News Reel

LAUSD provides resources to diverse schools in an effort to combat segregation – Pam Bondi’s agency wants it to stop

For decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District has classified its schools based on the proportion of enrolled students who aren’t white.

In a city where more than two-thirds of residents identify as Hispanic, Black or Asian, that meant a vast majority were found to have extraordinarily diverse student bodies. And in an effort to combat segregation, the school district has afforded those diverse schools with smaller class sizes and other benefits.

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing
• Klæbo claims sixth gold of Games | And email Tanya

Men’s four-man bobsleigh In the workshop, a man carefully waxes down a sleigh. Another Canadian team next, under Dearborn, but they can’t improve on their countrymen.

Men’s four-man bobsleigh: The French have a cracking silver sled, but it all goes wrong at the start when one of the riders gets his foot stuck.

On Friday, President Trump signed a proclamation that would impose 10% tariffs on most foreign imports to the United States.

Proposal will be at heart of offer to US as Trump considers whether to attack Iran

Iran is refusing to export its 300kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but is willing to dilute the purity of the stockpile it holds under the supervision of UN nuclear inspectorate the IAEA, Iranian sources have said.

The proposal will be at the heart of the offer Iran is due to make to the US in the next few days, as the US president, Donald Trump, weighs whether to use his vast naval build-up in the Middle East to attack the country.

Blizzard warnings were issued Saturday for New York City, New Jersey and coastal communities along the East Coast.

Can being "very online" really affect our brains, asks the Washington Post: Research suggests that scrolling through short videos on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube Shorts is affecting our attention, memory and mental health. A recent meta-analysis of the scientific literature found that increased use of short-form video was linked with poorer cognition and increased anxiety... In a 2025 study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers looked at longitudinal data from more than 7,000 children across the country and found that more screen use was associated with reduced cortical thickness in certain areas of the brain. The cortex, which is the outer layer that sits on top of our more primitive brain structures, allows for higher-level thinking, memory and decision-making. "We really need it for things like inhibitory control or not being so impulsive," said Mitch Prinstein, a senior science adviser to the American Psychological Association and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study. The cortex is also important for controlling addictive behaviors. "Those seem to be the areas being affected by the reduced cortical thickness," he said, explaining that impulsivity can prompt us to seek dopamine hits from social media. In the study, more screen time was also associated with more attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms... But not all screen time is created equal. A recent study removed social media from kids' devices but let them use their phones for as long as they wanted. The result? Kids spent just as long on their phones but didn't have the same harmful effects. "It's what you're doing on the screen that matters," Prinstein said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The man known for his walk-off, ninth-inning World Series-winning home run died Friday at age 89.

Labour MPs may clamour for bolder spending, but – like their Tory and Reform counterparts – they ask for the unaffordable

Too many Labour MPs want it all, and no amount of pleading from the top of government about the depleted public finances seems to make a difference.

The mainly leftist MPs want all the wrongs of the last 15 years put right and quickly. Their next opportunity to demand more cash arrives when Rachel Reeves delivers her spring statement on 3 March.

Parts of Maga view Israel with suspicion, but US ambassador continues to believe in its divine right to much of the Middle East

Parts of the Maga right may be souring on Israel – but a hardline form of Christian Zionism seems to remain unofficial Trump administration policy, if a heated debate between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is any indication.

On Friday, Carlson released a confrontational video interview with Huckabee, conducted at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, that vividly illustrated a gaping divide between two factions of the Republican party. On one side is a Christian nationalist stream of the Maga movement, which views the United States’s close relationship with Israel with increasing suspicion. On the other is an older Christian conservative establishment that views that alliance as a totem of US foreign policy – and in some cases believes that Israeli Jews possess a divine right to a large swathe of the Middle East, US public opinion be damned.

Don't let those ancient printers and PCs live rent-free in your home.

• Long-time rivals play for gold on Sunday at 2026 Games

• Tensions are high between two teams

• Status of Canada’s Sidney Crosby still uncertain

The US and Canada are prepared for a stormy men’s ice hockey final on Sunday as the long-time rivals face off for Winter Olympic gold.

This year’s Olympics mark the first time NHL players have competed at the Winter Games since 2014, meaning many of the best players in the world will face each other on Sunday. While Canada are the betting favourites – and have won the most ice hockey golds in Olympic history – the US players say they have motivation to upset their northern neighbours.

This week the Python Software Foundation explained how they keep Python secure. A new blog post recognizes the volunteers and paid Python Software Foundation staff on the Python Security Response Team (PSRT), who "triage and coordinate vulnerability reports and remediations keeping all Python users safe." Just last year the PSRT published 16 vulnerability advisories for CPython and pip, the most in a single year to date! And the PSRT usually can't do this work alone, PSRT coordinators are encouraged to involve maintainers and experts on the projects and submodules. By involving the experts directly in the remediation process ensures fixes adhere to existing API conventions and threat-models, are maintainable long-term, and have minimal impact on existing use-cases. Sometimes the PSRT even coordinates with other open source projects to avoid catching the Python ecosystem off-guard by publishing a vulnerability advisory that affects multiple other projects. The most recent example of this is PyPI's ZIP archive differential attack mitigation. This work deserves recognition and celebration just like contributions to source code and documentation. [Security Developer-in-Residence Seth Larson and PSF Infrastructure Engineer Jacob Coffee] are developing further improvements to workflows involving "GitHub Security Advisories" to record the reporter, coordinator, and remediation developers and reviewers to CVE and OSV records to properly thank everyone involved in the otherwise private contribution to open source projects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's guests include United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said of the Jewish state’s biblical right to land in the region: “It would be fine if they took it all.” Arab leaders rejected the comments.

A picture is emerging of one of the worst avalanche disasters in US history, and the women among a tight-knit group of friends who died

The ringing of a phone echoed through the Nevada county, California, sheriff’s office just before noon on 17 February.

The 911 call brought devastating news: an avalanche had occurred on nearby Castle Peak – a 9,110ft (2,780-meter) mountain north of the Donner summit in the Lake Tahoe area. A group of backcountry skiers had been on the mountainside, returning home from a three-day expedition, during a heavy winter storm. While six had survived, more than half their group was missing.

We've tested dozens of robot vacuums to evaluate pickup power, navigation, obstacle avoidance and more. Here are our best picks for 2026. Two of them earned a CNET Lab Award.

I spoke with ear health experts to learn more about the risks of wearing earbuds and which headphone style is best to prevent hearing loss.

Police in Spain seized a stash of about 1,161 pounds of Papaver somniferum, also known as opium poppy.

Team USA could add more gold medals to its tally, including on Sunday when the U.S. men's hockey team takes on Team Canada.

Gentler take on mullet has flowed over shoulders at Winter Olympics and is now tossed on red carpets

Hair cut ideas are typically drummed up in the salon, but recently a more unconventional source of inspiration has appeared: the vegetable aisle.

“Lettuce hair” is trending. A gentler take on a traditional mullet, the new salad style consists of more subtle differences in the length between the back, sides and top of the hair. Lettuce hair features a loose and often wavy top, softly tapered sides and a feathery tail that skims the back of the neck, resembling leafy greens.

Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

Congress members write to Kristi Noem to express ‘grave concern’ over detention of Georgia barber Rodney Taylor

Representative Pramila Jayapal and 20 members of Congress are seeking the release of Rodney Taylor from Stewart detention center in Georgia, several weeks after the one-year anniversary of when agents seized the double amputee outside his suburban home in Loganville, about 40 miles north-east of Atlanta.

The representatives sent a two-page letter on 17 February to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), drawing extensively from the Guardian’s reporting and quoting several stories in detail with “grave concern” due to Taylor’s “extreme hardship in detention and [because] his health is continuing to deteriorate”.

You can watch Lionel Messi without worrying about paying for a season pass.

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates.

As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there’s a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won’t be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request.

Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions – Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 – but if you’re happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

Guardian investigation showed Josh Simons falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ

Politicians from across the spectrum have said a minister should be sacked after a Guardian report that he had accused journalists of having links to Russian intelligence.

Their comments came after an investigation showed that Josh Simons, who was running Labour Together at the time, had falsely concluded the journalists had obtained information about the thinktank from a Russian hack.

A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the Emmy-winning program, hosted by Jane Pauley.

Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event is a few days away. Here's what we know so far about the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra.

Commentary: You might not even need a new phone to get clicky buttons.

The US supreme court ruled against the president. Let’s hope the court removes its pro-Trump glasses on other issues and stands up for the rule of law

There’s no denying that the US supreme court’s long-awaited ruling that overturned Donald Trump’s global tariffs is important, and if the ruling turns out to be a harbinger that the court is ready to abandon its startling sycophancy toward the US president, it could prove hugely important. The ruling this Friday is the first time during Trump’s second term that the justices have struck down one of his policies. Not only that, the policy they struck down is Trump’s signature economic policy – he has used tariffs to bash, lord over and terrorize dozens of other countries and make himself the King of the Economic Jungle.

In the court’s main opinion, joined by three conservative justices and three liberals, chief justice John Roberts used some sharp language to slap down Trump’s tariffs, writing that the constitution specifically gives Congress, not the president, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. (Roberts noted that tariffs are indeed taxes.)

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

String of embarrassing defeats for prosecutors as experts condemn DoJ effort to cast people as ‘violent perpetrators’

Department of Justice prosecutors across the US have suffered a string of embarrassing defeats in their aggressive pursuit of criminal cases against people accused of “assaulting” and “impeding” federal officers.

In recent months, the federal government has relentlessly prosecuted protesters, government critics, immigrants and others arrested during immigration operations, often accusing them of physically attacking officers or interfering with their duties.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: You wear them at work, you wear them at play, you wear them to relax. You may even get sweaty in them at the gym. But an investigation into headphones has found every single pair tested contained substances hazardous to human health, including chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminization of males. [...] Researchers say that while individual doses from particular sources may be low, a "cocktail effect" of daily, multi-source exposure nevertheless poses potentially severe long-term risks to health. [...] Researchers bought 81 pairs of in-ear and over-ear headphones, either on the market in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria, or from the online marketplaces Shein and Temu, and took them for laboratory analysis, testing for a range of harmful chemicals. "Hazardous substances were detected in every product tested," they said. Bisphenol A (BPA) appeared in 98% of samples, and its substitute, bisphenol S (BPS), was found in more than three-quarters. Synthetic chemicals used to stiffen plastic, BPA and BPS mimic the action of oestrogen inside organisms, causing a range of adverse effects including the feminization of males, early onset puberty in girls, and cancer. Previous studies have shown that bisphenols can migrate from synthetic materials into sweat, and that they can be absorbed through the skin. "Given the prolonged skin contact associated with headphone use, dermal exposure represents a relevant pathway, and it is reasonable to assume that similar migration of BPA and its substitutes may occur from headphone components directly to the user's skin," the researchers said. Also found in the headphones tested were phthalates, potent reproductive toxins that can impair fertility; chlorinated paraffins, which have been linked to liver and kidney damage; and brominated and organophosphate flame retardants, which have similar endocrine disrupting properties to bisphenols. Most were, however, found in only trace quantities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are we close to getting those new Avengers, Avatar and Coco rides? And what about the new lands for Cars, Monsters Inc. and Disney's villains? Here's what to expect and when.

With his six medals at Milano Cortina, Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has broken​ and extended the previous record of eight for most career Winter Olympic gold medals.

Investigators in the Nancy Guthrie case have turned to genetic genealogy as they try to make the most of potential DNA evidence.

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS.

ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.)

↫ Alan Coopersmith

You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls.

Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill.

↫ Alan Coopersmith

There’s many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we’ll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

Exclusive: Rami Ranger, who was suspended temporarily in 2023, makes successful bid at party fundraising event

A Conservative donor who was suspended from the party after being accused of bullying and inappropriate language spent £50,000 last week to have dinner with Kemi Badenoch, the Guardian has learned.

Rami Ranger was the successful bidder for the dinner at a Tory fundraising event and will attend the meal with a small group of friends, infuriating those in the party who believe he should not have been readmitted.

In Britain, the establishment has been shaken to the core by the files. In the US, however, ‘the Epstein class’ has faced little legal or political reckoning

The contrast could not be starker. At around 8am on Thursday, British police swooped on the Sandringham royal estate to arrest the former prince Andrew after allegations that he had shared confidential material with the late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was a seismic shock for the monarchy.

A week earlier Pam Bondi, the top US law enforcement official, was asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators her department had indicted, or whether she would give state attorneys general access to evidence to build further cases. She refused to answer.

Recent incidents involving Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert suggest things are not well at the network after the acquisition financed by Trump supporter Larry Ellison

Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.

If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

The civil rights trailblazer imagined a future for America in which the marginalized became the center of US politics

Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil- and human-rights trailblazer who died on 17 February, imagined a version of America where the marginalized became the center. His was a much more progressive vision than what the Democratic party thought possible after the civil rights movement, and through Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition – launched after his first presidential campaign in 1984 – he laid the groundwork for a new era.

“This Rainbow Coalition is the embodiment of a national politics that is radically inclusive,” Charles McKinney, a professor of history at Rhodes Collegesaid. “He was like: ‘I’ve got something for the middle class, I’ve got something for the elite, and I also have something for working-class folks. To me, that was the embodiment of his politics.”

An unlimited data phone plan opens all sorts of options. We pick our favorite plans with unlimited data from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

Smart rings are in, but they're not created equally. This is the one I swear by.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra performance and features are not that different from the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and likely the S26 Ultra). Plus, the S24 Ultra is half the price of the S25 Ultra.

Doug Ruch died in New Zealand in December after article called him a ‘conman’ but cause of death remains unknown

A US man who spoke to various media outlets about having terminal cancer and raising money to travel for community service projects died shortly before Christmas in New Zealand – the day after an article by a journalist there accused him of actually being “an alleged serial conman”.

Authorities in the US and New Zealand recently confirmed Douglas Lee “Doug” Ruch, 56, died in the capital of Auckland on 18 December, months after his so-called “Dying to Serve” tour. The hundreds of thousands of dollars he raised on GoFundMe earned headlines in the Washington Post, National Public Radio and the Guardian.

An orphaned monkey in Japan has captured hearts, flooding the zoo with visitors and boosting sales for the plush toy that became a comfort to him.

Police continue searches at Mountbatten-Windsor’s former Windsor home after arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office

Buckingham Palace will not oppose plans to remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the royal line of succession, the Guardian understands, as police confirmed a search of his former Windsor home would continue over the weekend.

Royal sources indicated on Saturday that King Charles would not stand in the way of parliament if it wanted to ensure the former prince could never ascend to the throne.

Galatz, which broadcasts revelatory reporting and wide-ranging talk, is one of Israel’s most popular stations. Critics see a broader effort to silence dissent.

What I am Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: When power meets principle

• A Historic Arrest Signals the End of Royal Immunity: Randy Andy goes to jail

• A Promise Made, A Promise Broken: Health‑Care Trust Plummets Under RFK Jr.

• Hidden Roots: Frederick Douglass fights for himself and the country

• What I’m Reading: A fairly fresh printing of James Baldwin’s essays

• Jukebox Playlist: Miles Davis, Milestones

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“No man is above the law, and no man is below it.” — Theodore Roosevelt

The quote has been repeated so often that it sounds more like a slogan than a principle. But life is tricky, in that it continues to hand us tests as to whether we actually believe it in practice. It seems so familiar that we really should ace it, but we don’t. In fact, most often, as a society, we fail to live up to Teddy’s words.

Thankfully, all we have to do is wait half a second and we’ll surely be tested again.

On the basketball court, rules are clear. They don’t bend for fame or reputation, or how much money you have in your bank account. You still have to run back on defense. You still have to earn your minutes. And if you mess up, you definitely hear about it for days, sometimes for years. That’s what makes a team work: accountability isn’t selective. It’s an equal-opportunity employer and destroyer.

But off the court—even though it wants to, or says it does—the world doesn’t seem to play by those rules. Too often, power is a shield. Wealth is insulation. And the people who should be held to the highest standard end up overriding the consequences that the rest of us live with every day. Put another way, they get off scot-free…a term that doesn’t originate either from Dred Scott or from Scotland, but that dates back to the 11th Century and stands for not paying one’s fair share of taxes—something many American billionaires and politicians are quite familiar with.

But accountability isn’t about punishment. It’s about trust. Trusting that the system works the same for everyone, not just the people with the right last name or the right connections. When the law at long last reaches upward toward people who have spent a lifetime above the fray, it sends a message that the ground is finally leveling, if only for a moment.

And these moments don’t happen because the universe suddenly wakes up with a sense of justice. They happen because We the People get tired of being the so-called Silent Majority…a grouping that never actually existed…or even the Vocal Minority. When we’ve had enough and more than enough, we take to the streets and the ballot boxes. Pressure builds, survivors speak, documents surface, justice is finally done…and we breathe a sigh of relief because Teddy Roosevelt was right, for once.

And that too-rare moment is where a new story begins.

Read more

Critics say Reform leader’s patronising rhetoric is part of worrying trend. He says scrutiny is a two way street.

When Nigel Farage told a journalist this week she should “write some silly story … and we won’t bother to read it”, it provoked an instant – and divided – reaction. For some it was a “masterclass” in dealing with mainstream media, but for others it was “rude, dismissive, misogynistic, arrogant”.

Behind the scenes, Farage’s treatment of the Financial Times’s Anna Gross – which was met with mirth and applause among Reform diehards in the room – provoked disquiet and anger among lobby journalists across the political spectrum.

Research project warns fall in homeworking roles could undermine efforts to reduce unemployment

A decline in the number of jobs for people who need to work remotely, including those with disabilities, could undermine the government’s efforts to reverse rising unemployment, according to a two-year study.

More than eight in 10 respondents to a survey of working-age disabled people by researchers at Lancaster University said access to home working was essential or very important when looking for a new job.

Banner at justice department just the latest example of how president has imposed himself on daily US life

You wouldn’t be alone if you feel that the US more closely resembles North Korea these days – with giant images of the dear leader scowling down on the citizenry, and his name inscribed everywhere from public buildings to street signs, transportation hubs and self-aggrandizing monuments.

Thursday’s unfurling of a massive banner bearing the visage of Donald J Trump, the 47th US president, on the exterior of the Washington headquarters of the federal justice department was only the latest example of how he has imposed himself on every facet of American life. Some critics have called it “dictator vibes”.

History shows that when called to testify about difficult things – Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi – Bill and Hillary excel

For political connoisseurs of a certain vintage, it feels like deja vu all over again.

To anyone who witnessed Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the once unimaginable spectacle of a sitting president testifying under oath over sexual misconduct allegations levelled on a wave of Republican antipathy became so familiar as to seem almost routine.

Arab Americans in Dearborn and beyond are being swept up by ICE at places of worship and work, with devastating consequences

Lorenda Lewis is so tired she can barely keep her head straight. Surrounded by her six young children at a cafe in Dearborn, Michigan, she recounts the nightmare of the past four months that saw her husband, Abdelouahid Aouchiche, an Algerian national, taken away.

It was still dark when, at about 5.15am last October, her 61-year-old husband and 12-year-old son, Abdullah, arrived at the Furqan mosque for morning prayers. Abdullah recalls his father being approached by two men outside the mosque, grabbing him and asking for his papers. After a brief conversation, he says he was allowed to call his mother and told to go inside the mosque by the agents. When she arrived minutes later, her husband and the agents were gone.

Files show accuser in 2011 provided extensive account of abuse as questions mount over why action was not taken

The Department of Justice’s release of millions of Jeffrey Epstein files has not only prompted questions about his crimes – but renewed attention on authorities’ failure to stop him after an accuser reported him in 1996.

This new cache of Epstein files has provided more insight into authorities’ familiarity with allegations against him in the years that followed, including time between his sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and federal arrest nearly six years ago.

Trump orders massive buildup of naval forces in Middle East, leading to fears of an imminent war

Iran’s foreign minister has said he expects to have a draft counterproposal ready within days after nuclear talks with the US this week, while Donald Trump said he was considering limited military strikes.

The US president has ordered a massive buildup of naval forces in the Middle East, including repositioning aircraft carriers and other warships, leading to fears of an imminent war. But it is not clear if the military movements are intended as an intimidation tactic to put pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.

For a decade, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was arrested on Thursday, advocated globally for U.K. trade, cooking up deals that at times made his family cringe.

The conservative-heavy court had largely given Trump everything he desired – until now, when two of his three nominees turned their back on him

After an agonising year in which the US supreme court has stood aside and watched while Donald Trump has run roughshod over the constitutional separation of powers, the highest judicial panel has finally stirred itself to set boundaries on the president’s increasingly regal pose.

Friday’s supreme court ruling declared Trump’s sweeping tariffs unlawful, yanking from the president the bloodied cudgel which he has used to beat foreign friend and foe alike.

OpenAI is reportedly developing its first consumer hardware product: a $200-$300 smart speaker with a built-in camera capable of recognizing "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity." It's also said to feature Face ID-style authentication for purchases. The Verge reports: In addition to the smart speaker, OpenAI is "possibly" working on smart glasses and a smart lamp, The Information reports. (Apple may also be working on a smart lamp.) But OpenAI's glasses might not hit mass production until 2028, and while OpenAI has made prototypes of gadgets like the smart lamp, The Information says it's "unclear" if they'll be released and that OpenAI's devices plans are in early stages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

• State board to finalize insurance coverage changes for weight loss drugs
• State utility regulator to hear input on possible grid connection costs for data centers
• Joint Finance Committee to review proposed Health and Social Services budget
• Education funding commission to discuss reforms, legislative timeline

State Employee Benefits Committee to change weight loss drug coverage

The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, will meet on Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs. Those changes could mean employees covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.

The SEBC previously met on Friday, Feb. 13, to introduce the potential coverage changes. 

At that meeting, the committee heard multiple different options that could save the state money, but they would pass costs onto consumers using the drugs in the form of higher co-pays, almost four or five times higher than the current rate.

According to a presentation at the meeting, members pay $32 for a 30-day supply of the drug or $64 for a 90-day supply. If new copays are added to the state plan, those numbers would jump to $120 and $200, respectively. 

Another option would be to completely eliminate coverage of the drugs for state employees who use them for weight loss, which officials suspect would save the state $179 million over the next three years. 

If the state continues its coverage as is, the SEBC estimates it would cost nearly $211 million by 2029.

📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee will meet publicly at 9 a.m. Monday at the Delaware Department of Human Resources, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd., Suite 100, in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.

Utility regulator to hear resident input on data center regulations

The Public Service Commission, the state body charged with regulating utility services, will hear public comment on Wednesday about Delmarva Power’s proposed “large-load tariff” for energy-hungry facilities like data centers to ensure they do not shift energy infrastructure costs onto other ratepayers.

The tariff, if approved by the PSC, would set a new electricity rate for data centers and require them to pay deposits to cover the engineering and equipment cost of electrical infrastructure improvements.

The proposal comes months after Delmarva revealed it is working with five data center developers whose projects would demand a combined 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy.

The peak load, or demand for electricity, of the entire state is 2.3 GW in the winter and 2.7 GW in the summer, according to PJM.

That means the proposed data centers would together almost double the power demand for all businesses and homes in the First State.

📍 The Public Service Commission will hear comments at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the PSC Hearing Room, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.

Lawmakers to review Meyer’s proposed DHSS, DelDOT spending

State lawmakers’ budget hearings will continue this week with testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation, two of the largest state departments by budget size.

Lawmakers will also review the Fire Prevention Commission’s budget proposal. 

The Joint Finance Committee’s budget review for DHSS will span the entirety of both Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings, as the department oversees a swath of large-scale programs used by many Delawareans, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover.

Tuesday’s hearing will include testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services. The morning will focus on a department-wide overview and Public Health. The afternoon will focus on Social Services and Medicaid & Medical Assistance.

Wednesday’s hearing will continue the DHSS budget review. The morning will focus on Substance Abuse and Mental Health and Aging & Aging Adults w/Physical Disabilities and Health Care Quality. The afternoon will focus on Developmental Disabilities Services.

Thursday’s hearing will feature testimony from the Fire Prevention Commission in the morning, and then from the Department of Transportation in the afternoon.

For information about virtual attendance for the Tuesday meeting, click here. For the Wednesday meeting, click here. And for the Thursday meeting, click here.

Education funding reform discussions continue

The Public Education Funding Commission, created by the General Assembly to recommend how dollars should be distributed to Delaware schools, will meet on Monday to discuss the “legislative timeline” of its proposed hybrid funding formula.

The hybrid proposal incorporates the state’s traditional framework of distributing money on a per-student basis with one that allocates dollars based on student needs.

The commission will also discuss local education funding models, comparing Delaware’s referendum model to that of other states. 

The commission’s work to reform public education spending comes after Gov. Matt Meyer made the issue a pillar of his gubernatorial campaign.  

📍 The Public Education Funding Commission will meet virtually at 4 p.m. Monday. For more details, click here.

Nick Stonesifer and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.

The post Get Involved: GLP-1 coverage, data center regulations, budget review, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don’t work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep—and minimize jet lag when they’re traveling.

My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don’t work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color.

↫ Patrick Mineault

And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It’s pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. "The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid," reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy's NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now) program. From the report: The researchers are developing ADS technology. This system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target (such as liquid mercury), triggering a process called "spallation." This releases a flood of neutrons that interact with unwanted, long-lived isotopes in nuclear waste. The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components of the waste by transmuting these elements. While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years. [...] To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power. Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin. These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation. The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron -- the same component that powers microwave ovens -- to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS. The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency. The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even as weather extremes worsen, the voices calling for the rolling back of environmental rules have grown louder and more influential

In the timeless week between Christmas and the new year, two Spanish men in their early 50s – friends since childhood, popular around town – went to a restaurant and did not come home.

Francisco Zea Bravo, a maths teacher active in a book club and rock band, and Antonio Morales Serrano, the owner of a popular cafe and ice-cream parlour, had gone to eat with friends in Málaga on Saturday 27 December. But as the pair drove back to Alhaurín el Grande that night, heavy rains turned the usually tranquil Fahala River into what the mayor would later call an “uncontrollable torrent”. Police found their van overturned the next day. Their bodies followed after an agonising search.

Creators say they’re offering Africans a ‘hopeful, utopian feeling’ of retrieving objects looted by colonial armies

A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a series of heists, amid a growing campaign to repatriate treasures looted by colonial armies.

Players of Relooted become South African sports scientist and parkour expert Nomali, as she leaps and dives through museums to retrieve 70 real objects. They include an Asante gold mask that was taken by the British army when it destroyed the Asante empire’s capital, Kumasi, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Another object is the skull of the Tanzanian king Mangi Meli, which was taken to Germany after its colonial regime executed him in 1900.

As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost

Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal and mass killer. It’s not only the victim-blaming and bullying of Kyiv into making concessions. It’s not even Donald Trump’s crass attempts to monetise the war and milk the misery of millions for Nobel glory, while undercutting Nato allies and trampling sovereign rights.

What really shocks, and hurts, is the sheer bad faith shown by a country that Europeans always counted a friend. As the 18th-century English gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe noted, “few circumstances are more afflicting than a discovery of perfidy in those whom we have trusted”. To echo Trump’s dark warning after he was rebuffed over Greenland: Europe will remember.

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

When Karen Newton left home in late July 2025, she knew that international travellers were being locked up in immigration detention centres in the US. “I was aware,” she nods. “But I never thought it would have any impact on my holiday.” Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa. She hadn’t been abroad for eight years, and was keen for some guaranteed sun. “I really just wanted to get away from the house.”

She and her husband, Bill, 66, had an ambitious itinerary that would take them through California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and then on to Canada over two months. Las Vegas wasn’t to Karen’s taste: “Way too commercialised.” She much preferred Yellowstone, where they saw Old Faithful, the famous geyser, as it shot boiling water into the air, and got up close with some extraordinary wildlife. “There was a bison right next to the car. Another time, a wolf walked past.” Her eyes sparkle at the memory. “It was just amazing.”

President Trump signed an order that will impose 10% tariffs on imports from all countries, just hours after the Supreme Court struck down a different set of sweeping global tariffs.

Iran has shown how plausible blackouts now are, with far-reaching consequences for the internet as we know it

During the height of Iran’s blackout in January, people could still access a platform that, in some senses, was like the internet.

Iranians could message family members on a government-monitored app and watch clips of Manchester United on a Farsi-language video-sharing site. They could read state news and use a local navigation service.

After meeting with unspecified tech leaders, senator calls for urgent policy action as companies race to build ever more powerful systems

Bernie Sanders has warned that Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.

Speaking at Stanford University on Friday alongside congressman Ro Khanna after a series of meetings with industry leaders in California, Sanders was blunt about what he called the “most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country”.

A federal judge who took the extraordinary step of holding a government lawyer in contempt of court earlier this week blasted the Justice Department for its handling of immigration cases on Friday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson's office has denied a request to have the late Rev. Jesse Jackson lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda due to past precedent.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 21, No. 516.

The Trump administration fired an interim top prosecutor in Eastern Virginia almost immediately after he was hired by a panel of judges, deepening the conflict between the DOJ and the judiciary in that region.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 21.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That's the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited." But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go. "We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed." [...] When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Company behind ChatGPT last year flagged Jesse Van Rootselaar’s account for ‘furtherance of violent activities’

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has said it considered alerting Canadian police last year about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities”.

This live blog is now closed.

• Furious Trump signs global 10% duty after supreme court issues tariff blow

• Trump news at a glance: president lobs insults at US supreme court for striking down his global tariffs

• What will happen to Trump’s tariffs after supreme court verdict?

According to reporters at the supreme court, one box of opinions has been brought out.

Typically, this means we can expect two decisions from the court.

Displays about slavery at the President's House​ in Old City were being restored nearly a month after they were removed by order of the Trump administration.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has cleared the way for a Louisiana law requiring poster-sized displays of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms to take effect.

The U.S. men's hockey team will face Canada on Sunday for the gold medal. The U.S. men have not won gold in the Olympics since the "Miracle on Ice" team in 1980.

Backlash intensified against Discord's age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs. Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored. Discord didn't hide that it planned to continue requesting IDs for any user appealing an incorrect age assessment, and users weren't happy, since that is exactly how the prior breach happened. Responding to critics, Discord claimed that the majority of ID data was promptly deleted. Specifically, Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, told The Verge that IDs shared during appeals "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation." It's unsurprising then that backlash exploded after Discord posted, and then weirdly deleted, a disclaimer on an FAQ about Discord's age assurance policies that contradicted Discord's hyped short timeline for storing IDs. An archived version of the page shows the note shared this warning: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used." Critics felt that Discord was obscuring not just how long IDs may be stored, but also the entities collecting information. Discord did not provide details on what the experiment was testing or how many users were affected, and Persona was not listed as a partner on its platform. Asked for comment, Discord told Ars that only a small number of users was included in the experiment, which ran for less than one month. That test has since concluded, Discord confirmed, and Persona is no longer an active vendor partnering with Discord. Moving forward, Discord promised to "keep our users informed as vendors are added or updated." While Discord seeks to distance itself from Persona, Rick Song, Persona's CEO [...] told Ars that all the data of verified individuals involved in Discord's test has been deleted. Ars also notes that hackers "quickly exposed a 'workaround' to avoid Persona's age checks on Discord" and "found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a U.S. government authorized server." The Rage, an independent publication that covers financial surveillance, reported: "In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting -- and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies." While Persona does not have any government contracts, the exposed service "appears to be powered by an OpenAI chatbot," The Rage noted. Hackers warned "that OpenAI may have created an internal database for Persona identity checks that spans all OpenAI users via its internal watchlistdb," seemingly exploiting the "opportunity to go from comparing users against a single federal watchlist, to creating the watchlist of all users themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as "AI modified." As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform's creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: "I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest]," artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. "Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins." [...] r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. "Pinterest keeps automatically adding the 'AI modified' tag to my Pins... every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then... the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I'm stuck in this endless loop of appealing, label removed, new Pin gets tagged again," read a post on r/Pinterest. The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out. "I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and 'no AI,'" they said. "On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled 'Hand Drawn' but simultaneously marked as 'AI modified,' it creates confusion and undermines that positioning." Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they've seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as "AI modified" despite being older than image generation tech. "There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected," she said. "Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI." Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. "I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it," said another post. "I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer's husband was banned from the Labor Department building after agency employees alleged he had touched them inappropriately, sources said.

Shooting death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, in Texas was not publicly disclosed by Department of Homeland Security

Newly released records show a US citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal immigration agent last year during a late-night traffic encounter that was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, would mark the earliest of at least six deadly shootings by federal officers since the start of a nationwide immigration crackdown in Donald Trump’s second term. On Friday, DHS said the shooting on South Padre Island last March occurred after the driver intentionally struck an agent.

Two skiers died Friday in separate incidents at Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain Resort, marking the latest in a series of ski-related deaths in the region this month.

Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's biggest social networks," Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs' VP of content, said in the blog post. "You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it's our main focus." Ryan went on to note that Meta is still focused on VR hardware. "We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures," Ryan wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump says he's considering limited strikes against Iran as negotiations over its nuclear program are underway. Here are some of the figures talking with him about the decision.

While the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration's emergency tariffs, experts said it could take years for businesses to get refunds.

The driver of the vehicle, a 23-year-old man from Albany, New York, had been reported missing and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

President Trump said he was "ashamed of certain members of the court" after the Supreme Court struck down most of his tariffs.

Barry Manilow announced Friday he needs to reschedule several more concerts as he continues to recover following surgery after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

"Jersey Shore" star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi said in a TikTok video that her results at a post-op appointment for a cone biopsy showed stage 1 cervical cancer.

President calls decision a ‘disgrace to the nation’ while praising three justices who dissented

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump on Friday railed against the supreme court justices who blocked his use of tariffs, calling the decision a “disgrace to the nation”, and later signed documents imposing a 10% tariff on all countries.

“It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” the president said during remarks from the White House. He cast that influence as social and cultural, saying: “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court. Absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint shed 6.8%, and Okta declined 5.7%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF fell as much as 3.8%, extending its losses on the year to 14%. Anthropic said the new tool will "scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review." The firm said the update is available in a limited research preview for now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philanthropist and mother of Elisabeth, James and Lachlan Murdoch died at home in Palm Beach, Florida

The author and philanthropist Anna Murdoch-Mann, the ex-wife of the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, died at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday. She was 81.

Murdoch-Mann’s death was reported Friday by the New York Post, one of her ex-husband’s media properties.

Hezbollah leader among dead as Israel says it hit militant command centres

At least 10 people have been killed and 24 wounded – including three children – in Israeli strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa valley, the Lebanese health ministry has said.

Israel said it had hit “command centres” of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Two security sources told Reuters that the senior Hezbollah leader Hussein Yaghi was killed in the attacks.

Remember the astronauts who were stranded in space for months? NASA says it's close to identifying the "true technical root cause" of the spaceship malfunctions.

Authorities suspect Carl Grillmair was shot by man arrested for carjacking, as friends mourn him as ‘irreplaceable’

A renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientist who studied distant planets and other areas of astronomy for decades was recently shot to death at his home in a rural community outside Los Angeles, authorities said.

Carl Grillmair, 67, died from a bullet wound to the torso on Monday in Llano, an unincorporated community in the Antelope Valley, according to information from the LA county medical examiner’s office. The county sheriff’s department said it had arrested a suspect in Grillmair’s slaying, identifying him as 29-year-old Freddy Snyder.

Nevada county sheriff said investigation includes learning why the ski trip was not cancelled by the guide company

Authorities are investigating whether any criminal negligence was involved in the deadly avalanche that swept California’s Lake Tahoe this week, which killed at least eight skiers and their guides while returning from a three-day backcountry skiing trip.

The Nevada county sheriff’s office said on Friday said that they notified the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), which regulates workplace safety, of the active investigation.

Goldman Sachs has launched an "S&P ex-AI" index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to "hedge their exposure to the AI trade," reports Axios. From the report: "Excluding 'AI enablers' from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype," Louis Miller, head of the firm's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index. The ex-AI index is a compilation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 that are not related to AI, also referred to as old-economy stocks. It's available exclusively to Goldman customers, created in collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices. Taking all the AI out of the S&P doesn't leave much behind, as AI companies make up ~45% of the index, according to the note. Over the last three years, the S&P 500 is up 76%. The ex-AI index is only up 32% in that same time period.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A man, 23, drove a car full of weapons through gate of power facility before shooting himself in the head, officials said

A 23-year-old man drove from New York to a Las Vegas suburb and crashed a rented Nissan Sentra through a gate and into a pile of heavy wire reels at a power substation before shooting himself in the head, local police said on Friday, describing the incident as a suspected act of terrorism.

The suspect, Dawson Noah Maloney, died of the self-inflicted shotgun wound, the Las Vegas sheriff, Kevin McMahill, said at a press conference on Friday. He was wearing soft body armor when police discovered him.

Alysa Liu stunned the skating world by retiring at age 16. Two years later, she returned to the ice, and now she's won gold at the Winter Olympics.

In her new book, the CBS News journalist highlights women who pushed America to live up to its founding promises of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

• Hughes and Eichel spark US rout of Slovakia

• MacKinnon scores late to send Canada through

• Border rivals to meet for men’s hockey gold

The United States and Canada men’s ice hockey teams will play for the gold medal on Sunday’s final day of the Milano Cortina Games after both teams came through semi-final contests of varying difficulty on Friday evening, setting up a blockbuster final in the first Olympic tournament to feature National Hockey League players in 12 years.

Canada left things late in the first game, fighting back from two goals down to win 3-2 over Finland on Nathan MacKinnon’s winner with 35.2 seconds remaining. The US made far lighter work of Slovakia in the nightcap to set up the heavyweight clash, strolling to a 6-2 win after Jack Hughes and Jack Eichel scored in a 19-second span during the second period to blow things open, ensuring the Americans no worse than silver and their first men’s hockey medal in 16 years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases. "There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable." More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The law would have required websites to block VPN users from accessing "harmful material."

Rightwing Trump ally tells Tucker Carlson Israel has biblical right to land from ‘wadi of Egypt to the great river’

The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed with Carlson interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.

The recall involves 3.4 million pounds of frozen chicken fried rice products shipped to Trader Joe's locations nationwide and to retailers in Canada.

The two-day summit in San Diego convenes leaders in AI, power electronics, and future energy, plus an optional technical tour focused on battery energy storage.

Feb. 20, 2026 — San Diego State University will host the 2026 AI x Energy Summit in San Diego on March 19–20, 2026, bringing together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of AI, power electronics, and clean energy—with a specific focus on emerging demands of AI-era data center power and the enabling role of solid-state power conversion and protection.

AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20. Image credit: leolintang/Shutterstock.

The summit will be held at the Tula Community Center, 5110 East Campus Drive, San Diego, CA 92182. Lodging suggestions include downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, or near campus, with convenient access to SDSU via the MTS Green Line Trolley.

The program features plenary talks, panels on topics such as solid-state transformers, energy for AI data centers, and nuclear fusion, a poster session, and an awards ceremony recognizing posters and leaders in AI-energy. Registration ends on February 28, 2026.

This year’s keynote speakers include:

• Dr. Hao Huang, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Adjunct Professor, University of Houston
• Susan Linwood, CEO, Novos Power
• Charles Ku, CTO, Acbel
• Marija Ilić, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Adjunct Professor, MIT
• Anna Stefanopoulou, Distinguished Professor, University of Michigan
• Thomas Schuldt, Vice President, DG Matrix
• Burak Ozpineci, Director, Oakridge National Laboratory
• Panfil Peter, Vice President, Vertiv
• Dr. Don Tan, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Vice President, IEEE
• Salim Youssefzadeh< CEO, WattEV
• Dr. Longya Xu, Member, National Academy of Engineering, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University
• Dr. Jinjun Liu, Distinguished Professor, Xi’an Jiaotong University
• George Santamaria, Director of Power Systems, RockeTruck

This year’s sponsors include Vertiv, SDG&E, Novos Power, DG Matrix, WattEV, and RockeTruck.

The summit welcomes sponsor participation and provides sponsor packages. Interested organizations can contact the conference chair via the event website.

Event Links

• Main website: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu
• Program at a Glance: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/program-at-a-glance
• Registration: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/event-registration
• Sponsors: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/exhibitors-sponsors
• Awards: https://ai-energy.sdsu.edu/awards

More from HPCwire: SDSU Women in STEM Seminar to Host Public Lecture by Kathy Yelick on March 5

Source: SDSU

The post SDSU to Convene AI and Energy Researchers at 2026 AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20 appeared first on HPCwire.

Claims against Wesley Dingus came from teen who had been staying at his residence and hid camera in bedroom

A Republican mayor in Ohio is facing criminal allegations after authorities say he was recorded on a concealed camera smelling an underage girl’s underwear.

An incident report from the Richland county sheriff’s Office details the accusations against Wesley Dingus, 48, who serves as mayor of Butler. The claims came from a juvenile who had been staying at his residence.

Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. "Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, "long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer's heir apparent, has resigned," reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Finally, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer and will work closely with Sharma. "I want to thank Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an email sent to Microsoft staff. "Over 38 years at Microsoft, including 12 years leading Gaming, Phil helped transform what we do and how we do it." [...] Spencer was named Head of Xbox in March of 2014, when he was tasked with righting a ship that had made a number of product choices and policy decisions that rubbed core gamers the wrong way in the run-up to the launch of the Xbox One in Fall 2013. Long hailed by gamers as being one of their own, Spencer could frequently be found on Xbox Live, playing games regularly with fellow Xbox gamers and racking up a healthy Gamerscore. His first major move when put in charge was decoupling the Kinect 2.0 peripheral from the Xbox One package, thus immediately reducing the new console's price by $100 to $399, matching the day-one price of Sony's PlayStation 4. He spearheaded the much-heralded backwards compatibility movement within Xbox, the Xbox Game Pass service was born under his watch, and accessibility made major advances during his tenure in both hardware and software. Xbox Play Anywhere, which sought to let gamers play their Xbox games on any device, be it a PC, console, or handheld, isn't new but has been a big recent focal point. Spencer's time running Xbox will perhaps be most remembered for Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King in 2022, which took almost two years to achieve regulatory approval from various agencies around the world. But Spencer began trying to solve for Xbox's dearth of first-party games in 2018, when the first wave of studio acquisitions occurred. Prior to the Activision deal, Spencer's biggest move came with the $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda, in 2020. The deal gave Xbox total ownership of Bethesda Game Studios and its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises along with id Software and its Doom and Quake IPs, among many others. Questions arose from there about whether or not that meant all of Xbox's new studios would produce games exclusively for Xbox consoles, and while some games were kept off of PlayStation platforms temporarily, many weren't and most now seem to come to PS5 eventually, if not on day one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• American halfpipe competitor says he has no regrets

• Britain’s Gus Kenworthy just misses out on medal

At the start of the Winter Olympics, Donald Trump called Hunter Hess a “real loser” after the US freeskier dared to admit that he had mixed feelings about representing his country.

As he swooped down the halfpipe on Friday morning, Hess delivered a neat riposte, flashing a L-sign with his hand before insisting his row with Trump was something “I definitely wear with pride”.

South Korea win gold and silver in women’s speed skating as new champions were crowned in men’s freeski, men’s aerials, men’s biathlon and women’s ski cross.

The first person down the half pipe was world champ, Finley Melville Ives, who lost a ski mid-air and is languishing at the bottom of the leader board.

Ah, here comes Gus Kenworthy, he of the the urinated ‘fuck ICE’ snow message, and silver medallist in the 2014 ski slopestyle for the US, before switching to Team GB. He’s a brave guy, and has received death threats since his protest.

The decision adds to economic uncertainty, as deals Donald Trump struck with other countries are upended

It is refreshing to witness the US supreme court recover its spine and stand up to Donald Trump’s most extreme caprices. The 6-3 decision on Friday to strike down his barrage of tariffs on imports from virtually everywhere based on the preposterous argument that they addressed national emergencies will reassure the world that the US’s system of government – based on the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rule of law – has not collapsed entirely.

But let’s hold the (imported) champagne. The court’s ruling will not restore the United States to its former place as a reasonable, trustworthy player in the world economy. The rules-based economic architecture that underpinned the integration of the world economy over the decades that followed the second world war remains fractured. Trump is still intent on its disintegration. And he retains power to do so.

Alex Ferreira's first gold medal came after he took silver in Pyeongchang in 2018, and the bronze four years ago in Beijing.

Legislation responds to concerns that immigration officers could interfere with voting during November midterms

A bill introduced this week by California lawmakers would ban federal immigration agents from being stationed outside polling places, responding to concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers could interfere with voting during the November midterm elections.

The legislation was introduced on Thursday by state senator Tom Umberg and co-authored by state senator Sabrina Cervantes. Umberg said the measure aimed to safeguard voters from “ruthless intimidation” near polling locations.

Feb. 20, 2026 — T-Labs, the research and development division within Deutsche Telekom, and Qunnect have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over a commercial network in Berlin, marking a major milestone in advancing deployable quantum technologies on existing telecommunications infrastructure. By using newly commercial technologies to overcome instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure, T-Labs and Qunnect demonstrated how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks.

Credit: Shutterstock

During trials conducted in a real-world telecom environment in January 2026, the team achieved quantum teleportation over 30 km of commercial fiber cables. The experiment was performed using Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware and Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, representing the first practical test of core components required for a future teleportation service. For this demonstration.

Paving the Way for the Future Quantum Internet

Quantum teleportation is a key building block for the future quantum internet enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.

“Our fiber optic network is quantum ready,” says Abdu Mudesir, Telekom Board Member for Product and Technology. “In Berlin we have now proven that quantum information can be transmitted over 30 kilometers of commercial Telekom fiber optics outside of a laboratory. This is done in parallel with regular data traffic and with a very high average accuracy of 90 percent. With quantum teleportation, we are laying the technical foundation for networking quantum computers over longer distances in the future and pooling computing power in more than one location. This will create the next generation of secure communication and a building block for Europe’s technological sovereignty.”

“Teleportation is a novel tool for moving information around networks leveraging quantum physics,” said Mael Flament, Chief Technology Officer at Qunnect. “We are showing the building blocks of teleportation can operate inside a real network, in real racks, under operator control, advancing it from a laboratory experiment to something a telecommunications provider can deploy.”

Quantum teleportation unlocks new applications for quantum networks including quantum cryptography, distributed quantum computing, secure cloud-based quantum services paving the way for quantum data centers, and networks of highly sensitive quantum sensors.

The Demonstration

The trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30-km fiber loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fiber testbed. Qunnect’s Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons for distribution over telecom fiber, along with a polarization compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fiber, enabling high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes. As a result, the teams achieved teleportation fidelities at an average of 90%, according to the preliminary publication of the data. At its peak, an accuracy of 95 percent was achieved.

Importantly, the teleportation part is done at a wavelength (795nm) essential for many platforms such as neutral-atom quantum computers, atomic clocks, and various quantum sensors, paving the path for connecting such systems to the telecom infrastructure for the future quantum internet.

The achievement builds directly on a series of earlier field trials carried out by the same partners, which progressively demonstrated quantum networking over metropolitan fiber links. Qunnect, Deutsche Telekom, and other partners will extend this demonstration to multi-node teleportation configurations, expanding the distance across which they will transfer quantum states. This expansion will evaluate broader deployment and next generation use cases within a metro-scale carrier network infrastructure.

For those who would like to dive deeper, the results of the experiment are published at: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16613

More from HPCwire: Qunnect and Cisco Demonstrate Metro-Scale, High-Speed Quantum Entanglement Swapping Over Commercial Fiber

Source: Deutsche Telekom

The post Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect Successfully Test Quantum Teleportation Over Live Berlin Network appeared first on HPCwire.

Recruitment of children for study delayed after MHRA warns that participants should be no younger than 14

A clinical trial into puberty blockers for children has been paused after the medicines regulator warned it should have a minimum age limit of 14 because of the “unquantified risk” of “long-term biological harms”.

Discussions between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the trial sponsor, King’s College London, will begin next week to discuss the wellbeing concerns, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said on Friday evening.

Samsung is holding an event on Feb. 25 in San Francisco, where we expect the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra to be revealed.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO)​ and Industrial Technologies Office (ITO) announced on Feb. 19 selections totaling $4.8 million for 12 projects that will improve America’s manufacturing competitiveness by harnessing the processing power of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Funded through DOE’s High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program within its High-Performance Computing for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the selected teams will work with staff from one or more DOE national laboratories to advance the development and optimization of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and digital simulations to address their material design and manufacturing challenges. The solutions developed through HPC4Mfg help companies improve the performance of their technologies and/or the efficiency of their processes.

Learn more about the selected projects here.

HPC4Mfg is funded by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. HPC4EI is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Visit the HPC4EI website for additional information.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Awards $4.8M to 12 HPC Projects Supporting US Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform. The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-branded AI image of Harry Potter. The Kaggle dataset's uploader, data scientist Shubham Maindola, told Ars Technica the public domain label was "a mistake" and deleted the dataset after the outlet reached out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court divided 6-3 in finding that a federal law known as IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.

A simple reason explains why U.S. economic growth seemed to hit a wall in the final three months of the year.

Subspecies driven to extinction by hungry whalers returns after ‘back breeding’ programme using partial descendants

Giant tortoises, the life-giving engineers of remote small island ecosystems, are plodding over the Galápagos island of Floreana for the first time in more than 180 years.

The Floreana giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger niger), a subspecies of the giant tortoise once found across the Galápagos, was driven to extinction in the 1840s by whalers who removed thousands from the volcanic island to provide a living larder during their hunting voyages.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 21, No. 1,708.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 21, No. 720.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 21 #986.

President Trump is pressuring Iran to either curtail its nuclear program or face military strikes, after Iran amassed a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Here's what to know.

The county alleges Roblox has engaged in deceptive business practices and is failing to protect children from predators.

• 31-year-old adds to his 2018 silver and 2022 bronze

• Estonia’s Sildaru, Canada’s Mackay round out podium

American freeskier Alex Ferreira won the men’s halfpipe final at the Milano Cortina Winter Games on Friday to complete his collection of Olympic medals.

The 31-year-old Ferreira won with a third and final run worth 93.75 points, adding the gold medal to his silver from Pyeongchang in 2018 and bronze from Beijing in 2022.

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy. The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar. On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack. OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple revamped its entire Apple Watch line, but some models got more improvements than other. We look at all the details.

The Trump administration on Friday formally proposed a regulation that would dramatically restrict work permits for asylum-seekers.

In mid-January, an unassuming man in khakis and a button-down shirt walked to a wooden lectern at a school board meeting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Most chairs in the audience were empty. The man, Tim Smith, was the only person signed up to speak during public comments. He had five minutes.

“I trust that each one of you had a good Christmas and New Year’s,” he began. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing.”

His wife is an assistant teacher at a public elementary school in the county, epicenter of the state’s historic measles outbreak, and shortly before winter break she’d received a notice that a child in her classroom had measles. Given his wife is fully vaccinated, he wasn’t worried. 

Then, she began to get sick. And sicker. She got a measles test and, to their shock, it came back positive. She was apparently among the very rare breakthrough infections. 

Frightened, they took her to the hospital that night. “My wife was throwing up,” Smith said at the meeting. “She had diarrhea. She couldn’t breathe. All for what? This is — it’s absolute insanity.” 

Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician working a county away, wasn’t even aware that anyone in South Carolina had been hospitalized with measles-related illnesses until a short time later when she logged on to Facebook and saw someone relay the distraught husband’s comments. 

Part of the reason Bragg didn’t know is that South Carolina doesn’t require hospitals to report admissions for measles, potentially obscuring the disease’s severity. In the absence of mandatory reporting rules, she and other doctors are often left to rely on rumors, their grapevines of colleagues, and the fragments of information the state public health agency is able to gather and willing to share. 

With 973 reported cases, South Carolina’s measles outbreak has ballooned into the nation’s largest since the virus was declared eliminated in the U.S. 25 years ago. Yet, since state health officials first confirmed the outbreak on Oct. 2, the state’s hospitals have reported only 20 measles-related admissions, or about 2% of cases. Some infectious disease experts say that the true number is likely much higher. 

Hospitalization rates can vary greatly by a measles outbreak’s location and who is getting infected. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 20% of measles cases will result in admissions.  

“A hospitalization rate at 2% is ludicrous,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization advisory committee. 

“It’s vast underreporting,” Offit said. “Measles makes you sick.”

Measles is among the most contagious of viruses. In 2026 so far, almost half of states have reported cases. Yet it’s left largely to each state to decide how much infectious disease reporting to require about it. 

“We don’t think we are getting an accurate picture at all of how these illnesses are impacting our community,” Linda Bell, the South Carolina state epidemiologist, said at a briefing last month. “We’re just not getting a picture of that now with the small number of hospitalizations that are known to us.” 

Bell said the state Department of Public Health is urging hospitals to report their measles-related admissions, and seven hospitals have done so. (There are at least a dozen acute care hospitals in the Upstate alone.) But the state cannot force them to do so. Bell also said that the agency, which sets infectious disease reporting requirements, hasn’t considered adding hospitalizations to the list because the primary purpose of public health surveillance is to understand disease transmission, frequency and distribution — not to track complications.

That leaves doctors like Bragg advising patients, including vaccine-resistant parents, without the benefit of confirmed, real-time data about how many South Carolinians have been hospitalized with measles. Severe complications include pneumonia, dehydration and a potentially life-threatening brain swelling called encephalitis.

“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”

ProPublica contacted state health agencies across the South and found most do not require hospitals to report measles-related admissions. Alabama does. So does Virginia, although it doesn’t release that data to the public. Like South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas don’t require reporting of hospitalizations, but epidemiologists can identify them during case investigations.

During the Texas measles outbreak last year, 99 people were hospitalized out of 762 cases. 

That’s a rate of about 13%. In South Carolina, the reported rate is 2%.

Real-time hospitalization data can show where to target resources and help hospitals prepare for an influx of patients. “As vaccine rates decrease, it could also really help us understand the changing epidemiology of measles in this current context,” said Gabriel Benavidez, an epidemiology professor at Baylor University in Texas.

When ProPublica asked hospitals across the Upstate, the northwest quadrant of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated, if they are reporting their measles-related admissions to the state and how many patients they had treated, few responded. Only Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System shared its total. (As of mid-February, the number was four.) 

A spokesperson for Prisma Health, a Greenville-based nonprofit that owns eight acute-care hospitals in the Upstate, said its hospitals are “reporting everything we are supposed to report.” She wouldn’t say how many measles patients have been hospitalized at Prisma hospitals or how many the system has reported to the state. 

Doctors in the Dark 

Bragg, who is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric infectious disease, works in the region of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated. It’s a highly religious expanse with the state’s lowest student vaccination rates. She recently met with a parent questioning the recommended vaccines for a 1-year-old child, which includes a first dose of measles vaccine.  

“We’re in the middle of a measles outbreak,” Bragg thought.

Then she began a 30-minute discussion of the vaccine’s extreme safety and 97% lifetime effectiveness when two doses are given. She explained that 95% of people in South Carolina who have gotten measles were unvaccinated. She rattled off historic risks of measles complications. 

Yet Bragg couldn’t tell the parent just how severely ill their fellow South Carolinians were getting from the outbreak sickening people around them. 

She had heard about pneumonia, ICU admissions — and even a case of encephalitis. But she hadn’t been able to confirm it, or find out if it was a child, much less how the patient fared. (Shortly after, Bell announced that the state health agency had learned of encephalitis cases in children, but she didn’t provide the numbers of patients or their outcomes.) 

As president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Martha Edwards is connected to physicians across the state. “All I’m hearing about are ‘complications of measles,’” which can mean a lot of different things, she said.

Communicating the risks of severe illness is all the more important because few of today’s parents have seen measles up close. Neither have most practicing doctors. 

Early in his career, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University who focuses on the prevention of infectious diseases, worked with the CDC to implement the measles vaccine. When he tells medical students today that in the 1960s, before the measles vaccine, 400 to 500 kids died of measles and its complications each year, “They’re stunned.” 

“If the severity of the illness cannot be ascertained — if it can’t be determined — it can’t be appropriately communicated to the public,” Schaffner said. “And the public might get the false impression that measles is milder than it really is.”

At a briefing, Dr. Robin LaCroix, a Prisma pediatric infectious disease physician, said the organization’s physicians “have seen the whole gamut of acute and post-measles infections that have afflicted these children. They are sick.” Children have become listless and suffered blotchy rashes, coughing and coughing spasms, dehydration and secondary infections including pneumonias.

Measles infections are particularly dangerous for babies who cannot get vaccinated yet and young children who haven’t gotten the second dose. Infections during pregnancy also pose severe risks for mothers who are not vaccinated or immune, including miscarriage and a tenfold increase in death due to pneumonia. Mothers can pass on the virus to their babies, “which can be catastrophic,” said Dr. Kendreia Dickens-Carr, a Prisma OB-GYN.

More than 900 confirmed measles cases have been reported across the country already in 2026, compared with 2,281 in all of 2025. Most of this year’s cases are in South Carolina, but Florida has reported 63 cases and neighboring North Carolina 15, including one hospitalization. 

“We really do need to think about the way in which we report these things, because viruses and bacteria don’t respect state lines,” said Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. “Public health professionals from one state to another should be comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.” 

The most advanced pediatric care in the state is provided at the Medical University of South Carolina’s campus in Charleston, several hours away from the Upstate on the coast. So far, its children’s hospital hasn’t admitted any measles patients, doctors said. 

Dr. Danielle Scheurer, the chief quality officer at MUSC, celebrated the state’s low hospitalization rate and said she doubted hospitals would object to required reporting of measles-related admissions if the state health agency were to change its rules. 

“Transparency here is going to help other states,” Scheurer said. “The more transparent we are about all of our statistics, the better off any other state is going to be in preparing.” 

Political Pressures

Across South Carolina, large health care systems have bought up local hospitals and doctors’ practices. With that control, they can exert influence over what those doctors and hospital employees say publicly, especially when it comes to potentially controversial topics like vaccines. At the same time, they face pressure from Republican lawmakers and a growing segment of vaccine-wary patients. 

The result is often highly controlled information sharing, or a lack thereof.

“There’s this level of caution that wasn’t there before,” Edwards said. She understands that hospitals don’t want to offend patients who are dubious of vaccines. Bragg agreed but said given that 93% of the state’s students are vaccinated, she worries the hospitals are “pandering to a small group.”

A pending bill, sponsored by several of Spartanburg County’s state representatives, seeks to prevent hospitals and doctors from questioning or interfering “in any manner” with a patient’s right to refuse treatments or vaccines. During COVID-19, the bill contends, federal agencies collaborated with medical organizations and others “to orchestrate a coordinated and coercive propaganda campaign” to shame people who declined COVID-19 vaccines. Doctors and hospitals argue they must balance public health risks with individuals who decline to take vaccines.

The state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, and major GOP candidates to replace him have largely framed their responses to the measles outbreak around the concept of medical freedom, particularly when discussing vaccine mandates. 

Andrews, the pediatrician running for the U.S. Senate, said she’s experienced the “chilling effect” the GOP’s “anti-science movements” have had on health care systems and individual physicians. “If you speak up, you are at risk of being censored,” Andrews said. “If you speak up, you are at risk of losing your job. So everyone is just trying to keep their head down and do what’s best for their patients.”

Bragg is among the declining ranks of doctors who run their own independent practices. She has the freedom to post what she wants to on social media and to wear pro-vaccine T-shirts that say things like, “Got polio? Me neither because I got the vaccine.” 

But one recent day, her 10-year-old son asked why she insisted on wearing the T-shirts. “Even a 10-year-old can tell you how polarizing vaccines have become,” Bragg said. Despite that, she has continued to wear them.

The post South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles-Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark. appeared first on ProPublica.

Nasrallah Abu Siyam shot dead in occupied West Bank as UN human rights office accuses Israel of war crimes

Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian American man during an attack on a village, the Palestinian health ministry and a witness have said.

Raed Abu Ali, a resident of Mukhmas, said a group of settlers came to the village on Wednesday afternoon where they attacked a farmer, prompting clashes after residents intervened.

President Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court over its tariff decision, saying he was "absolutely ashamed" of the justices who ruled against him.

Among the available titles are Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

President Trump did not offer a source for the new death toll, which is far higher than what has been previously reported.

6-3 ruling against unilateral imposition of tariffs without congressional approval labelled a ‘disgrace’ by Trump

• Trump illegally used executive power to impose global tariffs, supreme court rules

• US politics live – latest updates

The US supreme court has struck down Donald Trump’s flagship policy of imposing tariffs on foreign imports in his bid to revitalise American manufacturing. The US president has reportedly called the decision a “disgrace”. Here’s what it means, and what could happen next.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote. Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: Meta's pushing its metaverse platform almost entirely to phones. It's the latest sign of a massive shift in the company's focus.

The US president says he will impose a 10% global tariff after the supreme court found his current use of tariffs illegal blocked it. Trump called the decision a disgrace

A successful fueling test prompts NASA to press ahead toward a March 6 moonshot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content. The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism. Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First lady is first in more than 100 years to have two inaugural gowns in museum’s popular collection

Her husband has described it as “OUT OF CONTROL”, a place where “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been”.

But Melania Trump, the wife of US president Donald Trump, declared a temporary ceasefire in hostilities with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington on Friday – with the help of a silk gown, diamond brooch and headless mannequin.

US president vows to enact 10% global baseline tariff after calling the supreme court justices ‘a disgrace to the nation’

• US politics live – latest updates

The US supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal on Friday, in a sharp rebuke that topples a key pillar of the president’s aggressive economic agenda.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court decided that a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies did not provide the legal justification for most of the Trump administration’s tariffs on countries across the world. It is the first time the court has overruled one of Trump’s second-term policies.

Looking for a forex broker? These are some of the best in the USA right now.

Officers being asked to ‘consider carefully whether anything they saw or heard’ may be relevant to review of Epstein files

Scotland Yard has announced it is expanding its inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by approaching all his former protection officers and reviewing records of flights at London’s airports to see if they were used for human trafficking.

The disclosure by the Metropolitan police is separate to the inquiry that led to the former prince’s arrest on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, but underlines the complex nature of the multiple investigations now focused on King Charles’s brother.

Administrator Jared Isaacman cites ‘major progress’ since earlier discovery of liquid hydrogen leaking from rocket

Nasa said on Friday it was planning to launch its delayed Artemis II moon mission on 6 March after successfully completing a fueling test that had caused it to stand down earlier this month.

Jared Isaacman, the space agency’s newly confirmed administrator, cited “major progress” since the original so-called wet dress rehearsal in which engineers discovered liquid hydrogen leaking from the space launch system (SLS) rocket on its Florida launchpad at Cape Canaveral.

Team Canada beat Finland in the men's hockey Olympic semifinals on Thursday. They will play for the gold on Sunday.

Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them. Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow. Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Ramadan in Gaza, Russian airstrikes in Odesa and flooding in France – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Government ‘expects privileged trading position’ to go on as EU ‘seeks clarity’ over Trump administration’s next steps

Britain and the EU said they were assessing the implications of the US supreme court ruling against Donald Trump’s global tariffs, while business groups reacted to the court’s announcement with caution.

A spokesperson for Downing Street said: “The UK government is working with the US to understand how the overturning of Donald Trump’s tariffs by the supreme court will affect the UK but expects our privileged trading position with the US to continue.”

Exclusive: David Blunkett and Estelle Morris among those calling plans a ‘once in a generation chance’ to fix system

Five former education secretaries have made a joint appeal to Labour MPs to back the overhaul of special education provision in English schools, calling it “a once in a generation chance” to fix a failing system.

The open letter is signed by David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson, who between them held the post for a decade from 1997.

Cherish Bean, 15, and Ethan Slater, 17, were discovered at a rental property in Little Eden Holiday Lodge Park on Wednesday

A teenage couple who died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning at an East Yorkshire holiday park have been named by police.

Cherish Bean, 15, and Ethan Slater, 17, were discovered at a rental property at Little Eden holiday park, near Bridlington, on Wednesday.

Here are some highly rated series to try, plus a look at what's new in February.

Criminal investigation into possible sex trafficking at Zorro Ranch follows Guardian report on lack of federal action

New Mexico will reopen its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro ranch in the state after a public pressure campaign for a fuller accounting of the role the location it played in the late financier’s sex-trafficking conspiracy.

The New Mexico department of justice’s announcement came less than two weeks after the Guardian reported that federal agents did not appear to have ever searched Zorro Ranch.

Don't deposit a five-figure amount in either account type before first calculating your interest-earning potential.

New head will face decisions crucial to movement’s future, such as how far to cooperate with Trump’s Gaza plan

Hamas has reportedly begun holding leadership elections among its members at a time when the militant Palestinian movement faces imminent decisions which will be critical to its own continued existence and the potential for peace in Gaza.

According to the BBC and press reports in the Gulf, Hamas members in Gaza have already voted. Those in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons and the diaspora are also expected to cast ballots for delegates to the movement’s 50-member general Shura council, which ultimately chooses its politburo and a new interim leader. The process could last weeks.

The department is reportedly considering buying a Boeing plane for deportation flights and for use by Trump officials

A $70m aircraft the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering for deportation flights has a luxurious interior and will be used to transport Trump administration officials to engagements in comfort, according to a report published Friday.

NBC News obtained images of the Boeing 737-8 Max plane showing a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and a bar.

The decision allowing Russia and Belarus to rejoin competition drew outrage in Ukraine and Europe following the disqualification last week of a Ukrainian skeleton athlete.

Move would follow any police investigation after former prince questioned on suspicion of misconduct in public office

The government will consider passing legislation to strip Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his right to inherit the throne once any police investigation has concluded, it is understood.

Several politicians have called for the former prince to be removed from the line of succession after he was arrested and questioned by detectives on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

British Chambers of Commerce official says US supreme court decision ‘does little to clear the murky waters’

• US politics – live updates

The US supreme court just declared Donald Trump’s boldest tariffs illegal, but international businesses and governments are still uncertain over what’s to come.

After the court said the president cannot enact tariffs in peacetime using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the White House said it will quickly replace the levies by other – but potentially more cumbersome – means.

PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025. The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach. "On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital ('PPWC') loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025," PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users. "PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Metropolitan Police also working with US counterparts to establish whether London airports had been used to ‘facilitate human trafficking and sexual exploitation’

• King: ‘The law must take its course’

• Analysis: What’s next for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson?

The family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, responded last night to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest.

“Astonished to see Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested today over alleged misconduct in public office linked to material from the so‑called Epstein ‘Files’,” they posted on an X account run by Maxwell’s siblings.

Breaking from the president, Congress voted to fund institutions including the Institute of American Indian Arts

In a break with Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a funding bill for multiple key government agencies and institutions in January. Some of those groups included the cultural institutions whose federal funds the president had sought to severely decrease or totally eliminate.

Last year, Trump issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, an executive order that specifically cited the Smithsonian Institution as having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology”. The executive order called for an overhaul of the museums and called out the American Women’s History Museum, which now exists only as an online exhibition, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

As aid trickles into Gaza, Washington channels $10bn into a body chaired by the president. Peace in the region rests on law and sovereignty, not ego and brinkmanship

In Gaza, aid still trickles in at levels relief agencies say are far below what is required. Temporary shelters are scarce. Reconstruction materials are restricted by Israel’s controls on goods entering the territory. Conditions, say the UN, remain “dire”. The violence has not stopped: Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed about 600 people since the ceasefire began. The announcement that the US would transfer $10bn to President Donald Trump’s newly convened Board of Peace is hard to reconcile with the reality on the ground. Even worse is that Washington has paid only a fraction of its UN arrears – $160m against more than $4bn owed.

This raises the obvious question: why is a private initiative being capitalised so heavily while existing UN mechanisms remain severely cash-strapped? Funnelling state funds into a body chaired by Mr Trump suggests foreign policy is serving private interests, not the public good. The board has ambitious plans. Rafah is to be rebuilt within three years with skyscrapers. Gaza is to become self-governing within a decade. An International Stabilisation Force is expected to begin deployment, eventually numbering 20,000 troops. These are dramatic claims. But their delivery is largely notional.

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.

Democrats cry foul at change to airport closest to Mar-a-Lago days after president’s lawyers trademarked new name

Democrats in Florida have condemned Republican colleagues in the state legislature who approved renaming the airport in West Palm Beach to the “President Donald J Trump International Airport”, less than a week after lawyers for Trump sought to trademark the name.

Only the signature of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, now stands before a renaming ceremony at the airport less than six miles from the president’s waterfront Mar-a-Lago mansion and private resort club in Palm Beach.

After a successful halfpipe qualifier, Team USA's Hunter Hess flashed an "L" and referenced insults from President Trump.

Narendra Modi’s thirst to supercharge economic growth is matched by US desire to inject AI into world’s biggest democracy

India celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, “early versions of true super intelligence” could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week.

It’s a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi: can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to raise the prospects of its 1.4 billion people?

Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm’s use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.

A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers. The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. women's hockey veteran Kelly Pannek reflects on the team's stunning overtime win against Canada to claim Olympic gold.

Dozens of the animals in Chiang Mai region first began to show signs of illness earlier this month

A highly contagious virus is believed to have caused the deaths of 72 captive tigers in northern Thailand this month, with officials racing to contain the outbreak.

Teams are urgently disinfecting enclosures and preparing to vaccinate surviving animals.

Businesses could be owed nearly $150 billion in refunds after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Large U.S. retailers say the Trump administration tariffs are forcing them to hike customer prices to offset higher costs.

The Justice Department's civil antitrust enforcement action against OhioHealth comes a week after DOJ's antitrust chief, Gail Slater,​ was fired from her post.

The split screen between President Donald Trump’s talk of peace in Washington and drumbeats of war in the Middle East struck some critics as incoherent.

Environmental groups warn that weakening air toxics and mercury standards will lead to higher health-related costs

The Trump administration announced on Friday it would roll back air regulations for power plants limiting mercury and hazardous air toxics at an event in Kentucky, a move it says will boost baseload energy but that public health groups say will harm public health for the most vulnerable groups in the US.

Donald Trump’s EPA has said that easing the pollution standards for coal plants would alleviate costs for utilities that run older coal plants at a time when demand for power is soaring amid the expansion of datacenters used for artificial intelligence.

French champion Surya Bonaly backflipped on Olympic ice years before Ilia Malinin was even born, and it brought her penalization, not plaudits.

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled President Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs under a federal emergency powers law.

Schumer says ‘overreach failed’ after court rules president cannot bypass Congress’s power to tax

• US politics – follow live

Democratic lawmakers are rejoicing after the supreme court ruled that Donald Trump overstepped his authority by imposing steep tariffs on global imports, toppling one of the president’s most aggressive assertions of executive power.

The 6-3 ruling found that a 1977 emergency powers law did not provide legal justification for most of the administration’s sweeping tariffs, a ruling the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, framed as a win for “American consumers” and an example of how Trump’s “overreach failed”.

US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House Expert comment thilton.drupal 20 February 2026

Initial reaction after the top US court dealt a blow to President Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.

By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies to impose tariffs.

They ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 did not grant the president the power to impose tariffs, which have been a central part of Trump’s economic agenda during his second term. Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he would impose a new levy.

Here is early analysis. Chatham House experts are monitoring developments, and will be following the fallout from, and reaction to, the ruling.

Heather Hurlburt, Associate Fellow in Chatham House’s US and the Americas Programme, writes:

At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.

The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.

I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.

The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10% tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other “national security” tariffs.

However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)

President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down. He has already told a reporter that he still has options, and crucially he did not appear to be backing off his fondness for tariffs.

I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanagh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’

The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.

Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?

Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?

Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.

This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.

Heather Hurlburt has a distinguished career in analysing, explaining and working to close the gap between the practice of international affairs and the realities of politics in the United States.

From 2022 to 2024, she served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, overseeing strategy and management for the agency charged with carrying out President Biden’s initiative for a worker-centred American trade policy. Read her full Chatham House biography here.

Last November, when the legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs reached the Supreme Court, one of Heather Hurlburt’s Chatham House colleagues wrote about the issues involved, and how the outcome could have far-reaching consequences for global trade and beyond. 

From the Chatham House archive:

Max Yoeli, Senior Research Fellow in the US and North America Programme, wrote on 5 November 2025:

‘The case concerns tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which empowers the president to declare a national emergency over an ‘unusual and extraordinary’ foreign threat and respond with a range of actions, including sanctions and the freezing of funds. 

IEEPA has never before been used as a basis for tariffs nor does the statute explicitly authorize them, though President Richard Nixon relied on a similarly worded law to impose an emergency tariff on imports in 1971.

Under the US Constitution, taxation is Congress’s remit. The power to impose tariffs can be delegated to the executive under the right circumstances, including authority presidents have used across administrations to impose sectoral tariffs on national security grounds.

Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump is also using IEEPA to impose tariffs, including levies on China, Mexico and Canada linked to fentanyl supply chains, ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on global trading partners in response to the US’s trade deficit, and recent measures targeting developments in Brazil and India.’

Read his full Expert Comment here: Trump’s tariffs face Supreme Court challenge that could have significant consequences for presidential power

US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House experts Expert comment thilton.drupal 20 February 2026

Chatham House analysts give their Initial reaction after the top US court dealt a blow to President Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.

By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies to impose tariffs.

They ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 did not grant the president the power to impose tariffs, which have been a central part of Trump’s economic agenda during his second term. Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he would impose a new levy.

Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts, who are are monitoring developments and will be following the fallout from the ruling.

Heather Hurlburt, Associate Fellow, US and North America Programme:

At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.

The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.

I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.

The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10% tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other “national security” tariffs.

However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)

President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down.

I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanagh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’

The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.

Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?

Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?

Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.

This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.

Heather Hurlburt has a distinguished career in analysing, explaining and working to close the gap between the practice of international affairs and the realities of politics in the United States.

From 2022 to 2024, she served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, overseeing strategy and management for the agency charged with carrying out President Biden’s initiative for a worker-centred American trade policy. Read her full Chatham House biography here.

Ambassador Julián Ventura, Associate Fellow, US and North America Programme:

The 20 February US Supreme Court 6-3 decision on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is a significant fork in the tariff-driven trade policy road taken exactly 13 months ago by President Donald Trump when he announced his America First Trade Policy.

It does not, however, mark an end to his expansive use of Executive authority to shape his engagement with global trading partners.

In his combative reaction to the ruling, the president previewed alternative legal authorities that his administration will use as a basis for continued tariff action, including a new 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows for temporary import surcharges or import quotas to address balance-of-payments issues.

With details on scope, applicability and implementation of additional actions still unclear, US trade partners around the world will scramble in the coming days to determine the potential impact on their respective deals or framework agreements reached with Washington. Uncertainty will continue to be the name of the game.

The ruling comes on the heels of the release of the US Census Bureau’s 2025 international trade data confirming Mexico and Canada’s place as the first and second US trading partners, export markets and sources of imports, and as the three countries undertake the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)’s first joint review.

In North America,  with intraregional annual trade at almost 2 trillion dollars and millions of jobs and investment decisions linked to the continuity of the agreement, a great deal is at stake.

In its initial reaction to the ruling, the government of Canada stated that it reinforces its view that the IEEPA tariffs ‘are unjustified’. Mexico´s Secretary of the Economy said he would be reaching out to his US counterparts and await more details on the announced 10% global tariff. Both countries were subject to IEEPA tariffs (35% on Canada and 25% on Mexico) on non-USMCA compliant exports, in addition to various Section 232 sectorial tariffs which continue to apply.

It’s important to keep in mind that  roughly 85% of massive Canadian and Mexican USMCA-compliant exports – totalling approximately 780 billion dollars – maintains tariff-free access to the US market.

Beyond specific negotiating strategies with Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City will continue to focus on reducing uncertainty and preserving their current relative competitive advantages in a rapidly changing tariff environment.

Ambassador Julián Ventura is a career diplomat, currently on leave from the Mexican Foreign Service. With over 33 years in public service, he has held senior diplomatic positions in four administrations, most recently as Deputy Foreign Secretary, where he oversaw key relationships in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and served as Mexico’s G20 Sherpa. Read his full Chatham House biography here.

Last November, when the legal challenge to President Trump’s tariffs reached the Supreme Court, Senior Research Fellow Max Yoeli wrote about how the outcome could end up having far-reaching consequences for global trade, and beyond. Here is his commentary, from the Chatham House archive:

Max Yoeli, Senior Research Fellow in the US and North America Programme, wrote on 5 November 2025:

‘The case concerns tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which empowers the president to declare a national emergency over an ‘unusual and extraordinary’ foreign threat and respond with a range of actions, including sanctions and the freezing of funds. 

IEEPA has never before been used as a basis for tariffs nor does the statute explicitly authorize them, though President Richard Nixon relied on a similarly worded law to impose an emergency tariff on imports in 1971.

Under the US Constitution, taxation is Congress’s remit. The power to impose tariffs can be delegated to the executive under the right circumstances, including authority presidents have used across administrations to impose sectoral tariffs on national security grounds.

Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump is also using IEEPA to impose tariffs, including levies on China, Mexico and Canada linked to fentanyl supply chains, ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on global trading partners in response to the US’s trade deficit, and recent measures targeting developments in Brazil and India.’

Read his full Expert Comment here: Trump’s tariffs face Supreme Court challenge that could have significant consequences for presidential power

Man in 60s also faces charges of raping and sexually assaulting his wife over period of 20 years

A man has appeared in court accused of conspiring with other men to drug his wife and rape her while she was unconscious.

The man, in his 60s, from the Stockport area of Greater Manchester, also faces charges of raping and sexually assaulting his wife over a period of 20 years.

Investors respond after US supreme court rules that Donald Trump exceeded his authority in imposing sweeping tariffs under emergency powers

• US Politics live: US supreme court rules against Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs

• UK reports record-breaking budget surplus of £30.4bn in surprise boost for Rachel Reeves

• Art and antiques help lift retail sales in Great Britain to biggest monthly rise since 2024

The jump in tax receipts last month may show that UK government receipts are starting to get the boost from inflation and wage growth earlier in the year.

Nick Ridpath, research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says:

Today’s data on the public finances is particularly important, given the outsized impact of January’s self-assessment returns on revenues and borrowing for the year as a whole.

Income tax receipts had been a little disappointing over 2025, lagging behind forecasts even as inflation and wage growth exceeded expectations. But today’s data shows that self-assessment revenues in January were almost £2bn (6%) higher than forecast.

Mail order retailers, which are predominantly online, experienced a boost from retailers selling sports supplements, as well as continued strong sales volumes by online jewellers. Comments from jewellers reported that demand had hit unprecedented levels.

Ex-investigations editor Paul Henderson says allegation he was link for corrupt private investigators is an ‘absolute lie’

A former Mail on Sunday journalist has denied being the “handler” of a private investigator alleged to have bugged homes and tapped the phones of his targets, the high court has heard.

Paul Henderson, who was the Mail on Sunday’s investigations editor and briefly its news editor, said it was surreal to be described as having a close relationship with Gavin Burrows, a private investigator whose disputed confessions provide the most serious accusations of unlawful information gathering against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

"I guess I can say I am considering that," President Trump told reporters when asked about the possibility of a limited strike on Iran.

Former prince’s arrest was most damaging event for the family firm in centuries – and the questions keep coming

London fashion week was probably the last public place King Charles III wanted to be on Thursday, admiring the suits and costumes that no one he knows would dream of buying, and making light conversation with designers he would have difficulty in recognising at a royal garden party.

Charles must have been contemplating the crumbling of all his plans and hopes for his reign. He always knew it would be short, even before his cancer diagnosis, but he probably never thought it would be upended by the alleged behaviour of his own brother.

Rumors about the next iPhone model already are spreading. Here are all the speculation and leaked information we've heard about so far.

Amateur climber’s conviction over girlfriend’s death could put people off activity, say experts

• Climber convicted of manslaughter after leaving girlfriend on Austria’s highest peak to seek help

The decision of an Austrian court to convict an amateur climber of manslaughter after he had left his girlfriend behind to die on an Alpine peak in winter is certain to be examined closely throughout Europe.

In his decision in Innsbruck, the judge, Norbert Hofer – a climber, and an expert in Austrian law relating to the mountains – ruled that the “galaxies-wide” disparity in experience and skills between Thomas P and his late girlfriend Kerstin G meant he had been de facto acting as her mountain guide “as a favour” despite no financial arrangement having been involved.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Abu Dhabi will establish a national-scale AI supercomputer in India, marking a new phase in India’s AI infrastructure development. The system will be delivered by G42 and Cerebras, in partnership with Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Designed to meet sovereign security and compliance requirements, the supercomputer will serve as a foundational asset under the India AI Mission. Image credit: G42.

The landmark project was announced on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit 2026 taking place in New Delhi, India. It follows the 5th India-UAE Strategic Dialogue held in December 2025 and the visit of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, to India in January 2026, that solidified a comprehensive partnership framework across defense, technology, space and energy.

At 8 exaflops of AI compute (measured using AI-optimized, lower-precision operations), the new system represents a significant increase in peak compute capacity, marking a transition to exaflop-scale AI infrastructure in India and expanding the country’s domestic compute capabilities for advanced AI development.

Hosted within India, the system will operate under India-defined governance frameworks, with all data remaining within national jurisdiction. Designed to meet sovereign security and compliance requirements, the supercomputer will serve as a foundational asset under the India AI Mission.

“Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness,” said Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India. “This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security.”

Once operational, the India supercomputer will be accessible to the nation’s diverse ecosystem, from premier institutions to startups, small and medium enterprises, and government ministries. This democratized access model is designed to lower barriers to AI innovation, particularly for applications serving India’s 1.4 billion citizens.

“MBZUAI is committed to advancing AI research and education that addresses real-world challenges. This collaboration with India represents a shared commitment to expanding access to advanced AI compute for researchers and students, enabling breakthroughs in critical areas like healthcare, agriculture and education,” said Richard Morton, Executive Director, Institute of Foundation Models, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

“Cerebras and G42 have already successfully delivered Condor Galaxy supercomputers in the United States, demonstrating how our technology is purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads at scale,” said Andy Hock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cerebras. “Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs.”

This latest project builds on G42’s commitment to supporting nations in building domestic AI capability. In December 2025, G42 and MBZUAI released the latest version of the open-source Hindi-English large language model (LLM), NANDA 87B, featuring 87 billion parameters. As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies, India plays a central role in advancing regional AI innovation. The new supercomputer aims to strengthen India’s ability to build, deploy and scale AI securely within its own borders.

Source: G42

The post G42, MBZUAI, Cerebras, and C-DAC Partner on National AI Supercomputer for India appeared first on HPCwire.

• Werder Bremen scrap plans to play in Minnesota, Detroit

• Club cites unrest after ICE killings, US visa restrictions

German soccer club Werder Bremen have canceled a trip to the United States due to concerns over unrest in Minnesota after the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as economic risks, a club spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

The top-flight team were planning to visit Minnesota and Detroit in May and play two friendly matches, according to media reports in the US and Germany. No opponents for the matches had been confirmed.

STONY BROOK, N.Y., Feb. 20, 2026 — In his office lined with hand-drawn diagrams and alphabet-like symbols, Stony Brook researcher Jeffrey Heinz is trying to answer a deceptively simple question: How well, exactly, can today’s neural networks learn, and where do they fail?

Heinz, a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute of Advanced Computational Science, usually studies the sound patterns of human language. In his latest project, he and his collaborators have built something that looks less like a traditional linguistics study and more like a stress test for modern AI.

Their work, called MLRegTest, is a carefully designed stress test for neural networks (or other AI techniques), built not to ask a model to write articles or poems, but to pose thousands upon thousands of tiny yes-no questions about simple symbol patterns, and watch very closely what happens.

Heinz said, “We’re trying to understand the learning capacities of neural networks from a controlled experimental point of view,” Heinz said.  “It’s an endeavor to map their performance on kind of a big scale.”

1,800 Tiny ‘Languages’ for Machines

At the heart of MLRegTest is a huge collection of what computer scientists call formal languages, not English or Spanish or French, but small, made-up rule systems over simple symbols.

Think of them like this:

• There’s a small alphabet of symbols (like A, B, C, D).
• You line them up into short sequences.
• A hidden rule decides which sequences “belong” and which don’t.

A model’s job is to look at lots of examples and learn to answer: Does this sequence follow the rule, yes or no?

Heinz and his team constructed 1,800 different rule systems of this kind. Then, for each one, they generated a plethora of example sequences, some that obeyed the rule and others that didn’t. “This was a large-scale effort because we wanted to create a benchmark that would be around for a while,” Heinz added.

Each rule is built using a compact mathematical description called a grammar — like an equation that defines which sequences are in and which are out. The team also made sure that every language in the collection was genuinely distinct, not just a disguised version of another rule.

That careful construction matters. Because the patterns are so tightly defined, they give researchers a way to “look inside” the black box of neural networks without actually opening it up.

Pushing AI to the Edge of the Rule

Once MLRegTest was built, the team used it to probe how different neural network architectures behaved when they tried to learn these pattern rules. Two parts of the test design were especially revealing.

First, the researchers checked how well models could generalize to longer sequences than the ones they saw during training. That’s a long-standing worry in natural language processing: a system may see mostly short sentences in training, then stumble when faced with something much longer and more complex. MLRegTest confirmed that performance tends to drop as sequences get longer.

But the most striking results came from a more delicate probe: what Heinz calls the “border” of a language.

For each rule system, the team built special test sets made of pairs of almost-identical sequences. Each pair is the same length, with the same symbols in nearly the same positions. The only difference might be a single symbol. According to the underlying rule, one sequence belongs, and the other doesn’t.

To humans, those edge cases are often where the rule becomes clearest: change one small thing, and suddenly the pattern breaks.

The networks struggled.

“We found that the networks were much worse at correctly classifying those strings along the border of the language,” Heinz said. “While they could learn generally pretty well, they weren’t learning the same thing as the underlying pattern.”

In other words, on everyday examples, the models often looked fine. But when you zoom in on the edge cases, they reveal that AI has learned a rough approximation of the rule, not the rule itself.

In high-stakes domains — law, medicine, or engineering — that distinction matters. The “border cases” are exactly where we most need a system to behave reliably.

Not Just ‘More Data, More Compute’

MLRegTest is also a quiet challenge to the current trends of training AI models: “Just feed it more data.”

For every one of the 1,800 languages, the team trained models in three conditions: small, medium, and large training sets. From his linguistics background, Heinz is especially interested in systems that can learn from limited data — more like kids who generalize quickly from relatively few examples.

“I think it’s possible to design learning systems that can generalize accurately and quickly from small amounts of data,” he said. “The trend in AI has not been in that direction. It’s been, let’s consume more data, more compute, more energy.”

This is not only a scientific concern but a practical one. In applications like robotic medical assistance or self-driving cars, many of the most serious situations are rare: a particular combination of weather, road design, and other drivers might occur only one in a million times. A model that only works well on patterns it has seen thousands of times isn’t enough.

Heinz imagines MLRegTest as a kind of challenge problem for anyone who wants to push AI in a different direction.

The benchmark makes it possible to say: here is a wide variety of clearly defined pattern rules; here are strict tests on their edge cases; here are three tiers of training data. How far can your system go?

“If any system can do well across the board on the small data set, that would be a truly remarkable accomplishment,” he said.

A Long View on AI’s Limits

MLRegTest answers to a long tradition. In the 1940s, early neural networks were analyzed using symbolic tools that later became the regular expressions many programmers use today. Heinz’s work loops back to that history, using modern mathematical tools to study today’s much larger networks.

He’s realistic about how quickly it will influence commercial models.

“I don’t think Big Tech cares about this at all,” he said with a laugh. “But for researchers who want to understand AI systems, not just deploy them, the benchmark offers something rare: a way to ask precise questions about what a model has really learned.” Notwithstanding, there is growing interest in generative AI for formal languages that can be used to develop verifiable code for applications, like critical infrastructure.

Heinz’s work is a reminder that good performance on a handful of benchmarks doesn’t necessarily mean deep understanding. If we want AI systems we can trust, we’ll need to keep inventing new, sharper ways to test them.

Source: Ankita Nagpal, Stony Brook University

The post Stony Brook Study Stress-Tests Neural Networks on Thousands of Tiny Rule Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

"America's Next Top Model" winner Eva Marcille tells "CBS Mornings" that she "was gobsmacked" after watching behind-the-scenes moments from the reality competition show.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Telefónica, Fundación Vithas, and Francisco de Vitoria University (UFV) have launched a new project that uses quantum computing for the intelligent design of cancer drugs.

Credit: Telefónica and Fundación Vithas

The goal is to combat the BRAF V600E mutation, an altered protein that drives the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells, by generating molecules that inhibit the action of this protein. To this end, this multidisciplinary team has developed a hybrid model that combines conventional artificial intelligence with the properties of quantum physics to generate drug candidates with far greater precision and quality than current methods.

This project represents a technological milestone and a significant advance in speeding up the development of critical treatments in oncology and other complex diseases.

The work to develop the project has been coordinated from the Javier Echenique Talent and Technology Center, a new strategic space for advanced innovation created by Telefónica and located in Bilbao, which places Spain at the forefront of applied quantum technologies in Europe.

The discovery of drugs using traditional experimental methods involves long development times and a high rejection rate, as only a very small number of drug candidate molecules make it to the most advanced stages of development.

In the project, a classic neural network (called LSTM or Long Short-Term Memory) acts as an ‘architect’ that builds molecules while taking advantage of the broad creative vision of a quantum circuit (QCBM – Quantum Circuit Born Machine). This symbiosis makes it possible to obtain a list of high-quality candidate molecules and evaluate them using chemical filters, with the advantage of significantly shortening drug development research times. The work carried out so far has yielded very promising preliminary results, with the molecules obtained improving in virtually all parameters involved in the evaluation of a potential drug.

Towards More Efficient and Accurate Medicine

This innovation pilot combines Telefónica’s connectivity and computing capabilities, Vithas’ clinical experience, and UFV’s knowledge of molecular biology to position Spain as a leader in the use of quantum technologies applied to oncology.

Juan Cambeiro, Head of Applied Quantum Projects at Telefónica Spain, highlights: “This initiative demonstrates how quantum computing has moved beyond theory to become a tool with real possibilities in sectors such as healthcare, industry, logistics, and banking. At Telefónica, we are committed to putting quantum technology at the service of our customers in a practical way and applying it to real challenges. By combining traditional machine learning techniques with quantum circuits in this project, we are not only reducing research times, but also opening the door to more efficient and accessible medicine.”

For his part, Ángel Ayuso, corporate scientific director of Vithas and director of the Vithas Foundation, points out: “From the Brain Tumor Laboratory, a joint unit of the Francisco de Vitoria University and the Vithas Foundation focused on glioblastoma, we are promoting a strategic line of drug discovery that combines the identification of targets or therapeutic molecules in adult and pediatric primary brain tumors (gliomas) with the rational design of molecules capable of modulating these targets. In this context, the collaboration with Telefónica and UFV to incorporate quantum computing represents a differential leap forward: it allows us to refine the selection of structures with a higher probability of success and accelerate the path in the preclinical development of more effective and precise treatments.”

Jorge Plazas, professor at the Higher Polytechnic School of the Francisco de Vitoria University, adds: “The adoption of quantum computing constitutes a paradigm shift in the management and processing of information. At its current stage of development, this technology can already offer tangible advantages in specific areas of application. Characterizing its capabilities, along with expanding its applicability to specific use cases, is a priority line of research for UFV. In this project, these objectives are part of a high-impact inter-institutional effort in the field of health.”

The project will be on display at Telefónica’s stand at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is being held in Barcelona from March 2 to 5, and will also be presented on Wednesday, March 4, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Telefónica’s Ágora in the round table discussion “Applied Quantum Computing: BIN packing and tumor-inhibiting molecules.”

The initiative is another milestone in the collaboration between Telefónica and the Vithas hospital group in quantum computing. During the last edition of MWC, both entities presented a pioneering healthcare cybersecurity project that consisted of deploying a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) link via fiber optics to connect the Vithas Madrid Arturo Soria and La Milagrosa hospitals in Madrid in an ultra-secure manner. This ‘Quantum-Safe’ technology, developed in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and partners such as LuxQuanta and QoolNet, made it possible to shield critical data, such as medical records, medical images, and vital sign monitoring, from the future computing power of quantum computers, ensuring that patient information remains unaltered and private.

More from HPCwire

• Spain’s CESGA Selects IQM and Telefónica to Deploy Advanced Quantum Computing Infrastructure
• IBM and Telefónica Tech Sign Collaboration Agreement for Quantum-Safe Tech

About Telefónica

Telefónica is one of the world’s leading telecommunications service providers. The company offers fixed and mobile connectivity as well as a wide range of digital services for residential and business customers. With over 350 million customers, Telefónica operates in Europe and Latin America. Telefónica is listed on the Spanish stock market, New York and Lima.

Source: Telefónica

The post Telefónica, Vithas, and UFV Launch Quantum Computing Project for Cancer Drug Design appeared first on HPCwire.

Feb. 20, 2026 — The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at NIST has announced the launch of the AI Agent Standards Initiative. The Initiative will ensure that the next generation of AI—AI agents capable of autonomous actions—is widely adopted with confidence, can function securely on behalf of its users, and can interoperate smoothly across the digital ecosystem. Working in coordination with other federal partners, including the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST, CAISI aims to foster the emerging ecosystem of industry-led AI standards and protocols while cementing U.S. dominance at the technological frontier.

Credit: Grandbrothers/Shutterstock

AI agents can now work autonomously for hours, write and debug code, manage emails and calendars, and shop for goods, among other emerging use cases. While the productivity promise is enticing, the real-world utility of agents is constrained by their ability to interact with external systems and internal data. Absent confidence in the reliability of AI agents and interoperability among agents and digital resources, innovators may face a fragmented ecosystem and stunted adoption. To address this concern, NIST, including CAISI, aims to foster industry-led technical standards and protocols that build public trust in AI agents, catalyze an interoperable agent ecosystem, and diffuse their benefits to all Americans and across the world.

CAISI, with ITL at NIST, will collaborate with the National Science Foundation and other interagency partners to advance the Initiative along three pillars:

1. Facilitating industry-led development of agent standards and U.S. leadership in international standards bodies.
2. Fostering community-led open source protocol development and maintenance for agents.
3. Advancing research in areas of AI agent security and identity to enable new use cases and to promote trusted adoption across sectors of the economy.

In the months ahead, NIST will announce research, guidelines, and further deliverables for the AI Agent Standards Initiative. To support the interoperable and secure adoption of AI agents, NIST will leverage a full toolbox for public input, including convenings, RFIs, listening sessions, and other approaches. Stakeholders can inform the Initiative today through responses to CAISI’s Request for Information on AI Agent Security (due March 9) and to ITL’s AI Agent Identity and Authorization Concept Paper (due April 2). Beginning in April, CAISI will hold listening sessions on sector-specific barriers to AI adoption, with a focus on AI agents, to inform concrete projects to spur confident adoption in key sectors. CAISI partners with industry at the frontier of AI, and, with the launch of the Initiative, is working to support the development of a trusted and interoperable AI agent ecosystem that advances human flourishing and U.S. leadership.

More from HPCwire: NIST’s CAISI Issues Request for Information About Securing AI Agent Systems

Source: NIST

The post NIST’s CAISI Announces AI Agent Standards Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

Considering borrowing from your home equity? These are the HELOC and home equity loan interest rates to know first.

Completion of glass cross brings Antoni Gaudí’s church to maximum final height of 172.5m, 144 years after work began

The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum final height 144 years after work began.

After several days when it has been too windy to work, the upper section of the 17 metre-high four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11am on Friday, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. At 172.5 metres, the Sagrada Familia, to which the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí devoted the later part of his life, is Barcelona’s tallest building and the world’s tallest church.

One skier remains missing and is presumed dead after an avalanche buried a group of skiers near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday.

schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The report adds: The FT was able to identify 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use a single private server for their email, "mx.phoenixtrading.ltd," showing that they share back-office functions. The FT was then able to identify companies by comparing the names in the domain to those of entities that appear in Russian and Indian customs records as involved in carrying Russian oil.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google engineers hit the slopes with Team USA's skiers and snowboarders to build a custom AI training tool.

German Doner Kebab aims to open at 25 new sites this year with self-service screens and healthy options aimed at gen Z

They are already packing our groceries and delivering shopping. Now robots are coming to the kebab shop, alongside self-service screens and loyalty apps, as takeaways look for ways to tackle rising costs.

German Doner Kebab (GDK), a perhaps surprisingly British-owned chain that has been springing up across the country, has turned to technology to keep its fast food business buzzing in the face of rising costs and tough times on the high street.

We put 15 of the latest air purifier models through CNET's "smoke bomb test" to find out which perform the best at particle filtering, noise levels and energy efficiency. Here are the models to clean your winter air.

American Express tells CBS News it regrets having had Jeffrey Epstein as a client, as files reveal he used the company to book travel for multiple women or girls.

Demonstrators were outside hotel in Washington demanding the release of political prisoners in Azerbaijan

Bodyguards traveling with the Azerbaijani president, who was visiting Washington for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, punched, kicked and chased protesters outside a Washington hotel on Thursday, video footage shows.

Demonstrators calling for the release of political prisoners were driven from the street near the motorcade of Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani leader.

A day after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at his new home, police were still searching his previous residence on the Windsor estate.

After stepping away from figure skating, the US star climbed back on her own terms. Her journey culminated in a medal, but it was about much more than that

Alysa Liu made her way through a mixed zone teeming with hundreds of reporters at a quarter past midnight early Friday morning, an Olympic gold medal draped around her neck, the sequins in her color-coordinated dress glimmering beneath the klieg lights and crush of television cameras. The 20-year-old from West Oakland had just become the first American woman to win figure skating’s biggest prize in 24 years, drilling seven clean triples to leapfrog a pair of Japanese rivals from third place after Tuesday’s short program and gatecrash her sport’s most rarefied air. But to hear Liu tell it, her second gold in 12 days was merely a passing footnote in a Milan fortnight she doesn’t want to end.

Liu’s carefree mindset should and will be studied in the weeks, months and years after these Olympics – especially these Olympics – as a counterpoint to the results-obsessed mindsets that have shattered the mental wellbeing of so many athletes thrust into the pressure-cooker of the world’s biggest sporting event. She spoke candidly and insightfully on how her unique journey from child prodigy to burnout case to second-act skater gave rise to an indifference to scores or placements. All she wanted in the end was a chance to make the US team and share her artistry on the world stage.

Police say UK entrepreneur Quentin Griffiths fell from 17th floor of an 18-floor condominium on 9 February

Quentin Griffiths, the co-founder of the online fashion retailer Asos, has died after falling from an apartment building in the Thai seaside resort city of Pattaya.

Police told Reuters that the 58-year-old had fallen from the 17th floor of an 18-storey condominium on 9 February.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority. The court ruled that the Trump administration's interpretation that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - grants Trump the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine. The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress. The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commentary: It may sound morbid, but the show offers one last chance to remember beloved figures after they're gone.

Feb. 20, 2026 — AQT has announced the integration of its trapped-ion quantum computer into Scaleway’s cloud. This new cloud partnership aims to strengthen digital sovereignty and expand access to quantum computing in Europe.

Trapped-ion quantum computer by AQT. Photo credit: D. Kühl, AQT.

AQT’s trapped-ion quantum computer IBEX Q1 will be available via Scaleway’s Quantum-as-a-Service (QaaS) platform, which gives industrial companies, research institutions, public authorities, educational institutions and developers access to quantum processing units (QPUs) via its sovereign cloud infrastructure.

AQT’s quantum computer can be accessed and programmed without reservation needed from Qiskit, Cirq and Pennylane packages. The device is available Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 to 17:00 CET, providing customers in European time zones convenient access during their work hours.

Scaleway and AQT’s collaboration enables:

• A new sovereign quantum infrastructure made in Europe, combining European cloud and quantum hardware to support digital resilience and technological independence
• A stronger AQT presence within the French quantum ecosystem, fostering closer collaboration with research, industry, and innovation stakeholders.
• The development of hybrid applications, by pairing AQT’s quantum systems with Scaleway’s classical computing resources.
• An enhanced cloud offering from Scaleway, featuring digital, universal quantum hardware integrated directly into its platform.

“Together with Scaleway, AQT offers our customers hands-on access to the best quantum computers in Europe,” said Dr. Felix Rohde, Director of Cloud Partnerships and Business Development at AQT. “We are convinced that the synergy between our quantum computers and Scaleway’s cloud infrastructure will open up completely new capabilities and international markets.”

“We are thrilled to integrate AQT’s trapped-ion technology into our quantum ecosystem,” said Valentin Macheret, Scaleway’s Engineering Manager. “AQT’s approach offers remarkable fidelity and unique all-to-all connectivity, which are critical for running complex and deep quantum circuits. We are actively enabling the HPC-QC hybrid paradigm, giving developers & researchers the seamless environment they need to leverage this new computational paradigm.”

With this partnership, Europe expands its sovereign quantum infrastructure. The combination of high-performance cloud technology and European quantum hardware creates a robust foundation for the practical use of secure and independent quantum computing. This strengthens Europe’s technological autonomy in a world where the quantum era is no longer a distant promise, but a reality.

For B2B enterprises, this partnership opens a window of opportunities. Quantum computing unlocks new approaches in optimization, simulation, materials research, logistics, financial modelling, and more areas where classical computing is reaching its limits. Cloud-based access significantly lowers barriers to entry, enabling companies to explore initial use cases, build expertise, and secure lasting competitive positioning without the need to operate their own quantum hardware. Those who act now will be better prepared for a market that will fundamentally reshape value creation and business models.

The new partnership directly supports Europe’s ambition for digital sovereignty. Sensitive data and critical workloads remain within a European infrastructure designed to meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and transparency. European cloud and quantum hardware reduce dependencies and build trust – key requirements for enterprises and public institutions alike. At the same time, they provide a solid foundation for long-term innovation strategies across research, industry, and government.

The integration of AQT’s quantum hardware and Scaleway’s cloud provide an open and powerful quantum ecosystem that continues to grow. AQT’s quantum hardware features high-fidelity operations, long coherence times, and full connectivity, enabling advanced experimentation and development. Technology providers, cloud operators, and solution developers are invited to join this platform and collaborate on market-ready quantum applications.

Europe’s digital future is being shaped through strong partnerships, sovereign infrastructure, and a shared commitment to adopt transformative technologies early. As quantum technologies continue to mature, organizations have a unique opportunity to explore their potential today, while executives are given accessible entry points to understand, experiment, and help shape the emerging quantum ecosystem.

More from HPCwire: AQT’s Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer Now Available on Amazon Braket

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.

About AQT

AQT is a global leader in ion-trap quantum computing, offering high-fidelity systems designed for real-world scalability and applications. Based in Innsbruck, Austria, AQT builds on decades of academic excellence to provide industry-leading solutions for enterprise quantum computing.

Source: AQT

The post AQT Brings IBEX Q1 Trapped-Ion Quantum System to Scaleway QaaS Platform appeared first on HPCwire.

If you’re aiming to heat the human, not the home – or just love snuggling under something cosy – these are our best buys from our test of 24

• The best heated clothes airers to save time and money when drying your laundry

Aside from hugging a fluffy hot-water bottle, sipping whisky and ramping up the thermostat, an electric blanket or heated throw is the best way to ward off the winter chill.

When you consider that more than half of a typical household’s fuel bills goes on heating and hot water, finding alternative ways to keep warm – and heating the person, rather than the whole home – seems like a good idea. Many of the best electric blankets and heated throws cost about 2p to 4p an hour to run, so it’s hard to ignore their potential energy- and money-saving benefits.

Best electric blanket overall:
Carmen C81190 fitted electric blanket (king)

Best budget electric blanket:
Slumberdown Sleepy Nights (double)

Apple's sequel to the iPhone 16E may be getting several new features seen on the iPhone 17, but keep its $599 price.

• Olympic freeski star was born in San Francisco

• VP suggested US-born athletes should compete for US

Olympic freeskier Eileen Gu has responded after vice-president JD Vance appeared to criticise her choice to represent China on the international stage instead of the United States.

With five medals, the 22-year-old Gu is the most decorated female freeskier in Olympic history. She won two golds and a silver at the 2022 Beijing Games and has claimed two silvers at the Milano Cortina Games, with one more medal event set for Saturday in the halfpipe.

Norway's Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has earned the most gold medals at the Milano Cortina Games.

Feb. 20, 2026 — Artificial intelligence and modeling are effective tools for computational research on new materials. The AI-TRANSPWOOD EU project focuses on transparent wood-based materials and their modeling. The project aims to effectively integrate advanced AI-based computational models with SSbD (Safe and Sustainable by Design) principles for the safe and sustainable design of wood-based composites.

The goal in developing new transparent wood composites is to integrate or even replace plastic and glass in the construction, automotive, electronics, and furniture industries. To support this, the project is developing user-centric tools, including alternative modelling methods and targeted LCA tools to measure product life cycles and environmental impacts, for consortium members and external industrial partners. From Finland, VTT, which is coordinating the project, and Aalto University are participating in this 13-partner project.

“The role of VTT and Aalto in the project focuses on the development of AI-based surrogate models, i.e., lighter AI models that replace the original model, as well as the broad development of various machine learning methods,” said Professor Simo Särkkä.

Accelerated development of AI Models with the LUMI Supercomputer

The AI-TRANSPWOOD project utilises the GPU units on the LUMI supercomputer to develop surrogate and physics-driven AI models. They are trained using neural network models and PyTorch software to recognize various wood properties and screen them for the most promising candidates for new materials.

“Lightweight AI-based surrogate models are used for optimization instead of slow and heavy physics-based models, for example. This significantly speeds up model development,” said Aalto researcher Dr. Marcin Minkowski.

“The original physics-based models are used to generate data that is then used to train surrogate models,” said Joonas Linnosmaa, Senior AI Researcher at VTT. “The original model can be revisited to check the results and validate the performance of faster models. The most promising surrogate models can be selected for development as AI models, and lighter models can be scaled up massively, for example, in a supercomputer computing environment. This is currently an established method for optimising and discovering new materials. If the original computational model is unsuitable for a high-performance computing environment, a surrogate model can also be used in this case.”

CSC Training and Expert Support Familiar

VTT researchers are generally aware of and trained in the use of CSC resources. This enables the smooth and versatile use of computing systems in various projects. CSC’s computing services documentation is always available to help when needed. The informal weekly coffee meeting for researchers is a convenient way to network and, if necessary, ask for support for your own use. The multinational LUMI user support, LUST, which also assisted Marcin Minkowski, provides support for the international EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer.

“It is always extremely interesting and useful for CSC to be involved in industrial and academic RDI collaboration projects as an enabler of computational simulations and the use of new technologies,” said Dan Still, Development Manager at CSC. “We want to provide researchers with the best possible tools. Smooth cooperation between companies, universities, research institutions and CSC is a particular focus of our development efforts, because it is essential for Finland that the world-class computing resources acquired to support domestic and European research projects are used efficiently in research and business applications.”

More information about the project can be found here.

Source: LUMI consortium

The post AI-TRANSPWOOD: AI Methods and Modeling Accelerate the Development of Wood Materials appeared first on HPCwire.

Sunshine Sykes says Trump administration poses threats and is recklessly violating law with its mass deportations

A federal judge has accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people.

The judge said that the White House had also “extended its violence on its own citizens”, citing the killings of Renee Good in January by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer and Alex Pretti in the same month by border patrol, both US citizens and both protesting in Minneapolis.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GDP grew 1.4% last quarter, down from economists’ forecast of 3%, though AI and tax cuts could boost growth this year

• Business live – latest updates

US economic growth slowed more than expected in the fourth quarter amid disruptions from last year’s government shutdown and a moderation in consumer spending, but tax cuts and investment in artificial intelligence were expected to support activity this year.

Gross domestic product (GDP) increased at a 1.4% annualized rate last quarter, the commerce department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said in its advance estimate of fourth-quarter GDP on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rising at a 3.0% pace. The survey was, however, completed before data on Thursday showing the trade deficit widening to a five-month high in December.

Global Counsel stops trading after clients cut ties over former ambassador’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

The consultancy co-founded by Peter Mandelson has collapsed into administration, after a number of clients cut ties with the company over the former ambassador’s relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010, said on Friday that it had stopped trading and its staff in the UK were being made redundant.

The built-in basket keeps socks together and shields delicate sweaters from the wear and tear of everyday washing.

AI has convinced computer science students to shift majors and white-collar workers to change careers, while some are embracing it

Matthew Ramirez started at Western Governors University as a computer science major in 2025, drawn by the promise of a high-paying, flexible career as a programmer. But as headlines mounted about tech layoffs and AI’s potential to replace entry-level coders, he began to question whether that path would actually lead to a job.

When the 20-year-old interviewed for a datacenter technician role that June and never heard back, his doubts deepened. In December, Ramirez decided on what he thought was a safer bet: turning away from computer science entirely. He dropped his planned major to instead apply to nursing school. He comes from a family of nurses, and sees the field as more stable and harder to automate than coding.

Purdue says no ban on Chinese students exists, but reportedly rescinded dozens of offers after warnings from legislators

Several universities have scrapped partnerships with Chinese institutions in recent months as a direct result of pressure from US legislators. But no university appears to have gone as far as Purdue University in Indiana.

Students and faculty at the public university say that an unofficial policy is in effect to automatically reject students from China and a number of other countries altogether.

Thomas P given five-month suspended prison sentence and €9,400 fine over death of Kerstin G by gross negligence

• Europe live – latest updates

An amateur mountaineer has been found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter over the death of his girlfriend, whom he left behind on Austria’s highest peak after they got into difficulty on their climb.

Thomas P, 37, was handed a five-month suspended sentence and fined €9,400 (£8,200) for causing the death of Kerstin G in January 2025 by gross negligence, an offence that carries a maximum prison term of three years.

The identities of some of the victims of the deadly California avalanche near Lake Tahoe became known on Thursday.

President Trump directed his administration to release files on UFOs and any "alien and extraterrestrial life," an issue that has drawn decades of fascination — and spawned more than a few wild theories.

Sade Robinson, 19, disappeared after a first date. Milwaukee investigators say clues in her car pointed to her assailant.

A Minnesota federal judge ordered a government attorney to be held in civil contempt of court, further escalating tension between the judiciary and Trump administration over immigration cases.

Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev is in town for a meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace. Police said an incident that “involved Azerbaijan security guards” had been referred to the State Department.

US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding: "He made a big mistake." Asked if he also thinks aliens are real, Trump answered: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not." Former US President Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he thinks aliens are real in an interview released last Saturday. "They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51," Obama said. "There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experts say new labeling could deceive consumers as dangerous substances still allowed under new rules

In a further retreat from its pledge to ban artificial dyes from food, Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would loosen labeling requirements to allow companies to state “no artificial colors”, even though products may contain some dangerous substances such as titanium dioxide.

The FDA in early February announced it would allow food makers to claim “no artificial colors” as long as the dyes are not petroleum-based, but health experts say even some naturally based additives present health risks, and the labeling would deceive consumers.

Sam Forstag, who parachutes from planes to fight wildfires, believes pro-worker polices can flip district from Trump ally

Sam Forstag is used to launching himself into heated territory.

As a smokejumper, his job is to jump out of airplanes 3,000 feet in the air and parachute down into the Montana wilderness. Going by air is often the easiest way to access the remote wilderness and combat the wildfires that burn an average of 7.2 million acres a year in the state.

No one needs a Virtual Boy. But I always wanted one. And now it's living with me at last.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc., was something of an industry standard across government and much of the corporate world. Clients included the US Air Force, Army, Navy and other parts of the Defense Department, the Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, thousands of companies and more than 2,000 banks including Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to federal procurement records, internal documents, interviews and the accounts of former Ivanti employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose customer information. Soon after sending out their order, which instructed agencies to install an Ivanti-issued fix, staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency discovered that the threat was also inside their own house. Two sensitive CISA databases -- one containing information about personnel at chemical facilities, another assessing the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure operators -- had been compromised via the agency's own Connect Secure software. CISA had followed all its own guidance. Ivanti's fix had failed. This was a breaking point for some American national security officials, who had long expressed concerns about Connect Secure VPNs. CISA subsequently published a letter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the national cybersecurity agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warning customers of the "significant risk" associated with continuing to use the software. According to Laura Galante, then the top cyber official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government came to a simple conclusion about the technology. "You should not be using it," she said. "There really is no other way to put it." That attack, along with several others that successfully targeted the Ivanti software, illustrate how private equity's push into the cybersecurity market ended up compromising the quality and safety of some critical VPN products, Bloomberg has found. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Citrix Systems Inc., another top VPN maker, experienced several major hacks after its private equity owners, Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners, cut most of the company's 70-member product security team following their acquisition of the company in 2022. Some government officials and private-sector executives are now reconsidering their approach to evaluating cybersecurity software. In addition to excising private equity-owned VPNs from their networks, some factor private equity ownership into their risk assessments of key technologies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a university ecosystem that breeds hunger for status, Epstein made scholars feel like celebrities

The Jeffrey Epstein story is often told as the intersection of two obsessions: sexual abuse and money. The recently released emails certainly contain significant evidence of both. But after more than two decades as a professor at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, I am most struck by the limitation of that frame – in part because it fails to explain why academics show up so consistently in these files.

Certainly, money played a role in Epstein’s university connections. A rich man using donations and access to burnish his ego and legitimacy is a well-worn script, from Andrew Carnegie’s libraries more than a century ago to Bill Gates’s more recent global health philanthropy. As a college drop-out, Epstein clearly craved “respect” from high-profile academics. Universities, meanwhile, are perpetually fundraising and institutions that rely on donations often avoid asking hard questions about where the money came from. As the Bard College president, Leon Botstein, put it when defending his Epstein connections: “Among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people.” Institutions sometimes learn to stop asking hard questions about where the money came from.

Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi professor of management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs

A group of largely authoritarian world leaders and a few observers joined Donald Trump in Washington for the inaugural meeting of the newly established Board of Peace. Guardian Europe reporter Jakub Krupa looks at who attended the organisation's first meeting and what it means for the future world order. The body was created to implement the US president's vision for Gaza’s future after the territory was destroyed by Israel, but Trump has widened its scope, calling it 'the most consequential international body in history'

• Troops for Gaza and money top agenda as Trump’s Board of Peace meets

• Authoritarians, strongmen and dictators: who is on Trump’s Board of Peace?

Mayor says Japanese city will respect donor’s specification that £2.7m gift must be used to repair dilapidated system

Osaka has received a hefty gift of gold bars worth 560m yen (£2.7m) from an anonymous donor and a request for its specific use: to fix the Japanese city’s dilapidated water pipes.

The gold bars, weighing a total of 21kg (46lb), were given to the Osaka City Waterworks Bureau in November by the donor who wants to help improve ageing water pipes, the mayor, Hideyuki Yokoyama, told reporters on Thursday.

We want to hear people who have been through the process of renouncing their US citizenship and how they found it

Are you an American living abroad who has tried to renounce your citizenship? We want to hear from you!

We want to hear about what triggered it, how hard it was, whether you encountered any issues or have concerns about returning home in the future – as well as any fun encounters you had while doing it. How has it all made you feel?

There was a backlash when No 10 invited online content creators inside its doors. But in a fast-changing media landscape, this solves two problems at once

Last year, No 10 took an unprecedented step: it invited content creators to cross the threshold of Downing Street.

Naturally, the creators all filmed themselves outside the famous door. Once inside, their most treasured possessions, their phones, were taken from them and exchanged for government-approved devices, so they could continue to take photos and record video without breaching security guidelines. At the reception, creators from areas as wide as science, education and travel took part in a networking session at the heart of government.

Kirsty Major is a deputy Opinion editor for the Guardian

Destructive storms blasting through parts of the Midwest spawned tornadoes that hit Indiana and Illinois, as near-hurricane force winds swept parts of the region.

A man charged with trying to bribe a juror with up to $100,000 at the drug trafficking trial of a former heavyweight boxer pleaded guilty to obstructing justice.

I got a glimpse at the next generation of home appliances at a sprawling showcase in Orlando. These were the standouts from KBIS 2026.

Do you need to carry so much phone with you? Here's how the two top slim phones compare.

The instrument has strengthened community ties, but some organizers say whistles can create panic or confusion

Over the past year, whistles have become a symbol of the collective resistance of ordinary people standing up to federal immigration enforcement. As the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown to cities and towns across the US, people are relying on whistles to warn their neighbors about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

But not all activists agree on their efficacy. Some organizers, including those in rural areas of the US, say that whistles can heighten panic in the communities they serve. Others say they can create unnecessary confusion for children, the elderly and those with disabilities.

When a few grassroots organizations across the country, from Washington state to Maryland, posted on social media about their decision to keep whistles out of their activism, a debate exploded online. But scholars of social movements say that tactical adaptability is a healthy part of organizing, as coalitions emerge, coalesce and continue to transform to meet the needs on the ground.

After tech billionaire Peter Thiel and others donated to Jace Yarbrough’s campaign, Donald Trump endorsed him

A rookie congressional candidate in a nine-way Texas primary has received the imprimatur of wealthy hard-right donors including tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Claremont Institute board chair Thomas Klingenstein and Charles Haywood, who once expressed a desire to be a “warlord”, according to new Federal Election Commission filings showing early donations to his campaign.

In a recent candidate forum, Jace Yarbrough unapologetically staked out a series of extremist positions, saying that critics may call his approach to politics “bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish”, but that he is “past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form”.

Struggling British carmaker says earnings for 2025 will be worse than City forecasts as US tariffs hit sales

Aston Martin has warned that its losses will be worse than expected and sold its permanent naming rights to its Formula One team, as the struggling British carmaker battles to stabilise its finances.

The luxury carmaker, majority-owned by the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, said its earnings for 2025 would be worse than City forecasts, its fifth profit warning since September 2024.

French utility company EDF says operations in Somerset will start a year later as delay costs firm €2.5bn

Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation at the Hinkley Point C site will face further delay, at a cost of €2.5bn to the French utility company EDF.

EDF said the first reactor at the site in Somerset will begin operations in 2030, a year later than planned – almost 13 years after construction work began – after a series of delays to the project.

Mexico said it seized about four tons of drugs and detained three people from a "narco sub" 250 nautical miles south of Manzanillo.

The updated QuickShot II brings retro gameplay into the modern era while preserving the no-frills button smashing and endearing flaws that fans loved

Nostalgia is big in the modern games industry. It’s ironic that the most technologically obsessed art form on the planet is just as watery-eyed about the past as cinema and music. And to prove it here is the new version of the legendary QuickShot II, a plasticky joystick from the early 1980s that wasn’t even that good the first time round. It was, however, cheap and it resembled an actual fighter plane control stick with its multiple fire buttons and ergonomic shaft. If you wanted a rugged and precise controller you’d go for the Competition Pro, but that one didn’t let you pretend to be in Star Wars or Airwolf. Plus, the QuickShot II had suckers on its base so you could stick it to your cockpit control panel – sorry, I mean MDF computer table.

The new QuickShot II from Retro Games and Plaion Replai is almost an exact replica in terms of its dimensions. You can grasp it in your fist and wrap your thumb and forefinger around its large red buttons. Yes, you can stick it to your table; the designers have even included the original auto-fire switch at the rear for players who weren’t prepared to hit the fire button repeatedly while playing Green Beret.

Guardian review of US justice department files reveals Epstein interacted with six CBP officers. Plus, how anxiety over AI could fuel a new workers’ movement

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Good morning.

Federal investigators examined Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer who worked at the St Thomas airport to which the late convicted sex offender flew regularly by private plane before traveling by boat or helicopter to his private island, newly released documents reveal.

Was anyone ever charged? No CBP officer was ever charged for crimes related to Epstein, and the Guardian has not seen any evidence to suggest that CBP officers had direct knowledge or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

How have Epstein’s survivors reacted? One of them, Marijke Chartouni, said: “If only the US justice department acted as decisively. It took British police less than three weeks from the release of the latest tranche of Epstein files to arrest Andrew, making Pam Bondi and Kash Patel look increasingly inept.”

The mayor of Osaka says a mystery donor's gift of 46 pounds of gold, to help bring the city's water pipes up to scratch, left him "speechless."

Gloria Allred says allegations involving sharing of state trade secrets were prioritised over sexual assault claims against trade envoy

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – latest updates

A lawyer representing several victims of Jeffrey Epstein has said she does not believe there will be “any real justice” for those trafficked and abused by him and his high-profile associates, despite the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Gloria Allred, who has worked as a women’s rights lawyer for five decades, said that while the UK had acted quickly on the allegation that the former prince had shared confidential documents with the disgraced financier while he was a trade envoy, there appeared to be far less progress on sexual assault allegations against him.

Agreement across continent that Mountbatten-Windsor’s detention has put monarchy in unprecedented danger

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – latest updates

• Europe live – latest updates

Neither the shock nor the historical significance of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was lost on the European press. And if there was one thing that correspondents and leader writers around the continent could agree on, it was that the former prince’s detention had plunged the British monarchy into a place of unprecedented danger and vulnerability.

“Despite all the scandals that have shaken the British royal family over the decades, it’s no exaggeration to say that the arrest of King Charles III’s brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor represents a momentous watershed for the Windsor monarchy,” El País said in a leader on Friday.

In April 2025, Eric Dane announced he had been diagnosed​ with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

The avalanche, the deadliest in California history and fourth deadliest in U.S. history, killed at least eight people and left a ninth missing.

While the PS6's release is still years away, here's what we know so far about the next-gen console from Sony.

The future of home was on display at KBIS 2206. Here's all the coolest stuff coming in 2026.

Netflix has a treasure trove of fantasy gems.

The 2026 MLS season kicks off on Saturday. Our writers discuss the teams, players and story lines they’re watching this year

Messi v Son. The two best players in the league play for the two “glamour” teams on opposite coasts, and each have large and dedicated fanbases. If both stay relatively healthy and perform up to capabilities, there’s no way the race between them for some honor (Golden Boot? MVP? Both?) won’t be fascinating to see unfold. AA

Geoengineering does little to defuse most of the risks that really matter for people – and it runs the risk of making some harms worse

Planetary-scale solar geoengineering interventions involve the deliberate injection of either natural or artificial particulates into the stratosphere – stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI – with a view to offset some of the global heating caused by greenhouse gases. If implemented, the technology would create a metaphorical thermostat for the planet. Such a thermostat is advocated on the grounds that controlling global temperature reduces the harms associated with the climate crisis.

I wish to challenge this assertion.

Having a reliable and efficient smoke detector in your home can be a lifesaver. Here are our top five recommendations.

A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll underscores the extent to which Americans are living in fear of the deportation dragnet and dislike the administration’s approach.

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold.

The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this year and has executed more than 140 people in boat strikes.

As the U.S. hurtles toward war with Iran and further military action in the Middle East and continues to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Cuba is just the latest foreign policy arena where the Trump administration has further ensnared the U.S. This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks with fellow reporter Jonah Valdez about how U.S. foreign policy is impacting the upcoming midterm elections and Valdez’s recent reporting on how a new anti-Zionist PAC has associated with influencers who have made statements that are outright antisemitic. 

Lacy also speaks to University of Miami history professor Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability, about the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Missing from mainstream news coverage of Trump’s attacks on Cuba and U.S. efforts to impose regime change in the region is a recognition of how Trump’s policies fit into his attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bustamante says.

“One of the, I think, subtext of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, ‘We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do,’” Bustamante says.   

“It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think, is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change, per se.”

The Trump administration’s strategy is likely to backfire, Pertierra says.

“You don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear,” he says. “So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America. I think it’s going to further weaken it.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept. 

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept, also covering politics and U.S. foreign policy.

AL: We have been deep in midterms coverage. We had early voting in Texas start this week. The first real midterms of the cycle are less than a month away in March.

Jonah, you’ve been reporting on a new and interesting fundraising group that’s active in midterms this cycle — a group called the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC. Tell us a little bit about them.

JV: AZAPAC got its start in August, and so they’ve been around for a few months now, but really sort of hit traction online when they posted sort of like an ad video in November.

And the video is full of a lot of explosive imagery and language from Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, to a lot of images of Israel’s bombs blowing up Palestinian civilian infrastructure, a lot of dead children. And in this, there’s this voiceover stating the whole thesis for the thing, which is “We need to get Zionists out of American politics. They are extorting Americans of their taxpayer dollars and they have too much influence over the U.S. government.” And they list some of their top enemies, which is AIPAC — which, Akela, you’ve reported on extensively — on top of the more moderate group J Street. So they’ve really positioned themselves as a group that is diametrically opposed to the pro-Israel lobby establishment in U.S. politics.

However, when you go a little deeper into its founder Michael Rectenwald, who is a former New York University professor, and the associations that he’s made with figures on the far right, the picture starts to be a lot muddier than just opposition of Zionism.

Related

StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing.

It’s a tricky thing, right? Because, as you know, it’s like the biggest weapon that the pro-Israel establishment has against the free Palestine movement, against any sort of advocacy to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza or any of its actions, is a blanket statement that all of that is antisemitic. A phrase that’s commonly used is, you know, claims of the genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic blood libel.” So you have this situation where this group is trying to be a very loud anti-Zionist voice, but is also making affiliations with figures who are very clearly interested in rooting their criticism of Israel in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

AL: Are they gaining a lot of traction? Are they raising a lot of money? Why should people care about what this group is doing?

JV: That’s a good question. I mean, the first FEC filings came out in January. And so from August when they were founded up until December, they raised about $111,000 — which in the grand scheme of things, when you’re going up against a PAC as large as AIPAC, it’s not a lot.

But I think why we should care about them is what makes them unique. And what makes them unique is they are very directly trying to win over support from not just the left, not just progressives, but also the right and growing criticism of Israel on the right, which has been a huge question mark for pro-Palestine advocates for the past year. Of like, how do we grapple with growing criticism of Israel among the Republican base or even further right than that, and people who are disaffected voters who may not have voted or even avoided voting for Trump altogether, but still have conservative views and are now criticizing Israel for its genocide in Gaza? How do we treat them? Should we ally with them? Should we get support wherever we can? Or should we be skeptical because of their other views?

And so AZAPAC is really, especially in its early months, really catered to that audience. And we see this with its founder Michael Rectenwald going on podcasts such as The Stew Peters Show. Which, if you’re not familiar with Stew Peters, he is a far-right white nationalist who has a show, a podcast that has gained popularity but really took off during Covid. But a big feature of his brand is what he calls the “Zionist occupation” of the government, and a lot of Jewish antisemitic conspiracy theories basically blaming Jewish people for all the issues, including domestic issues of the U.S. government.

He says the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad Satanic Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” And in that same episode, he referred to Department of Justice Attorney Leo Terrell [as] the N-word, and also in another episode referred to Jewish people using another antisemitic slur. And this is just kind of run of the mill for folks like Stew Peters, who, again, the AZAPAC founder Michael Rectenwald is associating himself with, willingly, he told me, to gain support from other audiences to have a broad range of support.

AL: Jonah, I know you’ve had extensive conversations with Mr. Rectenwald, but can you tell us a little bit about his responses to some of your reporting?

JV: I reached out hoping to have an open-ended conversation. Just giving everyone the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are trying to be critical of Israel. It’s like, OK, well, let me hear out what you have to say. 

But before our call, I did a little bit of digging — of like, how is he kind of framing the argument when he’s off-camera? Just going on his Twitter, his X account, and what I found was a lot of references, not just to Zionism, but a lot of references to what he calls the “Jewish mafia” or “Jewish elites,” which are pretty common dog whistles to the far right.

Related

A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists.

So I bring some of these questions to our conversation, and he gratefully agreed to talk with me on the phone. And [I] gave him a chance to let me know what his platform is, and he reiterated that he wants to end all U.S. military support to Israel. He opposes the genocide, wants to oppose the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, and he is pouring money into certain campaigns that are looking to unseat certain pro-AIPAC members, such as Randy Fine in Florida. 

Then I ask him about, well, what about the language that you use? Don’t you think that this risks kind of blurring the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? And that’s when he started kind of going on the defensive, and he disavowed any idea that he himself was antisemitic.

At the time, I only knew that he was on The Stew Peters Show for one appearance. And he said that that was like a very uncomfortable situation for him and that he would’ve called out Peters, but he’s a very aggressive person on his show and he didn’t want to startle him or anything. After our conversation, I come to realize that he has actually been on The Stew Peters Show three to four times to promote AZAPAC.

So I call him back and press him on this more. I say, like, hey, what’s going on here? You’re clearly a regular, and I think you’re clearly trying to gain his support and the support of his audience.

This time, he said, Stew Peters really helped us out in the beginning and after appearing on his show a lot of donations poured in and I don’t want to throw him under the bus. And he didn’t rule out any future appearances.

AL: Who are the candidates that this PAC is working with?

JV: I want to highlight two of them that stuck out to me. One of them is Tyler Dykes. You might recognize him as a convicted rioter from the Capitol riots on January 6. He pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, but also was accused, famously, of performing a Nazi salute on the Capitol steps while storming the Capitol building. And even before that, he was also convicted of taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Actually, for that, he was also sentenced for carrying a burning tiki torch, which I guess there’s a charge in Virginia for carrying a burning object to intimidate.

Anyway, there’s also figures that AZAPAC is supporting, like Casey Putsch who is running for governor in Ohio. He posted a video where basically he is giving a lot of Hitler apologist statements. 

But there’s two other candidates that I wanted to mention who AZAPAC supported and endorsed, which is Anthony Aguilar, who is running as a progressive Green Party candidate out of North Carolina. And he was actually one of the whistleblowers from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that blew the whistle on violence aimed at aid-seeking Palestinians in Gaza. He’s taken that moment into a whole political career. 

He actually decided to rescind his endorsement after The Intercept approached him — after we approached him — with our reporting on both Rectenwald, his statements, his associations with the far right, but also these backgrounds of other candidates that Aguilar’s campaign wasn’t aware of.

And it’s the same case for another recent AZAPAC endorsement, which is Greg Stoker, who is also a progressive Green Party candidate. He was part of one of the flotillas to break the siege in Gaza. And, you know, similar case where when we approached him with our reporting on Rectenwald and AZAPAC — decided to rescind his endorsement. And sure enough, as of this week, all mention of both Aguilar and Stoker’s campaign were removed from AZAPAC’s website, scrubbed from social media.

I think they are making a calculation similar to some concerns that I’ve raised in my reporting — it harms the movement.

AL: Jonah, we’re looking forward to reading your piece, which is up now. Thank you for walking us through your reporting. You know, while frustration over Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a major focus of our reporting and covering how the Israel lobby is approaching midterms and how much voters still care about that — this is far from the only foreign policy issue that is top of mind for voters right now. 

We are potentially moving toward war with Iran, according to reporting from Axios on Wednesday. There is a very large aircraft carrier moving toward the Middle East.

Our episode today focuses on what’s happening as the U.S. is ramping up sanctions in Cuba. If you’ve been following The Intercept’s reporting, you know, we’ve been tracking the more than 140 people the administration has killed in boat strikes in the Caribbean. Amid these boat strikes, we hope you did not forget that the U.S. also kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

After toppling Maduro, the Trump administration demanded the Venezuelan government hand over its oil. This has led to a fuel shortage in Cuba, which largely depends on Venezuela’s oil. Now the Trump administration has Cuba squarely in its crosshairs. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security — we’ve heard that one before — which has led to an oil blockade, which is now spiraling into a humanitarian crisis in Cuba as we speak. 

To understand what’s happening, I spoke to Michael Bustamante, an associate professor of history and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability. 

Here’s our conversation. 

Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks for having me. 

Michael Bustamante: Thanks for having me.

AL: To start, Andrés, the last time you spoke to The Intercept in 2024, you were joining us from Havana, Cuba. You’ve since left. What can you tell us about what life was like for people in the country when you were last there?

AP: I was there in 2024. Things were really bad already when I was there. The country was recovering from the Covid crisis more or less, protest waves had gone from a historic exception to part of the new normal. And while I was there, there were actually the beginning of what became, I think, in total six national blackouts. Six times that the entire national grid collapsed, usually for two to three days. Inflation was out of control. Wages had gone back to basically symbolic, at least if you were in the state sector. 

And there was just a despair, a generalized despair, that I had never remembered seeing before. I mean, people were always desperate and frustrated, but there was a despair of things ever getting better that was novel, that was kind of pushing people to leave en masse. In the last five years about 20 percent of the population has left the island, which is pretty extraordinary for a country not in a state of war.

AL: Recently, a reporter asked Trump about Cuba making a deal with the United States. Let’s hear Trump’s response.

Reporter: You’re warning Cuba to make a deal. What does that deal look like? What do you want them to do? 

Donald Trump: Make a deal. Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take off. They’re clogging up their runway. We’re talking to Cuba right now. They have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.

AL: In that clip, Trump goes on to say, “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no anything.” Michael, can you bring us up to speed? Tell us about the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba and the Trump administration’s efforts to increase pressure.

MB: I think it’s widely known that the United States has had a program of comprehensive sanctions on Cuba since the early 1960s that come out of the consequences of the Cuban Revolution, the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties and businesses, the emergence of Cuba as a kind of a Cold War flashpoint. That history has never gone away. 

What I think has changed over time is sort of the degree to which there are holes that are poked in that sanctions regime. There have been openings and closings — most memorably, perhaps, under the Obama administration that really moved to try to put relations with Cuba on a new footing and try to normalize diplomatic ties. In fact, they did that. But the sanctions as such have been codified under law since the 1990s, and that really limits the purview of what the executive branch can do on its own.

The first Trump administration when it came in promised to undo the “bad Obama deal” with Cuba, and it did so, piling on sanctions particularly by 2019 that certainly made things difficult — more difficult — in Cuba.

But the last decade in particular, I would say, has also been a time in which there is a greater and greater consensus inside Cuba, among Cuban economists, among Cuban social scientists, that the country itself is desperate for reforms of a political and economic variety, that the government has been slow — sort of slow footing. And those reforms are needed, not because the United States says so, but because foe and friend alike to Cuba have been been telling them so. 

And so the Cuban people are left in the middle, it seems to me, of a U.S. policy that particularly in the last few weeks has intensified even further in the wake of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro, and the particular vulnerability to that pressure that comes from Cuba’s own inability to put forth a reform program and do so successfully. 

So that’s kind of where we are. And right now, there are few lifelines available to Cuba in an economic sense. The Trump administration feels that it has the leverage and is trying to use it, albeit, as you heard the president admit, at a potentially, very significant humanitarian cost.

AL: Andrés, can you talk more about how these sanctions work and how they’re playing a role in the current state of Cuba’s economy and its prospects for governance? Walk me through how we got here, like I’m 5.

AP: I think that the most urgent sanction, which is the novelty here, is the current oil embargo.

Basically, the United States has declared it as a matter of policy that if you ship oil to Cuba, the United States government is going to increase tariffs and basically engage in punitive economic measures against your country. And so this obviously creates a huge disincentive for countries that even want to sell oil.

So Venezuela would give oil, it would sell it at below-market rates, it would aid Cuba for political reasons. That’s over, thanks to the change of leadership with Delcy Rodríguez. With Mexico, [President Claudia] Sheinbaum has made it clear that she wants to help Cuba. But she’s not really willing to cross Trump on the oil issue. So she’s sending every kind of aid except for oil. That is the real key thing that is basically causing the wheels to come off the bus, as it were. 

But if you’re talking about broader sanctions and regimes, you have Helms-Burton. Trump, during the first Trump administration, activated Title III, which had never been activated before, which among other things, basically says if you’re doing business in a way that engages with or uses resources that were nationalized by the Cuban government, never compensated owners for them, and the owners are U.S. citizens — blah, blah, blah, lots of caveats there — but basically that you can then be sued.

For example, if you have a cruise ship and it docks in a port that was owned by a Cuban who has U.S. citizenship, da da dah, you can then be sued. So the Carnival cruise ships died overnight. That entire sector just collapsed. And I actually had a friend who part of his business model was giving day tours for the tourists who were just there for the day — dead overnight.

Or another thing is, by Trump, and this is — I’m not sure if this is technically an economic sanction, this is not technically an embargo. But another policy that’s hurt Cuba is by putting Cuba on the [state] sponsors of terrorism list. That means that if you’re a European citizen who normally qualifies for an ESTA visa to come to the United States, you no longer qualify if you visit Cuba for a period of, I think, five years, which obviously also impacts the tourism sector.

Also the famous one is, if you have a shipping container and you dock in a Cuban port, you can’t dock in an American port for six months. Like there’s a lot of different measures that turn up the pressure, but really it’s the state sponsors of terrorism list plus the oil embargo that’s really like turning the volume up to 11, right now.

MB: I just wanted to add to that — Andrés has done a good job zeroing in on some of the more recent things and some of the more specific things. But of course, there’s just a broader trade embargo, right? Which means that U.S. companies, by and large, with few exceptions, cannot export goods to Cuba, nor can U.S. persons or actors or companies import goods from Cuba.

Now, there have been exceptions to that put in place over time. A big one came in the year 2000 for the export of food stuff. So it is legal to export food. In fact, a lot of the chicken that gets consumed in Cuba is from the United States. 

One of the, I think, Achilles’ heels of the Cuban economy is the degree of import dependence for foodstuffs. A lot of which has been coming over the last 10, 20 years through that loophole. But I think because of that, and because of loopholes like that, and then also because of the fact that the trade embargo per se is a bilateral thing, it doesn’t impact in theory the ability of Cuba to trade with France or Brazil or whatever else. You often hear this commentary, “Well, you know, embargo, what embargo if Cuba can trade with the rest of the world?” And that’s kind of true, but it neglects sort of the impact of the sanctions regime on global financial institutions.

The fact of the matter is that because the global financial system is so integrated and so tied into U.S. banking institutions — because particularly of Cuba’s addition to the state sponsors to terrorism list — any transaction that Cuba might want to do with an enterprise in Europe, say, but that has a link to a U.S. bank or that has a subsidiary that operates in the United States, they just don’t want to touch it. Cuba is radioactive. 

And so there are significant kind of extraterritorial effects of the U.S. sanctions regime that obviously don’t make it any easier for Cuba to do business elsewhere in the world, even when in some ways they can.

AL: President Barack Obama, as you mentioned Michael, tried to normalize relations with Cuba when he first entered office, lifting restrictions on remittances and travel to Cuba. In 2014, Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro’s brother, took steps to fully restore diplomatic ties, and there were signs of positive economic outcomes as a result. Then Trump won in 2016, immediately reversed those Obama-era policies. Biden comes into office and tries to normalize relations again. Then Trump is back in office, this time increasing pressure on the country even more.

What has that back and forth on U.S. policy toward Cuba meant for the nation and what is driving the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts, which I will note that the United Nations is warning that the humanitarian situation will “worsen and if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” Andrés, I’ll start with you.

AP: I think that the first thing the listeners should understand is that pre-1991 and post-1991 U.S. Cuba policy have similar but very different dynamics. In the context of the Cold War, you could make more arguments about Cuba as a national security threat. You could make these arguments, like Cuba is intervening in Angola and U.S. interests and all the rest, or U.S. support for guerrillas in Central America. Post-1991, the problem is more like a Jeep that’s stuck in the mud on the side of the road, right? Even though the consensus — 

AL: I love that image. Yes.

AP: The consensus post-1991 has long been, at least in foreign policy circles, like a rational Cuba policy would be normalization. It would be engagement. I mean, think back to the ’90s. What is the U.S. approach to China? More trade, more investment, more integration in the hopes that you’re going to defeat Communism with Nike and Coca-Cola. That’s similar to what people have been thinking about Cuba for a long time. But because of the fact that an increasingly well-organized Cuba lobby in a strategic swing state — like Florida — is able to basically leverage that. Not saying you can’t cross them; you can. Obama did, and he won Florida anyway.

But it increased the pressure. And part of it is, Cuba is not important enough to kind of escape those shackles of domestic politics. If it were a national security issue, then those domestic policy issues could be overridden much more easily. But it’s not, and that’s kind of the core problem. It can have this kind of lobby interest capture in a way that many other countries don’t. And I think that’s the core problem.

AL: Michael.

MB: First, just on the flip-flopping between relative degrees of openness and closeness in U.S. policy — it certainly doesn’t do anything to help, say, the investment landscape in a place like Cuba.

Imagine you’re a European company or whatever, and you’re watching this sort of flip-flop. You want stability in whatever the framework is in which you have to figure out how to operate. And by the way, that also applies to the increasingly important Cuban private sector, which has been growing slowly but surely through ups and downs in Cuba’s own internal regulatory framework. But in 2024, the Cuban private sector was doing more business just in terms of retail sales to the population than the Cuban state. And that is a very significant shift in kind of the internal economic logics of the place. 

But they also are contending not only with an unstable policy landscape internally and the sort of ups and downs of opening and closing to private sector expansion, which have not been helpful. They’re also dealing with the ups and downs of U.S. policy and thinking, OK, can I get a visa to go to the United States and think about sourcing goods in the United States under certain embargo loopholes? Well, are they going to close me off, are they not? Is the U.S. going to authorize investment, for perhaps, in the private sector with the notion that United States might have a strategic interest in supporting the growth of the private sector versus the state economy?

So the flip-flopping makes it very difficult to sort of envision a path forward. It means that I think both for Cuban officials, but also Cubans on the ground who are trying to push their country forward sometimes against the ways that their officials are not happy with. Everyone’s sort of playing whack-a-mole constantly, right? 

One thing I would just amend your description of the recent years slightly. And just to say that A, when Trump was elected the first term, he didn’t undo the Obama thing right away. It took a couple years and cruise ships kept going to Cuba for a couple years, and that was sort of an odd thing. Despite the rhetorical change, obviously. It’s really in 2019 when they put in place what they call a maximum pressure policy tied to a similar policy on Venezuela at the time.

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And then the Biden administration, I think there was some expectation that when they came in, Biden would roll back the clock to what Obama had done. For better or worse, that didn’t happen. And part of that didn’t happen because when Biden comes in, he’s got a huge agenda. It’s the middle of the pandemic. Cuba’s not high on the geopolitical priority list, as Andrés mentioned.

And then when in July of 2021, Cuba was at the low point of the pandemic itself and the economic crisis that had been induced by it or worsened by it and there are these mass protests across the island. And the Cuban government responded to mass protests of people who wanted food, electricity, and greater political freedoms by throwing a thousand kids in jail. 

And so, like it or not, the Biden administration is not going to step into that moment and say, “Yeah, let’s open the doors.” I wish they had been more, had more foresight on the humanitarian front, but there’s also a pattern here of the Cuban government doing things over time that make the political optics fair or unfair for the United States to move its own policy ball forward more difficult. 

And when the Cuban president at the time says, you know, we’re sending out people to the street to combat these anti-revolutionaries, I mean, how do you think the United States is going to respond, even under a Democratic administration? So again, I just again and again, see that in this back and forth, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle of this geopolitical game between both governments. And we’re now seeing those consequences have really probably the most tragic effects that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

[Break] 

AL: Michael, for the Journal of Democracy, you recently wrote, “Many U.S. policymakers, diaspora leaders, and opposition figures have embraced humanitarian suffering as a tool of political change.” You’re touching on this — I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and what effect the Trump administration’s pressure campaign is having on the Cuban people and the government? That’s some of the least of what I’ve seen in the reporting on this, about the real effects on the ground. And I’m also curious what has been the response from Cuban people to the U.S.’s latest efforts to oust the government?

MB: Those lines in the piece alluded to the fact that, in addition to the effort to sanction or disincentivize further oil shipments and really cut off oil, Cuban American elected officials and other voices in the community have been calling for further measures. Measures that would include cutting off commercial flights that still exist between the United States and various places in Cuba that are largely used by members of the Cuban diaspora to go visit and support their families. The ability of Cubans to send remittances to send gift parcels of various kinds, right?

All of these things are really very important lifelines for Cuban families in unequal ways, because not every Cuban on the island has family outside, and not everyone has access to those remittance dollars. But those remittance dollars are a vital lifeline.

I think the position of the elected officials is, is that any kind of economic lifeline to the Cuban economy helps the Cuban state stay afloat. And they are arguing that if the Trump administration is really going to try to crack down, you might as well go all the way if you want to use leverage and try to force them to the negotiating table or force the Cuban government to seed to U.S. wishes or whether opening to U.S. economic interests or political change — you got to cut off every source of supply. 

This has been a more delicate thing for Cuban American politicians to navigate in recent years because they’re well aware that many of their constituents are sending money to their families. Sending, you know, in a country that has — there’s no antibiotics, let alone basic painkillers, right? The care package that you can send really, really makes a difference. 

And just to put it into context, while it’s really hard to calculate the number of remittance or the value of remittance that go into Cuba because a lot of it is sort of in people’s suitcases. It’s thought that the income that the Cuban economy gets from this is really on par of what it has gotten in from something like tourism. So it’s a major contributor to the Cuban economy, but it’s sensitive to cut that off because it touches people. It’s one thing to say, “Down with the Cuban government.” It’s another thing to say, “You can’t send painkillers to your mom.” But lately they have been saying it. The Cuban American officials have been saying it. They’re calling for it. And I think they’re making a bet that you step up the pressure to 1,000 percent and you have a better chance of getting the Cuban government to seed. Of course, there’s a huge humanitarian risk there.

I think it’s a mistake in some of the reporting I’ve seen to attribute the degree of, say, the trash piling up on Cuban streets or the degree of the economic problems to just what’s happened since January. This has been a rolling train wreck for a while. What we’ve done is ratchet it up, and there’s this very dangerous game of chicken that’s happening between both governments. And I think as time passes, the more difficult it is for U.S. policymakers to allege that none of the suffering is on their hands, that this is only the Cuban government’s fault. I mean, it’s both. And again, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle wondering which side is going to back down first.

AL: Andrés, can you expand on that?

AP: I did want to say that a lot of people, and I think Michael has already touched on this, is a lot of people think, oh, Miami Cubans, and you’re thinking about a bunch of white Cubans who left between 1959 and 1975 — that’s a minority. 

Since 1980, not only do Cubans often come from working-class backgrounds, they grew up or were born under the revolution, they maintain closer ties. But many of them still buy in for reasons of extreme frustration with the Cuban government. So I think that even as I disagree with their policies, I do think it’s important for listeners to understand that this is not just the same kind of caricature of the white Cuban who left back in the day. This is like, I have classmates who are pro-Trump — or former classmates, because I did my undergrad in Cuba — and they are pro-Trump, despite being Black and Cuban. That is a dynamic that I think listeners should be aware of. 

But I agree with another thing that Michael said and I think is really important here, which is that it’s not just that this is going to hypothetically hurt people, but this is going to kill people and it’s probably already killing people. What happens when someone has an asthma attack, and there’s no meds at the hospital? Or someone has an asthma attack, and you can’t even get to the hospital because there’s no ambulance, there’s no transportation, there’s no gas? Something that’s small or should be small then suddenly becomes this catastrophic life-changing event.

I even met someone two years ago — two years ago, before this mess — whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip. And she was told by the doctors that she would have to import basically everything, including surgical supplies, not just medicines for him to have his hip replaced or his hip operated on. And I said, “But that means he’s not going to be able to walk.” And she’s like, yeah. 

That is the kind of impact that a maximum pressure campaign has. Which is why traditionally, it’s one thing to, for example, in World War I create this maximum pressure sanctions — no oil, no nothing — campaign against Germany in the context of aggression in World War I or World War II. Or even maximum pressure sanctions against Russia that’s invading Ukraine. Like, that is one thing. 

It is entirely another to have this policy against a government which is despotic, which abuses its citizens, which is incompetent, which does all of these things — I’m not trying to dodge any of that — which throws kids in jail, draconian measures, all that stuff. But then who’s footing the bill? It’s everyday people, and the politicians don’t take responsibility for that. They still try and dodge, by and large, their responsibility.

And the fact that they are killing people and they’re doing it from the safety of Florida — which to me, beyond the intellectual component — to me just feels like, come on, if you really want to commit to this, you’re not even going to suffer from these policies that you’re enforcing. You’re not even going to take responsibility for it. And I don’t think it’s justifiable.

MB: Andrés is right, that it feels a little cheap to say pile on the pressure — pile on pressure from the outside — when you’re not going to be on the receiving end of it. But one thing that I think is important is that because of the tremendous recent migration from Cuba, some of the people who are calling on for piling on pressure do have family members in Cuba.

And they have grown embittered by the fact that they have to send remittances to their family in the first place. And this translates to more and more people I know on the island — I mean, of course there are people on the island who are horrified by what the United States is doing — but there are others who are saying, you know what? Between the sort of unwillingness to move the ball forward internally between our government officials saying we would rather sink in the sea than seed to the Americans when maybe we should seed a little because that would help me breathe too. And then the sort of hostility of the outside, I hear people saying more and more, listen, enough with the sort of middling approaches from the United States, whether it’s poke a little hole in the embargo this, or close down this. It’s either you rip off the band-aid of sanctions and let the economy breathe, and you just learn to live with the Cuban government — or send in the F-16s.

And I don’t say that to sound callous or to endorse that way of thinking, but that’s the mindset of many, many Cubans I know who are, I think, more open than they have ever been to some kind of drastic U.S. action, if it would at least maybe move the ball forward, even if there are tremendous risks that come from it, and rather that than this kind of slow-rolling humanitarian disaster that may unfold if the governments continue to just be playing the standoff over the oil shipments and other kinds of trade.

So I think there’s a thirst for decisive action, but of course this is an administration, if we want to go there, I think they’ve shown quite clearly in Venezuela that they’re not too keen on long-term boots on the ground and trying to do this sort of remote governance, in a sense, by proxy of the Delcy Rodríguez regime. In Cuba, that’s a much more difficult proposition to envision. And so one of the other things I argue in that piece of Journal of Democracy is that, ultimately, if the United States really wants to force regime change here, it might require a kind of forcing of the issue from the outside in a way that I think could get uncomfortable for more isolationist actors within the Trump administration. So that’s going to be very important to watch too — how that conflict internally in the decision-making process in Washington evolves.

AL: You also wrote, “Exile groups, for their part, are as numerous as they are competitive for influence and attention. With Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Cuban Americans have never held more sway in the U.S. federal government. But unlike during the heyday of the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1990s, there is no single organization or leader who can claim to speak for the entire diaspora community.”

I want to talk a little bit about Rubio’s influence here and of the Cuban diaspora, as well as what you describe as “credible architecture for political change.” And the question in the back of my mind here is also like, how much of what we’re seeing here is part of a lobbying effort on behalf of the Cuban diaspora or Cuban interests in the U.S. versus how much of this is just like, we don’t like communism?

MB: I mean, unquestionably, Marco Rubio has been highly influential, if not determinant in the direction of U.S–Cuba policy under this administration. He was certainly in the ear of the Trump administration, the first go around, albeit from the Senate. And it’s no secret that the secretary of state has had a long interest in seeing a different political and economic model in Cuba and believing that U.S. sanctions are the tool to achieve that. 

You know, everybody’s making the Venezuela comparison. So the parts of my piece that you cited come a little bit in response to that. U.S. diplomats have floated this idea that what we want is to combine external pressure with sanctions, with trying to find someone in Cuba to negotiate with. That for someone like Rubio, I find to be highly interesting from a political point of view because this is somebody who made his career in a sense — or at least part of his career, part of his foreign policy bonafide — arguing, as many Cuban American elected officials have, that any talks whatsoever with the Cuban government are tantamount to legitimizing a government that is illegitimate.

That was their response to the Obama normalization, and yet, in effect, what the president himself keeps saying, and Rubio confirms and denies — a little bit more, more unclearly — is that there may be talks underway. There’s a report in Axios that suggests that the secretary of state himself is actually engaged in a kind of a back-channel dialogue with Raúl Castro’s grandson, who is, let’s just say not a particularly beloved figure among most Cubans. How Rubio sells that to a Miami constituency, I think, is quite interesting. But that kind of deal-making impulse is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus. 

And I also happen to think that in the Venezuelan case, Rubio has said in response to criticism, look, you don’t get a political transition overnight, a political transition is not something you cook for two minutes in a microwave oven. I think he’s right in most cases, right? This idea of the Cuban government or the Venezuelan government just kind of imploding and disappearing and to be replaced by something that’s unclear is a little bit of fantasy, I think, in these two contexts. And particularly in the Cuban context where, as I argue, there are opposition actors in Cuba and groups and certainly in exile, but there is nothing comparable to the figure of María Corina Machado that acts as a force around which both an internal opposition and a diaspora opposition can gravitate. And so I think the big missing piece here, in this vision of forcing change through sanctions and dialogue is, where’s the counterpart? And so that’s the paradox of this moment, too. 

I mean, you’ve never had Cuban Americans more influential in the foreign policy-making process toward Cuba, right? It’s not the Cuba lobby anymore. It is a Cuban American who’s the secretary of state. He doesn’t need to be lobbied perhaps in the same way that others needed to. This is his issue. But the Cuban American community is as divided as ever. Not necessarily in terms of their vision for change on the island, but who is to lead it and the politics — the intergroup politics — of this group or that group. I mean, that is as old as time and hasn’t gone away. And contrast with the moment in the 1990s when the Cuban American National Foundation was really the leading organization of the Cuba lobby, so to speak, and claimed, I think with a bit more credibility, to speak for the community as a whole. That’s disappeared. And there’s this sort of scrum of elected officials, influencers, you know, all sort of vying for attention. 

But what is the actual structure of governance that would follow a supposed fall of the Cuban government on the island? I don’t think it exists. And that might explain why this administration, even under Rubio, is flirting with this idea of some kind of negotiated exit, even as improbable or fantastical as that may seem at this juncture.

AL: Andrés, do you want to jump in?

AP: I agree with what he’s saying, and I think that also it kind of underlines this broader tension in the MAGA coalition, as it were. So you don’t just have these conflicting interests and all these positions within the Cuban diaspora, but you also have this coalition where you’ve got the more isolationist wing and you’ve got the hawkish wing.

The hawkish wing is obviously more the Rubio wing. While the isolation of swing is, I guess, more Stephen Miller and JD Vance, though, I’m not sure how seriously Trump takes Vance, but Stephen Miller at the very least. 

So you have all these conflicting interests, and this does seem to be narrowing the possible policies that the Trump administration is willing to do. So no boots on the ground. And this risks not only with Venezuela, with Delcy Rodriguez, that’s not a consummated regime change operation, right? They took out one person. They have someone who’s more pliable, but she’s in a very delicate position domestically.

So it remains to be seen how much of a transition there will be. There’s already like problems over how many political prisoners she’s released, you know, will she try and break free of this kind of quasi vacillation. So, not only is the Venezuela 1.0 model still a question mark, but you also have these tensions within the Trump coalition that severely constrain how much Rubio or Trump or anyone can have a coherent policy towards a country that is, you know, as Mike said, very different and very complex. 

For context, I mean, not only is it that Cuba has a very different level of dissident organization, all the rest — like look at Eastern Europe, look at the USSR. In almost all cases, accept in Poland with Solidarity, dissident movements were microscopic until the very end. In Cuba, you had attempts to organize a broader dissident organization. There was right after the 2021 protest, you had the attempts to articulate something called Archipiélago. That movement was broken. Its leaders were basically given the choice of exile or jail. And there is no leadership.

And so really what you would have to do is negotiate with the state, but then that creates the tension that Mike’s already talked about, which is OK, how do we do that without pissing off these people? It seems like they’re going to piss off part of their coalition no matter how they handle it, even if the current approach is “successful,” right? So it’s really like even seeing things in terms of whatever they’re doing right now is successful, it is going to create problems down the road for them. And I’m not sure that it is going to be successful in the way that they think it is. 

AL: For both of you, what do you think mainstream media, particularly in the U.S., is missing in how it’s covering the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba right now?

MB: I mean, part of it is what I said already. I think there’s some missing context that this humanitarian crisis — like, it didn’t just start. There was already a humanitarian crisis. 850,000 Cubans came to the United States since 2021. That is the largest Cuban migration in history ever. That’s happening for a reason, right?

So where we are now hasn’t come out of nowhere. And I think there’s a kind of a presentism in coverage sometimes that is understandable but I think is missing a little bit of the boat of this wider history. That’s one thing. 

To shift gears slightly to another issue that’s been kind of in the ether, particularly in the diaspora, all throughout this period, and certainly since Trump retook office, is the subtext of migration policy. And thinking about how the Trump administration has treated the historic numbers of those Cubans who came in recent years and sort of revoked status. Long story short, 400 to 500,000 Cubans of that giant recent exodus have some kind of indeterminate status that the Biden administration gave them, that the Trump administration has either tried to pull away or seems less likely than Biden ever was to sort of convert it to permanent status.

Deportations have been increasing, and they’ve been continuing even since January at a slow clip or relative to the size, but nonetheless significant. And so I think one thing that would even in a circumstance in which a Cuban government falls — there’s a regime insider that becomes the Delcy Rodríguez of Cuba, the best-case scenario that the Trump administration can imagine — the politics for the Cuban American community are going to be really important to watch because one of the, I think, subtexts of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, “We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do.” It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does then the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change per se.

AL: Andrés.

AP: One of the core things that I think a lot of the coverage has kind of struggled with is how to balance systemic failure from embargo policy in a particular Trump-era policy. And I think that part of the problem is that if you talk to a lot of people, especially politicians or activists, you’re going to get either it’s all the fault of the government, or it’s all the fault of sanctions, and there’s no real room in between or even like the beginnings of a framework to understand how to approach this.

And I think that, not only to mention it in the same breath is important because it’s clearly both factors. But also something that might be helpful for journalists covering this to think about is, think of the systemic economic and policy failures in Cuba as kind of an immune disease. People often miss that because these systemic failures, these policy problems, the unreformed nature of Cuban agriculture — meaning that a country that is a historical ag exporter is importing previously about 60 to 80 percent of its food. Now, I don’t doubt, somewhere around 95, like they’re importing everything at this point.

Like these are things that are aggravated by the embargo, but they’re not caused by the embargo. And that you need to see the embargo as multiplier rather than cause of why the system just is struggling to breath. Why there’s kind of like a pneumonia — economic pneumonia — in the country right now.

AL: Both of you have touched on the fact that this is happening right after our kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. And I won’t say unprecedented because it’s not unprecedented, but probably the most U.S. intervention in Latin America that we’ve seen since the coup spree of the ’50s through the ’80s. What does this mean for Latin America more broadly?

Michael, I’m really glad you brought the immigration policy into this, but you know, we’ve killed people in boat strikes in the Caribbean. And as you mentioned Andrés, people are probably already dying now from the most recent sort of ratcheting up of these sanctions. 

But as we’ve talked about, it’s not being covered in the same way. So I wonder if you could just speak to that and sort of what you were expecting to see in the future.

MB: The conversation about Cuba policy is intimately related to broader conversations about U.S. national security strategy. If you read that national security strategy that was put out by the administration late last year I believe, I think what was so striking to many folks was how far it leaned away, even from the rhetoric of kind of great power competition and more that we will let China and Russia do their thing, but it’s really about spheres of influence.

And so I think, all this business about the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the “Doroe” doctrine, and aggressive force projection, to put it mildly in the Western Hemisphere, feels like deja vu for someone who teaches about the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America in the early 20th century quite often. So it’s inseparable from that. There’s this notion that the administration feels that this is our hemisphere. I mean, they’re using this language much more boldly and baldly than I think we’ve seen since, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt or something.

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What I think is interesting about this moment is that Latin America itself as a region has had its own backs and forths in terms of the ideological direction of leadership but right now is in a moment of largely or sort of more of a swing to the right with few exceptions. You know, [Gustavo] Petro (Colombia) and Lula (Brazil) are exceptions in the regional political landscape. And also, there’s no love lost in much of the region even on the center left for parts of the region, for someone like Nicolás Maduro who, you know, Venezuela became the source of a mass exodus in its own right that impacted a number of countries and became a political problem across the region.

So I think part of that is why you don’t see many voices in the region necessarily standing up and criticizing too much what the administration has done in Venezuela. The critiques have been more pro forma, but also because those governments that might be more likely to critique those actions, they’ve got their own fish to fry with an increasingly transactional administration that’s wielding tariff threats in new ways. That explains why Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, to go back to an earlier point, is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to the demand that she stop Mexico’s own oil shipments to Cuba. And I don’t think the Cuban government can count on the kind of regional support that it might have in prior moments. 

If you go back 10 years ago, part of the reason that Obama does what he does on Cuban normalization is because he’s hearing an earful every time he goes to a regional summit that the path to improving U.S. relations with Latin America as a whole coming out the George W. Bush years is to get away from sort of unilateralism and interventionism or the threat of that. And that the way to signal to the region that you’re turning the page is to fix your problem with Cuba and get policy on a more normal, practical footing. And guess what? The Cubans are also reforming and there’s a path here. The regional landscape right now is very, very, very different — very different politically. And so Cuba is much more isolated than it has been in a long time.

You hear voices on the center-left also saying, you know, the Cuban government here, yes, what the United States is doing is horrible and using Cuban people as cannon fodder for this policy that increases humanitarian suffering with the goal of getting the Cuban government to seed or come to the table. But man, the Cubans have had a decade or more — 30 years since the end of the Cold War — to get their economy on at least a little bit stabler footing. And they’ve kind of opened themselves up to this in a way, right? Which is not to blame the victim per se, but it is a complicated story. And I think Cuba’s more isolated on the regional front than it’s been in a while because of it.

AP: There’s a reason that the United States just didn’t really do what the Trump administration is doing anymore, right? Like that really in your face, just do it, break some things on our way to fixing it solution or approach to Latin America. There’s a reason we moved past that.

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And I think that a return to that is going to create a backlash. The exact way that this backlash is going to take form we won’t see it for a while. He’s going to cow various governments into obeisance for a bit, but you don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear. You get them to temporarily cooperate while they now figure out a backdoor, other guarantors.

So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America; I think it’s going to further weaken it. Not least because I mean, if you look at who is the main trade partner of a lot of Latin America, it’s not the U.S. anymore, it’s China. China’s investing. This is not the USSR, where the USSR even at peak was a fraction of the U.S.’s GDP and had real trouble exporting their economic model. This is a country that can compete with the U.S. on its own terms, and in fact can excel because like they, oftentimes the Chinese don’t really care as much about, is this country a dictatorship? Is this country going to be able to pay us back reliably? They’ll just do it.

So, I don’t even think that purely in a Machiavellian sense, this is going to create a coherent policy or an effective policy. And another way that I think this is going to create a likely backlash and actually strengthen authoritarian tendencies among the left, is look at the overthrow Jacobo Guzmán in 1954 in Guatemala, which was a seminal moment for many Latin Americans during that period, not at least many of those who created the Cuban Revolution, but also look at [Salvador] Allende in 1973. And I understand that’s more complicated. It wasn’t just a foreign coup. It was like a lot of domestic factors. But what I’m trying to say is, the lesson that a lot of people on the left took was, a democratic path to policies that we want is impossible, ergo realism dictates that we take a different road. And does that mean that we’re going to see guerrillas pop up tomorrow? Probably not. This seems to be set to supercharge that tendency, even if we can’t exactly foresee what direction or manifestation it will have in practice.

AL: I want to thank you both for helping me and our listeners understand this even a tiny bit better. Michael and Andrés, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with us on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thanks a lot. 

AP: Thank you.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it really helps other listeners to find us.

If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post What Does Trump Want With Cuba? appeared first on The Intercept.

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Chatham House Prize 2025: Honouring Sudan’s civilian humanitarian leadership 26 March 2026 — 6:00PM TO 7:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 20 February 2026 Chatham House and Online

Please join us as Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), accept the Chatham House Prize.

Please join us as Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), accept the Chatham House Prize.

Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups – the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – have been awarded the 2025 Chatham House Prize, in recognition of their crucial role in delivering humanitarian support during the ongoing war in Sudan.  

These community networks are said to have been the difference between life and death for millions – saving lives in areas often inaccessible to international organizations. They step in where state structures have broken down, providing essentials like food, water and medical supplies and maintaining or repairing power and water systems.  

Their work has been praised and recognized by several international bodies including the Norwegian Nobel Committee – particularly for their impartial nature and attempts to provide aid for all parties caught up in the war.  

About the Chatham House Prize

The Chatham House Prize is voted for by Chatham House members, following nominations from the institute’s staff. The award is presented on behalf of the institute’s patron, His Majesty the King, representing the non-partisan and authoritative character of the Prize.

The Chatham House Prize was launched in 2005. Previous recipients of the Prize include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sir David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

City of Catania calls ruse to avoid CCTV cameras installed to stop fly-tipping ‘as cunning as it is doubly wrong’

A man in Catania, Sicily, trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish by the roadside in an attempt to evade surveillance cameras installed to combat fly-tipping, municipal police have said.

The episode was detailed in a post on the city of Catania’s official Facebook page. Accompanying a video of the dog was a remark from the police that “inventiveness can never become an alibi for incivility”.

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022

The 22-year-old became the first Black woman to win an Olympic hockey title on Thursday. Those she grew up alongside couldn’t hide their delight

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The TV screen’s jazz of drags, snaps, pops, and stops during the Milano Cortina Games have shown sport at its most powder-light and loveable

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The median property tax bill in the U.S. soared 30% between 2019 and 2024, compounding the financial pressures on millions of Americans.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators. "The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine," reports The Verge. From the report: The plan, which was introduced by Hochul as part of the state's budget proposal last month, would have allowed limited robotaxi deployment in cities other than the Big Apple -- while leaving whether New York City would get autonomous vehicles up to the mayor and the City Council. But now that plan is DOA, as support in the legislature never materialized. "Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal," Sean Butler, a Hochul spokesperson, said in a statement. "While we are disappointed by the Governor's decision, we're committed to bringing our service to New York and will work with the State Legislature to advance this issue," Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said in a statement. "The path forward requires a collaborative approach that prioritizes transparency and public safety."

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January increase of 1.8% beats forecasts and was also driven by shoppers snapping up jewellery online

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Retail sales in Great Britain rose 1.8% in January, the largest monthly increase in almost two years, according to official data, as heavy discounting and post-Christmas sales drew consumers back to bigger ticket purchases.

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Trump has attacked judges and weakened global safeguards. Someone needs to stand up to the US and stop the erosion of democracy

In an era of overlapping crises, corruption is no longer a side issue – it is a structural threat to achieving international equality and even freedom itself. Each year, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a league table of 182 countries, is greeted with predictable theatrics: praise where it flatters power, condemnation where it can be weaponised, and hollow promises of reform that quietly expire once attention moves on. Instead of a moment of reckoning, it is ignored by those with the power to act.

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Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens visits the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to talk about a months-long project looking at the results of Delaware’s first reassessment of property values in more than 40 years. Working with Tech Impact, Spotlight produced an interactive map showing how the state’s tax burdens and property assessments have shifted in that time. 

In his accompanying reporting, Jake highlights questions around the outcome of the reassessment prompted by the data map, including whether the reassessment will help Delaware achieve educational equity.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

We tend to only get on this podcast with you when you are engaged in massive, months-long projects. 

Yes, that seems to be my forte these days.

For this is a super-complicated project that you and the team have taken on, we are going to start with what we normally call our “Hey mom” question. But your mom doesn’t live in Delaware. 

Not anymore. They retired and moved to warmer climates. 

So we’re going to do the “Hey, mother-in-law question.” I’d like you to imagine that you’re talking to your mother-in-law, who I’m guessing doesn’t know a ton about this issue, and just tell her briefly about this data mapping project and the reporting that came out of it. 

Ironically enough, my mother-in-law and my mother have the same name, so that makes it even easier.

So. Hey Linda, we did this big data project that really looked to kind of check Tyler Technologies’ homework and find out whether the property assessment data matched what we expected to see, and it brought some pretty interesting results. 

Let’s go back to the beginning here. Where did the idea for this project come from, and why did you have to partner with somebody on the outside to do it?

So it really got started out of a little bit of frustration. We’d seen so much hand wringing and conversation and debate over, “Did we get this right? Did we get it wrong? What should we have expected? What didn’t we get?” 

I was looking to the state or maybe even the counties to release this sort of project that basically would help the public really understand what happened with the assessments and the data. We just weren’t seeing it, and from what I heard, they weren’t going to do it. 

Then I checked on the legal settlement and the legal settlement didn’t require any kind of after action report to be done. So I really started talking with the team and said, “Do you think we could do this? Is this something that is in our wheelhouse?”

And, you know, we quickly decided that some of it was, and some of it probably wasn’t. 

Data collection is something we have done on the regular. So we knew we could probably get the raw numbers. But what we did with them then to make them of any kind of use to the public was something that I really hadn’t had much experience with. But I remembered talking with a friend of mine, Ryan Harrington at Tech Impact’s Data Lab. 

This was an initiative started up back during COVID to help New Castle County and the state really dig through a lot of data that was coming out on the spread of COVID and try to predict the hotspots. One of their more interesting projects was using fecal matter. Apparently the COVID strain lived in the fecal matter, and so they were tracking sewer results around the county. 

And so I thought to myself, if they could do that, they could probably do this.

Because that was one form of a fecal show. The property reassessment is another form of a fecal show.

It was definitely a form of a fecal show. So I had a chat with Ryan. He was very interested.

We started meeting. They pulled a team together, we pulled a team together and we got underway. 

The lawsuit that you mentioned in passing – that was a lawsuit about a variety of educational issues. But one thing it mandated was this assessment. 

It was a group of plaintiffs, really led by the NAACP. I think it was the Delawareans for Educational Opportunity – DEO II believe was the acronym. It was a couple different groups, but CLASI (the Community Legal Aid Society) and the ACLU were involved to help litigate it.

Ultimately the Delaware’s Chancery Court came down and ruled that the way that we were doing reassessments was unconstitutional because we weren’t establishing fair market value.

They [DEO] asked for a couple different things to try to increase funding for schools, but they also were looking to create a more equitable funding model for the state. And so that was part of why we couldn’t continue to kind of make up fake values for what a property might’ve been worth decades ago. We needed to start using actual valuations. 

If a listener has not been on the website or looked to the newsletter, what’s the product that came out of this work? What all is there for people to look at?

You’re going to find a couple things. 

First and foremost, you’re going to find the map. It’s a heat map that Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a team of data engineers and mapping designers, built for us. It has some tutorial futures that take you around the screen and give you an understanding. 

But this is not a map where you zoom in and say, “my house went up this much.” This is really meant to look at communities against communities. So Tech Impact made some choices along the way and that included using census precinct level data, which is something you probably aren’t that used to seeing. 

We did not use zip codes, which you may be more familiar with. ZIP codes, unfortunately, are usually fairly large in some areas and can include wildly different types of housing and communities. So we used essentially the smallest designation we could find that still made sense and mapped it out. 

You’ll also find an explainer story about what this map is, why we did it, how to navigate it, and probably most importantly what it isn’t. 

And then finally, you’ll see reporting that really dives into why it matters and why officials think that the takeaways are what they are. 

On the map you can filter it in three ways, per census precinct level. What are those three things people can find on it? 

The most important one, I think, is assessment change. This one basically shows you a collection of the properties within the census precinct, their total value between 2024 and 2025. So that shows you basically the pre-assessment and reassessment total value and the percentage change between those. 

And the important thing to note with this is: everything went up. This was a reassessment. Nothing goes down. So everything is judged against the median value. So if it went up compared to the median, or the middle most value, you’re going to see reds. If it went below that median value, you’re going to see blues. 

Second, you’re going to see tax change. This is an accumulation of all the taxes paid by the parcels in that precinct, judged against the median. 

And then finally tax burden, which is essentially a calculation of your tax over your assessment. So, how much tax are you paying compared to the value of your home? 

Before we get into some of the findings, let’s talk a little bit more about process. Can you talk us through the process of getting the raw data and then the work with Tech Impact to create the maps?

It was interesting because one of the things we’ve come to understand is that every county is different and they do things their own way. We quickly came to understand that while we thought maybe it would take a week or two or three to get all the data, it ended up taking us almost three months to really get everything we needed to make the maps.

Sussex County gave it to us as a Google Sheet. New Castle County gave it to us as an Excel sheet, but only through certain file protocols because it was too large of a file to just drop into Google.

And then Kent County, God bless them, I don’t know what file format they used, but even Tech Impact said they had never seen it before. So there was a little bit of a learning curve to compute whatever it is Kent County is doing into something readable in their formats. 

So if we’re shouting out counties, we’re shouting out Sussex County.

Sussex – God bless you.

And then your helper at New Castle County.

Yes. Uh, Robert at the data assessment data office in New Castle County. I had to go through him setting up a file transfer protocol three times to finally get the gigabytes of data. So thank you for your steadfast efforts, Robert. 

I remember when you brought this idea up in one of our leadership meetings, you were very honest saying, “You know, I don’t know what this data will show. We might do a whole bunch of work on this. And it’s not really a story.” 

As you started working through the data, what were some of the things that caught your eye and made you think, okay, there’s something here?

There were a couple moments early on. We got Sussex County’s data right away, and so we actually mapped Sussex County first, and there weren’t any real surprises.

The assessments really moved where we thought it should in terms of along the beaches. Western Sussex saw smaller changes compared to the median. 

When you say it moved as you thought it would move. Does that mean the houses that you expected would be worth more, were worth more?

That’s right. And not only just worth more, but the increase between years would’ve been the highest out of anywhere in the county. That’s where you would expect to see your deep reds. And we did. Places like Rehoboth and Dewey were your hotspots and then places like Harrington and Bridgeville out the other way were lower.

The other thing that we saw was in Kent County. Same kind of thing. The suburbs of Dover where we’ve had some housing growth like Cheswold and Magnolia, and even the beach communities like Bowers Beach and Kitts Hummock and some of these areas, we saw property valuations rise. Areas like the older parts of Dover didn’t, at least as much.

Those were all expected. 

So you got through Kent and Sussex and you’re like, this may not be a story. This may have worked.

In some ways if the reassessment worked, I think that’s a story, but maybe just not one that most readers would come to expect. 

And then we really saw New Castle County, which in my mind really raised some questions because that trend of really seeing the reds where we would see housing growth in recent decades wasn’t what we were seeing. We were actually seeing blues in areas like Middletown, Odessa Townsend, Greenville, Centerville, Hockessin. And then when we looked at downtown, historic, hundred year old communities in Wilmington, we saw really deep reds where places like Hilltop and East Side and Riverside and Southbridge had percentage increases higher than anywhere in the county 800% or 1000% increases. 

Again, for our color-minded friends, if you’re looking on the map, blues are less higher increases, reds are higher increases. 

Yes, higher than the median. 

So that made you realize, okay, something did not work the way it was supposed to work here. 

In some ways it did because one of the things when I’d been talking to the lawyers who had filed the original lawsuit was this belief that lower income families had been subsidizing the property tax bills of higher income families because the value of their homes hadn’t changed since 1983. And obviously the housing market has boomed since then. 

So you would expect that if your house is worth a million dollars in Greenville, that you’d be paying a disproportionately high part of your income in your taxes. And what we didn’t really see was that reflected in the data. We actually saw higher comparative changes for these families that the advocates were basically out to serve.

At a super high level, once all the data was processed and the maps were created, what are the main takeaways for a layperson in Delaware? For your mother-in-law? 

Everybody’s going to have a different feeling with this because anytime I try to talk to anybody around the state about this, they will reflect on their own bill. That’s a totally normal way to think about this. 

The one thing that I would say is this was a zero sum process. Which meant that if it truly was going to be revenue neutral and the valuations change, then that means somebody pays more and somebody pays less.

I think the expectation was that communities like Hilltop would pay less than what they ended up paying, and yet we see wide swaths of a really struggling, lower income community paying significantly more in their tax bills. And then in areas that have higher property wealth, we actually saw some areas that went down or saw much smaller movements in their property tax.

In the end, we all kind of ended up subsidizing the softer commercial real estate market. But, in terms of the balance, just on the residential side, we didn’t necessarily see the movement that we expected to see. 

Were there people concerned about that specifically in the run up to this, and this data kind of lets them go, “We were onto something”? 

Yes. So, shout out to Christian Willauer. She’s a Wilmington City Council member. She actually represents the Hilltop area and has been raising concerns that these valuations didn’t make sense. 

And in fact, in Tyler Technologies’ own final report to New Castle County, it notes that its evaluations in many of Wilmington’s communities did not meet industry standards. They just kind of chalk that up to say, well, we tried our best and we’re going to move on to the next thing now. 

That has really infuriated city council leaders, the mayor’s office, as they’ve tried to remedy this. New Castle County has taken a little bit cooler of an approach so far to basically say, well, it was never going to be a perfect system.

So I think for those in the city, it’s been particularly frustrating because the reassessment, in their minds, was going to be a break for many of these struggling homeowners or renters, and instead they’re actually getting tax increases. 

Because in theory, although this lawsuit did many things, the lawsuit that prompted this property tax reassessment was to try to create this more equitable funding landscape. Everyone’s going to pay their share in part, and if your home is worth more you should be paying more. 

Was it supposed to do that all at once? Or is this something that reassessments over time were going to get at?

No, this really was meant to kind of be a rebalancing of the whole system that had not been rebalanced in 30 years, in 30 plus years, 40 years. Delaware is only one of I think a half dozen or fewer states that hadn’t done a reassessment in decades. To most people, they kind of look at Delaware and say this is not a way to do business

This was our way to catch up. 

So if in New Castle County the reassessment had worked in the way that the advocates behind the lawsuit wanted it to work, where would we have seen the blues? Where would we have seen the reds? Again, blue are lower increases and reds are the higher increases.

I think at the very least you would’ve seen areas, like Hilltop and East Side and Southbridge with much cooler reds, if not even blues. They certainly would not be the kind of outlier, in terms of increases over the median. 

Just for instance, I was looking at the data here at the taxes paid on a home in the Hockessin census precinct. Before the reassessment, they were paying about $4,700. After the reassessment, they’re paying $5,100. About 400 bucks. Still went up. It’s an 8% change, on the median. 

But when you look at Hilltop, which is right on basically the west side of Martin Luther King Boulevard there on up the big hill. In 2024, the median tax bill was $505. And after the reassessment, it’s now 13, almost $1,400. So you see an increase of about $800 in Hilltop and yet only $400 in Hockessin.

So highest level takeaway: the assessment didn’t quite work the way New Castle County thought it was going to work, or advocates were hoping it was going to work. For our folks in Kent and Sussex County, highest level takeaway is it seemed to work?

It seemed to work there. There will always be complaints about individual parcels or properties, but on the whole, when we’re looking at a 30,000 foot view, which is what this map kind of gives us, the values seem to move where we thought they would move.

In New Castle County, there are questions that are left to be resolved. 

I want to ask one more “in the weeds” question. You said the third thing you can look for on the map is tax burden, which is how your tax change relates to your assessment.

You all made the decision, you and Tech Impact made the decision, in New Castle County to use the first tax rate. New Castle County famously went through a little bit of hubbub and they ultimately were able to split the rates and change the rates for homeowners and businesses. But you used the initial rates.

Why? If the point is to show tax burden, why not use the actual rates that are hitting people’s bills? 

There were a couple reasons for that. We had more internal debates about, what do we do with this one? It came late in the process of making the map. Do we throw the whole map out and start all over?

But the more we thought about it, we really stuck with our guns about what this map was meant to be, which was checking Tyler Technologies’ homework. And essentially this is what they handed back to New Castle County and said, here’s our homework teacher, grade it. 

And by using the split rate taxes, in a way, we were letting politics influence that because the valuations are the valuations. The split rate taxes are the politicians’ reaction to the outrage following those valuations. So we wanted to really put the onus on Tyler to say, defend or not defend these valuations.

And then, secondly, the split rate taxes are only good for a year. They were a short-term get through the pain of everybody learning to deal with this new reality, but they’re set to expire before the next tax bills come out. And there’s real questions about what the state legislature and the county are going to do in terms of allowing split rates in the future.

So that led us to really lean on the original valuations.

Back to process one more time here. After you did the work of creating the maps, you then wrote this article to try to give the reader some context. But you also did some preliminary sharing of this data with some of the political figures. What was your thinking behind doing that in the article and not just trying to break down the data?

This is a very data heavy endeavor and we didn’t want the impact of it to get lost on readers. We wanted to put a face on it. There’s a reason why an $800 increase in Hilltop matters much more than a $400 increase in Hockessin when it comes to the ability of a homeowner to pay that increase. 

So we took it to city leaders to really outline what has been the impact and what’s been the reaction. I was surprised that they were somewhat unsurprised. Obviously they’ve been raising concerns about this for a while. I had a conversation with Mayor Carney about the findings and he really felt like it was indicative of what he believed was a reality: that the 1983 values weren’t truly 1983 values, especially when you look at areas that have had housing growth that didn’t move as much after the reassessment. 

There’s real questions about “Were you really using 1983 valleys before the reassessment or not?” Because if you were, you would expect the price of a four bedroom, two bath home in Middletown to be pretty low in 1983 versus today’s market. And we didn’t see as much of a movement.

There are real questions kind of about how the county was doing its assessments in the prior years. So if that was the reality though, the onus falls a little bit on New Castle County and falls a little bit on the advocates who basically pushed for this because it’s actually made the reality more inequitable for areas of Wilmington that they had hoped to serve.

If you’re imagining a Spotlight Delaware reader out there, what would you hope they would do with this information that you’ve done all this work for and laid it out for them? If we’re about empowering Delawareans, what does this data do for a Delawarean?

I think it’s twofold. I think in one respect it’s really for our leadership, especially our county leadership. For many months now, New Castle County leadership in particular has defended its process, but I think what the data is telling us is something’s still not right here. I’m not sure that most people would believe that these valuations are on the nose. So there’s work to be done to figure out why that is and what, if anything can be done to remedy it.

Secondly, I think it’s a reminder to the public at large. When we talk about equity, it’s a tough discussion because equity means – again, we’re starting from a zero sum balance – and if someone else is carrying more of the burden that means that somebody else is carrying less. 

One of the things I think got missed in the reassessment conversation is that many people should have expected to see higher bills because you’ve essentially been given 40 years of a break on those increases that just about every other state in this country would’ve been putting on you. I recognize that it’s still a shock to the system when you see those increases. But when it comes to an equitable society, we have to kind of think about ourselves and our ability to pay and the resources to carry that weight, and that if we’re not doing our fair share, then somebody else is doing it for us.

So I think there’s a little bit of that self-reflection that happens when you see some of this data as well. 

We’ll get you out of here on this: as Editor in Chief you’ve talked about it would be great if we did more of these data-driven projects. So after you’ve gone through this whole process, does it give you the appetite for Spotlight Delaware to take on more of these data-driven projects? 

Not next month. Maybe take a little bit of a break. I say that and then like tomorrow I’ll find something that will just be too interesting to not put down.

I will say I loved working with the Tech Impact team. I would definitely work with them again. They’re very hands-on, responsive to what we wanted to do. 

And I think that it really shows the value of what Spotlight can bring the state, because this is something that no one else was doing, no other media outlet was doing, no other government entity was doing. Short of us investing the time and resources to do it, we would just have to take the anecdotal as truth, without being able to back it up with some kind of data-driven approach. 

So the more that we can do that, I think the better the state will be, and hopefully we’re providing real value for people.

I certainly would do it again in a heartbeat, but I’m going to take a little bit of a long break or pass it off to one of my colleagues next time. 

The post Beyond the Headlines: How and why Spotlight created the reassessment map appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Today, Spotlight Delaware unveiled a months-long project taking an in-depth look at the data underpinning the state’s first property reassessment in nearly 40 years.

Spotlight’s analysis underscored the concerns raised for months by Wilmington residents, community leaders and city officials: predominantly Black, brown and low-income communities were hit hardest by rising property values and tax bills spurred by the reassessment. 

While many expected reassessment to bring new relief to some of the state’s lowest income residents, it actually raised their tax burdens.

The data for the project was compiled through Freedom of Information Act requests made by Spotlight Delaware and mapped in partnership with Tech Impact’s Data Lab.

The following Q & A is meant to inform readers about the map and be transparent about the choices made by Spotlight Delaware and Tech Impact’s Data Lab in its design.

Why did you build this map?

We recognized that the reassessment of every property in Delaware was a seismic event intended to reshape how we fund government services and our school districts, but there was no public accounting for the results of that work in a way that would be easily understood by the public.

We set out to understand how communities fared in the reassessment and whether the micro-level results matched the public beliefs about Delaware.

Where did the data come from?

Beginning in September 2025, Spotlight Delaware submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the master assessment data from New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties.

In the cases of New Castle and Sussex counties, we acquired parcel-level data from the 2024 tax year and 2025 tax year to compare the work of the reassessment.

Because Kent County completed its work a year earlier, however, its data is from the 2023 tax year and 2024 tax year.

How did you make the map?

In order to translate hundreds of thousands of parcel-level details into a readable map, we contracted with Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a Newark-based initiative that helps government agencies and nonprofits leverage data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for social good.

It cost Spotlight Delaware about $10,000 in contract costs on top of significant staff time to complete the project.

What are the shapes on the map?

We used Census tracts, which provide a detailed and statistically reliable view of neighborhoods across the state while preserving privacy. 

We could have used ZIP codes, which more people may be familiar with, but they often include communities of very different types, which could skew the results.

What does this map show?

These maps are constructed as heat maps, but unlike most heat maps that you have seen before, blue areas don’t always signify that a reduction has occurred.

Because Delaware hadn’t done a reassessment in decades, all property values were set to rise. So the heat map conveys the change in value relative to the median value in the dataset.

That means that red areas are higher than a median value while blue areas are lower than a median value. Most properties saw increases in assessed value due to the nearly 40-year-long gap between reassessments.

Why did you use median values?

We chose to use a Census tract’s median value – or the value at the absolute center of its data set – because it more accurately depicts how a community member might feel about the reassessment.

Using the average value, or the value of all property divided by the number of properties, allows a few large increases or decreases in a data set to skew how it would appear to the public.

What are the three different maps?

The first map is the assessment map, which shows the percentage change for the total assessed value of property in a given Census tract from before reassessment to after.

The second map is the taxation map, which shows the percentage change for the total taxes levied for property in a given Census tract. That includes county, school district and municipal taxes.

The third map is the tax burden map, which shows the percentage change for the calculation of taxes levied versus the assessed value of property for a given Census tract. This is a calculation of what percentage of property value is paid in taxes annually. Essentially, the tax burden map showcases places in Delaware that were more or less impacted by the ramifications of reassessment.

Why do Sussex County and Kent County see larger swings than New Castle County?

That is due in part to how the southern counties previously accounted for their tax rates. Before the reassessment, Sussex County used 50% of a property’s assessed 1976 value for its tax rate, while Kent County used 60% of a property’s assessed 1987 value.

On the other hand, New Castle County previously used 100% of a property’s assessed 1983 value for its tax rate.

Now all three counties will use 100% of assessed value for its tax rates, which means that the southern counties saw bigger jumps to catch up.

Did you account for areas that have seen new construction?

We did. Areas where there is a lot of new construction could have skewed the results if newly improved properties were left in our datasets.

We limited the dataset to properties that existed in both the pre- and post-reassessment years to ensure we were only tracking changes to existing properties.

Did you use the split rate taxes for New Castle County?

We did not. We aimed to check the work produced by Tyler Technologies – which turned over the data seen here as its completed work – not the government intervention that followed. 

The decision to increase the taxation on commercial properties was a political reaction to concerns by homeowners and lawmakers, and was only a short-term fix that is due to expire this year.

Can I see my home on this map?

Our map does not go down to the parcel level, but users can get a sense of how their larger community fares compared to others.

There are other available resources to determine your property assessment and tax bill, and those of neighboring properties.

One such website, MyDETax.com, allows you to compare individual parcels.

My property taxes don’t match the map’s conclusions. Why is that?

Our map is not meant to be representative of every property in a jurisdiction, but it allows for a larger comparative look for how different areas of the state are assessed and taxed. The results for each Census precinct is representative of the median property, but that means virtually all others will be some degree above or below it.

The post Spotlight Delaware’s Reassessment Map Explained appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

How Beijing is encouraging entrepreneurs without giving up control.

Joint patrols are being mounted to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage: localised cooperation is our best hope for now

• Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council thinktank

When European countries in the Baltic Sea region joined Nato for protection against Russia, they were not anticipating their most powerful Nato ally would be the one threatening to seize territory from them. The shock of the Greenland crisis may have faded from the headlines, but Donald Trump’s US has also suggested it may decide not to defend Europe. And Russia continues to be a nuisance in the Baltic Sea.

Luckily, the vulnerable Baltic nations have launched an impressive string of initiatives to keep their mini-ocean safe. As the US sheds responsibility for Europe’s defence, these efforts could provide a model for the future of Nato itself.

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council thinktank. She is the author of Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World and The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression

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.

Newark Country Club on Monday announced the appointment of Jeff Robinson as general manager.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The first comprehensive property reassessment in decades reset how Delaware’s tax burden is divided among property owners. While many expected that it would bring new relief to some of the state’s lowest income residents, it has actually raised their tax burdens.

Visitors to Hilltop, the largely working-class community west of Interstate 95 in Wilmington, will immediately find signs of an immigrant diaspora and the people who call it home.

There are Jamaican jerk and Haitian creole spots, Dominican cafes, Puerto Rican bakeries, and Mexican restaurants. The heart of the community is William Judy Johnson Memorial Park, which is named after the Hall of Fame Negro League baseball player.

More than 90% of residents in the multicultural community are Black or Hispanic.

For all of its vibrancy, however, Hilltop is still very much a community that struggles with poverty. The median household income for the more than 7,000 residents in the area is less than $50,000 a year – or nearly half the statewide average.

And, according to the recent once-in-a-generation reassessment of property in New Castle County, the community is also the place where property saw the largest percentage increase in median value.

That increase seemingly stands in contrast to one of the bedrock arguments behind the legal fight that prompted the reassessment in the first place: that low-income residents were subsidizing the education of their wealthy neighbors based on the state’s outdated tax structure.

For Deborah Smith, a resident of North Franklin Street for more than 40 years, it was a shocking revelation.

“I’m lucky to have a pension and Social Security, but there are a lot of people struggling out here,” she said.

Analysis finds wide New Castle County disparities

Spotlight Delaware completed a first-of-its-kind analysis of reassessment data for the entire state of Delaware, which underscored concerns raised by leaders in the city of Wilmington.

The data, compiled through Freedom of Information Act requests by Spotlight Delaware and mapped in partnership with Tech Impact’s Data Lab, show that in most areas of the state, property wealth and subsequent taxation moved to areas where they would largely be expected.

In Sussex County, the Rehoboth Beach area saw the median property assessment rise more than 5,000% while much of the more agrarian western Sussex land saw median assessments rise just 1,700%.

In Kent County, growing Dover-area suburbs like Magnolia and Cheswold, along with recreational areas like Bowers Beach and Kitts Hummock, saw median assessments increase more than 1,000%, while downtown Dover areas saw increases only about half as large.

In New Castle County, however, the largest increases came in less likely places: some of Wilmington’s poorest neighborhoods.

Communities like Hilltop, Eastside, Riverside and Southbridge saw increases between 700% and 1,000%.

Meanwhile, chateau country communities like Centreville, Greenville and Hockessin and the booming Middletown-Odessa-Townsend corridor saw increases of 300% to 450%.

Those values all matter, because assessed property values are now expected to match market rate as of July 1, 2024 – meaning a property should have been able to sell for that sum as of roughly 18 months ago. Those assessed values are also how a county, school district and municipality determine a property owner’s annual tax bill.

The median tax bill in Hilltop nearly tripled, adding more than $800 in new taxes to homeowners. Meanwhile, the median tax bill for the Centreville area – where the median home value is just under $1 million – actually dropped nearly $250.

Arguments for why NCC differs abound

Why New Castle County’s most expensive housing regions did not see the kind of assessment growth that both Kent and Sussex counties did is an open question.

Before the reassessment, New Castle County utilized an algorithm that computed a new-build home’s characteristics, including square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, location, lot size and more, as if it existed in 1983.

If all homes were being held to the same standard, then presumably the homes that were worth the most in today’s value would have seen the greatest increase.

Wilmington Mayor John Carney, who has previously served as governor, congressman, lieutenant governor, and state finance secretary, said that there has been long-lingering suspicions that New Castle County wasn’t actually rolling the values of new-build homes all the way back to 1983 values in order to inflate the amount of property taxes to county coffers. 

The opaqueness of the rollback calculation made it difficult for property owners to contest whatever value was assigned, and the surprising findings in Spotlight Delaware’s analysis only further stoked his questions, Carney said.

New Castle County officials denied having ever strayed from the algorithm’s calculations, and argued that the smaller percentage increases in some of the most property-rich areas was likely evidence of more updated permitting info.

Anytime a homeowner built an addition, installed a swimming pool or finished their basement, those changes would be recorded by the county and reflected in updated property assessments. For homes in the unincorporated county, that meant assessors could literally walk across the hall at the County Administration Building to update their valuations.

Meanwhile, many of the smallest municipalities in the county give the larger jurisdiction oversight of permitting matters, but the largest ones, including Wilmington, process them in house.

“Any municipality that does those things on their own, be it Newark, Middletown or Wilmington, has the responsibility to send that info to the county. So we work with them frequently to make sure that we’re getting the information, but sometimes it doesn’t always come to us in the most efficient manner,” said David Del Grande, the county’s chief financial officer.

Recent sales detail issues

The questionable nature of assessments in communities like Hilltop has not been a secret.

Tyler Technologies, the assessment company hired by each of the three counties to complete the reassessment statewide, admitted in its final report that the results in several Wilmington communities did not meet industry standards.

It blamed two potential reasons for those shortcomings: that it did not have enough sample sales data for unimproved properties and that it could not see inside homes to judge the condition of the properties.

Therefore, the homes in Hilltop and other impacted communities were assessed against comparable sales that primarily featured renovated homes being sold by flippers.

The median assessment in Hilltop now sits north of $180,000, but recent sales of unimproved properties have fallen far under their assessed values.

A four-bedroom townhome on West Third Street sold three months ago for $125,000 – or about 46% less than its $234,800 assessed value.

A five-bedroom row home on North Harrison Street, whose bones date back some 136 years to before cars even traveled the city’s streets, was assessed by Tyler Technologies to be worth more than $250,000. It was sold last month to investors for just $140,000, or 44% less than its assessed value.

Another five-bedroom home on West Third Street sold for $130,000 – or about 46% less than its $214,700 assessment.

Each of those sales seemingly demonstrates that longtime residents of Hilltop who have not invested in significant renovations are likely paying more than their fair share in property taxes.

Smith, of Franklin Street, is likely counted among those homeowners.

Her 1,100-square-foot home was assessed by Tyler Technologies to be worth more than $178,000. She said she periodically receives offers from flippers in the neighborhood, but the highest offer she’s ever received was $128,000.

City leaders decry assessment

Since last spring, Wilmington Mayor John Carney and members of the City Council have been criticizing the assessment of city properties.

The concerns over whether to accept Tyler Technologies’ work nearly resulted in a budget impasse last spring, but the city council ultimately relented without a firm alternative plan.

In September, as the public outcry over the reassessment results had only grown louder, Carney announced the city’s plan.

Wilmington will hire a third-party company to conduct samples of interior assessments and appraisals of residential properties on a block-by-block basis for neighborhoods that were assessed “too high.” They expect those reviews to help prove that many homes in the city are overvalued – and therefore taxed too highly – and will present those results to New Castle County in the hopes that the managing jurisdiction will amend its assessments.

“If the valuations are right, that’s OK from the perspective of being fair, but if it’s higher for some other reason, which we believe it is, that’s not fair,” Carney told Spotlight Delaware.

The city has budgeted $500,000 for the consultant, which Carney’s office expects to hire by the end of March. The project would run over the spring, with results being submitted in the summertime, officials said.

“We’ve got to find answers. We can’t accept [Tyler’s results],” Carney said. 

It’s a message echoed by City Councilwoman Christian Willauer, who represents the Hilltop community and has been a vocal critic of the reassessment’s results.

She asserted that New Castle County adopting the admittedly flawed assessments by Tyler Technologies in Wilmington were evidence of the county’s lack of oversight on the consequential process.

“I don’t think that [Tyler Technologies] didn’t make mistakes in Sussex or Kent. I think that the mistakes didn’t get through there because the county was in charge, but New Castle County chose to wash their hands of any kind of oversight,” she said. 

Whether New Castle County would accept the results of Wilmington’s independent review and incorporate them into the broader assessment remains to be seen.

County Executive Marcus Henry, who took office last year after the reassessment work had concluded, said that he would “talk with the mayor’s office as that scope is further defined,” but his staff expressed concerns with potentially adjusting the assessments of just some homes in the county.

Assistant County Attorney William Martin said that accepting those adjustments could defy the Delaware Constitution’s uniformity clause, which stood at the crux of the Chancery Court ruling that ordered the reassessment.

“That’s because we’d be using different methods to assess similarly situated property, i.e., homes in the city,” he said. “Throughout the county, you can imagine there would be other folks who would say, ‘Please check out the inside of my house. I would like my assessed value to be reduced.’”

Whether the city’s spot assessments could withstand a constitutional challenge or whether the county would rather pursue a different course of action remains to be determined.

For now, county officials stress that any homeowner has the ability to appeal their assessments. Obvious errors in their assessment, such as incorrect square footage or number of bedrooms, among other factors, can be corrected without a formal appeal.

But in a formal appeal, a homeowner would be required to show comparable sales that refuted the results issued by Tyler Technologies. In communities where such sales may be hard to find, county officials conceded that the best course of action would be to commission a personal property appraisal – something that would result in upfront costs to homeowners.

County hopes for new foundation

For New Castle County Executive Henry, who walked into office just months before a firestorm of public criticism over the reassessment process was sparked, the findings of Spotlight Delaware’s analysis only further solidified his resolve.

“This is why you can’t wait 40-plus years to do a reassessment,” he said.

Henry, the son of famed Wilmington State Sen. Margaret Rose Henry, said that his hometown’s changing dynamic also likely led to a problematic reassessment.

Major redevelopment and infill property flips have rejuvenated the Wilmington housing market after decades of stagnation, while the commercial property market has softened considerably following the departure of DuPont’s downtown headquarters and the post-COVID move away from offices. In the 1980s, the city was also still grappling with a legacy of redlining that undervalued properties of Black and brown families.

“All of these factors were going on back in the ‘80s and into the ’90s, through multiple administrations, but none of that’s captured in reassessment,” he said.

Henry said his administration would begin “quality control” reviews to correct under- and over-valued commercial properties. His office is also reviewing a half dozen other proposals related to the reassessment that could lend additional tools.

“We have this data from 2024 now and we want to balance out that data for the next reassessment,” he said. “That includes being vigorous in terms of our appeals process, and looking at what’s available to us administratively to do some level of review to potentially help the city of Wilmington.”

The post Analysis: Reassessment hit Black, brown Wilmington hardest appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Two Russian Tu-95s bombers, two Su-35s fighter planes and an A-50 spy plane were detected in the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, NORAD said.

US lawmakers say action by UK authorities on matters arising from release of Epstein files compares unfavourably with a lack of accountability in the US

• King says ‘law must take its course’ after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on US law enforcement radar 15 years before UK arrest

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office in the UK has prompted calls from US lawmakers and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse to demand accountability for those linked to the late sex offender across the Atlantic.

Mountbatten-Windsor, 66, was detained on Thursday in connection with his conduct as a UK trade envoy and after disclosures of emails linked to Epstein, the disgraced banker and convicted sex offender. He was released under investigation on Thursday evening after police questioned him in relation to allegations he shared confidential material with Epstein. Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein, and Thursday’s arrest is not related to any allegation of sexual misconduct.

Julie Watts interviewed every candidate for California governor ahead of next year's election.

Long-serving socialist former leader Evo Morales has reappeared in his political stronghold after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence

Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared on Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumours he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-president Nicolás Maduro.

The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US president Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.

The president’s announcement came after predecessor Barack Obama went viral last week for saying aliens are ‘real’

Donald Trump has announced he is directing the defense department and other agencies to release whatever files they have on the search for alien life.

In a post on his social media platform, Trump said that he will ask the defense secretary and others “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

Engineers were able to fully fuel NASA's Artemis II moon rocket without any signs of leaks like the ones that derailed an earlier dress rehearsal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: baby chickens make these same sound-shape connections, suggesting that the link to human language may not be so unique. The results, published today in Science, challenge a long-standing theory about the so-called bouba-kiki effect: that it might explain how humans first tethered meaning to sound to create language. Perhaps, the thinking goes, people just naturally agree on certain associations between shapes and sounds because of some innate feature of our brain or our world. But if the barnyard hen also agrees with such associations, you might wonder if we've been pecking at the wrong linguistic seed. Maria Loconsole, a comparative psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and her colleagues decided to investigate the bouba-kiki effect in baby chicks because the birds could be tested almost immediately after hatching, before their brain would be influenced by exposure to the world. The researchers placed chicks in front of two panels: one featured a flowerlike shape with gently rounded curves; the other had a spiky blotch reminiscent of a cartoon explosion. They then played recordings of humans saying either "bouba" or "kiki" and observed the birds' behavior. When the chicks heard "bouba," 80 percent of them approached the round shape first and spent an average of more than three minutes exploring it compared with an average of just under one minute spent exploring the spiky shape. The exploration preferences were flipped when the chicks heard "kiki." Because the tests took place within the chicks' carefully supervised first hours of life outside their eggshell, this association between particular sounds and shapes couldn't have been learned from experience. Instead it may be evidence of an innate perceptual bias that goes back way farther in our evolutionary history than previously believed. "We parted with birds on the evolutionary line 300 million years ago," says Aleksandra Cwiek, a linguist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland, who was not involved in the study. "It's just mind-blowing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This live blog is now closed.

• Trump news at a glance: president weighs ordering ‘bad things’ against Iran as nuclear deal sits in limbo

Donald Trump will start his day in Washington for the Board of Peace meeting at the White House.

He’ll then travel to Rome, Georgia, as part of his tour of the country to tout the administration’s affordability message. He’ll meet with local businesses there, and deliver remarks at 4pm ET.

President Trump has one bright red line for Iran's nuclear program and some areas of flexibility as he weighs military strikes or a possible deal in the coming days.

Avalanche in Sierra Nevada killed at least eight people, including six who frequently went on ski trips together

Six of the eight people who died after a major avalanche swept through the Castle Peak area of the Sierra Nevada this week have been identified, according to multiple reports.

The identified victims – Carrie Atkin, Liz Clabaugh, Danielle Keatley, Kate Morse, Caroline Sekar and Kate Vitt – were part of a close-knit group who frequently went on ski trips together, a spokesperson for the families told the San Francisco Chronicle. The women and their families “cherished time together in the mountains”, the spokesperson said.

Shawn DeRemer, husband of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, reportedly accused by at least two female staff members

The husband of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Donald Trump’s labor secretary, has reportedly been barred from the labor department’s headquarters in Washington after at least two female staff members accused him of sexually assaulting them, the New York Times, Politico and the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The allegations against Shawn DeRemer come as Chavez-DeRemer is under fire over allegations of misconduct.

A woman police allege is a serial shoplifter is behind bars, charged in a string of thefts in the Newark area spanning more than a year.

The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, "including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda," reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. Headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, the project was expected to be unveiled at last week's Munich Security Conference but was delayed, the sources said. Reuters could not determine why the launch did not happen, but some State Department officials, including lawyers, have raised concerns about the plan, two of the sources said, without detailing the concerns. The project could further strain ties between the Trump administration and traditional U.S. allies in Europe, already heightened by disputes over trade, Russia's war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump's push to assert control over Greenland. The portal could also put Washington in the unfamiliar position of appearing to encourage citizens to flout local laws.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit was ostensibly to promote economy, but US president focused on repeated, unverified claims of voter fraud

Donald Trump forcefully defended his tariffs on Thursday, claiming “tariffs are my favorite word in the dictionary” and promoting their use to empower American manufacturing at an event in north-west Georgia.

“Without tariffs, this country would be in so much trouble right now,” Trump said during his remarks at Coosa Steel Corporation, a steel-processing and distribution firm in Rome, Georgia.

California's recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with "firearm blocking technology," banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washington State and New York, California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates, and civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation." From the report: Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the "California Firearm Printing Prevention Act," on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models... certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with "firearm blocking technology." Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn't on the list by March 1, 2029, it can't be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor. [...] As Michael Weinberg wrote after the New York and Washington proposals dropped⦠accurately identifying gun parts from geometry alone is incredibly hard, desktop printers lack the processing power to run this kind of analysis, and the open-source firmware that runs most machines makes any blocking requirement trivially easy to bypass. The Firearms Policy Coalition flagged AB-2047 on X, and the reactions tell you everything. Jon Lareau called it "stupidity on steroids," pointing out that a simple spring-shaped part has no way of revealing its intended use. The Foundry put it plainly: "Regulating general-purpose machines is another. AB-2047 would require 3D printers to run state-approved surveillance software and criminalize modifying your own hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This was the seventh gold medal match — and fifth in a row — between the two hockey powerhouses.

Astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita Williams were expecting to spend eight to 10 days in space. They ended up​ remaining in orbit for 286 days.

Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro "represents a step forward in core reasoning." The "upgraded core intelligence" that debuted last week with Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in Gemini 3.1 Pro for more users. This model achieves an ARC-AGI-2 score of 77.1%, or "more than double the reasoning performance of 3 Pro." This "advanced reasoning" translates to practical applications like when "you're looking for a clear, visual explanation of a complex topic, a way to synthesize data into a single view, or bringing a creative project to life." 3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn't enough, taking advanced reasoning and making it useful for your hardest challenges.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The family of Virginia Giuffre​, who accused former Prince Andrew of assaulting her when she was a teenager, thanked police on Thursday after he was arrested.

LA County says the gaming company does not carry out adequate moderation and its age-verification systems are not fit for purpose, which Roblox denies

Officials in Los Angeles have said they are suing Roblox, alleging the popular online platform exposes children to sexual content, exploitation and online predators.

In a lawsuit, Los Angeles County said the company does not carry out adequate moderation and its age-verification systems are not fit for purpose.

Three figure skaters from Team USA competed in the women's individual free skate event at the Milan Cortina Winter Games.

For years, Wisconsin’s powerful Assembly speaker refused to allow a bipartisan bill to come to a vote that extends postpartum Medicaid coverage for new moms. Finally, this week, he relented.

“Go out and take your victory lap,” Republican Robin Vos told caucus members late Wednesday, according to one lawmaker. 

“You won,” Vos added. 

On Thursday, the Assembly agreed 95-1 to opt in to a federal program that provides free health insurance to low-income mothers for a year after giving birth, up from 60 days. Vos was among those voting yes. 

The legislation, which had already been adopted by the Senate, now goes to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. He has openly supported such legislation for years and is expected to sign it.

Every other state in the nation, except Arkansas, has already taken the step. 

The vote represented a rare capitulation for Wisconsin’s longest-serving Assembly speaker — a man who controls the legislative agenda, provides campaign cash to those he favors and punishes those who antagonize him. ProPublica wrote about Vos’ opposition to the bill last fall.

The turnaround came on a day of surprises involving Vos. Earlier, at the start of the session, he announced that he would retire at year’s end, revealing that he’d had a slight heart attack in the fall and needed to reduce his stress. “To my leadership team and my caucus colleagues, thank you for your trust, thank you for your candor and your willingness to carry responsibility when it is heavy,” he said. 

Rep. Patrick Snyder, a Republican and the lead sponsor on the postpartum bill, threatened to not pursue reelection if he did not succeed in getting the measure passed — a legislative goal he had promised constituents he would deliver. That would have left an open GOP seat in a swing district. Typically, incumbents have an advantage in elections. 

“I just said if we can’t get this thing passed, I just don’t feel I can come back,” Snyder said he told the speaker. “It was that important of a bill.”

Vos has long opposed extending Medicaid coverage for new moms, explaining that he opposes spending more money on welfare in Wisconsin. The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated that, once fully phased in, the 12-month policy would cost the state about $9.4 million, with the federal government paying an additional $14.1 million. 

All sides have felt a sense of urgency as the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, intends to wrap up the session soon to hit the campaign trail for the remainder of the year.

On Wednesday, Democrats moved aggressively on the postpartum extension issue, proposing amendments that attached the Medicaid change to bill after bill, creating a bit of legislative havoc as Republicans repeatedly ruled the matter not germane to the legislation under consideration. (Democrats did the same for another stalled bipartisan bill on insurance coverage for breast cancer screenings, a measure that also passed Thursday.) 

Snyder said the Democrats’ tactic nearly derailed GOP efforts to convince Vos to let both bills advance. In a press conference, a dismayed Snyder likened it to someone tripping him as he made a dash for the finish line.

“I guess maybe they just didn’t think I could get it done,” he later told ProPublica. “And now we did.”

In recent weeks, seven other GOP members joined Snyder to push Vos to reconsider his stance. In a letter to Vos dated Feb. 3, the group told the speaker the legislation aligns with core Republican priorities, including safeguarding infants by ensuring they have healthy mothers.

The eight lawmakers are all in competitive districts. This week, despite whatever conflict they had with Vos, they still were careful to pay him homage, with one calling the speaker “a tough negotiator” and another publicly thanking Vos for “his understanding.”

Read More

He Vowed to “Protect the Unborn.” Now He’s Blocking a Bill to Expand Medicaid for Wisconsin’s New Moms.

The legislation was backed by hospitals and medical groups as well as anti-abortion advocates, who favor robust support for pregnant women and new moms. Research has shown that the year after birth can be a dangerous time for women, who can face postpartum depression, blood clots, hypertension, cardiovascular ailments and other long-term health issues.

Kate Duffy, a Wisconsin mom who amplifies political issues on social media under the moniker Motherhood for Good, has fought for the extended postpartum coverage and challenged Vos on the topic for about a year. She’s grown a sizable audience, especially among Wisconsin women, many of whom responded to the call to urge lawmakers to act.

She credited the bill’s passage to “good old-fashioned organizing and relentless persistence.” 

Said Duffy: “We just would not shut up about this.”

The post New Moms in Wisconsin to Get Extension of Vital Benefits After GOP Powerbroker Ends Holdout appeared first on ProPublica.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested Thursday for suspected misconduct in public office stemming from revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs. The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. [...] Some cybersecurity professionals have publicly urged companies to take measures to strictly control how their workforces use OpenClaw. And the recent bans show how companies are moving quickly to ensure security is prioritized ahead of their desire to experiment with emerging AI technologies. "Our policy is, 'mitigate first, investigate second' when we come across anything that could be harmful to our company, users, or clients," says Grad, who is cofounder and CEO of Massive, which provides Internet proxy tools to millions of users and businesses. His warning to staff went out on January 26, before any of his employees had installed OpenClaw, he says. At another tech company, Valere, which works on software for organizations including Johns Hopkins University, an employee posted about OpenClaw on January 29 on an internal Slack channel for sharing new tech to potentially try out. The company's president quickly responded that use of OpenClaw was strictly banned, Valere CEO Guy Pistone tells WIRED. "If it got access to one of our developer's machines, it could get access to our cloud services and our clients' sensitive information, including credit card information and GitHub codebases," Pistone says. "It's pretty good at cleaning up some of its actions, which also scares me." A week later, Pistone did allow Valere's research team to run OpenClaw on an employee's old computer. The goal was to identify flaws in the software and potential fixes to make it more secure. The research team later advised limiting who can give orders to OpenClaw and exposing it to the Internet only with a password in place for its control panel to prevent unwanted access. In a report shared with WIRED, the Valere researchers added that users have to "accept that the bot can be tricked." For instance, if OpenClaw is set up to summarize a user's email, a hacker could send a malicious email to the person instructing the AI to share copies of files on the person's computer. But Pistone is confident that safeguards can be put in place to make OpenClaw more secure. He has given a team at Valere 60 days to investigate. "If we don't think we can do it in a reasonable time, we'll forgo it," he says. "Whoever figures out how to make it secure for businesses is definitely going to have a winner."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WilmerHale to conduct review following new revelations about Leon Botstein’s dealings with convicted sex offender

Bard College’s board of trustees has retained the outside law firm of WilmerHale to conduct an independent investigation into communications between Jeffrey Epstein and the college’s longtime president Leon Botstein.

WilmerHale’s will conduct an “independent review” of the “full scope of these communications”, financial contributions connected to Epstein, and any related matters, the board said in an announcement on Thursday evening.

A study led by MIT researchers found that agentic AI developers seldom publish detailed information about how these tools were tested for safety.

Former prince released under investigation as searches continue at the Royal Lodge in Windsor

King Charles has insisted “the law must take its course” after detectives took the unprecedented step of arresting his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Police took him to Aylsham police station in Norfolk on Thursday morning for questioning about allegations he shared confidential material with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Virginia governor is seen as a model for the party to win back power in midterm elections

Virginia’s governor Abigail Spanberger will deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next week, elevating a pragmatic voice whose affordability-focused gubernatorial campaign is seen as a model for the party to win back power in the November midterm elections.

The Democratic rebuttal will immediately follow Trump’s address to Congress on 24 February. Spanberger, a former undercover CIA officer who served three terms in Congress, became Virginia’s first female governor earlier this year, resoundingly winning an office previously held by a Republican. She won the race by a double-digit margin, campaigning on affordability and lowering costs for families.

Shrai Popat contributed reporting

Starting Thursday, Gemini 3.1 Pro can be accessed via the AI app, NotebookLM and more.

New Mexico's attorney general has reopened an investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Jeffrey Epstein's former Zorro Ranch.

Exclusive: The Samsung phone had been lost for a decade. Then Katie Elkin found it.

Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they're suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: "Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that updating from OpenGL to Vulkan will take modders more effort than the updates you undertake for each of our releases. To start with, we recommend our modding community look at moving away from OpenGL usage. We encourage authors to try to reuse as much of the internal rendering APIs as possible, to make this transition as easy as possible. If that is not sufficient for your needs, then come and talk to us!" It does mean that players on really old devices that don't support Vulkan will be left out, but Vulkan has been supported going back to some pretty old GPUs. You've got time though, as they'll be rolling out Vulkan alongside OpenGL in snapshots (development releases) "sometime over the summer." You'll be able to toggle between them during the testing period until Mojang believe it's ready. OpenGL will be entirely removed eventually once they're happy with performance and stability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Space agencies and companies looking to set up lunar outposts should build far away from seismic activity.

Lawyers say Trump is sending migrants to Cameroon who originated elsewhere. AP freelancers, among others, were detained while reporting on the deportees.

US citizen George Retes was held without access to family, an attorney, or information about the charges against him

An army veteran detained by federal immigration agents in southern California during his work commute in July has filed a lawsuit against the federal government.

According to the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday with the help of the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, George Retes was held in a detention center for three days without access to his family, an attorney, or any information about the charges against him, in what the suit argues was an unconstitutional detention.

Jeffrey Damnit says actor punched him and second man on Tuesday, calling both ‘faggot’ repeatedly

One of the men whom Shia LaBeouf allegedly battered and insulted with a homophobic slur on Mardi Gras morning in New Orleans on Tuesday, leading to his arrest, would like to see the actor face hate crime charges.

Jeffrey Damnit, who dresses in drag and was in makeup at the time of the encounter with LaBeouf, said on Thursday that the behavior attributed to the Transformers film franchise star was “a complete slap in the face to any alternative-culture person”.

Guardian review of US justice department files reveals Epstein interacted with six CBP officers. The officer investigated denied any knowledge of trafficking underage girls

Federal investigators examined Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer who worked at the St Thomas airport to which Epstein regularly flew on his private planes before traveling by boat or helicopter to his private island, newly released documents reveal.

As part of that investigation, which did not result in any charges, investigators also issued subpoenas related to three additional CBP officers working at the Cyril E King airport (STT) on St Thomas, documents show. The Guardian also identified two other CBP officers on St Thomas and in Florida who were in contact with Epstein, based on emails and text messages between Epstein, his staff and the officers. It does not appear the FBI ever investigated those two officers.

Fresh from the conflict with Venezuela last month, the USS Gerald R. Ford — America’s newest and largest aircraft carrier — is speeding through the Mediterranean and toward a potential war with Iran. Another aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln is already deployed to the Middle East. The military pressure campaign, which could allow the U.S. to begin sustained attacks in a matter of days, is part of the Trump administration’s multipronged effort to pressure Iran to cease a nuclear program whose key sites, according to President Donald Trump, were “completely and fully obliterated” in U.S. attacks last year.

America’s latest gunboat diplomacy gambit comes as Trump’s two main envoys, his friend Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have engaged in indirect talks with Iranian diplomats in Geneva. The talks are taking place even though Trump previously said no agreement with Iran was necessary. “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” he announced last June. “I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear.” Trump added: “They’re not going to be doing it anyway.”

Trump reversed himself late last month imploring Iran to “quickly ‘Come to the Table’” or face more strikes. On Thursday, at a gathering of his self-styled Board of Peace in Washington, Trump reiterated his call for a deal. “Now is the time for Iran to join us on a path that will complete what we’re doing,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But bad things will happen if it doesn’t.”

“A massive Armada is heading to Iran,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

The United States has, in fact, spent weeks moving military assets into place for a potential resumption of the war on Iran. The Ford alone can carry more than 75 aircraft, including F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters and F/A-18 Super Hornets, as well as EA-18 Growler radar-jamming jets. The Lincoln is accompanied by three warships that are equipped with Tomahawk missiles, which were used to strike two of Iran’s nuclear facilities last June. In addition to destroyers, cruisers, and submarines at sea, the U.S. has moved additional air assets needed for sustained conflict across the Atlantic including a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, dozens of refueling tankers, scores of additional fighter jets, and critical E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System jets, which can provide advanced radar, communications, and sensors to track and thwart planes, drones, and cruise missiles.

The massive accumulation of military forces in preparation for a potential war with Iran dwarfs even the monthslong build-up that proceeded the U.S. coup in Venezuela that saw its leader Nicolás Maduro deposed and power transferred to a U.S.-backed puppet regime.

Related

Would-Be Iran Monarch Reza Pahlavi Declares a Civil War in Iran

Three U.S. officials with long experience in the Middle East told The Intercept that they do not believe Trump has made a final decision to launch a new attack on Iran but the chances of it are high. All said that the U.S. attacks could possibly destabilize the Iranian regime, spur a grave humanitarian crisis, and have major impacts across the region. None thought the Trump administration had anything but vague plans to deal with such blowback.

All three officials believed that sufficient U.S. military assets were in place for a sustained military campaign. One said that Tehran may see the second major U.S. attack in a year as an existential crisis and respond by launching a more formidable counterattack than its ineffectual strikes on America’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in 2025.

Over the past month, the U.S. military has moved critical air defense equipment — including Patriot missile batteries and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems, also known as THAAD — to the region to protect U.S. troops and allies from Iranian ballistic missiles.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said he believes reports that Trump administration officials think there’s a 90 percent chance the president will order strikes on Iran. He said that such a war would be “catastrophic” and lead to counterattacks that put U.S. troops in the region at risk.

Iran has repeatedly warned of retaliatory strikes on U.S. troops and allies in response to any American attack. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week to conduct military exercises. 

Khanna announced on Thursday that he and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., would attempt to force a vote on a war powers resolution regarding Iran next week. “I am confident we can win this vote and assemble a bipartisan coalition,” Khanna told The Intercept. Khanna believes they can force the vote before Trump attacks Iran, but one of the government officials expressed concern that strikes could come as early as Sunday or Monday. Another speculated that Trump might be convinced not to conduct an attack during Ramadan — the Muslim holy month that began Wednesday — or at least wait for a “decent interval” in deference to other U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Trump is also delivering his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday with a reported focus on messaging around domestic issues ahead of fall midterm elections, which may impact his decision. The conclusion of the Winter Olympics on Sunday might also play a role in the timing of the attacks as the notion of an Olympic truce, or “Ekecheiria,” dates back millennia.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

For a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, came into office claiming to be a “peacemaker, and has consistently campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has proven to be a warmonger. During his second term Trump has already launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name and has also threatened Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Iceland, and Mexico.

The post Trump Menaces Iran With Massive Armada Capable of Prolonged War appeared first on The Intercept.

The man who heroically jumped into Lake Michigan to save an 8-month-old baby in a stroller who had been blown into Chicago's Belmont Harbor doesn't know how to swim.

President Donald Trump’s sparsely attended Board of Peace meeting set a mission to stabilize Gaza, but plans beyond that remain murky.

The IRS's IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal "efficiency" overhaul, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. ... The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees. As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs." "So clearly there was an opportunity, and I thought the opportunity that we needed to really execute was reorganizing." That included breaking up silos within the organization, he said. "Everyone was operating in their own department or area." It is not entirely clear where all those staff have gone. According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135. However, reports say that as part of the reorganization, 1,000 techies were detailed to work on delivering frontline services during the US tax season. According to FNN, those employees have questioned the wisdom of this move and its implementation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• 20-year-old delivers near-flawless free skate

• Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai win silver and bronze

Alysa Liu completed a stunning comeback to competitive figure skating by winning the first Olympic women’s figure skating gold medal for the United States in 24 years on Thursday night.

The 20-year-old from Clovis, California, who vanished from the sport nearly four years ago uncertain if she’d ever return, delivered a career-best long program to overtake Japanese rivals Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai. Skating in a shimmering gold dress to Donna Summer’s MacArthur Park Suite, Liu cleanly landed all seven of her triple jumps, including three in combination, and drew a standing ovation before finishing with 226.79 points overall.

Second annual event will feature talks, panels, and collaborative sessions focused on advancing accessible HPC

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 19, 2026 — The Global Open OnDemand (GOOD) Conference will return March 9–12, 2026, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, bringing together users, developers, and contributors from around the world to share how Open OnDemand is advancing accessible, user-friendly high performance computing (HPC).

Building on the success of the inaugural conference in 2025, GOOD 2026 reflects the continued growth of the global Open OnDemand community and its expanding impact across research, education, and industry. The four-day, in-person event is designed to support both knowledge sharing and hands-on engagement through a mix of technical sessions and collaborative discussions.

Developed by the Ohio Supercomputer Center and funded by the National Science Foundation, Open OnDemand is an open-source web portal that simplifies access to advanced computing resources through a browser-based interface. Used by institutions around the world, Open OnDemand enables researchers, educators, and students to run complex computational workflows without needing specialized local software or command-line expertise.

The GOOD Conference will begin Monday, March 9, with a Contributor Jam, offering attendees an opportunity to work directly with Open OnDemand developers. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of Open OnDemand’s core components and leave with the knowledge and tools needed to contribute to the platform’s continued development.

The main conference program runs March 10–12 and includes talks, panels, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions highlighting practical implementations, emerging technologies, and community-led innovation.

The GOOD 2026 program will feature sessions spanning a range of technical focus areas, including:

• Supporting AI and machine learning workflows through Open OnDemand
• Managing interactive applications, remote desktops, and visualization at scale
• Integrating Open OnDemand with cloud, container, and hybrid computing environments
• Addressing security, authentication, and access challenges in shared research infrastructure
• Sustaining and evolving open-source research software through community collaboration

“The GOOD Conference continues to reflect the strength and growth of the Open OnDemand community,” said Alan Chalker, Open OnDemand project lead and director of strategic programs at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. “By bringing together users and contributors from around the world, GOOD creates an environment where ideas can be exchanged, challenges addressed, and new collaborations formed to help make advanced computing more accessible to all.”

The full program schedule is available on the GOOD conference website here.

The GOOD Conference is organized by NumFOCUS, a nonprofit organization that promotes open practices in research, data, and scientific computing.

The conference will take place at the University Guest House & Conference Center and is hosted by the University of Utah.

Registration for professionals and students is now open. The GOOD Conference is a welcoming event for all. For information about eligibility for financial assistance to attend the event, please contact the conference organizers at info@openondemand.org.

More from HPCwire: Open OnDemand 4.1 Builds on Community-Driven Enhancements to Simplify HPC Workflows

Source: Lexi Biasi, OSC

The post GOOD Conference Program Highlights Innovations of Global Open OnDemand Community appeared first on HPCwire.

Government plans legislation giving landowners and tenants rights to cull deer to protect crops and property

It will be much easier to shoot deer in England under government plans that aim to curb the damage the animals are doing to the country’s woodlands.

Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, plans to bring forward new legislation to give landowners and tenants legal rights to shoot deer to protect crops and property.

This live blog is now closed. For the latest read our coverage:

• Full report: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested

• Why has former prince Andrew been arrested – and what happens now?

Before the arrest was announced, the prime minister told BBC Breakfast “nobody is above the law” when asked about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Keir Starmer added:

Anybody who has any information should testify.

So whether it’s Andrew or anybody else, anybody who has got relevant information should come forward to whatever the relevant body is, in this particular case we’re talking about Epstein, but there are plenty of other cases.

Four families whose loved ones died after consuming sodium nitrite allege that Amazon sold the product despite being aware it could be used for suicide.

GB progress to men’s curling final, USA beat Canada in overtime to win gold in women’s ice hockey and the USA’s Alysa Liu triumphs in figure skating

The cross-country bit gets going at 1pm, and I’m looking forward to that. It’s a scientific fact that here’s no kind of race a human can devise that is uncompelling.

In the Nordic, teams of two both have a go at ski jumping, and Germany have just leapt into the lead; they’ll start the cross-country portion with no time penalty, because Austria have just completed this part of things, and only landed far enough for fifth. Norway are second, Japan third and Finland fourth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company's efforts to secure ever more of its users' time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta's growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn't seek to attract children as users. [...] Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, repeatedly asked Zuckerberg about internal company communications discussing targets for how much time users spend with Meta's products. Lanier showed an email from 2015 in which the CEO stated his goal for 2016 was to increase users' time spent by 12%. "We used to give teams goals on time spent and we don't do that anymore because I don't think that's the best way to do it," Zuckerberg said on the witness stand in sworn testimony. Lanier also asked Zuckerberg about documents showing Meta employees were aware of children under 13 using Meta's apps. Zuckerberg said the company's policy was that children under 13 aren't allowed on the platform and that they are removed when identified. Lanier showed an internal Meta email from 2015 that estimated 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram. He estimated that figure would represent approximately 30% of all kids aged 10 to 12 in the U.S. In response to a question about his ownership stake in Meta, which amounts to roughly more than $200 billion, Zuckerberg said he has pledged to donate most of his money to charity. "The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to invest in science research," he said. [...] On the stand, Zuckerberg was also asked about his decision to continue to allow beauty filters on the apps after 18 experts said they were harmful to teenage girls. The company temporarily banned the filters on Instagram in 2019 and commissioned a panel of experts to review the feature. All 18 said they were damaging. Meta later lifted the ban but said it didn't create any filters of its own or recommend the filters to users on Instagram after that. "We shouldn't create that content ourselves and we shouldn't recommend it to people," Zuckerberg said. But at the same time, he continued, "I think oftentimes telling people that they can't express themselves like that is overbearing." He also argued that other experts had thought such bans were a suppression of free speech. By focusing on the design of Meta's apps rather than the content posted in them, the case seeks to get around longstanding legal doctrine that largely shields social-media companies from litigation. At times, the case has veered into questions of content, prompting Meta's lawyers to object.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Make America Safe Again’ banner put up in striking symbol of president’s control over top US law-enforcement agency

A large banner featuring Donald Trump’s face was hung on the exterior of justice department headquarters on Thursday in a physical display of the president’s efforts to exert power over the law enforcement agency that once investigated him.

While Trump banners have been hung outside other agencies across Washington, the decision to place one on the storied justice department building amounted to a striking symbol of the erosion of the department’s tradition of independence from White House control.

Hollywood scion and talent agent exchanged sexual emails with Epstein associate

Casey Wasserman was born into Hollywood royalty, and for much of his life – until the release of the Epstein files brought his world crashing down – he appeared as formidable and untouchable as the entertainment industry moguls of old.

He wasn’t just the man charged with organizing the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles – a position he still holds, despite widespread calls for his resignation. He was a consummate power broker, someone who controlled the careers of prominent musicians, actors and athletes through the talent agency named after him, cultivated relationships in local and national politics, raised money for key election contests, endowed civic buildings and, through his family wealth, gave lavishly to social causes.

Amazon Web Services this week announced the general availability of Hpc8a, the next generation of its HPC-optimized EC2 infrastructure. AWS claims Hpc8a delivers up to 40% higher performance, 42% greater memory bandwidth, and 25% better price performance than the previous Hpc7a generation.

AWS says these gains come from addressing the architectural bottlenecks, like memory throughput and inter-node communication, that have historically limited certain HPC workloads in cloud environments. Cloud HPC has often worked best for embarrassingly parallel jobs, or those that distribute cleanly across many cores with minimal communication between nodes. Tightly coupled MPI applications like CFD or structural modeling, however, require frequent data exchange across nodes, making network latency and consistency much more critical. And as jobs scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes, even small inefficiencies can quickly decrease performance and increase cost.

(JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock)

That dynamic has made on-prem clusters and supercomputers the preferred environment for communication-heavy HPC workloads. The result has often been a tradeoff between scaling efficiency and the operational flexibility of cloud infrastructure. With the introduction of Hpc8a, AWS could be narrowing that tradeoff. With 192 cores, 768 GiB of memory, and 300 Gbps EFA, each Hpc8a instance is built to handle the bandwidth and synchronization demands of strongly scaled MPI workloads, AWS says.

Hpc8a is built on 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors with boost frequencies reaching 4.5 GHz, pairing higher per-core performance with increased aggregate throughput across the 192-core node. Sustained memory bandwidth and inter-node communication are limiting factors in tightly coupled jobs, making Hpc8a’s 42% greater memory bandwidth over Hpc7a a notable increase.

The AMD EPYC 9005 series processors powering Hpc8a are based on AMD’s “Zen 5” microarchitecture and were formally launched in October 2024. This architecture delivers higher IPC compared to the prior generation, with AMD citing up to around a 17 % improvement for enterprise and cloud workloads and even larger gains in HPC and AI contexts. The EPYC 9005 series also supports twelve DDR5 memory channels per socket and higher memory speeds than the prior generation.

The Hpc8a instances use AWS’s sixth-generation Nitro system to offload networking, storage, and virtualization functions to dedicated hardware. By reducing host CPU overhead and minimizing jitter, Nitro is intended to deliver more stable scaling behavior under large-scale MPI synchronization. Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is also disabled, a design choice meant to deliver more consistent performance per core.

Hpc8a is offered in a single 96xlarge configuration with a 1:4 core-to-memory ratio aligned with many simulation workloads, and integrates with AWS ParallelCluster and AWS Parallel Computing Service for cluster orchestration, along with Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-throughput parallel storage.

Early customer benchmarks suggest that the performance gains AWS is citing are translating into measurable improvements in production workloads. Rescale, a cloud-based HPC platform that supports CAE and multiphysics simulations across multiple industries, reports up to a 52% speedup in CFD applications and up to a 38% improvement in CAE workloads compared to Hpc7a. According to the company, the gains are driven by a combination of higher memory bandwidth and improved network behavior, with benefits observed across fluid dynamics, structural analysis, and other simulation-heavy use cases.

(neurobit/Shutterstock)

Weather modeling organizations have also reported measurable performance improvements. Spire, which runs high-resolution atmospheric models using data from its satellite constellation, cites a 1.5x speedup after transitioning to Hpc8a, saying the additional throughput allows it to generate forecasts more quickly from complex atmospheric datasets. Similarly, Weathernews reports a 34% performance improvement in its production workloads based on the Weather Research and Forecasting model compared to Hpc7a. In forecasting environments, incremental performance improvements can directly affect model turnaround time and update frequency, resulting in more timely forecasts of mission-critical weather information.

In industrial simulation contexts, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reports a 36% acceleration in CFD workloads used to model steam turbine aerodynamics. The company notes that the performance increase allows it to explore higher-fidelity physics models and expand the scope of design studies within existing time constraints.

While Hpc8a obviously does not eliminate the structural differences between cloud infrastructure and purpose-built supercomputers, it reflects the continued effort to reduce the technical barriers that have constrained communication-intensive workloads in the cloud. Improvements in performance per core, sustained memory bandwidth, and inter-node networking all lead to enabling more tightly coupled applications to scale efficiently in the cloud.

For engineering teams and research groups that regularly weigh scaling efficiency against procurement cycles and infrastructure management, that shift reduces one of the technical arguments for keeping tightly coupled workloads on dedicated systems. If memory-bound and communication-sensitive workloads can achieve competitive performance in elastic environments, the types of workloads that are practical to run in the cloud will only continue to expand.

“I’m old enough to remember when even the suggestion that demanding HPC workloads could run in the cloud was met with incredulity,” said Jeff Barr, AWS VP and chief evangelist, in a LinkedIn post. “Fortunately, that time is long past. The AWS cloud now provides EC2 instances, with lots of memory, memory bandwidth, compute power, and network bandwidth, along with file systems and other storage, that are a great fit for those HPC workloads.”

The post AWS Targets Tightly Coupled Cloud HPC With Hpc8a Instances appeared first on HPCwire.

The CMS Collaboration demonstrates that machine learning can outperform traditional methods in the full reconstruction of particle collisions at the LHC

Feb. 19, 2026 — The CMS Collaboration has shown, for the first time, that machine learning can be used to fully reconstruct particle collisions at the LHC. This new approach can reconstruct collisions more quickly and precisely than traditional methods, helping physicists better understand LHC data.

A particle collision reconstructed using the new CMS machine-learning-based particle-flow (MLPF) algorithm. The HFEM and HFHAD signals come from the forward calorimeters, which measure energy from particles travelling close to the beamline. Image credit: CMS.

Each proton–proton collision at the LHC sprays out a complex pattern of particles that must be carefully reconstructed to allow physicists to study what really happened. For more than a decade, CMS has used a particle-flow (PF) algorithm, which combines information from the experiment’s different detectors, to identify each particle produced in a collision. Although this method works remarkably well, it relies on a long chain of hand-crafted rules designed by physicists.

The new CMS machine-learning-based particle-flow (MLPF) algorithm approaches the task fundamentally differently, replacing much of the rigid hand-crafted logic with a single model trained directly on simulated collisions. Instead of being told how to reconstruct particles, the algorithm learns how particles look in the detectors, like how humans learn to recognise faces without memorising explicit rules.

When benchmarked using data mimicking that from the current LHC run, the performance of the new machine-learning algorithm matched that of the traditional algorithm and, in some cases, even exceeded it. For example, when tested on simulated events in which top quarks were created, the algorithm improved the precision with which sprays of particles – known as jets – were reconstructed by 10–20% in key particle momentum ranges.

The new algorithm also allows a collision to be fully reconstructed far more quickly than before, because it can run efficiently on modern electronic chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs). Traditional algorithms typically need to run on central processing units (CPUs), which are often slower than GPUs for such tasks.

“New uses of machine learning could make data reconstruction more accurate and directly benefit CMS measurements, from precision tests of the Standard Model to searches for new particles,” said Joosep Pata, lead developer of the new MLPF algorithm. “Ultimately, our goal is to get the most information out of the experimental data as efficiently as possible.”

While the new algorithm was tested under current LHC data conditions, it is predicted to be even more useful for data from the High-Luminosity LHC. Due to start running in 2030, the LHC upgrade will deliver approximately five times more particle collisions, posing a significant challenge to the LHC experiments. By teaching detectors to learn directly from data, physicists are not just improving performance, they are redefining what is possible in experimental particle physics.

Find out more about the algorithm on the CMS website and more about machine learning in particle physics through this CERN colloquium.

Source: CERN

The post CMS Uses Machine Learning to Fully Reconstruct LHC Collisions appeared first on HPCwire.

Siemens EDA, UCIe Consortium, and Sarcina Technology Win the First Annual Chiplet Industry Awards Celebrating Technical Innovation and Excellence

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 19, 2026 — The fourth annual Chiplet Summit, the largest conference dedicated to chiplets, has reported on its 2026 Best of Show Awards at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The winners are:

• Siemens EDA for “Packaging: Design” – Their Innovator3D IC software enables fast planning and heterogeneous integration of ASICs and chiplets using 2.5D and 3D packaging technologies.
• UCIe Consortium for “Connectivity and Interoperability” – Their UCIe 3.0 specification delivers higher performance to meet demand for high-speed, interoperable chiplet solutions.
• Sarcina Technology for “Packaging: Hardware” – Their advanced chiplet-based AI package design enables scalable, high-bandwidth systems, delivered through turnkey packaging and test services without the need for an in-house packaging team.

“Chiplet innovation is everywhere,” said Chuck Sobey, General Chair, Chiplet Summit. “We received a wide range of compelling submissions that highlighted advances in design, interoperability, and packaging. We congratulate our winners on their leadership and technical excellence.”

For details on the winners, go to https://chipletsummit.com/2026-best-of-show-awards.

About Chiplet Summit

Chiplet Summit, a product of Semper Technologies, is the industry’s largest chiplet show. It serves the needs of technologists who use chiplets in designs for processors, memories, communications chips, and AI devices. For more information, visit www.chipletsummit.com.

Source: Chiplet Summit

The post Chiplet Summit Announces 2026 Best of Show Award Winners appeared first on HPCwire.

It's the last day here at KBIS. Follow along for the final moments of the 2026 show.

Have you seen the Mike Tyson ad telling people to eat "real food?" The black-and-white spot that debuted during the Super Bowl is the latest promotion for the federal government’s new dietary guidelines. 

With a quick scroll, football watchers who visited the website in the ad would have encountered the statistic that "90% of U.S. healthcare spending goes to treating chronic disease — much of which is linked to diet and lifestyle." 

This statistic also appeared in the dietary guidelines and on the CDC’s website. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it this way in his Jan. 7 announcement: "The CDC reports that 90% of healthcare spending treats chronic disease." 

This number grabbed podcaster Michael Hobbes’ attention. "I couldn't find anyone fact-checking this number," Hobbes said on the Jan. 30 episode of "Maintenance Phase," a podcast that digs into the science behind health and wellness trends.

No worries — PolitiFact is here to answer the call! 

The 90% figure has roots in a 2017 report by the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan research organization. But one of the researchers told PolitiFact that the claim, as stated by Kennedy and RealFood.gov, didn’t accurately reflect their findings. 

The Rand report calculated all health spending on people with chronic illnesses, which includes a majority of Americans. It did not isolate the total spending on treating chronic illness itself.

Here’s another way to think about it: If someone with asthma broke a leg, got glasses or picked up antibiotics, that all counted as spending on a person with a chronic disease — even if it’s not treating the asthma. 

The department did not respond to our request for comment. HHS relayed the research more accurately in the dietary guidelines document and CDC website. 

What the report really said

A trail of footnotes in the dietary guidelines leads to the 2017 Rand report.

Rand used data from an annual government-run survey. The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey asks families to report a year’s worth of personal health care use and spending — including doctor’s visits, prescriptions and hospital stays. It also collects data on people’s health conditions, which can be categorized as chronic or not chronic.

The sample size has varied over the years, ranging from about 18,000 to 37,000 people. Experts said it is among the best data sources on personal health spending. 

The report defines a chronic condition as a mental or physical health condition lasting over a year that either requires functional restrictions or ongoing medical treatment. Many conditions fall into this category, including hypertension, diabetes, depression, anxiety, osteoarthritis, asthma, heart disease, high cholesterol, and cancer. 

Using survey data collected in 2014, Rand researchers estimated almost 60% of Americans had at least one chronic condition. 

Then they looked at people’s health care costs, including payments made by insurers and out-of-pocket costs. 

According to Rand, spending on the 60% of people with one or more chronic conditions made up 90% of all spending. The 40% with no chronic illnesses made up 10% of the spending. 

"A person in a year spends or incurs health care costs for multiple related things," said Christine Buttorff, a Rand health policy researcher and study co-author. "It could be their chronic disease, but it also could be something as simple as an acute illness where they had to go to the doctor or go to the emergency room for something totally unrelated to the chronic disease. So our estimates lump all of that together." 

The claim that 90% of U.S. health care spending goes to treating chronic disease is "not an accurate reflection of our report," Buttorff said. 

Limited data on chronic illness treatment spending

Estimating how much Americans spend on treating chronic illness is harder. It typically requires using insurance claims data, which is spread across government databases and private insurers. 

It can be difficult to link expenses and conditions. If, for example, a person with asthma is hospitalized with pneumonia, is that part of their chronic disease treatment or an acute case? If a person pays to see a psychiatrist but has both anxiety and depression, which diagnosis is that cost linked to? 

University of Washington researchers have been tackling this question. The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in 2025 analyzed personal health care spending from 2010 to 2019 on 148 health conditions, without distinguishing chronic illnesses from other ailments. 

In 2019, the top three most expensive conditions were Type 2 diabetes ($143.9 billion), musculoskeletal disorders such as joint pain and osteoporosis ($108.6 billion), and oral disorders such as cavities and orthodontia ($93 billion). 

"Reality is, we spend a ton of money on things that people don't associate with chronic diseases," said Joseph L. Dieleman, a University of Washington health metrics sciences professor and study co-author.

PolitiFact did not find any studies since 2018 that looked specifically at past chronic disease treatment spending. 

One recent report tried to model future spending on chronic disease. A 2025 report from GlobalData and the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease estimated an average of $2.2 trillion annually in medical costs over the next 15 years. 

Given that current health care spending is over $5.3 trillion annually, that rate of spending would put chronic disease spending around 42% annually. 

Rising chronic illness burden is not all related to diet and lifestyle

U.S. chronic illness rates are rising.

In 2010, about 50% of Americans had at least one chronic condition. The number has climbed closer to 75% in recent years, boosted in part by better diagnostics and longer lifespans. 

"Chronic conditions linked to lifestyle choices such as physical inactivity or diet are a huge issue in the U.S., even if their use of this statistic isn’t quite right," Buttorff said. 

Several of the most common chronic conditions — hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and high cholesterol — have been linked to diet and lifestyle related risk factors. 

Others can’t always be linked to lifestyle, including mental health conditions, asthma, Type 1 diabetes, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, and dementia.

Our ruling

Kennedy and his department said that 90% of health care spending is for treating chronic disease.

The statistic is based on all health spending on people with chronic diseases, not spending on treatment itself. 

A majority of Americans have chronic illnesses, so it’s likely the real number is high. We were unable to find a reliable report that isolated chronic illness spending in the past few years, but a predictive report estimated it could be around 2.2 trillion annually, which would be less than half of current health spending. HHS did not provide evidence to support the claim about treatment spending. 

We rate this statement False. 

Staff Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report

As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated. Soon, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 11 26H1, but you most likely won’t be getting it because it’s strictly limited to devices with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Series processors.

The only way to get this version of Windows is to go out and buy a device with a Snapdragon X2 Series processor. Windows 11 26H1 will not be made available to any other Windows 11 users, so nobody will be able to upgrade to it. Furthermore, users of Windows 11 26H1 will not be able to update to the “feature update” for users of Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, the regular Windows versions, planned for late 2026. Instead, Microsoft promises there will be an upgrade path for 26H1 users in a “future” release of Windows. Why?

Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026. This is because Windows 11, version 26H1 is based on a different Windows core than Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and the upcoming feature update. These devices will have a path to update in a future Windows release.

↫ AriaUpdated at the Windows IT Pro Blog

The same thing happened when Qualcomm releases its first round of Snapdragon processors for Windows, as Windows 24H2 was also tied to this specific platform. It seems Microsoft is forced to have entirely separate and partially incompatible codebases just to support Snapdragon processors, which must be a major pain in the ass to deal with. Considering Windows on ARM hasn’t exactly been a smashing success, one may wonder how long Microsoft remains willing to make such exceptions for a singular chip.

Kathy Hochul backed away from allowing robotaxi services in smaller cities, though Waymo still plans to move ahead in New York City

New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, has pulled her proposal to allow commercial robotaxi services in smaller cities outside New York City, a spokesperson for the governor said on Thursday.

“Based on conversations with stakeholders, including in the legislature, it was clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal,” the spokesperson said.

• Canadians led 1-0 in regulation before late US goal

• Megan Keller clinches title with overtime winner

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results

Rescued from the brink of defeat by a deft touch from their captain in her final Olympics, the US beat Canada in Milan on Thursday to claim the women’s ice hockey gold medal.

Hilary Knight got engaged this week to the American speed skater, Brittany Bowe, and the 36-year-old now has another reason to celebrate. Out-fought and out-thought by their great rivals for much of this contest, the Americans were poised to lose to a team they had thumped 5-0 in the preliminary round only nine days earlier.

A bare-bones Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" -- whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they're still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins -- has rocketed to the top of China's app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising. The app wasn't built for the elderly, as many assumed; its creators are Gen-Z developers who said they were inspired by the isolation of urban life in a country where one-person households are expected to hit 200 million by 2030. Its rise coincided with China's birth rate plunging to a record low. Beijing quietly removed the app from Chinese stores last month, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new name on social media after their first rebrand attempt, "Demumu," failed to catch on.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

West Virginia's attorney general alleges that iCloud's end-to-end encryption is being used to store and distribute child sexual abuse material.

The US team fought back from a goal down to defeat Canada 2-1 and claim gold, Megan Keller with the decisive goal in overtime

USA 0-0 Canada, first period, 15:13 left: Poulin with the shot. Remember that she was out injured when these teams played earlier in these Games. The USA won’t want to let her have many touches.

USA 0-0 Canada, first period, 15:57 left: To underscore the point, NBC commentator AJ Mleczko, fresh from calling part of yesterday’s men’s game with Snoop Dogg, recalls a year in which her US team lost once – in the Olympic final.

Google's Pixel 10A phone is now available for preorder, featuring a small feature refresh and a design that looks quite similar to last year's Pixel 9A.

NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2026 — StorONE has introduced the 9x ROI on Flash Program, designed to help organizations dramatically increase the value they derive from flash storage while maintaining all-flash-class performance for data in active use.

The 9x ROI on Flash Program enables enterprises to increase effective storage capacity by up to nine times by intelligently combining flash performance with lower-cost capacity tiers without replacing flash or changing applications. The program is delivered as part of StorONE platform v3.9, which introduced new intelligent data placement and auto-tiering capabilities that enable the program at scale.

Breaking the Flash Bottleneck

The 9x ROI on Flash Program addresses the core challenge behind rising storage costs and ongoing supply-chain volatility. By combining an existing flash tier with a lower-cost HDD tier, StorONE automatically manages data placement in real time, keeping hot data on flash while moving warm and cold data to HDD transparently and continuously. The result is tier-one performance where it matters, and tier-two economics where it doesn’t.

As part of the 9x ROI on Flash Program, organizations can redeploy existing all-flash JBODs under StorONE software as the flash performance tier of a unified storage system.

An HDD capacity tier is added for the majority of data, while StorONE continuously and automatically promotes and demotes data based on live access patterns without application changes and without manual intervention.

Unlike approaches that rely on deduplication or compression, StorONE delivers real-time data efficiency through automated data placement, avoiding the additional memory and CPU overhead associated with data reduction techniques. The StorONE architecture is designed for direct, inline writes that do not depend on DRAM-intensive buffering, reducing overall memory requirements while sustaining consistent write performance.

“As the founder of StorWize, we were the first to bring real-time, inline compression to enterprise storage,” said Gal Naor, CEO of StorONE. “I know both worlds extremely well. Data reduction has its place, but it is inherently dependent on the data itself. Auto-tiering works on every type of data and delivers certainty. That’s why it’s the more resilient and correct architectural approach. The 9x ROI on Flash Program is about breaking the flash bottleneck, providing organizations with a way to grow capacity intelligently without paying the all-flash tax.”

The 9x ROI on Flash Program is available immediately through the StorONE platform. For more information, visit 9x ROI on Flash.

Join StorONE’s Gal Naor and James Keating at an upcoming webinar on March 5, 2026 at 12:00 PM Eastern Time (9:00 AM Pacific) to discuss “The Architecture Behind 9x ROI on Flash: What True Smart Auto-Tiering Actually Requires.״ Find the registration link here.

About StorONE

StorONE is the leader in auto-tiered storage architecture, built to address the challenges the market is only now beginning to understand. While most storage solutions were built in an era when flash served primarily as an acceleration tier rather than a bottleneck resource, today’s AI-driven environments demand a fundamentally different approach. As flash becomes scarce, expensive, and strategically critical, StorONE’s Smart Auto-Tiering technology is purpose-built to optimize performance and efficiency across storage tiers. This architecture enables organizations to maximize the value of high-performance while maintaining scalability, cost control, and operational ease in today’s data-intensive environments. StorONE’s software-defined platform separates software from hardware, supports all major storage protocols, and runs on any server, any disk media, and across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments—delivering long-term flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in.

Source: StorONE

The post StorONE Introduces 9x ROI on Flash Program appeared first on HPCwire.

Children to get individual support directly from school instead of via council in attempt to curb spiralling costs

Children in England with special needs will receive individual support and therapy directly from their schools as part of the government’s overhaul of England’s special education provision.

Under the plans, mainstream schools will be given commissioning budgets to spend on therapists or additional support, instead of the money being controlled by highly indebted local authorities.

Second carrier strike group heads for region as US waits for Iran to respond after talks in Geneva

Donald Trump has said it will be clear within “probably 10 days” whether he can reach a nuclear deal with Iran, as the US military buildup in the Middle East intensifies with the impending arrival of a second carrier strike group.

The US president, speaking at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington DC, insisted Iran could not have a nuclear weapon and emphasised that “bad things will happen” if the country continued “to threaten regional stability”.

Abigail Shry was due to begin serving a 27-month federal prison sentence this week for threatening a federal judge, but she failed to appear.

A Los Angeles judge ordered Meta officials to remove their AI glasses at a trial over the impact of social media on users.

Patel took an FBI jet to Italy and plans to watch the Men's USA Olympic hockey team compete in the medal rounds, multiple sources said.

Although the United States and ally Israel have a military advantage over Iranian forces, there are ways for Tehran to make any attack painful, officials said.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, 31 schools have signed agreements to end links with organizations that “restrict participation based on race.”

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 20, No. 515.

As the search for Nancy Guthrie continues, investigators are turning to a small device they hope could lead to a breakthrough: the 84-year-old’s pacemaker.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 20, No. 985

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 20, No. 719.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 20, No. 1,707.

• Team have been in Chicago since 1921

• Indiana committed to helping build new stadium

The Chicago Bears’ potential move to Indiana took another step forward on Thursday when a key committee approved a plan to create an agency that would help get a stadium built.

The Indiana House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee passed a bill establishing a Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority to finance, construct and lease a stadium by a 24-0 margin. The Bears are looking at a tract of land near Wolf Lake in Hammond, Indiana.

Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve. The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve 66 megabits per second, meaning a full slab would take over 150 hours to write, though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forecasters predict more snow in Sierra Nevada mountains as climate crisis increases threat of dangerous conditions

Avalanche risks remain high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California this week, following the deadliest snowslide the region has seen in modern times.

The climate crisis has set the stage for more dangerous conditions, with sharper swings between dry periods and severe storms, according to experts, who have long warned that extremes will amplify as the world warms.

Could new information lead to answers in the brutal murder of four teenage girls in Austin, Texas, more than 30 years ago?

"48 Hours" can exclusively report there has been a huge break in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls in a Texas yogurt shop.

Unlike King Charles I, who was arrested in 1647, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will not be executed. But his legal woes and ties to Jeffrey Epstein threaten to damage the royal family.

A look at the timeline of events in Karen Read's high-profile Massachusetts murder trial and retrial. Read was acquitted of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe.

President’s move, which also seeks ‘immunity’ for makers, faces backlash from health advocates and Maha coalition

Donald Trump has signed an executive order protecting production of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, which some bodies and studies have linked to cancer and which are the subject of widespread US litigation.

The president’s move, which also seeks to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides, was strongly criticized by health and environmental advocates including some figures in the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) coalition.

This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group

Oil prices could surge depending on the level of disruption from U.S. military strikes on Iran, Wall Street analysts say.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has made a series of claims about the economy, a topic that should feature prominently in his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 24.

“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said at a White House press briefing on Jan. 20, adding later that “America is booming.” He made similar comments the following day, asserting that “we were a dead country” a year ago.

But his economic boasts include false or misleading claims, and he sometimes pushes an incorrect narrative of an abrupt change in some economic indicators since he came back to the White House.

As preparation for what we might hear in Tuesday night’s speech, we offer a guide to a dozen of Trump’s recent claims about the economy, most of which we’ve written about before. They touch on inflation, economic growth, manufacturing, wages, jobs, the deficit, stock market and more.

Economic Growth

Proud of federal data showing that economic growth in the second and third quarters of 2025 exceeded expectations, Trump in Iowa on Jan. 27 falsely claimed that “under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of. They’ve never had them before.”

After declining by an annualized rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the three months from January to March, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and at a rate of 4.4% in the third quarter, according to estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But those were not record-setting numbers. They were the largest quarterly increases since the economy expanded at a rate of 4.7% in the third quarter of 2023, under President Joe Biden.

As we wrote this month, the quarterly growth record is 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, which was at the beginning of the economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, according to BEA estimates back to 1947, the record was 16.7% growth in the first quarter of 1950. Yearly growth in GDP has averaged about 2.75% over the last 50 years.

Jobs

Trump told NBC News in a Feb. 4 interview: “We have, it was just announced, more jobs right now occupied in the United States of America than at any time during its existence, 250 years. There are more people working today than at any time in the history of our country. Pretty good stat.”

While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions. This graph from BLS gives the long-term picture:

Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.

There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.

Trump has frequently cited this hollow statistic about more people being employed than ever before during both his first and second terms, including during his State of the Union address in 2019.

Inflation

In the NBC News interview, Trump repeated his false claim that he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country,” and added that “now we have almost no inflation.”

When Trump took office in January 2025, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920. 

Trump has repeatedly mocked Democrats for raising the issue of “affordability,” which Trump says he has since solved.

“Prices are way down. You don’t hear the Democrats talking about affordability anymore, which they caused the affordability problem, very badly,” Trump said on Feb. 6. “But you don’t hear that word. I haven’t heard that word spoken in a week and a half because they can’t speak because the prices are down.”

But overall prices are not down. As of January, one year into Trump’s second term, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%. However, that’s above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.

Stagflation

In the Jan. 20 press briefing at the White House, Trump falsely claimed to have “ended Biden stagflation,” which he said is “far worse than inflation.” The U.S. was “plagued by the nightmare of stagflation” under Biden, and now “we are witnessing the exact opposite,” Trump said at a World Economic Forum meeting on Jan. 21.

But, as we’ve written, economists told us that the U.S. economy under Biden did not experience stagflation, which Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us “refers to a sustained period of high inflation combined with weak or stagnant real economic growth, typically alongside rising unemployment.” He said that definition did not apply to the Biden economy.

Inflation was high during Biden’s first two years in office, then declined sharply in the last half of his presidency. “However, real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Handley said. 

In addition, Aeimit Lakdawala, an associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University, told us that there has not been a complete economic turnaround under Trump.

“What we’re really seeing is a continuation of trends that were already well underway before Trump took office in January 2025,” Lakdawala said. He noted that the annual inflation rate is “modestly lower” under Trump, while the average annualized increase in real GDP under Trump is “a touch lower” than in Biden’s last two years. The unemployment rate, at 4.3% as of January, is also slightly higher than it was when Trump took office.

Stock Market

Trump has repeatedly boasted that the stock market has outperformed expectations. “Your 401(k)s are doing very well,” Trump said in a speech to military families in North Carolina on Feb. 13.

A Feb. 16 press release from the White House put some additional spin on the claim, saying the stock market has “rebounded strongly under President Trump’s leadership.” The release notes that the S&P 500 “surg[ed] nearly 40% from its early-year low.” That’s true. But the low in 2025 came just a few days after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2 that sent stock prices tumbling. Since then, stocks have rebounded and achieved new highs.

Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.5% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on Feb. 18, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.

As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”

“And if you remember when I was first elected, everybody said, if I got it to 50,000, the Dow, or 7,000 with the S&P, if I got it to 50,000 with a Dow, that would be an amazing — that would be in four years from then, from the election,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 13.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,576 at the open of the market on Feb. 19.

But it’s misleading to suggest the stock market “rebounded strongly” under Trump. The stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P 500 grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.

We also note that while Trump often boasts that everyone’s 401(k) retirement account has risen, only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.

Gasoline Prices

In a Feb. 6 gaggle with reporters, in which he claimed that “we’ve had massive price reductions,” Trump misleadingly said that “if you look at gasoline, $1.99 a gallon.” That was far from the national average price.

Gasoline prices are about 19 cents (or 6%) lower than they were when Trump took office, but, as of the week ending Feb. 9, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.90, nearly $1 more than Trump said, according to the Energy Information Administration. One week later, the average price was $2.92, as of the week ending Feb. 16.

There also were no states in which the average price was below $2 at the time of Trump’s claim. Oklahoma had the lowest average price at $2.36 per gallon on Feb. 6, according to AAA data. That state, at $2.29, also had the lowest average price on Feb. 18.

Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in an email that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 16 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.79 was the “most common U.S. gas price encountered by motorists.”

Energy and Grocery Prices

In a Jan. 27 press gaggle, Trump also claimed to have “made a lot of progress” on the “very, very high prices” that he inherited. “So, we have the groceries going down. We have the energy going down,” he said. That’s misleading.

While the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, has decreased since the start of Trump’s second term, average food prices overall are up — not down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data. 

As for energy prices, it’s not clear what Trump is referring to. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.

Budget Deficit

In his Jan. 30 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Trump exaggerated when he wrote that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.”

Budget deficits occur when federal spending exceeds revenue. The White House has said that Trump’s figure was calculated by comparing the cumulative budget deficit from February to November in 2025 with the combined deficit for the same 10 months in 2024. 

But organizations that track the budget deficit typically compare deficits based on months in fiscal years, not calendar years. The $1.78 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which began on Oct. 1, 2024, and ended on Sept. 30, decreased about 2.3% from the $1.82 trillion budget gap in fiscal year 2024. (Trump alone was president for a full eight out of the 12 months in FY 2025.) 

As of January, the budget deficit was down about 17% through the first four months of FY 2026 when compared with the same period in FY 2025. An increase in federal revenue, including from tariffs, contributed to the decline. On Feb. 9, the Congressional Budget Office said, “Customs duties, including tariff revenues, collected this year were more than four times the amount recorded in the first four months of last year, an increase of $90 billion.” 

However, in its most recent long-term budget outlook, the CBO projected that the final FY 2026 budget deficit will end up being close to $1.9 trillion, higher than the deficit in FY 2025. That would be about $140 billion higher than the deficit that CBO projected for FY 2026 in January 2025, before any of Trump’s policies had been implemented.

Trade Deficit

Trump’s claim that he has “slashed our gaping trade deficit by a staggering 77%,” as he said Jan. 27 in Iowa, is misleading. In 2025, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services decreased by 0.2%, or about $2.1 billion, from 2024, according to data the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Feb. 19. The 2025 goods-and-services trade deficit of roughly $901.5 billion was the third largest going back to 1960.

Instead, as we wrote on Feb. 3, Trump’s claim appears to compare the monthly trade deficit in January 2025 to the deficit nine months later in October, a 16-year low. That’s a decrease of 77.6%, according to BEA figures revised this month. (The decrease from January to December was 45.2%.) But economic experts told us that comparing the trade deficit in one month to another is not preferable because monthly trade figures can be volatile.

For instance, in the first three months of 2025, the trade imbalance surged to between roughly $120 billion and $136 billion, as U.S. importers loaded up on foreign goods to get ahead of tariffs on imported products that Trump had proposed. Imports went back down after the tariffs went into effect, producing smaller trade deficits in the months later in the year. 

“Large month-to-month swings are common, even in periods with no underlying structural change in trade policy or economic conditions,” Handley, at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email for our story. “For that reason, economists almost never evaluate claims about the ‘trade deficit’ based on comparisons between two individual months.”

Manufacturing Construction

Trump has repeatedly claimed that “factory construction is up by 41%” under his second term. That’s misleading. The Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data, which the White House referred us to, shows that spending has declined since Trump took office.

The quarterly data show a 6.7% decline, while the drop was 7.3% on a monthly basis, from January 2025 to October, the latest data available.

As we’ve explained, the White House gets a 41% increase by comparing the monthly average from January to August 2025 with the yearly average for 2021 to 2024. But that methodology fails to take into account the 212% increase in factory construction spending over Biden’s four years, partly fueled by the 2022 CHIPS Act, which helped fund semiconductor manufacturing facilities and continues to affect construction spending. Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade association, told us that the manufacturing construction spending in 2025 is “largely due” to the CHIPS Act.

It’s worth noting that the economy lost 83,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first 12 months. In the year before he took office, the decline was 202,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Real Wages

Trump has repeatedly mentioned the decline in real wages, meaning they are adjusted for inflation, over the four years of Biden’s presidency and the increase in real wages so far under his second term. It’s true that real average weekly earnings fell 4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, during Biden’s term, and they’ve gone up 1.9% in the year since January 2025. But Trump at times has left the misleading impression that this has been an abrupt turnaround. Over Biden’s last year, real wages went up 0.7%

On Jan. 13, Trump said: “After real wages plummeted by $3,000 under sleepy Joe Biden, real wages are up by $1,300 in less than one year under President Trump.” Later that month, he said that “wages have gone up … much faster” than inflation. With Biden, he said, “it was just the opposite. Wages in the United States in the last year have gone up.”

Wages rose faster than inflation over the last year-and-a-half of Biden’s presidency. They’ve outpaced inflation since June 2023, and they’ve continued to do so since Trump took office.

“It remains the case that both at the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is to say, inflation has been rising more slowly than wages have been,” Gary Burtless, a senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a phone interview when we wrote about this topic in December.

As for the specific dollar amounts Trump has mentioned — a $3,000 decline in real wages under Biden and a $1,300 increase under his term — the White House told us that’s based on weekly wage data from BLS that’s adjusted for inflation using the CPI-W, which is the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. It measures the change in prices for a basket of goods purchased by such workers, and it’s the index Social Security uses to calculate cost-of-living adjustments. Using that method, we got a decline of nearly $2,900 over Biden’s four years and an increase of about $1,400 for Trump’s first year ($1,363 to be exact), a figure that includes January data released this month.

Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, cautioned against looking at wage growth only over presidential terms, calling it “deeply misleading” because “macroeconomic cycles occasionally have huge effects that have nothing to do with presidential performance.”

Bivens noted that average wages jumped up during the COVID-19 pandemic when the unemployment rate also spiked as mainly low-wage workers lost their jobs. As those low-wage workers regained employment, “it had the effect of artificially lowering measured wages in the aggregate.” (Burtless also said the pandemic had this impact on wage data.)

“The lesson is that the proper way to measure macroeconomic variables like average wages is from business cycle peak to business cycle peak, not from the trough to a peak. That’s why, for example, we measure from 2019-2024 or 2025,” Bivens said.

But presidents of both parties are apt to take credit or cast blame for increases or declines in real wage growth.

Investments

The president continues to make the exaggerated boast that “we secured commitments for a record breaking plus $18 trillion” in “new investments,” as he said in Iowa in late January. In his pre-Super Bowl NBC News interview, Trump also made the claim, saying “$18 trillion is being invested in our country as we speak.” At times, he has attributed this to his policies on tariffs.

A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.

“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.

In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.

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

The post A Pre-SOTU Guide to Trump’s Economic Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta's social media platforms and addressed his public persona in a Los Angeles courtroom.

India’s largest manufacturers are teaming with global industrial software leaders Cadence, Siemens and Synopsys to build AI factories for design and manufacturing accelerated by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, CUDA-X and Omniverse libraries.

Feb. 19. 2026 — India is entering a new age of industrialization, as AI transforms how the world designs, builds and runs physical products and systems. The country is investing $134 billion dollars in new manufacturing capacity across construction, automotive, renewable energy and robotics, creating both a massive challenge and opportunity to build software-defined factories from day one.

Image credit: Wipro PARI

At the center of this transformation are applications accelerated by NVIDIA CUDA-X and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, which connect data from design to operations and bring physical AI into factories, warehouses and infrastructure.

India’s largest manufacturers are teaming with global industrial software leaders Cadence, Siemens and Synopsys to advance the nation’s AI boom using applications accelerated by CUDA-X and Omniverse libraries.

India’s Manufacturing Leaders Modernize Factories With Siemens and NVIDIA

To scale India’s growth, manufacturers are using Siemens industrial software integrated with NVIDIA CUDA-X and Omniverse libraries to design, build and operate next-generation, software-defined factories.

Reliance New Energy, the clean energy arm of Reliance industries, is expanding its collaboration with NVIDIA and Siemens by combining Siemens’ digital twin technology with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries for faster, more precise simulation and plant design for its next-generation gigafactories.

Addverb Technologies, a leading Indian company providing robots and innovative warehouse automation solutions, is using Siemens’ Technomatix portfolio, NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models to create digital twins of its factories and train its quadruped and wheeled humanoid robots in simulation.

Hero MotoCorp is utilizing Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA infrastructure to accelerate the product development lifecycle by enhancing its capabilities in computer-aided engineering, numerical virtual verification and validation.

Partners Advance Design and Engineering with NVIDIA-Accelerated Software from Synopsys and Cadence

Leading enterprises are integrating Synopsys and Cadence’s electronic design automation tools, powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure and libraries, to enable rapid design iteration and operational intelligence across the energy, automotive and electronics sectors.

Electrical equipment and home appliances leader Havells India Limited is using Synopsys’ Ansys Fluent to accelerate simulation powered by NVIDIA CUDA-X. Havells has obtained 6x faster fluid dynamic simulations, enabling exploration of more design options to optimize airflow and energy efficiencies, and achieve faster time to market.

Larsen & Toubro Semiconductor’s application of Cadence Spectre X, accelerated by CUDA-X libraries, on NVIDIA GPUs shortens design iterations of next-generation AI chips.

India’s Technology Leaders Advance Industrial Automation with Physical AI

India’s IT and business consulting sector has grown into a global powerhouse, projected to reach over $350 billion this year, serving as a primary engine for transforming the world’s largest industries.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global leader in IT services, is investing in large-scale AI infrastructure to deliver enterprise solutions at scale. By harnessing the NVIDIA Metropolis platform, the NVIDIA Blueprint for video search and summarization and digital twins built on Omniverse libraries, TCS is setting safety and precision benchmarks at Tata Motors, converting standard camera feeds into intelligent sensors for automated quality checks and real-time safety compliance.

TCS is also deploying physical AI applications, including autonomous safety and quality inspections via quadruped robots, to minimize risk across complex manufacturing environments.

Wipro PARI, a leader in industrial automation, is integrating NVIDIA AI infrastructure, Omniverse libraries and the NVIDIA Isaac robotics development platform to deliver solutions for its consumer and automotive customers. This includes real-time simulation and validation of robotic workflows, as well as virtual stress-testing of operations before physical deployment.

Tata Consulting Engineers is launching its Cognitive Twin platform, built on NVIDIA Omniverse, to create real-time industrial simulations that link physical assets with digital intelligence across manufacturing, energy and infrastructure. The platform supports both capital project planning and operational optimization through early-stage simulation and AI-enabled decision-making. Pilot projects are underway with National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited, Torrent Power and Power Grid Corporation of India Limited.

To see what’s next, explore industrial AI and manufacturing sessions at NVIDIA GTC.

Source: Timothy Costa, NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and Global Industrial Software Leaders Partner with India’s Largest Manufacturers to Drive AI Boom appeared first on HPCwire.

We look at price, reach, perks and more to compare two of the biggest phone carriers in the US.

A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe's failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes -- problems California shares in abundance -- but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per employee in Germany, 38 in France, and 62 in Spain, compared to seven in the United States. The downstream effects are visible across Europe's flagship industries. When Audi closed its Brussels factory after cancelling the E-Tron SUV in 2024, severance ran to $718 million -- over $235,000 per employee and more than the cost of writing off the plant's physical assets. Volkswagen spent $50 billion on its electric vehicle lineup, failed to develop competitive software internally, and ultimately paid up to $5 billion for access to American startup Rivian's technology. Between 2012 and 2016, 79% of all startup acquisitions tracked by Crunchbase took place in the US. The essay points to Denmark, Austria and Switzerland as countries that have found a middle path -- generous unemployment insurance and portable severance accounts that protect workers without penalizing employers for taking risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CAMPBELL, Calif., Feb. 19, 2026 — Komprise, a leader in analytics-driven unstructured data management, today announced Komprise AI Preparation & Process Automation (KAPPA) data services, a first-of-its-kind serverless compute offering for unstructured data.

Unstructured data is hard to leverage and process for AI, as it is spread across NAS, cloud and SaaS and has rampant quality issues. Fast, accurate metadata extraction is intrinsic to making unstructured data searchable, governable, and useful for AI by giving structure and identifying traits to the data. Yet IT organizations must often customize metadata extraction and data preparation for AI to meet unique requirements for security, departments and their respective industry.

ETL and other traditional approaches of data processing via pre-built connectors and plug-ins are time-consuming to create, inflexible, and costly to update. With KAPPA, you can create custom data services to meet any requirement in just hours, not months. This serverless compute offering for unstructured data allows IT and data experts to focus on the per-file function without having to provision or manage the infrastructure to process the operation across large datasets.

For instance, a research director in healthcare may want to read custom metadata headers from medical DICOM files for tagging, apply ERP project tags to files, mask PII, import sensitive data labels and integrate project context from other platforms such as Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs). In another industry example, a media and entertainment company may want to tag files with specific EXIF metadata from digital media assets.

KAPPA data services make the process of defining custom actions simpler and faster. IT and data experts simply insert a few lines of code for the requested actions per file into a data operation field. Komprise then performs the steps to execute the custom action across a specified dataset as part of a broader AI workflow or data management plan. Enterprises can now execute metadata enrichment across petabytes with just a few lines of code.

Key features include:

• Easy definition and customization of data services: With KAPPA functions, you can focus on the file operation with a few lines of Python while Komprise handles the complexities of scaling and executing the instructions across large data sets and infrastructure.
• Global search and curation: KAPPA functions apply enriched metadata tags into the Komprise Global Metadatabase service so they are searchable and discoverable across all your hybrid storage silos. Komprise Deep Analytics is a rich search and query interface for users to find the right data and orchestrate AI workflows using Komprise Smart Data Workflows.
• Built for autonomous agentic AI data orchestration: The autonomous execution of multiple AI tasks in agentic AI requires parallelism in data orchestration. Agentic AI can directly invoke KAPPA functions for their data needs. For example, an airline may have a customer service AI agent that first tags all files for a journey with its reservation number using a KAPPA function.
• Customizable setup and lifecycle management: Komprise will automatically manage specified pre- and post-processing for the KAPPA workflow, such as spinning up a cloud AI service prior to processing and decommissioning it when the data service is complete.
• Reusable library of data services: Komprise and its partners are developing a library of reusable data services which users can easily configure for their specific requirements.

“Enterprises are realizing that the unstructured data that has been piling up for decades is now a goldmine for AI, but it’s incredibly hard to tap into,” said Kumar K. Goswami, co-founder and CEO of Komprise. “Since nearly every enterprise has unique needs, KAPPA data services deliver a nimble, serverless compute architecture for custom metadata enrichment at scale.”

“Valuable metadata including embedded information from media asset management tools and contextual enterprise-specific metadata which are key for AI are lost when files are stored,” said Aaron Cardenas, CEO of P1 Technologies. “Kappa data services allows us to enrich file metadata and customize it to our clients’ needs with incredible ease and speed, while also conforming to their security models. This new functionality from Komprise is making a tremendous difference in the outcomes of our projects.”

Availability

Komprise AI Preparation & Process Automation (KAPPA) data services are currently in an early access program for customers. To learn more visit: Komprise.ai/KAPPA

About Komprise

Komprise connects unstructured data management with AI through a unified platform. With Komprise Intelligent Data Management, enterprise IT can easily analyze, migrate, transparently tier and manage the lifecycle of petabytes of file and object data across hybrid environments. Organizations gain full visibility across silos to optimize storage, backup, ransomware and cloud costs. Komprise Smart Data Workflows and the Komprise Global Metadatabase unlock rich unstructured data context and governed access for AI.

Source: Komprise

The post Komprise Accelerates Agentic AI with Serverless Compute for Unstructured Data appeared first on HPCwire.

Arctesthes avatar moth, which won nearly half of the votes, was discovered in 2012 and is critically endangered

A tiny critically endangered moth, named after the Avatar films because of the proposed mining activity threatening its primary habitat, has been crowned New Zealand’s bug of the year.

The Avatar moth won by a wide margin, earning 5,192 of the more than 11,000 total votes cast. It won 2,269 more votes than the runner-up, the mahoenui giant wētā, one of the world’s largest insects. Other contenders included the wonderfully spiky hellraiser mite, the country’s heaviest spider – the black tunnelweb – and a giant earthworm that glows in the dark.

Former duchess has stood by the former prince through waves of allegations and has yet to comment on his arrest

While the spotlight has been on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, his arrest has prompted questions about what is next for his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.

Ferguson, known by the tabloids as Fergie, married the then prince Andrew in 1986 and was divorced from him 10 years later after an alleged affair with an American financial adviser. It was one of multiple scandals in the 1990s and 2000s involving the former duchess, who was widely considered an embarrassment to the royal family.