action, it set a new guideline for investigators. “EBSA must avoid cases that unfairly second-guess process-based fiduciary judgments,” the bulletin said, meaning investigators should not challenge an employer’s investment choices if the employer can show it followed the proper steps, regardless of the outcome for workers.
Tim Hauser, a 34-year-veteran of EBSA who was the highest-ranking career staffer there before retiring last year, said such ideas undermine the heart of ERISA. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EBSA was “dedicated to protecting plan participants,” he said, but that has changed under Aronowitz. The ability of courts and regulators to hold employers accountable for using bad judgment when choosing 401(k) investments is “fundamental to this whole system,” Hauser said. “They are proposing to deprioritize it at the same time that they are encouraging plans to invest in more complicated, opaque investments. It’s infuriating.”
The shift at EBSA has also been evident in court. Over the last year, the Labor Department has filed amicus briefs — friend-of-the-court filings that lay out legal arguments for judges — in several class-action lawsuits on the side of the defendant company. In the past, the Labor Department’s briefs had generally sided with the employees. These amicus briefs can be influential. Recently, the agency interceded on Home Depot’s behalf in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs then dropped it.
A Labor Department spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica that EBSA would prioritize “the highest-risk matters” in order to protect participants.
In pushing for looser rules and easing enforcement, the Trump administration and Wall Street are aiming for much more than giving workers the option of investing in so-called alternative assets. They predict it will become common, part of a new normal.
In recent years, the typical 401(k) plan has settled into a pattern, one that’s proven popular with investors but less lucrative for the recordkeepers and asset managers that serve plans. Decades ago, actively managed mutual funds, where professionals pick investments and charge for doing so, were dominant. They carried higher fees, often above 1% of the amount in the fund each year. But over time, passive funds, which often track an index of stocks or bonds like the S&P 500, attracted investors with their promise to deliver the same or better results for fees often below 0.1%.
Investment and administrative fees in 401(k) plans have, on average, steadily decreased. One main reason is the rise of passive funds, but another, expertssay, is the threat of litigation. With cheap options broadly available, large companies might have a hard time explaining to a judge why they forced their employees to choose funds that cost 10 times more.
This decline has pinched profit margins in the 401(k) world, said Kai Richter, an attorney with Cohen Milstein who has long specialized in ERISA class-action cases. “So the financial industry is looking for other ways to make money.”
Nonpublic investments like private equity are, as a rule, actively managed. That means higher fees. If 401(k) plans began to commonly include these investments, the long-term trend of lower fees would halt and perhaps reverse.
Broad adoption of alternative assets is indeed the administration’s goal. One of the most consequential parts of a 401(k) plan is the default option, since most workers simply leave their money there. Usually, the default is a target date fund, which, based on the investor’s target date of retirement, gradually shifts its composition as that date approaches from mostly publicly traded stocks to mostly bonds, becoming more conservative and less risky as the person gets closer to needing the money. Target date funds haven’t changed much over the past two decades as they’ve soared in popularity. They offer all-in-one simplicity and, since they are often passive, low cost. Adding complex investments like private equity or hedge funds as a standard part of the mix would be a sea change.
The proposed rule professes to be “neutral” as to what effect the new, lax standard will have on investments, but it confidently predicts that companies will include more alternative assets over time in 401(k)s. That, after all, is the point of the rule, to broaden access to “the potential growth and diversification opportunities associated with alternative asset investments,” as Trump’s executive order put it. After the rule is finalized, plans covering about 5 million participants will add new or modified target date funds that include alternative investments, according to the proposal, and the number will continue to grow every year.
Over the past year, there’s been a wave of product announcements in the 401(k) industry as financial companies, taking their cues from the administration, have prepared to offer new options to plans. Major firms that manage private investments, such as BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, have announced funds for 401(k)s that include private assets.
Ahead of the proposed rule’s adoption, Empower, the second-largest recordkeeper, has been expanding alternative options through managed accounts where participants opt to have advisers shape their 401(k) portfolios. About 1,000 companies have agreed to offer these investments to their workers, Empower’s CEO said recently.
But the ultimate effects of the administration’s efforts won’t be limited to alternative assets, and the outcome is far from certain. The proposed rule seems sure to meet legal challenges, and employers, even with Aronowitz’s assurances, might remain reluctant to overhaul their plans. Short of lawsuits, employers may fear blowback from their workers, who surveys show are content with traditional investment options.
We assess the teams who played in the tournament’s last 16 before the next round of games begins
A very different side of France came to the fore, proving they are not mere showboaters, there is plenty of steel, grit and determination among the ranks. It was a brutal encounter as they became targets for Paraguay, who added menace to the low block. No one in blue retreated to the shadows, instead taking the overaggression head on, using it as fuel. “To anyone who wants to go to war with us, this is what you should expect,” Rayan Cherki said. It was the biggest test they have faced this far but intimidation tactics do not work, it transpires, leaving everyone else wondering how to stop them.
For some employees, the 401(k) system works great: They have easy access to low-cost funds with high returns. But many participants are stuck in investments with bloated fees and pay for costly advisory services on top — and may never know it because they’ve never scrutinized their plans’ disclosures. (If you’re worried this is you, our questionnaire below explains how you can check.)
As we’ve reported, the Trump administration wants employers to include less-regulated “alternative” investments like private equity and cryptocurrency in 401(k) plans. To make that happen, the administration is changing regulations and pulling back on enforcement of the law that protects participants.
ProPublica is taking this opportunity to investigate these changes and the broader 401(k) system. To do this reporting, we need detailed insight into what’s happening inside plans: what products financial services companies are pushing and what fees they are charging. Many of these details are not made public, but they are disclosed to plan participants. That’s why we need to hear from participants in these plans, employers (particularly small-business owners) and those with expertise in the industry. The more people we hear from, the better informed our reporting will be.
Note: We are not asking for anything that shows your account balances or personal information. If you have a 403(b) plan and work for a private, tax-exempt organization, we’d also like to hear from you.
Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit. We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these materials for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part.
If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips.
Summer holiday bookings have bounced back recently after the fragile ceasefire in the Middle East, the package holiday operator Jet2 has said.
The company, which flies about 20 million people every year, said its summer bookings are up by 7.1% compared with this time last year and the average load factor – which measures its available seating capacity filled with paying passengers – is up 1.2 percentage points.
Cross-Channel ferry passengers and the port of Dover face “utter chaos and miles of tailbacks” under the EU’s entry/exit system (EES) unless the technology is fixed or checks suspended by next week, MPs have warned.
The home affairs select committee chair, Karen Bradley, urged the government to “apply maximum pressure” on the French authorities to act on the EES before peak holiday traffic arrives at the port.
Experts on laws protecting patient safety give Washington state high marks for the types of information it is willing to disclose about doctors accused of wrongdoing.
Like other states, Washington lets patients look up doctors by name online to read any state allegations against them. But decades ago, Washington lawmakers created a separate pathway that doesn’t leave the homework to patients, mandating that regulators issue a press release whenever an investigation results in formal allegations being filed against a doctor. Washington is alone in legally requiring such proactive outreach to the news media, the Federation of State Medical Boards says.
Yet an examination of Washington discipline records by KUOW and ProPublica found that regardless of what the law calls for, Washington fails to reliably call the public’s attention to serious misconduct allegations against doctors who have been allowed to keep practicing while their cases proceed.
Announcements can take months to go out — and may not go out at all until after the case is resolved.
Take the case of Brooks Watson, a Richland, Washington, doctor who the state medical board accused of making nonconsensual sexual contact, unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate sexual remarks to five of his coworkers over the course of five years.
During one encounter in 2023, Washington Medical Commission records allege, Watson isolated a subordinate in his office and, without her consent, kissed her, touched her breasts, put his hands down her pants, groped her vagina and exposed his penis.
The commission sent Watson a “statement of charges” alleging sexual misconduct and unprofessional conduct on Aug. 19, 2025, and it amended the charges in June to include an allegation that Watson had assaulted someone at his home.
Yet the commission issued no public announcement about Watson’s case for more than nine months after first filing allegations.
Watson remains licensed to practice, and an online provider database run by the state shows no final decision on his case has been made as of July 6.
The attorney defending him in the criminal case stemming from the incident at his home said that Watson disputes the allegations and that he pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor assault charge against him. The attorney referred further questions to another lawyer who he said represented Watson in workplace matters; that person acknowledged a request for comment sent by email but did not answer emailed questions or respond to voicemails.
Watson did not answer emails or phone messages seeking his response to the medical commission’s claims. Meeting materials on the commission’s website say Watson had a hearing scheduled in April.
He initially kept seeing patients, and at least one has accused Mulholland in court of abuse and negligence that she says occurred during the time between when the commission filed formal charges and when it announced them. The woman alleges Mulholland “shoved his fingers into her rectum” and “said to her with confidence that she had a nice-looking and tight vagina.”
More than 80 lawsuits related to Mulholland’s alleged misconduct have been filed against the doctor himself, his former employer Kadlec or its affiliate, the Providence hospital chain.
(Mulholland has not responded to requests for comment, but the doctor or his attorney told the commission previously that he strives to be gentle and respectful with cervical exams and denied conducting them in ways that patients described. In the civil litigation, which remains ongoing, the doctor, Providence and Kadlec all deny wrongdoing. In the state disciplinary case, which remains open, Mulholland signed an interim order agreeing to restrictions on his license.)
As with many announcements of charges against doctors whose licenses remained unrestricted, the commission did not first publish a notice about Mulholland on the press release section of its website, but rather in a subscribers-only email that said nothing about what he was accused of. It came six weeks after charges were filed.
The list is supposed to go out quarterly, a schedule that guarantees many charges stay off the radar for months — or even longer when the board fails to keep to its publication schedule. At least 269 days passed recently without subscribers receiving an email announcing charges being filed against a doctor and without the commission announcing charges in an online press release.
Some cases still have not been publicized.
Presented by KUOW and ProPublica with questions about how it notifies the public, the commission issued a written statement saying it plans to alter its practices to make allegations against doctors more visible.
Although the commission believes its current practices meet the law’s notification requirement, the statement said, the agency “is always looking for ways to grow.”
“Technology and public accessibility standards continue to evolve since the statute was written,” the statement said. The medical commission “recognizes the value in refining our processes and establishing new best practices to enhance transparency.”
On May 29, the same day the commission sent its statement, it sent four email notices announcing initial or updated allegations against licensees who were not immediately suspended — the first such emails subscribers received since June 2025.
Washington state Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat and outspoken advocate for disclosure and accountability, said the medical commission was “absolutely not complying with the law.”
“The Legislature clearly said, ‘You have to inform the public quickly, and you should do that through a news release,'” Pollet said. “That’s one of the mechanisms. And the implication of a news release is you have to put it out while it’s still news. And waiting months to put something on a limited listserv doesn’t meet the spirit, much less the letter, of the law.”
Pollet said he plans to ask other legislators to join him in contacting the medical commission and asking for more prompt and public notifications.
And if that doesn’t work, he said, “ What we might need is direction in the budget to demand that they follow the law.”
The Letter of the Law
The Washington Medical Commission has a well established process for looking into the roughly 2,000 allegations of provider misconduct it receives each year.
If an investigation finds evidence that a doctor violated the law, the medical commission issues a statement of charges. The doctor has a right to contest these before a health law judge or the commission issues a final order spelling out any disciplinary action or dropping the case. Months can go by in the interim.
Washington law directs the medical commission to report both statements of charges and final orders to interested parties: the person whose complaint triggered an investigation, certain professional organizations and the public.
Specifically, the law says public notification “shall include press releases to appropriate local news media and the major news wire services.”
Two legal experts said the availability of the state’s email list notifying subscribers of “legal actions,” which requires journalists and others to opt in, conceivably meets the law’s requirements. But Seth Rosenberg, an administrative and employment law attorney, said by email that the fact that it gives only names, dates and locations — not a description of the charges doctors face — arguably means “it is bereft of meaningful detail.”
Whether or not the emails convey enough information, KUOW and ProPublica’s review found that they often are not issued for a long time.
The review focused on charges against doctors whose licenses remained untouched while they awaited a disciplinary decision. It turned up 13 emails or press releases from May 2024 through July 6 that announced charges while the case was still open, five of which were not sent for more than two months after charges were brought.
In another 12 cases, the commission did not send out public notifications until after it resolved charges against the doctor, often months after the physician was put on notice. Three of these cases were shared by way of the agency’s quarterly newsletter, which doesn’t necessarily go to subscribers on the legal actions list.
Four doctors accused last year or in January still have yet to appear in an email, press release or newsletter noting their charges as of July 6.
All told, the commission has gone 100, 200 or even 300 days — in the case of Watson, the Richland doctor accused of sexual misconduct with coworkers — without either publicizing charges or taking away a doctor’s license.
It’s unclear how many of the physicians identified in KUOW and ProPublica’s review continued practicing while waiting for their cases to be resolved, but they had the legal ability to do so.
The commission did not respond when asked to verify that it had failed to publicize cases against doctors for whom no email bulletins could be found from early in the disciplinary process. Executive Director Kyle Karinen said the commission has consistently attached charges to doctors’ entries in an online database and listed charged doctors in commission meeting materials online.
The Washington Department of Health, a related agency that handles sexual misconduct allegations against doctors when the investigations do not require medical expertise, acknowledged that it failed to publish any bulletins on 30 enforcement actions since 2016 but said it has recently fixed the problem.
The medical commission’s delayed or or nonexistent notifications encompass a range of alleged doctor misconduct.
Kareematulai Arogundade was accused in August of failing to undergo a mental examination that the commission required. The physician, who did not respond when contacted by KUOW and ProPublica by email and phone, first appeared more than 120 days later in the commission’s winter newsletter after his license was indefinitely suspended.
Sophie Gomez was accused in October of failing to respond to a request for information about a complaint filed with the board, and her license was indefinitely suspended in February, after which the commission issued a press release. (Gomez declined to comment when contacted by KUOW and ProPublica.)
The commission did announce charges prior to resolving the case against Jonathan Wynn Hemmert, who oversaw clinical operations at three Washington clinics that used a device called Cryoskin, a temperature-controlled wand that manufacturers say can remove unwanted fat cells when it’s rubbed against a patient’s skin.
The state agency said clinic staffers had clients sign a personal injury waiver, which the commission said was unenforceable, against public policy and deceptive and dishonest. The commission said he also failed to ensure the device was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and failed to supervise staff using the device on patients.
Hemmert signed a settlement agreeing to address the concerns, but the commission in November filed formal allegations that he had breached it. (Hemmert did not respond when asked to comment on the allegations, which have not yet been adjudicated.)
A press release was posted to the commission’s website in March, 112 days after he was charged with breaching the settlement. Two months after that, a listserv notice went out.
“A Right to Know”
The 1984 Washington state law that requires public notification was passed as part of the Uniform Disciplinary Act, a set of guidelines for state medical boards and commissions that license providers and investigate complaints.
Among the sponsors was then-state legislator Mike Kreidler, a Democrat and optometrist who served 16 years in the Legislature and 24 as insurance commissioner.
Kreidler said he doesn’t recall the details of how the 1984 law came together. But looking back at it, Kreidler, now 82, said he believes the public notification requirement fulfilled an important function. He said to get to the point where the commission completes an investigation and files charges means a complaint has enough evidence behind it to proceed toward disciplinary action.
“They’re not going to be frivolous in any fashion, and therefore the public certainly does have a right to know,” he said.
Presented with KUOW and ProPublica’s findings, people who support policies favoring disclosure to patients said the commission’s interpretation of the 1984 notification law falls short.
Patricia Kelmar, senior director of healthcare campaigns at PIRG, a nonprofit advocacy organization for consumers, said the commission should be expansive in discharging its duty to notify the public as the law requires, contacting not only reporters but also a doctor’s current and former patients.
“ We should not be hoping that we stumble across the information that’s going to protect us from a doctor who’s dangerous,” Kelmar said.
Lisa McGiffert, patient safety activist with the Patient Safety Action Network, said the commission’s frequent delay in notifying the public does not fulfill the spirit of Washington’s law, which in her interpretation necessitates a quick release of information.
“ There’s nothing preventing Washington state from saying these have to be sent out to the news media within four or five working days,” McGiffert said.
Local media outlets have paid attention in the occasional cases where the medical commission has announced an action via the press release section of its website. A review of news releases about in-state doctors accused of conduct unrelated to their mental health shows that, more often than not, relevant media outlets have published stories afterward.
A news tip to a local journalist, not the commission’s email list, prompted the first media coverage of the case against Mulholland last June — nearly two months after the commission formally charged the gynecologist with misconduct involving three patients.
The woman who later accused Mulholland of performing an uncomfortable rectal exam and saying her vagina looked nice said the actions occurred at an appointment on May 1, 2025, or just days after the commission filed formal allegations.
The woman told KUOW and ProPublica that she was angry that she heard no news about the commission’s existing allegations before she saw Mulholland.
“I’d never heard anything bad about him,” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.
As heat waves intensify, manufacturers are betting you'll buy the fan with the biggest airflow claims. Our testing shows why that's a mistake that could cost you money.
Iran said it had targeted more than 80 U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait, after the U.S. launched strikes in response to attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
With peace talks on hold, the U.S. said it launched a "series of powerful strikes" on Iran in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
Japan's Hayabusa2 probe captured rare close-up images of near-Earth asteroid Torifune, revealing a snowman-like shape made of two joined lobes. Phys.org reports: The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 skimmed asteroid Torifune on Sunday in a mission that demonstrated the ability to deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth. A new image released by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Monday could aid such efforts, as researchers say near-Earth asteroids vary in their size, shape and surface characteristics.
"The moment I actually saw this image and the scientific data -- it really gave me goosebumps," JAXA scientist Yuya Mimasu told reporters, adding the asteroid "personally looked like a snowman." The black-and-white image, captured by a telescopic camera, showed what appeared to be two round objects joined together. "You can actually see the rocks... I really hadn't expected to be able to take a photo like this, so I'm absolutely over the moon," he said.
[...] Moving at a speed of more than 18,000 kilometers (11,185 miles) per hour, the probe was due to fly within 800 meters (2,625 feet) of the asteroid, but JAXA said it would analyze the distance later. If confirmed, the mission would be one of the closest flybys of a near-Earth asteroid ever. JAXA also said Monday it succeeded in acquiring data from three other devices that can measure the distance from the asteroid and examine the existence of water.
Wednesday’s national Telstra mobile outage serves as another stark reminder of how reliant on connectivity Australia now is, and how single points of failure can have widespread consequences across the country.
The nearly five-hour outage – which brought train lines to a halt, affected traffic lights, stopped Eftpos payments and even prevented people being able to charge their electric vehicles – was caused by what Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland, said was time-keeping servers that feed up-to-date information to the rest of the network.
The Newsom administration waited 24 days to decide if it would even let Californians see the multi-million-dollar contract with Baby2Baby, a nonprofit linked to First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
Catching a flight with just a carry-on can make travel feel easy. No need to check a bag and all your belongings stay with you. But quite often, that suddenly changes before boarding.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Meta launched its inaugural AI image model from the Meta Superintelligence Labs on Tuesday, its effort to compete with the likes of OpenAI's GPT Images 2.0 and Google's Nano Banana 2 in the AI image generation race. The new model, called Muse Image, rolled out with deep integrations woven into the Instagram app. As part of this update, public Instagram profiles are now automatically opted into being fodder for generative AI remixes. All someone has to do is tag your account's profile in a prompt -- if it's public -- and they can use Meta AI to generate an image using your likeness.
Meta positions this feature as a cheeky way to personalize generations with images of real people. "Whether you want to design a custom event invitation, mock up a collaborative creative concept, or generate a personalized graphic, tagging a username lets Meta AI use public photos to build a visual that's ready to post," reads one of Meta's announcement blogs about the new AI tool. [...] Instagram's help center site includes more details about how this feature will impact users, saying that "people may be able to create content with your Instagram content using AI features at Meta" if you leave your account public and on the default settings. (A previously archived version of this page from 2025 does not include similar, AI-focused language.) Instagram users who want to stop others from using their public posts for AI images (without switching your account to private) must manually disable the options under the app's "Sharing and reuse" settings. However, turning off the setting only blocks future AI generations; any AI images already created from their content will remain.
Meta also says users will not be notified when others create AI-generated content using their posts.
I'm sure this info is already out there somewhere but here is some of what I gathered while troubleshooting one of my marketplace pints. l.
I'm by no means a professional and am poking about from my own curiosity. This is probably wrong in some way. Please correct any inaccuracies in the comments.
Backstory:
Picked this up for cheap as a parts board.
It seems my 12v regulator gave up and just dumped battery voltage to my mosfet driver and 5v regulator.
My 5v regulator seems to have sacrificed itself to protect everything downstream (RIP)
My processor even seems to sorta start to boot when 5v is prodded into the right spot.
100% not worth fixing as the bms is probably also toast, but Might try and still fix this hopeless pint motherboard just to spite the landfill
I very much hope that better documentation is out there, but i wasn't able to find it in a quick Google search. If it does please point me towards it.
Ordered the new GT XL over the weekend are just got it this morning, super stoked. Opened it up, plugged in the charger, and board went blank. Tried every order of plugging it in, everything i could think of. Then i took it for a tiny ride and dang that thing rips, coming from 2500miles on my og pint.
Then i looked closer and the charger it came with wasn’t blue tipped like the i saw in the picture. Then i looked on the bottom and it say 75V GT home charger… So FM sent me the wrong charger.
Two questions:
Did plugging in the GT charger into a GT S series cause any harm? I would imagine not right? Less voltage?
All of the GTS chargers are blue connectors right? I’m not making that up?
I ordered the hyper charger, hopefully FM will get back to me someday and send me the right charger.
July 7, 2026 — Max single-threaded CPUs at scale are a new category of CPUs built for the agentic AI era.
Across the creation and deployment of an agentic system, the CPU is on the critical path for reasoning, response time and learning. CPUs are the processor which executes the work the AI model commands: the tool calling, code execution, data processing, KV-cache and result analysis.
For agents in AI factories, speed matters.
The faster the CPU can run the tool, the faster the agent can perform the task at hand.
The NVIDIA Vera CPU.
For the AI factory, the utilization of GPU is the most valuable resource in the data center so any time waiting for a task to complete constrains the revenue of an AI factory — or worse, impacts the GPU utilization waiting for the CPU to finish its task. AI factories need a CPU with max single-threaded performance to maximize AI factory revenue and agent performance.
Today’s data center CPUs are not designed for speed at scale.
While the world has fast CPUs for PCs and workstations, data center CPUs have been evolving in directions away from single-threaded performance. The advent of the cloud has pushed CPU makers to build higher core-count CPUs while minimizing cost at the expense of performance.
Building CPUs that optimize costs per rentable core increased the number of cores per chip while taking away silicon area from what makes those cores run fast — like high-performance memory fabrics and faster instruction processing per core. The move to chiplet architectures further reduced cost but created a “chiplet tax” where each CPU’s cores can no longer can get access to the full memory performance of the chip.
AI agents need a CPU designed for max single-threaded performance at scale.
A max single-threaded CPU at scale keeps each agent step fast while the system is fully loaded. Every core completes the agent task at full performance without other cores slowing it down. Max single-threaded CPUs at scale are designed differently to deliver:
Strong performance per core under load
Enough memory bandwidth per core to keep active cores supplied with data
Predictable latency
Every core can finish its task without any other core slowing it down, delivering excellent throughput and, more importantly, the fastest possible single-core task performance possible.
NVIDIA Vera exemplifies this new class of CPU design.
How Max Single-Threaded CPUs at Scale Are Built to Run the Agentic Loop
An AI agent doesn’t stop running after a single request. It acts in a loop. The model reasons about the next step. The CPU executes the work around the model. The result comes back. The model decides what to do next. Then the loop runs again.
That pattern creates a demand profile for which conventional CPUs were not optimized. Traditional CPU work is intermittent and user-driven, made up of short interactions triggered by people. Agentic work is persistent and parallel: swarms of agents running continuously, each advancing through a chain of steps where each step depends on the result of the one before it.
More cores in a CPU means more agent tasks per CPU, and data center CPUs need lots of cores to maximize throughput of tasks.
However, adding more cores to a CPU cannot shorten the time for each step inside a single agent loop. More cores can’t make any one task run faster. In fact, CPUs designed to maximize core count can even slow down the performance of each core as they contend for resources.
Individual per-core performance matters to drive the speed of each step’s completion. The throughput of additional cores is useful but insufficient. And since each action is dependent on the previous result, per-core speed determines how fast the loop advances.
In the end, the best agentic CPU needs the best single-threaded performance per core, and every core needs to deliver that performance without compromise. The world counts in seconds. Agents count in nanoseconds. NVIDIA Vera is built for this new category — and speed — of work.
NVIDIA Vera Is the Max Single-Threaded CPU at Scale for Agents
NVIDIA Vera is a max single-threaded CPU at scale, designed from the ground up for the agent loop: the work that happens between model calls as agents use tools, process data, run code and check results.
At the core of Vera is Olympus, NVIDIA’s custom CPU core, which delivers 50% higher instructions per cycle than NVIDIA Grace. That matters because many agent steps are sequential. A tool call, code execution, test run or data-processing step must finish before the next model call can use the result. Faster cores move each loop forward faster.
Vera pairs those faster cores with up to 1.2TB/s of LPDDR5X memory bandwidth at less than 40 watts of memory power, plus a monolithic compute die that helps active cores stay fed and keeps data movement predictable with 3.4TB/s of core-to-core bandwidth, 3x greater than any other data center CPU. This enables all 88 cores with the full memory performance of the CPU without creating bottlenecks that slows down every core.
The result is faster agent loops. In loaded CPU workloads that represent agentic execution, Vera delivers 1.8x the sustained per-core performance of x86.
Those gains compound across tool calls, code executions, data-processing steps and verification passes, helping AI factories complete more agent work with the GPUs they already operate.
Perplexity tested Vera on the agentic work it runs every day. Running a real coding workflow — cloning a repository and running its test suite in sandboxes — Vera completed the job about 1.5x faster than x86, and started concurrent sandboxes up to 1.9x faster. Perplexity is now looking to deploy Vera in its upcoming production system.
Agents also depend on data. They query, retrieve, filter and move information constantly, and Vera runs those CPU-side data workloads faster. Partners have measured 3x faster large-scale SQL analytics with Starburst and up to 6x lower latency on real-time streaming with Redpanda, both against leading x86 server CPUs.
Agent work isn’t one workload. An agent runs tools and sandboxes, processes data, serves requests and trains the next model with reinforcement learning — and all of it leans on the same strengths.
One Vera handles the whole range, rather than requiring a different CPU for each kind of work. And because Vera is the same CPU that hosts the GPUs in NVIDIA Vera Rubin and powers the NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX storage processor, the whole AI factory runs on one architecture and one toolchain.
And NVIDIA’s not done. NVIDIA’s next-generation Rosa CPU with the Rigel core will continue the company’s CPU roadmap for the agentic AI era. Rigel is NVIDIA’s next-generation Arm v9.2 CPU core, delivering higher per-core performance than Olympus while keeping the same silicon footprint. Key improvements include better instruction delivery, a larger L2 cache and more efficient memory handling.
Built for the Speed of Agents
In the agentic AI era, there will be billions of agents, and every one of them will turn to a CPU to act, check, retrieve, execute and verify. In this new market, completed agent work is the product. Faster agent loops help every GPU spend more time generating revenue producing work and less time waiting.
Utah has revoked the license of a boarding school where Paris Hilton said she was abused as a teenager, saying the school has "failed to provide applicable health and safety services for clients."
Donald Trump said he had a “very good talk” withVladimir Putin, ahead of arriving in Turkey.
This comes amid a wave of recent Russian strikes across Ukraine that have killed at least 21 people. The US president said that he also spoke with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy ahead of the Nato summit.
Defense attorneys say prosecutors coerced Anthony, 19, into waiving his right to testify, and cite additional reasons
Karmelo Anthony’s legal team is seeking a new trial and the recusal of a state judge a month after a Texas jury convicted the 19-year-old of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf, 17, at a track meet in 2025.
In a Tuesday motion, Anthony’s defense attorneys argued that their client’s conviction should be overturned because prosecutors coerced him into waiving his right to testify, among other reasons.
I know you can technically run both BTG and 5-inch, but if you had to choose one upgrade to start with, which would you pick? I’m trying to figure out which one gives the bigger real-world improvement/ more enjoyable first for someone who rides mostly street, paved paths, smoother trails, gravel, and rougher park paths. But the more I upgrade my board the more I’m enjoying the rougher trails around me ; and does BTG sacrifice carvability or speed ? I do enjoy wide carves and holding the edge of my tire on carves , I just recently got a 6in thubdercat and been enjoying being able to carve on loose gravel and rock paths more effortlessly and at higher speed.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by immigration enforcement as he was looking to hire workers, his son says
A federal immigration agent fatally shot a driver in Houston on Tuesday morning, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has said.
Agents stopped Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at around 6.50am and tried to arrest him, according to ICE, which described Salgado Araujo as a Mexican national and an “illegal alien” whom the agency was seeking as part of a “targeted enforcement operation”.
The Democratic Party is once again in upheaval as Graham Platner, its unconventional nominee to knock out longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, faces a rape accusation that threatens to end his once-powerful campaign and endanger Democrats’ chances of flipping a key seat in the November midterm elections.
Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer whose anti-establishment campaign had already weathered a series of scandals, has denied the rape allegation from ex-girlfriend Jenny Racicot, which Politico first reported on Monday. His campaign said the allegation was “coached and coordinated by out-of-state establishment operatives,” though it was supported by messages Racicot sent in 2023, long before Platner had a political profile.
Despite Platner’s denials, a cascade of Democratic politicians, operatives, and organizations have called on him to drop out of the race by 5 p.m. next Monday, in time to be removed from the general election ballot. Platner has said he would only drop out if he’s allowed to pick his successor to face Collins in November. If Platner withdraws, Maine Democrats would have to pick a new candidate by July 27.
That’s set off a scramble to find a replacement nominee and point fingers over the darkest chapter yet in a race that had already drawn national attention for a series of controversies — including accusations that Platner had twisted another woman’s arm behind her back and trapped her in a room; a sexting scandal; a Nazi tattoo; and a series of Reddit posts in which he belittled sexual assault, asked why Black people don’t tip, and disparaged white and rural voters. (Platner has denied that he mistreated women and apologized for the tattoo, text messages, and Reddit posts.)
Where does the Democratic Party — and the insurgent movement that saw Platner as a powerful rebuke to the establishment — go now?
We’re bringing you an extra episode of The Intercept Briefing this week to cover Platner’s downfall and where Maine voters might look next. In this episode, host Akela Lacy speaks with Adam Carlson, a Democratic strategist and founding partner of the polling firm Zenith Research who supported Platner through all the other scandals until Monday — and now says he was wrong.
“We — as in, the people who were looking for something different — looked at past nominees against Collins and wanted to try something different,” Carlson told The Intercept Briefing. “An outsider, someone who could appeal to white working-class voters, appeal to disaffected Trump voters, independents, Republicans, maybe someone who didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines, progressive economic populist, but also pro-Second Amendment. A bit more heterodox.” When Platner launched his campaign, “it’s, like, here comes this guy who epitomizes what we are lacking.”
The story has reanimated the age-old feud between Democrats loyal to the party establishment and a surging cohort of progressive and leftist candidates bucking the party line. But while competing factions rush to use Platner’s downfall as evidence of their own political prowess, Carlson says, they’re learning the wrong lessons.
“Yes, you should have better vetting. Yes, having people who are in public office who have faced some level of media scrutiny are less likely to have these kinds of things appear. Not foolproof: Look at Eric Swalwell,” Carlson said. “But I think you can overlearn the lessons from this and try and turn this into a factional win. And I think that all this is subtext for the conversation that we’re about to have in 2028.”
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.
We’re bringing you an extra episode this week because there has been a serious and troubling update in the Maine Democratic Senate race. Candidate Graham Platner was accused of raping a woman in 2021, according to reporting from Politico on Monday.
The woman, Jenny Racicot, came forward after having previously told the New York Times that Plattner had displayed “reckless” and “unsettling behavior” toward her in a story last month. She reportedly told the Times off the record about the rape allegation, but it was not publicly reported before Politico broke the story on Monday.
In a campaign video Platner released after the story published, he denied the allegation and called it, “troubling, serious, and false.”
Graham Platner: I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false.
AL: Platner has said his campaign is considering its next options, and observers expect him to drop out in the coming days after a flurry of Democrats and organizations that had endorsed him called on him to do so. But as of this recording on Tuesday evening, he has not dropped out.
In a separate statement, Platner’s campaign claimed the rape allegation, which was supported by multiple accounts, including messages from 2023, well before he launched his Senate campaign, was “coached and coordinated by out-of-state establishment operatives.”
For listeners who might have forgotten, the rape allegation comes after Platner already had another women claim he was physically aggressive with her apologize for having a Nazi tattoo and authoring a series of Reddit posts belittling sexual assault, asking why Black people don’t tip, and making other controversial statements about white rural voters and police.
How did Platner get away with all those blemishes for so long? What does this mean for Democrats’ chances in Maine? To discuss all of this, I’m joined by Adam Carlson, who was a Platner supporter until the most recent news broke. Carlson is a founding partner of Zenith Research, a political polling firm that works with Democrats.
Adam, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Adam Carlson: Thanks for having me.
AL: You are someone who supported Graham Platner through all of his other scandals. When did you first learn about this allegation, and what was your reaction?
AC: I first learned about this specific allegation that came out on Monday about the alleged sexual assault when the story came out. There were all kinds of rumors buzzing around, potentially other oppo that may have been dropping later. Maybe Republicans were planning on dropping it after the dropout deadline on July 13. I heard about it when Politico broke the story.
AL: You published a long post on Tuesday morning with some reflections from this fallout. You wrote, “There are a lot of people who bear responsibility for this. The team that didn’t vet him properly. The people (like me) who bought his schtick hook line and sinker and used their platforms to not just promote him early on, and stuck with him after just an insane amount of obvious red flags for months on end — I should have known better, and I for one will be doing a lot of introspection (and hopefully lesson-learning) on how I got to that place of cognitive dissonance.”
You also talk about the blame on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for trying to foist Gov. Janet Mills on the electorate. I want you to walk us through this a little bit and explain what you’re talking about with respect to that cognitive dissonance here.
Why do you think so many people fell into that?
AC: I’ll speak to what I fell into. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can’t imagine I am alone just given the meteoric success that Graham had coming out of the gate. I think the Democrats have been struggling for a long time, at least since 2016, probably before then. 2016 is when it really kicked into high gear with white working-class voters.
Maine is a very white state. The general electorate is very working-class, low-college-educated, a bit older – representative of a lot of groups that Democrats have struggled with of late, and that we’re looking to get back.
Susan Collins is a very formidable challenger, always overperforms her polling, her benchmarks, wins in tough environments. I think that we — as in, the people who were looking for something different — looked at past nominees against Collins and wanted to try something different. An outsider, someone who could appeal to white working-class voters, appeal to disaffected Trump voters, independents, Republicans, maybe someone who didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines, progressive economic populist, but also pro-Second Amendment. A bit more heterodox. And here comes this guy who is, on paper, perfect. Outsider.
AL: Heterodox. The definition of heterodox. [Laughs]
AC: Exactly, yeah. He’s a sharpshooter, he’s an oysterman, he was a town harbormaster, he was a combat veteran. This gruff speaking voice. And I think that a lot of us — I live in a fairly working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. But much different than I’d say white working-class voters are in somewhere like Maine, particularly rural Maine.
In my head, and I think the heads of a lot of people, it’s, like, here comes this guy who epitomizes what we are lacking. People who can speak authentically — or what we thought was authentically — and can reach beyond our traditional messaging of like a Sara Gideon or people that have run against Susan Collins and fallen short in the past.
AL: Sara Gideon being the party-backed candidate who lost to Susan Collins previously.
AC: In 2020, who led in nearly every poll right before by a fair amount — and still lost pretty handily. So I think there’s a lot of trauma [laughs] among people like myself who every six years or so think that we got Susan Collins or people of her ilk in the party who take moderate votes, who cross party lines, who have independent bonafides in the state.
I was looking at someone like Janet Mills, who was rumored to be jumping in, and I was like, “This feels like another one in that same line.”
AL: Another wrong choice.
AC: Yeah, an establishment-backed traditional choice, a safe choice. Someone who doesn’t really excite people, who can’t really appeal to the middle. You’re trying to do just like a partisan Democratic strategy that’s been done before.
So I think a lot of it came from the trauma of losing to Trump a second time, and the trauma of Collins continuing to over-perform, and really needing that seat in order to have a chance to take back the Senate. Here comes Graham Platner, gruff-speaking voice, lifting kettle bells in his launch video.
A lot of us, I’ll put myself in this category of coastal elite types, were like, “Yeah, this is the working class-type candidate that we need.” Turns out he wasn’t working-class. That was implied but not actually true, given his upbringing. I don’t think there’s any outright lying about that, but definitely some misleading about that and just the image he was trying to portray.
This is the risk, right? It’s a high risk, high reward, as we’ve seen with Republicans over the years nominating these outsiders, because they’re untested, unvetted.
They have that kind of appeal: “I’m not part of the Washington system,” or whatever euphemism you want to use, the swamp, et cetera. But there is a downside potential, and I think we’re seeing that now.
AL: Part of that appeal was very early on in this cycle tapping into what we’re seeing now borne out, which is a widespread anti-incumbent sentiment and a bias — warranted or not — against older politicians and people who have been in office for a very long time.
We’re talking about Janet Mills, someone who was not only the governor but was almost 80 years old and was again, this archetype of exactly what the left has said for such a long time is the reason that Democrats are failing at the national level.
But you’re talking about another big storyline coming out of these primaries, which is like, who is the real working class? Who has the authority to speak for the working class, and how do we draw those lines?
“Who is the real working class? Who has the authority to speak for the working class, and how do we draw those lines?”
I was struck by an interview that I had with Amanda Litman of Run for Something back in October when the Nazi tattoo fallout was happening, and she said something that really struck me on this, which is talking about who is deemed authentic and who can credibly speak as the voice of the people. And she touches on the same thing that you’re talking about.
Again, Platner’s aesthetics. The first ad that his campaign put out was that he’s an oyster shucker, from the shores of Maine who can hobnob with farmers and fishermen and people who work on their feet all day. She said, “This particular type of brawly white dude with tattoos who can speak the visual language of what we associate with the working class. This is really a moment for us to collectively gut check — who gets permission to be seen as authentic? And who gets permission to be a little unkempt?”
And that was nine months ago at this point. And obviously now it’s more than being unkempt; he’s been accused of rape. But again this constant pursuit of working-class voters that Democrats, in some cases, I think in New York, this narrative was debunked with the gains that, that people saw with Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, although they did also excel in the white coastal elites neighborhood, and that’s something that we’ve been doing a lot of reporting on.
Avila Chevalier being the candidate who ousted Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat in New York last week, and Claire Valdez who won the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez against her chosen successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, both of whom are headed to the general election in November but are likely to enter Congress given the safety of those blue seats.
But I think one storyline on this working-class question that at least I missed coming out of Maine was from Greg Sargent at The New Republic that looked at some less favorable polling for Platner that showed him trailing against Collins [in voters] who did not have a college degree, which is often a proxy used for the working class.
“Everyone wants to use this scandal as evidence that proves that their strategy is the best one.”
There are liberal commentators, I saw [former Biden domestic policy adviser] Neera Tanden seizing on that as evidence of the left’s folly here in putting up what they say is an unvetted populist who clearly was unvetted, rather than going with the party pick. The counterpoint to that being that Mills did so poorly in this campaign that she had to drop out before the primary. That was the party’s pick here.
So everyone wants to use this scandal as evidence that proves that their strategy is the best one. But is anyone actually right?
AC: I think everyone’s a little bit right and a little bit wrong. I know that’s a cop-out, but I’ll explain.
AL: [Laughs] OK, I’m listening.
AC: I’ll start with my wing of the party, which — I wouldn’t consider myself a leftist, but definitely an establishment skeptic who is now aligned with the left because we share those goals. I think that we felt, as I mentioned before, wanting to have our cake and eat it too.
Maybe being the most progressive kind of economic-populist candidate is the most electable in the general election. There’s this little bit of a proxy war as we’re seeing in the Michigan Senate race between now just between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, on the left and the center, respectively.
AL: Yes, the other news over the weekend in the Michigan race is that Mallory McMorrow, one of the Democratic primary candidates dropped out, setting up another progressive versus centrist test between El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens.
AC: That’s a really good point in that the story of McMorrow — who I supported initially, so I’m really doing great here, 0 for 2 — is she was kind of the Goldilocks candidate between the kind of left-progressive candidate in Abdul El-Sayed and the more centrist and AIPAC-friendly candidate, establishment, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee favorite Haley Stevens. And she got squeezed. I think that was part of it.
It’s just like the electorate — the Democratic electorate — is so angry and so desperate to win, and there are two competing theories of the case, not just for 2026, but this is a dress rehearsal for 2028 when this conversation will kick into overdrive. Regardless of whether AOC runs [for president], there will be somebody on the left standard-bearer who will be making that argument.
I think that Graham Platner — I would personally separate these two, but they’re lumped together for, for good reason sometimes at least in terms of the electability argument — Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner. Where these two examples of more progressive, economic populist candidates, can they win in a swing state or a swing seat or a blue-leaning seat to defeating a Republican incumbent?
I would argue Abdul El-Sayed is squeaky clean, at least so far in comparison to Graham Platner or anybody. But I think you see the Stevens’s campaign trying to tie them together, and I think you see the Neera Tandens of the world trying to make the case, “We were right about Platner. Listen to us about Haley Stevens as well.”
AL: And forget about Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Cal Cunningham.
AC: Oh, Eric Swalwell and Andrew Cuomo. Eric Swalwell.
I took last night off of social media. I was like, “I’m good. I’m gonna reflect and sleep on it.”
AL: Keep it in the drafts. [Laughs]
AC: Exactly. Oh, you should see my drafts.
So, that’s one side of it, right? To summarize, the left-progressive whatever, populist coalition faction, whatever you want to call it, was right about Platner being able to tap into that anger and that enthusiasm and that passion that clearly Janet Mills was unable to tap into.
I’m of the opinion that she was never really viable. Not in this cycle. Maybe if it was 2018, maybe if it was a less angry, desperate Democratic electorate — maybe she would’ve had a chance in a different cycle.
“Maybe if it was 2018, maybe if it was a less angry, desperate Democratic electorate — maybe [Mills] would’ve had a chance in a different cycle.”
But someone of her archetype, again, very accomplished, very experienced, not just a two-term governor, but two-term attorney general, has been in public office for decades. A long list of accomplishments. Stood up to Trump on trans stuff, although that’s not the best issue, popularity-wise, to stand up to. But still — was seen as a fighter, and it wasn’t enough. So I’m not of the opinion that if Platner didn’t come around, Mills would’ve waltzed to the nomination.
I think there would’ve been somebody to fill that void potentially. So the left got that right. What they got wrong is that — and what I got wrong — is that believing in white-knuckling it and negative polarization against Chuck Schumer and the establishment and all the naysayers about Platner throughout all these abhorrent scandals.
The Nazi tattoo thing really threw me at the time, and I stopped posting about that race for a couple of months after that, after really backing him very publicly. And then jumped back on the horse because the primary’s heating up.
You’re right, there is a desire to notch that as a win, but obviously he wasn’t the right candidate. And I think that Abdul El-Sayed is now the next test of this, in about four weeks from now.
Now, the other side of it is, yes, the Neera Tandens of the world, the Third Ways of the world, people on Bluesky, et cetera, were yelling and screaming about Graham Platner for months and months and months before even the scandals.
They were like, “This guy’s untested. We shouldn’t rock the boat. This isn’t the time.” And the rest of us were like, “Look at him! He’s great! He’s going to break the archetype, break the mold.”
AL: Look at him go.
AC: And they were right. They were 100 percent right about Graham Platner.
But I think that they’re learning the wrong lessons from this, in my opinion. In that, just go with the establishment candidate. Yes, you should have better vetting. Yes, having people who are in public office who have faced some level of media scrutiny are less likely to have these kinds of things appear. Not foolproof: Look at Eric Swalwell.
But I think you can overlearn the lessons from this and try and turn this into a factional win. And I think that all of this is subtext for the conversation that we’re about to have in 2028. This is JV compared to what we’re about to experience in about, I don’t know, six to eight months.
[Break]
AL: Backing up a little bit to the midterms, which are looming in the background here the big takeaway being that both parties have a consistent problem with candidates credibly accused of sexual assault. This news, as you mentioned, came after McMorrow dropped out in Michigan, and Maine was a pickup that Democrats really needed to ease an already extremely difficult path to winning the Senate.
Do you think their chances in Maine are completely shot now? We’re anticipating news that Platner drops out in the next day or two. The deadline to do so would be on July 13, which is the coming Monday. There’s been reporting that Maine Democrats are going to rush a new convention process to potentially pick another candidate. There are several names being floated right now, most of the candidates who lost in the gubernatorial primary. But do you think Democrats’ chances in Maine are shot now?
AC: I would say it’s the opposite. I spoke with a bunch of Republican operatives, strategists, pollsters yesterday when I was taking my social media hiatus — my very brief social media hiatus, my dopamine hit hiatus — to ask them, “How you feeling?” And they’re like, “God, I hope he stays in.” They’re like, “Oh, what’s in it for him to drop out? Like at this point, might as well just keep going.” When his video dropped yesterday of him saying, “We’re taking time to evaluate next steps,” it felt to a lot of us who are in this industry who’ve seen these kinds of things before, as a prelude to a dropout.
I’d be shocked and appalled and angry if he didn’t drop out. I think what he’s trying to do right now is use his leverage to get his ally Troy Jackson, former state Senate president, I believe, who ran and came close to winning the gubernatorial nomination this year — who was also backed by Bernie Sanders, close with unions, the same type of archetype, but is an elected official. Again, fairly aligned in a lot of ways with Platner’s vision and kind of economic populist message. I think he’s trying to maybe use that as leverage to get his guy to take his place. So he’s not replaced with an “establishment-type” candidate. Although we’ll see if we’re getting into uncharted territory with this rapid convention.
But I think the consensus is, among Democratic and Republican strategists that I’ve spoken to, that Democrats have a better chance of holding the seat now. And I think that one of the arguments is that, “Oh, they won’t have any money.” The money will come. This is a must-win seat, and now that Platner, who was already struggling with fundraising — he put out a thing, I think, last week, I think a few folks like Matt Yglesias were, like, making fun of him for trashing the establishment and then asking the establishment for money because he’s getting swamped on the airwaves.
So I think the money will come to whoever replaces him on the ballot. But I do think that Democrats are in a better position, although we’re in uncharted waters. So it’s going to be tricky, and Susan Collins is no slouch. But someone with less baggage running in this kind of environment does have a really good shot still.
AL: One question that keeps coming up for me is it really possible that the people who vetted Platner missed this? I could see a plausible scenario where he blacked out and Jenny Racicot, the people that she told, weren’t going to go spreading this around because he wasn’t running for the Senate. But do you actually think the campaign didn’t know about this, or what do you think happened there?
AC: I don’t know. I know that Graham knew about all these things. He knows what he posted. They were deleted, whether it was the Reddit posts or whatever else was was unearthed.
AL: And the claim that he didn’t know about the Nazi tattoo has pretty much fallen apart at this point.
AC: Yeah, I think it fell apart a while ago. And I don’t think that the people who vetted him and recruited him to run knew about all these things before. I think Graham Platner said throughout the campaign —
AL: But like how? Especially the Reddit posts. Like how?
AC: The Reddit posts, that was a vetting failure. No doubt about it. Anything that has a digital footprint that you don’t unearth now, even if it’s deleted in the archives, like KFile, whoever’s going to do it, they’re going to unearth it. Oppo firms, they know how to do that. We saw with Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York 13.
AL: Right.
AC: These things don’t stay deleted. The internet is forever, which we’re going to see that coming up more and more with millennials and Gen Z politicians who grew up on the internet, who posted dumb stuff when they were younger — or even when they’re older.
So that was a vetting issue, and that’s something that should be addressed structurally, not just with DSCC establishment type backed candidates, but with all viable candidates. Like, the party apparatus or outside groups need to do a better job of doing self-vetting, self-oppo on these kinds of things.
In terms of things that don’t have a digital footprint that were verbal, other accusations from people — Graham knew. There’s no doubt about that, right?
AL: Yeah, and I’ll just say for our listeners, because Platner’s accuser says that after the night that she says that he raped her, she followed up with him because she was worried that she was pregnant to tell him that she wasn’t pregnant, and they had communications after the fact.
AC: I think there’s no real way of knowing when you’re vetting somebody about that unless the candidate comes forward, right? You can talk to people in their life, you can talk to their exes, you can do this. Maybe they didn’t think that Platner would be viable. Maybe they weren’t ready to talk about it yet. At the end of the day, that’s not on the vetters necessarily. That is on Graham Platner.
I think what’s getting lost in a lot of this in the blaming of people like the vetters or people like me who help prop him up, or Schumer for that matter, or the voters, or whoever it is you want to blame — and I think there’s plenty of blame to go around — is that this is on Graham.
He kept saying repeatedly throughout the campaign — and every time he did it, I would wince, even earlier on when I was standing by him — “Oh, nothing more is coming out. They’ve emptied the tank.” I spoke to Democrats, Republicans who are in the know who are like, “Yeah, more’s coming.”
A lot of us were like, “If he survived Nazi tattoo stuff, then he can survive anything.” Little did we know that — obviously, something like this is objectively even more serious than that.
AL: Yeah, there’s no question.
AC: But the fact that he kept saying nothing more is coming out speaks to either, you’re in denial, or you think that it’s never going to come out, and it’s hubris that you think you can can hide it well enough or people won’t speak out against you. But I don’t know. I’ve been following politics and working in politics for a long time. This stuff always comes out, and to think that you are the exception never works out well.
Maybe it happens once you’re in office. At some point the bill comes due. And if you’re not being forthright with people that are putting their entire reputation on the line, not talking about me, people who worked on this campaign, who got him in the race, vetted him, et cetera, and then all the fallout that extended out from that —
AL: And all the people who are withdrawing their endorsements of him right now.
AC: Exactly. There’s just so much collateral damage, and clearly there’s something appealing about his candidacy that both the people inside and outside of Maine saw something in him, and I think there is something real about what he tapped into. The ideas of his campaign can live on, but if you’re not forthright about these kinds of things, what else aren’t you being forthright about?
There were all these [Sen. John] Fetterman comparisons throughout the campaign, this gruff, unconventional guy. And I was one of the people who was like, “No, you’re just stereotyping these types of people,” but we don’t know what would’ve happened if he had won and was in the Senate, and maybe, who knows what positions he would’ve taken or what else would’ve come out.
Then maybe we [would] have a special election on our hands. There’s all kinds of implications, and I do hope that he does drop out — both to work on himself and for the sake of the party and the sake of the Democrats’ chance of having a window to take the majority. Because if Democrats lose that seat, it’s almost impossible for them to flip the Senate.
AL: I’ll just mention also that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democrat-aligned Majority PAC have said that they will not spend on this race if Platner does not drop out.
Adam, we’re going to leave it there.
Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. Great to have you on.
AC: Thank you for having me.
AL: Is there something you’re concerned about and want to see more reporting on? Let us know. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278.
That does it for this episode.
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After getting fed up with my GT, I finally decided to buy a XRC. I was very excited because it meant I could go back to using the FF/Hoosier Whisper 6" tire that I loved from the XR. However, came to find that the tire has been discontinued. I read that it was replaced with a tire called the "Nimbus" but I can't find any of those either. Can anyone help me?
I loved that tire because it was very soft and round. Softness being the most important aspect because I need a lot of cusion for my bad foot. The rougher the ride, the quicker it starts to hurt. That's the main reason I'm getting rid of my GT.
If anyone knows where I can find a Whisper or Nimbus or knows of a comparable replacement, please tell me. You'll be my hero!
Utah prosecutors showed video footage on Tuesday allegedly depicting Tyler James Robinson entering the campus of Utah Valley University on the day of Charlie Kirk’s killing and climbing on to a roof from where they say he fired a fatal shot at the conservative commentator.
The Utah county attorney’s office presented the evidence on the second day of a week-long preliminary hearing in which prosecutors must prove to state district judge Tony Graf that there was enough evidence for the case to move to trial.
Officers say they saw signs of life multiple times, and after hospital treated the child, he was taken to hospital’s morgue
A toddler who was declared dead after being discovered in a backyard pool in February was actually alive and found hours later in a room that serves as the hospital morgue, recently released police records show.
Two Gilbert police officers saw possible signs of life multiple times, but the child was still taken to the hospital’s “cold room” after being treated by staff, according to the documents.
Thousands of people descend on Newport Beach, drawn by flash mob-style meetup organized online
An alleged “TikTok takeover” sparked mayhem in a southern California beach town over the Fourth of July weekend, leading to fires, roughly 400 arrests and officers on horseback for crowd control.
Thousands of people descended on Newport Beach, California, on Saturday night, many drawn by an online flash mob-style meetup, according to a city statement. Balboa Peninsula was already packed with tens of thousands of Fourth of July revelers, but as night fell, officials said, a large crowd obstructed traffic, set fires and hurled explosives at law enforcement officers.
Officials also find multiple cracks and sagging floors in building that is being converted into apartments
A high-rise building in Manhattan was deemed unstable on Tuesday after authorities determined that support columns buckled, spurring evacuation of nearby buildings, according to officials and reports.
Officials said they also found “structural issues” on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer pharmaceutical building, which is being converted into residential apartments. “Two structural columns buckled, and there were multiple cracks and sagging floors,” the fire department said on X.
Looking for earbuds that keep you connected to your surroundings while still delivering good sound? These are my current top picks for true-wireless earbuds with an open design.
About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you’d expect.
Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.
That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution.
This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing.
What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of.
And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess.
The Trump administration has revoked a waiver that allowed Iranian oil sales, a key source of revenue for the regime, after Iran attacked three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
UK consumer group says lives are at risk because platforms fail to prevent dangerous items reaching customers
Babies are being put at risk by dozens of potentially lethal infant products sold to UK parents on major online marketplaces, an investigation has found.
The consumer champion Which? identified 150 products, including self-feeding prop feeders that pose a choking risk and baby sleep pillows linked to suffocation.
Sanders, one of Platner’s earliest and most influential backers, is latest to call on him to withdraw from Maine race
The progressive senator Bernie Sanders called on Graham Platner to withdraw from the US Senate race in Maine, citing “very serious allegations” of sexual assault, hours before the embattled nominee faced another claim of sexual misconduct.
While Platner has denied the new allegations, reported by Politico, and later by the Washington Post, the initial report prompted a wave of prominent Democrats to urge him to stand aside as the party’s nominee in the consequential Senate contest.
Doom developer id Software is reportedly laying off about half its staff as part of Microsoft's broader Xbox cuts. The reported layoffs potentially affects around 90 employees. Engadget reports: While neither Microsoft nor id Software have formally acknowledged the layoffs, one former member of the studio's staff, Michael Maynard, has echoed the 50 percent figure on LinkedIn. According to at least one of Game Developer's sources, that could translate to around 90 job cuts, though it's so far unclear what departments at id Software have been hit hardest.
[...] Bloomberg reported yesterday that as part of the "reset" at Xbox, ZeniMax Media, the parent company of id Software, will be focusing on its biggest franchises -- like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein and Doom -- going forward. It's possible that motivated the cuts to id Software, but the developer at least outwardly appears to be already heavily focused on Doom. The studio launched Doom: The Dark Ages in 2025 and an expansion to the game on July 7, 2026. Whatever the reason, the cuts at Xbox aren't over: While Microsoft eliminated 1,600 roles alongside the announcement that Xbox is restructuring, it still plans to lay off another 1,600 employees over the coming months.
A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice cannot have access to personal information for every person who worked during the 2020 election in Georgia's Fulton County.
Report finds widespread overbidding as rapid AI growth generates increased wealth in city where housing is scarce
San Francisco’s AI boom has buyers spending unprecedented amounts of money on homes – much more than sellers are asking for.
A new analysis from real-estate brokerage Compass, found that in the first half of 2026, more than 140 homes in the city sold for at least $1m above their asking price, 44 of them in June alone.
Novak Djokovic beat Felix Auger-Aliassime in Wimbledon’s longest-ever quarter-final, while Karolina Muchova saw off Naomi Osaka and Jannik Sinner also won
Now a love hold for Struff, who’s started pretty well and leads 3-2 He looks confident, but he’s not yet been put under pressure and I wonder if he can offer more testing returns. Even if he needs to stand back to give himself a better look at Sinner’s serve, he has to try and dig into it rather than hope e can struggle to a tiebreaker.
Nana Sinner appears to have been busy knitting Jannik’s top; that, or Nike have rinsed him with gear yet again.
I charged my onewheel XL over winter once a month. It has maybe 50 miles on it. It didn’t turn on in the spring. I opened support ticket. I was given three or four things to check. No help. RMA issued immediately, fixed, and returned working in very short time.
I know there’s lots of FM hate out there but wanted to share my story of good support execution.
I have a new favorite Windows laptop, but I still think the MacBook Air is the best laptop for most people. Check out all of my picks, from budget models to high-powered rigs for gamers, creators and everything in between.
Microsoft will turn on Windows settings backup and restore by default for eligible Windows 11 business devices outside the EU, starting with Windows 11 26H2. The Register reports:
Now dubbed "Windows settings backup and restore," the service backs up a device's settings and a list of installed Microsoft Store apps, which can then be restored to a new device. Microsoft gave a use case for the technology: "Imagine a lost laptop, a hardware refresh, or an unexpected reset. These are some of the moments when your users need backup most. And that's rarely when anyone wants to discover that backup was never turned on."
However, some organizations might not want it on. Perhaps those with strict privacy or data sovereignty requirements, or those regulated by the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), for whom the default-on behavior won't apply. Windows 11 25H2 and earlier are also excluded, as is any device with a backup policy that explicitly disables the setting. Everything else running Windows 11 26H1 will get switched on after a feature update, and the same applies to 26H2, currently with Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel.
Administrators might reasonably be wary of this being opt-out rather than opt-in. Backups are useful, but Microsoft is clear that this is not a comprehensive backup solution, calling it only "one step in a broader Windows resiliency effort." The implications still need consideration. An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators' workloads rather than lightening them.
The US military launched a series of “powerful” strikes against Iran, it announced on Tuesday night, in response to what it said were “unwarranted, dangerous” Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels in the strait of Hormuz.
In a statement on social media, US Central Command accused Tehran of a “clear violation” of the ceasefire agreement between US and Iran, which was signed last month.
President also threatens to pull all American troops from Europe and rails against Nato stance on Iran war
Donald Trump has revived his bid for the US to acquire Greenland, threatening to pull all American armed forces out of Europe after the continent repeatedly pushed back.
Arriving at the Nato summit in Ankara on Tuesday, the US president also suggested his commitment to defending Europe had been tempered by political decisions by leaders on immigration and energy.
Why unlimited? A phone plan with no caps on the data you use lets you stream media, play games and stay connected. We pick our favorites from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.
A 2-1 ruling from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found Florida's assertion it could control the speech of its employees to be "a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the state's own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry."
I recently got a Pint S and would like to use it for my work commute (6km each way). Anyone doing this that would have useful insights? I am not sure yet about what protective / weatherproof gear to buy. Thanks!
Regional partnership establishes innovation platform to strengthen agriculture security and rural reinvestment
July 7, 2026 — F3 Innovate (F3i), Fresno State and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego have announced the launch of the F3i Supercomputing Center, a regional innovation platform providing the computing power, technical support and talent pipeline needed to accelerate innovation across California’s food and agriculture supply chain. The center represents a first-of-its-kind partnership between industry and higher education to expand access to the advanced computing infrastructure needed to compete in an AI-driven economy.
The universities, F3i and local leaders will celebrate the launch of the Supercomputer Center from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday, July 9, in the Fresno State Library.
The event will include AI model demonstrations, case studies and discussion about the center’s role in advancing the future of agriculture and food security, workforce development, K-16 pathways and more.
The Central Valley produces a significant share of the nation’s food, supports more than 14,000 farming and food-processing operations, serves as a critical logistics hub and is home to a growing network of manufacturers, researchers, entrepreneurs and educational institutions. While these industries generate significant economic value, most of the investment supporting AI development and other advanced technologies has historically been located elsewhere.
The center brings advanced computing resources directly to the Central Valley. Instead of requiring businesses, researchers and educators to build their own computing systems, the F3i Supercomputing Center provides shared access to powerful computing resources and technical support allowing growers, food processors, manufacturers, logistics companies, startups and researchers to test and apply AI to real-world challenges across the food and agriculture supply chain.
“Data and computing power are becoming foundational infrastructure for the global economy,” said Priscilla Koepke, F3i chief executive officer. “The technologies shaping agriculture’s future, from artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to robotics and biotechnology, all depend on the ability to process and apply massive amounts of information. This partnership creates the infrastructure, expertise and talent pipeline needed to ensure Central Valley agriculture remains globally competitive while accelerating innovation across the entire food and agriculture supply chain.”
Fresno State will serve as the home of the center, expanding opportunities for applied research, workforce development and industry collaboration while reinforcing the university’s role as California’s leading agricultural university.
“Fresno State is excited to give our students, faculty and industry partners access to technologies that are reshaping agriculture and the broader food system,” said Dr. Bao Johri, vice president of information technology and chief information officer. “By hosting this center, Fresno State will help prepare the next generation of engineers, researchers, agricultural professionals and entrepreneurs while strengthening the innovation ecosystem that supports the Central Valley’s economy.”
The partnership also leverages the nationally recognized expertise of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which has spent decades advancing cyberinfrastructure for scientific research, including the development of the National Research Platform and National Data Platform with support from the National Science Foundation.
“High-performance computing has become essential infrastructure for research, innovation and economic competitiveness,” said Frank Wuerthwein, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “Through this partnership, we are extending advanced computing capabilities beyond traditional research environments and into one of the nation’s most important production economies. By combining our technical expertise with Fresno State’s leadership in agriculture and workforce development and F3i’s deep connections to industry, we are creating a model for accelerating innovation across the food and agriculture supply chain.”
The center will provide three integrated services:
Affordable High-Performance Computing: The center offers shared access to advanced computing resources that enable growers, startups and researchers to train AI models, process large datasets and test emerging technologies without making significant infrastructure investments.
Applied AI Services: The center provides technical expertise to help organizations identify opportunities, develop AI-enabled solutions and deploy advanced technologies that improve productivity, sustainability, efficiency across agriculture and related industries.
Workforce and Talent Development: Through F3i’s Data Challenges and AI Launchpad program with Microsoft, the center prepares students, educators, researchers and working professionals to use advanced computing and artificial intelligence in careers advancing agriculture’s next era.
The center is one part of F3 Innovate’s broader strategy to strengthen the Central Valley’s innovation ecosystem. By bringing together growers, universities, startups, investors, public partners and workforce programs, F3i helps move promising ideas from research into real-world use, creating new businesses, preparing workers for emerging careers and accelerating the adoption of technologies that improve the competitiveness of California agriculture.
Source: BoNhia Lee; California State University, Fresno
In the early morning hours of June 29, federal agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security conducted a raid on home in Midlothian, Texas, in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.
The raid, which saw federal agents deploying flash-bang grenades and using armored vehicles, was authorized by a federal search warrant related to an ongoing federal investigation into an alleged bomb plot at a June 14 Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House. The Justice Department characterized the case as an assassination plot against high-ranking officials using of explosive drones and sniper rifles.
The search warrant in Midlothian was issued as part of federal agents’ search for evidence of several potential charges, including conspiracy to commit murder, according to documents viewed by The Intercept.
“They are stress-testing the limits of NSPM-7.”
The subject of the raid in Texas claimed that, in the days after the raid, federal agents returned to her home and offered her up to $200,000 to act as an informant for federal law enforcement. The resident, “Doberman,” who asked only to be identified only by her social media handle because of ongoing threats to her safety, has not been indicted on any charges. Doberman also said she was visited by agents from the FBI and Secret Service weeks before the raid.
The raid was part of a sweeping effort by the federal government and far-right media figures to spin up a vast far-left conspiracy casting antifascist activists as well-organized extremists who pose a threat to public safety.
President Donald Trump has made attacks on antifascist activists a centerpiece of his domestic crackdown on the left, designating antifa a terrorist organization and issuing directives like the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 to focus resources on going after left-wing activists.
The crackdown recently helped spur centuries’ worth of combined prison sentences for a clutch of left-wing activists who launched a protest at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility, just a 20-minutes drive from Midlothian.
First Amendment advocates said the Midlothian raid fit into the widespread pattern of aggressive policing tactics being used against the left, including other attempts to flip activists.
“They are stress-testing the limits of NSPM-7, both by trying to cast various groups or voluntary associations that are protected by the First Amendment as being antifa, or as falling within the ambit of this sort of very broad definition of terrorism,” said Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a New York-based attorney who represents defendants in federal cases but is not working on the Midlothian raid. “We see that with this thing in North Texas, we saw that in Prairieland, and we’re seeing that in Minneapolis” — a reference to the recent indictments of 15 anti-ICE activists in Minnesota.
Doberman is a well-known activist in north Texas left-wing circles. She has been filmed armed at protests and is a member of a group known as the Community Liberation Brigade.
In the days before the raid, a Dallas Express op-ed by a local right-wing activist identified Doberman as a leader of the Community Liberation Brigade. The article suggested that Doberman had ties to the Pairieland defendants — a case that saw the government’s first successful prosecution under Trump’s directives against antifa. It’s unclear what role, if any, the Dallas Express op-ed played in the raid.
Doberman, who told The Intercept she doesn’t have any ties to the Prairieland defendants, said she was questioned about the case during the raid. Authorities also asked Doberman about people named in recent federal indictments surrounding the UFC plot, where the most serious charges included conspiracy to commit murder — the same charge that appeared on the search warrant for Doberman’s home.
Because of the ongoing investigation, the Secret Service directed questions about Doberman’s case to the Justice Department. The Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the FBI. Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI immediately responded to requests for comment.
“Rifles Trained Directly at Me”
Two weeks before the Midlothian raid, federal agents tried to question Doberman about the alleged plot to attack the UFC 250 event, an extravagant mixed martial arts performance hosted by the White House as part of its celebrations of 250 years of American independence.
Two men who identified themselves as federal agents from the FBI and Secret Service arrived at Doberman’s door, according to video footage of the encounter obtained by The Intercept.
In the footage, one of the agents assures Doberman that she is “not in trouble” and asks her if she knows anything about an impending attack. Doberman replies that she doesn’t know anything about any plot. When asked if she plans to travel to Washington, she says she is “broke as fuck.” Shortly after, Doberman declined to answer further questions and instructs the agents to come back with a warrant.
Two weeks later — just days after the Dallas Express piece published — federal agents arrived during the early morning hours in Bearcat armored vehicles. They broke down Doberman’s door in a “no-knock” raid, a controversial tactic that has led to the deaths of innocent people.
“I was woken up by a loud crack, a loud bang,” Doberman told The Intercept in her first media interview since the raid. “I shot up and looked directly to my door, where I was then briefly blinded by a very fucking bright flash of light. After I got my vision back, I saw three rifles trained directly at me.”
Officers placed Doberman in handcuffs, she said, and led her to a local police cruiser parked nearby. Doberman, who is transgender, was denied the opportunity to put on clothes, even after being detained and handcuffed by agents. She was then forced outside in her underwear.
“I’m a trans woman — so, trans woman in a very red state, in a very red city, in feminine underwear. Not the best look,” she said.
According to a seizure receipt viewed by the The Intercept, Doberman’s cellphone was the only item taken during the raid.
In the days after the raid, another FBI agent, whom Doberman said did not give their name, returned her cellphone.
“We know that you’re struggling financially. We know that the people you hold dear are struggling financially.”
During the exchange, Doberman said, the agent offered her hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a confidential informant.
“He said, ‘Hey, we know that you’re struggling financially. We know that the people you hold dear are struggling financially. We are willing to offer monetary gain if you can give us any information on bad actors,’” she recalled.
“The agent said $100,000 to $200,000, which is a life-changing amount,” Doberman said.
Doberman said she told the agent that she would think about the offer. In an interview with The Intercept, however, she said she had no intention of accepting.
Shortly after the offer was made, Doberman spoke to Xavier de Janon, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who confirmed the account to The Intercept. De Janon says that proposals like the one received by Doberman could be indicative of the larger network of resources being poured into federal investigations under Trump’s NSPM-7 directive.
“Getting money in exchange for information isn’t new for this government. It’s actually pretty old. I think what is a bit surprising is the amount,” he said. “These cash payouts are really large and probably reflect the very large budgets that these federal agencies have under Trump.”
De Janon said large financial offers to potential collaborators raise questions about the validity of information provided by informants.
“Even without cash payments, federal informants and state-level informants, too, are pressured so much to give out information that they start behaving in ways that creates criminal situations and questionable moments that wouldn’t have happened to begin with,” he said.
For her part, Doberman was rattled by the raid. Though she was not accused of any crimes, the violent raid left her in a persistent state of anxiety. “I’ve been working on my PTSD for years,” she said. “It’s gotten so much worse. And every night now, constant nightmares.”
First-of-its-kind initiative will integrate quantum sensing, networking and computing into a single operational system to strengthen American economic competitiveness and national security
July 7, 2026 — The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced Project Triad, a first-of-its-kind initiative to integrate quantum sensing, quantum networking and quantum computing into a single operational system. By bringing these three capabilities together for the first time, Project Triad will move quantum technology out of the lab and into real-world use — with applications spanning safety, healthcare, energy, manufacturing and more.
Credit: Shutterstock
The initiative will lay the scientific and technological foundation needed to refine, scale and commercialize these systems through U.S. industry, strengthening American economic competitiveness, national security and quality of life.
“NSF Project Triad will unite the research enterprise to advance the administration’s vision, ensuring public investments translate into strategic advantages in quantum technology for all Americans,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “Project Triad, in alignment with the executive order ‘Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,’ continues NSF’s leading role in advancing innovation that improves American prosperity, quality of life, national security and creates jobs for American workers.”
Quantum technologies make use of quantum properties (such as entanglement and superposition) found in particles of matter and energy, like atoms and photons. This allows quantum sensors to detect finer details and quantum computers to potentially solve problems that would otherwise take years, or even centuries, to tackle.
Combining quantum sensors, networks and computers in integrated quantum systems opens a new frontier of possibilities:
Navigation and secure communications for first responders and military personnel operating in areas without access to GPS or other satellites.
Detecting underground oil, gas and mineral deposits with less exploratory drilling.
Precise medical imaging and diagnostic data to produce individually tailored medicines that effectively treat a range of illnesses.
“Achieving Project Triad will require exceptional fundamental scientific work alongside translational research to utilize quantum data to its utmost,” says NSF Chief Science Officer Simon Malcomber.
Quantum technology is advancing fast globally, and the U.S. needs to move quickly, but also smartly. Project Triad takes a systematic approach to identifying which quantum breakthroughs are ready to scale, cutting the ones that aren’t, and accelerating the most promising ideas from lab to market. It does this through three interlocking programs that bring together government, universities and private industry — making it the first effort to build a fully integrated quantum environment in the United States.
NSF National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NSF NQVL) will deliver Project Triad’s proof-of-concept integrated quantum system for experimentation and testing. Currently in the design phase, NSF plans to accelerate several NSF NQVL projects from design to implementation by December 2026 (pending funding availability).
NSF X-Labs are independent teams of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs pursuing milestone-based federal funding to solve specific scientific challenges, including quantum systems involving interconnects and photonics. Such technology will play a critical part in enabling integrated quantum systems to transfer quantum information between devices.
NSF Quantum+X will work directly with industry to identify promising use cases and potential applications for integrated quantum technology. NSF is now actively seeking partnerships for the launch of an initial set of NSF Quantum+X funding tracks that could span the energy, finance, biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors, among others.
Project Triad draws on NSF’s existing portfolio of quantum research programs — including its network of specialized institutes, engineering centers and national research infrastructure — giving Triad access to the latest findings and discoveries for real-world testing within the integrated quantum system. These programs also train the next generation of quantum scientists and engineers, ensuring the workforce is ready to build on what Project Triad delivers.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, July 7, 2026 — GIGABYTE is demonstrating how AI TOP ATOM four-node clustering scales local AI computing for increasingly complex workloads. As AI models, scientific simulations, and enterprise applications continue to grow in size and complexity, standalone systems are increasingly insufficient to meet rising memory and compute demands. AI TOP ATOM clustering removes that constraint, enabling memory-intensive workloads to run locally without compromising on data security.
GIGABYTE Demonstrates AI TOP ATOM Four-Node Clustering on Scientific Computing
Each AI TOP ATOM node delivers 1 PFLOPS FP4 AI performance and 128 GB unified memory. Through a RoCE-capable 200GbE switch, four interconnected nodes, each with 128 GB of unified memory, enable memory-intensive workloads to scale beyond the limits of a standalone system. The modular architecture allows organizations to scale from one node to four nodes as workload requirements evolve while maintaining local deployment and full data sovereignty, providing a scalable foundation for larger AI and scientific computing workloads.
To demonstrate these capabilities, GIGABYTE collaborated with NVIDIA to showcase an AI-driven scientific computing workflow on AI TOP ATOM clusters. Powered by NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints, the workflow orchestrates NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-NVFP4 open-source models for research hypothesis generation and dispatches GROMACS to execute simulations across the cluster. By connecting AI reasoning with scientific simulation, the workflow demonstrates how AI-driven research can be executed within a clustered computing environment.
As part of the demonstration, the workflow is applied to thermal interface material (TIM) development for advanced semiconductor packaging, a workload that increasingly relies on large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. While standalone systems are typically limited to simulations of approximately 10 million atoms before encountering memory constraints, a four-node AI TOP ATOM cluster extends simulation capacity beyond 30 million atoms for next-generation IC packaging research.
The demonstration highlights how AI TOP ATOM four-node clustering can support larger-scale scientific simulations that exceed the capabilities of a standalone system, extending its role from AI development to emerging scientific computing applications. For more information, please visit GIGABYTE AI TOP ATOM here.
About GIGABYTE
GIGABYTE is an engineer, innovator, and leader in the tech world that offers a complete product and service portfolio of different scales to accelerate individuals and businesses in reaching their potential. With unique industry insights and strong eco-partnerships, GIGABYTE continues to expand its products and influence, enabling customers to facilitate AI implementation and future robotics, and align the advancement of computing with environment sustainability to “Upgrade Your Life.”
Only a few days ago we had Linux on the Mega Drive, and someone took that as a challenge, so now we have Linux on the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar has a very different architecture than the Mega Drive, but does happen to use a processor from the same 68000-family.
Interestingly enough, to this day, Linux has architecture code for the 68000-family of processors. 68040, 68030, 68010… and even the original base 68000 processor. All neatly structured under arch/m68k/.
A slew of Ford recalls affects some new and used Mustang, Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid and Explorer Hybrid vehicles, according to a federal safety watchdog.
Samsung's chip division is projected to earn more in 2026 than it made across its previous 40 years in semiconductors, driven by soaring AI-fueled demand for memory and storage. The company's latest quarterly operating profit reportedly topped Nvidia's, making Samsung the world's most profitable tech company for the period. Tom's Hardware reports: Brokerage consensus puts Samsung's full-year 2026 operating profit near 300 trillion won ($196 billion), and its second-quarter figure at about 84.6 trillion won ($55.1 billion). Samsung easily beat the consensus with $58.5 billion when it posted preliminary results on July 7, overtaking Nvidia's most recent quarterly operating profit of $53.54 billion and becoming the most profitable technology company in the world for the period, on the back of AI-driven memory demand.
Samsung's DS division booked 53.7 trillion won ($35.1 billion) of the company's 57.2 trillion won in total operating profit during the first quarter of 2026, roughly 94% of the total, which is why the division's projection sits so close to Samsung's full-year consensus. "This year's profit will exceed the cumulative profit generated over the past 40 years since we entered the semiconductor business," Kim Yong-Kwan told staff, scoping the claim to the chip business rather than the wider conglomerate. Further reading: Samsung Chip Workers To Get $340,000 Average Bonus In AI Boom
Whether you use your printer for school, a small business or everyday household tasks like printing photos, we’ve identified the top options worth considering.
College freshman’s mother identified his body after he was reported missing following 4 July boat trip with friends
On 4 July, Nolan Xavier Wells, an 18-year-old from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a group of friends went on a boat trip to Horn Island, a barrier island about 10 miles off the Mississippi Gulf coast. Wells’s friends all returned back home that evening, but Wells did not, prompting his mother to report him missing and ask for help on social media, triggering a two-day search that caught national attention. That search came to an end on Monday, when a body was found on the island. On Tuesday, Wells’s mother, Christine Wonsley, identified the body as belonging to Wells.
“His father, our family, friends and I are absolutely devastated,” Wonsley wrote in a Facebook post. “My heart is broken for my sweet son who was always willing to cheer and uplift others. Nolan was a special soul, God took his time creating our son.”
The rise of an GPU-less supercomputer called LineShine on the TOP500 list last week has provoked questions about supercomputer architectures. Namely, do we still need GPUs to run AI and scientific computing workloads? The question was recently taken up in a new paper written by a trio of HPC experts, Jack Dongarra, Satoshi Matsuoaka, and Torsten Hoefler.
They look at the different data types that are at play with HPC and AI workloads, and how general-purpose GPUs addressed them. They analyze the bottlenecks in the modern entire supercomputer architectures, the programming models, and how data types match to hardware.
In the end, they come to the conclusion that GPUs may not be needed, as modern CPUs have adopted many of the capabilities that drove people to GPUs in the first place.
The Rise of GPUs
The HPC experts documented the rise of GPUs over the past decade, which has made Nvidia–the dominant supplier of GPUs thanks in large part to its CUDA programming environment–the richest company on the planet.
Nvidia GPU performance over time (Image courtesy Hartwig Anzt, TUM)
“The following success is easy to understand: GPUs provide massive floating-point throughput using optimized datatypes, excellent efficiency for dense linear algebra, matrix-matrix operations, high memory bandwidth, and many forms of data-parallel computation,” they write. “Modern AI, especially deep learning, has been shaped around the strengths of GPUs, and many scientific applications have been rewritten to exploit them.”
The main reason the scientific computing community and AI pioneers adopted GPUs was because “conventional CPUs lacked sufficient parallel arithmetic capability or memory bandwidth for emerging AI and high-performance computing workloads,” they write in the paper.
What matters is not whether the device is called a GPU, the authors write, “but whether it provides the right computational structures, memory system, programming model, and numerical capabilities.” The capabilities of GPUs fit the bill, while those of CPUs did not.
Fitting Hardware to the App
Neither hardware nor software is developed in a vacuum. Each side is guided, in some degree or another, by what’s happening on the other side. When they’re sufficiently intertwined, we like to use the term “co-design.”
With that said, there are some core computational requirements, some kernels, that don’t change much. Matrices and vectors are the dominant data types in both AI and much of scientific computing, and so that is what’s needed on the hardware.
Specifically, AI training and inference is dominated by matrix-matrix multiplication, convolution, and attention kernels, which “map extremely well to highly parallel hardware,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write.
In the world of scientific computing, dense linear algebra calculations remain the heart of workloads like eigensolvers, factorizations, simulation codes, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and emerging AI-assisted modeling.
GPUs have delivered the most bang for the buck when it comes to meeting these requirements over the past decade. But there’s no reason why that has to be the case going forward.
“If a CPU contains vector and matrix engines with high bandwidth and the right datatype support capable of delivering high throughput for these operations, then one of the GPU’s most important historical advantages is diminished,” the authors write.
This is exactly what’s happening today. On the ARM processor, the addition of Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) allow ARM processors to handle vectors of any size, as well as the matrix math central to linear algebra-based scientific computing workloads and newer AI software. China’s new LineShine supercomputer–which took the number one spot on the TOP500 last week–is an example of utilizing ARM SVE and SME extensions to achieve very high levels of FP64 compute in a GPU-less architecture. Intel’s AVX and AMX extensions provide something similar for X86 chips. (IBM’s latest POWER processor also has matrix and vector math engines, too.)
“If these features are implemented with high throughput and paired with sufficient memory bandwidth, then the CPU becomes not merely a scalar control processor but a true numerical engine,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write.
Parallel Compute No Longer the Bottleneck
When computational horsepower was the bottleneck, it made sense to adopt large, powerful GPUs to overcome it. However, for some workloads, the huge increases in computational power that Nvidia and AMD have brought with their latest GPUs are essentially going to waste, as the systems just can’t get data to them fast enough.
In many cases, GPUs are starving for data. Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Rubin Vera superchips, which combine two GPUs with one ARM-based CPU, are marvels of engineering. But even with gobs of HBM and an extremely fast NVLink chip-to-chip (C2C) interconnect, many workloads are not scaling as they used to, and the extra cost and complexity is becoming a burden.
“Moving data between CPU memory and GPU memory adds latency, consumes energy, complicates programming, and forces applications to manage multiple memory spaces,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write. “Unified memory models and high-speed interconnects help, but they do not completely remove the complexity.”
If you can get a single powerful CPU with matrix and vector engines and enough HBM, then the benefits gained through having a single memory abstraction that’s managed by one processor that also handles the OS, communication, control flow, and numerical kernels, then you might have a setup that beats a GPU-based one. Again, that appears to be what’s happening in the market.
Mixed Precision
The authors also discuss the importance of having processors that support mixed precision workloads. While many scientific computing workloads demand the high precision that comes with FP32 or FP64, today’s newer AI workloads run best using lower precision. Having processors that can run the full gamut–from FP4, FP16, FP32, FP64, and INT8 to block-scaled FP8 and FP4–is important.
“But there is nothing inherently GPU-specific about low-precision matrix arithmetic,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write. “A CPU that supports multiple precisions natively is well suited to this model. It can perform bulk computation in lower precision, accumulate or correct in higher precision, and use double precision where necessary.”
Programmability
The increased complexity of adding GPUs made sense when compute was the bottleneck, even if that model increased costs and made programming more complex. But the model makes less sense when we have CPUs that are approaching GPU-level performance thanks to additional vector/matrix capabilities and loads of HBM.
“GPUs are very effective, but they often require specialized programming models, careful kernel design, memory hierarchy management, and attention to occupancy, thread divergence in older models, and data placement,” the authors write. “High performance will still require optimized libraries, careful data layout, compiler support, and algorithmic restructuring.
(Image courtesy Jack Dongarra)
“But the path may be simpler if the processor remains a general-purpose CPU with accelerator-like features built in,” they continue. “Instead of treating the GPU as a separate device, the programmer sees a powerful CPU with scalable vector and matrix instructions for the right datatypes and high-bandwidth memory. That can make it easier to support irregular workloads, dynamic control flow, adaptive methods, sparse computations, and tightly coupled simulations.”
The authors make the case that CPUs have an inherent advantage over GPUs when it comes to handling the long tail of scientific computing’s needs. Again, that advantage may be overcome if the GPUs is delivering raw power that can be harnessed. But when that raw power advantage is cut into, the extra costs associated with GPU computing begin to nag.
“Scientific computing is broader than dense matrix multiplication,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write. “Many important applications involve sparse matrices, graph-like data structures, adaptive meshes, particles, multiscale coupling, irregular memory access, global reductions, and communication across distributed systems. GPUs can handle many of these workloads, but efficiency is often harder to achieve than for dense tensor operations. CPUs are traditionally better at latency-sensitive, branch-heavy, and irregular computation. If the CPU also has strong dense linear algebra performance, it can handle both sides of the workload: the regular, compute-intensive kernels and the irregular orchestration around them. This reduces the need to split an application awkwardly between CPU and GPU and removes unnecessary data movement.”
The Case of AI
Scientific computing has enough nooks and crannies and odd irregularities where the difficulties in adapting to a GPU may offset the raw performance gains that a GPU gives you, the authors argue. In this case, an all-CPU design may make sense.
But that’s not necessarily the case in AI. As previously noted, deep learning has essentially been built up around the capabilities of GPUs, a case of industry-wide co-design. To train a frontier models on CPUs would be quite an undertaking, as it would put huge demands on the matrix engines, as well as memory bandwidth, communication performance, and software support. “That is a high bar,” the authors write.
But training is not the only AI workload that matters. And as we have been covering for the past six months here at HPCwire, AI inference increasingly runs on CPUs, which “are cool again.” The HPC gurus note that AI is not a monolith, and goes beyond the prefill and decode stages of AI inference.
“Inference, fine-tuning, scientific machine learning, surrogate modeling, graph neural networks, sparse models, and AI embedded inside simulation workflows may run very effectively on a CPU with matrix extensions and HBM,” they write. “In these cases, integration and data locality may matter as much as raw tensor throughput.”
In the end analysis, the HPC experts make the case that CPUs can effectively step in to run many of the workloads that folks have been using GPUs to run. For supercomputing site at DOE labs, universities, and major corporations, the message is clear: Don’t be hamstrung by thinking you must have a GPU-based system.
“The strongest argument, then, is not that GPUs are useless. They are not. GPUs are extremely powerful and will remain important,” Dongarra, Matsuoka, and Hoefler write. “The argument is that GPUs are not fundamentally required if the CPU evolves to include the architectural features that made GPUs attractive. A CPU with SVE/AVX, SME/AMX, HBM, multiple precision formats, and matrix-multiply capability is no longer a conventional CPU. It is a general-purpose processor with accelerator-class numerical machinery.”
Doug Eadline, an HPCwire contributor says the paper brings up an important point and reinforces a rule he lives by.
“The general always absorbs the specific,” Eadline said. “This scenario has played out in the CPU market for years where the manufacturing costs of CPUs requires that they address the largest market possible and currently AI is defining the market.”
Spend any time around US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino and you’ll likely notice a medallion hanging from a bracelet on his right wrist. It is emblazoned with an engraving of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.
It’s a detail that feels appropriate for Pochettino, or any high-level manager, really, all of whom are inherently nomadic. The Argentinian has enjoyed stability at a handful of stops but has also done his share of moving, having shepherded five different clubs prior to his arrival in the United States about 22 months ago.
French far-right leader announces decision after court orders her to wear ankle tag over embezzlement
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has announced she will run for the presidency in 2027 and will lodge an appeal to France’s highest court over her sentence to wear an electronic ankle tag for the embezzlement of European parliament funds.
“Tonight, I am a candidate in the presidential election,” Le Pen, 57, told TF1 television on Tuesday night.
An investigator testified that a video shows Tyler Robinson going over a railing onto a rooftop, crouching down and running to a site overlooking where Charlie Kirk was speaking.
President Donald Trump recently filed a required financial disclosure form outlining his 2025 income, and it drew attention to the scale of his wealth — an estimated increase of more than $2 billion in one year.
On July 1, a reporter asked Trump how he’d respond to critics who say he’s profiting off the presidency.
Trump responded, "Well, you know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up — everybody's profiting. Do you have a 401(k)? … So we're all profiting. I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash."
Trump’s sizable stock holdings, and transactions involving them, make up more than 800 pages of the 927-page disclosure document, and they have undoubtedly increased in value along with the rest of the stock market.
But the financial disclosure form shows several major sources of income that have nothing to do with the stock market. Cryptocurrency is most notable, bringing in $1.4 billion. The disclosure also shows another $400 million from non-stock sources such as real estate, legal settlements, overseas licensing agreements and branded merchandise such as watches and footwear.
"The vast majority of what he’s reporting has increased outside of a direct connection to the stock market," said Kedric Payne, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, which focuses on campaign transparency, ethics and voting rights.
The White House did not dispute PolitiFact’s calculations of the disclosure form’s figures.
"As President Trump said, he has a lot of assets because he was a massively successful businessman prior to becoming President, which was why he was elected to office in the first place," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.
The Trump Organization, the president’s real estate-focused business, told PolitiFact in another statement that "the breadth and depth of this filing further underscores our commitment to transparency."
What is and is not included in the disclosure form
Despite the hundreds of pages dedicated to stocks in Trump’s disclosure document, it’s difficult to assess his stock-related gains with precision. The form lists thousands of stock purchases and sales but the proceeds are reported in broad ranges of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. This makes it nearly impossible to determine the specific net gains from Trump’s stock transactions.
In addition, the form doesn’t address the value of the stocks Trump holds that were not bought or sold in 2025.
To test Trump’s assertion that his gains were primarily driven by the stock market, we turned to portions of the disclosure form that detailed income unrelated to stocks. Although the form is often unclear about what specific line items refer to, it provides enough information to determine that cryptocurrency ventures provided Trump with well over $1 billion in 2025 income.
Two major crypto ventures included in the form are World Liberty Financial and Celebration Coins, the latter of which appears to be linked to his $TRUMP meme coin. The Associated Press has described meme coins as "a strange and highly volatile corner of the crypto industry that often start as a joke with no real value but can surge in price if enough people are willing to buy them." Dogecoin, a meme coin based on the Shiba Inu meme, is one high-profile example.
Trump’s reported income from World Liberty Financial transactions is roughly $791 million, while income from Celebration Coins is just over $635 million — $1.4 billion total. (It’s unclear whether Trump profited from all this income or if some was allocated to overheard or shared by co-investors.)
Trump earned money every time someone bought or sold one of his cryptocurrencies, but rank and file investors have fared less well as the currency’s value has declined, according to The New York Times. The Times reported that nearly 1 million people who bought his meme coin have collectively lost $3.81 billion in value through the end of June, citing a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen.
Trump’s crypto ventures have also raised concerns about foreign countries and people with interests before the U.S. government using crypto investments to influence the president.
Other income, from golf to merch
Other non-stock income sources added another $400 million, according to the form:
Real estate. Trump’s pre-White House career was in real estate, and he has continued to make significant amounts of money from that sector, including almost $196 million in 2025. This includes income from many of his well-known properties, including Mar-a-Lago in Florida and golf courses in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Ireland.
Legal settlements. Trump listed $88.5 million in payments received as legal settlements, including from media companies such as ABC and CBS and social media platforms Meta, YouTube and Twitter.
Overseas licensing. Trump has struck $65 million in licensing deals with several overseas entities. The properties are located in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Romania, the Philippines, Vietnam and India.
Trump-branded merchandise. Trump netted $8 million from sales of watches, footwear and published materials.
Two separate estimates by media outlets suggest that the non-stock gains account for well over half of Trump’s 2025 income gains.
A New York Times analysis of the disclosure form estimated that Trump "pulled in at least $2.2 billion" overall in 2025. And a March Forbes analysis — before the disclosure form was released — estimated that Trump’s wealth had risen by $2.7 billion, partially offset by a $1.3 billion loss from stock valuations in the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social.
Using these estimates as a baseline, Trump’s non-stock gains would be either 81% of his gains (using the Times’ figure) or 67% (using Forbes’ figure). Neither indicates gains driven largely by the stock market.
"It's a fair reading of this disclosure form to say that President Trump's crypto ventures accounted for a substantial portion of his financial gains in 2025," said Michael Beckel, who tracks money in politics for Issue One, which tracks campaign finance. "Without his forays into the crypto industry, President Trump's financial gains in 2025 would have been significantly less. The stock market's performance alone does not explain President Trump's sizable financial gains in 2025."
Our ruling
Trump said, "You know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. ... I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash."
Like other Americans invested in the stock market, which had a strong 2025 performance, Trump likely made gains last year. But his 2025 financial disclosure form reports $1.4 billion alone in income from cryptocurrencies, and another $400 million from non-stock sources, including real estate, legal settlements, overseas licensing agreements and branded merchandise.
A full and precise accounting of Trump’s income is not possible. However, credible estimates indicate that two-thirds to 80% of his total income gains in 2025 came from non-stock sources.
His statement that he profited because "the stock market’s going up" contains an element of truth but omits information that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.
The FCC plans to roll back broadband label rules that require ISPs to itemize all passthrough fees. Under the proposal, providers could instead list a single "up to" amount for location-based charges. It would also allow ISPs to link to pricing labels rather than display them prominently, while eliminating machine-readable pricing files. Ars Technica reports: ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments. ISPs would be well within their rights to advertise accurate monthly prices and charge those exact prices on monthly bills. But because ISPs rarely do that, the FCC has required them to make specific price disclosures to consumers for the past decade. The Biden-era FCC updated the broadband-label rules to require that ISPs "itemize on the label (PDF) all discretionary monthly fees that the provider passes through to the consumer." The change drew protest from Comcast and other ISPs that complained bitterly about the complexity of listing all the hidden fees they had chosen to charge.
Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the Trump FCC has steadily whittled away at requirements imposed under Democrats. An order (PDF) released in draft form last week would eliminate the requirement to itemize passthrough fees and let ISPs list them in a single "up to" amount. The "up to" amount can include both government fees and fees charged by non-government entities such as owners of utility poles. "Rather than continuing to require providers to itemize 'passthrough fees' that can vary by location, we allow providers to display such fees in the aggregate, either as a maximum or 'up to' amount for the total fees applicable in any location where the service plan is offered, or as the exact total of such fees assessed in a particular location," the FCC draft order said.
The order to be voted on later this month includes a few other changes that will please ISPs and their lobby groups. ISPs will be allowed to provide links to price labels instead of displaying the full labels prominently on ordering pages and account portals, and will be allowed to stop making the price-label information available in machine-readable spreadsheets. The FCC is also relaxing the requirement that price information be available over the phone. The FCC said the change will "allow phone sales representatives to present label information conversationally, as a summary of key label fields, rather than require verbatim recitation."
The changes have been in the works since October 2025, when the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to let the public submit comments on the proposals. The outcome of that process is the draft order, which will be voted on at the FCC's July 22 meeting and take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register. There are many types of passthrough fees that ISPs will be able to stop listing individually and roll into the "up to" amount. The FCC defined the fees as follows, saying they include just about anything that isn't a tax [...]. Another planned change will eliminate a requirement that providers archive all labels for at least two years after a service plan is no longer available. The Utility Reform Network, an advocacy group, told the FCC that the archived labels provide crucial data about how prices and services change over time, and that machine-readable labels are important for affordability research and information accessibility.
Kneeland died by suicide in 2025 after police chase
Researchers determine he was in stage one of four
Brain disease can be diagnosed only after death
Former Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland, who died by suicide in November 2025 after a high-speed chase with police, had early stage chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain abnormality linked to repeated concussions, his family announced Tuesday.
The Boston University CTE Center, which investigates the long-term consequences of repetitive brain trauma in athletes and others, analyzed Kneeland’s brain tissue after his death. Researchers determined Kneeland, who was 24, was in stage one of four of CTE.
An indictment announced in Los Angeles accuses Lawrence Bishnoi and another defendant of ordering the killing of "H.S.N." — the apparent initials for Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down on June 18, 2023, near a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia.
A federal appeals panel struck down a significant chunk of Ron DeSantis’s so-called Stop Woke Act on Tuesday, delivering another rebuff to the Republican Florida governor’s efforts to stifle free speech in higher education.
In a scathing order, judges of the 11th circuit court of appeal said by a 2-1 majority that the higher education component of the law – which prevented college and university professors teaching or sharing thoughts on concepts of race and gender – breached the free expression rights guaranteed under the US constitution’s first amendment.
Reform UK leader to quit as MP but stand again, saying the people of Clacton ‘should be the judges of my actions’
Q: Do you think the parliamentary commissioner for standards should investigate Nigel Farage’s gifts from George Cottrell?
Badenoch said that was a matter for the commissioner.
[Farage is] hinting at press regulation. For all of the criticism and the attacks, and I would even say abuse that I’ve got from the press, I’ve never once recommended curbing our free press. I think this is one of the amazing things about this country.
I would be very worried about a Reform government using government power to control the press. I don’t think that that would be right.
A look at the case, the appeal court decision and how it could affect the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron
Marine Le Pen has said she will be a candidate in France’s presidential race next year, after a court ruling on her appeal against a conviction for embezzlement of public funds allowed her to run.
However, the path ahead is far from straightforward.
Hilton in a statement said Provo Canyon school ‘failed the children in its care’ and faced abuse allegations for decades
The state of Utah has revoked the license of a boarding school where socialite Paris Hilton said she was abused as a teenager, saying the school had “failed to provide applicable health and safety services for clients”.
The state’s action, which took effect on Monday, cites multiple noncompliance issues against the Provo Canyon school’s campus in Springville. The school has 15 days to request a hearing before Utah’s health and human services department.
ARMONK, N.Y., July 7, 2026 — IBM today announces new IBM z17 and IBM LinuxONE 5 configurations, marking the first time IBM is offering rack mount alongside single frame systems across its full Z and LinuxONE portfolio. The expanded IBM z17 and LinuxONE 5 portfolios now offer a wide range of deployment options, engineered with the same flagship performance, security, and ecosystem standards. New single frame and rack mount options provide additional ways for organizations to position their infrastructure where it fits best for their business needs, helping support flexibility and operational efficiency.
LinuxONE 5 Single Frame System. Credit: IBM.
Organizations processing highly sensitive workloads at scale are facing record-low data center vacancy and rental rates exceeding $400 per kW/month, according to CBRE’s 2026 Global Data Center Trend Report. At the same time, they need infrastructure that can optimize their data center footprint while prioritizing the resilience required for their core applications. Enterprises can use IBM z17 and LinuxONE 5 rack mount and single frame systems to address these challenges, optimizing their data center real estate to meet today’s realities.
“The number of mission-critical workloads is rising at an incredible pace, forcing organizations to make tough decisions about performance, AI integration, and infrastructure footprint,” said Tom McPherson, General Manager, IBM Z and LinuxONE. “With these new IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE systems, we’re making it easier to run workloads where they make the most sense, while opening the door for a wider range of organizations to benefit from these technologies for the first time.”
New Systems Built for Data Center Flexibility
The new IBM z17 and IBM LinuxONE 5 configurations support up to 82 cores and 18 TB of memory across two processor drawers, representing about a 20% increase in core count and 12% increase in memory capacity. Single processor capacity of IBM z17 ME2 provides full speed IBM z/OS configurations including 10% greater throughput per core than IBM z16 A02 with some variation based on workload and configuration.
Clients have the flexibility to co-locate IBM and non-IBM equipment to achieve the best fit-for-purpose installation in their data center. Each system is designed to help organizations reclaim space, improve energy efficiency, and integrate seamlessly into existing environments:
IBM z17 single frame is a fully packaged solution in an IBM rack and intelligent power distribution units (iPDUs), delivered as a complete enclosed unit ready to deploy, now with the added flexibility for clients to co-locate other technologies within the frame.
IBM z17 rack mount allows clients to install IBM Z components directly into their own industry-standard rack, with built-in flexibility for co-location with other technologies.
IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 is the scalable, multi-drawer LinuxONE system for high-density workloads, with on-chip AI acceleration, confidential computing, and post- quantum cryptography available in both single frame and rack mount configurations.
IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 rack mount and Express offerings deliver enterprise-grade Linux, confidential computing, and on-chip AI acceleration in a compact 18U configuration. Designed for organizations supporting a smaller set of workloads, the offering provides a cost-efficient entry point that can scale as business grows, while prioritizing security, resiliency, and performance.
As with the rest of the IBM z17 and LinuxONE 5 portfolio announced last year, the single frame and rack mount systems deliver advanced multi-model AI inferencing through the IBM Telum II processor, Red Hat OpenShift AI and the IBM Spyre Accelerator to deliver in-transaction predictive AI and generative AI.
Maximizing Business Value at the Core
Building on the flexibility of IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE systems, IBM is announcing new software and management capabilities designed to help clients simplify infrastructure operations, reduce the skills required to run the platform, and get more value from the workloads already running their business.
IBM Infrastructure Management for Z and LinuxONE brings together provisioning, configuration, and operations together. Enterprises can now leverage Terraform and widely adopted Infrastructure-as-Code that are engineered to automate infrastructure deployments, and orchestrate configurations in a unified user interface with a simple visual I/O topology and configuration while addressing the number of specialists required.
IBM COBOL Elevate for z/OS is built to simplify modernization and optimize performance for COBOL applications running on IBM z17, helping clients get more value from the applications they depend on with no rewrites or specialized skills required, with availability beginning September 18.
Post-quantum cryptography security is now standard on z17 and LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 systems, leveraging post-quantum cryptography, confidential computing, and enterprise-wide secrets management.
New IBM Crypto Discovery & Inventory capabilities are engineered to simplify security operations by giving security teams a consolidated view of their cryptographic posture across the enterprise, helping them prepare for post-quantum standards with end-to-end visibility.
“With the emergence of generative AI methods, we need the highest levels of performance, efficiency, resiliency and security to safely hold, and process the sensitive datasets,” said Dr. Owain Kenway, Head of Research and Development (Platform Technologies) in ARC at University College London. “The new IBM LinuxONE 5 single frame, rack mount, and Express models enable organizations like us to access advanced technologies at cost-effective prices, and help our academic teams deliver outstanding research.”
Availability
The new z17 single frame and rack mount configurations, IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5, and IBM LinuxONE 5 Express will all be generally available August 12, 2026. IBM Infrastructure Management for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE will be generally available August 14, 2026. IBM COBOL Elevate for z/OS will be generally available September 18, 2026. For more information, visit https://www.ibm.com/products/z17 and https://www.ibm.com/products/linuxone-5.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
New release delivers enterprise-grade multi-tenancy, identity management, security and POSIX capabilities required to move AI from pilots to large-scale production
PARIS, July 7, 2026 — DDN today announced the launch of DDN Infinia 2.4 at the RAISE Summit in Paris, extending the industry’s leading platform for production AI, large-scale inference, and sovereign AI infrastructure.
As AI moves from training models to operating intelligent systems in production, enterprises face a new challenge: maximizing the economic return of AI infrastructure investments. The bottleneck is no longer acquiring GPUs—it is keeping those GPUs productive, reducing cost-per-token, accelerating inference, and securely governing data across multi-tenant AI environments.
Infinia 2.4 establishes the enterprise-grade foundation required to run AI factories at scale, combining production-ready multi-tenancy, identity management, governance, and security with the high-performance data architecture that powers some of the world’s largest AI deployments.
By enabling higher GPU utilization, faster data access, improved inference efficiency, and simplified operational management, Infinia 2.4 supports NVIDIA DSX-based AI factory deployments by helping organizations accelerate time to value while improving the return on billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure.
“The economics of AI are rapidly becoming more important than the models themselves,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “The industry has entered an era where success is measured by cost-per-token, inference efficiency, GPU utilization, and business outcomes—not simply the number of GPUs deployed. Organizations need infrastructure that transforms expensive AI investments into productive AI factories. Infinia 2.4 provides the governance, security, performance, and operational foundation required to maximize AI ROI while enabling the next generation of enterprise and sovereign AI.”
Accelerating Inference Economics and Token Efficiency
As enterprises increasingly deploy agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), copilots, and autonomous AI systems, inference has emerged as the dominant operational cost in modern AI environments.
Infinia’s architecture is designed to optimize the economics of production inference through ultra-low-latency data access, high-performance object storage, and intelligent data services that help keep accelerators fully utilized.
DDN continues to lead innovation in AI data infrastructure through capabilities such as:
Sub-millisecond access to AI datasets and model artifacts
Massive concurrency for multi-tenant inference environments
Optimized support for RAG, vector databases, agentic AI, and large-scale inference workloads
Improved GPU utilization and reduced infrastructure waste
These capabilities help organizations reduce cost-per-token, improve inference throughput, accelerate response times, and generate greater business value from AI investments.
Introducing the Enterprise Foundation for AI
Infinia 2.4 focuses on four strategic pillars designed to help organizations operationalize AI at scale:
AI Cloud Partner and AI Operator Readiness
The release introduces foundational capabilities required by many of NVIDIA’s cloud partners, managed AI services operators, and enterprise AI platforms, including:
Advanced multi-tenancy
Identity integration and management
Quota enforcement and governance controls
Enhanced operational isolation for shared AI environments
These capabilities allow organizations to securely support multiple teams, customers, business units, or sovereign AI workloads from a single platform.
POSIX Support Reaches Limited Availability
Infinia 2.4 delivers the first Limited Availability milestone for POSIX support, including:
POSIX client qualification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu
Defined throughput commitments
Documented deployment guidance and operational parameters
This milestone expands application flexibility while maintaining Infinia’s high-performance architecture for modern AI and data-intensive workloads.
S3 Compatibility and Continuity
Organizations can adopt Infinia 2.4 without disruption to existing applications and workflows. The release maintains full compatibility with established S3 environments and SDKs while preserving the performance and scalability advantages that enterprises rely on today.
Driving the Future of Enterprise and Sovereign AI
The launch comes as DDN expands its leadership position across hyperscale AI, enterprise AI, inference infrastructure, and sovereign AI initiatives worldwide.
Organizations including NVIDIA, xAI, Salesforce, Mistral, SK Telecom, Yotta, and leading government and research institutions rely on DDN technology to power some of the world’s largest AI environments, achieving higher infrastructure utilization, faster model deployment, improved inference efficiency, and greater returns on AI investments.
At RAISE, DDN executives will share insights on the next phase of AI infrastructure evolution and the growing importance of data intelligence in enabling enterprise and sovereign AI initiatives.
DDN Executive Keynotes at RAISE
As part of RAISE 2026, DDN executives will take center stage to discuss two of the most important forces shaping the future of artificial intelligence: the economics of AI and the rise of sovereign AI infrastructure.
Alex Bouzari
CEO & Co-Founder, DDN July 8 | 1:20 PM – 2:00 PM The AI Gold Rush: Models Are Shovels, Data Is the Gold
In this keynote, Alex Bouzari will explore why the next phase of AI competition will be determined not by who builds the largest models, but by who can most effectively harness, govern, and operationalize data. As organizations invest billions in AI infrastructure, the critical challenge has shifted from acquiring compute to maximizing its economic value.
Drawing on DDN’s experience powering some of the world’s largest AI factories, Bouzari will discuss why inference economics, token efficiency, GPU utilization, and data intelligence are becoming the defining metrics of enterprise AI success, and why the next generation of AI leaders will be determined by operational efficiency rather than model size alone.
Mohsen Moazami
Vice Chair, DDN July 8 | 2:00 PM – 2:40 PM Sovereign Stacks: Building Trusted AI on National Terms
As nations increasingly view AI as a strategic capability, governments and enterprises are seeking new approaches to maintain control over their data, infrastructure, and innovation ecosystems. In this keynote, Mohsen Moazami will examine the emergence of sovereign AI and the technology foundations required to build trusted, secure, and economically sustainable national AI capabilities.
The session will explore how countries, enterprises, and service providers are developing sovereign AI strategies, the importance of trusted infrastructure and data governance, and why sovereign AI is becoming a defining factor in global competitiveness and technological independence.
Meet DDN at RAISE
DDN executives, technical leaders, and collaborators will be available throughout RAISE to discuss the future of AI factories, sovereign AI infrastructure, enterprise AI deployment, and the capabilities introduced with Infinia 2.4.
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across millions of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns. Discover more at ddn.com.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Chinese startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, according to three people familiar with the matter, a push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train and run its globally popular models. The chip is designed for inference -- the stage of AI computing in which a trained model generates responses for users -- rather than for training new models, the sources said. If successful, DeepSeek's expansion into semiconductor development would mark a major strategic shift for a company widely hailed in China as the country's AI champion, potentially adding to challenges faced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.
High court dismisses claims by group including Duke of Sussex that Mail publisher used unlawful methods to source stories about them
Prince Harry and six other prominent figures are facing a legal bill of up to £50m after losing their case against the publisher of the Daily Mail over claims it used unlawful methods to source stories.
In an emphatic ruling that is likely to signal an end to new litigation relating to the phone-hacking scandal era, the high court dismissed all the group’s claims, stating that the claimants had not proved that any information had been obtained unlawfully.
The Duke of Sussex has variously described his long-running legal battles with certain sections of the British media as a “mission” and a “life’s work”.
Exclusive: Latest Guardian revelation about gift from cryptocurrency tycoon comes as Reform UK leader forces byelection
The £5m gift to Nigel Farage by a cryptocurrency billionaire was reported to the National Crime Agency by bankers who were concerned it may have been laundered money, the Guardian can reveal.
The disclosure will put further pressure on the Reform UK leader, who is awaiting a decision by the standards commissioner over whether his failure to declare the money breached parliamentary rules.
Scientists explore the U.S. NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility and the discoveries it will enable
July 7, 2026 — A new era of U.S. scientific computing is underway.
Horizon, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, will soon begin early operations broadly for the research community. As the flagship supercomputer of the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF), Horizon will provide unprecedented computing power to researchers tackling some of the nation’s most ambitious scientific challenges.
Clockwise) Dan Stanzione, Texas Advanced Computing Center; Katie Antypas, National Science Foundation; Tom Quinn, University of Washington; Yifeng Cui, San Diego Supercomputer Center; Steven A. Gottlieb, Indiana University Bloomington; David Hardy, University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne; Feliciano Giustino, Oden Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
Last month, more than 200 members of the national open science community gathered virtually to explore how leadership-class computing is driving the next generation of scientific discovery through the NSF LCCF and its Characteristic Science Applications (CSA) program.
The event featured remarks from NSF and TACC leaders, followed by a moderated panel of researchers using TACC’s Frontera and Vista supercomputers to tackle some of science’s most complex challenges. Panelists shared how the CSA program is accelerating breakthroughs in astronomy, earthquake science, quantum materials, lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and biophysics, demonstrating the transformative impact of advanced computing on research across disciplines.
“This is an investment of over $400 million and a commitment by the NSF and the nation to support the computational science and AI-driven workloads that will spark the innovations and discoveries of the future,” said Katie Antypas, senior adviser for cyberinfrastructure for the NSF. “This commitment is a long-term investment to match the science missions TACC supports. At the highest level, they have included several Nobel Prize-winning research projects in computational protein design, the detection of gravitational waves, and confirmation of the Higgs boson of particle physics,” she added.
For nearly two decades, TACC has defined the leading edge of U.S. academic supercomputing, from the NSF-funded Ranger system to the Stampede family of supercomputers, Frontera, and the AI-focused Vista — each expanding the nation’s computational capabilities and paving the way for Horizon in 2026.
Since 2001, more than 125,000 academic researchers and students have relied on TACC resources to drive discoveries with global scientific and societal impact.
Leadership-Class Computing Arrives
The first LCCF supercomputer, Horizon, has entered the first of two phases in its deployment — its graphical processing unit (GPU) computing racks are operational, totaling 4,000 NVIDIA NVL4 Blackwell GPUs and 2,000 NVIDIA Grace GB200 CPUs interconnected with 800 GB/sec Infiniband networking and 400 petaflops of solid-state storage.
“The basic premise of the Leadership-Class Computing Facility is to build new and more capable systems to replace systems in the current NSF fleet,” said Dan Stanzione, TACC’s executive director and associate vice president for research at The University of Texas at Austin. “The LCCF has made a long-term investment and commitment to having computing for the scientists who rely on us for their projects and large instrument data.”
The science applications that run on Horizon will be 15-20 times as fast as on Frontera, with AI-based applications sped up to 100x or more. The CPU part of Horizon is expected to come online in Winter 2026 or early 2027, with 8,000 NVIDIA Vera CPUs. The Ranch data archive system has been in production since 2025, with an exabyte of capacity.
Characteristic Science Applications Drive Design and Innovation
Helping shape Horizon from the ground up is the Characteristic Science Applications (CSA) program — 11 cutting-edge software projects developed through yearslong collaborations with research teams to prepare the system for some of the most demanding scientific challenges of the coming decade.
“The CSAs are our acceptance tests to make sure Horizon performs,” Stanzione said. “These scientists are our co-design partners to make sure we pick the right mix of things to put into the machine, and they’re some of our early access users.” The CSA teams have been testing running their code on Vista and most recently on 72 Blackwell GPUs TACC added to Vista, to test pre-Horizon nodes.
Five CSA teams on the virtual panel highlighted early results from projects across a diverse range of disciplines, including particle physics, astrophysics, advanced materials, biochemistry related to neurological disorders, and earthquake modeling.
LCCF — A Facility for Other NSF Facilities
Soon, the earliest users will gain access to Horizon and the broader distributed system spanning the LCCF and partner sites, including the Atlanta University Center Consortium, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
“Something else I wanted to note was just how LCCF is enabling other NSF investments, particularly our largest facilities,” Antypas said. “You can see that in the partnerships that the LCCF has developed, whether that’s with the Vera Rubin Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, LIGO, Earthscope, or many others that will rely on the LCCF for data analysis.”
“In this age of AI, we expect this system will accelerate science even far beyond what we could imagine,” Antypas added.
Galaxy Evolution at Scale Tom Quinn (Moderator) Professor of Astronomy, University of Washington
Astrophysicist Tom Quinn is unraveling how galaxies take shape, tracing their evolution across cosmic time and from the smallest structures to the grandest formations. With the NSF LCCF, his team aims to build a unified model of galaxy formation, spanning
Quinn’s group uses particle-based simulations to investigate galaxy formation across cosmic scales, from the emergence of planets to galaxy clusters and the web-like large-scale structure of the universe.
Unexpected observations from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — including a surprisingly rich population of galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang — have upended existing models and are fueling the group’s efforts to better understand how the early universe evolved.
“On Frontera, we have been able to do simulations of Milky Way-sized galaxies. As we move to larger, more capable facilities such as Horizon, we’re moving to clusters of galaxies,” Quinn said.
What’s more, although the JWST can gather images of a galaxy from the early universe, that information can’t tell us how the galaxy will evolve — and whether it is a progenitor of a Milky Way-like galaxy or perhaps a seed for the formation of a large cluster of galaxies.
“It’s only with the simulations that we can follow a galaxy over the full history of the universe and compare images from JWST to, for example, observations by the Vera Rubin telescope of galaxies we see today.”
Quantum Materials Feliciano Giustino (Panelist) Professor of Physics and W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Quantum Materials Engineering, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin
Quantum materials design at finite temperature using the EPW code. The Center for Quantum Materials Engineering uses computer simulations to design new materials for applications such as semiconductors, solar cells, and quantum computing superconductors. Credit: Feliciano Giustino, UT Austin
Giustino leads the Center for Quantum Materials Engineering, which develops predictive simulations to design advanced materials for semiconductors, solar energy, and quantum technologies.
For the past three years, his group has been porting the EPW code from CPUs to GPUs, a major software engineering effort that enables faster, larger-scale simulations of electron-phonon interactions critical to understanding superconductivity and other quantum phenomena.
“We demonstrated a 30-fold speed up of this code on the GPU accelerators of Vista,” Giustino said. “Also exciting is the performance portability achieved on the Aurora supercomputer of the Argonne National Lab, where we managed to scale the code up to 6,000 GPUs. This gives us confidence that we’ll be able to utilize Horizon to its fullest.”
At an NVIDIA Hackathon hosted by TACC in May 2026, the group’s EPW team achieved an 80-fold acceleration in optical absorption spectra calculations on Horizon test nodes, demonstrating the performance gains possible on next-generation GPU-based systems.
Netting New Particles and Forces Steven A. Gottlieb (Panelist) Distinguished Professor Emeritus; Provost Professor Emeritus of Physics, Indiana University Bloomington
Data from the world’s premiere particle accelerators, such as the Muon g-2 of Fermilab shown here, will be used by Steven A. Gottlieb’s group at Indiana University Bloomington to model quantum chromodynamic (QCD) strong interactions between quarks and gluons on the TACC’s Horizon supercomputer. Credit: Fermilab
Gottlieb’s group works with the MILC (MIMD Lattice Computation) collaboration and Fermilab to search for evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, the theory describing the fundamental particles and the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces that govern their interactions.
Using lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to model the strong force with unprecedented precision, the team produces calculations that help interpret results from major particle physics experiments, including the Large Hadron Collider, Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment, KEK, and BESIII.
His group models QCD strong interactions between quarks and gluons using a 4D space-time grid, which is the main source of systematic errors.
“We need to take a range of lattice spacing to the continuum limit, a computational heavy job, which is why we want to use Horizon,” Gottlieb said. “We project that Horizon is so powerful that this much tougher problem of a finer grid resolution will only need six months to generate our targeted 1,000 configurations.”
Dynamic Evolution of Biomolecular Simulations David Hardy Senior Research Programmer, Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Emad Tajkhorshid uses molecular dynamics to track how viruses change over time and space. The work relies on NAMD, an open-source software package developed at the university’s NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Visualization, harnessing massively parallel simulations of complex biological systems. Credit: Emad Tajkhorshid, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hardy’s group and the Computational Biophysics Group develop NAMD, the widely used molecular dynamics software behind some of the world’s largest biomolecular simulations. Written in C++ and built on the CHARM++ parallel programming model, the Gordon Bell Award-winning code enables researchers to simulate complex biological systems efficiently on the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
In their latest work, the team simulated a billion-atom protocell of the Satellite Tobacco Mosaic Virus, a model system for understanding how viruses assemble and remain stable. They also optimized the GPU version of NAMD on TACC’s AI-focused Vista supercomputer, improving performance and scalability on NVIDIA Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU architectures, the same technology that will power Horizon.
“We were seeing really good results scaling up to 512 nodes of Vista, and we’re gratified to see that,” Hardy said.
He also highlighted recent simulations of glutamate transportation regulated by the synaptic gap that occurs when neurons are talking to each other, where dysregulation is associated with various neurological disorders. This work is in collaboration with the lab of fellow University of Illinois colleague Emad Tajkhorshid, a developer and principal investigator of the NAMD project.
“They’ve run this now on Vista, where they can run our very fast GPU resident code for NAMD, and they’re getting simulation rates of about 90 nanoseconds per day. This is scaling quite nicely, and they’re looking forward to being able to use Horizon so they can scale this out to one system per GPU or one simulation per GPU,” Hardy added.
Shaking Up Seismic Hazard Analysis Simulations Yifeng Cui (Panelist) Director, High Performance GeoComputing Laboratory, San Diego Supercomputer Center; Principal Investigator, Statewide California Earthquake Center
AWP-ODC: Seismic Simulation for Hazard Management — Yifeng Cui of the San Diego Supercomputer Center is advancing earthquake modeling. His team is adapting AWP-ODC — a powerful seismic wave simulation tool widely used by Southern California Earthquake Center researchers — for the LCCF Horizon system. The team aims to improve statewide seismic hazard maps that predict ground motion across California for the next 50 years. Credit: Yifeng Cui, SDSC
Cui traced the evolution of earthquake simulations, from the groundbreaking TeraShake project in 2004 to the ShakeOut scenarios run at TACC that serve as the scientific foundation for earthquake preparedness drills involving tens of millions of people worldwide.
Today, his group is advancing the state of the art with CyberShake, a physics-based probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) framework that models earthquake risk at unprecedented fidelity. The project runs vast ensembles of simulations across more than 1,000 sites, executing approximately one million jobs per site on leadership-class supercomputers to generate detailed seismic hazard forecasts.
“With Horizon, we are going to push the PSHA map from one to two hertz and beyond,” Cui said. “This would cover the earthquake resilience of structures at the house-to-house level. Ultimately, it would provide a more reliable loss estimate for both insurance models and building codes.”
A ShakeOut 2.0 version is also planned for development on Horizon with five hertz linear wave propagation, as well as another CSA developing code for Seisol, which captures dynamic rupture simulations. Also, aftershock simulations are in the works for studying potential magnitude 7.0 quakes in the Los Angeles basin.
“Breaking this frequency barrier with Horizon will be a game changer,” Cui said.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 7, 2026 — Scality, a global leader in data infrastructure software for the AI era, and WEKA, the data and memory infrastructure company, today announced an expanded partnership in France, anchored by a new joint customer support agreement.
Under the agreement, Scality will distribute the companies’ joint solution to customers in France, giving local enterprises a single, in-country point of contact for sales and tier-one support. The announcement precedes RAISE Summit 2026, Europe’s premier AI event, taking place July 8–9 at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, where both companies are exhibiting.
A Single, In-Country Support Experience for French Customers
Scality and WEKA’s combined technologies deliver a complementary solution for AI workloads. WEKA’s NeuralMesh software provides accelerated storage and context memory performance at scale, keeping GPUs fully utilized for AI model training and inference. Scality ADI (Autonomous Data Infrastructure) is a data infrastructure platform that delivers autonomous operations, cyber resilience, and sovereign control across the full data lifecycle, from active workloads to durable, long-term retention at exabyte scale. The new agreement makes the combined solution easier for French customers to adopt and operate, with front-line technical support delivered locally by Scality.
Deepening Joint Go-to-Market in France
The support agreement builds on the jointly validated solution the two companies announced on February 24, 2026, which pairs WEKA’s NeuralMesh high-performance AI storage and context memory platform with a cost-efficient Scality RING object tier. The integration uses Scality’s lightweight object connector for NeuralMesh, delivering up to 10x faster performance and up to 20% lower infrastructure costs in Scality testing.
It also reflects a broader expansion of joint go-to-market activities in France, where Scality and WEKA are engaging a growing set of shared prospects. By aligning their complementary technologies and now their local support and sales motions, the partners aim to give French enterprises, government organizations, and AI builders a clear, low-risk path to high-performance, cost-efficient, cyber-resilient AI infrastructure.
Meeting Customers at RAISE Summit Paris
Both companies are exhibiting at RAISE Summit 2026. Visit Scality at booth #3D and WEKA at booth #2D to learn more about the joint solution and meet the experts behind it. The companies will co-host an invitation-only Lumiere Candlelight concert and dinner at the Pullman Paris Tour Eiffel on Wednesday, July 8, bringing together Europe’s top AI builders, founders, and partners beyond the conference floor.
“The race for AI is no longer limited by GPUs. It’s increasingly limited by data infrastructure,” said Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality. “Our partnership with WEKA brings those strengths together, and extending it with local, French-language support means our joint customers in France get the combined solution backed by a single, in-country point of contact. This is exactly the kind of practical, customer-first collaboration that earns trust in mission-critical environments.”
“AI doesn’t stall because enterprises run out of models. It stalls because infrastructure can’t keep pace with the demand they create,” said Nilesh Patel, Chief Strategy Officer of WEKA. “NeuralMesh solves the performance layer: it maximizes GPU utilization, scales inference throughput, and drives down cost per token. Scality covers the full data lifecycle with the cyber resilience and sovereign controls that regulated European industries require. Local French-language support from Scality removes the final barrier to adoption. For French enterprises deploying at scale, that is a meaningfully shorter, lower-risk path to production.”
About Scality
Scality builds data infrastructure software for enterprise AI, cyber resilience, and sovereign control at multi-petabyte to exabyte scale. Its platform aligns the right storage media, performance, protection, and economics to each workload and data stage through media-aware lifecycle management governed by human-approved policies, while AI-powered autonomous operations reduce operational burden. Built on CORE5 cyber resilience and open-code principles, Scality ADI, ARTESCA, and RING help the world’s most demanding enterprises and government organizations power AI initiatives, defend critical data, and build infrastructure designed to last for decades. Recognized as a leader by Gartner, Scality is where AI remembers, learns, and thinks.
About WEKA
WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served.
JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees over a bank-owned network, however. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Capital One Financial bought Discover Financial in a $50.6 billion deal, it got a network that cut out the need for a middleman in card transactions and allowed it to deal more directly with merchants. Now, big banks are looking on with envy because owning a network can mean exemption from a federal law that caps debit-card fees. Those fees collectively amount to billions of dollars each year across the industry, but banks have long complained the government-defined cap limits their ability to offer customers debit-card rewards and other services. Some have been exploring a small deal that could upend the rules, though they are worried about political backlash if they try.
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.
Emily Scherer for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Source images: Library of Congress, Texas Tribune, and documents obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.
“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.
The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”
“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.
Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.
It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.
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Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.
ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to Paxton’s campaign on June 3, 15 and 25, asking why he remained registered to vote in Collin County when he appeared to no longer live there and about his connection to the Denton County property. A reporter also left a voicemail on his personal cellphone on June 25. The news organizations sent his government office and campaign staff an email on Monday with a detailed list of questions, including a request for Paxton’s response to election lawyers’ belief that he may be violating the law.
Paxton and his office did not reply until Monday’s email. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy did not answer the questions from the news organizations. Instead, she issued a statement saying that the attorney general has been “a national leader on election integrity, with a long record of defending Texas elections.” Cercy said that “attempting to insinuate otherwise and tear him down with a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story is not real reporting.”
Asked twice to provide specifics about what they believed was inaccurate, the campaign did not respond.
Voting in an election when the voter is ineligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. But prosecutors rarely bring cases challenging individual voters’ residency claims because they are hard to prove, the election lawyers said.
State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.
Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.
“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”
Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.
“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.
Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.
“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.
Paxton has advocated for strict enforcement of the state’s election fraud law, including in cases against voters his office alleged had falsified records about where they lived. In 2018, the attorney general’s voter fraud unit arrested nine people on suspicion of using residential addresses where they did not live to vote in a municipal election in Edinburg, in the state’s Rio Grande Valley. County prosecutors, acting on behalf of Paxton, later dismissed the charges after failing to secure a conviction against the mayoral candidate they alleged had encouraged those voters to register at false addresses. The candidate, Richard Molina, said he was innocent and said the prosecution was politically motivated.
Clark Birdsall was not the attorney on those cases but defended another resident whom Paxton prosecuted for illegal voting. Birdsall was stunned that the attorney general appears to have voted under an address where he does not live.
He called it “especially egregious that someone such as Ken Paxton appears he’s not conforming to the law.”
State privacy laws allow some politicians and law enforcement officials to shield their voter registration information from public view. Paxton does not do so. His opponent in the Senate race, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, does. Talarico’s campaign said he lives and is registered at the north Austin home he purchased in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune were not able to independently confirm this.
Paxton’s campaign did not raise any issues with Talarico’s voter registration. In her statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, however, Cercy said, “Talarico has actively campaigned against voter security measures” and has said he opposes voter identification requirements. She pointed to a 2021 Fox News interview in which the state representative said he opposed voter identification rules that would require Texans to provide their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for mail ballots. Talarico said hundreds of thousands of Texans, who don’t drive, lack a driver’s license. He did not directly answer a question about Social Security numbers during the interview.
The Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Paxton’s living arrangements since he separated from his wife are not public, but information obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune offers some indication of where he may have been residing since February.
In mid-February, a trust bought a 5,000-square-foot home listed for $2.4 million in a gated community in Denton County, according to the appraisal district and the seller’s real estate agent. The trust did not disclose its ownership to Denton County officials. Trusts are not required to by law, a spokesperson for Travis County’s appraisal district said.
Paxton shares a separate blind trust with his wife, Angela, that they have used to purchase property and other assets. For years, the address listed for that blind trust had been an office building in Collin County. But that address was changed to the Denton County home a week after the property was purchased.
Angela Paxton said through a spokesperson that she has no connection to the Denton County home or the trust that purchased it. The trustee of the Paxtons’ trust, family friend Chip Loper, did not respond to questions about the address change.
In June, a reporter knocked on the door of the Denton County home. No one answered. When the reporter placed a letter for Paxton in the mailbox, an envelope addressed to Warren Paxton, the attorney general’s given name, was visible.
Later that week, Paxton appeared on a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Video from the podcast showed Paxton seated in front of a fireplace and mantle that were nearly identical to those depicted in the home’s online real estate listing. One resident also told the newsrooms that they spotted Paxton in the gated community.
In a podcast appearance in June, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was seated in front of a gray fireplace that appeared to match real estate listings for a Denton County home.Obtained and edited for privacy by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Separately, the Daily Mail reported in May that Paxton had moved into the Denton County home with Tracy Duhon, whose extramarital affair with Paxton, the news outlet said, prompted his wife’s divorce filing. The Daily Mail also published a video of Paxton and Duhon that it reported was taken at an airport in Iceland in late June. The video was quickly seized upon by Talarico, who depicted Paxton as out of touch with Texans. Duhon did not respond to questions about her connection to the Denton County property or about the Daily Mail reporting.
Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.
Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.
“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”
Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.
“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”
Refloat 1.3 beta2 is out, mainly containing the LCM LEDs sometimes not working after startup (plus a potential rare crash), and a few other small fixes/improvements.
Péter Magyar hails ‘end of propaganda broadcasts’ as Kossuth radio and M1 TV channels suspend transmission
Hungarian public media outlets close to Viktor Orbán have suspended broadcasting, the country’s prime minister said as he hailed efforts to dismantle the longtime nationalist leader’s control over information.
Péter Magyar, who ousted Orbán in a landslide election victory in April, wrote on Facebook: “A historic day. Today marks the end of propaganda broadcasts on public media platforms. They lied at night, they lied during the day, they lied on every wavelength. That is now over.”
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Tuesday that he spoke with Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner and recommended that he exit the Senate race.
The company’s target to hit £1bn profitability is intact. Why isn’t the board putting up a proper fight?
Some foreign takeover swoops on UK listed companies are easier to swallow than others. Sometimes it is hard to mount an argument that shareholders should stick to the virtuous path of independence and say no to an offer of hard cash at a fat premium. The current £10bn bid for Intertek, the FTSE 100 product testing and quality inspection firm that had been going sideways for a while, probably falls into that category. The bid premium on that one was about 60%.
EasyJet, on other hand, looks to be a case of a board giving up before it has put up a proper fight. The story so far at the budget airline is that three non-starter offers from Castlelake, a US private investment firm that is big in aircraft financing and leasing, were rejected in the standard manner as “fundamental” undervaluations. The last of those was at 625p. A fourth, at 650p a share, was dismissed in the softer language of “substantial”. Then “an agreement in principle” was reached at the weekend at 690p, or £5.5bn. Castlelake has until 3 August to put up or shut up.
1.2.3 has been released (no beta this time) with a fix for LCM LEDs not working after startup and a potential rare startup crash. It should hit the package store soon.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued for Ukraine to be allowed to join Nato at its annual summit – saying it would be wrong to exclude a country that had built up strong defences in its long struggle against the Russian invasion.
The Ukrainian president said his country had developed almost all the weapons it needed, and now only required European help in developing an alternative to the US Patriots to protect against ballistic missile attack.
SEOUL, South Korea, July 7, 2026 — Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, and MegazoneCloud, South Korea’s leading cloud and AI transformation company, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly explore a series of quantum computing initiatives designed to accelerate enterprise adoption, expand commercial deployment capabilities, and strengthen quantum technology development across South Korea – moving enterprises from pilot to production through managed cloud access, targeted use cases development, and on-premises QPU deployment.
Supported by MegazoneCloud’s enterprise cloud infrastructure, the initiatives aim to support Korea’s broader digital and technological transformation. The MoU establishes a framework for collaboration across the following key areas:
QPU Integration into Managed Cloud Services: Explore the integration of Pasqal’s full-stack neutral-atom Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) technology, including Quantum Software Development Kits (QSDKs), within MegazoneCloud’s managed cloud service portfolio, enabling Korean enterprises to access quantum workloads through a trusted domestic cloud provider.
Enterprise Use Case Development: Jointly identify and develop quantum computing use cases across four priority sectors, namely finance, logistics, biotechnology, and manufacturing, through enterprise seminars, technical workshops, and co-developed solution demonstrations.
On-Premises QPU Deployment: Pursue dedicated on-premises QPU deployment opportunities at domestic customers and integration with high-performance computing (HPC) centers, to help strengthen South Korea’s hybrid classical-quantum computing capabilities and ecosystem.
Pasqal’s neutral-atom systems already support 25+ commercial use cases for global enterprises across oil & gas, financial services and materials science. MegazoneCloud’s clients will now be able to access that same industrial-grade capability domestically.
Wasiq Bokhari, Pasqal CEO, said: “South Korea is one of the world’s most advanced technology economies, and its enterprises are heavy users of cloud computing and are ready for quantum. This MoU with MegazoneCloud is the foundation for a commercial partnership that will drive adoption, putting Pasqal’s neutral-atom hardware where it matters most: inside enterprise workflows, at scale, through a platform Korean organizations already trust.”
Joo-wan Lee, CEO of MegazoneCloud Corporation, said: “MegazoneCloud has built its leadership by delivering what is next before it becomes expected. Quantum computing is the most consequential infrastructure investment a Korean enterprise can make over the next decade, and this MoU with Pasqal positions our clients to move today, with confidence, and through a partner of global standing.”
About MegazoneCloud
Headquartered in Seoul, Korea, MegazoneCloud is a leading AI-native cloud company with more than 2,000 cloud and AI experts, serving over 8,000 customers worldwide as a trusted digital transformation partner. Through strategic partnerships with major global and domestic cloud service providers (CSPs), as well as collaboration with over 200 ISV partners and proprietary cloud, AI, and security solutions, MegazoneCloud continues to drive innovation and growth for its customers.
With its vision, “Transform Tomorrow, Together,” MegazoneCloud is committed to building future competitiveness for its customers through technology, data, and people. The company operates in 10 countries, including Korea, North America, Japan, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, growing alongside its global partners and customers.
About Pasqal
Pasqal is a global leader in delivering practical quantum computing at scale utilizing neutral atom technology and dedicated software for industry, science, and governments. Since its founding in 2019, Pasqal has leveraged Nobel Prize winning research to build high-performance quantum systems and cloud-ready software designed to address complex challenges in optimization, simulation, and artificial intelligence.
Headquartered in France, Pasqal employs over 275 people and serves over 25 clients and partners, including Aramco, CMA CGM, OVHcloud, Thales, IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network), and Sumitomo. Backed by more than USD 300 million in total funding from leading international investors, Pasqal is pursuing a listing on Nasdaq in partnership with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II (Nasdaq: BBCQ) and is accelerating the adoption of scalable, high-performance quantum computing worldwide.
About Bleichroeder
Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II is a blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, amalgamation, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses.
A criminal complaint against alleged Scattered Spider member Peter Stokes revealed that Microsoft can associate Windows activity with a persistent "Global Device ID," which investigators used to link his PC to online activity connected to a hack. While unique device IDs are common, the case has raised privacy concerns because the identifier can apparently persist across updates, has no simple opt-out, and may allow Microsoft to connect a Windows installation to activity on third-party services. PCMag reports: Last week, the U.S. announced it had extradited 19-year-old Peter Stokes from Europe for allegedly being a member of the notorious hacking group Scattered Spider. But the case stands out because Microsoft played a key role in linking Stokes to the suspected hacking crimes, according to an unsealed criminal complaint. Stokes allegedly hacked an unnamed luxury jewelry retailer in May 2025 while using a VPN. The 39-page criminal complaint shows the FBI used Microsoft records to discover that his IP address was associated with a Microsoft device identifier known as Global Device ID (GDID).
"According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," the complaint explains. The global device ID isn't exactly surprising, given that it's standard practice to assign a unique ID to each account or device so a tech provider can recognize and distinguish between them. But the complaint reveals Microsoft can associate the GDID with third-party services and the timing as well, giving Redmond a way to theoretically track a user's online activity. In other words, Redmond might be able to track the online activity of your Windows PC without third-party browser cookies.
Stokes was discovered exploiting a web development tool called ngrok to bypass the jewelry retailer's network defenses. The complaint says Microsoft had records showing that on May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC, the GDID associated with Stokes' computer "accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard[.]ngrok.com/signup,' the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account." The document adds that Microsoft records also showed the GDID accessing "multiple sites" from servers at Tzulo, a web hosting provider, to help pull off the hack. Hence, the fact that federal investigators used the Microsoft identifier to nab a suspected hacker is raising concerns that it could be abused for other surveillance purposes. "Microsoft Windows is surveillance software," cybersecurity expert Matthew Hickey alleged in a tweet.
Desks offering gift wrapping and bureau de change stations will be closed at dozens of stores nationwide
John Lewis has put 200 jobs at risk as it plans to shut down desks operating gift wrapping and foreign exchange services.
The 36-strong department store chain said it had begun a consultation on redundancies as it plans to close the desks that operate bureau de change services in 30 stores, and specialist gift wrapping in 25 stores.
Top Democrats are considering their options as Graham Platner, the party’s candidate for US Senate in Maine, faces growing calls to withdraw after a sexual assault allegation.
While Platner has denied the claims, first reported by Politico on Monday, they sparked a chorus of criticism. He said he was “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” in the wake of the story.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba had previously called FBI sting while mayor of Jackson a ‘political prosecution’
The former mayor of Mississippi’s capital city pleaded guilty on Monday to bribery, wire fraud and money laundering, after saying a corruption case brought against him two years earlier was a “political prosecution”.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba was the mayor of Jackson in November 2024 when he was indicted by a federal grand jury after an FBI investigation and sting operation in which he and two other elected Democrats allegedly accepted illegal payments to secure a real estate deal.
Sen. Susan Collins helped pass a 2012 law that affirmed that members of Congress are not exempt from insider-trading laws and required members to more promptly disclose their trades of stocks and other investments. But an ad from a pro-Democrat group falsely claims that the Republican senator “doesn’t think” that insider trading “should be illegal.”
The TV ad from Majority Forward, an issue advocacy organization, goes on to say that Collins, who is running for reelection in Maine, “is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.” And a spokesperson for the group criticized the effectiveness of the 2012 law, telling us in a statement that Collins is “blocking the only thing that would actually work” to stop Congress from profiting on insider information – “a ban on members trading individual stocks.”
It’s true that Collins does not support a complete ban on stock trading by representatives and senators. A spokesperson for her Senate campaign told us that she believes they should still be able to have a stock portfolio that is “managed by an outside advisor who makes the decisions independently and without consultation with the member.”
But that’s not the same as thinking that insider trading should be legal.
As of July 7, Majority Forward had put more than $628,000 into running the ad, which began airing in Maine and other parts of the New England region on June 27, according to AdImpact. The group is affiliated with Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, that is trying to keep Collins from winning a sixth term representing the Pine Tree State.
30 years living the D.C. lifestyle changes people.
Susan Collins wants to keep insider stock trading so senators can enrich themselves while Mainers struggle to afford the basics.
The ad begins with a man saying that her long Senate career has changed Collins. Then, he says: “Getting rich from insider trading should be illegal, but Susan Collins doesn’t think so. Susan Collins is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.”
The ad ends with a plea for viewers to “tell Susan Collins to stop the congressional stock trading.”
We’ll get to Collins’ position on legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks shortly.
But the ad’s other claim about her stance on the illegality of insider trading is wrong.
“Majority Forward is lying,” Blake Kernen, a spokeswoman for the Collins campaign, said in an email about the ad. She told us, with emphasis: “Insider Trading IS illegal — and it should be. In fact, Senator Collins wrote the law signed by President Obama that explicitly ensured that Members of Congress and their staff are not exempt from insider trading laws.”
Indeed, in 2012, six years after it was first introduced and attracted little support, Congress approved the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act, which Obama later signed into law. It passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, including from Collins, who helped write parts of the legislation and usher it through the Senate.
Among other things, the STOCK Act clarified that existing laws and rules prohibiting insider trading also applied to members of Congress, congressional staffers and other federal officials. It reiterated that members and their staff are prohibited from using nonpublic information derived from their official positions for personal benefit. And it changed the disclosure rules so that certain stock transactions exceeding $1,000 had to be reported in no less than 45 days — rather than just once a year in an annual report.
The law was intended to address public mistrust over allegations of insider trading by members of Congress, including during the Great Recession in 2008, when some members reportedly made changes to their investment portfolios after learning details about the looming collapse of the U.S. economy in private meetings with the top economic officials.
“This common-sense legislation … makes it crystal clear that members of Congress are forbidden from trading on insider information,” Collins said in a statement at the time.
STOCK Act Criticism
However, critics of the law say that it has largely been ineffective.
“While the STOCK Act has helped expose the extent of potential conflicts of interest and provided the public with transparency into lawmakers’ financial activities, a lack of enforcement has stopped it from achieving the goal of curbing insider trading,” the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center wrote in a September 2025 analysis.
For example, the CLC, which focuses on voting rights and congressional ethics rules, pointed out that the initial penalty for members who don’t file their disclosure reports on time is a $200 fine – “a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market,” the center said.
Also, a Business Insider report from January 2023 said that the fee for a disclosure violation is sometimes waived by the House and Senate ethics committees responsible for enforcement.
Moreover, the CLC has noted that, “despite credible allegations,” no member of Congress has been prosecuted for insider trading under the law – which it has attributed to “the high standard for insider trading under the STOCK Act and investigatory hurdles.”
Majority Forward emphasized the law’s shortcomings in defense of its ad.
“The 2012 STOCK Act was supposed to stop insider trading in Congress, and it has failed – so badly that Susan Collins, who helped write it, broke it herself and paid no price,” Lauren French, a spokeswoman for Majority Forward, said in a statement emailed to us.
“Now she’s blocking the only thing that would actually work: a ban on members trading individual stocks,” French said. “That puts her against 86% of Americans and 95% of Mainers – and on the side of a loophole she’s personally profited from, which is exactly the point made in this ad. Standing in the way of a widely popular, bipartisan, tougher piece of legislation is, by default, opposing stricter enforcement and allowing for the continued practice of insider trading to occur.” (French linked to polls in recent years that found such high support for a ban on stock trading by lawmakers.)
NOTUS reported in March that Collins violated the law’s disclosure requirement in February, when she disclosed her husband’s purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the 45-day reporting deadline.
Kernen, the Collins campaign spokeswoman, told the news outlet that investment decisions for Tom Daffron, Collins’ husband, “are made exclusively by a third-party advisor without his consultation.” In addition, she said that Collins “has never bought, sold, or owned any individual shares of stock” during her Senate career – a point that Kernen reiterated in an email to us.
It’s also the case that Collins has opposed proposals that would completely ban members of Congress and other high-ranking federal employees from buying and selling stocks and other securities. She has instead argued for greater enforcement of the STOCK Act.
But the ad goes beyond making those points by inaccurately claiming that Collins “doesn’t think” insider trading “should be illegal.”
“Insider trading is already illegal, and Sen. Collins believes that the law that is already in place, in addition to the robust financial disclosure requirements, provide appropriate safeguards and should be enforced,” Kernen told the Bangor Daily News for an August 2025 story about Collins opposing legislation put forward by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
That bill, which Hawley introduced with a bipartisan group of fellow senators, would ban members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and their spouses and dependent children from holding, buying or selling stocks, according to a press release.
When we asked about Collins’ current position, Kernen said in her email, “She believes that Members of Congress should not be allowed to buy or sell individual stocks unless the stock portfolio is managed by an outside advisor who makes the decisions independently and without consultation with the member.”
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For much of the star’s career, this tournament has been held as a high-water mark. Instead much of the USMNT’s success came without his involvement
There was a quiver in Christian Pulisic’s voice as he answered the final question posed to him at the 2026 World Cup.
On its face, the question was straightforward: how did the overall experience of this tournament meet his expectations? The subtext was overwhelming. For eight years, this World Cup co-hosted by the United States has been viewed as the potential high-water mark of his career and those of his teammates. Every machination of American soccer has operated with signposts displaying “2026” in bold.
I feel like i constantly strip the screws on my X7LR ive worked with screws and tools for a long time i just cant seem to work with these without stripping them
UPDATE: I got so many great comments and suggestions from y'all and I guess the thing that surprised me was that riding the Onewheel is a skill that takes time and practice and that falling is just an inevitable part of that process. It just LOOKS easy and apparently it's not. So I have decided to get an eBike instead, since I already have that particular skill. If I can get my core and balance in better shape then I may revisit the Onewheel some time in the future, and if I ever have an opportunity to try one out in the grass I will definitely do that.
---------- Context: I'm an older (61), out-of-shape dude who loves being outdoors, but I hate walking because it feels SO slow (thanks, ADHD). I have a weak core and my balance isn't great. I saw a guy riding a Onewheel the other day and it just looked... really fun. I also thought it might actually help improve my core strength and balance if I rode it a lot.
Then I started reading this subreddit, and the impression I'm getting is that EVERYONE wipes out eventually. I really, really don't want to wipe out.
I want to emphasize that I would have no intention of going fast. Faster than walking? Absolutely. FAST fast? Nope.
A little analogous backstory: when I took the MSF course and bought my first motorcycle, I took the same approach. I'm extremely risk-averse and cautious. I never ride over the speed limit, and I've never had an accident or even dropped my bike, even though everyone says it's inevitable. I genuinely think I'd approach a Onewheel the same way.
My primary use would probably be cruising around my neighborhood and riding easy to maybe medium-rated trails—not anything crazy.
So, given all that—and especially the fact that I really don't want to wipe out—would you recommend I get a Onewheel? Or is this one of those hobbies where falling is simply unavoidable?
And if you think I should get one, which model would you recommend? Assume my budget is around $2,000 or less for my first one..
Australia must finally deal with a deadly risk that has plagued its native football code for more than 120 years, sports safety advocates say, after the death of a suburban Aussie rules footballer.
Nathan Fitzgerald, a 27-year-old school teacher, died in a Melbourne hospital on Monday after a horror accident on Saturday in which it is believed the Epping reserves grade footballer clashed heads with another player while tackling an opponent and received a second blow to the head as he fell, before striking his head a third time on a concrete-based cricket pitch in the middle of the ground.
Fears of a recession have fallen away, with economists saying Australia is set to safely navigate the biggest global oil supply shock in history even as they warn of substandard growth in the year ahead.
The de-escalation of the Middle East conflict has been accompanied by a major retreat in global oil prices back to prewar levels, essentially removing the worst-case scenarios contemplated before Donald Trump’s wobbly ceasefire with Iran was announced in mid-June.
The USA men’s run at a home World Cup had attracted people who usually ignore soccer. Instead of triumph, they saw a humbling by Belgium
In the closing moments of the USA’s 3-2 win against Portugal at the 2002 World Cup, the ESPN commentator Jack Edwards took a moment to remind viewers who had stayed up all night of the profound result they were witnessing. From his perch in Suwon, South Korea – where he was watching the first match of a campaign that would end in a quarter-final that remains the high‑water mark for the modern US men’s national team – Edwards delivered a soliloquy that cut straight to the heart of the profound role World Cups play not just for the USA men’s team but for soccer as a force in American life.
“The players on that 1950 team that beat England … this [result] is about the foundation that they laid,” Edwards said in his booming bravado as the hour crept toward 7am ET. “This is about the thousands of American families who have helped this sport grow, and the people in those pockets all over the country who have stuck with soccer. And it’s also for those seven- or eight- or nine‑year-old kids, who are going to hear about this result when they wake up in the morning and rush outside, and knock a ball against a wall, and dream of something even greater than this.”
The initiative brings together Alfred University’s applied engineering, ceramic, glass, and materials engineering, and energy systems expertise with Classiq’s high-level quantum software platform, enabling students and researchers to build quantum programs without starting from gate-level circuit design. With Classiq’s platform, Alfred University is making this powerful technology accessible to students and researchers without requiring deep coding expertise, accelerating the bridge between theory and real-world application.
Quantum computing is an advanced field of computing that uses the principles of quantum physics to solve highly complex problems by processing information exponentially faster than classical supercomputers. Unlike traditional computers that process information linearly using 0s and 1s, quantum computers can analyze vast numbers of possibilities simultaneously. This allows them to solve complex engineering, energy grid and materials science problems that are far beyond the reach of standard computation. Its industry applications include the energy, pharmaceutical and financial sectors; materials science and battery development; and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
At Alfred University, Junpeng Zhan, assistant professor of renewable energy engineering in the Inamori School of Engineering, is introducing students to quantum computing through tools that help them focus on concepts, algorithms, and engineering problems. “I introduced the Classiq platform (as an instructional tool) this past semester. As I familiarize myself with the platform, I will utilize it more,” said Zhan, who has incorporated quantum computing into several courses and has also led outreach activities through prior National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research projects, including hands-on demonstrations for local BOCES students.
“Alfred University’s strength is connecting advanced science with practical engineering problems,” said Zhan. “With Classiq, students can begin working with quantum algorithms in a way that emphasizes the problem, not only the code. For research, the platform helps us move faster from scientific ideas and published methods to implementations we can evaluate for power systems and energy applications.”
“Our collaboration with Classiq represents an important step in preparing engineering students for technologies that will shape the future of research and industry,” said Gabrielle Gaustad ’04, dean of Alfred University’s Inamori School of Engineering. “This gives students and faculty the opportunity to explore real-world engineering challenges using tools that were once available only to specialists. This initiative reflects our commitment to combining hands-on learning with emerging technologies that can accelerate innovation.”
Zhan’s research includes electrical engineering, power systems and optimization. One area of focus is the unit commitment problem, where utilities and grid operators determine which power generation units should operate, and at what output levels, to meet electricity demand while minimizing operating costs. By exploring quantum computing approaches to these optimization problems, Alfred University is investigating new tools for future energy systems research.
Zhan has previously utilized quantum computing in his research. He and two students assisting him on a National Science Foundation-funded project from 2022, which simulated and found solutions to power system problems, used quantum computing. He collaborated with Rochester Institute of Technology on a 2024 grant project funded by ISO-New England to research how quantum computing can be used to solve power system optimization problems. ISO-New England is an independent, non-profit corporation that works to ensure the New England states receive reliable, competitively priced wholesale power.
The Alfred University-Classiq initiative will also explore quantum materials with S. K. Sundaram, Inamori Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. This area of focus will explore quantum approaches to advanced ceramic material development and testing.
“This initiative also creates exciting opportunities to expand quantum computing across the New York State College of Ceramics, where our strengths in materials science, ceramics, glass and manufacturing intersect with some of today’s most computationally complex research questions,” said Gaustad. “As quantum technologies continue to mature, we see tremendous potential to integrate these capabilities throughout our research enterprise, SUNY, and beyond, fostering new collaborations across disciplines and positioning our students and faculty to help lead the next generation of advanced materials discovery and sustainable engineering.”
“Universities such as Alfred University play a unique and essential role in shaping the workforce of the future,” said Jason Silbergleit, Head of Americas at Classiq, who earned a bachelor’s degree in ceramic engineering from Alfred University in 1996. “Ensuring broad access to next-generation computing platforms is critical for fostering innovation and accelerating discovery. By equipping students and researchers with hands-on experience in quantum computing, institutions can help advance groundbreaking research while preparing graduates to lead in the emerging quantum economy.”
Alfred University and Classiq are also exploring future initiatives around AI-assisted quantum learning, including educational programming that integrates AI-assisted quantum software tools into quantum computing instruction. The organizations are also discussing a potential multi-institution grant proposal focused on broadening access to quantum computing education, involving Alfred University as well as community colleges and institutions within the SUNY and CUNY systems.
About Alfred University
Alfred University was founded in 1836 and is one of the oldest co-educational institutions of higher education in the country. Located in the village of Alfred in the Southern Tier of Western New York, Alfred University offers an uncommon set of top-ranked programs, with nearly more than 60 majors and more than 70 minors across five schools and colleges: the Inamori School of Engineering, the School of Art and Design, the College of Business, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the School of Graduate and Continuing Studies. The School of Engineering offers a bachelor’s degree in Renewable Energy Engineering and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biomaterials Engineering, Ceramic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Glass Science Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. Alfred also offers PhDs in Ceramic Engineering, Glass Science Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering and is the only institution in the country to offer bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in Glass Science Engineering.
About Classiq
Classiq is the leading quantum computing software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness quantum computing. Classiq’s quantum software engineering platform leverages an agentic workflow and high-level functional models to build and execute optimized, hardware-portable quantum circuits automatically. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner, without deep hardware expertise.
As visible by my picture, the right side of the foot pad is registering pressure. The error is 15 blinking yellow lights. The circuit is normally open so I unplugged it, powered it on and then plugged it back in to see wtf is happening.
New foot pads are like $150 after taxes and shipping… that’s a lot in my opinion. Is there any way to fix the sensor before I go ordering one?
Solution provides a practical, cost-effective and secure pathway for federal, defense, space, critical infrastructure and enterprise customers preparing existing systems for CNSA 2.0 Readiness
COLUMBIA, Md., July 7, 2026 — EigenQ, Inc. has announced new platform capabilities designed to help organizations prepare deployed Intel Xeon processor-based infrastructures for CNSA 2.0-aligned post-quantum migration requirements.
As advancements in quantum computing progress, agencies and regulated enterprises are accelerating plans to protect sensitive systems and workloads from future quantum-enabled attacks. As a part of this process, many face a practical challenge: how to enable quantum-resistant protections across infrastructures s already deployed in the field.
By working closely with Intel, EigenQ’s post-quantum security platform and quantum entropy capabilities are now compatible with Intel’s secure computing architecture and platform ecosystem. This alignment enables a clear, seamless and scalable approach to augmenting post-quantum readiness for existing in-field Intel Xeon processor-based systems – across federal, defense, space, critical infrastructure and enterprise environments – without the need to fully replace existing system infrastructures. The EigenQ solution is expected to support use-cases involving sensitive workload protection, secure communications, identity, key generation, attestation and modernization of high-assurance systems.
“EigenQ is proud to work with Intel to help bring practical quantum-safe protections to the enormous installed base of Intel Xeon processor-based infrastructure,” said Dr. José R. Rosas-Bustos, Chief Executive Officer, EigenQ. “Our goal is to help customers preserve the value of trusted infrastructure while adding a quantum-safe security layer that supports real-world deployment requirements before compliance deadlines arrive.”
“Intel is committed to addressing the evolving post-quantum security landscape,” said Srini Krishna, Intel Fellow, Data Center Products, Intel Corporation. “Along with companies like EigenQ, we’re enabling practical security modernization for the large installed base of Intel Xeon processor-based systems deployed across mission-critical environments. This allows organizations to move toward CNSA 2.0 readiness and mitigate the possibility of future quantum threats to their existing Xeon-based infrastructure.”
In alignment with EigenQ’s broader ecosystem development for secure federal and space applications,BlackVe — a trusted mission partner delivering asymmetric and operationally responsive national security space capabilities – has committed to utilize EigenQ’s Intel-compatible post quantum cryptography technologies, including PQC enabled encrypted video teleconferencing capabilities, as a foundational security layer for a complete secure video system.
“BlackVe is excited to partner with EigenQ as we advance the development of next-generation post-quantum cryptography solutions for space and mission-critical environments,” said Doug Wolfe, Chief Solutions Architect, BlackVe, Inc. “Together, we are combining innovation, security, and operational expertise to help shape resilient PQC-enabled architectures capable of protecting tomorrow’s space and intelligence missions against emerging quantum threats.”
By combining QMA quantum entropy technology, PQC+ cryptographic libraries and platform integration capabilities, EigenQ is helping enable a post-quantum secure solution designed for mission-critical communications.
“Post-quantum security is increasingly a deployment problem, not only an algorithm problem,” said Dr. Jesse Van Griensven, Chairman, EigenQ. “Customers need solutions that work with existing infrastructure, can be integrated into operational environments and can support mission timelines. That is where the pairing of Intel and EigenQ technologies can help to deliver immediate and practical impact.”
Collaboration with Intel further underscores EigenQ’s focus on translating post-quantum security from planning and standards into deployable capabilities for current mission-critical environments. By integrating currently deployed Intel Xeon platforms, EigenQ is helping customers prepare for the post-quantum transition with solutions designed to preserve operational continuity, strengthen resilience and support practical deployment at scale.
About EigenQ
EigenQ is a Quantum computing Company developing and commercializing foundational technologies for the Quantum Era. The Company operates at the intersection of Quantum Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Secure Communications, Advanced Sensing, and Trusted Computing, with a mission to enable the next generation of intelligent, secure, and resilient digital infrastructure.
EigenQ’s technology portfolio spans Quantum Security, Quantum AI, Quantum Communications, Quantum Sensing, and Quantum Computing. Through a combination of proprietary technologies, strategic partnerships, and commercialization-focused execution, the Company develops solutions designed to address emerging challenges across government, defense, critical infrastructure, enterprise, and AI-driven environments.
With market-ready products, validated deployment pathways, strategic ecosystem relationships, and a growing portfolio of intellectual property, EigenQ is positioned to participate in multiple segments of the emerging quantum economy while helping organizations prepare for the transition to a more secure, intelligent, and quantum-enabled future. For more information, visit www.EigenQ.com.
‘Shaping Global Order’ exhibition at the 2026 London ConferenceNews releasejon.wallace
An exhibition at this year’s conference showcases the extraordinary diversity of speakers in Chatham House’s history, as captured by specialist portrait photographer Ander McIntyre.
Chatham House is holding an exhibition of the work of specialist portrait photographer Ander McIntyre on 9 July during its annual London Conference.
Shaping Global Order documents the extraordinary range of international figures who have spoken at Chatham House over the last 15 years, as part of the institute’s mission to convene meetings of the people and organizations that can bring about change.
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Portrait of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy taken at Chatham House in 2025 by Ander McIntyre
The exhibition includes current world leaders Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Alexander Stubb; former world leaders Theresa May, Helen Clark, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, Jacinda Ardern and Julia Gillard; and prominent politicians including Valerie Amos, Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
Also featured are significant figures from civil society such as Maria Ressa, Melinda French Gates, Tawakkol Karman, Amartya Sen and Sir David Attenborough; business people and entrepreneurs such as Lujain Al Ubaid and Anne-Marie Imafidon; and United Nations leaders such as Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson.
Ander McIntyre
McIntyre’s path to photography was unconventional. After studying English Literature at Oxford and working as a writer, editor, and picture researcher, he began photographing portraits for Oxford Today magazine.
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Portrait of Baroness Amos taken by Ander McIntyre at Chatham House in 2018.
Rejecting the confrontational style often used by portrait photographers, he developed a simple philosophy based on civility, trust, and speed.
Working with just one camera and minimal equipment, McIntyre aims to make himself almost invisible.
His portrait sessions often last no more than ten seconds, allowing him to capture people before they adopt the carefully rehearsed expressions expected in front of a camera.
Rather than directing or staging his subjects, he asks them to do almost nothing believing that genuine character emerges in quiet, unguarded moments.
His long-running project, Portraits of an Establishment, explores the people who shape the modern world. The series includes political leaders, intelligence chiefs, economists, academics, activists, and cultural figures, revealing them not through status or spectacle, but through humanity.
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A portrait of Alexander Stubb by Ander McIntyre
Joseph Osayande, curator of the Chatham House exhibition, said:
‘Whether photographing a former president, a Nobel Prize winner, or a leading scientist, Ander McIntyre seeks authenticity over perfection
‘He creates portraits that are both understated and deeply revealing.
‘His work reminds us that behind every public figure is an individual, and that sometimes the most powerful portrait is made not through elaborate production, but through patience, observation, and the brief moment when someone simply stops performing.’
Why Should Delaware Care? Belle Mead is one of several controversial developments that have become part of a larger debate over how to manage growth in booming eastern Sussex County. The Supreme Court’s decision on this case could set precedence for how the County Council should handle future developments.
A fight over a proposal to build apartments and shops near the Delaware beaches is headed to the state Supreme Court.
But lawyers of the project’s developer, Capano Management, soon filed a motion to dismiss the case.
They argued that Route 24 Alliance’s lawyers wrongfully excluded them from the initial case and did not establish “standing,” or proof that the resident group would be harmed by Belle Mead, other than “generalized grievances which may be shared by the population at large.”
In late May, Superior Court judge Mark Conner granted that motion to dismiss the case. Public documents do not outline the reasons behind that decision.
In late June, Route 24 Alliance then filed to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. It will likely take months before the case is heard again.
Sussex County Council voted 3-2 in December to approve a rezoning request from Capano Management, essentially greenlighting a plan to transform a horse farm into 125,000 square feet of commercial space and up to 334 apartments.
A total of 15% of those apartments will be under the county’s affordable housing program. The 40-acre property inland from Rehoboth Beach is adjacent to Beacon Middle School and across Route 24 from Love Creek Elementary School. It sits about 2 miles southwest of Route 1.
Judy Rose Seibert, a Route 24 Alliance member listed on the appeal, declined to comment on the litigation.
Representatives from Sussex County and Capano Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reasons behind the appeal
Route 24 Alliance’s initial appeal asserts that county council members “misunderstood several crucial data points,” primarily the timing of traffic improvements around the site.
While explaining his vote in favor of the rezoning, Councilman Matt Lloyd said the buildout of Belle Mead “aligns” with planned major improvements to Route 24.
Lloyd did not say which improvements he was referring to. But DelDOT plans to widen Route 24, although the project will be in preliminary planning stages through 2032, according to the state’s draft Capital Improvement Plan.
Belle Mead is projected to be fully built out by 2032, well before construction on that widening would begin.
The appeal points to Lloyd’s comments as an example of a “mistaken belief” that led to the council’s approval.
The appeal also cites a letter from Cape Henlopen School District’s Director of Operations Jason Hale opposing any additional growth in the district until an impact fee program was in place.
Belle Mead is located next to Beacon Middle School and Love Creek Elementary School. Hale’s letter also stated that increased traffic from Belle Mead could adversely affect the school pick up and drop off, as well as student safety.
Seibert previously made an hour-long presentation to the County Council urging them to deny the rezoning request. She argued that since Belle Mead would be the first approved under the county’s C-4 zoning district, the county council’s decision would set a precedent for what level of traffic congestion is acceptable for future applications.
Seibert said Sussex County does need more affordable housing, “but this is not the right place for it.”
When the council first made the rezoning decision, Capano Management released a statement saying Belle Mead is “thoughtfully supported by existing and planned infrastructure” and is located where the county has determined growth is appropriate.
Why Should Delaware Care? The public is by now aware of the work productivity or creative uses for AI programs, but even an obscure humanities research team is finding ways of putting the new technology to work for them.
While treating a book for an exhibit in 2019, Melissa Tedone, an assistant professor for art conservation at the University of Delaware, made a surprising discovery.
The green Victorian Era book she held in her hand was awash with the toxic chemical arsenic.
Given the massive scale-up in production during the industrial revolution in England, she knew it was unlikely that it was the only one of its kind.
Thinking that libraries across the U.S. and Europe would have books with these potentially-toxic bindings, Tedone’s find kicked off a global search for other such books called the “Poison Book Project” to ensure they were handled and stored appropriately.
Today, that search has enlisted a decidedly 21st century assistant in artificial intelligence, with software engineers at UD partnering to map where these books would have been published more than 100 years ago.
Books that contain arsenic should be handled carefully, because the chemical is highly toxic, especially if ingested. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NAOMI WEISS
What are these ‘poison books‘?
Since 2019, the project has helped discover almost 500 arsenical books, though Tedone knows there are probably thousands more in circulation that owners are unaware of.
The bright green pigment in the poison books is called copper acetoarsenite – a powder containing bits of toxic arsenic and copper – that was used in all kinds of products in the 19th century. There are historical accounts of teenage girls getting skin rashes, abscesses and headaches when working with it to make decorative hats, Tedone said.
And the Victorians were well aware about the health effects, with debate arising in newspapers about banning the pigments.
“Today, you see the same thing happening in the news about microplastics and things like that,” Tedone said.
Particularly, the cloth-covered poison books have toxins that can easily transfer onto hands and other surfaces. In its current phase, the researchers are studying how cloth-covered books were made, which Tedone says was a “trade secret” at the time, so that in the future they can make an adhesive treatment for them.
“We’re basically trying to reverse engineer Victorian book-binding cloth to help us understand it better as a material,” she said.
Kevin Bhimani, a software engineer from UD, helped to build geocoded maps from the database of info collected by the Poison Book Project team. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY NAOMI WEISS
Calling in Claude
Since this past fall, the poison book project has forayed into AI and data science.
The tech team, composed of UD research software engineers Kevin Bhimani and Asritha Polu, deployed Anthropic’s Claude to place the poison books on what they call an “AI-geocoded map.”
According to Bhimani, the purple dots are the exact addresses Claude could find, and the green dots are approximations. | MAP COURTESY OF KEVIN BHIMANI / UD
To help plot the map, the Winterthur team gives spreadsheets of poison book data, including the elements present in the books and bibliographic data, like the location, date and publisher of a book, to the engineers.
The books were mostly published in England and North America, with a large concentration in London and some other cities like Philadelphia and New York, said Rosie Grayburn, the lead scientific researcher at Winterthur Museum.
If you were to just use the internet or directly ask a chatbot to find the addresses for nearly 500 books, it would take quite a while and might be less accurate, Bhimani explained.
So, Bhimani coded an AI agent that uses Claude to find the publisher address for all 500 books, given the data the Winterthur team provided. Claude’s training on “millions or billions of books,” helps it find the addresses, Bhimani explained.
This is the prompt template for Claude, an example of prompt engineering. The “Call Claude” function calls Anthropic’s API, or applied programming interface. Bhimani said using the API allows him to “call” Anthropic’s AI system and get output back from them, which is different from using a chatbot. | PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN BHIMANI / UD
“These are kind of the instructions that we send it,” Bhimani said, noting the program takes about 30 seconds to a minute to run for every book.
In order to ensure that the AI program does not make up answers to their queries, Bhimani explained that he prompts it by using known publishing districts such as Philadelphia and New York.
“This kind of grounds it,” he said.
On the historical side, the map helps Tedone see clusters of where poison book publishers were located, which might imply publishing competition in specific areas.
“They might have said, ‘Look at that gorgeous bright green book cloth. Where are they getting that? Let’s find out where they’re getting that, and we want to publish our books with that too,’“ Tedone said.
Grayburn said the map visually shows them the professionals in London and New York who might have been trading in very small groups, which helps them understand the spread of the book cloth which has health and safety implications.
“We’re understanding where these books are located now in collections, but we’re missing that thread between when and where they were created and where they are now,” Grayburn said.
The collaboration partly has its roots in the software engineer project lead’s own passion for art. Sunita Chandrasekaran, also an associate professor of computer and information science at UD, brought her team to the Winterthur research building’s open house and realized she could help art conservation faculty use software engineering to “build a holistic picture of historic data sets.”
The Winterthur and AI programming team currently meet every two weeks to discuss data visualizations. Tedone said if she were doing the work herself, she’d have to manually reassess the data every time there are new additions to the collection.
“It would take days and days of really tedious plugging numbers into a spreadsheet,” she said.
UD professor Melissa Tedone, who started the Poison Book Project, said she has appreciated how the emerging technology advanced their work. | SPOTLIGHT DEAWARE PHOTO BY NAOMI WEISS
Humanities research finds use for AI
When asked about how she feels using AI in her humanities research, Tedone said she was “torn” and that she constantly thinks about these frictious feelings in her work.
“There’s a part of me that feels hypocritical to use AI in my work, and then also not want a data center in my backyard,” she said.
But the Winterthur pair is far from alone in using AI, with studies showing 84% of researchers using AI in 2025 and more than half of them using it for peer review.
Tedone has settled on the idea that whatever you produce via AI should contribute to the world in a meaningful way.
“If the answer is no, then I think you should really question why you’re doing it,” she said.
With their project, Chandrasekaran noted that AI helps “triage” the necessary work, while a human with the necessary conservation science background can help make the “final call” on whether to categorize books as hazardous.
“Or else we lose a precious book being moved into the wrong catalog,” Chandrasekaran wrote to Spotlight Delaware.
Using AI for tasks like plotting graphs and identifying trends allows Tedone to focus on archival research, data collection, collaborating with colleagues, developing health and safety protocols, writing papers and giving presentations to the public.
She recalled a grandmother who reached out to her team after buying vintage books for her granddaughters and “freaked out,” thinking she might have accidentally poisoned them. The Winterthur team was able to reassure her that her books did not contain arsenic.
“It’s those human stories about the human experience – that’s why this work matters,” she said.
Zambia’s 2026 election: What is at stake?
15
July 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
As the campaign enters its final stage, hear from analysts about what voters, investors and democratic groups should watch out for.
As the campaign enters its final stage, hear from analysts about what voters, investors and democratic groups should watch out for.
Zambia’s election follows a period of economic reform and renewed international influence under President Hakainde Hichilema. Achievements such as Zambia’s first successful G20 debt restructuring have raised expectations for continued progress. As voters head to the polls, the result will test the strength of Zambia’s democratic and economic trajectory.
This event will discuss:
What are the main issues shaping Zambia’s 2026 election?
How has Hakainde Hichilema changed Zambia’s international standing?
What would democratic progress look like after the election?
Where are the risks of political or institutional backsliding?
Which economic indicators will provide the clearest test of success after the poll?
What could the result mean for investors and international partners?
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: If artists and scientists have been warning us for centuries, what excuse do we have for treating the planet like a disposable prop?
Trump Earned $2.2 Billion in 2025 Amid Countless Conflicts of Interest: A president turning public trust into private profit is not entrepreneurial brilliance, it’s corruption pure and simple. Do we care?
Trump Rewrites History and Ignores Its Lessons: When a government starts scrubbing slavery, conquest, and civil rights from public memory, it’s not defending patriotism but manufacturing amnesia.
Trump Pardons Polluters and a Major Donor: Calling industrial pollution “fixing their car” is the kind of linguistic buffoonery that turns dirty air into a donor perk.
Years and Years: This series understands that the most frightening apocalypse is the one that arrives disguised as ordinary life.
Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”: Marvin Gaye wraps grief in silk here, then leaves you to reckon with how calmly we destroy what keeps us alive.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day.”
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), playwright and physician
Chekhov in Yalta, 1902 (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Uncle Vanya was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, but Chekhov had been working on it for a decade. An earlier version, The Wood Demon, focused even more directly on the environmental concerns that were peripheral to the themes of the finished play. But the concerns expressed here, by the character Astrov—a provincial doctor and amateur naturalist who plants trees in his spare time as a private obsession—viewed with 21st century eyes, are perhaps the most remarkable thing about the play. In the 19thcentury, there were an estimated four trillion trees on the planet Earth. Today there are roughly three trillion. Dry rivers and lakes, the extinction of countless species, the ravaged climate, which is making Earth an ever hotter and less hospitable planet—Chekhov saw it all, he issued a dire warning, and it has been, for all intents and purposes, roundly ignored.
There’s another judgment here: that the earth has become not just poorer but “uglier.” We are used to ignoring artists when they talk about issues outside their particular field—“Shut up and sing,” right-wing critics tell Bruce Springsteen—but who is better situated to judge the difference between beauty and ugliness than the artist? What Chekhov is telling us, through Dr. Astrov, is that you do not need tools, numbers, or a laboratory to understand what is happening. You just need to open your eyes and resist the temptation to look away. The earth is losing its beauty. When did we decide that was an acceptable trade?
Chekhov was far from the first person to make these points. Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist, was warning in the early 1800s that deforestation would dry up the springs, destroy the rivers, and alter local climates. George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat, wrote in 1864 that “the earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.” By the time Astrov walked onto that stage, a century of clear-sighted people had delivered essentially the same message, and civilizations had listened politely and continued at full speed. What do we make of a species so capable of clear sight, and so consistent in its refusal to act on what it sees?
When people who are able to grasp the consequences still choose short-term extraction over long-term stewardship, what we’re dealing with is a failure of responsibility, and a failure of conscience. The insurance industry has a term for this: moral hazard. Roughly speaking, moral hazard is when one person or entity chooses to cause harm because someone else is going to have to pay for it. That is basically the Republican Party’s environmental policy in a nutshell. We log the old-growth forest and drill-baby-drill because the timber and oil checks clear this quarter and the future doesn’t vote in this election.
If there’s any hope to be found in Astrov’s speech, it’s in two little words: “until now.” Which means we still have a chance to do better. Chekhov practiced medicine, so he understood the difference between a diagnosis and an autopsy. A diagnosis is still worth acting on. Today, scientists are debating whether we are in the diagnosis or autopsy stage of climate change. There is no consensus answer to that question, but we have nothing to lose by acting like there’s still a chance to cure Patient Earth. Worst case scenario, we might keep the planet a fit home for its noblest inhabitants for a few generations longer. Best case scenario, we might turn things around. We created this situation decision by decision. We won’t improve it by kicking the can down the road to our grandchildren because we were too lazy, greedy, or addicted to creature comforts to pick it up ourselves.
Kareem Takes on the News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Joy is unbounded and when it dies down perhaps the guilty will be held to account for cheating and facilitation: perhaps they won’t. Still, enjoy the moment
Oh dear. Such a shame to see the US lose at football after their insanely embarrassing president cheated for them. Still, it really brought the world together. The last time this many people cheered on a Belgian resistance, it was 1914 and the Germans had just crossed the Meuse. As you’ll be aware, the USA were dumped out of their own World Cup on Monday night by a wholly superior Belgium, after Donald Trump boasted that he’d personally intervened in three phone calls with Fifa president Gianni Infantino to get the red card shown to USA striker Folarin Balogun rescinded. Yes, the US cheats at football. Pass it on.
You’ve heard a lot about shithousery during this tournament. We have even, excruciatingly, seen a few American commentators attempt to use the word in conversation. Guys, please, just – no. It’s not for you. You have ’erbs, “a couple things”, and “a ways to go”. But let’s call the events of the past few days by the name they deserve in all the languages of the world: Whitehousery.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to Be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Artificial intelligence models are already “cheating, deceiving and going their own way”, Australia’s assistant minister for technology, Andrew Charlton, has warned, as the federal government’s AI Safety Institute begins testing the latest models.
In a speech to an AI safety forum in Sydney on Tuesday, Charlton said safety for AI matters now as “AI systems are already doing things their creators never intended”.
Working on a buddy’s Pint thst has an issue charging. Found the input diode and mosfet to be where the 64 volts stops. It goes from charger input through input diode and then goes to mosfet 025L80 on the drain side and assuming when the gate gets triggered it goes through source. I found continuity from source all the way to current sensing resistor heading to the battery pack plug. What im assuming the issue is, is this resistor I found being “shorted”. Not like a dead short but showing around 120 ohms. This is where the microcontroller feeds pin 1 of this ic P3906 and the output of that is feeding 5.6v to the gate on 025L80. Problem is on thst gate source voltage is out of range at the 5.6v. The data sheet shows from 1.4v to 2.1v.
What I believe is happening is the resistor sets the output voltage of ic P3906 heading to the gate and with the resistance being so low it’s causing the voltage to be higher and not effectively enabling the gate. Im also afraid that with the gate swing over double its rated input it may have damaged the mosfet too…but it tests fine for now in diode mode.
So im looking for the value of this resistor to replace it. It’s R57 on the BMS board by pin 1 of ic P3906. Pics attached for reference.
Exciting things are planned for White Clay Creek State Park, including a new nature center, new trails, a larger events venue at the Judge Morris Estate and a project to convert historic buildings into cottages where visitors can spend a…
I just had to share the new setup. I finally grabbed a new orange fender and paired it up with my ghost rail guards. The combo instantly turned the board into a full-on Jack-O'-Lantern, and I'm totally here for it.
ESPOO, Finland and BERLIN, July, 6, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers, a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, has acquired selected assets of Quantistry GmbH, a Berlin-based developer of cloud-native simulation workflow platform for automotive, aerospace, chemical, materials and pharmaceutical industries.
The acquired assets include proprietary software applications, algorithms, and intellectual property. IQM will also retain Quantistry’s core technical, quantum chemistry, and software engineering talent, ensuring seamless continuity and rapid platform integration.
The transaction completed recently, concurrently with IQM’s business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (RAAQ), which made IQM the first publicly listed quantum computer company from Europe.
This transaction integrates Quantistry’s cutting-edge application software platform, algorithm simulation libraries, and user-friendly machine learning layer with IQM’s hardware infrastructure, creating a powerful full-stack solution designed to accelerate industrial research and development across automotive, aerospace, chemicals, materials science, and pharmaceuticals.
“True commercialization of quantum computing requires more than powerful hardware. It requires a bridge between hardware, software, and real industrial applications. The acquisition of Quantistry’s software assets builds that bridge,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-Founder of IQM Quantum Computers. “It accelerates our software development timeline in a capital-efficient way, and brings in a technical team whose expertise will help us deliver cloud-accessible simulation value to enterprise customers. This is the kind of move that gets us there faster.”
The acquisition positions IQM to actively engage an exceptional roster of industrial leaders. The company plans to transition and expand these enterprise relationships under the IQM brand, offering clients a continuum of classical simulation, AI-driven optimization, and quantum acceleration — with a clear path to continuously upgrade their systems, optimize their operations, and deliver innovative, cutting-edge solutions to their own customers. This is Production Quantum in practice: enterprises do not just access a quantum computer, they own, operate, and grow with one.
Dr. Marcel Quennet, Co-Founder and CEO of Quantistry, said: “Joining forces with IQM Quantum Computers represents a monumental next chapter for our technology and the industry. IQM’s world-class quantum, hardware infrastructure and deep institutional trust provide the ultimate launchpad to scale our simulation platform. Together, we will enable R&D teams to model complex molecular and physical properties with unprecedented speed, moving from theoretical simulation to market-ready material innovation faster than ever before.”
Quantistry has established itself as an innovative force by building an intuitive cloud platform that leverages quantum mechanics, chemical simulations, and high-performance computing. A core differentiator of Quantistry’s technology is its proprietary Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) layer, which allows a user without deep expertise in Quantum Computing or chemical simulation to create and simulate chemical compounds with accuracy on demand.
This framework automatically determines the most efficient computational pathways, seamlessly directing complex workflows across classical HPC infrastructures, native AI computing environments, and quantum backends.
Quantistry’s software will connect directly to IQM’s quantum computers. Industrial clients can build a proof of concept inside the IQM ecosystem, then scale it as the hardware improves, without switching platforms or starting over.
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Quantum Computers (Nasdaq: IQMX) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to enterprises, research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Finland, with major operations in Munich, IQM employs over 400 people and operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM is the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Stock Market.
About Quantistry GmbH
Quantistry is a leading provider of cloud-native chemical and materials simulation software. By combining high-performance computing (HPC), quantum chemical algorithms, and an intelligent machine-learning framework, Quantistry simplifies and accelerates the discovery of next-generation materials. Its platform serves key industries, including automotive, aerospace, energy storage, and pharmaceuticals, helping R&D teams innovate with greater speed and predictability.
NATO summit is Europe’s moment to turn crisis into opportunityExpert commentLToremark
Erosion of public trust in US leadership and the growing Russian threat are opportunities for European NATO allies to build public support for fast and decisive action on defence.
This week’s NATO summit in Ankara takes place at a pivotal moment in the alliance’s evolution – and for US–Europe relations.
In Ankara, the agenda will rightly focus on defence spending targets and score cards for national budget commitments and appropriations. There will be an accounting of who has signed (and paid for) big defence contracts and who is stuck at the political rhetoric stage. Like the businessman he is, US President Donald Trump will want to see concrete numbers from allies to prove there is action behind the 2025 Hague summit’s target of 5 per cent GDP spending on defence. If last year’s summit was about setting ambitious new targets, this summit will be about delivering on those promises.
Beyond delivering on commitments, NATO faces another key challenge. Recent announcements of reduced US defence presence combined with President Trump’s disparaging rhetoric on NATO and threats to take Greenland has not only damaged political relations but has also affected European public opinion on US leadership and reliability. This erosion of trust undoubtedly poses a challenge but is also an opportunity for European governments to build public understanding of and support for the funding and process changes needed to meet ambitious defence goals.
Russia builds as America scales back
Hanging over the summit are two impending force posture shifts changing the landscape of European security. One is America’s recently announced reduction of troop numbers and critical capabilities in Europe. The other is Russia’s upgrade of installations, planned manpower, and increasing hybrid operations along NATO’s border.
The US informed European officials in May that it would gradually withdraw military capabilities from NATO – including fighter jets, strategic bombers and warships. The announcement is short on details and continues to be caught in a whirlwind of gossip about internal Trump administration battles over the scale and timing of the changes. According to a recent report, NATO’s top commander has stated that European allies have already filled most of the gaps left by US reductions and are exploring workarounds for the remaining shortfalls. Announcements about these changes are expected at the Ankara summit but the devil is in the details. European allies currently do not have the scale of capabilities rumoured to be on the chopping block. And the fear that the US will leave NATO altogether remains. Should this happen, experts estimate it could take up to 25 years to fill the gap created.
In Ankara, European leaders should build consensus around a more urgent approach to the new reality and work to overcome bureaucratic processes and public attitudes that stymy quick action on defence plans.
This is even more important as Russia does not face domestic push back on military expenditures. The second issue looming over the Ankara summit will be Russia’s plans for a massive military build-up along NATO’s eastern border and its intensifying hybrid warfare against NATO and European targets. While Moscow’s war campaign against Ukraine has failed to achieve its military goals, Russia is now rooted in a war economy, fielding war-tested troops and preparing for a prolonged period of conflict. The Kremlin is taking steps towards building a military that seeks to have 1.5 million military service personnel and 17 new manoeuvre divisions. Its primary focus is conflict with NATO.
Recent discussions in Western capitals that the pressure on Russia’s economy, from successful Ukrainian drone strikes to international sanctions, is reaching an inflection point for Moscow are perhaps comforting but miss the point. For Russia, NATO’s expansion in the Nordics and full support for Ukraine are evergreen existential threats. And the Kremlin now sees that the US is distracted in other parts of the world and deprioritizing Europe.
Against the backdrop of Russia’s build-up, European leaders should view the twin crises of reduced US commitment and the erosion of trust in American leadership as opportunities to rally more urgent action on defence modernization.
According to data from Pew Research Center, European views of the US and Donald Trump are especially negative. Across 10 countries polled, a median of 81 per cent say they lack confidence in him doing the right thing regarding world affairs. This sentiment can be used to motivate legislatures and to reform bureaucracies to achieve national defence goals.
In Ankara, European allies should align to keep the United States engaged while building a modern European security architecture that better meets today’s threats and is less dependent on American assets. Three key actions will support this agenda.
First, get the public narrative right. European publics need to unify around a common understanding of Putin’s mindset, Trump’s withdrawal, and what is truly needed from Europe to keep the peace. Panic is not the answer; revitalized budgets and coordinated, timely defence investments are. Effective communication with their publics is one of NATO’s and European leaders’ most important strategic instruments.
Second, look to the Nordic defence industry model and US moves to use AI in procurement processes to help accomplish more efficient, forward-looking defence build-ups. By focusing on consistent cooperation with industry – from defining needs to developing and procuring new equipment – the Nordic nations are putting smart, integrated defence spending at the centre of their security and budget priorities. The smart use of AI could streamline procurement processes and production, shortening delivery timelines for needed capabilities.
Okay so I want to upgrade to the top of the top when it comes to trail riding.
I live en Denmark so buying from USA directly will double the cost just it Import and taxes...
So atm I just look at the FM GT-s rally XL board.
But the X7 supercharged from fungineers just looks very tempting too (but will be a hassel in the import)
So reddit, what will you tell me is the best choice to do ? 😄 I'm open for anything
Note.
I'm also looking at the Atom board just for the fun of it.
UPDATE after reading your comments and looking more intthe X7 LR I'm differently going to buy that board next month. It seems perfect for my needs and even more. Thanks for the response and hope this can help others.
Will NATO be convinced by the UK Defence Investment Plan?Expert commentjon.wallace
A tortuous process has produced a plan that does not set a clear path towards meeting the UK’s defence expenditure targets. But it includes many elements which will make the UK a more attractive collaborative partner for NATO allies.
The UK Government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was finally published last week to predictably mixed reviews from the British media and commentariat. It is the outcome of a tortuous process begun with the launch of a ‘first-of-its-kind’, externally-led Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in mid-July 2024 – one that was dogged from the start by an unclear budgetary envelope.
The DIP does not set a visible trajectory towards achieving the government’s commitment to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence in the next Parliament or to meet the 2025 NATO Hague Summit’s agreement to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence by 2035. And even for the remaining years of this Parliament, the plan appears to contain a £1.2 billion per year funding shortfall. That money will need to be found.
Protracted deliberations between the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Treasury and No 10 over the size and shape of the future defence programme are nothing new. But this time they were uniquely public and theatrical – watched with concern not only by observers in the UK but among key allies and partners.
The government should ensure that such a conceptually flawed process is also the last-of-its-kind.
Novel technologies
The DIP says that it is built around three key areas: ‘Transforming the Armed Forces’; ‘Backing British’ [technology, industry and skills]; and ‘Stepping up UK leadership’. The last will be of particular interest to the UK’s NATO allies, as the US announces plans to reduce its conventional forces in Europe and President Donald Trump continues to criticize the organization. European countries must step up to fill the gaps left by the US. How credible does UK leadership look, as the NATO summit convenes this week?
In terms of the raw numbers, the UK’s once vaunted status as the top defence spender in Europe has gone. By 2030, Germany plans to spend €188.4 billion – 3.7 per cent of GDP – twice the UK figure of £79.1 billion (2.7 per cent of GDP). The UK now appears to be falling (slightly) behind France too. But it is still one of NATO’s biggest spenders, so how it spends its money is important and influential. On this, two points stand out.
The DIP finally tries to take a more strategic approach, outlining a clear policy preference for ‘further develop[ing] capability co-operation with our closest allies and partners’
First, the DIP involves a significant shift in spending towards novel technologies including considerably more on autonomous systems, digital infrastructure, drones and the ‘hybrid navy’. It also better reflects the realities of contemporary warfare, as practised by Russia and Iran, by enhancing investment in integrated air and missile defence.
And it deliberately retains increasing levels of a central contingency holding of unallocated money – allowing the MOD to respond more easily to future developments in the rapidly evolving character of warfare. This is something which previous UK defence planners often aspired to but rarely achieved. While the sharp growth in Germany’s defence expenditure is welcome, commentators have noted that relatively little of it is for ‘new-paradigm systems’.
International collaboration
Second, the DIP is unashamedly international in content and tone. The UK has long collaborated with the US and European allies on many of its biggest defence programmes. Despite this – and a commitment in 2015’s Strategic Defence & Security Review to make UK Defence ‘international by design’ – previous UK governments have too often been transactional and case-by-case in their approach.
Building on the SDR’s restatement of the importance of international collaboration, the DIP finally tries to take a more strategic approach, outlining a clear policy preference for ‘further develop[ing] capability co-operation with our closest allies and partners’, stating that ‘international partnerships will be considered from the start of capability development’. The plan also recognizes that such collaboration is a cornerstone of wider international engagement, particularly in the Euro-Atlantic, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
Fittingly, two big winners from the DIP are collaborative programmes: the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to build a next generation fighter jet, a partnership with Italy and Japan; and AUKUS, a nuclear-powered submarine and novel technologies agreement between the UK, US and Australia. There are further commitments: to work with Germany on deep precision strike weapons and close support artillery; and to explore a new amphibious combined fleet with the Netherlands.
Such commitments have previously been hampered by bureaucratic structures and processes that clumsily privilege financial accountability over strategic vision.
This time, the policy aspiration is supported by a new structure – the National Armaments Director Group (NADG) – which could be seen as the UK’s belated counterpart of France’s formidable Direction Générale de L’armament.
The NADG will take a portfolio (rather than case-by-case) approach to acquiring capabilities – which should allow a more flexible approach to international collaboration – and will have a strong international pillar.
Much of the rest of the DIP will be of limited interest to NATO partners. But one other point is notable: the revised defence spending profile over the next four years shows a relatively small but tangible increase in ‘Resource DEL’ – broadly, day-to-day running costs – with the intention of improving readiness.
Well-publicized events earlier this year raised serious doubts among allies about the readiness and deployability of the UK’s armed forces, so this commitment should be welcome.
No more over-promising?
In summary, the DIP is likely to viewed as a mixed bag by the UK’s NATO partners. Its gestation has been painful for them to watch. Its plateauing of UK defence expenditure at 2.7 per cent of GDP from 2027/8-29/30 will raise eyebrows. So too will the ever-increasing proportion of the UK’s defence budget (from 20 to 25 per cent) the plan allocates to the UK’s defence nuclear enterprise.
Tensions between the US and Europe loom large over NATO summitExpert commentthilton.drupal
Disagreements over the Iran war and defence procurement threaten to turn the annual summit into another theatre for division and distract from the threat from Russia.
The upcoming NATO summit in Ankara is not the first meeting at which the alliance’s members have had to navigate internal tensions. Recent summits involving the Trump administration have often been tense, most famously in 2018, when President Donald Trump first began to threaten to leave NATO if other allies did not increase their level of defence spending.
However, tensions ahead of Ankara are at a much higher level than in previous years. This is because the Trump administration has become serious about reducing its level of involvement in European security, which has major ramifications for NATO. It is also partly a result of NATO moving to annual summits in response to the intensification of the threat level in Europe after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has created a stage for tensions to play out publicly.
NATO members will arrive in Turkey with several different points of disagreement between them. President Trump remains upset that other allies did not support the US war in Iran to the extent that he had desired. For his administration, this is an example of what they see as European security freeloading, as they believe that their action in the Middle East will benefit global security overall.
President Trump has also let his disappointment over Iran turn into significant disagreements with several European leaders, including the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
All three of these leaders were relatively close with President Trump and were praised by him, but he has now publicly criticized them. With only days to go until the NATO summit, Merz has defended Germany’s defence spending record, Meloni has significantly distanced herself from Trump, and Starmer has focused on connecting with other European leaders to provide a counterbalance to the US.
Transatlantic defence tensions
This reflects the wider mood in Europe: 2025 was already a difficult year for the transatlantic relationship, but 2026 has been even more difficult to date.
The confusing US threats against Greenland in January and February shocked those who had not thought that the US would truly turn its back on NATO. Europe has become much more wary about Washington’s intentions. The US is now seen as an inconsistent ally with a short memory that does not remember Europeans’ support when the US called for Article 5 assistance after the 9/11 attacks.
US officials have also reportedly privately warned several European allies that their orders from American defence contractors will likely be delayed as Washington prioritizes replenishing its own stockpile after the Iran war, deepening the sense of the US turning away from Europe. These allies include the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Germany, who are now put in a difficult position, especially given pre-existing concerns that Russia could pose a threat to NATO years before European states have sufficiently improved their military capabilities.
For Europeans, this shift justifies their focus on rebuilding European defence industrial capabilities. This will allow them to reduce their dependence on the US when it comes to new procurement contracts in the future.
However, this increasing independence will undoubtedly exacerbate tensions between the US and European allies in the future: While the US has encouraged its European allies to spend more on defence, there also seems to be an expectation that this will be in the form of them continuing to purchase American equipment. If the number of European orders reduces over time, the US might then not be so keen on a more independently secure Europe.
2025 was already a difficult year for the transatlantic relationship, but 2026 has been even more difficult to date.
Washington’s announcements that it would be reducing troop and equipment deployments in Europe has also caused concern among allies that the US’s extended deterrence guarantee to the continent is no longer as firm.
The US is reportedly planning to affirm its ongoing commitment to Article 5 and extended deterrence at the summit in Ankara. However, it is legitimate to question the extent to which potential adversaries will continue to perceive NATO’s deterrence posture as credible if they can see the US disengaging from the continent. After all, a crucial tenet of Cold War thinking was that the US would not risk becoming involved in a nuclear war in Europe if it did not have any skin in the game; the same logic could also apply today.
Divide over managing Trump
Beyond the tensions between the US and European allies, inter-European tensions will also require careful management. As the US has become a more erratic ally, European views on how to manage the relationship with the US have diverged.
Ahead of the NATO summit in The Hague in 2025, there was some reluctance about NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s approach to managing Trump, which has been characterized by flattery. But the overwhelming view remained that if his methods led to results then the ends justified the means.
Iran, the ceasefire and the Gulf: what comes next
13
July 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Learn how the war with the US and Israel has affected Iran’s diplomacy, security outlook, and internal politics.
The war has created new pressures on Iran’s domestic politics, security environment and regional relationships. These shifts are affecting Tehran’s ties with its partners and rivals alike, raising questions about the future of diplomacy, regional stability and Iran’s strategic direction.
The war has created new pressures on Iran’s domestic politics, security environment and regional relationships. These shifts are affecting Tehran’s ties with its partners and rivals alike, raising questions about the future of diplomacy, regional stability and Iran’s strategic direction.
This event discusses:
How is the war reshaping Iran’s domestic political and security dynamics?
What impact has the conflict had on Iran’s regional partnerships and proxy networks?
What are the prospects for diplomacy with the US, Europe, Russia and China?
What factors could drive further escalation or de-escalation?
What does the conflict reveal about Iran’s future role in the region?
Gov. Matt Meyer and Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay spent part of the nation’s 250th birthday at Cooch’s Bridge Historic Site, paying tribute to the patriots who died there during Delaware’s only Revolutionary War battle.
Two Newark residents were among the 10 people injured when a boat exploded after refueling at Schaefer's Canal House and Marina in Chesapeake City, Md., on Saturday afternoon, according to Maryland Natural Resources Police.
Newark’s fireworks show was cut short Saturday evening when Mother Nature decided to put on a light show of her own, sending spectators dashing to their cars to avoid the rain and lightning.
Burnham should use a ‘Makerfield Test’ to ground UK foreign policy in real placesExpert commentjon.wallace
An international form of Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ could strengthen UK foreign policy by making it inseparable from outcomes in UK regions.
Foreign policy in Britain is often discussed as if it were a distant theatre, detached from the everyday realities of people’s lives. Yet the past decade has shown repeatedly that global shocks land first and hardest in the towns that have the least insulation from volatility. Energy price spikes, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions and investment flows reverberate through UK towns like Leigh and Wigan, Motherwell and Port Talbot, long before they appear in Westminster briefings.
Andy Burnham, newly elected as MP for Makerfield, steps back onto the national stage after nearly a decade as a metro mayor – and as the UK Labour Party’s near-certain choice to replace Keir Starmer as UK prime minister. Burnham describes his politics – shaped by the lived experience of Greater Manchester’s towns – as ‘Manchesterism’: an attempt to deliver ‘good growth in every British postcode’, nurtured ‘from the bottom up’, using ‘public intervention where necessary’ – driven by higher ambition for UK regions and towns.
This outlook, core to his local election success, also offers a distinctive way of thinking about Britain’s international posture: an approach that I describe as ‘International Manchesterism’. That is, a place rooted internationalism that treats global forces as inseparable from local outcomes.
International Manchesterism begins with the recognition that global shocks are experienced locally. The manufacturing clusters of north-west England, and other UK regions, have felt the real world consequences of supply chain fragility more acutely than the financial districts of London. When international energy markets convulse, households in older housing stock across Wigan and Leigh face disproportionate hardship. And when geopolitical tensions disrupt investment flows, regeneration projects in Greater Manchester stall.
Foreign policy must stabilize the economic foundations of Britain’s towns, not merely enhance the country’s global profile.
I propose that International Manchesterism should be applied to UK policy through a ‘Makerfield Test’: a disciplined framework a new Burnham government can use to assess its international priorities.
Rather than judging foreign policy by summitry, diplomatic choreography or doctrinal positioning, the Makerfield Test would ask a simpler and more demanding question: do Britain’s international choices tangibly improve life in the communities that forged Burnham’s politics?
Recasting foreign policy through this lens offers a way to reconnect global strategy with domestic renewal. It can also rebuild public trust in the value of international engagement. So what elements make up the Makerfield Test?
Economic security
Economic security is the first pillar. For towns like Makerfield, global economic shifts are not abstract phenomena; they determine job stability, wage levels and household resilience. A credible foreign policy agenda must show how Britain can better shield its industrial and service sectors from volatility.
That means strengthening supply chain resilience for regional manufacturing, ensuring trade agreements reflect the needs of sectors outside London, and developing a strategic approach to critical minerals and inputs.
This would recognize that these issues are not technocratic concerns but questions of fairness. Foreign policy must stabilize the economic foundations of Britain’s towns, not merely enhance the country’s global profile.
Energy resilience
The Makerfield test would insist on energy policy that is understood through the lived experience of households, not the abstractions of international negotiations. England’s northwest has been particularly exposed to international price spikes.
And the experience of the past few years has made clear that Britain’s energy diplomacy cannot be judged solely by its alignment with global climate summits. It must be judged by whether it lowers household bills and creates industrial opportunities in places like Leigh, Ashton and Wigan.
That requires diversified gas supply, expanded storage, deeper cooperation on renewable energy including offshore wind and hydrogen, and a commitment to ensuring that global energy transitions generate regional jobs rather than bypassing them.
Rebalancing investment
A third element of the Makerfield Test concerns international investment. Foreign direct investment has long been concentrated in London and the southeast of England, reinforcing regional inequality. But Burnham’s mayoralty has demonstrated that targeted international engagement can attract capital to regions historically overlooked by national strategy.
The Test would require a foreign policy agenda that champions regional investment corridors, strengthens ties with countries investing in advanced manufacturing, and reforms the UK’s investment promotion machinery so that regional assets are systematically showcased abroad. In this framing, international investment becomes a tool for rebalancing the geography of opportunity.
Skills, mobility and global opportunity
Globalization has often been experienced as insecurity rather than possibility, particularly in towns with limited access to global networks. The Makerfield Test would ask if government foreign policy is helping to reverse this dynamic.
Doing so would mean developing international skills partnerships in digital, green and advanced manufacturing sectors; expanding mobility schemes for young people outside major metropolitan centres; and aligning migration policy with regional labour needs.
The Makerfield Test would demand policy that positions global opportunity as something that must be distributed, not captured by a narrow geography.
Reimagining Atlanticism
For decades, successive UK governments’ Atlanticism has been framed as a strategic reflex – a doctrinal commitment rather than a practical question.
The Makerfield Test would judge the government’s US related policies by their ability to deliver concrete benefits for Britain’s towns: stable jobs, secure energy, resilient supply chains and access to global markets. This requires a shift from rhetorical alignment to purposeful cooperation.
The UK and US already share interests in critical minerals, semiconductors, green manufacturing, and energy security. Applying the Makerfield Test would drive policy that deepens collaboration in these areas, in ways that underpin the economic resilience of regions like Greater Manchester.
It would treat joint investment in battery technology, aerospace, life sciences and hydrogen as central pillars of a shared industrial future with the US. And it would draw on US experience with community college systems and regional workforce development to strengthen Britain’s own skills infrastructure.
China and the Global South
The UK occupies a space increasingly defined by middle power dynamics, in which countries exercise influence through coalitions, issue based partnerships and strategic agility rather than through unilateral leverage.
The Makerfield Test would demand global strategy that seeks to convene, coordinate and shape rules across multiple domains in a way that delivers tangible benefits at home.
This is particularly important in navigating the evolving US–China relationship. The Test would require policy that avoids binary alignment with either side and instead focuses on protecting British economic security, maintaining access to critical technologies and ensuring that global competition does not undermine regional industries.
It would support deep cooperation with the US on supply chain resilience and green industrial transitions, while maintaining selective engagement with China in areas where cooperation is essential – such as energy transitions, global health, scientific research and regulated trade.
The Makerfield Test would also apply to policy on the Global South, seeking partnerships capable of delivering investment, technology and market access to Britain’s regions. That requires moving beyond paternalistic development narratives and instead building reciprocal, interest based coalitions that reflect the realities of a multipolar world.
By applying the Test, Britain would become a connector, a convener and a problem solver – a country that leverages its diplomatic networks, regulatory influence, scientific capacity and development expertise to shape outcomes that matter both globally and locally in the UK.
Foreign policy as domestic renewal
Ultimately, International Manchesterism challenges Westminster to rethink how foreign policy is conceived, communicated and assessed. It insists that international engagement be judged not by elite indicators but by its impact on UK communities. And it aligns global strategy with domestic renewal, offering a language for explaining foreign policy in terms that resonate with everyday experience.
If Burnham can articulate an international agenda that passes the Makerfield Test, he will not only redefine Britain’s foreign policy conversation. He will demonstrate that global strategy can be rooted in the lived realities of the places that shaped him.
Why Should Delaware Care? As America marks its semiquincentennial on July 4, Delaware can be remembered for its service in the statesmanship and military service in the founding of the nation.
On July 1, 1776, Caesar Rodney was in Dover, questioning British loyalists when he received the fateful word from counterparts in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress.
His vote had become crucial, and his presence in Philadelphia was necessary the next day.
That stormy night was the culmination of weeks of change across the American colonies and in Delaware in particular. Less than three weeks prior, there was no Delaware to speak of.
After a decade of increasing British taxes, nationwide boycotts and a crackdown on colonial dissent, war broke out in Boston in 1775. The occupation of one of America’s key cities convinced the colonies of their need to assert their independence.
Within a year, each colony would craft its own constitution to declare themselves an independent state. In June 1776, Delaware was still considered “the Lower Counties” of the Pennsylvania colony.
But state delegates met in New Castle on June 15, 1776, where they declared Delaware’s independence from both Great Britain and Pennsylvania.
Caesar Rodney was a lawyer, landowner and one of Delaware’s earliest statesman. He cast the deciding vote in the Declaration of Independence. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE PUBLIC ARCHIVES
Rodney casts historic vote
After expending significant political capital to secure what Rodney thought would be a successful vote for independence, the third member of Delaware’s congregation, George Read, had decided to vote against separating from the British.
With fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean voting in favor, Read’s dissent would leave Delaware – and potentially the nation – in a stalemate. The Continental Congress intended to declare national independence unanimously or not at all.
With the nation’s independence sitting on a razor-thin margin, Rodney embarked on his famous midnight ride to break the tie and swing the Delaware delegation’s support for independence.
For 18 hours overnight, he trekked the 80 miles to Philadelphia on horseback and by carriage through thunder and rain, as detailed in a letter Rodney sent to his brother, Thomas, on July 4, 1776 — the only such letter recovered from a Congressional delegate from that day.
Aside from the national implications of the watershed moment, Rodney’s ride was an act of personal courage as well. He hailed from southern Delaware originally, where the population held more sympathetic views towards the British — Rodney’s grandfather was even an Anglican minister — though his family believed in the revolution.
As put by Ciro Poppiti, the New Castle County Register of Wills and reenactor who recently completed a horse ride from Dover to Philadelphia to honor the anniversary of Rodney’s journey, the statesman also knew he was “riding to the gallows.”
In the midst of a raging war, Rodney was potentially exposing himself to targeting by the British as one of the deciding votes for independence. Additionally, at the time of his ride, Rodney was battling facial cancer that had left his cheek and nose deeply scarred, a significant disfigurement which Rodney concealed with a scarf.
The cancer would claim Rodney’s life nearly eight years to the day of his momentous ride.
Like most of the American colonies, Delaware had a fervent revolutionary movement, but many residents continued to support the British crown. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DELAWARE PUBLIC ARCHIVES
Delaware had a conflicted populace
Rodney’s ride is perhaps the most notorious single piece of Delaware lore in relation to the American Revolution. But thanks to its location, resources, and an apprehensive and divided population, the state played a significant role in the struggle for America’s freedom from the British kingdom.
During the Revolutionary era, Delaware was viewed as a valuable strategic spot, particularly given its coastline and proximity to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital and largest city at the time. The territory’s largely rural environment further made it an agricultural hub, meaning it was also a popular supplier of food for the American armed forces to the north.
The state – second smallest with just 37,000 residents in 1776 – was a melting pot of cultures, including English, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and French, along with native tribes, enslaved Africans and free Blacks.
Similar to today’s political partisanship, the state’s geography also played a role in residents’ opinion of the Revolutionary movement. The Wilmington area was primarily a Revolutionary stronghold, along with cities like New Castle, Dover and Lewes.
Sussex County was more sympathetic to the British, even drawing the presence of American forces at times to quash small-scale rebellions, while Kent County was split.
As evidenced by the division that necessitated Rodney’s ride, the state’s population had the same misgivings about independence as anywhere else, even as the war intensified after the Declaration.
British Loyalists in Delaware continued to organize against the revolutionaries during the war and after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and in response, roving “committees of inspection and observation” were established.
These committees acted as a kind of secret police force dedicated to snuffing out British-sympathetic activities among citizens, according to Ryan Schwartz, of the Lewes Historical Society, largely achieving this through intimidation as opposed to violence.
Many British Loyalists living in Delaware ended up fleeing to Canada as the war continued and after it ended, finding Delaware to be an increasingly inhospitable place to sow dissent.
Delaware’s regiment of Revolutionary War soldiers were known as the “Delaware Blues” due to their distinctive uniforms. | PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Patriots fight in the war
Despite its location and festering opposition, Delaware’s native sons also raised up a respected regiment of soldiers known as the “Delaware Blues” for the color of their uniforms – there was no standard uniform in the Revolutionary War as each state outfitted its men how it could.
They would fight at some of the war’s earliest battles, including Long Island and White Plains. They crossed the Delaware River with Gen. George Washington on Christmas night 1776 for an attack at Trenton, New Jersey.
Their founding colonel, John Haslet, would be killed in January 1777 during the Battle of Princeton.
The state of Delaware only saw one major battle during the war, which took place at Cooch’s Bridge near Newark, though there were smaller skirmishes throughout the state.
But Delaware narrowly avoided potentially becoming another main theater of the war, Schwartz said. The British were focused on toppling Philadelphia, and with previous attempts to do so via land proving futile, their plans in the late summer of 1777 turned to a naval advance on the capital via the Delaware River.
Stymied by the Delaware River’s shoaly terrain and further deterred by strong American defenses established along the body of water, the British instead decided to land at nearby Elkton, Maryland, just beyond the Delaware border.
That then led to the Battle at Cooch’s Bridge on Sept. 3, 1777, which saw the undermanned Delaware battalion of 1,200 men, officially formed just a week before the battle, temporarily hold off a group of 16,000 British soldiers before eventually retreating north to join Washington’s forces. Casualties are unclear, but a British officer commented at the time that the fighting at Iron Hill was the worst they faced on their march to Philadelphia.
While the battle is recorded as a loss for the Americans, Joe Sullivan of the Delaware Public Archive said the battalion’s efforts derailed the British advance to Philadelphia for an additional five days after the fighting had ended. That gave Washington additional time to gather troops and prepare for the oncoming British forces.
Despite the apparent setback, the Delaware battalion had fulfilled Washington’s Sept. 2 directive: “Give them as much trouble as you possibly can.”
Days later, the Delaware soldiers would fight at the Battle of the Brandywine, just over the state border in Pennsylvania. It would be a humiliating defeat for the Americans as British Gen. William Howe outflanked Washington’s army.
Following their victory at Brandywine, the British forces would decamp to Wilmington, where they occupied the city and tended to their wounded for about a month before advancing up to Philadelphia.
Along the way, the Delaware Blues would fight at the Battle of Germantown, where they suffered significant losses, including the wounding of their second leader Col. David Hall.
Delaware’s soldiers would head south in 1780 and 1781 to fight in five more battles in the Carolinas before the end of the war.
An American victory at Saratoga generated enough optimism that the French then decided to support the revolutionary effort militarily. This forced the British to expand their fight on several international fronts, diverting resources from their troops on American soil and opening the door for the Americans to emerge victorious from the war.
USA at 250: Soft power, hard power and the future of the American dreamAudiosseth.drupal@c…
In this episode of Independent Thinking, Bronwen Maddox is joined by Laurel Rapp and Ambassador Tim Davis to discuss America’s international role and its domestic divisions as it approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
The United States marks its 250th birthday at a moment of intense division and international uncertainty. At home, President Donald Trump is aggressively remodelling America’s governance around expanded White House power and burning through firewalls intended to prevent presidential overreach and self-enrichment. Internationally, his capricious mix of transactional diplomacy, coercive tariffs and naked hard power has left American allies shell-shocked – and opened the door for China to spread its influence.
Former US ambassador to Qatar Tim Davis joins host Bronwen Maddox and Laurel Rapp, director of our US and North America programme, to discuss the future of the United States in the world – and whether, for ordinary citizens, the American dream still exists.
About Independent Thinking
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
Politicians of both political parties have blamed either the Trump or the Biden administration for the arrival of the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating fly that affects the cattle industry, in the U.S. after decades of eradication. But experts say the reasons are different or more complicated than either side is saying — and that it’s no one administration’s fault.
The agriculture secretary, meanwhile, has said that the previous administration “hadn’t really done anything” to combat screwworm, wrongly claiming that there had been “no funds” secured and “no plan deployed.” The Biden administration approved nearly$275 million in emergency funding to fight screwworm starting in late 2023.
Since the Department of Agriculture announced a confirmed screwworm detection in a calf in Texas on June 3, politicians on both sides of the aisle have lobbed blame at the other. The return of the fly is a major threat to the cattle industry, and its arrival in Mexico has already contributed to rising beef prices in the U.S.
SeveralDemocratsand some in the media have been pointing the finger at President Donald Trump, noting staffing cuts at USDA or funding cuts to screwworm programs made in early 2025 by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“Apologized yet for the Screwworm outbreak?” Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, wrote in a June 8 X post addressed to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “You agreed to the DOGE cuts to federal programs that were designed to prevent Screwworm outbreaks.” He repeated a similar statement at a June 9 press conference.
“The Trump administration is directly responsible for this crisis: Last year, it decimated the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which oversees prevention and response efforts related to pests and diseases that pose a threat to U.S. agriculture, including the New World screwworm,” a June 8 Democratic National Committee press release said.
Republicans, meanwhile, have pinned the blame on former President Joe Biden.
“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for — that when millions of people came out of … Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well,” Sen. Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, said in a June 8 Newsmax interview.
“The threat didn’t appear overnight; it was the direct result of the Biden-Harris Admin’s WEAK foreign policy agenda and FAILED immigration policies (and wide open border…),” Rollins wrote in a June 4 X post, noting that the biological barrier for the fly at the border of Panama and Colombia “broke down in 2022,” during the prior administration.
“The Biden-Harris admin … ran a wide-open border that turned the Darien Gap into a nonstop highway for illegal migration, infested animals and all,” she wrote in another post the same day. “That single policy did more to introduce NWS into the US than anything we’ve seen in 60 years.”
Experts, however, told us that both parties are off-base. A couple of entomologists we spoke with suspect that what precipitated the barrier breakdown in Panama was a fly strain failure, which in some ways was decades in the making. Better monitoring — particularly as late as 2025 — would have perhaps slowed but not prevented the arrival. And while illicit cattle movement could be a major way the screwworm travelled north, an expert told us it had nothing to do with Biden’s immigration policies (any travel on humans would be minor).
“Neither of them are to blame,” David Taylor, an emeritus adjunct professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told us, of the Biden and Trump administrations.
The return of screwworm “should not be reduced to a simple partisan blame story,” Dr. Joseph Annelli, a former director of emergency programs for veterinary services at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told us. “The more accurate explanation is a long-term preparedness failure involving multiple administrations, multiple Congresses, international partners, workforce shortages, infrastructure limitations, and the natural human tendency to underinvest in prevention until a crisis occurs.”
‘A Scientific Marvel’
Screwworm was once native to the southern U.S., but through the use of sterile fly releases starting in the 1950s, the parasite has largely been eradicated from the country for more than 40 years.
The flies lay eggs in open wounds and the resulting larvae then burrow like screws into live tissue. After about a week of feeding, the larvae then drop off the wound and complete their transformation into flies in soil, the USDA explains. While the fly can infest open wounds in any warm-blooded animal, including people, pets and wildlife, the insects prefer larger mammals and human cases are rare.
Eradication efforts began last century due to the burden on ranchers. Screwworm infestations can sicken or kill livestock, especially newborns, and they can be expensive to treat and monitor for. According to the USDA, before the eradication of the pest, livestock producers lost tens of millions of dollars or more to screwworm every year.
Annelli called it “a scientific marvel” to figure out how to use sterile flies to control the pest. Because the female flies mate only once, releases of sterilized males stop reproduction, and the population dies out. Scientists devised ways to rear the flies, irradiate them to sterilize them, and release them into the wild, over time pushing screwworm out of the U.S., down through Mexico and as far as the Darien Gap in Panama.
With the exception of Darien province, Panama had been free of screwworm since 2006, with a dedicated facility producing tens of millions of sterile flies each week that were dropped over the isthmus, preventing spread of the fly from South America, where it has remained endemic.
A New World screwworm fly being examined at a USDA facility in Texas. Photo by Lance Cheung/USDA.
The U.S. declared the screwworm eradicated in 1966, although Taylor said that there were large outbreaks through the 1970s. It was “not really until 1980 that the U.S. became screwworm-free,” he said. Since then, there have been some imported cases, but only one self-sustaining outbreak, largely in deer, in Florida in 2016, which ended after bringing in sterile flies.
“Unfortunately, we are the victim of our success,” Anneli said. “People don’t even know about screwworm anymore because it was eradicated so long ago.”
Screwworm began its return to North and Central America sometime around 2022, with Panama experiencing an increase in cases that year. By mid-2023, screwworm was in Costa Rica, and in Nicaragua by March 2024. Mexico reported its first case, near the border with Guatemala, in November 2024.
Since the U.S. detection in early June, the USDA has identified 31 animal cases as of July 1, primarily in cattle, but also in sheep, goats and dogs. All of the cases have been in Texas, except for one dog in New Mexico. (Rollins said in a hearing and elsewhere that the dog had been brought across the border with Mexico, but state officials have said that is not true.)
The Democratic Argument
In assigning blame for screwworm, some Democrats, such as Lieu and the DNC, have focused on funding and staffing cuts made under the Trump administration.
It’s true that the USDA is significantly smaller under Trump. In one year, the department lost around 20,000 employees, including around 2,000 members, or 23%, of the agency’s inspection service, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The Agricultural Research Service, the agency’s chief scientific arm that is involved in sterile fly efforts, also lost nearly 2,200 people, or 31% of its staff.
However, it is not known how many of those individuals worked on screwworm.
Using Office of Personnel Management data and figures through April, we got similar staffing reductions for the inspection and research departments. Overall, USDA staffing has dropped by about 16,000 employees.
Three former USDA officials told Politico for a June 17 story that the staffing cuts complicated the agency’s screwworm response, particularly because more experienced veterinarians were gone.
Rollins has said that when she came into office there were just 10 people working full time on screwworm, and that she has now expanded that to over 110 or 120 people. She hasdenied any negative impact on screwworm from funding or staffing reductions.
An April 2025 memo from Rollins indicates that employees dedicated to screwworm would be exempt from a hiring freeze.
Four former USDA officials have disputed Rollins’ figure of 10 employees, with one calling it “definitely false” and an underestimate, according to reporting in Agri-Pulse, a trade publication.
A few Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio, who is the vice ranking member of the agriculture committee, have also cited a separate March 2025 Agri-Pulse story about funding cuts. Lieu’s press office also directed us to the story, among several others, when asked for support for his claims. It reported that among the administration’s many cuts to USAID were “animal disease monitoring projects” operated by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, including $250 million specifically for global health security projects.
“Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America,” the trade publication reported. It went on to say that the stop work orders went out in late January, “just days before” the Trump administration reopened the border for cattle trade that the Biden administration had closed due to concerns about importing screwworm.
Reporting by KBHB Radio in South Dakota at the same time confirmed the cuts via a Food and Agriculture Organization spokesperson, but offered little additional detail. “Throughout Central America, FAO monitored and responded to New World Screwworm, preventing the spread of the disease to the U.S.,” the spokesperson said, giving an example of the FAO program’s impact.
FAO did not reply to our request for more information, but confirmed the cuts to Agri-Pulse in a separate June 24 story, stating that “the reductions meant that some planned country support — including disease surveillance, laboratory strengthening, veterinary training and outbreak preparedness — could not be implemented as originally planned or had to be delayed or scaled back.”
Many of the scientists we interviewed were not able to comment directly on any funding or staffing reductions. But given the timing of the grant cancellations, it is unlikely that those had a large impact. Screwworm had already been detected in southern Mexico in late November 2024, two months before Trump took office.
Taylor said that once the outbreak reached Nicaragua, it was “inevitable” that the flies would reach the U.S. because there was not enough sterile fly production capacity.
“You might have been able to do better surveillance. You might have been able to track it better,” he said. “But I don’t see that you are going to stop it.”
“I would be cautious about attributing the problem solely to recent USAID, USDA, or other federal funding reductions,” Annelli, who is also the executive vice president of the National Association of Federal Veterinarians, said, noting that he was speaking for himself and not for any organizations. “Surveillance and prevention funding are important, and reductions can certainly weaken preparedness. However, the northward progression of screwworm reflects broader and longer-term vulnerabilities that predate any single administration.”
The Republican Argument
Some Republicans, meanwhile, have been pushing a narrative that Biden’s immigration policies are to blame for bringing screwworm stateside again.
“With open borders and the proliferation of the Mexican cartels and their illicit cattle trafficking, the New World screwworm began to make its way north,” Rollins said in recent congressional testimony.
Setting aside that Biden’s approach was not one of “open borders,” there are several flaws with this argument.
First, to be clear, experts do not think migrants themselves are carrying screwworm frequently enough to spread the pest. Paul E. Kaiser, a retired insect geneticist who had leadership roles in two sterile screwworm production facilities, told us that to the best of his knowledge, “no data” support that idea.
Illegal cattle movement, including from the cartels, however, likely did play a role in bringing screwworm north. Researchersandjournalistshave documented how cartels traffic cattle with falsified veterinary papers to launder money and how those trade routes align with the spread of the pest. But scientists told us that this does not explain what originally went wrong because illicit trade has long been a problem — and yet screwworm had remained at bay.
Illegal livestock movement “had nothing to do with the outbreak” itself, Kaiser said. Animals “infected with screwworms are brought illegally from Colombia into the Darien every year,” he explained. “So illegal cattle trade exacerbated the problem, but it didn’t start the problem.”
Taylor agreed. The illegal cattle trade “may have accelerated the pace of the advance, especially once they made it through Panama and Costa Rica,” he said, “but I think the flies would have made it to Texas with or without cattle smuggling.”
“Illegal livestock movements can certainly contribute to spread, but the biology of the parasite does not support immigration policy as the principal explanation for what occurred,” Annelli similarly said.
Moreover, Jennifer Ann Devine, a Texas State University geographer and political ecologist who has studied narco-ranching, told us that it is inappropriate to link the illegal cattle trade to immigration policies.
“If we’re to point blame for screwworm re-emergence, a big part of the puzzle is not immigration policy, but the war on drugs,” she said.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Devine explained, efforts to clamp down on the drug trade have arguably driven the cartels more toward activities such as narco-ranching, which not only offers a source of funding and plausible cover, but also develops new smuggling routes as traffickers seek out more remote areas for their operations.
In terms of drug policy, the Biden and Trump administrations are “much more similar than not,” Devine said, although Trump has perhaps amplified the traditional approach of interdiction, seizure and criminalization.
“Both administrations have contributed to the spread of illegal cattle ranching,” Devine said. “We can’t say that the Biden administration [specifically] made this worse.”
What Scientists Suspect Really Happened
Several scientists told us that one possibility is that the sterile flies being used to maintain the border in Panama became less effective or stopped working. The specific strain in production had been in use for 16 years by 2022, even though entomologists told us that they should have been swapped out at least every eight years, or even every two to three years.
“The fault lies with, in my opinion, very possibly with strain deterioration,” Taylor said, although he cautioned that this was only a suspicion at this point.
As the flies are mass produced, he explained, they could have developed genetic mutations that made the flies less compatible with wild flies or in some way diminished their ability to reduce fly populations in the field. Although the sterile fly facility in Panama — a joint effort between the U.S. and Panama called COPEG — runs tests on the produced flies to check basic functions, Taylor said, there is no direct way to test for effectiveness.
The strain “was obviously not competitive in the field against wild males,” Kaiser told us, calling the breach in the Darien “completely avoidable.” He believes the APHIS employees in charge at USDA in 2022 should have recognized the problem faster, immediately restricting animal movement and collecting a new strain. Panama did not declare a state of emergency until 2023, and a new strain was not established until 2024, which by then was too late, Kaiser said.
This would have occurred under the Biden administration, but multiple administrations had the opportunity to swap out strains or maintain viable backup strains.
Both Taylor and Kaiser also said that these sorts of mistakes would come down to management of the sterile fly program itself, rather than a president or even a USDA chief.
“The blame goes down to the local level for not changing the strain,” Kaiser said.
“I think there have been systematic problems in the program since the early 2000s,” Taylor said. He believes there needs to be an external review.
Enrique Samudio, the then-Panamanian director of COPEG, told a Panamanian newspaper in July 2023 that the “fly wasn’t being effective enough” and said a new strain, which had been cryopreserved, was in production by March 2023. He also attributed the surge in screwworm cases to a variety of other factors, including a larger population of cattle in the Darien than when the program started, ranchers not recognizing the problem and climate change.
COPEG did not respond to our request for more information. According to a February 2026 research study, the current production strain was established in 2024 from 11 lines of flies collected from animal infestations in Panama and Costa Rica during 2022 and 2023.
A variety of other missteps over many years have contributed to the current situation, experts said.
The only facility capable of producing sterile flies until recently was in Panama, with a capacity of 100 million flies per week. Experts say that left no contingency plan in case of a larger outbreak that would need significantly more flies.
“There are not enough flies to do the control,” Taylor said. “You’re putting Band-Aids on mortal wounds until you get more flies.”
There had been another production facility in Chiapas, Mexico, that the U.S. was involved with, but it closed in 2012. “While that closure occurred during the Obama administration period, it would be inaccurate to portray it as solely an Obama administration decision,” Annelli said. “Rather, it reflected a broader perception shared by multiple governments and administrations that screwworm had been sufficiently controlled and that maintaining excess production capacity was no longer necessary.”
Annelli also said that both Republican and Democratic administrations had made cuts to the USDA’s veterinary workforce over the years, leading to staffing shortfalls particularly during emergencies.
Entomologists also bemoaned the fact that the government has not more aggressively pursued the use of an all-male screwworm strain, which would make fly rearing cheaper and much more efficient. As it is now, half the sterile flies that are produced are females and are worthless or worse, since the sterile males may end up mating with them rather than with wild females.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous that we don’t have an all-male strain,” Kaiser said, noting the general concept for such a screwworm strain goes back to at least the 1990s.
Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, has been working on such an effort. He said he tested one strain in the field in 2018 but that COPEG decided not to use it for mass production.
“There were opportunities years ago to develop much more effective genetic methods to control a screwworm,” he said, and “no one funded them.”
Scott said it might never be known why the boundary in Panama failed, but “it’s probably going to be a mix of factors,” noting that there had been an increasing number of cases along the border in Colombia, putting more pressure on the barrier. The blame game politicians are participating in, he said, is “not particularly helpful.”
Rollins’ Claims About Biden’s Actions
On multiple occasions, Rollins has portrayed the previous administration as taking little or no action against screwworm.
In a June 10 Senate hearing, Rollins said, “I was sort of shocked that the last USDA really had no plans, hadn’t really done anything,” regarding screwworm. She later asked, “Why did no one do anything about it until we walked in the door in January and February of last year?”
During an interview in Texas a day after that, Rollins said that when she began as secretary last year, she realized “that really not much had been done to prepare for this moment — no funds had been secured, very little staff … really no money invested, no plan deployed.”
While it’s a matter of opinion whether the Biden administration could or should have done more, it’s not the case that it did nothing and had no funding or plans in place.
In December 2023, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack approved a transfer of $109.8 million in emergency funding to combat screwworm “in areas of Panama and other areas that are critical to preventing the pest from spreading back into North America,” according to an agency press release.
In November 2024, when Mexico notified the USDA of a screwworm detection, the agency immediately halted imports of live cattle and bison from Mexico.
In a letter Vilsack wrote to his counterpart in Mexico just before his departure in January 2025, he said that the authorized emergency funding “has allowed us to increase sterile fly production fivefold in the past year” and to scale up “dispersal, surveillance, education, and partnerships in the region.” He also asked for Mexico’s assistance in setting up “two planned sterile fly dispersal centers in Southern Mexico.”
In twotrade publications in June, Vilsack disputed Rollins’ claims, saying it was not true that the Biden administration’s USDA had done nothing, pointing to the sterile fly additions, funding for a Mexican dispersal facility, bolstered surveillance measures and closing the border to imports, which Vilsack said at the time “was perceived to be a very aggressive step.”
One of the reports also noted that Rollins said that some of the $1.3 billion in screwworm funding under Trump came from Biden administration programs.
Two anonymous former USDA officials also told Politico that the Biden administration had left plans and funding to convert a fruit fly facility in Metapa, Mexico, into a screwworm production facility. The Trump administration took four months to review the spending, officials told the outlet. Agri-Pulse published a similar account. Rollins announced the $21 million renovation project in late May 2025.
USDA did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson, however, told Politico that the agency “has moved at lightning speed to obtain any and all necessary funding and approvals to fight New World screwworm,” having “aggressively moved dollars and project timelines at a pace unprecedented for [the] U.S. government.”
In early February 2025, the Trump administration resumed cattle imports from Mexico, but halted them again a few months later in May.
Taylor said the Biden administration’s decision to block imports was a “good move” primarily because it slowed the movement of cattle from southern to northern Mexico.
“There were very, very strong feelings amongst my colleagues in Texas that [Trump] should not have reopened the border, and they were quite happy when it was closed again,” he said. “But it was such a short period of time, I don’t think it really had an impact.”
Now, the emphasis is on building up sterile fly production. Rollins has said that the U.S. now needs as many as 500 million sterile flies a week to begin pushing the screwworm back out of the country, essentially starting the eradication process over again.
On June 27, the retrofitted production facility opened in Metapa, Mexico. It will eventually produce as many as 100 million sterile flies a week.
In March, the USDA announced a contract to build a new sterile fly facility at Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas, that eventually can produce 300 million flies a week. But the first flies aren’t expected until around November 2027, with an initial start of 100 million per week.
Kaiser said it would likely take several years before screwworm is out of Texas again, and over a decade before the flies are pushed once more back to the Darien.
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