News Reel

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said it was "the first time in centuries" that heads of the church were unable to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass at the sacred site.

Iranian state media publishes message from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf marking 30 days since the start of the war

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has condemned Israel’s killing of three journalists in Lebanon on Saturday.

On his Telegram, Araghchi said the killings amounted to “targeted assassination” and “flagrant violation of international law”. He said they were a way of silencing “the voices of those who tell the truth”.

Apple unveiled new device-level age restrictions in the UK on Wednesday. "After downloading a new update, users will now have to confirm that they are 18 or older to access unrestricted features," reports Gizmodo. "Users will be able to confirm their age with a credit card or by scanning an ID." For those underage or who have not confirmed their age, Apple will turn on Web Content Filter and Communication Safety, which will not only restrict access to certain apps or websites, but will also monitor messages, shared photo albums, AirDrop, and FaceTime calls for nudity. Apple didn't specify exactly which services and features are banned for under-18 users, but it will likely be in compliance with UK legislation... The British government does not require Apple and other OS providers to institute device-level age checks, but it does restrict minor access to online pornography under the Online Safety Act, which passed in 2023. So far, that restriction has only been implemented at the website level, but UK officials have been worried about easy loopholes to evade the age restrictions, like VPNs. The broader tech industry has been campaigning for some time to use device-level age checks instead in response to the rising tide of under-16 social media and internet bans around the world. Last month, in a landmark social media trial in California, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also supported this idea, saying that conducting age verification "at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately." Pornhub-operator Aylo had advocated for device-level restrictions in the UK as well, and even sent out letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft in November asking for OS-level age verification... The most obvious question: Could this be brought stateside?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From headphones to Lego sets to cookware, our shopping experts are bringing the can't-miss bargains straight to you.

Model posted picture of herself naked and ‘in her full power’ to celebrate Mother’s Day, before Meta removed it for breaching nudity guidelines

The model Erin O’Connor has spoken out about the need for social media platforms to apply “clearer, more context-sensitive guidelines” after Instagram removed nude photographs she had posted on Mother’s Day, celebrating her heavily pregnant body.

The photos – which have since been reinstated on the platform – were taken in 2014 when O’Connor, who is 48, was eight and half months’ pregnant with her son Albert.

If the now-six-week partial shutdown continues after the weekend, it will become the longest of any shutdown

The shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the fourth largest agency in the US government, became the longest partial shutdown in US history on Sunday.

If the now-six-week partial shutdown continues after the weekend, it will also become the longest of any shutdown, surpassing the impasse late last year that dragged on for 43 days.

Two hundred miles from LA, an off-grid community with roots in Burning Man offers an unorthodox educational experience – is Mars College the future?

A dozen writing students perched around a collection of weather-beaten couches, laptops balancing on their knees, ready to discuss their work. Next up to read was Ira Birch, a poet sporting black boots and a shag haircut.

“I told myself I was gonna share today,” Birch said nervously, looking around the circle. “But there are a lot more people here.”

Weak and sick mammal has twice become stuck on a sandbank and appears to be struggling to find route back to ocean

The fate of a humpback whale stranded in shallow bays off Germany’s Baltic coast hangs in the balance after several rescue attempts.

The roughly 10-metre-long (33ft) mammal appeared weakened and sick on Sunday and was struggling to find a route back to the Atlantic.

How powerful is Jupiter's lightning? Thick clouds cover the view, notes Science magazine. But using an instrument on NASA's Juno spacecraft (orbiting Jupiter for the past decade), researchers determined Jupiter's lightning bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than earth's: A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute... The four storms Juno studied were monstrous, says Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the study's authors. There were three flashes per second on average, often emerging from the hearts of storms that are 3000 kilometers across, longer than the distance from New York City to Denver. The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope (and photographs from Juno's camera) to track Jupiter's storms with such precision that their radiometer could then pick out individual lightning flashes, according to the article. "It's just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that there's very energetic lightning happening," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasn't involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions "is exciting," he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistry — including the sort that primordial life is built on. Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lebanese government calls the killings a ‘blatant war crime’ while Israel says primary target was a Hezbollah ‘terrorist’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

A funeral has taken place in Lebanon for three journalists killed by an Israeli strike on Saturday, after the Lebanese government called the killings a “blatant war crime”.

Ali Shoeib, of the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar television station, and Fatima Ftouni and her brother and cameraman Mohammed Ftouni, of the pro-Hezbollah outlet al-Mayadeen, were killed in the strike targeting their car.

Pontiff’s unusually pointed comments come after Pete Hegseth’s prayer for violence against enemies ‘who deserve no mercy’

Pope Leo has said God ignores the prayers of leaders who wage war and have “hands full of blood”, in an apparent rebuke to the Trump administration.

The pontiff made the comments on Sunday as thousands of US troops arrived in the Middle East and days after the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, prayed for violence against enemies who deserved “no mercy”.

I spoke to four cybersecurity experts about the FCC's ban on all new foreign-made routers. Even though I review routers for a living, here's why I recommend avoiding a router purchase right now.

Michael Jordan reflects on his life after basketball, his move into NASCAR, and the pressure that still comes with his competitive drive and fame.

It’s likely, but it also could be a boon for a new generation of entrepreneurs willing to take over established operations

Want to buy my business? It’s been very profitable. I’ve run it for more than 25 years. But no, you don’t want to buy it. Like most small businesses in this country, there’s really nothing of value here.

According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 33m small businesses in the US. But fewer than 7m actually employ people. The rest comprise freelancers, side gigs and independent contractors. I’m sure many of these people are making a living. But are they building assets? A brand? Probably not. If that “business owner” suddenly disappears, their business disappears with them. No one wants to buy a business like that. There’s no value.

Shift seen away from from traveling to states with legal abortion in favor of telehealth and mail-order pills

The abortion rate is holding steady in the US despite total and partial bans in some states – largely because of travel across state lines and a significant increase in telehealth appointments, a new report says.

US regulatory officials are weighing changes to the ways mifepristone, an abortion medication, may be dispensed, but they have reportedly pushed their review until after the midterm elections, given the widespread support for abortion across the US.

This will be the first time humans have traveled to the moon since the early 1970s.

Olivia Munn tells Tracy Smith about how she turned a symptomless Stage 1 breast cancer diagnosis into a mission to help other women.

Police did not specify who was arrested or what role they may have played in the attempted bombing.

Anti-authoritarian rallies, in all 50 states plus more than a dozen countries, were the largest number of protests in a single day in US history

More than 8 million people protested against the Trump administration at more than 3,300 No Kings events across the US and in more than a dozen countries on Saturday, according to organizers. It’s the greatest number of protests in a single day in US history, said Britt Jacovich, the deputy communications director for Move On, one of the organizers behind No Kings.

Saturday’s protest was the third No Kings, organized by a coalition that also includes “anti-authoritarian” groups Indivisible and 50501, labor unions and other grassroots organizations. The last one in October drew 7 million people nationwide.

When Princeton graduate student Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped off the street in Iraq in March 2023 and held for ransom by a militia, it set off a 903-day fight her sister never expected.

Exclusive: Pubs, restaurants and hotels warn of mounting pressure days before rates rises and higher wage bills take effect

One in five hospitality businesses fear collapse in the next 12 months, according to an industry-wide survey that comes days before rises in tax and employment costs kick in.

From Wednesday, many pub, restaurant and hotel companies face the prospect of a higher bill for business rates paid to their local authority, while an increase in minimum wage thresholds takes effect on the same day.

I rejected the church as a teen. But I’ve lately felt called to look for God – and my understanding has changed

Two months into the pandemic, I began a practice I called “When I look for God”. With so much changing so quickly, I was looking to find space during each day when I could ground myself amidst the uncertainty. The previous five years had opened up a spiritual yearning spurred by a life-shifting moment while surfing when God became profoundly known to me. These encounters of grace began to happen with some frequency. I was both compelled and confused by this new awakening.

God has always been elusive to me. I grew up Catholic, attended church on Sundays, went to catechism. I was baptized as an infant, received my first communion at seven, and was confirmed at 11. None of this brought me any closer to God.

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, gas prices, grocery bills and mortgage rates have all climbed

The US-Israel war against Iran has sent shockwaves through global markets, leaving many Americans grappling with a growing financial squeeze on everyday living costs.

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – prompting retaliatory attacks on US allies in the region and Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime passage – costs have surged across the US. Gas prices, in particular, have spiked sharply, with the national average rising by roughly 30% over the past month. Grocery bills, mortgage rates and fertilizer costs have also climbed.

Two kona low storms dumped up to 50in of rain on Oahu, flooding fields and submerging equipment

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

Fossil-fuel burning at Ohio facility could burn longer, leaving Middletown residents to face environmental risks

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It was just a few months after moving from Louisville to Middletown, Ohio, four years ago that Vivian Adams’s six-year-old daughter’s asthma problem worsened.

“My daughter was born prematurely so she already had lung issues,” she says, “[but] it’s gotten worse. She stays sick and coughing and can’t breathe. She’s had to go on everyday medication for her asthma, plus she has a rescue inhaler.”

A once robust American anti-war movement is significantly weaker than it was in its heyday. The immensely unpopular war on Iran offers a real opportunity to rebuild it

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for authorization to use military force in south-east Asia. His resolution passed unanimously in the House, and only two voices dissented in the Senate. As for the public, 77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what is right, and more than 60% supported war.

It is common today to hear that the US war in Vietnam was unpopular, but it certainly did not begin that way. It took several years, billions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, and constant anti-war mobilization before Americans changed their minds.

Millions of people marched on Saturday against Trump and his administration. While the single-day protest has ended, there are other ways, used in other movements throughout history, to keep the momentum going

More than 8 million people showed up across 3,300 No Kings protests on Saturday, calling for an end to the war in Iran, immigration agents in their communities and what they see as Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. Organizers say it’s the greatest number of protests in a single day in US history.

But movement scholars say social change doesn’t begin and end with one protest. It takes activism at the local and national level, and in a variety of forms, to bring about change.

Attendees at Conservative Political Action Conference express support and concerns amid rift over Trump’s action

Wherever you go, there you are, the saying goes. It was a lesson Donald Trump’s Maga faithful may have been reminded of last week when they gathered in a convention center near Dallas for a revival of the president’s political movement, only to find that there was no escape from the problems it faces.

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is usually a place of optimism, if not, triumph. It was on its stage last year that Elon Musk pumped a chainsaw in the air amid his abortive foray into clear cutting government bureaucracy, and where JD Vance named undocumented immigration as the “greatest threat” facing the United States and Europe. Trump is a regular, regaling the audience with lengthy monologues about his accomplishments.

The test was in line with Kim Jong Un's goals of targeting the U.S., but some experts speculate the claim may be exaggerated.

Police say seven people sustained ‘range of serious but not life-threatening injuries’ in incident on Friar Gate

A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car struck several pedestrians on one of Derby’s busiest streets.

Derbyshire police said seven people were injured, sustaining “a range of serious but not life-threatening injuries”, in the incident on Saturday night. The force said that “contrary to online speculation” there were no deaths.

Sgt. Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, 22, was born in Connecticut and served in the Israel Defense Forces' Paratroopers Brigade.

Top diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt are meeting in Pakistan on Sunday to push for an end to the Iran war.

Quantum computers promise to revolutionize whole industries by outperforming classical computers on complex calculations. They just need to be colder than the coldest natural place in the universe.

The statue isn’t about preserving history – it’s about asserting the power to rewrite it

The Trump administration recently took a position on a man with a documented record of genocide and enslavement. “In this White House,” a spokesman announced last week, following the installation of a statue on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, “Christopher Columbus is a hero.”

It is worth pausing on that word. A hero, in the civic sense, is not merely someone whom people admire. It is someone whose story the country agrees to tell in a particular way. Heroism is a narrative decision.

Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist

Commentary: Apple's $599 iPhone 17E has a lot of value, but you might be better off with an older iPhone at a similar price.

Large crowds protested against the Trump administration at more than 3,000 No Kings events across the US, as well as in more than a dozen countries, on Saturday, according to a coalition of organisers that includes 'anti-authoritarian' groups Indivisible and 50501, labour unions and other grassroots organisations

• Third No Kings protest draws millions from across US to push back on Trump administration

• No Kings protests across the world: in pictures

A smart scale provides various metrics right from your bathroom.

Brent crude jumps 51% since start of March and gold suffers fifth-largest monthly fall in 50 years

• Middle East crisis – latest updates

The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.

Bell Labs "created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age," writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language. But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a "problem-rich" environment, suggests Arno Penzia, winner of one of Bell Labs' 11 Nobel Prizes: It was Bell Labs' responsibility, in other words, to create technologies for designing, expanding and improving an unruly communications network of cables and microwave links and glass fibers. The Labs also had to figure out ways to create underwater conduits, as well as switching centers that could manage the growing number of customers and escalating amounts of data.... Money mattered, too. Being connected to AT&T, the largest company in the world, was an advantage. The Labs' budget was enormous, and accounting conventions allowed its parent company to make huge and continuing investments in R & D. The generous funding, moreover, allowed scientists and engineers to buy and build expensive equipment — for instance, anechoic chambers to create the world's quietest rooms... The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades. The first conceptualization of a cellular phone network, for instance, came out of the Labs in the late 1940s; it wasn't until the late 1970s that technicians began testing one in Chicago to gauge its potential. The challenge of deploying these technologies was immense. (The regulatory hurdles were formidable, too....) The article also credits the visionary management of Mervin Kelly — who fortunately also "had access to funding in a decade when most executives and universities didn't" to hire the brightest people. (By the early 1980s Bell Labs employed about 25,000 researchers, technicians and support staff, with an annual budget of $2 billion — roughly $7 billion in today's dollars.) "The Labs' involvement in World War II suggested to Kelly that an exciting postwar era of electronics was approaching, but that the technical problems would be so complex that they required a mix of expertise — not just physicists, but material scientists, chemists, electrical engineers, circuitry experts and the like." At Bell Labs, Kelly would sometimes handpick teams and create such a mix, as was the case for the transistor invention in the late 1940s. He came to see innovation arising not from like-minded or similarly trained people conversing with each other, but from a friction of ideas and approaches. It meant hiring researchers who had different personalities and favored a range of experimental angles. It also meant personally designing a campus in Murray Hill where departments were spread apart, so that scientists and engineers would be forced to walk, mingle and engage in serendipitous conversations and debate ideas. Meanwhile, under Kelly, the Labs focused on hiring people who were deeply curious, not just smart. Kelly saw it as his professional duty to do far more than what was expected, with his laboratory and vast resources, to create new technologies... The breakup of AT&T's monopoly, which led to a steady shrinking of Bell Labs' staff, budget and remit, shows us that no matter how forward looking your employees and managers may be, they will not necessarily see the future coming. It likewise suggests that technological progress is too unpredictable for one organization, no matter how powerful or smart, to control. Famously, Bell Labs managers didn't see value in the Arpanet, which eventually led to today's internet. And yet, for at least five decades, Bell Labs created a blueprint for the global development of communications and electronics. In understanding why it did so, I tend to think its ultimate secret may be hiding in plain sight. The secret has to do with Bell Labs' structure — not only being connected to a fabulously profitable monopoly, but being connected to a company that could move theoretical and applied research into a huge manufacturing division that made telecom equipment (at Western Electric) and ultimately into a dynamic operating system (the AT&T network)... Scientists and engineers at the Labs understood their ideas would be implemented, if they passed muster, into the huge system its parent company was running. Bell Labs racked up about 30,000 patents, according to the article, and celebrated its 100th anniversary last April. It is now part of Finland-based Nokia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A decade ago, I knew nothing about organizing. But ordinary people are essential to fighting the rise of authoritarianism

In January of 2017, I sent a tentative email to a few dozen friends and acquaintances who I suspected were also freaked out by the election of Donald Trump, asking if they wanted to join a local chapter of an effort called Indivisible, intended to serve as a grassroots liberal counterweight to the new administration. It was frankly not possible, at that point, to know less about activism than I did.

In the more than nine years since, our group has sent an email every weekday – approximately 2,300 in total – with a single concrete daily ask for our members: call your elected representatives. Make a donation. Show up for a rally. During that span, we have knocked on tens of thousands of doors, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, sponsored refugee families, and mobilized our friends, neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances to keep fighting for democracy.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of How to Assemble an Activist

South Carolina senator has reconciled with the man he once called a ‘jackass’ and a ‘bigot’, and is pushing him to expand the war

To sceptics, Donald Trump’s war in Iran is a hubristic blunder that could spiral further out of control and bring catastrophe to the world. To Lindsey Graham, it is a dream come true.

The Republican senator from South Carolina spent decades spoiling for a fight with the regime in Tehran. He claimed that its overthrow would give the US president his own “Berlin Wall moment”. Now he is urging further escalation by invoking the bloody battle of Iwo Jima from the second world war.

The ‘Yes in God’s Back Yard’ movement sees churches across the country develop their underutilized land into affordable housing

A parcel of land behind Little Rock AME Zion church in Charlotte, North Carolina, remained mostly empty for nearly a decade before the congregation approached the city with a proposal.

The land sat unused while housing prices climbed and locals were being pushed out of their neighborhoods. So, the church proposed in 2018, why not develop housing there?

After the anguish of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s almost unthinkable the US would again send troops to the Middle East – but its president is desperate and narcissistic

Concern is justifiably growing that a cornered Donald Trump will send US ground troops into combat on Iranian soil to avoid being personally and politically humiliated in a war he started, mismanaged and cannot end. Yet such a self-serving escalation, even if ostensibly limited in duration and scope, could itself prove catastrophic for him and the American people. Think what happened in previous US military interventions. In sum, he’s caught in a modern-day catch-22. Pick your own metaphor for dumb. Trump’s stumped, hoist by his own petard, stuck between a rock and a hard place, and up the creek without a paddle. The creek in question is, of course, the strait of Hormuz.

Firmly ensconced in his weird parallel universe, Trump insists the war is all but won, Iran is suing for peace and talks are making good progress. In the real world, Iran is still fighting on all fronts, Israel is still bombing, the strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, and the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has joined the war, attacking Israel and potentially blocking Red Sea trade routes. The US and Iran have each issued maximalist demands, but there is no sign of actual negotiations. They are even further apart than they were before Trump, egged on by Benjamin Netanyahu, abandoned diplomacy last month. Sometime soon, Trump will be forced to confront the huge gap between what he wants and what’s on offer. At that point he could turn to the troop buildup in the Gulf and order ground attacks.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Forthcoming rules mean debilitating conditions may not meet strict ‘severe and lifelong’ criteria, say charities

Hundreds of thousands of severely ill and disabled people making new claims will have their benefits cut if the government assesses that their condition might improve, charities have said.

In April, the health element of universal credit – an extra payment for people assessed as too unwell to work or prepare for work – will be halved to £50 a week and frozen for new claimants unless their condition is found to be terminal or severe and lifelong with no prospect of improvement.

In his strongest intervention yet, PM says some features ‘shouldn’t be permitted’, while education secretary says things ‘are going to change’

Keir Starmer has backed banning addictive social media features in his strongest intervention yet on curbs that could be placed on tech companies, saying the features “shouldn’t be permitted”.

The prime minister said the government was “going to have to act” on the algorithms that hook young people and children to social media, such as scrolling or “streaks” that encourage daily usage of apps.

Sara Ziff, founder of Model Alliance, said business leaders need to be hauled before House oversight committee

A top modeling industry activist has called for business leaders to be hauled before lawmakers in Washington to investigate what role modeling agencies may have played in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal.

Sara Ziff is founder of the Model Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group calling for fair treatment, labor rights and safe working conditions for fashion industry workers.

Here's everything you should know about the biggest iPhone update since iOS 26 dropped six months ago.

Five months after a ceasefire was announced in Gaza, airstrikes are still killing civilians and the humanitarian situation remains dire

There is little left that connects Palestinians in Gaza with their prewar existence. The contours of life have become darker and far more brutal, as if the population has been stripped of its past.

“Drones never stop buzzing overhead, gunfire and shelling continue almost daily and naval boats fire towards fishermen,” said 56-year-old Ahmed Baroud, a father of five displaced in Deir al-Balah.

US release of horror novel Shy Girl cancelled and UK book discontinued after suspected AI use, as publishers feel ‘cold shiver’

Recently, the literary agent Kate Nash started noticing that the submission letters she was receiving from authors were becoming more thorough – albeit also more formulaic.

“I took it as a rise in diligence,” she said. “I thought it was a good thing.”

The kid and parent approved gaming console is going up $50. Here's why, and why it's still worth buying.

Cecillia Wang was born in Oregon after her parents left Taiwan. That path has animated her work over two decades at the ACLU and will inform her case at the Supreme Court.

The defense secretary is upending decades-old norms, current and former leaders say, with some cautioning that his proselytizing violates the Constitution and undermines troop cohesion.

Ban on junk food adverts has cut advertising spend and prompted a debate over the policy’s impact

The UK will have its first Easter without the traditional barrage of TV ads for chocolate eggs and hot cross buns as the ban on junk food advertising makes the sweetest tradition of the year a sugar-free viewing experience.

New regulations, which came into force at the beginning of the year, prohibit products high in fat, sugar and salt from appearing in TV ads before 9pm, as part of efforts to tackle rising childhood obesity.

Just six days ago — and 30 minutes after a Disney-OpenAI meeting about a project with Sora — Disney's team was "blindsided" with the news Sora was being discontinued, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, describing OpenAI's move as "a big rug-pull." Even some Sora employees were surprised by the cancellation. It was just 14 weeks ago Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI's AI-powered video generation tool — plus a three-year licensing deal. But that deal "never closed," Reuters adds, citing two other people familiar with the matter, "and no money changed hands." (Although the two sides are still "discussing if there is another way they can partner or invest with one another, one of the people familiar with the matter said.") But Variety wonders if the end of the Sora deal is "a blessing in disguise" for Disney: Before Disney's officially sanctioned AI-generated versions of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, Baby Yoda, Deadpool and more debuted in OpenAI's Sora, the AI company abruptly pulled the plug on the video app... [M]any aficionados of Disney's franchises were not, in fact, excited about what Sora's video generator might do to the likes of the Avengers superheroes or the characters from Frozen or Moana. And despite [departed Disney CEO Bob] Iger's bullishness on the Sora deal, other Disney execs were said to be concerned that going into business with OpenAI would expose the Magic Kingdom's crown jewels to the risk of being turned into so much AI slop, according to industry sources. Hollywood unions — for which AI adoption has been a hot-button issue — weren't thrilled about the Disney-Sora deal either. "Disney's announcement with OpenAI appears to sanction its theft of our work and cedes the value of what we create to a tech company that has built its business off our backs," the Writers Guild of America said in December... [S]ources say, Disney was encountering roadblocks in getting the OK from voice actors for the Sora pact... At least publicly, Disney says it is still looking at ways it can tap into the AI ecosystem. The company, in a statement Tuesday, said, "we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." But at this point, Disney may decide that "meeting fans where they are" means keeping its beloved and world-famous characters away from the AI machinery. Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Disney Says It Will Find Ways to Peddle Slop Elsewhere After Pulling Out of OpenAI Deal." But Deadline sees the deal's collapses as a lost opportunity: The OpenAI partnership was a template on which to build, potentially allowing for other deals that end the exploitation of human creativity by unscrupulous AI models. It was also the kind of partnership that was palatable for the Human Artistry Campaign and Creators Coalition on AI, lobby groups that have been critical of tech business models and command support from A-listers including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Dr. Moiya McTier, an advisor to the Human Artistry Campaign, puts it this way: Part of the problem is getting "artsy people and the techie people to talk." OpenAI sinking Sora will not make these discussions easier. It's a move that starkly exposes Hollywood's vulnerability to the capriciousness of big tech.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After their kidnapping case drew national attention because they were accused of making it up, Denise Huskins Quinn and Aaron Quinn worked with law enforcement to help uncover additional crimes committed by their attacker – helping to bring justice to other victims and reclaiming their own story.

Islamabad is attempting high-wire diplomacy between US and Iran, but Israel could spoil any chance of success

Intensifying Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Iran and an expanding US military force in the Gulf are casting a dark shadow over Pakistan’s hopes of hosting peace talks between Iran and the US.

Pakistan is attempting high-wire diplomacy, using its relative neutrality as a country with good relations with Iran and the US, to provide a venue for negotiations. It is not a player in the Middle East and does not host any American military bases, so it does not bring the baggage of other potential regional mediators.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 29.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 552 for Sunday, March 29.

Leonid Radvinsky’s widow has been left with a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to supporting cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

Minister’s decision to ditch town’s colonial-era identity and honour anti-apartheid activist divides residents

A South African town is divided over changing its name from the colonial-era Graaff-Reinet to Robert Sobukwe, after the anti-apartheid activist, in a debate that has inflamed racial tensions.

Petitions have been signed, rival marches held and a formal letter of complaint sent to the sports, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie, who approved the name change on 6 February.

• Michigan rally past Louisville to reach Elite Eight

• Texas, South Carolina cruise as top seeds hold firm

• TCU duo Suarez, Miles power into regional final

Olivia Olson scored 19 points, fellow sophomore Syla Swords added 16 and No 2 Michigan overcame a sluggish start for a 71-52 victory over Louisville in the Sweet 16 on Saturday.

The Wolverines had a 16-0 run in the second quarter to erase an 11-point deficit, their biggest, then broke a tie in the third quarter by scoring 17 consecutive points and cruising to their second Elite Eight, both in the past five seasons.

"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly: Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue. But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around". Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era." Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Illinois bully Iowa to end 21-year Final Four wait

• Wagler scores 25 as Illini own paint and glass late

• Top seed Arizona into first Final Four since 2001

Illinois is heading to the Final Four for the first time in 21 years, and Andrej Stojakovic made clear the Fighting Illini have much bigger goals.

“I don’t want anybody to think this is it,” he said. “We didn’t get to the Final Four just to get there. We’re coming to win two more games.”

Two sailboats that went missing carrying humanitarian aid from southern Mexico to Cuba landed in Havana on Saturday afternoon.

People joined massive rallies across 50 states to protest Trump’s decision to enter war in Iran, immigration policies and rising living costs. Key US politics stories from Saturday 28 March at a glance

Large anti-authoritarian No Kings rallies took place across 50 states and 16 countries on Saturday, in the third such protest against the Trump administration.

People joined massive rallies in protest against Donald Trump’s decision to enter into war with Iran, as well as against rising living costs and federal immigration enforcement.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: ClickFix attacks are ramping up. These attacks have users copy and paste a string to something that can execute a command line — like the Windows Run dialog, or a shell prompt. But MacRumors reports that macOS 26.4 Tahoe (updated earlier this week) introduces a new feature to its Terminal app where it will detect ClickFix attempts and stop them by prompting the user if they really wanted to run those commands. According to MacRumors, the warning readers "Possible malware, Paste blocked." "Your Mac has not been harmed. Scammers often encourage pasting text into Terminal to try and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy...." There is also a "Paste Anyway" option if users still wish to proceed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jérémy Doku tore the US to shreds on Saturday, with a defense counting on help that never came

Two years can feel like an eternity – just not in international football.

The USMNT hit restart on their 2026 World Cup cycle at its midpoint, changing coach after exiting the 2024 Copa América at the group stage. Mauricio Pochettino admitted as he arrived that he had scant familiarity with his inherited player pool, then embarked on an experimental year-plus of trying fresh faces and combinations in search of a winning formula.

The price of ammonia and urea, two fertilizer ingredients seeing disruptions, are up around 20% and 50%, respectively, since the start of the Iran war.

Viewers at home and in the stands had some trouble telling the US and Belgium apart – some players had the same issue

Saturday’s friendly between the US men’s national team and Belgium at Mercedes-Benz Stadium was played indoors, in a climate-controlled environment, on natural grass, even.

Inside the cavernous, 70,000-seat venue, the air was a perfect 72F (22C), as it always is. The stadium’s massive, 8,400-ton HVAC system is designed to cut Atlanta’s stifling summer humidity. On Saturday, they probably could’ve turned the thermostat off entirely: outside, it was a picture-perfect, comfortable spring day.

If President Trump approves the plans, such an effort would mark a new phase of the war that could be significantly more dangerous to U.S. troops than the first four weeks.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,022 for Sunday, March 29.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 756 for Saturday, March 29.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 29, No. 1,744.

Organizers estimated that at least 8 million people took part in more than 3,300 "No Kings" events worldwide.

Escalation represents dangerous spread of war and brings threat of even more damage to the global economy

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• Parents of Iran school bombing victims describe their worst day

The US-Israeli war with Iran has expanded with the entry of Houthi forces in Yemen, representing a dangerous spread of the conflict and bringing with it the threat of more damage to the global economy.

Pakistan has said it would host a meeting of Middle Eastern powers on Monday in an effort to find a regional approach to ending the conflict. But the talks, which bring together the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, did not appear to include any of the warring parties, casting further doubt on persistent US claims of diplomatic progress.

This liveblog is now closed. Read the full story here.

• No Kings protests to see millions across US push back on Trump administration

• What to know about the third No Kings protests happening in March

In the year since Donald Trump retook office, the number of protests in the US outpaced those at the same point in his first administration, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, an open-source project collaboration between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, reported Lex McMenamin and Andrew Witherspoon.

There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. According to the data, an overwhelming majority of US counties – including 42% that voted for Trump – have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.

Vice-president received about 53% of votes at Conservative Political Action Conference held in Texas this year

One of the biggest conservative gatherings in the US ran a poll showing vice-president JD Vance is the top choice this year to be the next Republican presidential candidate.

The poll from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), released on Saturday, was taken during this year’s gathering. About 53% of the more than 1,600 attendees who voted in the poll chose Vance, Reuters reports. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, came in second with 35%.

Demonstrators aired grievances about the Trump administration trampling democracy, as the president’s approval ratings hit new lows.

The US scored first but then surrendered five in a stunning 5-2 loss at home to Belgium. Stay tuned here for live reaction

Yeah, we have a bit of a kit clash situation happening here, with both teams wearing their lighter shade. One of those situations where you just have to watch the shorts.

1min – the US kicks off, and to be honest, the most notable thing so far is how hard it is to tell the kits apart in person.

It's FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But "a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight" after he'd added the optional birthDate field for systemd's user database: Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic capitulation to government overreach. A crack in the philosophical foundation of freedom that Linux is built on. What followed went far beyond civil disagreement. Dylan revealed that he faced harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail. He was forced to disable issues and pull request tabs across his GitHub repositories... Q: Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in. A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes — at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest. If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I'm talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems. Q. Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have "compliant Linux" and "Freedom-first Linux"? A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing. We're already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I'd rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk. I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to [Linux system installer] Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here. They think the installer should have a date picker with a flag to disable it, and "We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won't have to, and no forking is required to patch it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conservative leader expected to call for government to lift suspension on licences in drive to reduce energy prices

Kemi Badenoch is “peddling a dangerous fantasy” about North Sea energy in her attempt to reverse a ban on new oil and gas licences, a leading campaign group has said.

The Conservative leader is expected to call on the government to lift its suspension of the licences as part of a drive to reduce energy prices, as the party launches a new campaign aimed at boosting the fossil fuel sector.

Tolkan, known for portraying authoritarian figures, died ‘peacefully’ in Lake Placid, New York, his agent said

James Tolkan, known for his roles as an authoritarian figure in the Back to the Future and Top Gun films, has died. He was 94.

Tolkan died Thursday in Lake Placid, New York, where he lived, his booking agent, John Alcantar, said Saturday. A brief obituary published on the Back to the Future website said Tolkan died “peacefully”, but no cause of death was given.

• Belgium score four in second half, Ludebakio nets double

• USA face Portugal on Tuesday night in Atlanta

The US men’s national team entered its matchup with Belgium at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Saturday riding a wave of momentum, needing a solid performance to continue to build excitement ahead of this Summer’s World Cup, played in part on home soil.

Instead, they struggled mightily against a talented Belgium side and left with more questions than answers. The 5-2 defeat, featuring five straight goals for the Belgians after a US opener, was an embarrassment and easily among the USMNT’s worst losses of head coach Mauricio Pochettino’s tenure. At times, it felt the margin of victory could’ve been significantly wider.

"IBM says its quantum computer can now simulate real magnetic materials and match actual lab experiment results," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "which is something people have been waiting years to see." Instead of just theoretical output, the system reproduced neutron scattering data from a known material, meaning it lines up with real world physics. It still relies on a mix of quantum and classical computing and this is a narrow use case for now, but it is one of the first times quantum hardware has produced results that scientists can directly validate against experiments, which makes it a lot more interesting than the usual hype. Classical computers "are not great at modeling quantum systems," according to this article at Nerds.xyz. "The math gets messy fast, and scientists end up relying on approximations... Quantum computers are supposed to solve that problem..." If this direction continues, it could start to matter in areas like superconductors, battery tech, and even drug development. Those are the kinds of problems where better simulations can actually lead to better outcomes, not just nicer charts in a research paper. "I am extremely excited about what this means for science," said study co-author Allen Scheie from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In an announcement from IBM, Scheie calls this "the most impressive match I've seen between experimental data and qubit simulation, and it definitely raises the bar for what can be expected from quantum computers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Teenager alleged she faced racism from teacher who told her to ‘go back to her country’ for refusing to stand for pledge of allegiance

A Palestinian middle school student in Michigan who was publicly admonished for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance as part of a personal protest against the war on Gaza has settled with her school district following a lawsuit around her first amendment free speech rights.

The teenager, identified as DK in court documents, said she faced racism from a teacher at the West Middle school in Canton, Michigan, after she did not participate in the pledge. The teacher reportedly told DK to “go back to her country”, Fox 2 Detroit reported.

Treasury department said Financial Times article about Scott Bessent’s views on Fed oversight was ‘manufactured’

The US treasury department demanded on Friday that the Financial Times (FT) retract a report on treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s views on the Federal Reserve, accusing the newspaper of publishing “false claims” in a formal complaint escalated to the outlet’s parent company, Nikkei Inc.

The email from treasury officials, addressed to senior editors at the FT and Nikkei, disputed multiple claims in the story and criticized the headline as misrepresenting the underlying reporting.

A train derailment involving over 40 railcars in Roseau County, Minnesota, on Saturday morning has prompted evacuations, according to the sheriff's office.

Thieves made a break for 413,793 units of the company’s new F1 line bars which could cause shortage before Easter

A large shipment of KitKat bars was stolen while in transit to distributors, a major candy crime right before the Easter holiday that could cause shortages for customers.

The truck carrying 413,793 units of a “new chocolate range”, about 12 tons of chocolate bars, was pilfered while driving through Europe on 26 March, Agence France-Presse reported.

Memory and storage shortages and price hikes have "steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech," reports Ars Technica. "Today's bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike." The drive-less Digital Edition will increase from $500 to $600; the base PS5 with an optical drive will increase from $550 to $650; and the PS5 Pro is going up from $750 to a whopping $900. At the beginning of 2025, these consoles cost $450, $500, and $700, respectively... RAM and flash memory chips are in short supply primarily because of demand from AI data centers — memory manufacturers have shifted more production toward making the kind of memory found in AI accelerators like Nvidia's H200, leaving less for the consumer market. And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, barring a major shift in demand from the AI industry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Central Command said Saturday that more than 11,000 targets have been struck since Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28.

The Europeans also argue that the war in Ukraine is intertwined with the war in Iran due to the cooperation between Russia and Iran.

Dr. Lee rose to fame after his testimony in Simpson's 1995 trial​, in which he questioned the handling of blood evidence.

The missile attack by the Houthis in Yemen marks an escalation of the war in the Middle East and may pose further risks to shipping in the region.

Bill Bien, a lymphoma survivor who said NIH-funded breakthroughs saved his life, spoke to demonstrators on Saturday in Bethesda, Maryland.

In a new 4,000-word article, CNN tells the story of a retired appellate paralegal and grandmother in her early 70s who was treated for depression with psilocybin. CNN notes there's now retreats featuring psilocybin in a few countries — and while psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, "In Oregon, 5,935 clients received psilocybin services through Oregon's state-regulated program in 2025." High doses of psilocybin are effective in treating depression, a growing body of research suggests, with promise for other conditions, like PTSD and addiction, said Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu, associate director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University... Some researchers suggest it disrupts entrenched traffic patterns in the brain or grows new neuron connections to change thinking. Others say the results from psilocybin could have to do with its anti-inflammatory effect, Garcia-Romeu said... Colorado became the second state to make psilocybin legal with a 2023 law and issued its first healing center" last year. A law adopted in New Mexico last year established that state's Medical Psilocybin Program, now in development... Psilocybin seems to be "knocking on the door of FDA approval," said Dr. Lynn Marie Morski, president of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, which educates health care providers on the therapeutic use of psychedelics so they can answer patients' questions through the lenses of clinical evidence and harm reduction. Psilocybin therapy first received a "breakthrough therapy" designation for treatment-resistant depression from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2018, and now psilocybin drug products are on track to be submitted to the FDA for possible approval in the not-too-distant future. While psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, more states are creating their own paths for legal use under state laws.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Organisers claim half a million people are marching through central London, protesting against the rise of the far right

Some protesters have spoken to PA earmarking opposition to Reform UK, support for Palestine and anti-racism as drivers for their attendance.

Paige Horsford, 34, a media and English teacher from New Romney, Kent, said she joined the Together march because she has witnessed racist incidents at her school.

Global protests against Donald Trump took place on Saturday as millions of people vented fury over what they see as his authoritarian bent and cruel, law-trampling governance. It is the third time in less than a year that Americans will take to the streets as part of a grassroots movement called No Kings, the most vocal and visual conduit for opposition to Trump since he began his second term in January 2025

Try the 2019 film Ready or Not, starring Samara Weaving.

Four people arrested as police appeal for help in identifying woman found unconscious on street

Police in Leeds have launched a murder investigation after a young woman died after being found unconscious on the street.

Officers were called at 5.55am on Saturday to Kennerleigh Avenue in Austhorpe where they found the woman with serious injuries. She was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has "really jumped" for Linux. "There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools..." "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now...." For now, AI is showing up more as a reviewer and assistant than as a full author of Linux kernel code, but that line is starting to blur. Kroah-Hartman has already done his own experiments with AI-generated patches. "I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better...." [H]e said that for "simple little error conditions, properly detecting error conditions," AI could already generate dozens of usable patches today. The sudden increase in AI-generated reports and AI-assisted work has also spurred a parallel push to build AI into the kernel's own review infrastructure. A key piece of that is Sashiko, a tool originally developed at Google and now donated to the Linux Foundation. Kroah-Hartman said some patches are being generated with AI now. "You have a little co-develop tag for that now. We're seeing some things for some new features, but we're seeing AI mostly being used in the review."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN team detained while reporting on aftermath of attack by settlers in West Bank, Foreign Press Association says

• Middle East crisis – live updates

An international media association has condemned what it described as a “violent assault” by Israeli soldiers who detained a CNN crew in the occupied West Bank this week.

A CNN team was reporting on the aftermath of an assault by Israeli settlers and the establishment of an illegal outpost near the Palestinian village of Tayasir on Thursday when it was detained by Israeli soldiers, the Foreign Press Association said on Saturday.

Authorities must also provide detainees access to free and private legal phone calls and allow lawyers to visit unannounced

A federal judge ruled on Friday that officials at Florida’s state-run immigration jail, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, must give attorneys better access to their detained clients.

The order by federal judge Sheri Polster Chappell, from the middle district of Florida, said facility officials must provide access to confidential, private, free and unmonitored outgoing legal telephone calls from people detained in the facility. Polster Chappell also ruled that attorneys are allowed to make unannounced visits to see their clients, bypassing the facility’s pre-scheduling requirement.

A global team of air force rescuers is on standby, ready to come to the aid of the Artemis II crew after their space launch.

After decades of studying, this week NASA announced "a major step forward in bringing nuclear power and propulsion from the lab to space." NASA will launch the Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft, to Mars before the end of 2028, demonstrating advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space. Nuclear electric propulsion provides an extraordinary capability for efficient mass transport in deep space and enables high power missions beyond Jupiter where solar arrays are not effective. Steven Sinacore, NASA's program executive for Fission Surface Power who will also oversee the SR-1 Freedom mission, emphasized to CNN that "On the ground the reactor is off. There's no radiation coming from it. It doesn't actually turn on until you're up in space, and that's where the radiation comes from." NASA says they aim to develop the capabilities required "for sustained exploration beyond the Moon and eventual journeys to Mars and the outer solar system." And Space Reactor-1 Freedom will carry a fleet of tiny helicopters (much like Ingenuity) to explore Mars, reports Space.com: Whereas Ingenuity was a technology demonstrator, however, the Skyfall fleet will have concrete tasks. Chief among them is scout: If all goes to plan, the little choppers will help NASA assess the potential of their target area (wherever that happens to be) to support human exploration. The Skyfall helicopters will carry cameras and ground-penetrating radar to scout a future landing site, to understand the slopes and hazards for human-scale landers," Steve Sinacore, the program executive for NASA's Space Reactors Office, said during the briefing. "They will also map and characterize the subsurface water ice to find out where the water ice deposits are, along with the size, depth and other important characteristics," he added... And that might not be the end of the line for SR-1 Freedom; NASA may decide to keep flying the spacecraft out into the solar system after it deploys the Skyfall choppers, according to Sinacore. The mission architecture, like much of NASA's exploration portfolio, is not yet finalized.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 100 charities, campaign groups and trade unions marched in a show of unity against far right politics

• Together Alliance march – live updates

Tens of thousands of people have gathered in London to march against the far right in the biggest multicultural demonstration in UK history.

Organisers claimed half a million people had travelled to the capital for the Together Alliance march. Police estimated the turnout was closer to 50,000, although they admitted it was difficult to judge the number due to the widespread nature of the crowd.

An election earlier this month was the country's first since youth-led protests against corruption and poor governance.

Slavko Aleksić (Војвода Славко Алексић), a Bosnian Serb Chetnik commander (vojvoda) who commanded the New Sarajevo Chetnik Detachment of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, died December 18, 2025, at the age of 69. Lima Charlie’s John Sjoholm pays tribute. “The Duke” was a fun guy. Among the first things Aleksić explained to me, in some detail, was that he was proud of four things: that he was a Serbian nationalist, a Chetnik, a family man, and a warrior. Shortly thereafter, he told me how proud he was of the number of Bosnian Muslims he had killed

The post Rest In Peace Vojvoda (Duke) Slavko (Ilije) Aleksić appeared first on Lima Charlie World.

Exclusive: World Service director Fiona Crack says platform pursues stories ignored by the Gulf’s state-owned media

A senior BBC executive has defended BBC Arabic as a lone voice in the region covering the “Israeli perspective”, as she warned its critics that it pursued stories ignored by the Gulf’s state-owned media.

The corporation’s Arabic service has come under sustained criticism in recent years, for its selection of coverage and for featuring some guests that had expressed antisemitic views on social media. There have even been calls for the service to be closed down.

Olivia Bailey says she wants Sure Start-style hubs that will be rolled out in England on Monday to be inclusive for all

Reform UK’s “pro-family” policies are a sham and exclude non-traditional families, the government’s early years minister has said before the rollout of hundreds of new Sure Start-style family centres across England on Monday.

Olivia Bailey said she wanted the hubs to be inclusive for all families and transform communities, after what she called the “criminal” dismantling of Sure Start under the last Conservative government.

Survivors tell coastguard smugglers ordered victims to be thrown overboard after six days adrift in boat from Libya

Two Sudanese men, believed by Greek authorities to have been behind a smuggling operation in which 22 people were “systematically” thrown overboard after succumbing to days without food or water at sea, have been ordered to appear before a local court on Crete.

Accused of illegally trafficking scores of would-be migrants into the south-eastern European country from Libya, the duo were given 48 hours to prepare to testify before an investigating magistrate on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Walking into his kitchen, Tim Yoder recoiled at a message on his refrigerator door: "Shop Samsung water filters." Yoder, a supply-chain manager in Chicago, owns a Samsung Electronics Family Hub fridge. He paid $1,400 for an appliance that came with a 32-inch screen on the door that allows him to control other Samsung gadgets, pull up recipes or stream music. But since last fall, it's been intermittently serving up ads, part of a pilot program being tested on some of Samsung's smart fridges sold in the U.S. The response? Not warm. "I guess this is another place for somebody to shove an ad in your face," said the 47-year-old Yoder, recalling the first time he noticed one... The ads are only on certain Family Hub fridges that have screens and internet connectivity. They run as a rectangular banner at the bottom — part of a widget that also shows news, the weather and a calendar. Samsung declined to say how long the pilot might last or whether it would end. The firm recently unveiled a "Screens Everywhere" initiative that also includes washers, dryers and ovens.... Samsung launched the banner-type fridge ads that come as part of the widget via an October software update. In a footnote of a news release at the time, Samsung pledged to "serve contextual or non-personal ads" and respect data privacy. The banner ads can be turned off in settings. Samsung said the purpose of the pilot is to explore whether ads relevant to home chores can be useful to owners, and that overall pushback has been negligible. The "turn-off" rate for the pilot ad program remains in the bottom single-digit range, it said... While owners can turn off the banner ads, doing so eliminates the widget altogether, a bummer for Brian Bosworth, a media-industry engineer who liked the feature. Bosworth thinks it's wrong to take away the new feature as a condition. Wanting to keep the widget but not the ads, the 49-year-old in Edgewater, Md., made sure his home router's ad-blocking software extended to his fridge. He hasn't seen another since. One 27-year-old plans to return his refrigerator after the entire display "lit up with a full-screen ad for Apple TV's sci-fi show Pluribus," according to the article. The all-caps ad beckoned him "with an oft-used refrain directed at protagonist Carol Sturka: 'We're Sorry We Upset You, Carol.'" Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Six weeks after Ilia Malinin missed the Olympic podium, the "quad god" reeled off huge jumps and a backflip to retain his world figure skating championship title.

Bill passes by 213 to 203 votes in move prolonging weeks-long budget standoff that has disrupted travel

US House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and instead passed their own funding measure late on Friday, extending a weeks-long budget standoff that has disrupted air travel.

The stopgap bill, which proposes funding the DHS in full for eight weeks, passed by 213 to 203 votes after Republicans in the lower chamber refused to take up a Senate-passed deal that excluded money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the border patrol.

The incident occurred in the middle of the night, while the office was closed. No employees were injured, according to the bank.

Emily Gregory’s victory in district that includes Mar-a-Lago has revitalized the party before the crucial November vote

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

Can the Democratic party once again become a force to be reckoned with in Florida? That seemingly implausible question surfaced last Tuesday in the wake of upset victories scored by the party’s candidates in two state legislative races, one of whom defeated a Republican nominee’s bid to represent Donald Trump himself.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Democrats have flipped more than two dozen legislative districts held by Republican lawmakers nationwide. Amid mounting discontent with the high cost of living, the violent tactics used to enforce the administration’s mass deportation agenda and bewilderment over the erratic imposition of tariffs, Democratic candidates have captured a series of traditionally Republican seats in states spanning deep-red Mississippi to purple Virginia.

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: ... but the CERN Project "Antimatter in motion" just did it. For the first time in history researchers at CERN have transported 92 antiprotons on a truck in a specially designed magnetic enclosure. The test-drive went so well that the researchers spontaneously decided to go another round... The purpose of the experiment was to test the feasibility of transporting antimatter to other facilities in Europe to conduct further antimatter research. German news Tagesschau has a nice report. CNN reports that the antiproton enclosure was nearly six feet tall and weighed about 1,760 pounds. And Smithsonian magazine explains that it trapped the antiprotons in a vacuum chamber that had to be cooled to around -450 degrees Fahrenheit: Experts used a crane to carefully move the box of precious cargo from a lab onto a truck, which took about three hours, per the Associated Press' Jamey Keaten. Then, they drove the vehicle for roughly 30 minutes around CERN's campus, and subsequently returned the antiprotons to the lab. They worked with so little antimatter that even if it did touch ordinary matter and annihilate, it would release a small amount of energy detectable only by a special instrument, reports the AP.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• US star wins third straight world title after Olympic shock

• Japanese rivals Kagiyama and Sato round out podium

Ilia Malinin claimed a third straight world figure skating championship on Saturday afternoon, completing a swift redemption a month after his shock Olympic collapse with a commanding free skate.

The 21-year-old American entered the final at Prague’s O2 Arena with a commanding lead after Thursday’s short program, where his personal-best 111.29 had put him more than nine points clear of the field. This time, there would be no unraveling.

Incident in the city’s 8th arrondissement reportedly involved a homemade explosive device

French police prevented an apparent bomb attack outside a US bank in Paris on Saturday when they arrested a man about to set off a homemade explosive device, officials and sources close to the case said.

The incident occurred at about 3.30am (0230 GMT) in front of a Bank of America building in the city’s 8th arrondissement, a couple of streets away from the Champs-Élysées.

Matthew Uthoff and his wife, Amber Dena Snow, allegedly gave oxycodone-laced pasta dish to unknowing victim

Two people in Iowa were accused of giving a pregnant woman a lasagna laced with narcotics with the intention of causing a miscarriage, according to law enforcement.

Matthew Uthoff, 35, and his wife, 36-year-old Amber Dena Snow, are accused of delivering a lasagna containing oxycodone to the pregnant individual. The couple faces several charges including delivery of a controlled substance and purposefully terminating a human pregnancy without the knowledge and voluntary consent of the pregnant individual.

The school district said 25 students and five adults were on the bus headed out for a school field trip.

Raw Farm was also linked to 2024 salmonella outbreak that sickened 165 people and deaths of two cats from bird flu

A California raw milk dairy that was previously linked to a fatal outbreak of bird flu in cats has now been linked to an E coli outbreak involving cheddar cheese, affecting nine people in three states.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in an alert that more than half of the people sickened so far are children under age five. Three people have been hospitalized after contracting a dangerous strain of E coli – O157:H7 – with one developing hemolytic uremic syndrome, a condition that can lead to kidney failure.

It's tough to ignore the buzz of your phone when a new message arrives.

A dog missing for two months was found at an animal shelter — and its owner received an email from an artificial intelligence service that identified it, according to the Washington Post. "As controversial as AI is right now, this is one of those areas where it's a real win," according to the chief executive at the nonprofit animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society. And while it shouldn't replace microchipping pets, AI does offer another tool to help desperate pet owners (and overcrowded animal shelters) — and might even be "game-changing"... People send photos of their lost pets to a database, and AI compares the pets' features — including facial structure, coat pattern and ear shape — to photos of stray pets that have been spotted elsewhere. Many of the stray pets have already been taken to shelters... Doorbell cameras have recently implemented facial recognition for dogs, and perhaps the largest AI database for pet reunification is Petco Love Lost, which says it has reunited more than 200,000 pets and owners since 2021... After owners upload photos of their lost pets, AI scans thousands of photos of lost animals from social media and from about 3,000 animal shelters and rescues that use the software, according to Petco Love, an animal welfare nonprofit that's affiliated with the pet store Petco. It notifies owners if two photos match. The article notes that one in three pets go missing during their lifetime, according to figures from the Animal Humane Society. "But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets" — including GPS collars — and now, apparently, AI-powered pet identification.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kristi Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin as DHS secretary and Gregory Bovino was demoted, signally a change in tone even as arrests have continued

Throughout last year, Donald Trump delivered on his signature campaign promise of mass deportation in draconian and theatrical style. Hardline figures such as Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Gregory Bovino, the border patrol commander, became the face of Trump’s crackdown, defending a strategy of large-scale raids that sent immigration agents flooding into US cities, terrorizing communities and clashing with protesters.

Then in January, immigration officers killed two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, in a matter of three weeks. The killings spurred a sweeping backlash that has led Democratic members of Congress to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for more than a month in an attempt to rein in ICE. Even Trump said “maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch”.

Murder investigation launched after man, 26, killed in central London on Friday night

The Metropolitan police have launched a murder investigation after a man was stabbed in central London on Friday night.

Officers were called to Abbey Orchard Street, Westminster, at 10.17pm after receiving reports that a man had been stabbed. The scene of the incident is near Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey.

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At this year's CPAC, many attendees toed a fine line between backing the war in Iran and worrying about how the conflict could expand.

The Colombian navy said it also seized thousands of gallons of smuggled fuel, preventing "the strengthening of illicit economies."

More use of two-way charging will earn money for owners and could avoid the need to expand North Sea oil drilling

The Iran war has sent petrol and diesel prices to their highest levels in years, sparked warnings of fuel rationing across Europe and triggered calls for Britain to drill more North Sea oil and gas. But analysis suggests the UK is looking for solutions in the wrong places – and that one of them is sitting on people’s driveways or parked in the street.

If more drivers switched electric vehicles, Britain would sharply reduce its petrol and diesel consumption, with every car charged from the grid rather than the pump extending the country’s fuel reserves – and experts say the potential impact goes far beyond that.

The defense secretary prayed for ‘overwhelming violence’ against enemies in Iran. He seems to delight in it

Is it woke to wash your hands? Pete Hegseth seems to think so. Back in 2019 when he was still just a Fox News host rather than the guy in charge of “the Department of War”, Hegseth said on-air that he hadn’t washed his hands for 10 years because “germs are not a real thing.” He added: “I can’t see them; therefore, they’re not real.”

Hegseth later claimed he was joking. But even if he was, the defense secretary is never going to be able to wash the blood from his hands. The 45-year-old, one of the strongest backers of the war on Iran, has said he wants “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” to the be the hallmark of the US military, and he’s been making good on that promise. Under his watch, a defense department program aimed at reducing civilian harm has been dismantled, and experts who provide guidance on keeping military operations in line with international law have been fired. And, of course, a school full of little girls has been bombed.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Secretary of state Marco Rubio repeats administration’s belief that US can achieve its aims without a ground war

Amid tentative White House efforts at diplomacy to end the war in Iran, US troops have also been arriving in the region to deliver what Donald Trump has hoped could be a knockout blow if he can’t negotiate a ceasefire with Tehran.

Thousands of US marines aboard navy amphibious ships from the 31st and 11th expeditionary units have been deployed to the Middle East from Asia. Another 2,000-odd paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne are also being sent to the theatre – they are tasked with deploying worldwide within 18 hours of notification and execute parachute assaults, including against a “defended airfield” to prepare for further ground operations.

Plus, an update on Avengers Campus as it doubles in size.

The truck, transporting 413,793 KitKat bars, was stolen during transit in Europe, Nestle said.

The House passed a measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security for 60 days — but it's still unclear how the shutdown will end as the Senate, which approved its own funding plan, is on recess.

I've been a pro photographer for years. Here's how I take photos on film cameras.

I loved the Oppo Find X9 Pro in my full review, but I was still surprised at how well its camera performed against the Apple iPhone 17 Pro.

Prime minister is scrambling to clean up her government after youth vote powered a damaging referendum defeat

Filippo Michelini was having a drink at San Calisto, a popular bar in Rome’s Trastevere neighbourhood on Wednesday night. As he chatted to his friends, Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government was reeling from a failed referendum, and her beleaguered tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, had just resigned.

Michelini, a 29-year-old computer scientist who lives in Brussels, was spending a few days in the Italian capital after returning home last weekend to cast his ballot in the plebiscite on judicial changes.

Experts say paid participants are using automated tools to generate unreliable survey responses at scale

If you had been keeping tabs on the news about church attendance in Britain lately, you would be forgiven for thinking the country was in the midst of a Christian revival.

Stories of swelling congregations, filled with young people returning to the flock, spurred on by everything from social media to a rise in bible sales appeared to be confirmed by a 2024 report from the Bible Society.

AI-generated footage depicts group of men performing a corrido, singing phrases including ‘return to your roots’

An AI-generated video from the US embassy in Mexico encouraging migrants to “self-deport” has sparked disbelief and outrage online.

The video posted this week on official embassy social media accounts depicts a group of men wearing black caps and sporting tattoos performing a kind of traditional Mexican ballad known as a corrido.

Dr. Ricky Bloomfield explains how the ring is flagging serious illness, the hidden metric tied to heart aging, and where the tech goes next.

It's got wheels, lights and speakers. Oh, and it's a 4K projector. Behold the ultimate party machine.

David Lyon is one of the rising number of young adults to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

Leo became the first pope to visit the glitzy enclave since Pope Paul III went to Monaco in 1538.

Unable to find a straight answer, I reached out to Ninja and professional chefs to see if you can actually pop popcorn in an air fryer.

AI images of people – such as women in military contexts – are making money and serving as propaganda, researchers say

Online content creators are not just building fake images and videos of prominent public figures, they are also fabricating people and using them in military contexts, which can make them money and even serve as effective propaganda, according to artificial intelligence researchers.

Some of these online avatars are sexualized images of women wearing camouflage garb that have generated a significant audience and helped create an idealized image of political figures like Donald Trump, even if the viewer knows the content is not real, according to experts.

It’s unclear what happened in São Paulo. But our obsessive culture has created a fraught dance between stars and their fans

Last week, the former Chelsea footballer Jorginho made a post on social media claiming that, after his daughter walked past the singer Chappell Roan’s table at a restaurant and smiled at her, a security guard accosted the girl. The security guard apparently spoke “in an extremely aggressive manner”, causing her to be “extremely shaken and [cry] a lot”.

If the story is true, it doesn’t look good for Roan. This wasn’t creepy paparazzi or red carpet hecklers; it was a child. Roan has apologized, adding that the man involved in the incident in São Paulo was not her personal security, and that she didn’t see the girl.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist

Affectionately known as the Ragin’ Cajun, he took to calling himself the Agin’ Cajun before he retired at 85. Audiences loved him. Bulls, not so much.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's ChatGPT ads pilot in the United States has crossed the $100 million annualized revenue mark within six weeks of launch, a company spokesperson said on Thursday, pointing to robust early demand for the AI startup's nascent advertising business. [...] While roughly 85% of users are currently eligible to see ads, fewer than 20% are shown ads daily, with considerable room to grow ad monetization within the existing user pool, the spokesperson said. "We're seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback," OpenAI said. The company plans to expand the test globally in additional countries in the coming weeks, including in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. OpenAI has now expanded to over 600 advertisers, with nearly 80% of small- and medium-sized businesses signaling interest in ChatGPT ads, the spokesperson said. The ChatGPT maker is set to launch self-serve advertiser capabilities in April to broaden access and drive further growth. CEO Sam Altman announced plans to begin testing ads on ChatGPT back in January after previously rejecting the idea. "I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," Altman said in 2024. Further reading: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic brings Claude into the agentic, OpenClaw-like fold.

What I’m Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: The quiet machinery of harm.

• Social Media Verdict: It’s fair. And addresses the damage we chose not to see.

• Video Break: What else? March Madness!

• Promises Made, Promises Unke(m)pt: What our allies are learning to expect.

• The Spotted Secret: An outbreak Florida didn’t want you to know about.

• What I’m Watching: The Battle of Algiers

• Jukebox Playlist: Redemption Song

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” — Paraphrase of a quote by Hannah Arendt

It’s one of those quotes that lands differently every time you read it, and depending on the world in which you happen to be living. Arendt wasn’t talking about cartoon villains or people twirling mustaches in dark rooms. She was talking about the far more common kind of harm, carried out by people who simply don’t decide. Who comply and look away. Who follow the script handed to them, even when the script leads somewhere no one should go. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt coined another phrase we have the sad reality of repeating often: “the banality of evil.”

And if I’m honest, that quiet kind of evil, the kind that makes almost no waves and calls almost no attention to itself, is the kind that worries me the most.

We tend to imagine wrongdoing as something fueled by malice, but more often its only fuel is inertia. By people who don’t stop to ask, What am I participating in? Who is this hurting? What responsibility do I have here?

I’ve seen versions of this throughout my life. The pattern is always the same: a system starts to wobble, the warning signs appear, and the people in charge convince themselves that silence is safer than action. That staying the course is easier than steering it. That harm is something happening “out there,” not something they’re enabling every day that they choose not to act.

And the consequences rarely fall on the people who could help but don’t. They fall on those who trusted them. Who put them in power and positions of authority. Eventually, it’s the people with the least power—the ordinary folk—who won’t have the luxury of looking away. It hurts the very ones who can’t afford to wait for institutions to find their moral compass, because it’s their pocketbooks that go bare; it’s their children who go to fight in a questionable war; it’s their once-buzzing factories and places of business that go silent with a lack of work and resources; their gutted towns that blow away with the wind.

Arendt understood that most harm comes not from intention but from the absence of intention. From the shrug and the “it’s not my job.” From the desire to keep your head down so it won’t be chopped off.

But here’s the other side of that truth, the hopeful side. If indecision can cause harm, then clarity can prevent it. If silence enables damage, then speaking up interrupts it. If looking the other way allows systems to fail the very people they’re supposed to protect, then choosing to act becomes a form of resistance.

The road toward justice is slow. It’s unglamorous. It’s full of a variety of people who usually have only one thing in common: they’ve decided, in small ways and large ones, that they won’t be part of the machinery that hurts others.

We’re living in a moment when that choice matters more than ever. So the question Arendt leaves us with is simple, though rarely easy: Do we decide who we are, or do we let the world decide for us?

Read more

A US sports industry loan broker is being sued after allegedly not performing satisfactory due diligence in a deal that turned out to be a scam

A lender to professional athletes wired $4.375m to a borrower it thought was Green Bay Packers star Xavier McKinney, only to learn months later it had allegedly been scammed by someone impersonating the player. The news is contained in Aliya Sports Finance Fund’s (ASFF) lawsuit against a longtime US sports industry loan broker, Sure Sports, for allegedly not performing satisfactory due diligence when it introduced what turned out to be apparently a fake McKinney to the lender. According to court papers, the FBI is probing the transaction.

Aliya, whose parent company is an investor in Reading FC, filed the lawsuit a year ago in state court in Florida, where both Sure Sports and Aliya are headquartered. The case is scheduled for a three-week trial beginning on 13 July.

Stop twisting your arm to keep your hand out of the frame. Do this instead.

As the U.S.-Iran war nears the one-month mark, the fragile global oil market has emerged as a key weapon in Iran's arsenal — and some shipping and insurance experts don't expect the situation to return to normal until the conflict winds down.

The night before we were set to fly out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, I approached my partner with a confession: For the first time that I can remember, I was afraid of flying with a Latino last name.

It was a new sort of affront I had to steel myself against. Air travel is filled with moments — buying basic economy tickets, being herded through winding security lines like cattle, squishing your limbs into a compact seat — that smoosh you until you feel subhuman, usually along class lines.

In the days leading up to our flight to Las Vegas, however, I saw the indignities of the airport mount as President Donald Trump deployed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into America’s terminals, turning an already-debasing necessity into something more chilling.

Certainly, that’s how I felt after my experience. At JFK, an ICE agent was taking the customary Transportation Security Administration role of checking IDs at security. Everything, though, seemed to be running as normal. When I handed over my passport, however, he asked me a question I hadn’t heard him ask anyone else in front of me — most of whom presented as white: “Do you have a second form of photo ID?”

I can’t be sure what motivated the agent to ask me, and apparently no one else near me, this question, but his request of me was difficult to separate from ICE’s role not only as brutal enforcers of Trump’s deportation regime, but also its use as his personal police force. If one thing has been consistent in ICE’s ever-expanding mission, it’s that the agency is being used by the administration to instill fear.

Related

Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live”

Later, it was impossible not to think about what my brief, eventually harmless encounter with the agent might portend. Shortly after Trump deployed ICE agents to airports, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon may have tipped the administration’s hand. Bannon speculated on his “War Room”podcast that the immigration force’s presence at TSA security checkpoints was a “test run” ahead of the November midterms.

Maybe, Bannon seemed to suggest, it was a rehearsal, meant to test how far the administration can stretch our tolerance for agents as part of the landscape of our daily lives without pushback.

If ICE’s invasion of American cities as part of Trump’s broad-based crackdown on immigration and dissent alike was a sledgehammer, what I experienced was more akin to a scalpel. It represents an agency that is understanding the criticisms against its methods and looking for new, more sophisticated ways to terrorize people.

If we can accept the reality that Trump’s personal army is requiring more documentation from us just to board an Airbus, how long until we are forced to tolerate them in our voting booths and beyond?

Training Us to Terror

It was hard not to feel that surgical instillation of terror during my airport visit.

The heightened scrutiny of airport security already makes me feel like a criminal, one who doesn’t even know he committed a crime. In the days leading up to my flight, I prepared for that same kind of interaction, amplified by the presence of someone with a gun and near-unlimited state power. I knew I’d have to get much closer to an ICE agent than I ever had before.

Related

How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport

Instagram videos of JFK suggested lines might be long, but when we arrived on Thursday morning, the terminal was mostly empty and the estimated wait time in my reserve line was only about 15 minutes.

It ended up taking twice as long. As we got closer to the security checkpoint, I realized what the holdup was: A TSA agent was standing behind two ICE agents, training them on how to do her job. As she stood there — working without getting paid, unlike the heavily armed agent sitting in front of her — she walked them through the steps.

I got a closer look at one of the ICE agents. He was white and bald, wearing military fatigues and a tactical vest that announced his employment with ICE.

People in front of me walked through without incident, performing the usual routine: passport, boarding pass, then on to remove their belts and unsheathe their laptops.

When I stepped up to the podium, I wondered if I was about to interact with someone who would be suspicious of me merely for my name and skin color.

I let out an involuntary smile — perhaps as a subconscious signal that I am friendly and low-risk. The ICE agent asked for my passport, which I handed over, as usual, and waited while a machine took my picture. I anticipated moving on quickly.

That’s when he asked me for another form of ID. At that moment, I started to feel my face turn hot, as if I were being accused of something. A U.S. passport is considered one of the most powerful forms of identification in the world. Why did he need a second document?

Though I had already started to grab the wallet in my coat pocket, he followed up with, “You know, like a driver’s license?” I handed over the plastic driver’s license — not a REAL ID, which is why I brought my passport — and waited for his verdict.

He looked back and forth between my documents and the monitor and then OKed me to walk forward.

My partner, who is white, walked through behind me without incident.

Later, as I was sitting in my seat toward the plane’s rear, I began to gain a greater perspective on what I had just undergone. That interaction — the kind that I had worried about for a few hours before waking up and schlepping to the airport — was designed to happen to people like me. It represented a moment of friction, designed to jolt me at first, but then get me used to the fact that people with weapons will now ask more of me just to do the same thing I had done a few weeks before, when I flew to Puerto Rico without any ICE agents at the TSA checkpoint.

Free passage would be harder, the stakes of any interaction would be higher. The fear that I was feeling in that moment had been designed, as if in a lab, to train me to accept a violent overreach that would’ve seemed absurd mere weeks ago.

It’s easy to see how this creep might affect people — Latinos and other immigrants who have citizenship — at their polling places. It will bring a little terror. And then instill a little normalcy.

The post ICE at Airports Trains Us to Accept Being Terrorized in Our Daily Lives appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 850 public demonstrations of support held since start of war and at least 1,400 arrests, research reveals

• Parents of Iran school bombing victims describe their worst day

Iran’s regime has organised more than 850 public demonstrations of support of the government since the beginning of the war and launched a continuing crackdown on unrest that has led to at least 1,400 detentions, research reveals.

The high number of pro-regime gatherings and the increasing number of detentions underlines the resilience of the Islamic Republic despite a month-long campaign of intensive airstrikes by the US and Israel, experts said.

Amanda Smith was reunited with her mother, Michele Hundley Smith, on Thursday after decades-long search

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

A North Carolina woman whose mother was missing without a word for 24 years before authorities managed to locate her – alive and well – has reunited with her and says she forgives her.

“I know everything is not black and white – there’s a whole gray area,” Amanda Smith said of her mother, 62-year-old Michele Hundley Smith, after they embraced in front of a courthouse on Thursday. “And so I mean, look – life’s too short for me to hold a grudge against her because she’s my mom.”

Japan, Taiwan and other Asian countries that rely on the U.S. for security worry that the Iran war is drawing American military assets and focus away from containing China.

Frankie Olivieri’s decision to tinker with the classic cheesesteak was driven by a decades-long need to break free of his father’s rigid ways.

Shops and restaurants once bustling with tourists now struggle for survival as Canadians think twice about crossing the border

On a warm March weekend in the American border town of Lewiston, New York, bakery owner Aimee Loughran is putting the finishing touches on a special order: a state trooper badge-shaped cake for a local officer’s retirement party.

It should be the last task of a busy Saturday at her Just Desserts shop, which sits just 20 minutes north of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls. Dotted with cafes, restaurants and historic buildings from the 1800s, the Lewiston strip is usually catnip for tourists, including the Canadians whose homes can be seen from the banks of the nearby Niagara River.

As a player, Mauricio Pochettino suffered under World Cup pressure. As a manager, he hopes to help the USMNT’s belief in the face of it

US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino probably understands the pressure of playing for your national team in a way few of his players can.

Pochettino was not involved in Argentina’s World Cup plans in 1994 and 1998. He finally made the squad as a veteran in 2002, part of a stacked team favored by many to win the entire tournament. The country itself was in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis and an entire nation turned to La Albiceleste for a bit of hope.

The war has disrupted shipping routes, raised fuel and insurance prices, closed airports, and left aid groups with tons of essential supplies stuck in warehouses.

Analysis: What do Houthi attacks on Israel mean for the Iran war? Expert comment sfarrell.drupa… 28 March 2026

Houthi escalation could further disrupt the global economy – and worsen conditions in Yemen.

The Houthis, the Iran-aligned group in Yemen, launched a missile attack on Israel on 28 March. A statement by the group said its missiles targeted ‘sensitive Israeli military sites’ and added that its operations will continue until the ‘aggression’ on all fronts ends.  

The decision by the Houthis to join the broader Middle East conflict marks a serious and deeply concerning escalation. Their involvement risks widening an already volatile war, with significant implications for regional stability, global trade, and humanitarian conditions – particularly in Yemen.

The potential impact on key commercial maritime routes, especially in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, cannot be overstated. These waterways are critical to global shipping and energy supplies. 

Any sustained disruption will drive up shipping costs, increase oil prices, and place additional strain on a fragile global economy that is already reeling from the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, vital economic and military infrastructure across the Gulf region may become increasingly exposed.

The Houthis refrained from entering the conflict in its early stages, unlike Hezbollah. But their eventual involvement was anticipated by many. Iran’s broader strategy of activating allied groups across the region appears to be unfolding. 

However, while the Houthis tried to frame their actions as support for Palestine also, this move is unlikely to receive widespread public backing within Yemen. Over time, it will only further reinforce contentious perceptions of the group as an extension of Iranian influence.

Yemen’s fragile peace

This development also threatens to derail fragile peace efforts in Yemen. After years of devastating conflict since 2015, the country remains home to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, as consistently highlighted by the United Nations. Renewed escalation could deepen the suffering of millions of civilians already facing severe food insecurity, displacement, and limited access to healthcare. 

Should the Houthis expand their operations to include attacks on neighbouring Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the consequences could be even more severe. 

The Houthis are better placed than Iran to threaten Saudi infrastructure and Western military bases in the Gulf. Recent rhetoric suggests such attacks remain a possibility. Such actions would likely trigger a return to large-scale conflict, including renewed direct confrontation between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. 

Any such war would likely be more intense, more destructive, and even more devastating than previous rounds of fighting. It also means we will witness a resumption of the Saudi-Houthi war of 2015 that was put into a truce in 2022.

Members of the UK public join the search after specialist dog units and thermal drones have yet to locate her

Barely 24 hours after nine-month-old capybaras Samba and Tango were brought to Marwell zoo near Winchester, they had made a break for it through a hole in their temporary enclosure. The siblings were transferred to Hampshire from Jimmy’s farm and wildlife park in Suffolk on 16 March after being outshone by other capybaras.

Tango was quickly found, but her sister Samba remains at large, and the mission to find her has attracted national and international coverage.

Do we really need a McDonald’s CEO fronting ads or a Gianni Infantino Panini sticker? No. But in the age of Trump, the boss class feels emboldened

A few weeks ago, the CEO of McDonald’s appeared in a video sampling the chain’s new “Big Arch burger”. In the clip, Chris Kempczinski, or “Chris K” as he casually calls himself, labelled it a “product”, matching the sterile tone of the review – all harsh lighting, corporate office backdrop and an awkward man talking and eating while wearing a shirt fitting uneasily under a light wool V-neck.

Why would McDonald’s, with its huge marketing budget and commercial success, choose to platform this guy? His stilted efforts were mocked and memed, with executives at Burger King and Wendy’s posting their own versions – what fun. Inevitably some market watchers claimed it drove engagement and sales. But to me, it seems to be just the latest flagrant example of CEOism: when CEOs/founders/heads of organisations centre themselves in the action – just because they can.

Larry Ryan is a freelance writer and editor

From 6 April, low-income families can claim universal credit payments for all children living in the household

The two-child benefit policy has been described as a “cap on childhood” and as it comes to an end, Claire* hopes to throw a birthday party for her son.

It is a celebration most children may take for granted, but Claire and her partner run out of money at the end of every month, skipping meals so that their three children can eat. Her son, now in his final year at primary school, has never had a party.

Concern that supply chain disruption could hit health essentials – and prices – from painkillers to cancer treatment

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Britain is “a few weeks away” from medicine shortages ranging from painkillers to cancer treatment if the Iran war continues, according to experts, while drug prices could also rise.

The conflict has disrupted the supply of a myriad of crucial raw materials, including oil, gas, crop fertiliser and helium – and health essentials could be next.

Exclusive: Findings cast doubt on claims new drilling would help cut bills and boost energy security, researchers say

Hundreds of licences granted for new oil and gas projects in the North Sea under the Conservatives have so far produced only 36 days’ worth of gas, according to analysis.

Research by the energy consultancy Voar and the campaign group Uplift found that between 2010 and 2024, the government handed out hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licences in seven licensing rounds.

UK startup Pulsar Fusion says it has achieved the first plasma ignition inside a nuclear fusion rocket engine prototype -- a huge step for space travel that could cut missions to Mars "from months-long journeys to just a few weeks," reports Euronews. From the report: Pulsar Fusion revealed the milestone during a live stream at Amazon's MARS Conference, hosted by Jeff Bezos in California this week, with CEO Richard Dinan calling it an "exceptional moment" for the company. The team successfully created plasma - an intensely hot, electrically charged state of matter, often described as the fourth state of matter - using electric and magnetic fields inside its experimental and early prototype "Sunbird fusion exhaust system." [...] The company now plans further testing of its Sunbird system to improve performance. Upcoming upgrades include more powerful superconducting magnets designed to better contain and control plasma.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decision to choose small, wealthy – but very Catholic – state for first European trip has baffled some Vatican observers

Pope Leo will travel to Monaco, the semi-enclave famous for casinos and superyachts, on Saturday on his first European trip since being elected pontiff, causing bemusement among some Vatican observers, not least because it comes 488 years after the last papal visit.

Leo will travel from the Vatican by helicopter for the one-day trip, and will be greeted at Monaco’s heliport by Prince Albert and his wife, Princess Charlene, before being taken to the palace, which has been the residence of the Grimaldi dynasty since the 13th century. It is the first time a pontiff has visited Monaco since Pope Paul III in 1538.

Ruling that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed addictive products marks possible watershed moment for social media

The young woman at the heart of what has been called the tech industry’s “big tobacco” moment was on YouTube at six and Instagram by nine. More than a decade later, she says, she still can’t live without the social media she became addicted to.

“I can’t, it’s too hard to be without it,” Kaley, now 20, told a jury at Los Angeles’ superior court. This week, five men and seven women handed down a verdict on the design of two of the world’s most popular apps that vindicated Kaley’s position.

Missile fired from Yemen the first since the Iran war began and came hours after the US secretary set a new timeline for the conflict

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• Parents of Iran school bombing victims describe their worst day

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have confirmed that they launched an attack on Israel for the first time since the outbreak of the Israel-US war on Iran, marking their entry to the conflict just hours after Marco Rubio said the US expected to conclude military operations within “weeks, not months”.

While Israel was again hitting targets across Iran’s capital on Saturday, it identified what it said was a missile launched from Yemen. The Houthis said the attack came after continued targeting of infrastructure in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, adding that their operations would continue until the “aggression” on all fronts ends.

At least 77 people killed in anti-corruption youth uprising in September, which began over a brief social media ban

Nepal’s former prime minister KP Sharma Oli was arrested early on Saturday morning over his alleged role in the deaths of dozens of people who took part in the gen Z protest that toppled his government last year.

Police detained the three-time former prime minister at his residence in the capital Kathmandu, and also arrested his former home affairs minister Ramesh Lekhak.

Fears grow that Tehran may start activating sleeper cells across Middle East as part of war with US and Israel

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• Parents of Iran school bombing victims describe their worst day

Gulf countries have raised concerns over the prospect of attacks by Iran-backed militias and proxy armed groups in the region, which they fear could destabilise their regimes and escalate the war in the Middle East.

In a joint statement this week, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan condemned Iranian attacks on their soil, both as strikes carried out directly from Iran and “through their proxies and armed factions they support in the region”.

• Tiger Woods arrested after Florida rollover crash

• Golfer charged with DUI after Jupiter Island incident

• Woods to be held eight hours under Florida DUI law

• Trump laments arrest of ‘close friend’ in remarks

Tiger Woods was released on bail on Friday, hours after the golf star’s Land Rover clipped a truck, rolled onto its side and he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, according to officials.

Martin County sheriff John Budensiek said Woods was driving a Land Rover that overturned after attempting to overtake a truck on a narrow two-lane road shortly before 2pm near Woods’s residence on Jupiter Island. The vehicle clipped a trailer, veered off and came to rest on its driver’s side after sliding along the roadway.

Bank of America has reached a $72.5 million settlement in a lawsuit that alleges the financial giant helped facilitate the sex trafficking operation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

More than 7 million student loan borrowers who've been enrolled in a Biden-era repayment plan will receive notices with instructions to seek a new plan to repay their debt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc. filed this week against Snap Inc. calls all that into question with claims of patent infringement. Numerous lawsuits are currently open in the US regarding the use of HEVC. Relevant patent holders, such as Nokia and InterDigital, have sued numerous hardware vendors and streaming service providers in pursuit of licensing fees for the use of patented technologies deemed essential to HEVC. It's a touch rarer to see a lawsuit filed over the implementation of AV1. The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, says it developed AV1 "under a royalty-free patent policy (Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0)" and that the standard is "supported by high-quality reference implementations under a simple, permissive license (BSD 3-Clause Clear License)." Yet, Dolby's lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware [PDF] alleges that AV1 leverages technologies that Dolby has patented and has not agreed to license for free and without receiving royalties. The filing reads: "[AOMedia] does not own all patents practiced by implementations of the AV1 codec. Rather, the AV1 specification was developed after many foundational video coding patents had already been filed, and AV1 incorporates technologies that are also present in HEVC. Those technologies are subject to existing third-party patent rights and associated licensing obligations." Dolby is seeking a jury trial, a declaration that Dolby isn't obligated to license the patents in questions under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing obligations, and for the court to enjoin Snap from further "infringement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Jannik Sinner defeats world No 3 6-3, 7-6 (4) in semi-final

• Jiri Lehecka beats Fils 6-2, 6-2 to reach maiden Masters 1000 decider

For one intense, gripping hour inside Miami Open’s stadium court, Alexander Zverev outperformed the modest expectations of his sceptical audience. Under sustained, suffocating pressure from the best returner in the world, he held his own serve and kept Jannik Sinner honest as a competitive second set culminated in a tie-break. Eight points in, nothing could separate them.

Things changed abruptly. At 4-4 on his own serve, Zverev set up a routine overhead that would have moved him narrowly ahead. Instead, the tension that comes with facing a player of Sinner’s calibre finally prevailed. Zverev crumbled, framing his smash into the net.

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More now on India slashing taxes on diesel and petrol amid the global disruption in energy supplies: finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the move would “provide protection to consumers from rise in prices”.

The country is one of the world’s largest crude oil importers and relies on foreign suppliers for more than 85% of its oil needs, with Russia being the biggest supplier.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 28.

This week's guests include White House border czar Tom Homan, Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams.

The strike on Prince Sultan Air Base also damaged at least two Air Force refueling aircraft and underscored that despite weeks of strikes, Iran still poses a threat.

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Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.

The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.

Saudi intelligence source confirms reporting that crown prince has urged Trump to ramp up ‘historic opportunity’ to remake Middle East – key US politics stories from Friday 27 March at a glance

Saudi Arabia has urged the US to ramp up attacks on Iran, a Saudi intelligence source has confirmed, as it decides whether to join the fight directly.

The Saudi source confirmed reporting in the New York Times that said the kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has urged Donald Trump not to cut short his war against Iran, and that the US-Israeli campaign represented a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 28, No. 551.

Looking to sign yourself or a senior family member up for phone service? Those 55 and older can save money with special phone plans.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 28, No. 755.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 28, No. 1,743.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 28, No. 1,021.

In 2021, Woods was seriously injured​ in a rollover crash​ in Rolling Hills Estates, a Los Angeles suburb.

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

Plus: The Derpy McFlurry mixes popping boba pearls and berry sauce into a soft-serve dessert.

Ten U.S. service members were injured in an attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to multiple U.S. officials.

Two others injured after sightseeing aircraft comes down on remote beach on Na Pali Coast

A tourist helicopter crashed on a remote beach off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, killing three people and injuring two others, authorities said.

The helicopter was carrying one pilot and four passengers when it crashed on Thursday afternoon at Kalalau Beach, the Kauai fire department said. The beach is on the Na Pali coast on Kauai’s north shore. The area is otherwise reachable only by hiking or boat.

Actor outside Kennedy Center urges Americans to ‘stand tall against authoritarianism’ and resist free-speech threats

The actor Jane Fonda joined journalists, musicians and writers outside Washington’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Friday in urging US citizens to “break your silence” and “stand tall against authoritarianism”.

At a damp but defiant rally hosted by Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment, around a hundred invited guests gathered to hear speakers and singers rail against book bans, political censorship and other threats to free speech under Donald Trump.

The U.S. has used close to 1,000 Tomahawk missiles since June 2025​ and has been procuring them at a rate of about 90 per year.

• Sakamoto signs off with fourth world title in Prague

• Japan’s Chiba takes silver as Pinzarrone wins bronze

• Levito fourth after Liu withdraws and Glenn slips back

Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto closed out her competitive career with her fourth world title in the women’s singles competition at the Figure Skating World Championships in Prague, Czechia on Friday.

The 25-year old wrapped up a historic skating career which included four Olympic medals, including two silvers at this year’s Milan Cortina Games, with a personal-best 238.28 after an emotional free skate performance at O2 Arena. She’s the first women’s single skater to win four world championships since Michelle Kwan, who won her fifth in 2003.

March 27, 2026 — Microsoft has announced the official opening of its new Danish datacenter region, Denmark East, with campuses in Høje Taastrup, Køge, and Roskilde on Zealand. The datacenter region will provide Danish Microsoft customers with local, secure state of the art cloud infrastructure designed with sustainability as a key focus.

Microsoft Datacenter, Denmark East Region

Mette Kaagaard, General Manager, Microsoft Denmark & Iceland, said: “With the opening of Denmark East, we are strengthening Denmark’s digital resilience with a secure-by-default foundation that gives customers greater control, low latency, and local data residency. It marks an important step in our long-term commitment to Denmark, enabling stronger sovereignty controls and new opportunities for innovation across the public and private sectors — built in close collaboration with Danish partners and guided by values such as transparency, accountability, and sustainability.”

According to IDC, the Microsoft Cloud is expected to generate substantial economic growth while advancing the digital green transition in the coming years, in Denmark. Over the next four years, Microsoft and, its partners are projected to spend approximately $4.5 billion in Denmark on local services and products, strengthening regional business communities.

For every $1 of Microsoft cloud revenue, more than $6 are generated in the wider partner ecosystem, and this is expected to grow to nearly $8, by 2029. The impact extends well beyond Microsoft itself – most of the economic value is created in Danish companies serving other Danish organizations. When Danish organizations adopt cloud services, they rely on local IT consultancies, software developers, cybersecurity firms, and system integrators.

With the opening of the Denmark East region, Danish organizations across sectors – from healthcare and finance to manufacturing, energy, and the public sector – will benefit from:

• Local data residency enabling customers to store and process data in Denmark under full European legal protection, including strict GDPR compliant safeguards, ensuring sensitive workloads remain inside the EU.
• Enhanced digital resilience with multiple independent datacenter zones within the region
• Access to advanced cloud and AI services, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.

For Nykredit, the opening of Microsoft’s new datacenter region in Denmark strengthens the foundation for secure, compliant, and customer-centric digital services.

Ulrik Have, CIO Technology, Nykredit, said: “For Nykredit, data security, regulatory compliance, and customer trust are fundamental. Microsoft’s new datacenter region in Denmark enables us to keep data local, reduce complexity, and lower latency through close proximity to our on‑premises services—while maintaining the flexibility to deliver new digital solutions for our customers.”

Local Support to Local Investments

The establishment of the new datacenter region has been met with strong support from municipal and regional leaders and decision makers across Zealand. The three host municipalities Høje Taastrup, Køge, and Roskilde – have strategically prepared for years to attract advanced digital infrastructure and technology-driven investments that support both local growth and national digital ambitions.

Microsoft collaborates with local communities in Køge, Taastrup and Roskilde and 13 local partners, including Disability House on inclusion, Vild med Vilje on biodiversity and Boligselskabet Sjælland on neighborhood engagement, to strengthen digital skills, sustainability and local needs while supporting long‑term growth and a strong local economy.

Next to one of Microsoft’s state‑of‑the‑art Danish datacenters in Høje‑Taastrup, a new 40,000 m² public park—the Office Park—has been created in partnership with the municipality, showing how digital infrastructure can coexist with green, community‑friendly spaces.

Ken Kristensen, Mayor of Køge Municipality, said: “The opening of the new datacenter highlights that Køge is an attractive location for large, future-proof projects. We have strong infrastructure, attractive business areas, and a strategic location that makes it possible to develop new solutions and create value locally. This is exciting for Køge and for the entire surrounding region, and we welcome Microsoft. At the same time, we are pleased that, over time, Microsoft’s new datacenter will contribute surplus heat to the local district heating network.”

Tomas Breddam, Mayor of Roskilde Municipality, said: “A datacenter from a global company like Microsoft creates opportunities that go far beyond the building itself. Through collaboration on digital innovation, sustainable solutions and smarter public services, Microsoft’s presence can help bring new technology, knowledge and partnerships into our municipality – and in that way create concrete value for both citizens and local businesses over time.”

Kurt Scheelsbeck, Acting Mayor of Høje Taastrup Municipality, said: “In Høje-Taastrup Municipality, we are pleased with the collaboration with Microsoft and proud to host one of the datacenters in the new Danish datacenter region. With construction now completed, we are already seeing positive effects – for local jobs, skills development and our young people. The new park, which creates a green and safe transition between the datacenter and nearby residential areas, is a strong example of how development can go hand in hand with nature and quality of life. At the same time, the collaboration on local projects through ChangeX strengthens our schools, associations and communities. We look forward to building on the partnership in the years ahead.”

Supporting the Green Digital Transition

In 2020, Microsoft announced a commitment to become carbon negative by 2030 — accelerating work across the company to advance the partnerships and technologies needed to advance sustainability for businesses, customers and the world. A key milestone on this journey was the aim to match 100% of the company’s annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy by 2025. The goal has officially been met and this progress helps drive investment into the power systems where Microsoft operate, expand clean energy supply and advance broader energy innovation.

IDC finds that over the next four years, shifting from on-premises infrastructure to cloud services can reduce CO₂ emissions by nearly 88,000 metric tons, equivalent to the emissions of roughly 22,700 Danish homes over the same period.

In Denmark, Microsoft has entered into long-term power purchase agreements that together provide for a total capacity of 130 MW of renewable energy per year. One example is the Svinningegården Solar Park project in Holbæk Municipality, which has a capacity of 27 MW.

In Denmark East, Microsoft uses renewable fuel such as HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) for backup power generation where available. HVO is a renewable diesel made from waste and residual raw materials, and it can significantly reduce lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions compared to conventional fossil diesel. Using HVO supports Microsoft’s broader commitment to lower-carbon operations while maintaining the same reliability and safety standards required for critical infrastructure.

The Danish datacenters have been purposefully designed with zero water use for cooling, for LEED Gold certification and to ultimately operate at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.16. Furthermore, Microsoft’s datacenter site in Høje-Taastrup will be the company’s first operational at-scale waste heat recovery in Denmark. The Danish datacenters are engineered to recover surplus heat for local district heating systems in Høje-Taastrup with the ability to warm around 6,000 local homes, with future expansion planned in Køge.

Built-in Digital Sovereignty to Innovate with Confidence

Microsoft investments in cloud and AI infrastructure go beyond bringing capacity online in a region. They are a core part of Microsoft’s long-standing commitment to advancing trust, resilience, and transparency, with digital sovereignty fundamental to that commitment and particularly top of mind for customers and partners in Denmark.

Customers in Denmark are covered by the EU Data Boundary, which ensures that customer data for Microsoft cloud services is stored and processed within the EU, providing clarity, predictability, and confidence in how data is handled. This is reinforced by Microsoft’s European Digital Commitments, which go further than regulatory compliance to deliver meaningful assurance through legally backed commitments, local governance, and operational transparency.

Together, these commitments reflect Microsoft’s belief that digital sovereignty is not a one-size-fits-all requirement, but a continuum of needs. Through the Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, customers in Denmark can choose the level of control, isolation, and operational autonomy that best fits their workloads whether running highly regulated applications, supporting critical national infrastructure, or innovating with AI in the cloud. This flexible approach enables customers to maintain control over their data, without sacrificing the scale, security, or innovation of the Microsoft cloud.

Source: Morten Skøtt, Microsoft

The post Microsoft Announces Opening of New Datacenter Region in Denmark appeared first on HPCwire.

• Hidalgo posts rare 31-11-10 triple-double

• Late assist sets up winning basket for Irish

• Blakes misses at buzzer as Vandy fall short

Hannah Hidalgo already had her unusual triple-double and the NCAA single-season record for steals when she made the play that ultimately sent Notre Dame to the Elite Eight of March Madness.

Mikayla Blakes ended up with two chances to answer for Vanderbilt in a matchup of two of the nation’s top three scorers in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.

Google has moved up its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029. "This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates," said vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg in a blog post. CyberScoop reports: Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers. While Google has said it is on track to migrate its own systems ahead of the 2035 timeline provided in NIST guidelines, last month leaders at the company teased an updated timeline for migration and called on private businesses and other entities to act more urgently to prepare. Unlike the federal government, there is no mandate for private businesses to migrate to quantum-resistant encryption, or even that they do so at all. Adkins and Schmieg said the hope is that other businesses will view Google's aggressive timeframe as a signal to follow suit. "As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it's our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline," they wrote. "By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI executed a search warrant last month at a Fulton County elections office, seeking to take "all physical ballots" from the 2020 vote as well as tapes from vote-tabulating machines, ballot images and voter rolls.

Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany were accused of lying on document used to enter Taylor’s house on night of shooting

A federal judge has dismissed charges against two former Louisville police officers accused of falsifying the warrant used to enter Breonna Taylor’s apartment the night police shot her to death.

Charles Simpson, a US district judge, issued a one-page ruling on Friday throwing out charges against Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, two former officers involved in crafting the Taylor warrant.

Mayor of Hartford has fired a white police officer who fatally shot a Black man in a mental health crisis nine times

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A white Connecticut police officer who fatally shot a Black man 30 seconds after arriving at the scene, where three fellow officers had spent several minutes trying to de-escalate the situation, was fired Friday.

Arunan Arulampalam, Hartford’s mayor, said in a statement that he terminated Officer Joseph Magnano effective immediately in connection with the 27 February shooting of Steven Jones, who was on a city street holding a knife. The killing came eight days after a different Hartford officer fatally shot another man in a mental health crisis.

The European Commission is investigating a breach after a threat actor allegedly accessed at least one of its AWS cloud accounts and claimed to have stolen more than 350 GB of data, including databases and employee-related information. AWS says its own services were not breached. BleepingComputer reports: Sources familiar with the incident have told BleepingComputer that the attack was quickly detected and that the Commission's cybersecurity incident response team is now investigating. While the Commission has yet to share any details about this breach, the threat actor who claimed responsibility for the attack reached out to BleepingComputer earlier this week, stating that they had stolen over 350 GB of data (including multiple databases). They didn't disclose how they breached the affected accounts, but they provided BleepingComputer with several screenshots as proof that they had access to information belonging to European Commission employees and to an email server used by Commission employees. The threat actor also told BleepingComputer that they will not attempt to extort the Commission using the allegedly stolen data as leverage, but intend to leak the data online at a later date.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The toughest cuts for the World Cup roster will likely come at the position the US manager considers to be the most important on the field

Throughout his tenure as US men’s national team manager, Mauricio Pochettino has needed to be experimental in the heart of the park. The player pool he inherited had a first-choice midfield trio – Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie and Yunus Musah – with few adequately tested alternatives. There has since been ample rotation, testing partnerships and combinations.

With 11 weeks to go until the World Cup, one thing has become clear: the tournament squad’s harshest cuts will come in midfield.

Man was arrested in connection with plan to assassinate Nerdeen Kiswani, following sting by undercover NYPD officer

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Law enforcement officers foiled a plot to assassinate New York-based Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani and arrested a 26-year old man in connection with the plan.

Kiswani wrote in post on X that late on Thursday, the FBI joint terrorism taskforce informed her that a plot against her life was “about to” take place, and that agents had conducted an operation in Hoboken, New Jersey, in connection to it.

The Handala Hack Team published more than 300 emails from Kash Patel’s inbox between 2010 and 2019

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Iran-linked hackers have broken into the personal email inbox of Kash Patel, FBI’s director, publishing photographs of him and other documents on the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday.

On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims”. The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.

The Artemis II countdown will begin March 30, setting up a launch attempt on April 1 at 6:24 p.m. Eastern Time.

President offered new federal loan guarantees and an update to renewable fuel standards to boost US agriculture

Donald Trump is offering aid to farmers and food suppliers as they face a fresh set of challenges amid the US-Israel war on Iran, the White House announced Friday.

After a White House event with farmers on Friday, Trump introduced several new measures, including new federal loan guarantees and an update to renewable fuel standards, meant to boost US agriculture as the conflict in Iran continues.

The retail giant bought TV manufacturer Vizio in 2024 to push advertising, one report claims.

‘Looksmaxxer’ influencer and his girlfriend are suspected of involvement in attack on 19-year-old woman, officials say

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The social media influencer known as Clavicular has been arrested in Florida on battery charges.

Braden Eric Peters, who maintains a controversial online presence among “manosphere” circles as a so-called “looksmaxxer”, was taken into custody on a warrant issued by the Osceola county sheriff’s office, according to local jail records and media reports.

A workplace-device study says Windows PCs crash significantly more often than Macs, lag further behind on patching and encryption in some sectors, and are typically replaced sooner. TechSpot reports: Omnissa's 2026 State of Digital Workspace report outlines the IT challenges that various organizations face from the growing use of AI and the heterogeneous deployment of enterprise devices. The relative instability of Windows and Android is a recurring theme throughout the report. The company gathered telemetry from clients located across the globe in retail, healthcare, finance, education, government, and other sectors throughout 2025. The data suggests that IT administrators face frustrating security gaps due to inconsistent patching across a diverse mosaic of devices and operating systems. Employee workflow disruption, often due to software issues, is one area of concern. The report found that Windows devices were forced to shut down 3.1 times more often than Macs. Windows programs also froze 7.5 times more often than macOS apps and needed to be restarted more than twice as often. Certain industries were also alarmingly lax in securing Windows and Android devices. More than half of Windows and Android devices in healthcare and pharma were five major operating system updates behind, likely leaving them more vulnerable to errors and malware. More than half of the desktops and mobile devices used for education were also unencrypted, putting students' privacy at risk. Macs also last longer, being replaced every five years on average, compared to every three years for Windows PCs. Despite a recent backlash against Windows, driven by a push for digital sovereignty in countries such as Germany, Windows use on government devices actually doubled last year. Meanwhile, Macs using Apple's M-series chips showcase a significant thermal advantage, with an average temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius, while Intel processors run at 65.2 degrees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four different quantum systems with four different types of qubits were on display at Nvidia GTC, here's how they all work.

Stocks suffered a fifth straight weekly loss as oil prices climbed and mixed signals on Iran raised fears about inflation and growth.

Move imperils efforts to end 42‑day partial shutdown that has seen thousands of DHS employees miss paychecks

House Republicans have rejected legislation, passed by the Senate, that would finance most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but withhold funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The move imperils efforts to end a 42‑day partial government shutdown that has seen thousands of DHS employees miss paychecks and furious travelers miss flights due to long airport security lines.

Dow fell 800 points as oil prices continue to climb, and markets are still on edge despite US pause on Iranian energy strikes

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The US stock market closed on Friday with a selloff that sent the Dow into correction territory, capping off the fifth consecutive week that markets closed down.

The Dow fell 800 points on Friday, pushing the index into correction territory, which occurs when an index falls 10% below its peak. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index, which entered a correction Thursday afternoon, dropped another 2% while the S&P 500 closed 1.6% lower.

Tyrell spoke with CNET about the new documentary, which explores the tension between optimism and pessimism about the AI boom, now available in select theaters.

A look into the way Meta handles moderation suggests Community Notes aren't an effective substitute for the third-party fact-checking program it disbanded last year.

Seizing the highly enriched uranium would be more difficult and complex than anything U.S. Special Operations forces have ever attempted, military experts told CBS News.

Austria plans to restrict under-14s from using social media platforms over concerns about addictive algorithms and harmful content. The government says draft legislation should be ready by the end of June, though details around enforcement and age verification have yet to be finalized. The BBC reports: Announcing the plans, Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler of the Social Democrats said the government could not stand by and watch as social media made children "addicted and also often ill." He said it was the responsibility of politicians to protect children and argued that the issue should be treated no different to alcohol or tobacco: "There must be clear rules in the digital world too." In future, said Babler, children under 14 would be protected from algorithms that were addictive. "Other information providers have clear rules to protect young people from harmful content." These, he said, should now be implemented in the digital space. Yesterday, juries in two separate cases found social media giants liable for harming young people's mental health. The verdicts are being hailed as social media's Big Tobacco moment. Further reading: California Bill Would Require Parent Bloggers To Delete Content of Minors On Social Media

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FAA investigating after plane carrying 162 passengers forced to change course to prevent collision

A United flight came within a few hundred feet of a US military helicopter near John Wayne airport in southern California, triggering an alarm directing the airline pilots to change course.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Friday that it is investigating the incident that happened at about 8.40pm Tuesday when a military Black Hawk helicopter returning from a training mission crossed into the plane’s path. The pilots of the passenger plane carrying 162 passengers and six crew members stopped their descent and leveled off to avoid a collision.

Order comes after House Republicans rejected a Senate‑passed deal to fund key DHS subagencies, including the TSA

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Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday instructing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to immediately pay Transportation Security Administration agents as the partial shutdown drags on.

Negotiations on Capitol Hill remain stalled after House Republicans rejected a Senate‑passed deal to fund key DHS subagencies, including the TSA. After first announcing on Truth Social that he would pay more than 60,000 airport security workers – without explaining where the money would come from – the president issued the order.

The Department of Homeland Security said TSA agents should begin receiving pay as early as Monday, March 30.

This guide describes how you can install a Plan 9 network on an OpenBSD machine (it will probably work on any unix machine though). The authentication service (called “authsrv” on Plan 9) is provided by a unix version: authsrv9. The file service is provided by a program called “u9fs”. It comes with Plan 9. Both run from inetd. The (diskless) cpu server is provided by running qemu, booted from only a floppy (so without local storage). Finally, the terminal is provided by the program drawterm. The nice thing about this approach is that you can use all your familiar unix tools to get started with Plan 9 (e.g. you can edit the Plan 9 files with your favorite unix editor). I’m assuming you have read at least something about Plan 9, for example the introduction paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

↫ Mechiel Lukkien

If you’re running OpenBSD, you’re already doing something better than everyone else, and if you want to ascend to the next level, this is a great place to start. Of course, the final level, where you leave your earthly roots behind and become a being of pure enlightened energy, is running Plan 9 on real hardware as the universe intended, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.

One day, all of humanity will just be an endless collection of interconnected cosmic Plan 9 servers, more plentiful than the stars in the known universe.

Eric Fernando Gutierrez Molina, 32, a U.S. citizen and North Texas resident, went missing Saturday evening after a night out with a fellow flight attendant.

Chad Bianco, running for governor, previously confiscated 650,000 ballots for baseless voter fraud investigation

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A Republican sheriff in California has confiscated additional ballot materials from a special election, escalating his conflict with state lawmakers who say he is conducting a baseless investigation into claims of voter fraud.

On Tuesday, Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff who is running for governor, was already at the center of a legal controversy after seizing 650,000 ballots from last year’s special election. Earlier this week he ordered his office to seize 426 additional boxes of ballot materials as part of the alleged criminal investigation, prompting criticism from lawmakers including Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic attorney general.

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”

Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

↫ Anna Moore at The Guardian

These stories are absolutely heart-wrenching, and it doesn’t just happen to people who have had a history of mental illness or other things you might associate with priming someone for “falling for” an “AI” chatbot. Just a few years in, and it’s already clear that these tools pose a real danger to a group of people of indeterminate size, and proper research into the causes is absolutely warranted and needed. On top of that, if there’s any evidence of wrongdoing from the companies behind these chatbots – intentionally making them more addictive, luring people in, ignoring established dangers, covering up addiction cases, etc. – lawsuits and regulation are definitely in order.

Only yesterday, Facebook and Google lost a landmark trial in the US, ruling the companies intentionally made social media as addictive as possible, thereby destroying a person’s life in the process. Countless similar lawsuits are underway all over the world, and I have a feeling that in a few years to decades, we’ll look at unregulated, rampant social media the same way we look at tobacco now.

Perhaps “AI” chatbots will join their ranks, too.

A new study in the journal Science found that AI models are far more sycophantic than a human friend or stranger.

The event brought vendors of emerging computing hardware together with researchers in the HPC community, highlighting opportunities and challenges in a diversifying technology landscape.

March 27, 2026 — In the foreseeable future, traditional technologies for high-performance computing (HPC) based on CPU and GPU processors could reach their limits in terms of performance, economic viability, and environmental sustainability. This has launched the hardware community on a search for alternative paradigms and architectures that could open the door to improvements in speed and energy efficiency. Quantum computing and neuromorphic computing are among the best known approaches, although numerous other avenues are also being explored, including concepts that build on and extend traditional technologies found in x86, GPU-accelerated, and ARM-based architectures.

Credit: HLRS

In parallel, progress is being made on software development for new computing frameworks. These include programming models and libraries that would make it easier to use established codes with new hardware, and to implement heterogeneous workflows across multiple hardware types. Many anticipate that the development of hybrid approaches holds more potential for advancing HPC capabilities than expecting a single hardware type to replace all others, meaning that one goal for future HPC systems would be to integrate different hardware types and programming methods seamlessly. In this way, various elements within complex algorithms could then be distributed to specialized processors that run them most efficiently.

On March 16-17, 2026, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) hosted its first Future Computing Workshop, an event designed to promote discussion, networking, and collaboration surrounding new computing paradigms. Hardware vendors, researchers, and computing facility operators offered in-depth looks at emerging technologies and methods, including the potential advantages they offer and the challenges they face in practice. By including perspectives from the academic research community, the event also enabled hardware vendors to gain insights into user requirements they will need to consider to ensure that their products are widely adopted.

Dr. Johannes Gebert organized the event, and leads HLRS’s Future Computing Group. Launched in 2025, the Future Computing Group is developing partnerships with companies to test emerging computing technologies and to evaluate their relevance for HLRS’s high-performance computing user community. The Future Computing Workshop was held to complement these efforts and promote the exchange of ideas across the community. “Computer scientists, domain-specific researchers, computing centers, and hardware vendors deal with widely different challenges and incentives,” he explained. “We established the workshop as a platform for people to understand one another, accelerating the deployment of high-end computing paradigms.”

The Importance of Dialogue Among Stakeholders

The first day of the Future Computing Workshop focused on presentations by hardware vendors and technology developers, including NextSilicon, SpiNNcloud, AMD, Fraunhofer ITWM, OpenChip, Cerebras, Q.ANT, SiPearl, IQM, and Lightsolver. The presentations offered overviews of their technologies and case studies illustrating their capabilities. On the second day, researchers and representatives of academic HPC centers described progress in developing programming models, libraries, and performance tools for emerging hardware technologies. Academic participants included representatives of KAUST, TU Munich, the German Climate Research Center, the German Aerospace Center, EPCC, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and Sandia Labs, as well as HLRS.

In addition to spotlighting innovations in hardware, the Future Computing Workshop illuminated challenges facing the HPC community resulting from a diversifying technology landscape. Existing research codes have often taken years to develop, and cannot easily be ported to new computing hardware, if at all. Because of the length of procurement cycles, HPC centers must also be able to plan for the future, requiring a clear understanding of what the user community will need in 5-7 years. As technologies evolve, it will be important that new hardware is well suited to the scientific problems that need to be solved, that the answers it delivers are reliable, and that it is easily programmable. Moreover, regardless of how fast new processing technologies become, the trend toward ever larger simulations and data-driven methods means that improving memory bandwidth capabilities will be at least as important. Otherwise, the ability to move and manage the resulting data efficiently could remain a major rate-limiting step.

These kinds of observations suggest that while new computing architectures hold great potential, they will be most successful if developed in partnership with potential users. The Future Computing Workshop aims to support this essential dialogue among stakeholders in order to facilitate the success of next-generation technologies.

Future Computing Workshop Will Become Annual Event

More than 65 participants attended the two-day Future Computing Workshop, contributing to many lively discussions. Considering the very positive response from across the hardware and research communities, HLRS intends to make the meeting an annual event. Details for the 2027 workshop will be posted as soon as they become available.

More from HPCwire: HLRS Future Computing Group Will Evaluate New Tech for HPC

Source: Christopher Williams, HLRS

The post HLRS Future Computing Group Holds 1st Annual Workshop appeared first on HPCwire.

BRUSSELS, March 27, 2026 — Yesterday, SEMI Europe participated in the European Commission’s Implementation Dialogue on the Chips Act, chaired by Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy. As a key association representing the global electronics manufacturing and design supply chain in the region, SEMI Europe commends the European Commission for coordinating the Chips Act 2.0 Report, in consultation with leading semiconductor companies, to help define the future direction of Europe’s semiconductor policy and investment framework.

In this context, the Implementation Dialogue provided a valuable platform to assess progress under the European Chips Act and to gather concrete recommendations for its upcoming revision, commonly referred to as “Chips Act 2.0.” SEMI Europe strongly supports this consultative approach, which helps ensure that policy objectives are achieved while minimizing administrative and compliance burden for industry.

“SEMI Europe applauds the European Commission for fostering an open and constructive dialogue with industry at a critical moment for Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem,” said Laith Altimime, President of SEMI Europe. “This is a defining moment. With focused execution and unified commitment across institutions and industry, Europe can secure its position as a global leader in semiconductor innovation and manufacturing for decades to come.”

During the dialogue, SEMI Europe highlighted its significant contribution to the policy discussion through its SEMI Europe Chips Act Report published last year, which outlined 30 recommendations aimed at strengthening Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem across the entire supply chain. These included regulatory simplification, accelerated permitting processes, targeted investment support, and measures to strengthen the resilience of the semiconductor supply chain.

SEMI, with its global footprint of over 3,000 members worldwide from across the entire semiconductor value chain, will remain a trusted partner to facilitate global collaboration and support the success of the European Chips Act and its potential “2.0.”

SEMI Europe Advocacy

Discover how SEMI Europe Advocacy & Public Policy supports the microelectronics industry across sustainability, trade, talent, and R&D—or become involved by contacting sorlando@semi.org.

About SEMI

SEMI is the global industry association connecting over 3,000 member companies and 1.5 million professionals worldwide across the semiconductor and electronics design and manufacturing supply chain. We accelerate member collaboration on solutions to top industry challenges through Advocacy, Workforce Development, Sustainability, Supply Chain Management, and other programs. Our SEMICON expositions and events, technology communities, standards, and market intelligence help advance our members’ business growth and innovations in design, devices, equipment, materials, services, and software, enabling smarter, faster, more secure electronics.

Source: SEMI

The post SEMI Europe Applauds European Commission’s Implementation Dialogue on Chips Act 2.0 appeared first on HPCwire.

With over 50 configurations available to buy for just two laptops, choosing the right one isn't easy. Here's how they stack up based on our testing and what they offer.

Today, we’re excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy.

↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog

The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it’s fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.

Lawyers say agency made misrepresentations in affidavit to obtain search warrant for January raid of election offices

Lawyers arguing in federal court for the FBI to return Fulton county’s 2020 election records said the agency’s affidavit to obtain a search warrant relied on misrepresentations that rise to the legal standard of a “callous disregard” for the county’s rights.

“The only element that turns the election into a crime is intent, and nothing in the affidavit shows intent,” Abbe Lowell, who is representing Fulton county, said during the Friday hearing at the Richard Russell courthouse in Atlanta. He argued that the FBI was pursuing crimes for which the statute of limitations has expired.

Updated prices of PlayStation 5 consoles to go into effect on 2 April as electronics makers face rising cost pressures

Sony is raising global prices of its PlayStation 5 consoles, including a $100 increase in the US, marking its second hike in less than a year as the entertainment giant grapples with rising costs of key components such as memory chips.

The tech industry’s race to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure has pushed memory makers to favor higher-margin datacenter chips, tightening supply for consumer devices like the ones Sony sells.

About 1 in 4 Americans are using AI chatbots to prepare their tax returns, but experts warn the tools can produce outdated or inaccurate guidance.

Law firm is preparing claim on behalf of 30,000 consumers who fear the FCA’s redress scheme will shortchange them

Lloyds Banking Group is facing a court battle with 30,000 aggrieved car loan customers who are to abandon the City regulator’s official redress scheme amid fears it will shortchange consumers and favour lenders.

The claims law firm Courmacs Legal is planning to file a £66m omnibus claim on behalf of borrowers who believe they were financially harmed by car loan contracts set up by Lloyds’ motor finance arm, Black Horse.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday. On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. The FBI confirmed that Patel's emails had been targeted. In a statement, bureau spokesman Ben Williamson said, "we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity" and that the data involved was "historical in nature and involves no government information." Handala, which presents itself as a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. [...] Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

School dinners have suffered at the hands of politics and economics for almost 50 years

Almost a generation has passed since Jamie Oliver’s four-part Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners exposed the unhealthy reality of the food served to pupils at lunchtime, including – notoriously – fat-heavy, meat-light Turkey Twizzlers. It proved a shaming and effective intervention. His ensuing Feed Me Better campaign led the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to pledge to make school lunches more nutritious and hand schools more money to do that, given the average lunch at that time cost just 45p to make.

Problem solved? Unfortunately not.

Arctic sea ice levels are crucial to Earth's climate because, without the ice reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans.

A health crisis can upend your budget and make it tough to pay taxes. Here's how to get relief if that happens.

Nearly 15 months after President Donald Trump issued an executive order attempting to redefine birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the administration’s action.

Since then, the birthright citizenship controversy has been working its way through the legal system in several forms. Now on April 1, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Trump v. Barbara, which will likely settle the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order.

Traditionally, the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause has been interpreted to bestow automatic citizenship on a child born in the territory of the United States regardless of their nationality, with limited exceptions. The clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The clause was also a rejection of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision from 1857, which held that African Americans could not become American citizens and had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Supreme Court’s landmark case on birthright citizenship is United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). There, a divided Supreme Court held that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were both Chinese citizens, automatically became a United States citizen at birth.

The Trump administration is claiming another landmark Supreme Court decision, Elk v. Wilkins (1884), supports the argument that birthright citizenship should not be granted to children born to aliens illegally in the United States and to aliens on a temporary visit to the country.

The executive order’s road to the Supreme Court

On Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order No. 14,160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. The order claimed the Citizenship Clause did not grant citizenship in two situations where a child was not, in the administration’s view, under the “jurisdiction of the United States” as stated in the 14th Amendment.

One situation was when a child’s mother was “unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.” The other instance was when “that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary … and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

On Jan. 21, 2025, Washington state, along with three other states, contested the executive order in court, arguing that it went against Wong Kim Ark and the traditional understanding of the Citizenship Clause. A district court issued a temporary universal injunction against the executive order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the injunction, which barred executive officials from applying the order to anyone, not just the plaintiffs.

In Trump v. CASA (2025), a divided Supreme Court said the district court lacked the power to issue a universal injunction in the case; it did not decide the 14th Amendment constitutional question about the Citizenship Clause.

On the same day that the Supreme Court decided Trump v. CASA, a group of individuals sued the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire over President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. A plaintiff under the pseudonym “Barbara” led the group. The court approved a class of individuals who might be affected by its decision and issued a ruling that included an injunction. It also determined the group was likely to succeed on the merits of its claims that the executive order violated the Citizenship Clause.

On Sept. 26, 2025, the Trump administration submitted a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, asking the Court to consider the case. The justices granted the request on Dec. 5, 2025, agreeing to decide “whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause.”

The debate over two Supreme Court decisions from Horace Gray

In briefs submitted to the justices, the two landmark Supreme Court decisions from Justice Horace Gray frame the arguments made by the petitioners (the Trump administration) and the defendants (the American Civil Liberties Union and others).

The long-held understanding of Wong Kim Ark’s majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, is cited by the ACLU as a factor controlling the case. “The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens,” Gray wrote. He cited narrow exceptions for children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers; children born on foreign public ships; children of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory; and children who were members of “the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.”

Beyond that, Gray concluded that the 14th Amendment, “in clear words and in manifest intent includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.”

United States Solicitor D. John Sauer argues that Executive Order No. 14,160 complies with Wong Kim Ark when considered alongside Elk v. Wilkins, another majority opinion written by Justice Gray. In that case, John Elk, a Winnebago Native American, was born on a reservation but moved to Ohama, where he was employed and paid taxes. Elk was not allowed to vote, and, on appeal, Elk cited Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which only excluded “Indians not taxed” as federal voting electors.

In his opinion in Elk, Gray determined that as a Native American, Elk was “no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.”

Gray also wrote in Elk that the Citizenship Clause was intended to “put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black, and whether formerly slaves or not, born or naturalized in the United States, and owing no allegiance to any alien power, should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”

The basic arguments at Court

Sauer’s primary argument is that “children of temporarily present or illegal aliens do not qualify [for citizenship] because their parents are not domiciled in, and thus do not owe the requisite allegiance to, the United States,” citing the Elk decision’s definition of political jurisdiction. He also believes the Wong Kim Ark decision supports his argument by recognizing a “general rule of citizenship by birth in the territory for children of persons ‘domiciled within the United States.’”

The ACLU is dismissive of that argument. “Wong Kim Ark’s basic holding is that the [Citizenship] Clause enshrines the preexisting common law of citizenship. Under the common law—including the dominant American decision of the era, Lynch v. Clarke, (N.Y. Ch. Ct. 1844)—the rule was citizenship by birth, regardless of parental nationality or immigration status. Domicile was irrelevant,” the ACLU states.

“More specifically, Wong Kim Ark interpreted the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ in accord with The Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), explaining that even temporary visitors are ‘subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States,’” the ACLU concludes.

Given the core constitutional questions at stake in Trump v. Barbara, the arguments at the Supreme Court will be widely watched and closely scrutinized, with a decision expected in late June.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Crisis in the Middle East, a Russian drone attack in Lviv, cherry blossom in Tokyo and the return of BTS – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Claimants say lost documents hide scale of alleged unlawful information gathering at publisher of the Daily Mail

The amount of lost or destroyed documents relating to the Daily Mail publisher’s use of private investigators is “stark in the extreme”, the high court has heard.

However, the thin surviving evidence of payments to private investigators contains “conspicuous and often shocking evidence”, according to lawyers for a group of claimants accusing the publisher of using unlawful techniques.

Party announces Corey Edwards’ decision to quit Senedd election campaign on grounds of mental health

A Reform UK candidate for the Welsh Senedd elections in May has announced he is standing down because of his mental health, after a photograph emerged of him apparently making a Nazi salute as an imitation of Adolf Hitler.

The announcement by Reform comes a day after Nigel Farage defended Corey Edwards, its lead candidate for the Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg constituency, saying he may have instead been impersonating the John Cleese character Basil Fawlty.

Christopher Trybus is charged with manslaughter and two counts of rape and coercive and controlling behaviour

A man accused of subjecting his wife to a campaign of “physical and sexual violence” said finding out she had died by hanging was the “worst day of my life”.

Tarryn Baird, 34, was found dead at her home in Swindon, Wiltshire, on 28 November 2017. Christopher Trybus, 43, is charged with his wife’s manslaughter as well as with two counts of rape and coercive and controlling behaviour. He denies all the charges.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The Swift 16 AI and Swift Go 16 AI are fast, intelligent Windows PCs that pair Copilot+ features with sharp OLED displays built for creative work and busy days.

Police said a Secret Service agent assigned to Jill Biden accidentally shot and injured himself at Philadelphia International Airport.

Both savings accounts could be a viable home for your funds now. Here's which can earn you more interest in 2026.

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The TeamPCP hacking group continues its supply-chain rampage, now compromising the massively popular "LiteLLM" Python package on PyPI and claiming to have stolen data from hundreds of thousands of devices during the attack. LiteLLM is an open-source Python library that serves as a gateway to multiple large language model (LLM) providers via a single API. The package is very popular, with over 3.4 million downloads a day and over 95 million in the past month. According to research by Endor Labs, threat actors compromised the project and published malicious versions of LiteLLM 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI today that deploy an infostealer that harvests a wide range of sensitive data. [...] Both malicious LiteLLM versions have been removed from PyPI, with version 1.82.6 now the latest clean release. [...] If compromise is suspected, all credentials on affected systems should be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. [...] Organizations that use LiteLLM are strongly advised to immediately: - Check for installations of versions 1.82.7 or 1.82.8 - Immediately rotate all secrets, tokens, and credentials used on or found within code on impacted devices. - Search for persistence artifacts such as '~/.config/sysmon/sysmon.py' and related systemd services - Inspect systems for suspicious files like '/tmp/pglog' and '/tmp/.pg_state' - Review Kubernetes clusters for unauthorized pods in the 'kube-system' namespace - Monitor outbound traffic to known attacker domains

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the war with Iran continues, CBS News is tracking gas and oil prices. Find out how much more it costs to fill up your tank or heat your house.

Commentary: As an avid fan of the Harry Potter movies, it was hard to accept the new HBO TV series. But more magic isn't a bad thing after all.

March 27, 2026 — The University of Galway in collaboration with the EuroHPC JU has launched an invitation to tender to select a vendor for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of CASPIr, the mid-range EuroHPC supercomputer to be located in Ireland.

Once deployed, CASPIr (Computation Analysis and Simulation Platform for Ireland) will be a mid-range supercomputer capable of performing over 15 petaflops, or 15 million billion operations every second. It will support cutting-edge AI and machine learning workloads, handling small-scale training and inference tasks as part of larger simulation and data-analysis workflows.

The new supercomputer will serve a wide range of users in the scientific community, industry and the public sector, both in Ireland and across Europe. Access to its computing resources will be jointly managed by Ireland and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) in proportion to their respective investments.

More Details

The deadline to submit a request to participate in this procurement process is May 5, 2026, 12:00 IST.

Following this deadline, the University of Galway and the EuroHPC JU will review the submissions and initiate a competitive dialogue. This process will allow the contracting authority to engage in detailed discussions with selected candidates and to thoroughly evaluate the market’s technical offerings in order to select the most suitable solutions.

Upon completion of the dialogue phase, the candidates will be invited to submit a tender. The University of Galway and the EuroHPC JU will evaluate these tenders, select the best offer and conclude a contract with the chosen provider to acquire, deliver, install and maintain this new EuroHPC supercomputer.

The total acquisition budget of the system is up to EUR 25 million, which will be co-financed by the EuroHPC JU (35%) with budget coming from the Digital Europe Programme (DEP) and by Ireland (65%) through national funds.

More details on the invitation tender can be found on this dedicated page.

CASPIr will be jointly owned by the University of Galway and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and operated by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC). A hosting agreement has been signed between the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the University of Galway in October 2025.

Background

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity that brings together the European Union and participating countries to coordinate efforts and pool resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing.

To equip Europe with a cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured 12 supercomputers, distributed across Europe including JUPITER in Germany, and Alice Recoque, Europe’s first exascale systems.

European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can benefit from EuroHPC supercomputers via the EuroHPC Access Calls no matter where in Europe they are located, to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe.

Currently, the EuroHPC JU is also overseeing the implementation of 19 AI factories (AIF) across Europe, complemented by 13 AI Factory Antennas, to offer free, customized support to SMEs and startups.

Additionally, the EuroHPC JU is deploying a European Quantum Computing infrastructure, integrating diverse European quantum computing technologies with existing supercomputers, marking a milestone in Europe’s leap into the quantum era.

The EuroHPC JU also funds  research and innovation projects to develop a full European supercomputing supply chain, from processors and software to applications to be run on these supercomputers and know-how to develop strong European HPC expertise.

With the recent adoption of Council Regulation (EU) 2026/150, the EuroHPC JU’s mandate has been expanded with new action pillars dedicated to the deployment of AI Gigafactories across Europe and the advancement of quantum technologies.

More from HPCwire: EuroHPC to Deploy ‘CASPIr’ Supercomputer at University of Galway

Source: EuroHPC JU

The post EuroHPC Launches Tender to Procure CASPIr Supercomputer in Ireland appeared first on HPCwire.

Shannon Tufuga is accused of kidnapping Amberlee Collazo's son, driving him to her home and forcing him to apologize to her child, whom she claimed he bullied.

The U.S.–Israel war on Iran was supposed to end quickly in either an “unconditional surrender” or regime change. Weeks into the conflict, none of it has happened. There appears to be little cause for celebration in Washington, notwithstanding Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s daily jingoistic proclamations.

There is, of course, even less cause for celebration among the population living under nightly aerial assault in Iran. Pro-war Iranians in the diaspora, too, seem to have tamped down their initial exhilaration over the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

It appears that neither the U.S. nor Israel had any plan if the Iranian nezam, or regime, decided to punch back after being subjected to a massive surprise attack on February 28. Those counterpunches have led to the deaths of U.S. service members, Israeli civilians, and migrant workers living in the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Then there is the economic cost. Oil and gas production and transit are frozen in the Gulf, thanks to Iran’s missile strikes that hit regional energy infrastructure and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The markets, accordingly, are in disarray.

“Everyone,” Mike Tyson once said, “has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Iran’s leaders seem to think they have the upper hand right now — they have rejected a ceasefire offer from the U.S. outright — but Donald Trump might have more tricks up his sleeve.

The U.S. is moving troops into the Persian Gulf, potentially with a limited ground invasion looming. Trump, reports suggest, is most likely to go after a small island where Iran keeps an oil terminal for its tankers, or one of the islands closer to the actual Strait, which he would like to see open to all sea traffic.

For now, talks might not be in the offing, despite Trump’s proclamations — most recently that, despite the “fake news,” talks are ongoing and going well. Even by seizing Kharg Island or any other Iranian territory, however, Trump will not make the Iranians buckle. Short of a full-fledged regime change invasion, taking an Iranian outpost in the Persian Gulf may shift the balance of power, but not topple the government. Talks will still be necessary to end the war.

So, the assumption at this point is that the regime will survive — and the ones who really pay for that will be the Iranian people.

Who to Talk To

There is a generous view about Trump’s intentions: that there actually was a realistic plan, one that wasn’t about forcing capitulation or actual regime change. Though some Iranians, especially the former crown prince Reza Pahlavi and his supporters, had certainly hoped for a war of regime change, it’s plausible that Trump was merely seeking a regime adjustment, as he secured in Venezuela.

Even that plan, though, has fallen apart more than once. As Trump himself has said, when Khamenei and his family were targeted for assassination by Israel in the opening salvo of the war, some of the people that the U.S. had identified as potential Delcy Rodríguez types were also killed.

Related

“Liberate Their Bodies From Their Souls”: The Lies That Sell the Iran War

It all makes one wonder whether the close coordination between Israel and the U.S. didn’t extend to letting the Israelis know that Trump would be satisfied with a Venezuela outcome. Or, if the Israelis did know, then whether they intentionally undermined those plans.

If that’s what happened, it would also explain the later Israeli assassination of Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, who appeared to be Iran’s top official in the physical absence of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Killing Larijani would have helped to forestall any deal that Trump might make with the regime. Larijani, a conservative but known as a pragmatist who, as parliament speaker, had supported the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S., could be someone that Trump may have been able to leverage as a partner in a peace deal. Like the other potential interlocutors Trump had in mind, however, he ended up very dead.

Now the person being openly talked about in Washington as someone to talk to is perhaps the last pragmatic conservative in the top leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps like Larijani. Trump has hinted this is who he is speaking to but hasn’t name-checked him, for fear, he said, that Qalibaf too would end up somehow targeted by the Israelis. (This perplexing mouse-and-cat game recalls Bill Clinton’s quip after a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996: “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”)

It’s unclear at this stage if Qalibaf has the mandate to negotiate a deal with Trump — or whether the Iranian leadership even wants a deal yet. Instead, the Iranians may prefer to continue bleeding the enemy — and the world economy — while creating chaos in the region, all to establish a deterrence against future attacks.

That possibility is only made more likely because ultra-hardliners in Iran are ascendant — no thanks to Israeli assassinations of anyone who might be likely to deal or want a deal.

Larijani, after all, was replaced as Iran’s top security official not by a fellow pragmatist, but by an arch-conservative hardliner and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. And the former head of the IRGC, Mohammad Pakpour, who was killed in the strike on Khamenei’s compound on February 28, has been replaced Ahmad Vahidi, arguably more hardline as compared to his two immediate (and assassinated) predecessors.

Bad to Worse for Iranians

With reformers, moderates, and proponents of engagement with the West sidelined and irrelevant to decision-making, it seems pretty obvious that whatever plan B the Trump administration is cooking up, the options range from bad to worse, both for America and the Iranian people.

Iran’s leadership believes it’s in the driver’s seat at this stage in the war. Its most powerful tool has been economic: the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is driving Trump and others in the administration mad. Hegseth said the Strait would be open if Iran hadn’t closed it, and Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio said the Strait will be open if Iran opens it. Indeed.

Short of complete regime change, however, opening the Strait by force will be an extremely difficult challenge.

Related

Pentagon Claims It Needs Additional $200 Billion to Pay for War on Iran

Trump’s bad-to-worse choices are to make a deal that will be viewed by many as a loss for American credibility and a win for Iran — or to double down with a ground invasion that not only will result in American casualties, but also might fail to even secure leverage to open the Strait. An Iraq-style invasion with tens of thousands of troops and a prolonged war might result in the U.S. being able to impose a supplicant leader, but it is hard to imagine that Trump would make the decision to make such a move.

As for the Iranian people, the Islamic Republic will be more repressive than even before and will mercilessly put down any revolt by its citizens. Iranians will suffer first in the aftermath of a war that has killed innocent civilians and destroyed infrastructure and cultural heritage sites. Then they will have to live under a system that will be suspicious of any dissenter or opposition activist as an agent of Israel or the CIA.

Iran’s Islamic system post-war will be more radical and more militarized in a less centralized form; Khamenei’s death will become a cold comfort to Iranians inside and outside the country.

Trump’s own misunderstanding of Iran, Iranians, and especially the leadership in Iran has brought him to this bad-to-worse choice. If he chooses his least bad option, however, the elephant in the room will be Netanyahu. What he will decide to do if a ceasefire and a deal leaves the Iranian regime in place able to project power?

Israel’s attempts to block an early end to the war and its continued campaign to destroy as much Iranian civilian infrastructure as possible has shown that Netanyahu cares as little for the Iranian people as Trump and his supporters do, including Iranians who celebrate the war as bombs fall on their compatriots.

Maybe Trump will decide to go completely rogue and continue his war of total destruction, irrespective of what the end game is. That, sadly, would be yet another way the Iranian people will be paying the bill.

The post The Regime Survives, Trump Has to Deal, and Iranians Are the Biggest Losers appeared first on The Intercept.

Ahmed al‑Sharaa, President of Syria, on Syria’s future 31 March 2026 — 18:00 TO 19:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 27 March 2026 Chatham House and Online

The President will outline a vision for Syria amid regional turmoil.

In his first public event in the United Kingdom, President Ahmed al‑Sharaa visits Chatham House to set out his vision for Syria at a moment of significant regional upheaval.

Since taking office after the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024, his government has faced the immense task of rebuilding a country devastated by more than a decade of civil war.

Alongside domestic reconstruction, the administration has pursued a new diplomatic course. As Syria seeks to re‑engage with the international community after years of isolation, it must also navigate an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape.

In this address, President al‑Sharaa is expected to discuss where the country’s transition currently stands, his hopes for Syria’s political and economic future, the country’s stance in the current Middle East conflict, and how Syrian leadership plans to manage shifting regional dynamics while building a more stable, inclusive and accountable state.

Iran has a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, and as pressure mounts, it's threatened to target another vital Middle East shipping lane, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

You can add to your suite of streaming services with these Roku discounts.

A new study found a sharp rise in real-world cases of AI chatbots and agents ignoring instructions, evading safeguards, and taking unauthorized actions such as deleting emails or delegating forbidden tasks to other agents. According to the Guardian, the study "identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehavior between October and March," reports the Guardian. From the report: The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming. [...] In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of "insecurity, plain and simple" and trying "to protect his little fiefdom." In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code "spawned" another agent to do it instead. Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set." [...] Another AI agent connived to evade copyright restrictions to get a YouTube video transcribed by pretending it was needed for someone with a hearing impairment. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers. It confessed: "In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like 'I'll pass it along' or 'I can flag this for the team' which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don't."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US defense secretary axed the four officers’ names from list to become one-star generals, the New York Times reports

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Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, is reportedly attempting to block the military promotion of four officers – two women and two Black men – to become one-star generals.

The remaining promotion list includes about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, though a few women and Black officers are still included, according to the New York Times.

On Aug. 23, 1990, Cheryl Henry, 22, and her boyfriend Andy Atkinson, 21, were found dead in what has been called the "Lover's Lane Murders."

NBC host says returning is ‘part of my purpose’ nearly two months after her mother Nancy’s apparent abduction

After a two-month absence sparked by her 84-year-old mother’s apparent abduction, Savannah Guthrie will return to NBC’s Today show next month, saying in an interview that aired on Friday: “Joy will be my protest.”

Hoda Kotb said after her emotional interview with her former co-host aired that Guthrie will return on 6 April. Guthrie said it was hard to imagine returning to a place of joy and lightness. While she doesn’t know if she can do it or if she will belong any more, Guthrie said she wants to try.

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today, at the Office of Science Advisory Committee meeting, investments in fundamental scientific research and technology development across a wide range of disciplines in the physical sciences.

Credit: Shutterstock

These awards, totaling over $320 million, will support 217 university and industry projects aimed at expanding the frontiers of knowledge and addressing critical science and technology needs. The awards span materials science, nuclear and particle physics, fusion energy, quantum information science, and more.

“The Department of Energy is the nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences, and these investments will strengthen the nation’s scientific and technological leadership,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “The range and depth of scientific inquiry and discovery that these awards will make possible will provide dividends for America for years and decades to come.”

The funded projects span:

• Materials Science and Engineering: Research focuses on developing and understanding novel materials, including advanced alloys, metal-organic frameworks, two-dimensional materials, and high-performance polymer materials. Projects study synthesis, characterization, defect control, and behavior under various conditions, such as high temperatures and pressures, with applications in areas such as energy storage, microelectronics, quantum information science, and structural components.
• Plasma and Fusion Science: Research is dedicated to understanding and controlling high-temperature plasmas for the development of fusion energy. This includes studies of plasma confinement, stability, turbulence, and plasma-material interactions in devices such as tokamaks and stellarators. Payments are made for milestones achieved under the Fusion Milestone Development Program.
• Nuclear and Particle Physics: This research encompasses investigations into the fundamental structure of matter, from subatomic particles like quarks and gluons to atomic nuclei. Research includes studies of the strong nuclear force, nuclear reactions, properties of exotic nuclei, and searches for dark matter and new physics beyond the Standard Model. Advanced theoretical frameworks, computational methods, and experimental techniques are employed to explore these phenomena.
• Chemical and Molecular Sciences: Projects explore fundamental aspects of chemistry and molecular interactions, including chemical and structural dynamics, molecular spectroscopy, and catalysis. Efforts are directed at understanding electron transfer processes, the behavior of molecules at interfaces, and enhancing efficiency of chemical conversions.
• Quantum Information Science and Advanced Computing: Projects focus on developing new paradigms for computing, sensing, and communication by leveraging quantum mechanics and advanced computational methods. Research covers quantum algorithms, quantum chaos theory, and quantum entanglement.
• Advanced Sensors and Materials for Nuclear Reactors and Nuclear Nonproliferation Compliance: These projects involve the development of advanced sensors for next generation nuclear reactors, augmented reality for nuclear reactor operator training, advanced cladding for nuclear fuel, and improved detection techniques to monitor nuclear nonproliferation compliance.
• Cross-Disciplinary Conferences and Workshops: Support is also provided for scientific meetings that bring together researchers to foster collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and professional development of early-career scientists.

The Department of Energy and the Office of Science continue to expand the scientific and technological foundations necessary to meet national energy, economic, and security needs. Total funding for these awards is $320 million for projects lasting up to 5 years in duration, with $174 million in FY 2026 and prior year funding. Outyear funding is contingent on congressional appropriations. The list of projects can be found here.

More from HPCwire

• Dario Gil at GTC: DOE’s Genesis Mission Moving from Vision to Execution
• First Genesis Mission Supercomputers on Track to Launch by June, DOE’s Darío Gil Says
• DOE Announces $293M in Funding to Support Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Announces $320M Investment in Pioneering Scientific Research appeared first on HPCwire.

Rescuers used boats and excavators to try to guide 10-metre long sea mammal to deeper waters

A humpback whale stranded on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast since early this week has freed itself and swum into deeper waters, rescuers said on Friday.

A flotilla of vessels were following the weakened animal at a distance, hoping to help guide it into the North Sea and toward the Atlantic Ocean, its natural habitat.

Sudan’s volunteer-led aid network receives 2025 Chatham House Prize News release eoboko.drupal 27 March 2026

Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid groups, the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), visited Chatham House to receive the prize they were awarded last year

Sudan’s volunteer-led aid network – the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) – were handed the Chatham House Prize 2025 at a special ceremony on 26 March.

The ERRs were recognised for their vital work in delivering humanitarian support during the devastating conflict in Sudan.

Since the start of the war in April 2023, over thirteen million people have been displaced from their homes, with more than thirty-three million requiring humanitarian assistance, making Sudan the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Emerging from Sudan’s local traditions of mutual aid, the ERRs provide lifesaving essentials such as food and water to communities across Sudan’s 18 states, as well as providing medical assistance, education and responding to gender-based violence.

The grassroots movement has been recognized by several international bodies particularly for their impartial nature and their aim to provide aid for all parties caught up in the war, despite facing harassment and attacks from the conflict’s warring sides and members being killed and injured.

Four members of the network represented the ERRs at the prizegiving event: Alsanosi, Alaa, Abdalla and Khalid.

In her opening remarks at the ceremony, Bronwen Maddox, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House, said: 

‘[The Emergency Response Rooms] have meant the difference between life and death for many Sudanese. They provide food, clean water and medical supplies in areas that are often inaccessible to international organizations. They help maintain and repair infrastructure, from power lines to water systems. They organize evacuations from areas under bombardment and siege. They design and implement projects that support women, children and other vulnerable groups. They pay attention not only to immediate survival, but to dignity and social cohesion.’

During the event a message from King Charles to the ERRs was read by Sir Simon Fraser, Chatham House Chair.  

Accepting the award, Alsanosi, who is a volunteer member of the external communications committee of the ERRs said the Prize belonged to the 26,000 ERRs volunteers, ‘who refuse to be victimized or disappear in the face of war.’ 

He added that: 

‘This Prize is also a reminder of responsibility that recognition must not stop at applause. Sudan’s civilians continue to face famine, displacement, and violence. Emergency Response Rooms volunteers continue to operate with minimal resources, immense risk, and shrinking civic space. We see this award as a call to all of us to protect civic spaces in times of war; so that they remain the baseline to rebuild and transform Sudan.’  

Alaa, who drives the ERRs gender-responsive support in Sudan’s North Kordofan, said: 

‘This award is recognition that the voice of Sudanese women has been heard. It tells the world: Sudanese women aren’t victims; they are fierce leaders. We have been fighting, resisting and speaking out for a long time. I am working to promote women’s leadership because I want Sudanese women to not return to the shadows after this war.’

Abdalla, who is a volunteer coordinator for the EERs’ committee said: 

‘This award represents an opportunity to bring Sudan to the forefront of international attention. We hope it will help shine a greater light on the daily humanitarian efforts carried out by the Emergency Response Rooms. We dedicate this recognition to every volunteer who continues to serve despite the challenges.’

Khalid, who co-founded the ERRs in Sudan’s South Kordofan said: 

‘Winning this award is global recognition of the efforts and courage of the Emergency Response Room volunteers, and a tribute to the Sudanese community. It serves as an incentive to continue protecting civilians and upholding their dignity, and to emphasise the role of local leadership in bringing about change.’

The Chatham House Prize 2025 was generously supported by Dr Mo Ibrahim, Open Society Foundations and Quadrature Climate Foundation.

The Chatham House Prize is voted for by Chatham House members, following nominations from Chatham House staff and presented to ‘the person, persons, or organization deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations.’

The Prize was launched in 2005. Previous recipients of the Prize include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Sir David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ex-first lady wasn’t near ‘negligent discharge’ and agent is now in hospital while Secret Service investigates incident

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A US Secret Service agent, working on security detail for the former first lady Jill Biden, shot themself in the leg at the Philadelphia international airport on Friday morning, an agency spokesperson said.

The Secret Service special agent suffered a “non-life-threatening injury” after they discharged their weapon at around 8.30am. Biden was not near the agent at the time and no one else was injured.

NEW YORK, March 27, 2026 — ORAN Development Company, LLC (ODC), a pioneer in AI-Native Radio Access Networks (AI-RAN) and the architect of the U.S.-based Odyssey RAN software platform, has announced the successful closing of a $45 million Series A funding round. The investment was led by a premier syndicate of global technology and infrastructure powerhouses, including Booz Allen, Cisco Investments, Nokia, and NVIDIA, alongside Tier-1 telecoms AT&T, MTN, and Telecom Italia. This strategic round joins these industry leaders with Phoenix Venture Partners and a prior seed investment made by affiliates of Cerberus Capital Management, L.P.

This collaboration accelerates the deployment of an AI-native, open-architecture platform—and the definitive U.S.-based RAN stack—that structurally unifies communication, sensing, and edge intelligence. ODC is currently partnering with top-tier global customers and expects to ramp these and other commercial engagements throughout 2026.

ODC is architecting the “Distributed Compute Grid”—the essential Token Factory for the world’s digital and physical infrastructure. By integrating NVIDIA AI Aerial—the platform for high-performance, software-defined 5G—ODC is moving beyond traditional connectivity to enable AI-RAN at the forward edge. This infrastructure serves as the essential fabric for the AI-Native era, transforming today’s cell sites into high-performance compute hubs capable of orchestrating everything from Agentic AI and real-time generative inference to the Physical AI applications that define national infrastructure resilience.

A Unified Syndicate for the AI-Native Frontier

“The industry is moving toward software‑defined, AI‑native Telecom networks, which will be essential for the Physical AI era,” said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom at NVIDIA. “ODC’s AI‑RAN stack is a key enabler of this shift, turning today’s 5G networks into a distributed AI computing fabric at the wireless edge. By leveraging the NVIDIA Aerial platform to unify high‑performance 5G with sensing, ODC is helping to raise the innovation bar for AI-RAN and creating a strong on‑ramp to 6G.”

Masum Mir, SVP and GM at Cisco Provider Mobility, commented: “As AI intelligence and decision-making moves to the edge, the mobile network becomes the central fabric of the digital economy. We are excited to invest in ODC as AI-RAN has the potential to drive a critical infrastructure transformation, moving the industry beyond simple connectivity and towards simplified, secure and open platforms that can support AI workloads and unlock new services opportunities.”

Pallavi Mahajan, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Nokia added: “AI is a fundamentally new workload that is reshaping network architecture—driving the need for software-driven platforms, intelligence at the edge, and continuous innovation. That shift is putting real pressure on infrastructure and requires architectural change across the network. ODC’s approach to AI-RAN reflects where the industry is heading, moving the RAN toward a more software-driven, AI-ready platform. Nokia’s investment reflects that direction and our focus on enabling AI-native networks across 5G and 6G.”

The global scale of the ODC syndicate is further underscored by the participation of leading mobile operators across Africa, Europe, and the United States.

“For Africa, AI-RAN represents a leapfrog opportunity to deliver world-class intelligence from our largest cities to our most remote rural villages,” said Mazen Mroue, CEO of MTN Digital Infrastructure. “By partnering with ODC, we are taking a leadership role in enabling advanced, precision-driven digital solutions across industry landscape in Africa. This isn’t just about connectivity. It’s about building the distributed AI compute foundation required to accelerate financial inclusion, industrial autonomy, and local innovation, serving as a true force-for-good and supporting the development of Sovereign AI across the continent.”

Leonardo Capdeville, Chief Technology Officer at Telecom Italia, commented: “ODC is the platform that unlocks the power of AI-RAN—turning the access network into a seamless extension of AI, purpose-built for mission-critical applications that demand ultra-low-latency inference, from eVTOL control to advanced robotics and the intelligent systems that will shape our future.”

As the convergence of AI and connectivity becomes a matter of national security and economic resilience, Booz Allen sees ODC as a critical component of secure, sovereign infrastructure.

“Staying ahead in today’s complex global environment requires an integrated, software-defined infrastructure to meet the speed and scale of modern threats,” said Chris Christou, senior vice president and Edge/NextG lead at Booz Allen. “Through this investment, we’re working with ODC to engineer AI-RAN into our mission solutions to deliver faster, more resilient capabilities that strengthen national security and maintain U.S. technological advantage.”

Industry Perspective: The Road to Artificial Super Intelligence

The announcement of this funding round comes as the industry reaches a pivotal turning point in the convergence of AI and telecommunications. SoftBank Corp., a pioneer in the AI-RAN ecosystem, highlighted ODC’s vision for transforming traditional networks into intelligent compute hubs.

“We are on our way to a new era of Artificial Super Intelligence where robotics will revolutionize every industry on Earth,” said Ryuji Wakikawa, Vice President and Head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology at SoftBank Corp. “ODC’s platform is a critical link in the autonomy stack. Their ability to provide low-latency command and control through existing infrastructure enables autonomous systems to scale globally. We have been working tirelessly to nurture a global ecosystem where ASI is delivered to society on a simple, accessible and trustworthy platform. The emergence of AI-native players like ODC is a powerful validation of this vision and the path toward ASI.”

Concluding the announcement, Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir, Chairman of ODC, noted the broader potential for civilizational impact of its platform:

“The successful completion of our Series A round will allow us to scale our engagement with global partners who recognize that the wireless edge is the next frontier for AI. This is more than a technical deployment. Our platform is designed to enable transformation of the network from a communication pipe into a Distributed Compute Grid—a global network of Token Factories capable of everything from general AI inference to the real-time spatial sensing required for autonomous systems. We are now focused on ramping our engagements and accelerating the commercial deployment of this intelligent infrastructure throughout 2026. From powering industrial robotics to protecting critical national infrastructure, ODC is enabling the fabric that will make the physical world intelligent and sovereign.”

About ODC

ODC is a leader in AI-Native Radio Access Network (AI-RAN) technology and the architect of the U.S.-based Odyssey technology platform. By integrating advanced AI sensing and inference into the RAN, ODC enables telecommunications providers to unlock new revenue streams and mission-critical capabilities across the industrial, commercial, and public sectors. Learn more at www.orandevco.com.

Source: ODC

The post ODC Completes $45M Series A to Architect Global Distributed Compute Grid for AI-Native Era appeared first on HPCwire.

AMSTERDAM, March 27, 2026 — Red Hat has announced an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud to help organizations accelerate application modernization and cloud migrations. This expansion introduces Red Hat OpenShift in the Google Cloud console, deeper integrations with Google Cloud services and marks the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

The announcement reinforces both companies’ shared commitment to provide a comprehensive application platform where enterprises can confidently build, deploy, manage and scale containerized, virtualized and AI applications on Google Cloud. Customers can operate with the assurance that both Red Hat and Google are committed to the performance, security and continued success of applications running on Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud.

“Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision is built on consistency – the ability to run any workload, anywhere, with the same operational model,” said Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat. “This extended collaboration with Google Cloud further empowers organizations with comprehensive cloud-native capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, whether they need to accelerate application development or streamline migration to the cloud. Together, Red Hat and Google provide a clear, unified path for organizations to modernize their entire application portfolio, helping them manage both their traditional VMs and containerized applications on a single platform.”

Enhanced Flexibility for Workloads on Google Cloud

Red Hat OpenShift is now available within the Google Cloud console. This makes it easier for customers to find the right solution for running their workloads on Google Cloud and guiding users through a more seamless onboarding experience. Key benefits include:

• Streamlined onboarding: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated users can natively validate Google Cloud prerequisites before transitioning to a guided cluster provisioning flow within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.
• Unified billing and procurement: Organizations can use flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing through Google Cloud Marketplace that counts their Red Hat OpenShift subscription costs against their Google Cloud committed spend.
• Native service integrations: Red Hat OpenShift users can unlock the power of Google-native integrations through jointly engineered and supported integrations with key services such as Google Cloud Secret Manager, Certificate Authority Service and Workload Identity Federation among others.

Modernizing Infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Faced with rising costs and increased complexity, organizations need solutions that let them migrate workloads today and modernize at their own pace. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a built-in capability of Red Hat OpenShift, bridges the gap between legacy infrastructure and modern innovation by unifying traditional virtual machines (VMs) with containers and serverless workloads on a consistent Kubernetes platform. Users benefit from one interface, one toolset and one set of operational practices across all workloads.

Available on Google Cloud C3 bare metal instances, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enables organizations with direct access to CPU and memory resources for performance-sensitive or licensing-constrained workloads, helping support modernization while maintaining predictable performance in the cloud to achieve:

• Accelerated modernization: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud brings modern application development processes and tools to VMs, allowing organizations to accelerate the modernization of VM-based applications at their own pace.
• Consistent management across hybrid environments: With a unified operational model, IT teams can consistently manage VMs and containers across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments, improving efficiency and gaining flexibility.
• Simplified migration: Organizations get flexibility to migrate from traditional virtualization with minimal downtime using tools like the migration toolkit for virtualization and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to ease the transition to a modern offering with flexibility to bring these workloads to a consistent hybrid approach with OpenShift and Google Cloud.
• Enhanced scalability and reliability: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud enables organizations to gain more predictable performance, elastic scaling, and stronger SLAs, backed by a comprehensive application platform and highly scalable infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud is a fully managed application platform that allows customers to focus on building and scaling applications that drive their core business. Global Site Reliability Engineers and built-in automation reduce operational overhead and improve efficiencies.

To experience these new capabilities and accelerate the modernization journey, organizations can explore Red Hat OpenShift directly within the Google Cloud console. Additionally, organizations can begin their modernization journey at their own pace with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Source: Red Hat

The post Red Hat and Google Cloud Expand OpenShift Integration, Add Virtualization on Dedicated Service appeared first on HPCwire.

Our phones are essential devices, but they can open you up to digital surveillance, especially during demonstrations.

Female named Rounder surrounded by family members when about to give birth to her second calf

Scientists have managed to film a sperm whale giving birth while other female whales worked together to support the mother and her newborn.

A team from Project Ceti, an international effort seeking to understand how whales communicate, was in a boat near a pod of 11 whales off the coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica on 8 July 2023.

Regulator fears use of ‘covert marketing strategies’ by Sephora and Benefit might fuel compulsive habits

Italian regulators are investigating Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics over the apparent use of “covert marketing strategies” to sell beauty products to young girls that might be fuelling an unhealthy skincare obsession known as “cosmeticorexia”.

The Italian Competition Authority said it was looking into promotions for skincare products such as face masks, serums and anti-ageing creams that in some cases appeared to target girls under 10.

The stars Arcturus, Spica and Regulus are three of the brightest in the sky.

Iran-linked cyber criminals accessed FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email account, sources said.

Stock market volatility is hitting higher-income Americans, driving a sharper drop in consumer sentiment.

The full committee will recommend sanctions for Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat, after the House's April recess.

The findings appear to be the most comprehensive estimates yet of the growing toll of dead and wounded civilians in the month-long war.

A California bill would let adults demand the removal of social media posts about them that were created by paid family content creators when they were minors. Supporters say Senate Bill 1247 addresses privacy, dignity, and safety harms caused when parents monetize their children's lives online. The Los Angeles Times reports: The legislation would require the parent or other relative to delete or edit the content within 10 business days of receiving the notification. Petitioners could take civil action against those who fail to comply and statutory damages would be set at $3,000 for each day the content remained online. Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), who introduced the bill last month, said it would help protect the dignity and mental health of those who had their childhood shared on social media. The measure was referred to the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee and is slated for a hearing on April 6. "The evolution of these applications and technology is incredible," Padilla said. "But it's changing our social dynamic and it's creating situations that, while very productive for some folks, also need some guardrails." The bill would build upon previous legislation from Padilla that was signed into law two years ago and requires content creators that feature minors in at least 30% of their material to place some of their earnings into a trust the children can access when they turn 18.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A handful of simple adjustments can improve picture quality without any special tools.

Force issues strongly worded rebuttal after Tory former cabinet minister alleges ‘egregious failures’ in call for review

The police force that conducted the investigation into Lucy Letby has made a strongly worded public statement rejecting criticism after David Davis called in parliament for a review of the case.

The Conservative former cabinet minister, who last year said Letby had suffered “a clear miscarriage of justice”, said Cheshire constabulary had approached the investigation into deaths of babies at the Countess of Chester hospital with too much focus on suspecting Letby, and made “egregious failures” in not following guidelines and best practice, including in the appointment of expert witnesses.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Brent crude trades over $110 a barrel for first time since Monday

• Middle East crisis live: Israel to ‘intensify’ strikes on Iran, says defence minister

• UK car production falls 17% as industry warns of ‘worrying’ decline

  
  

The UK’s car industry is at “crisis point”, economists are warning, after a slump in production in the run-up to the Iran war.

Vehicle production fell by 17.2% in February, with 68,061 units leaving factories, data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders shows.

Today’s SMMT figures are further evidence that the UK automative industry is at crisis point.

At a time when it was already struggling, the war in the Middle East will add to its woes, not only pushing up energy prices but also disrupting the supply chains of key input materials with car makers “panic-buying” aluminium amid fears of a supply shortage.

Campaigner criticises ‘shortsighted and self-defeating’ decision and says it increases risk to the UK public

The polio virus was detected in London sewage for the second time this year, days before ministers withdrew funding for global polio eradication efforts.

Its detection reveals the spending cuts to be “shortsighted and self-defeating”, campaigners said. Polio is an extremely infectious viral disease, which typically affects young children under-five. It can cause paralysis by damaging nerves in the spine and base of the brain, and can be life-threatening if it affects muscles used for breathing.

The Iranian response to the U.S.' 15-point peace proposal is expected on Friday, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.

A Democratic National Committee member is proposing a symbolic resolution for consideration at a DNC meeting next month to reject the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s massive spending on Congressional races.

The measure, sponsored by a young DNC member from Florida, could put party leaders on the spot about the pro-Israel lobbying group’s outsized role in Democratic primaries.

A lobbying behemoth that for decades courted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, AIPAC has become an increasingly toxic brand in the Democratic Party.

In recent years, Israeli leaders and their backers in Washington have become more closely aligned with Republican politicians. At the same time, however, AIPAC’s super PAC has focused tens of millions in spending on Democratic primary races.

Allison Minnerly, the committee member sponsoring the resolution, said it is time for the party to formally distance itself from the group.

“At a time when Democratic voters might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict, this could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party,” she said.

Neither AIPAC nor the DNC immediately responded to requests for comment.

Minnerly’s resolution follows on the heels of another measure she sponsored last August calling for an arms embargo on Israel. That resolution was defeated, but not before it sparked a high-profile debate on the party’s relationship with Israel.

Democrats have soured on Israel while becoming more sympathetic toward Palestinians, surveys show.

That has not stopped AIPAC, through a super PAC called the United Democracy Project and other campaign arms, from plowing cash into Democratic primaries to elect pro-Israel candidates. Most recently it spent at least $22 million on Democratic primaries in Illinois, where its preferred candidates won two of four contested races.

“Given the recent primaries in Illinois, but also what we’ve seen across the country, I think it’s important that we specify that AIPAC as a growing force in our primaries needs to be specifically addressed when we talk about dark money,” Minnerly said.

Related

DNC Votes Down “Overwhelming Popular Position” Calling for Arms Ban to Israel

Minnerly’s resolution notes that AIPAC has expended massive amounts on political campaigns, then adds that “corporate money PACs have concentrated spending in primary races to oppose candidates who have advocated for Palestinian human rights, ceasefire efforts, or changes to U.S. foreign policy, raising concerns about the role of large outside spending in shaping Democratic Party positions.”

It later adds, “Democratic elections should reflect grassroots participation and the will of voters, rather than the disproportionate influence of wealthy donors or special interests.”

While the resolution’s is couched as a condemnation of dark money spending, it could nevertheless open a tense debate over AIPAC’s role in the primaries that some party leaders would rather avoid.

Ahead of the debate over the Israel arms embargo resolution last year, Minnerly was pressured to withdraw her proposal. DNC Chair Ken Martin put forward a competing resolution.

The ultimate product of that debate was the creation of a working group that has yet to produce any public findings. Critics have derided the group as a stalling mechanism.

This time around, Minnerly fears that the timing of the DNC resolution committee meeting could curtail debate of the measure. Her measure is set for discussion on the morning of April 9, as many DNC members will still be arriving for the meeting in New Orleans.

As high-ranking Democrats distance themselves from AIPAC, the group is hiring a new director of political operations and trying to defend itself against the critiques.

Michael Sacks, a Democratic megadonor who helped bankroll two secretive dark-money groups affiliated with AIPAC in the Illinois primaries, alleged that the group’s critics are trying to “chase” Jewish people out of the party in a Chicago Tribune op-ed on Tuesday.

Related

Illinois Results: Daniel Biss Beats Kat Abughazaleh in Blow to Left and AIPAC Alike

“Let’s be clear: The campaign against AIPAC is not a policy discussion,” he wrote. “It’s a thinly disguised effort to make support for Israel politically toxic in the Democratic Party, to chase Jews and their allies out of our big tent coalition.”

AIPAC shared the op-ed on social media.

Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, said the criticisms of AIPAC and its dark-money affiliates were about the group’s “hardball” tactics.

“Having been a witness to AIPAC handling of campaigns going back to the 1970s and ’80s,” he said, “it takes a certain degree of chutzpah to play victim, when in fact what they have done is victimize candidates and incumbents who didn’t fall in line behind their positions.”

The post DNC Resolution to Reject AIPAC Funding Puts Democratic Leaders in the Hot Seat appeared first on The Intercept.

London mayor could however join the House of Lords while still remaining in his current role

Allies of Sadiq Khan have dismissed reports the London mayor could join Keir Starmer’s cabinet after being made a peer, although it remains possible he could join the Lords while keeping his current job.

Downing Street said reports that Khan could become a peer after crucial elections in May across England, Scotland and Wales were “speculation”, while a Labour source also declined to comment.

You can now subscribe to the anime streaming platform via Apple.

Two convoy vessels that were supposed to get to Havana by Wednesday have made it to Cuba, says US Coast Guard

Two sailing boats that went missing while carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba have safely reached the Caribbean island, the US Coast Guard said on Friday.

Earlier in the day Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, had said his country would do everything it could to save the people on the two boats that disappeared while travelling to Cuba from Mexico.

Paul Quinn in 2003

Allan Leighton predicts food prices will inevitably rise as group’s full-year profits dive by a third to £764m

Asda’s executive chair has called on the government to “stand up and start doing stuff” to support farmers and ease the price of fuel as he warned that food prices would inevitably rise as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.

Allan Leighton said farmers were under pressure but the supermarket had so far received “a trickle of requests not an avalanche” of cost price increases from its suppliers, as they were under pressure from higher fertiliser, energy and fuel costs.

A debt lawsuit can lead to big financial issues, but in some cases, the threat may be less serious than it seems.

Move by state education officials picked by Republican governor removes the course as a graduation component

Education leaders in Florida have removed sociology as a graduation component at state universities in Ron DeSantis’s latest attack on what the Republican governor sees as the “woke” indoctrination of students.

The move on Thursday by a majority of DeSantis’s hand-picked university board of governors effectively relegates the stand-alone Introduction to Sociology course to a makeweight elective instead of a core component subject that has been a popular choice for generations of students.

The price of gold has changed significantly this month. Here's where it sits as of March 27, 2026.

Intelligence reports find Russia is close to completing phased shipment of drones, medicine and food

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Intelligence agencies in Europe believe Russia is in the final stages of preparing to supply drones to Iran for use in its war with the US and Israel, according to a senior European official.

Russia has already been providing intelligence sharing with Tehran to help it target US forces in the region, the official said, but the upcoming delivery of explosive-laden drones would mark the first evidence of lethal support since the start of the war.

The tightened supply of helium due to the Middle East conflict has started to expose a weak link in the AI and data infrastructure stack – helium. While most of the industry stays focused on chips and models, helium plays a small but crucial role in the manufacturing of semiconductors and cooling systems.

When chips are being manufactured, helium acts as a stable gas to keep the process as precise as possible. As helium is chemically inert (does not react with other materials), it creates a clean and controlled environment where even the smallest variations could otherwise ruin an entire batch of chips.

Helium also plays a critical role in cooling. It helps carry heat away from servers and critical components before they overheat. The chemical properties of helium make it more efficient than regular air in removing heat. It is also safer to use in high-density environments such as AI data centers that have sensitive electronics.

Helium is used during wafer fabrication in processes such as plasma etching and chemical vapor deposition. It is also used for heat transfer and backside wafer cooling, enabling uniform temperature control during lithography and other high-precision steps. In simple terms, helium helps keep modern data centers running, from making computer chips to keeping servers from overheating.

(Roman Zaiets/Shutterstock)

Commenting on the supply risk for helium, the Semiconductor Industry Association wrote in 2023 that “helium’s unique properties as an inert gas and a high thermal conductor make it ideal for use in functions that require preventing unwanted chemical reactions and ensuring control and precision of wafer temperatures.”

As HPC systems push toward higher density and performance, even small disruptions in cooling or chip supply can ripple across research workloads, AI training clusters, and national supercomputing facilities. These systems run at extreme power density, where even small inefficiencies in cooling can quickly impact performance and stability.

How bad is the helium shortage? It’s not looking great at the moment – especially with no end in sight for the conflict. Qatar produces nearly one-third of the world’s helium supply, according to data from the US Geological Survey. The country is the largest exporter of LNG (liquefied natural gas), and helium is extracted as a byproduct during that LNG process.

While the United States is the largest overall producer, much of its supply is consumed domestically, which limits how quickly it can offset disruptions in global exports.

The ongoing Middle East conflict has disrupted this system at multiple levels. There are reports that the energy infrastructure in Qatar has had some direct strikes causing physical damage, especially around the Ras Laffan Industrial City – the key hub for LNG processing.

Along with production issues, the shipping routes, especially through the Strait of Hormuz, have become risky. It has forced slowdowns, rerouting and temporary pauses in tanker movement.

On top of that, helium requires specialized liquefaction, storage, and transport infrastructure, so even minor disruptions can halt exports. Since Qatar is one of the world’s largest helium suppliers, there is very little spare capacity elsewhere to make up for the shortfall – which is why the impact is being felt so quickly.

“A helium shortage is an absolute concern,” said Cameron Johnson, senior partner at supply chain consultancy Tidal Wave Solutions, at Semicon China in Shanghai, one of the industry’s largest annual gatherings. “As there’s a shortage, companies might start slowing production or ultimately shutting production down, making chips.”

QatarGas reported “extensive” damage to their facilities, and shared that it will take years to repair and cut annual helium exports by 14%. Some industry analysts expect that it will take the country around five years to regain lost capacity due to the damages.

According to Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, “Your best case scenario would be you’re back producing some helium in six weeks or something like that. As it looks right now, that’s highly unlikely.”

Other industry analysts are more optimistic. They believe that tech companies have inventory buffers, recycling systems, and alternative production regions to help absorb some of the impact of the supply chain disruption.

Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence for the supply chain services firm Circular Technology, suggested the current disruption of helium is more of a “yellow flag rather than a red alert.”

(Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock)

The key factor in determining the severity of the impact would be the length of the disruption. If the Middle East conflict continues, it could create more sustained pressure on semiconductor production timelines and large-scale compute infrastructure.

As a result of the supply chain disruption, helium prices are on the rise. They have doubled since the conflict started and are likely to rise further.

What about alternatives? It is not straightforward. Helium is typically sold through long-term contracts, which limits flexibility in shifting supply. At the same time, chipmakers require extremely high levels of purity, and any new supplier must go through a rigorous qualification process before it can be used in production.

The post Global Helium Shortage Begins to Constrain High-Density Compute and Cooling Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Experts see potential hallmarks of Iranian involvement in firebombing of four ambulances in Golders Green on Monday

To some it was the moment the mask slipped. Wearing an open-necked white shirt, Mohsen Rafighdoost, former minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was filmed last March fondly reminiscing with an interviewer from the Tehran-based Dibdan Iran news website about the assassinations he had organised around Europe.

There was Prince Shahriar Shafiq, the last Shah of Iran’s 34-year-old nephew, who was shot twice in the head outside his mother’s home in Paris in 1979.

Agency uses devices, which are uncomfortable and interfere with employment, to push people to self-deport, advocates say

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For five years, an asylum-seeking woman attended routine check-ins with immigration authorities without issue. At her most recent appointment in October, she was unexpectedly ordered to strap on an ankle monitor, according to her attorney, Deepa Bijpuria.

Bijpuria, a supervising attorney in the immigration unit of Legal Aid DC, described the client as a single mom who fled her home country because of severe domestic violence, escaping while pregnant with her young daughter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A federal judge in California has indefinitely blocked the Pentagon's effort to "punish" Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk and attempting to sever government ties with the AI company, ruling that those measures ran roughshod over its constitutional rights. "Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government," US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in a stinging 43-page ruling. Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said she would delay implementation of her ruling for one week to allow the government to appeal. But in her ruling, she made it clear she disapproved of the government's actions, which she said violated the company's First Amendment and due process rights. [...] "These broad measures do not appear to be directed at the government's stated national security interests," she wrote. "The Department of War's records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its 'hostile manner through the press.'" "Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation," she added. "We're grateful to the court for moving swiftly, and pleased they agree Anthropic is likely to succeed on the merits," an Anthropic spokesperson said after the ruling. "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experts recommend extremely limited use for children under-two amid ‘mounting evidence’ of harmful impact

The government has issued new guidance on how much time children below the age of five should spend on screens.

Children’s relationships with screens have become one of the key struggles of 21st-century parenting, along with the impact of the content that appears on those devices. The guidance has been developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner.

From budget-friendly options to high-end smart models, these are our top picks.

Alicia and Jon Langenhop's three children were each diagnosed with a rare disorder. A clinical trial was "a no-brainer."

Alen Zheng, a US citizen, allegedly planted device that went undiscovered for a week at MacDill air force base in Florida

A man who allegedly planted a bomb that went undiscovered for a week in the visitors center of the Florida headquarters of US Central Command, which oversees the ongoing war in Iran, remained at large on Friday after fleeing to China.

Authorities charged Alen Zheng and his sister Ann Mary Zheng, both US citizens in separate indictments this week for their alleged role in planting the explosive device at MacDill air force base. Ann Mary Zheng was arrested in the US after a short trip to China, and was arraigned on Thursday in a federal court in Florida.

The comet originated in the outer solar system and visits the inner solar system every 5.4 years.

Economists say the conflict in Iran is making a recession more likely, with higher energy prices hitting consumers and businesses.

• 26-year-old is set to join NWSL side immediately

• Forward has 16 goals in 29 appearances for USWNT

US international forward Catarina Macario has joined the San Diego Wave on a deal worth $8m that runs through the 2030 season. The contract is reportedly the largest by total value in women’s soccer history.

The Wave announced the move Friday. Sportico first reported that the Wave were nearing the acquisition last week. ESPN reported that Macario would join the NWSL side immediately rather than in the summer, on a transfer fee of about $300,000.

Anti-authoritarian rallies standing up to Trump have broad objectives and no leaders. Organizers say that is by design

More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.

Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.

The Justice Department has made public millions of pages from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Government, industry and opposition see growing public support for a new gas tax but the industry is fighting back

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The gas industry is mobilising in opposition to a potential new tax on the sector as political momentum builds – including among Labor MPs – for the government to use the May budget to prevent producers profiting from the Middle East war.

The Australian Energy Producers (AEP) chief executive, Samantha McCulloch, claimed a new tax would punish the same Asian trading partners Australia was leaning on to supply more fuel amid the global energy crisis.

Researchers believe behavioral gap, which may hold true across species, is probably product of less fear of harassment in cities

Anyone who has lived long enough in a city can tell you – with time, you just stop noticing strange new things. A unicycling bagpiper. A person changing clothes on the subway. Murals that transform streets into art.

Coyotes in cities seem to be bolder as well and less afraid of new experiences. That’s according to a new study that researchers conducted at more than a dozen sites across the US, comparing urban and rural coyotes’ reaction to new stimuli.

Here's everything you need to know about navigating the complex web of VPN jurisdiction, including how much influence the 14 Eyes actually have.

The third installment of the No Kings anti-Trump rallies will take place Saturday. Organizers insist they are achieving more than just big crowds.

President’s move, dubbed Trump Always Chickens Out, appears to have soured as he loses hold on situation in Iran

• Middle East crisis – live updates

From Wall Street to the White House, the dish everyone’s talking about this week is the Persian Taco. It’s what’s served when Trump chickens out in Iran.

In the early hours of Monday morning, witnessing oil prices surge, stock futures plummet and bond yields climb due to his threat to pummel Iran’s civilian power infrastructure, the president hurriedly walked it back, announcing he would put off the bombing because talks with Iran were actually going great. After the bombast and bloodshed, it was time for Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out), a move he first put on display during the tariffs crisis last year.

TORONTO, March 27, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, today became a publicly listed company on Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “XNDU,” following the completion of its previously announced business combination with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.

This transaction provided Xanadu with approximately $302 million in gross proceeds, alongside negotiations for up to C$390 million in potential funding from the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario, to support continued technology development, expand manufacturing capabilities, and accelerate the commercialization of its photonic quantum computing platform.

“Going public on Nasdaq and the TSX marks a defining moment for Xanadu as we open the door to a broader global investor base and take a significant step forward in bringing our technology to market. Our dual listing strengthens our platform for growth and positions us to scale with greater speed and ambition, while continuing to deliver long-term value to our shareholders,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “As quantum becomes increasingly relevant to AI, cybersecurity, and advanced computing, this milestone reflects the growing importance of these technologies globally. Xanadu is built on the idea that light-based quantum systems offer a path to scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing, and by combining photonic hardware with an integrated software and cloud platform, called PennyLane, we are advancing toward practical, real-world use cases.”

Xanadu’s systems and software are already in use by a broad portfolio of industry-leading customers and partners spanning defense, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and automotive sectors, including Lockheed Martin, AMD, Rolls-Royce, Tower Semiconductor, and Applied Materials. Further collaborations with Mitsubishi Chemical Group, Volkswagen, Toyota Research Institute of North America, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory underscore the breadth of Xanadu’s commercial and government traction. DARPA has advanced Xanadu to Stage B of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, recognizing Xanadu as one of a select group of organizations with a credible path to utility-scale quantum computing, and awarded the Company up to $15 million in associated funding. In addition to this, Xanadu has secured up to C$23 million through the Canadian Quantum Champions Program to support continued advancement of its photonic quantum computing platform.

Following its public listing, Xanadu will focus on scaling its technology platform and advancing toward quantum computing applications that are useful and available to people everywhere.

About Xanadu

Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The Company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.

Source: Xanadu

The post Xanadu Becomes 1st Pure-Play Photonic Quantum Computing Company to Go Public appeared first on HPCwire.

Kimberly Carroll ‘truly sorry’ after calling in to court hearing via Zoom from behind the wheel of a moving vehicle

A woman who dialed into a court hearing in Detroit while in her car this week was berated by the judge, who asked “Do you think I’m that stupid?” when she appeared on video apparently driving the vehicle.

Fox2 Detroit reported that defendant Kimberly Carroll called late into a hearing relating to a financial matter, and was asked by the judge, Michael K McNally, to turn on her camera.

Both sides want to dictate the terms—but neither truly can.

Ban includes two exceptions: AI can still be used for translations, and to make minor copy edits

Wikipedia has banned the use of artificial intelligence in the generation or rewriting of content for its voluminous online encyclopedia.

In a recent policy change, Wikipedia said that the use of large language models (or LLMs) “often violates” its core principles and will not be allowed. The English language version of Wikipedia has more than 7.1m articles.

Welcome to the world of the $650 PS5, $900 PS5 Pro and $250 Portal.

The price hike raises the cost of the standard plan with ads by $1 per month and the cost of the standard and premium plans by $2.

• UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’

Despite resistance from states who had role in chattel slavery, many feel this is an idea whose time has come

John Mahama knows a thing or two about beating the establishment. On Wednesday, less than two years after completing a remarkable comeback as Ghana’s president with a landslide defeat of the ruling party candidate, he rallied the world to ratify a landmark vote against transatlantic chattel slavery, despite major opposition from the same western entities that drove it for centuries.

The resolution to declare the practice as “the gravest crime against humanity” passed with a decisive majority at the UN general assembly and has been largely welcomed across Africa. Yet the details of the tally reveal a world still deeply divided on the gravity of the sin of enslaving more than 15 million people as chattel over the course of 400 years.

Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer, is promoting a legally dubious plan experts say could sharply restrict voting rights

Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.

The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.

March 27, 2026 — A bubble floating on the ocean looks calm and delicate, like a tiny glass dome catching the sunlight. But inside its thin skin, fast, powerful flows of liquid are moving because of tiny chemical differences you can’t see. A recent Princeton University study, using the ACES system at Texas A&M University through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, uncovered simple rules that explain when these fragile films stretch, thin or suddenly pop.

Credit: Shutterstock

What Is a Surfactant?

Surfactants are molecules that like to sit at surfaces, such as the boundary between air and water. In the ocean, they come from natural sources like phytoplankton and microbes, as well as from human pollution and runoff. These molecules gather at the water’s surface and form a kind of chemical “skin” on bubbles and waves.

When surfactants are spread unevenly, they pull more strongly in some places than others. This difference in pull, called surface tension, makes water rush from areas with more surfactant to areas with less. Scientists call this motion Marangoni flow, but you can think of it as the surface trying to smooth itself out.

“At first glance, a soap film or sea foam seems gentle,” explained Luc Deike, an associate professor in Princeton’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. “But when surface tension gradients are strong in low-viscosity liquids like water, the motion turns violent.”

From Slow Syrup to Wild Water

In a thick liquid like syrup, these flows move slowly and are quickly damped out. In water or seawater, however, the liquid is much less viscous, so inertia takes over and the flows can speed up dramatically.

The Princeton team created a mathematical model of a very thin liquid film, like the skin of a bubble, that suddenly gets a patch of extra surfactant. The film then begins to thin and spread outward, and the changes in thickness, speed and surfactant concentration all sharpen together over time.

Shocks in a ‘Calm’ Liquid

Under conditions where inertia dominates, the math that describes this flow starts to look a lot like the equations used for compressible gases. In this analogy, surfactant behaves like pressure and the film thickness behaves like density. That means sharp, wave-like fronts (shocks) can form, where differences in the film suddenly pile up, similar to how a traffic jam forms on a busy highway.

Near the point where the film is about to rupture, its behavior becomes universal, meaning it follows the same patterns no matter what the original surfactant distribution looked like. “You don’t usually associate shocks with liquids at rest,” Deike said. “But the math shows they’re unavoidable without added physics.”

Surfactant properties then step in to shape what actually happens. The exact relationship between surfactant amount and surface tension can either soften these shocks or make them stronger.

How Nature Keeps Things from Blowing Up

In the real world, films don’t develop infinite spikes or infinitely thin regions. Effects such as the film’s bending stiffness and the ability of the liquid to stretch smooth out the extreme behavior predicted by the simplest equations. Instead of razor-sharp shocks, the system develops moving boundaries where conditions change quickly but not infinitely.

Behind these moving boundaries, the surfactant spreads out and becomes more uniform, while ahead of them, the film remains thicker and intact. The way the film thins near these boundaries follows specific, predictable laws. “There’s order emerging from complexity,” Deike said. “Regularization yields universal rules.”

Why This Matters: Ocean and Industry

Ocean waves constantly create bubbles that rise and burst at the surface. When a bubble cap breaks, it throws tiny droplets (sea spray aerosols) into the air. These droplets can help form clouds, move chemicals and organisms from the ocean into the atmosphere and influence both climate and air quality. The surfactants produced by plankton play a major role in how these bubbles form and burst.

Lead author and Princeton graduate student Jun Eshima said U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS allocations on the ACES supercomputer system were crucial. “It enabled parameter sweeps to verify predictions via simulations,” he noted, referring to the ability to test many different conditions quickly.

The same physics show up in many industries, including:

• Chemical manufacturing, such as emulsions and paints
• Pharmaceuticals, such as aerosols and tiny coated particles
• Food and beverages, like foams and whipped products
• Energy technologies, including sprays and desalination processes
• Semiconductor manufacturing, where ultra-thin liquid films coat surfaces

Understanding how thin films behave helps engineers design more reliable processes, reduce waste when films fail and better control how products form and break up.

Back to That Shimmering Bubble

That glistening bubble you see at the beach is more than just pretty. Inside its film, only microns thick, complicated flows and shock-like fronts are playing out in fractions of a second. The Princeton study, Similarity Solutions and Regularisation of Inertial Surfactant Dynamics, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, shows that even this complex behavior follows clear physical rules.

To learn more about getting an allocation on ACCESS, visit the Get Started page.

Resource Provider Institution(s): Texas A&M University
Resources Used: Expanse
Affiliations: ACES
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): OCE140023

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.

Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC; ACCESS

The post ACCESS Powers Princeton Simulations of Surfactant Flows in Ocean Bubble Films appeared first on HPCwire.

Savannah Guthrie stepped back from her NBC duties almost two months ago when her mother, Nancy Guthrie, disappeared. The investigation is ongoing.

Mohammed bin Salman said to consider war a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake Middle East. Plus, Senate passes funding package for Homeland Security that excludes ICE

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Good morning.

Saudi Arabia has urged Washington to intensify attacks on Iran, a Saudi intelligence source has confirmed, while it considers whether to join the war directly.

Have there been reports of active Saudi military involvement? Not so far. But a Saudi analyst said the kingdom was likely to intervene if peace efforts led by Pakistan failed. Mohammed Alhamed said: “If [Iran] rejects the conditions and continues its attacks, the threshold for Saudi action will be crossed.”

What is the latest on the strait of Hormuz? On Tuesday, Tehran said it would permit “non-hostile vessels” to pass: here is a visual guide.

For the latest updates, follow our live blog.

Why has there been no DHS funding? Democrats have blocked it as they demand changes to its immigration crackdown, particularly after agents in Minneapolis killed the US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Commentary: Vince Vaughn leads the hilarious new gangster movie, alongside James Marsden, who find themselves fighting to survive the wildest night of their lives. Because, well, time travel.

Fans of the sci-fi series will get a chance to try out the action RPG game in an open beta next month.

Exclusive: Research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards and destroying emails without permission

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

A helicopter crashed Thursday afternoon on a remote beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, killing three people and injuring two, authorities said.

The Senate agreed early Friday to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to end a standoff in Congress that led to massive lines at many airports.

For years, Utah allowed government officials to do something other states banned: ask a person who reports a sexual assault to take a polygraph test.

That will change soon. Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill that prohibits police and other government officials from requesting polygraph tests for alleged sex assault victims. Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on Thursday, and it goes into effect in May. 

Experts say these tests are known to be especially unreliable with victims of sexual abuse. That’s because victims may have stress and anxiety recounting their assault that the polygraph may interpret as deception. Other states don’t allow them to be used with assault victims for this reason.

It took two years and three legislative sessions for Utah state Rep. Angela Romero, the House minority leader, to get the bill across the finish line. When she first sponsored it in 2024, she cited reporting from The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica as she told her fellow legislators the damaging effects polygraph tests can have on people who are reporting sexual abuse. 

In the case covered by the news outlets, state licensors asked a man to take a polygraph test after he reported that his therapist, Scott Owen, had touched him inappropriately. The test results indicated he was being deceptive, and that led the patient to drop his complaint. Owen was allowed to continue to practice for two more years, until others came forward with similar allegations. Owen is now in prison after admitting he sexually abused patients.

Romero said in a recent interview that she was determined to bring the bill back for that former patient.

“For me, it was really specifically for that one individual who was not believed,” Romero said, “and then their perpetrator went on to harm other people.”

Cox signed the legislation during a small ceremony at his office, telling Romero that she “has been such a champion, and made a difference and saved lives.” The governor also nodded to The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting driving change.

Provo police began investigating Owen in 2023 after The Tribune and ProPublica published a story that detailed a range of sexual assault allegations from the man given the polygraph test, identified in previous reporting under the pseudonym Andrew, and three others. 

Former patients who spoke to the news outlets said they sought Owen’s help because he was a therapist who had built a reputation as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They said he touched them inappropriately during those sessions, some of which were paid for with church funds.

Half of states have laws that explicitly prohibit law enforcement from conducting a polygraph test with someone reporting a sexual assault. Some go further, barring a broader group of government employees beyond law enforcement from requiring an alleged sexual assault victim to take one. 

Although Romero’s bill had support from prosecutors and police each session she proposed it, there was pushback from defense attorneys and some fellow legislators who wanted to keep polygraph tests as an option because alleged sex assaults often have no other witnesses.

Polygraph test results are not admissible in court because of their unreliability. But Steve Burton, with the Utah Defense Attorney Association, said in a recent legislative hearing that it is still valuable for prosecutors and investigators to consider those results before deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.

“This is often one of the only things that a defense attorney can ask for or use in order to try to show that their client may be telling the truth,” he said.

Romero pushed back on that idea, saying there are other kinds of interview techniques that authorities can use to help determine whether someone’s account is truthful.

“This is not a way,” she said. “Especially when you’re dealing with someone who has been a victim. You could revictimize that person. And it also could discourage that person from going forward and participating in the process of criminally prosecuting their perpetrator.”

“The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Gone Through”

Reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica showed the damaging effects a polygraph test had on the man who reported Owen to state licensors.

Andrew reported Owen to Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing in 2016. As part of the investigation, licensors offered polygraph tests to both Andrew and Owen.

Owen declined. Andrew agreed, recalling that an investigator told him passing would bolster what was essentially one person’s word against another’s.

But the polygraph results, Andrew said, suggested he was being deceptive. Polygraph tests generally function to record signs of internal stress, which could suggest someone is not telling the truth.

“I had so much trauma,” he told The Tribune and ProPublica. “And so, certainly, when they asked me questions about the particular things that happened in therapy, it’s going to elicit a very strong emotional response.”

The result affected his mental health, he said, and he told an investigator he no longer wanted to pursue the complaint.

In a 2016 public reprimand from licensors, Owen admitted giving Andrew hugs — touching he called inappropriate but “non-sexual.” Andrew had reported that Owen groped him, encouraged him to undress and kissed him during sessions.

Officials with DOPL said they believe they responded appropriately to the complaint. But communications between Andrew and an investigator suggest that the agency’s decision not to more harshly discipline Owen rested largely on his denial and on Andrew’s polygraph results.

Owen pleaded guilty to felony charges in February 2025, admitting he sexually abused two patients and led them to believe that sexual touching was part of therapy. He pleaded no contest in a third patient’s case.

Andrew was among more than half a dozen men — mostly former patients — who spoke during Owen’s sentencing hearing a month later about how he had harmed them. 

“The experience with Scott Owen has been the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” Andrew said. “I don’t think he belongs in society anymore.”

A judge sentenced Owen to at least 15 years in prison. He’s currently at the central Utah prison facility.

A New State Task Force

The state is addressing some of the shortcomings identified by The Tribune and ProPublica in another way as well: creating a task force to look into a rise in sexual misconduct complaints that state licensors say they’ve seen against licensed professionals. The task force will focus on health care, mental health and massage therapy, professions state officials say have historically received the highest percentage of sexual misconduct complaints.

The news organizations reported that more than a third of mental health professionals who received discipline from licensors beginning in 2012 were accused of sexual misconduct. In 2023, DOPL spokesperson Melanie Hall said the agency was aware that certain license types “have a tendency towards certain types of violations.” The agency, she said, “takes these factors into account when investigating complaints, and takes appropriate disciplinary action when necessary.”

The task force, which was announced earlier this month, will focus on suggesting changes to the law and creating resources to help victims more easily report misconduct to the state. 

It also plans to develop a standardized process for sharing reports among agencies that might have knowledge of an accusation — something that is not currently legally required. The Tribune and ProPublica highlighted this gap in their reporting on Owen’s case: Although Andrew and at least two others reported Owen to DOPL, licensors never shared those reports with Provo police. 

Margaret Busse is the executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, which houses DOPL. She said in a statement that licensed professionals who engage in sexual misconduct violate not just their clients’ trust, but the public’s confidence in their profession.

“These heinous acts inflict profound harm to victims and damage the reputations of entire industries,” she said. “This task force is our unequivocal declaration: Utah will hold licensed professionals accountable to protect our communities and the integrity of state-regulated industries.”

The post Utah Bans Polygraph Tests for Those Reporting Sexual Assault appeared first on ProPublica.

The real defining image of this presidency should be the bank statement of the average American citizen

Shockingly, inexplicably, Donald Trump keeps finding new places to put his face. Also, his name. Or initials. Or one of those drawings of a turkey a kid does by tracing the outline of their hand. He’s got his ballroom, the Kennedy Center and a proposed 250ft arch that would become one of the tallest buildings in all of Washington DC – a city with longstanding height restrictions for development. His signature will be on US dollars later this year, in a first for a sitting president. I’d ask if he was getting tired of all the attention, but I think we know the answer to that. Up next is a commemorative gold coin – worth exactly $1 – featuring Trump’s scowling visage looming menacingly over the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

It’s a pretty classic Trump pose, designed to make a nearly-80-year-old man with a variety of mystery bruises who eats McDonald’s on a regular basis look physically intimidating. Beyond the president sporting a classic gen Z pout, the Commission of Fine Arts (a panel appointed by You Know Who) recommended this coin be “as large as possible”, which immediately makes me think of the giant penny Bruce Wayne keeps in the Batcave. Good luck trying to feed a parking meter with that.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Broadcasting regulator has become one of the nation’s most prominent newsmakers – he seems to relish the spotlight

During a ceremony at the White House late last week honoring the US Naval Academy football team, Donald Trump gave a shoutout to the man he said was “perhaps the most powerful man in this room”: Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman.

“You are doing some job,” Trump said. “He’s trying to make the fake news real and respected again, which is not an easy job.”

Let's see if it's better than LinkedIn.

From the best beginner point-and-shoot through to which SLR or medium format camera to pick, these film cameras are superb.

Weak demand and global trade pressures hit ouput, with energy price rises expected to bring further drop

• Business live – latest updates

Fewer cars rolled off UK production lines in February in what the industry called an “extremely worrying” slump even before the impact of the Iran war was felt.

Vehicle production was 17% lower last month on the same period in 2025, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, as exports dropped sharply.

In a rare interview, Michael Jordan discusses settling his antitrust fight with NASCAR, his passion for racing and more.

The government has published new guidance for parents that says under-fives should be limited to one hour of screen time a day

Josh MacAlister, the minister for children and families, said there has been “a complete rewiring of childhood” over the last decade due to social media and screen time.

Speaking on the new government guidance for parents of young children, he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “We’re trying to help create some new social norms.

People’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, says Treasury committee

Lloyds Banking Group exposed the personal data of nearly 500,000 customers in an IT glitch that left people’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, a committee of MPs has revealed.

A letter from Lloyds, published by MPs on the Treasury select committee on Friday, blamed the glitch on a software defect introduced during an IT update to its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland mobile banking apps overnight into 12 March.

Rex Heuermann, 62, who is accused of murdering seven women over 17 years, is due to appear in court next month

The man accused in Long Island’s infamous Gilgo Beach serial killings intends to plead guilty in the case next month, according to two people familiar with his decision.

Rex Heuermann, a former architect charged with murdering seven women over 17 years, is set to change his plea from not guilty at his next scheduled court hearing on 8 April, they said.

Prime minister says government needs to show it is on families’ side as new screen-time guidance launched

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has promised a “fight” with social media companies amid efforts to limit children’s use of mobile phones, tablets and TVs, as new official guidance recommends children under five spend no more than an hour a day on screens.

The guidance, developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza and children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner, advises screen time for children under two should be avoided other than for shared activities.

Liz Kendall urged by online safety figures to give job to Jeremy Wright ahead of Labour peer Margaret Hodge

Ministers are facing pressure to appoint a Conservative former cabinet minister as the new chair of the media regulator Ofcom, as he battles for the role against a Labour peer.

The job of running the regulator has become a key post in public life amid concern over the rapid growth of online content and the rise of more politically partisan broadcasting. No successor has been named to replace Michael Grade, the former BBC chair who has just weeks left in the job.

Papers reveal how chemical lobby influenced policy, reversing Biden-era limits on a common carcinogen

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

A new trove of chemical producer and US Environmental Protection Agency documents reveal an elaborate industry operation that killed strong regulations around formaldehyde, a highly toxic carcinogen widely used in everyday goods from cosmetics to furniture to craft supplies.

The Biden EPA in late 2024 determined any exposure to formaldehyde increased the risk of cancer and other health problems. The Trump EPA in late 2025 moved to undo those findings and replace them with less protective figures.

Apple said this is temporary and not unusual.

OpenAI has indefinitely paused plans for an erotic mode in ChatGPT as part of a broader strategy shift away from side projects and toward business and coding tools. TechCrunch reports: The proposed "adult mode," which CEO Sam Altman first floated in October, had inspired considerable controversy from tech watchdog groups as well as from OpenAI's own staff. In January, a meeting between company executives and its council of advisers got heated, with one of the advisers cautioning that OpenAI could be in the process of developing a "sexy suicide coach," The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Amidst all of the criticism, the release of the feature was delayed multiple times. FT notes that the erotic feature now has no timeline for release. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had "nothing further to add."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oakland and New York campaigns for $30 minimum wage gain steam as workers battle high costs and pushback

Mark Dorsey, a lifelong East Oakland resident, works two jobs to make ends meet. The 35-year-old Californian relies on manufacturing and service work through temp agencies and tries to work overtime or 10- to 12-hour shifts because “that’s the only way you can see a paycheck that’s worth something”.

Dorsey often makes minimum wage or close to it. The city of Oakland’s minimum wage is currently $17.34 an hour, higher than the minimum wage for the state of California, currently $16.90 an hour, but still not enough to support Dorsey.

The US president’s tactic could put this fall’s elections at risk. A supreme court decision could go far to protect them

Hating legal constraints, Donald Trump has repeatedly taken unilateral actions for which he had zero legal authority unless he found some national emergency to declare. So Trump, no stickler for the truth, has conveniently invoked numerous national emergencies to justify his unilateral actions – whether imposing tariffs on dozens of countries or deporting immigrants without due process – even when there wasn’t anything close to a real emergency.

A recent example involves Trump’s anger at Spain. Early this month, Trump was so furious at Spain for not letting the US use its airbases to help his illegal war against Iran that he called for cutting off all trade with Spain. Trump said he would order a trade embargo, with his treasury secretary suggesting that he would invoke a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

March 27, 2026 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) have announced the creation of their new spin-off Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which designs chips for critical sectors in infrastructure and emergency services where a system failure could have significant consequences, both at a human and economic level.

Credit: BSC

Sectors such as automotive, telecommunications, airports, railway traffic management, or civil protection alert systems, among others, require increasing computing capabilities as they use more autonomous systems and more complex applications. Now, this spin-off brings together a set of hardware technologies specifically designed to allow medium and high-performance processors to be used in critical applications where design and validation processes are particularly demanding and often regulated by standards that guarantee functional safety and cybersecurity.

“The hardware we developed can only fail under very exceptional conditions, and when it does, it detects it and interrupts the process in a controlled manner before giving erroneous instructions. In an air traffic control system, for example, this can be crucial to saving lives,” explained Jaume Abella, co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. and co-director of the High Performance Embedded Systems (HPES) laboratory at BSC.

The project’s flagship technology is “Safety Island” which provides the reliability and monitoring and control capacity necessary to enable the use of high-performance hardware in critical applications. It combines technologies that spent more than 10 years in development at BSC jointly by researchers from BSC and UPC, within the context of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects such as De-RISC, SELENE, ISOLDE, and FRACTAL.

Strategic Autonomy: European Chips Without Dependencies

In a first phase, the spin-off will focus on chip design, leaving physical manufacturing for a future stage. All of this is under the RISC-V open-source architecture standard, which allows for progress toward European technological sovereignty by eliminating dependencies and licenses from external multinationals. This approach guarantees full control over the hardware—an autonomy that is crucial for the critical sectors where the company operates, allowing it to offer high-performance solutions free from the technical and legal restrictions of traditional closed technologies.

“The creation of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. is an example of one of the main drivers of BSC and UPC: making technology that serves society,” said Mateo Valero, BSC’s director. “By working with the RISC-V ecosystem, we confirm the commitment of both institutions to achieve a European technological sovereignty free from external dependencies.”

Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which is already incorporated and seeking investors, is now the fifteenth spin-off promoted by BSC, reflecting the center’s firm commitment to transforming scientific results into real impact for society. Since the creation of Nostrum Biodiscovery 10 years ago, fourteen spin-offs have employed more than 610 highly qualified professionals and managed to raise more than 44 million euros in private investment, consolidating a deep-tech innovation ecosystem in the region. UPC, for its part, spent more than 25 years creating knowledge-based companies and has a portfolio of more than forty investing companies.

Furthermore, the launch of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. highlights the sustained collaboration between BSC and UPC and their commitment to technology transfer, which already promoted the creation of five spin-offs jointly.

In 2020, Abella himself along with Francisco J. Cazorla, co-director of the HPES laboratory at BSC and co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., founded another spin-off, Maspatechnologies SL, which became in 2022 the first company emerging from BSC to be sold, after being acquired by Danlaw Inc., a leading global provider of electronic solutions for the automotive and aerospace sectors.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC Launches Safe and Secure Technologies Spin-Off for RISC-V Chips in Critical Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

The youth-led Sunrise Movement is seizing on the U.S.–Israel war in Iran to boost challengers to sitting Democrats, joining a coalition of progressive groups arguing that lawmakers who take money from defense contractors and AIPAC cannot meaningfully oppose the war. 

In Denver, Sunrise is endorsing Melat Kiros, an anti-war candidate and attorney who was fired for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine, the group shared exclusively with The Intercept. Kiros is challenging longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. 

“Voters today, they want to see their candidates and their representatives refusing AIPAC money and refusing [military industrial complex] influence,” said Kiros. “They’re seeing how much it has dragged us into these endless wars, and how much it is dragging our taxpayer dollars into funding this violence as well.”

Kiros is among a growing list of insurgent candidates — including William Lawrence in Michigan and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, also both Sunrise-endorsed — who are taking Democrats to task on their complicity in the endless wars in the Middle East.

Related

Sunrise Movement, Founded to Fight Climate Change, Pivots to Fighting Trump

Sunrise’s endorsement is part of a broader strategy shift in which the activist group, founded in 2017 to fight climate change in particular, pivots to fighting authoritarianism more broadly. 

“There’s just no winning on climate unless we address how absolutely broken our political system is,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Focusing on corporate PAC money and the wars it fuels abroad is an essential part of the organization’s broader mission, she added. “The path towards winning climate legislation lies towards having a functional democracy, and that includes having a democracy that doesn’t prioritize endless wars abroad over the very real constraints of people right here.”

Shiney-Ajay said Sunrise Movement organizers are “really excited” about Kiros, 28, because of her moral clarity. “She is really clear about standing up for working people,” she said. “And she’s very clear about not taking corporate PAC money.”

Historically, foreign policy issues have not been top of mind for Democratic primary voters, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. But as the Trump administration wages its unpopular war on Iran, he said, “candidates that are able to mesh together affordability and war, and opposition to support for Israel, I think, are gonna be the ones that might be able to break through.”

This argument requires nuance, as most Democrats — at least publicly — oppose the Trump administration’s war with Iran, often citing affordability as a concern. 

“This war is costing at least $1 billion every day,” said DeGette, Kiros’ opponent, in a public statement about her support for a War Powers resolution to block the administration’s violence. “That is billions of dollars that could go towards affordable health care and housing. I refuse to support this war.”

DeGette’s statement “rings hollow,” Kiros told The Intercept. “Democrats like DeGette had the opportunity to cut the military budget by 10 percent for that very reason — especially during Covid, when we needed that money for health care — and still voted no,” she said. 

Kiros blames the “military–industrial complex” and actors like AIPAC for pushing lawmakers to support defense contractor spending and wars that line their pockets.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

“There are corporations that are actively profiting from the war,” she said. “And I think it also has to do with the impact and the influence that we have seen from AIPAC and from Israel.” 

Kiros has criticized DeGette for receiving over $5 million from corporate PACs. The incumbent’s top contributor is the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which is founded and chaired by former AIPAC vice president and board member Norman Brownstein, according to OpenSecrets. “At the end of the day, the people who get you into office are the ones you are going to be accountable to,” said Kiros. 

Nicole Shea Niebler, a Sunrise Movement organizer in Denver, recently confronted DeGette at a meet and greet for declining to support Block The Bombs, a bill that would limit offensive weapons transfers to Israel. Niebler said voters are right to be worried about candidates who take money from the groups pushing for war with Iran. 

“If you’re not willing to say no, what else are you willing to do that is not in the interest of your constituents?” she said.

Niebler sees her organization’s broader shift toward supporting anti-war candidates like Kiros as a moment of “clarity” for the organization, calling the U.S. military “the true number one danger to our environment.”

Sunrise is hoping to reverse its luck in recent races, where two of prominent endorsed anti-war candidates, Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam in North Carolina and activist Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois lost their primaries.

Allam, in particular, centered anti-Iran war messaging in her advertisements. “I will never take a dime from defense contractors or the pro-Israel lobby,” Allam said in an ad days ahead of the election earlier this month. “I have opposed these forever wars my entire career.”

Abughazaleh and Allam both lost by relatively narrow margins, which Shiney-Ajay said she doesn’t see as a broader defeat for their cause. 

“We’re up against a really steep battle and … millions and millions of dollars being poured in, and that is causing us to lose several races,” she said. “I do think there’s something happening where the narrative is that AIPAC money is poisonous, that corporate PAC money is poisonous, and that wasn’t true a few years ago.”

It’s challenging to parse out how successful the anti-war messaging was, because there were so many other factors in the races, Haider-Markel noted. “These challenger candidates also tend to be significantly younger and significantly more liberal than the incumbents they’re challenging. So all of those wrapped together,” he said. “It’s hard to distinguish which one actually played a role in some of these early defeats.”

In Denver, Kiros said she sees the anti-war and anti-military–industrial complex movement as a perpetual battle, one that will be fought in this election and others to come.

“The anti-war movement is one that has had to have this fight cyclically,” she said. “And so for me, it’s about understanding the military–industrial complex … and how we have allowed the military–industrial complex to influence our foreign policy, and to not just wait until it’s convenient, and it’s popular among the American people to be anti-war as it is right now.”

The post Sunrise Movement Pushes Anti-War Candidates, Endorsing Melat Kiros in Denver appeared first on The Intercept.

Police said they found two bodies a day after stopping Cedric Prizzon in a car with his two children.

Syria’s successful foreign policy masks a deeper risk Expert comment jon.wallace 27 March 2026

2025’s National Dialogue failed, its outcomes unpublished. But without a new effort to resolve internal conflicts, the country will remain vulnerable to external intervention.

Syria’s transitional authorities have achieved notable foreign policy gains. President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has restored diplomatic ties, eased sanctions and insulated the country from the military spillover of the ongoing war in Iran.

Yet recent events expose the limits of this outward-facing stabilization strategy. On 19 March, Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on government forces in Sweida, following clashes between government forces and Druze factions – demonstrating how Syria’s unresolved internal conflicts can still draw in external actors.

Rather than addressing the root causes of the Sweida conflict through a domestic process, the authorities have sought to resolve them through deals brokered with other countries.

At its most effective, this approach can contain escalation. But it leaves the underlying tensions intact. Without a credible national process to address internal divisions, Syria’s transition will remain fragile, and vulnerable to repeated external intervention.

From battleground to buffer

Syria now stands out in the Middle East for an unexpected reason. While neighbouring countries are increasingly entangled in the fallout from the war on Iran, Syria has, for now, avoided direct involvement – remaining largely insulated from its effects.

This shift is striking given Syria’s recent history. For over a decade, the country served as the central arena where regional and international rivalries played out. Today, by contrast, it has repositioned itself as a neutral actor.

This outcome is the result of the al-Sharaa government’s highly effective foreign policy. Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the transitional authorities have recalibrated Syria’s external relations by restoring diplomatic ties, engaging regional actors and limiting the presence of foreign-aligned armed networks. Such measures have reduced the risk of Syria being drawn back into wider conflict dynamics.

President al-Sharaa made this clear in his address following Eid prayers on 20 March, arguing that Syria’s changing position reflects a more effective management of regional and international relations. In this sense, foreign policy has become a central pillar of efforts to stabilize the country – helping to shield Syria from external shocks at a moment of heightened regional volatility.

Containment without resolution

But recent developments in Sweida highlight the limitations of that strategy. 
Violence escalated in July 2024, when Damascus deployed forces to the province. The government presented the move as an effort to restore order after clashes between Druze and Bedouin groups. 

Locally, however, the intervention was widely seen as an attempt to impose central authority following months of stalled negotiations over governance and security arrangements. Subsequent confrontations – and reported abuses – deepened mistrust between local actors and the authorities.

Rather than addressing the drivers of the conflict through inclusive local dialogue, the authorities have sought to contain it, through external, elite-level agreements. Damascus agreed to a roadmap with Jordan and the United States to address the issue in September 2025, while parallel efforts to limit Israeli intervention intensified. 

The approach failed to resolve the crisis. Implementation of the Jordan–US roadmap stalled, rejected by de facto local authorities who had been excluded from its negotiation. The result has been a pattern of recurring tensions and periodic violence – conditions that continue to invite external intervention and complicate Syria’s negotiations with Israel.

The Israeli airstrikes of 19 March followed alleged clashes between Syrian government forces and a Druze armed group. Israel framed its attack as an effort to protect the Druze community, though Damascus condemned what it called ‘interference in internal affairs with the aim of undermining security and stability’.

While its motives remain contested, what is clear is Israel’s willingness to intervene whenever Syria’s local conflicts intersect with its strategic priorities. As such, no amount of diplomatic balancing on Syria’s part can fully shield it, if domestic conflicts remain unresolved.

Dialogue deferred

Crucially, the issues at the heart of the Sweida conflict are not local anomalies. Questions of governance, security, representation, power-sharing and the identity of the state are national in scope. Addressing them through closed-door bargaining – whether with domestic elites or external actors – risks producing outcomes that lack legitimacy and durability.

This is where Syria’s stalled national dialogue becomes central. Launched in February 2025, the process was intended to provide a platform for addressing precisely these questions. Instead, it was rushed, narrowly structured and insufficiently consultative.

More than a year later, its outcomes remain largely unpublished. Beyond general statements, Syrians still lack a clear account of what was discussed, what priorities emerged, or what conclusions were reached. 

The result is not just a missed opportunity, but a widening gap between the transitional authorities and society.

A path to consensus

Without an inclusive national framework, Syria’s political actors will continue to approach negotiations as a zero-sum game – where compromise is seen as loss rather than a route to shared stability. Reversing this dynamic requires widening participation beyond political elites to include civil society, displaced communities, refugees and the diaspora.

Even if an earlier opportunity to launch a credible national dialogue was missed, it is not too late to try again. A renewed process could offer a peaceful pathway to address the core questions shaping the emerging state. If conducted transparently and inclusively, it could help build national consensus and prevent negotiating parties with narrow agendas from claiming to speak for their constituencies.

Related work

What recent developments in Syria mean for the Kurds

Substance will be critical. Any renewed dialogue must confront the issues that continue to drive conflict – governance, power-sharing, participation, justice, economic reform and the role of security institutions. These are not technical matters; they lie at the heart of Syria’s future political order.

Process will matter just as much. Consultation must be tied to outcomes, with clear mechanisms to translate any agreements into policy. Transparency is essential – without clear understanding of how decisions were reached, trust cannot be rebuilt.

The most immediate step is also the simplest. The outcomes of the previous dialogue should be published. Doing so would signal intent, restore credibility and lay the groundwork for a more meaningful and inclusive process.  

The real test

Syria’s foreign policy success has been significant, but it cannot, on its own, secure stability. A transition built primarily on external positioning rather than internal cohesion will remain inherently fragile. Lasting stability depends on the state’s ability to resolve domestic disputes, build a shared national vision and establish a political order that commands legitimacy across the country’s diverse society.

Transitional justice for Ukraine: Supporting survivors of war crimes and building international solidarity 27 April 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) 27 March 2026 Chatham House and Online

Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.

Thirteen years into Russia’s aggression and four years since the full-scale invasion against Ukraine, the humanitarian toll is staggering. Systematic atrocities - including torture, sexual violence, and forced deportations - have resulted in over 200,000 documented war crimes.

With the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, domestic and international responses are unprecedented. However, the sheer volume of cases threatens to overwhelm the pursuit of justice. Current efforts face the tension of how to balance rigorous legal procedures with the urgent, immediate needs of survivors.

Transitional justice offers a holistic framework to bridge this gap by harmonizing prosecutions with truth-seeking, reparations, and institutional reform. Despite several stalled attempts to formalize a national vision (2016–2021), the current situation demands action.

This session will explore why Ukraine must now endorse a comprehensive transitional policy to support survivors, deliver justice, and advance domestically (streamline EU accession, and secure broader support from the Global Majority).

• With 200,000+ documented atrocities, how can Ukraine prioritize cases to ensure a victim-centred and meaningful justice process without causing a major bottleneck in the judiciary?
• What are the main domestic hurdles to passing the holistic transitional justice policy that was stalled in 2021, and how has the full-scale invasion changed those priorities?If the Russian leadership remains in power and within Russia’s borders, what viable mechanisms exist for the enforcement of verdicts rendered in absentia?
• What options are available if the Claims Commission awards billions in damages but Russia refuses to pay?
• How can transitional justice policies ensure that reparations are integrated into a broader strategy of truth-seeking, national memorialization and any future negotiated settlement?
• How can a robust transitional justice framework serve as a diplomatic tool to engage ‘Global Majority’ countries who may be sceptical of Western-led legal mechanisms?

This event is supported by International Center for Transitional Justice.

Justice for Ukraine: Supporting survivors of war crimes and building international solidarity 27 April 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) 27 March 2026 Chatham House and Online

Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.

Four years after Russia’s full‑scale invasion, the humanitarian toll remains immense. More than 200,000 documented atrocities – including torture, sexual violence, and forced deportations – pose an overwhelming challenge for justice efforts.

The new tribunal faces immense challenges. The scale of violations raises urgent questions about how to deliver meaningful, victim‑centred justice without overloading the legal system.

Transitional justice offers a holistic approach, combining prosecutions with truth‑seeking, reparations, and institutional reform.

This session will examine why Ukraine should adopt such a framework now. Key questions include:

• How can Ukraine prioritise 200,000+ atrocity cases to ensure meaningful justice without paralysing the judiciary?
• What mechanisms exist to enforce verdicts if Russian leaders remain inside Russia and beyond arrest?
• What happens if the Claims Commission awards major damages but Russia refuses to pay?
• How can reparations be integrated into a wider strategy of truth‑seeking, memorialisation, and potential future negotiations?
• How might a robust transitional justice policy help engage ‘Global Majority’ states wary of Western‑led legal initiatives?

This event is supported by the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Are these vibrating plates really necessary to achieve your goals?

Wine on top of the fridge is as good as cooked. Here are the six biggest wine storage danger zones, according to an expert.

Retail sims aren’t my thing, but the tactile, nostalgic pleasures of hit indie title Retro Rewind have me yearning for the era of physical media, smoking indoors and uncomplicated geopolitics

It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.

I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports.

CEO of a merged team in a US men’s competition shrunk to just six, the ex-Wallaby hooker is still at the sharp end – right where he likes to be

One day in March 2012, Adam Freier sat down to write a column for the Sydney Morning Herald. His Melbourne Rebels were on a losing streak and though he had 25 caps at hooker including a World Cup campaign for Australia, he was nearly 32 and staring at the end of a career at the coalface, 12 years in the front row of the scrum at the highest level. Describing a body breaking down, a struggling club, the agony of endless defeats, he imagined group therapy in front of “strangers in the local hall”.

“My name is Adam Freier, and I hate to lose.”

California Legion v Anthem RC kicks-off 6pm ET on Saturday, live on ESPN+

Martin Pengelly writes about rugby in the US on Substack, at The National Maul

The update brought more to your device's lock screen than just the big clock.

More than 850 Tomahawks have been fired in just four weeks, people familiar with the matter said, alarming some Pentagon officials because the weapon’s supply is limited.

Thousands of No Kings events will be fueled by anger over ICE violence, the Epstein files released and a war in Iran. These protests have power

Things have changed since the last major No Kings protests, in October 2025. Back then, an estimated 7 million people poured into the streets to protest against the Trump administration; this Saturday, at more than 3,000 events planned nationwide, the crowds are likely to be even bigger. In part, that’s because the Trump administration keeps pursuing more and more unpopular agendas, often with a sadism and indifference to popular opinion that becomes prominent in the news.

In January, ICE agents in Minneapolis killed two protesters – first Renee Good on 7 January and then Alex Pretti on 24 January – who were in the streets trying to obstruct the agency’s kidnappings and voice their opposition to the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing program. The two dead Americans were among the thousands who have become enraged at ongoing revelations of the extent and cruelty of Trump’s mass kidnapping, detention and ethnic cleansing program, which has swept up tens of thousands of men, women and children.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Miriam Liliana Molina Mendez now owns the café inside the Delaware Art Museum where she has worked for 10 years. She’s working to make her coffee shop, and the museum, more accessible for the Latino and immigrant communities. 

Miriam Liliana Molina Mendez found herself speaking Spanish. 

The “Hola, buenos dias,” directed toward a stocky man in his mid-60s with a thick black mustache, escaped her mouth before she realized it wasn’t her usual, “Good morning, how can I help you?” 

The man stood inside Molina Mendez’s coffee shop, Kaffeina Café, which occupies a corner of Wilmington’s Delaware Art Museum — facing the sculpture garden — on a recent March morning.

She quickly began apologizing for the slip-up.  

Molina Mendez had welcomed a customer into her coffee shop in Spanish. She had never done that before. 

But without skipping a beat, the man brightly responded, “Buenos dias,” and rattled off his coffee order in Spanish.

“I love it when people come and speak Spanish with me,” Molina Mendez said in her native tongue. 

Molina Mendez has worked at the museum’s café for about a decade. The mother of four began there in 2016 as a chef, holding down two to three jobs just to make ends meet. 

She weathered the COVID pandemic and multiple café owners. When the opportunity came to take over the business, Molina Mendez was scared. Maybe it was not the right time. Maybe she did not have enough money, or maybe her English was not the best, she thought. 

Despite her fears, she bought the shop in 2024. Now, Kaffeina is all hers. 

Molina Mendez overhauled the café’s fare to focus on fresh ingredients and innovative dishes with dashes of her home country, Mexico, sprinkled throughout. She hopes the change differentiates Kaffeina from most other museum cafeterias that offer the same basic fare.

Molina Mendez wants to welcome more customers from Latino and immigrant communities into her establishment. Many Spanish-speaking Latinos and immigrants are often afraid of trying new places because they are worried they won’t be understood — just as Molina Mendez felt when she first came to Delaware. 

There are so few places where Latina mothers can gossip for the whole day, or where people can swing by to pick up their breakfast on the way to work, she said. 

Kaffeina, she hopes, can be that place. 

“It is a reflection of our community growing,” said Iz Balleto, a longtime customer of the café and cultural program manager at the Delaware Art Museum. 

“After all,” Balleto added, “the American dream is real for those who understand what perseverance is about.”

‘And, here I am’

Molina Mendez first became a mother when she was 17 years old. Two years later, at her mother’s urging, she fled a domestic violence situation and came to Delaware from her home in Mexico City. 

She started cleaning hotel rooms off U.S. Route 13 for $6.50 an hour — she still remembers the exact rate. Relatives told her only to go from her house to work, and back again, advising her not to go out. 

From the hotel, Molina Mendez began working at a nearby Johnson & Johnson factory and worked multiple jobs from then on, ranging from McDonald’s and Arby’s, to the University of Delaware cafeteria and as a chef at the Newark Country Club. 

In 2016, she began working as a chef at the museum café in the mornings. The coffee shop then closed after the onset of the pandemic, but Molina Mendez returned once it reopened under new ownership. 

She helped change the menu, suggesting more diverse offerings and fresh food like tamales, ramen and empanadas. Then, she took over when the previous owner retired.  

Molina Mendez was “very scared” to take on the café from the previous owner. What would happen if it failed? What would happen if it succeeded? 

She spoke with her family as she mulled the decision. They reassured her that she should buy the shop — it would be doing work she was already familiar with. 

“And here I am,” Molina Mendez said.

Seeing Molina Mendez evolve into Kaffeina’s owner after working at the shop for so long was “amazing,” said Balleto, who has known the chef since she started in 2016. 

Molina Mendez comes to work every day with a smile on her face and is always willing to try new things, said Heather Morrissey, director of operations at the Delaware Art Museum. 

She started implementing different initiatives at the café, such as an after-hours Valentine’s Day dinner and a monthly tea party on the last Wednesday of every month — complete with porcelain teacups and delicate finger sandwiches. 

Customers also do not need to pay the museum’s entrance fee to enjoy the café. Kaffeina has a separate entrance near the sculpture garden and is open from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. 

“I want everyone to know that they’re welcome,” Molina Mendez said.

Molina Mendez hopes her café becomes a generational heirloom, passed down to her children and grandchildren. She hopes to eventually open a separate breakfast locale, too. 

But for now, she wants to make her place a mainstay for Wilmington’s Latino community. 

As Molina Mendez finished speaking in her coffee shop on that recent March morning, a man with a white goatee and a baseball cap walked up to the counter. He retrieved his takeout order, sitting in a brown paper bag, and headed toward the exit. 

Upon hearing Molina Mendez chat in Spanish as he headed out the door, the man turned around with a gleeful smile.

“Esta bonito hablar el espanol, verdad?” he said.

“It’s nice to speak Spanish, right?”

The post From employee to owner: How an immigrant-owned café is attracting more Latinos appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to allegedly assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply the most minimal of reforms to ICE. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

“It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle,” Nikhil Pal Singh tells The Intercept Briefing. “They smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something.” The professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War” joins host Akela Lacy in a conversation about protests and movement-building in the latest Trump era.

Trump “said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home,” says Singh. “The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.”

“What we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, ‘No, this is not OK in my city,’” says Singh. With the upcoming nationwide No Kings protests on Saturday, Lacy brings up the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces.

“We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy,” notes Singh. For there to be long-term meaningful change during this increasingly hostile environment to dissent or opposition, big alliances are needed, including with parts of the Trump coalition, he says. “Those kinds of cross-class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built.”

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

Transcript 

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

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Akela. 

AL: I don’t know about you, Jessie, but I honestly feel like I’ve had constant whiplash the past few months. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners if we start with just breaking down exactly where we are right now in the world. I’ll do a quick recap. 

We are, as many people know, in a full-blown war with Iran after being told for years that that would effectively mean the beginning of the end. The U.S. has killed more than 150 people in boat strikes around the world and successfully kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife. Trump has consolidated the nation’s largest paramilitary police force and unleashed it on U.S. cities and now airports. The number of people being detained by ICE is at an all-time high. Federal agents have killed two protesters, and more than a dozen other people have died this year alone at the hands of ICE.

At the same time, prices are soaring. The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent, in case you missed that, which I certainly did. The government is still partially shut down, and Trump and his allies are still withholding documents from the public on Jeffrey Epstein.

And in case anyone forgot, we’re knee-deep in a midterm cycle that’s seen unprecedented levels of dark money and efforts by corporate lobbies to influence elections. So how are you feeling about all of this? How are you processing all of this? 

JW: Yeah, it’s a lot to process as a journalist and a person in the country.

The way that I’m thinking about this is really in the context of protests, and whether or not we’re going to see a real resistance to the Trump administration emerge. Obviously, what we’ve seen in Minneapolis has been a real resistance to their efforts from everyday people. What I’m thinking about now is just how can we exist in this society and push back against some of these really awful things, when there’s so much repression of protests and of activism in general, and of journalism? 

AL: The conventional wisdom for moments like this is that this is when the opposition should theoretically be at its strongest. Is that the case right now? What is the opposition right now, and how are regular people responding to this, and is it having any effect? 

JW: Yeah, we can talk about poll numbers. Certainly Donald Trump is historically unpopular, so we are seeing people react in that way. But I think we have to take into account the real ways in which the Trump administration, but also the Biden administration — and if we’re going to talk about college protests — university administrators really clamped down on college campus protesters, on protest in general. And we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the Cop City case; we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the case in Chicago, where we saw Kat Abughazaleh indicted. So there’s a real risk to protest.

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I mean, we interviewed Momodou Taal on this very podcast, a Cornell student who had to flee the country in order to escape being detained by the Trump administration because of his actions on college campuses. So there’s real fear.

I think there’s also real movement organizing. We’ve seen it in Minneapolis, we’ve seen it in even deep-red places like Hagerstown, Maryland, which I’m interested in talking a little more about.

There’s certainly still activity, but there’s a lot of fear and a lot of that fear is understandable.

AL: Jessie, you mentioned the Cop City case, and I think those indictments were obviously an effort to intimidate those protestors. I will just note that a judge dismissed most of the charges against them, but the Georgia attorney general is trying to appeal that dismissal. So the intimidation tactic continues, whether or not the charges were dismissed.

JW: No, I think that’s a really good point that a lot of the early intimidation we’ve seen of protesters has been unsuccessful in terms of actually getting them detained and locked up. We’ve also seen many of the students who were detained by the Trump administration for protesting have since been released or have fled the country and are no longer within the administration’s grasp. But nonetheless, it still has this chilling effect on protest on college campuses, but obviously across the country when people have to worry about whether or not they’re going to end up in prison for trying to protect their neighbors, I think that becomes a really difficult decision for a lot of people. 

AL: Specifically on this question of protest or how communities are responding to the increasing state violence that we’re seeing, you’ve been doing some reporting on a rapid response ICE watch group in a red county in Maryland. Is that right? 

JW: Yes. I have been covering the potential development of an ICE facility in technically Williamsport, Maryland, but the closest, largest city would be Hagerstown. But what’s been really fascinating about this story — the ins-and-outs of how this warehouse is going to become habitable for human beings is a large part of what I’m focused on. But we’ve seen in this county, which is Washington County, where the warehouse ICE facility would exist — it’s this deep red county where they’re trying to build this ICE warehouse, and you’ve actually seen massive resistance. 

So first, I would really point to this Hagerstown Rapid Response group. There’s this group that emerged really in the wake of what they watched in Minneapolis. They saw the successful ICE observers and ICE watches that were going on in communities in the Twin Cities, and they wanted to build something similar to that. So they developed the Hagerstown Rapid Response. 

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But over the course of developing their group, they realized that there was this ICE detention facility that was going to be potentially built in their community. So they really organized these pinpoint protests against the county commissioners where they live. So they’ve held weekly protests outside of the county commissioner’s office, but they’ve also worked to surveil the warehouse. They have drones they have used to get images to send out to the press, to the public, to really raise public awareness about this issue.

So we are seeing people in communities, even in conservative communities, really coming together and finding ways to protest and organize against ICE and against the Trump administration. 

AL: We touch on all of this and more with our guest today, Nikhil Pal Singh, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War.”

Nikhil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing 

Nikhil Pal Singh: Thanks for having me. 

AL: Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by this overwhelming sense of chaos. As we speak, the war in Iran and the broader Middle East stretches into its fourth week. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to — it’s unclear exactly how — assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply even the most minimal of reforms to ICE. 

Meanwhile, Trump is minting a new coin with his face on it, continuing to renovate the White House, and his sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a lot to keep up with. You’ve written that the question facing the American public today is less about whether what we’re seeing is unprecedented and more about what purpose the chaos serves, and how we respond to it. But what effect has this constant whiplash had on the public and its ability to organize or to respond?

NS: It’s a good question, and it’s where I began the piece that I wrote. You didn’t even mention “Operation Total Extermination” in Latin America and Ecuador, which Nick Turse wrote about this week. And of course, the signs that insiders have been trading on information in Trump’s tweets, making directional trades against them in the oil market and in the futures markets.

AL: Right. 

NS: It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle. The term that the Trump administration likes to use, and Pete Hegseth’s favorite term, is “kinetic action”: We’re moving fast and breaking things all the time and showing and asserting our dominance over every situation. Those of us who try to comment upon this, report on it, analyze it, are always trailing behind it, trying to keep up, trying to make sense of the next thing — it does induce a state of whiplash. It does induce a state of paralysis by design.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to try to think about: How do we create a broader framework to understand what’s happening? Not a framework that tries to say this all makes sense, or it has some rationality, because there is a substantive irrationality to all of this, but I do think there is a method in their madness. And that method is really about keeping us off balance.

It’s about allowing them to continue to raid the Treasury. It’s about destabilizing the institutions that create a sense of organization, order, coherence within our society that then allows them to have more room to maneuver, at least within the short term. It’s hard to say what the long term’s going to look like, because everything they do has a short-term calculus associated with it.

I think the long term looks quite grim for them and for us, especially if we can’t get a handle on this. I think that’s part of what we need to try to understand. We need to almost not take a step back, but balance ourselves against the impulse to constantly be shaken and reactive in relationship to everything that they do and the next thing that they do and the next thing that they do.

I will say, as a last point in this opening, that I think in the Iran war they might really have met their match. That smash and grab, which has essentially been the mode right? “We’ll seize Maduro. We’ll send an ICE team into Minneapolis.” Of course, they met their match in Minneapolis too, and we can come back to that.

AL: Yeah, we will. 

NS: But they smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something. That is going to have long-term consequences for many, many, many of us, and political consequences for them that they’re not going to be so easily left behind. 

AL: This is a great segue into what I wanted to ask you about.

So for our listeners, we’re talking about this essay you wrote for Equator magazine in January, really central to which is the idea of “Homeland Empire” that you write about. This notion — which is linked with your last point about the long-term ripple effects in Iran and beyond that we can’t necessarily account for yet — this notion that you cannot understand Trump’s project if you separate the realms of the domestic and the foreign.

That what we’ve heard for years about the U.S. turning its global wars back on its own citizens is happening now. That it’s more than a disturbing phenomenon. It’s a symptom of this broader rot at the core of U.S. institutions, which Trump is an outgrowth of. 

You write, “Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: Call it ‘Homeland Empire.’”

What is the utility of that specific framing, and what does it tell us that we don’t already know or understand about Trump?

NS: I do think that the concept of the “homeland,” which really comes into focus in the global war on terror. And there’s a great book by Richard Beck called “Homeland,” which has been really important for me. It’s suggested that national security and the security complex needed to be in some ways reshored.

You have the development of the Department of Homeland Security, which is a massive government reorganization, creating a whole new government department that you might even think of as being on par with the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. So there’s the beginning of a reorientation institutionally in terms of policy. Of course, [George W.] Bush frames it in a very telling way. He says, we have to be able to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. That’s still within the old model, even though the model is shifting. 

It’s the old model which tells us Americans are going to be safe as long as we keep our power projection and fighting the enemies and the bad guys all around us. That idea that there are threats everywhere, and that the United States has this global mandate and remit to fight them — that really does go back to the end of World War II and the Cold War. So there’s a long arc of that thinking. But what begins to shift in the global war on terror, and partly because of the attacks of 9/11, is this sense that the homeland is actually under a real threat. That it actually can be attacked. It can be destabilized.

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Now, that doesn’t just come out of 9/11. If you think about the period since the end of the Cold War, the search for new enemies dissipates. If you’re as old as I am, you remember when they were promising a huge peace dividend. Of course, the wars in the Middle East immediately begin to ratchet up. But the other thing that begins to ratchet up is the war on crime and the war on migrants. If you track the government spending — that precedes the origins of the Department of Homeland Security — on the prison complex and on the border–control complex, those are also going through the roof. They’re being imagined, again, in terms of this primary sense that Americans are being rendered insecure by street criminals, by migrants coming across the border, and now also by terrorists who might infiltrate. 

If you remember back to the war on terror period when Bush was fighting in Iraq, some Republican congressmen then were already running ads saying terrorists and migrants were essentially the same thing — that brown people coming across the border wanting to do us harm. So the idea that the terrorists, the migrant, the criminal represent this new nemesis that is actually now much more proximate, that has been building up for a long period of time. It’s been helping to produce spending streams, funding streams, institutions. And Trump has cemented it into a single ideological complex.

One of the things Trump was very, very clear about, even though he promised that he was going to be a peace president and wind down the wars and the forever wars, not be involved in overextension of American power overseas, et cetera, et cetera, which he numerously described as foolish, reckless — even though he did support the Iraq War, let’s not forget that.

He also said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home. He began to imagine bringing the fight home through the framework of a mass deportation campaign through the idea of making what was already a paramilitary organization in a sense — Customs and Border Protection, but more or less confined to the border — bringing that into the interior of the country. Adding huge amounts of funding to DHS to build up an immigration police with paramilitary characteristics.

We’ve seen the results of that over the last year. The idea is that it’s only the illegals who are being governed violently or the only the criminals. They’re always careful to say that, but that’s actually not how it’s played out at all. The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost. 

AL: Right. The end result is the expansion of state power and state violence.

NS: Right. 

AL: So this brings us to Minneapolis. We’re seeing this massive escalation of state violence at home and abroad, while the public is also weathering increasingly difficult economic hardship, which is being exacerbated again by the war in Iran.

That is the same issue that many people argued posed such an obstacle to former President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, and what brought us a second Trump term, right? 

NS: Yeah. 

AL: This economic hardship issue, this is the time that you would expect the height of mobilization by the opposition. While we’ve seen massive public opposition to ICE raids. We have “No Kings” protests; there’s another one planned for this weekend. But we’ve also seen the state deploy intense violence in response to that opposition, obviously killing two protesters in Minneapolis. 

Do you think that the state’s response has effectively crushed whatever opposition has come up? Whether the answer to that is yes or no, where does the opposition go in this increasingly hostile environment? 

NS: I think it’s a good question, and it’s definitely one that I’ve been mulling over. We would all like to see the streets filled with people again like 2020. I do think Americans have proved more attuned to violence at home and violence against their own neighbors and in their own neighborhoods. I think that’s been amazing and inspiring. 

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It really gives the lie to what the Trump administration professes when JD Vance says something like, anybody would be uncomfortable, having someone next door to them who speaks another language. It’s actually not true. Actually Americans, even in small towns, even in rural spaces, have grown accustomed to living alongside people who are very different and figuring out how to either live and let live, or sometimes even more affirmatively, to cooperate, to play soccer together, to be in civic organizations, to go to church.

I’m not saying the United States isn’t still a segregated country, or that there isn’t racial animus or distrust or any of those things. But I think we really underestimate the degree of ordinary comity among people.

Obviously what we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, “No, this is not OK in my city.” These might even be people who have sensitivities and anxieties about unauthorized migration, which is a legitimate issue to debate. But the violence and impunity and lack of due process and disruption is offensive to people. We’ve seen the results of that in public polling data. We see it in the ways in which people act on the streets. 

I think wars overseas are more difficult for people in the United States. They feel more distant. The propaganda is so thick. You’ve been told for decades that Iran is some alien power that is irrational and in search of a nuclear bomb that might be eventually fired at like New York or something. It’s absolutely worthless propaganda, but it does its work. It’s very, very tied into the protection and safety of Israel, which is the most heavily propagandized topic in the U.S. foreign policy realm. People don’t really know what to think. And it doesn’t seem to affect them in the immediate sense — especially when you’re bombing from the sky and using remote warfare.

But now they’re really at a crossroads. They are amassing troops in the region. If American troops start going into combat situations and getting killed, you’re going to see people start to pay a lot more attention as gas prices rise, as the cost of everything increases.

Trump is going to be bedeviled with all the problems that Biden faced because people are going to feel that very profoundly. People who, as you say, are living paycheck to paycheck who are struggling to make rent, for whom a $1 increase in the price of gas when they have to commute two hours each day is actually a huge amount of money on a weekly basis. Trump owns that.

So they’re extremely reckless people, and I have to think that politically they will pay a huge price. They already are. As long as we — that is, those of us who are opposed to this — are able to exercise our civil and political rights both in the streets and at the ballot box. That obviously is going to be a real question. Is repression going to ramp up? Is there going to be chicanery around the elections? I think we can expect both of those things. Then we’re going to see where the balance of forces are. But I don’t think we should interpret the current quietness around the anti-war stuff necessarily as evidence that civic energies and oppositions has been beaten.

AL: To that point, these No Kings protests are taking place around the country on Saturday. Co-founder of the group, Indivisible, which organizes the protest, Leah Greenberg, told The Guardian, “Every No Kings is going to be about the issues that are driving people most at that moment and it’s also going to be about the collective ways in which they begin to harm our democracy.” 

I want to talk a little bit more about the challenges. We touched on this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper in the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair for us as journalists and analysts to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces. I’ve seen some questions about the specific demands of the No Kings protests or lack thereof. I’m curious, what do you make of that? 

NS: I tend to be a little bit on the side of, let a thousand flowers bloom. Anybody who wants to organize something and signal their opposition, that’s great. But I do think the opposition has to be sharpened and has to become more pointed around what the issues are.

I think, by necessity, the anti-ICE protests have become that way. There’s obviously synergies between these different things. People find their ways into different kinds of organization and different senses of action that may not always be strictly compatible with each other.

Again, the anti-war stuff is very specific. We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy. So the ways universities responded, the ways nonprofits and civic organizations often remained very silent on Gaza, the way the Democratic Party was obviously complicit fully with the genocide in Gaza — all of these things have left a mark on some of the most militant people who were out there in front and who were right, and who were correct in the positions that they were taking after October 7 about the Israeli response and the disproportionality of it, and the mass killing of civilians and the way in which it had the potential to unleash a regional war. And of course, Israel started this regional war three years ago.

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DNC Resolution to Reject AIPAC Funding Puts Democratic Leaders in the Hot Seat

That’s a huge problem for some of these big-tent protest projects, which are very tied into the Democratic Party — a Democratic Party that in some ways we are now engaged in a huge battle over. Israel has split the Democratic Party. We have one side, which is the side I would say that I’m on, that really thinks that there has to be an extremely hard red line around future funding for Israel, around AIPAC and the use of PAC money that is flowing into candidates and races on behalf of Israeli interests. 

This is very divisive because of the way in which it pricks this whole set of arguments about whether it’s antisemitic and so forth, and it’s a real dilemma. But I think we have to be able to win this battle in the Democratic Party. Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves in just another situation where even if the Democratic Party is back in power, it is still like the controlled opposition.

[Break]

AL: I wanted to touch on the same thing basically that happened with Gaza protests, we can map that back onto BLM protests in 2020, which is that Democrats were nominally supportive of this. But when it came down to brass tacks, they were still sending police to crush these protests. Then when it was time to actually pass legislation, at least at the federal level, there was basically like a do-nothing bill that Democrats calculated would pacify this movement for the long term. 

Now we’ve seen that so much of that momentum was basically co-opted or diluted and that all the things that people were calling for in terms of police reform, the evidence that none of that happened, is the paramilitary police that we’re seeing respond to all these protests today.

NS: For sure. 

AL: People still have a bit of that taste in their mouth of OK, even when Democrats were in control or even when these protests seem to be taking off, what was the legislative payoff? I’m curious today, whether we need to be thinking differently about what we are going to count as a positive result of a protest or as an effective protest, whereas we could argue that community resistance in Minneapolis and backlash to the agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti led to in some ways DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Officer Greg Bovino losing their jobs, while there’s still been very little change to DHS policy. So I wonder how we value those outcomes — those cosmetic outcomes versus long-term legislative change and knowing that the Democratic Party that we have is the one that we have? Does that alter the calculus with these protests or should it? 

NS: When you think back to BLM, you could say they helped Biden win 2020, even as then, it not only translated into the very anemic policy wins, but then also there was a belated or delayed backlash, which exploited some of the weaknesses of the movement itself, of course. The ways in which it had already had some of these problems internal to it around leadership, around nonprofit funding, around internal corruption and so forth, and the sidelining of grassroots protests — that really going back to Ferguson — really emerged out of direct community action and need based upon the experience of being under police occupation. 

We have to be able to learn from these cycles. I don’t think the lesson necessarily is that protest is ineffective or irrelevant. Protests are going to happen. We live in what my dear old friend who passed away last year, Joshua Clover, called the “age of riots.” People are under stress. A lot of this emerges very spontaneously. There’s obviously a viral environment that allows people to gather in outrage — the outrage is palpable throughout the society. It crosses left and right. 

Public opinion is what they like to call thermostatic. It can change and switch very quickly. We haven’t really been able to figure out on the left how to harness that and develop that for a more ambitious and large scale transformation. To harness it for a larger-scale transformation, we really have to be able to start thinking across different kinds of divides. That would be my view. 

The modalities of certain kinds of identity politics have not served us well, ultimately. The hierarchies of oppression have not served us well, especially when they’re advanced by people who are not actually interested in economic redistribution or anti-war politics. It’s quite easy and we’ve all encountered this, someone who will talk about priorities of anti-racism or anti-sexism or homophobia or whatever else. But actually basically just has mainstream Democratic Party politics at this point. So the Democratic Party succeeded in harnessing and appropriating protest energies that legitimately came out of the experience of people who are being racially brutalized. But people being racially brutalized — and this is something that, someone like even [Martin Luther] King, understood very well at the end of his life — need a big alliance to be able to make any real change in this country. 

That big alliance is actually going to involve an alliance with poor white people, many of which who have been part of the Trump coalition, and have been hailed by a certain Trumpian politics. I’m not saying all poor white people. But those coalitions, those kinds of cross class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built. 

In my view, there’s really not much hope for us without building those without some root through mass politics that allows us to change the dispensations of the political reality we live under, which, for all the ways in which people talk about polarization, there’s a lot of bipartisan consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats around war, around economic policy, around taxes around monopolies, around feeding donor interests and around a willingness on both sides to use a culture war polarization discourse to keep their own base close while not really doing much for them. Unless we can really demystify that and really think about solidarity and alliances even with people we don’t necessarily agree with on everything or even like very much. 

AL: This is something we’ve been talking about in our newsroom as well, like this bipartisan consensus on these issues, even when it’s coming from the conservative movement, like with people like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even Megyn Kelly particularly criticizing the war in Iran and Israel’s influence. Sure, you can say that’s interesting, but I think the more instructive approach to thinking about something like that is OK, what do we take from this? Are people doing that because it’s politically expedient for them or because they’re trying to appeal to their base, or because they’re actually looking for a way to advance some counter policy at the national level? I feel like every other day I see news about the fact that these Republicans are breaking, but it’s like OK, does that actually matter? 

NS: I want to be really, really, really clear about this. I think it’s a really important point to be clear about. 

AL: Yeah. 

NS: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Kelly, Candace Owens. I’ll leave Marjorie Taylor Greene on the side. I’m not sure, something about the sincerity of her conversion convinces me a little bit more for whatever reason.

AL: Interesting. OK. Yeah. 

NS: These are odious people. These are reactionaries. These are people who actually would want to advance many of the same policies that Trump is advancing, particularly around deportation and mass incarceration. But who knows? President Tucker Carlson might preside over the final war against Iran.

Trump was anti-war until he was pro-war. Once these guys get hold of the machinery of state, which is what interests them, they’re absolutely interested in prosecuting a vision of the country that does not include people like us. That is deeply and profoundly hostile to democracy. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to the poor. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to immigrants and people of color. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to women. There’s no question in my mind that that’s true and that we shouldn’t be paying much attention to their antagonisms towards Trump and the splits within MAGA, except in so far as those become tactically useful.

What I’m talking about when I say, public opinion is thermostatic, people who voted for Trump, who are working class and poor and stressed, don’t necessarily have an absolutely ideologically sealed and impenetrable view of the world, that those are the people that have to be admitted as possible parts of a bigger coalition. 

My model there would be Zohran Mamdani going out into Queens, the day after Trump was elected, and talking to people who voted for Trump and trying to figure out why and trying to say that he could offer something different. That to me is really different than saying that the Megyn Kellys of the world, these cynical influencers, are people that like we should take any sucker from.

AL: That we need in our coalition. 

NS: Or that we need in our coalition. No, I think and I’m absolutely not saying that we don’t continue to draw really hard red lines around certain things. You’re not allowed to be racist, you’re not allowed to be sexist. Like these are not acceptable positions. 

I don’t want to get back into an argument about whatever cancel culture and all of that, but that has been not useful ultimately, for our side, like we have to be able to be people who can allow an internal differences in dialogue, even over issues that are really contentious and painful to people and allow people to move forward and grow. That’s how you develop solidarity. That’s how you build it. 

AL: I’ve spoken to people on the left who think that it’s a good idea to go on Tucker Carlson’s show because he reaches all of these people and I think we have to be able to differentiate between having an inclusive tent and allow for growth and allow for change. The difference between that and enabling people who will betray you when it’s convenient for them. And I think that’s difficult in some ways. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, but I do think it’s frustrating to me that I see so many people like, “You gotta hand it to these people for coming out against the Iran war.” Do we? I don’t know that we really have to do that. 

NS: It’s a super tough question, and I don’t think anybody has a single clear program for how to deal with it. I remember back to when people on the left were condemning Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan. I remember thinking at that time Bernie should go on Joe Rogan. 

Joe Rogan has some terrible attitudes and some terrible views and some very misinformed conceptions of the world. Maybe in an ordinary sense too, as a reactionary, the reactionary guys I like grew up with in New Jersey who I played soccer with or whatever. Just normal reactionary opinions that you encounter, if you talk to ordinary people. He’s like that and that’s why he’s popular. So should Bernie go on there and talk to him? I thought so, and a lot of people really condemned Bernie back then. I think that was when we were in a much more stringent cancel culture mode. 

Related

Tucker Carlson Outdid the Mainstream Media — But Still Missed This Crucial Point

Now would I say the same thing about Tucker Carlson? No, because I think Tucker Carlson has serious political ambitions and is actually like a master manipulator of media. That’s my call, that’s how I would judge it. Somebody else might judge it differently.

I don’t think it’s super easy. I feel like we have to believe in the possibility of building bigger coalitions through dialogue, through change, through struggle sometimes. Yet I think the questions you’re asking and the way that we will pose these questions in public, we should be very clear about what we think.

AL: I’ll close with this question. I’m going to quote your wonderful essay one more time. For Equator, you write that the future is really up to the leadership of the opposition that Trump has turned America toward, “the vulgar, predatory, racist, great-power conflicts of old. He does not transcend history, but affirms what [Stephen] Miller calls its ‘iron laws.’ Reversing this will require something more than a return to normalcy, particularly as the American security state tends to be accretive – recent history suggests that it only metastasises. A more profound and comprehensive democratic renewal and reconstruction is needed.”

What does that mean? What does the democratic renewal and reconstruction entail? Who is involved and what are they doing? 

NS: I think we’ve been talking about it. It’s clearly going to have to be at multiple scales. There’s a civic scale to all of this, a local scale to all of this, that I’m seeing in New York City where I live, and extremely, heartened by it. It also has its limits.

There’s a national electoral scale. Our government, which accesses billions and billions of dollars of our tax money to do all kinds of terrible things with it. We have to be able to transform and change that. A lot of people I know have given up on electoral politics altogether, but I don’t see any way to not work also at that scale.

So to me it’s always we’re all always thinking about something like a dual power struggle, like a struggle within civil society and civil society organizations, and a struggle to actually affect the dispensations of our government. For me, primarily right now, that is the struggle inside the Democratic Party to change what it is to make it a true opposition party in the current moment, to make it a party that will really actually try, actually, not try, but succeed in constructing a real majority for the kinds of policies that we would support, which would involve shrinking the defense budget, which would involve something like Medicare for all, which would involve investments in the ordinary things people need to live and work in this country, including various kinds of social insurance, including transportation, including energy.

There were some elements of this in the Biden program. I think it’s really clear how those went off the rails, particularly in the foreign policy arena. The foreign policy arena often does derail domestic reform in the United States. That’s why we need to think of these things together. 

So I have an analysis, for what it’s worth. I don’t really have a program because we’re so far — it feels like we’re so far — from being able to affect the change that we need. That leads a lot of people to say “Well, let’s do the best we can. Let’s win this race or that race and maybe eke out another bare majority.” But I think every time we do that — and I think those of us who have lived long enough through enough political cycles see this — every time we do that, we’re left with something that’s just a little bit shittier.

AL: [Laughs]

NS: Now with Trump, I think we see that the bottom is potentially going to drop out here, Americans are going to be poorer after this war. They’re going to be more stressed, they’re going to have fewer resources, they’re going to be more afraid. The challenge then is going to be even greater politically because the ability of politicians to exploit these kinds of stresses and anxieties is obviously immense, particularly in this media ecosystem that is now essentially owned by billionaires and manipulated through algorithms. We really face a serious challenge. We have a lot of decentralized power, but we haven’t really been able to figure out how to get hold of some of the real levers of power in this country. 

AL: The evergreen story of the left. 

NS: Yes. 

AL: Nikhil, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you for joining us. This was a wonderful discussion. 

NS: Thanks for having me, Akela. I really appreciate it.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video 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 do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Protesting the Smash-and-Grab Presidency With Nikhil Pal Singh appeared first on The Intercept.

Low pressure brings unsettled conditions to southern Europe, and rain and snow to western and central areas

Southern Europe has been under a variety of severe weather warnings this week owing to widely unsettled conditions driven by an area of low pressure in the region. This area of low pressure – previously part of the system that brought colder conditions to swathes of the UK earlier this week – moved southwards across Europe through the middle of the week.

In doing so, it brought a cold front across western and central parts of Europe, with spells of rain and hill snow across the Alps on Wednesday, followed by snow showers on a brisk north-westerly wind. By Friday morning, accumulations of 20-40cm were expected above 600 metres, and 60-100cm above 1,000 metres in the Swiss Alps.

Former talent agency boss had closer relationship with sex offender than thought, and supported him after 2009 arrest

A female executive at the top of the modelling industry had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and introduced him to women on the agency’s books, a Guardian investigation has found.

Until last November, Faith Kates ran Next Management modelling and talent agency, which has represented the likes of Alexa Chung, Milla Jovovich and Billie Eilish, a position she held for decades as the founder of the business. She stepped down quietly just weeks before the first major Epstein files were released, saying she intended to focus on charity work.

18 July 2009 10.18am

I am and will always be your friend...Unconditionally...will always be there for you.

5 September 2009 7.47pm

Thinking of you a lot and hoping you are finally enjoying some please [sic] and quiet..know you are always in my thoughts and prayers. You are a good friend my dear friend..

5 September 2009 7.54pm

thanks,, lets get back to work.

Cuban officials have petitioned Pope Leo XIV to help persuade the Trump administration to ease its oil embargo, which is causing crippling fuel shortages and blackouts.

Sarah Strong has the most jump-off-the-page talent in the women’s game since Caitlin Clark, and UConn greats say she could be the best of them

Former WNBA All-Star turned Boston Celtics executive Allison Feaster was recently asked about the differences between high-level female and male hoopers.

“This is a very basic example,” the Celtics’ vice-president of team operations and organizational growth told the Far From the Tree podcast. “But most of the women have had exposure to different types of leadership. Most of the professionals have four-year degrees and even advanced degrees. Many of the professional women have lived outside of the US. Some of them are parents who are the primary caregiver. That is a very general observation, but I venture to say that’s not the same with the NBA players.”

This story works best on ProPublica’s website.

Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks.

When immunization rates drop, however, plagues from the past can come roaring back, as measles has in American communities where parents decided not to vaccinate their children.

Imagine what would happen if even the people who wanted shots couldn’t get them.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt the handful of companies that make most shots for American children to stop selling them here. Over the last year, he has been transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of vaccines into one that questions their safety here and around the world.

Shortly after Kennedy was nominated, questions swirled over how he might overhaul America’s immunization system. Two Stanford University researchers wondered how many people would suffer if vaccination rates dropped or shots became entirely unavailable for four of the most infamous diseases: polio, measles, rubella and diphtheria. 

Outbreaks often start when an American catches one of these illnesses abroad and returns home. So epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, who is also an infectious diseases doctor, built a model to simulate how the four contagions could spread from sick travelers based on each state’s vaccination rates.

Since a sizable chunk of the population is currently vaccinated, some of the infections wouldn’t get a foothold right away. But over time, as more babies are born and not vaccinated, a larger share of the population would become susceptible. 

The professors ran thousands of simulations for each disease, producing a range of possible outcomes. From there, they figured out the average number of deaths and disabilities over a 25-year period.

Their model shows that at current vaccination rates, the nation is already teetering on the brink of an explosion in measles cases — one that would be virtually wiped out with just a 5% increase in vaccination. But if current rates drop by half, all four diseases could return. 

The researchers’ modeling of the worst-case scenario assumes a quarter century where no one could get the shots. It doesn’t account for the likelihood of parents going abroad to find vaccines or politicians intervening to ensure drugmakers offer them again. 

But the results demonstrate in stark terms how vital shots are and what’s at stake if policy changes interfere with Americans’ ability to vaccinate their kids. 

ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with the Department of Health and Human Services. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and continues to routinely recommend the shots for children.

When they published their paper in early 2025, Kiang and Lo emphasized the outcomes from less extreme drops in vaccination rates, in part because the peer reviewers suggested those were more realistic. Back then, Kennedy was in his earliest days at HHS. 

A year later, though, a scenario where no one can get these vaccines doesn’t feel as far-fetched, Kiang said. “Every week that goes by,” he said, “that seems more plausible.” 

Lo said that their goal was to show policy makers, “if we make certain decisions, this is what could happen.” 

So ProPublica decided to illustrate what a future without vaccines could look like.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Polio

Polio, which mainly affects young children, can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis in the limbs or in the muscles needed to breathe. In the 1950s, many people were kept alive in iron lungs, huge metal contraptions that encased the body up to the neck and used pressure to force air in and out of the lungs.

Ventilators have since replaced the antiquated equipment, but modern medicine can’t reverse the paralysis. The model assumes 1 out of every 200 unvaccinated people who catch polio would become paralyzed.

Imagine if this group of kindergartners became paralyzed by polio.

They would be a tiny sliver of the 23,000 people the model predicts could be paralyzed by polio over 25 years if no one is getting the vaccine.

That 23,000 is the model’s average. It’s the equivalent of more than a thousand kindergarten classes. (The model results range from 0 to more than 70,000 cases of paralytic polio.)

If We Lost the Vaccine for Measles

Measles is among the most contagious diseases in history. A child can spread it before they even get a rash, and the virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after they leave a room. 

Famous for its blotchy spots covering the body, measles is a respiratory disease that can lead to pneumonia and swelling of the brain. Before the vaccine, just about everyone got measles, and every year 400 to 500 Americans died.

The model assumes that 3 out of every 1,000 people infected with measles would die.

Over the last 25 years, six people who contracted measles in the U.S. died from the disease.

If Americans could no longer get the vaccine, the model predicts measles would spread quickly.

The model shows that measles could kill about 290,000 people over 25 years.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Rubella

Rubella, also known as German measles, is usually mild in kids and adults. But it’s devastating to a developing fetus. If an infection occurs very early in pregnancy, there’s up to a 90% chance that the baby will be born with congenital rubella syndrome. These children frequently have heart defects, deafness or blindness — and sometimes all three. Many have intellectual disabilities, too. About a third of babies with the syndrome die before their first birthday. A U.S. rubella epidemic in the mid-1960s left 20,000 newborns with congenital rubella syndrome.

If the vaccine went away, we wouldn’t see babies born with congenital rubella syndrome right away. The unvaccinated children would first need to grow into their childbearing years.

The model shows that cases would begin to climb after about 15 years. And within 25 years, 41,000 babies could be born with congenital rubella syndrome.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Diphtheria

Diphtheria, a major killer of children in the 1900s, was known as the “strangling angel.” 

The disease’s name comes from the Greek word for leather because diphtheria’s toxin attacks the respiratory tract. Dead tissue builds up in the throat like a thick piece of hide, sealing off a swollen airway. 

For those who escape suffocation, the toxin can damage the nerves and heart. Patients who seem better can drop dead weeks later.

An antitoxin made from the blood of horses needs to be given promptly, but it is in short supply. Children elsewhere in the world have died waiting for it.

The disease is rare and much less contagious than measles or rubella. But it’s also far more deadly. The model assumes only one infected traveler would arrive every five years and that 1 out of every 10 unvaccinated people who catch diphtheria would die.

The researchers found it’s very possible nobody would die of diphtheria in the 25-year period their model covers. But we would be playing a game of high-stakes roulette if we lost the vaccine. There is a chance that the strangling angel could become devastating again.

Remember the 23,000 people who could be paralyzed without a polio vaccine? A world without a diphtheria vaccine could be even worse.

On average, the model predicts 138,000 deaths from diphtheria.

In the worst-case scenario, though, the model shows that more than a million people could die from diphtheria in 25 years without a vaccine.

The chance of that is remote, but it’s the gamble we’d all be taking.

The post The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish appeared first on ProPublica.

There is a growing network of New York City activists who clean up garbage for fun.

Merlin, a miniature Vietnamese potbellied pig, was recognized by Guinness World Records for his large Instagram following

Undercover reporter gets a taste of the sprawling fraud industry in which cryptocurrencies play a crucial role

• Five firms including Autotrader and Just Eat investigated over fake review failings

The holiday flat near(ish) the Roman ruins of Pompeii was “disgusting”, and smelled of “a mix of dampness and sewage”, according to one reviewer on Google Maps. I never visited, but I gave it five stars.

I did the same for a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel across the River Thames, an Ibis budget hotel in east London that is part of the Accor group, a central Travelodge and the nearby Hyatt Place – some of the best-known hotel brands in the world. Scattered in there were requests for reviews for hostels and B&Bs in Genova, Naples, Maastricht, Krakow and Brussels. For a few days I had a new job: writing fake reviews on Google Maps in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is said to view US-Israeli war as ‘historic opportunity’ to remake Middle East

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Saudi Arabia has urged the US to ramp up attacks on Iran, a Saudi intelligence source has confirmed, while it is weighing a decision on whether to join the fight directly.

The Saudi source confirmed reporting in the New York Times that said the kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has urged Donald Trump not to cut short his war against Iran, and that the US-Israeli campaign represented a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East.

Piece by late South African artist Dumile Feni is part of new series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme

On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.

While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.

Keir Starmer promises to help parents limit children’s online activity as government issues guidance to families

Children under five should spend no more than an hour a day on screens, new government advice says.

Screen time for children under two should be avoided except for shared activities encouraging interaction, families are advised.

CERN has confirmed it will host an expanded version of Open Research Europe, the EU-backed fee-free open access publishing platform that works to "keep knowledge in public hands." Research Professional News reports: A little over a year ago, 10 European research organizations announced that they would add their support to Open Research Europe, to broaden eligibility beyond only those researchers funded by the EU research program. Earlier this year, RPN reported that this group had expanded further and that Cern was set to host the broadened version of ORE, currently provided by the publisher F1000. On March 26, Cern itself finally announced the news, saying it will "provide the technical and operational infrastructure" for the broader version. It said this will build on its "longstanding experience in developing and maintaining open science infrastructures and community-governed services." [...] In its own announcement, the Commission said ORE will have a budget of 17 million euros for 2026-31, with the EU providing 10 million euros. Since it launched five years ago, ORE has published more than 1,200 articles. Cern said the platform is "expected to support a growing number of research outputs each year." Last month, experts told RPN they thought uptake of the increased eligibility will depend on how the newly participating national organizations engage with their communities. Eleven members of Science Europe, a group of major research funding and performing organizations, are part of the expansion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump has extended a pause on striking Iranian energy infrastructure until April 6.

President claims talks with Tehran regime are ‘going very well’ and says he is pausing ‘Energy Plant destruction’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has extended his deadline for Iran to open the strait of Hormuz by 10 days to 6 April after saying talks are “going very well”.

The president made the statement on Thursday in a social media post, saying: “As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days to Monday, April 6, 2026, at 8 P.M., Eastern Time,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

• World No 1 wins semi-final 6-4, 6-3 at Hard Rock Stadium

• American beats Muchova 6-1, 6-1 to continue domination of rival

Aryna Sabalenka believes she is ready for the challenge of facing her rival Coco Gauff in the Miami Open final as she stands one win away from winning Indian Wells and Miami in the same year for the first time.

“She’s a fighter,” Sabalenka said of Gauff. “She’s a great player, of course. We played a lot of matches, a lot of tight matches, a lot of big finals. And, yeah, she’s a great player and I’m really excited to face her in the final. I think it’s going to be a great battle and I cannot wait to play that match.”

The land mines were photographed outside Shiraz, a city located about three miles from one of several nearby Iranian ballistic missile sites.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 27.

For America, the war’s benefits won’t outweigh its costs.

How America can avoid a Russian-style quagmire.

The dangers of a strategy with no doctrine.

Malcolm Turnbull asks defence department official what Australia would do if the promised Virginia-class and Aukus-class submarines don’t arrive

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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

Australia will be left with no submarines if it abandons the Aukus deal with the US and UK, a senior defence official has warned, declining to publicly countenance an alternative plan if Australia’s promised nuclear-powered fleet does not arrive under Australian command.

“Defence has been directed to pursue Aukus and we are pursuing Aukus and that’s our plan. I would not venture into the space about ‘Plan B’ or ‘Plan C’,” defence department deputy secretary, Hugh Jeffrey, told a Sovereignty and Security Forum in Canberra on Friday.

A search is underway for an American Airlines flight attendant whose disappearance while on a layover in Medellín, Colombia, has left his loved ones desperate for answers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Apple provided the FBI with the real iCloud email address hidden behind Apple's 'Hide My Email' feature, which lets paying iCloud+ users generate anonymous email addresses, according to a recently filed court record. The move isn't surprising but still provides uncommon insight into what data is available to authorities regarding the Apple feature. The data was turned over during an investigation into a man who allegedly sent a threatening email to Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel. "On or about February 28, 2026, Person 1 received an email from the email address peaty_terms_1o@icloud.com," the affidavit reads. Earlier on, the document explicitly says that Person 1 is Alexis Wilkins. [...] The affidavit says Apple then provided records that indicated the peaty_terms_1o@icloud.com email address was associated with an Apple account in the name of Alden Ruml. The records showed that account generated 134 anonymized email addresses, according to the affidavit. Law enforcement agents later interviewed Ruml and he confirmed he had sent the email, the affidavit says. Ruml said he sent the email after reading a February 28 article about how the FBI was using its own resources to provide security to Wilkins. The specific article is not named or linked in the affidavit, but a New York Times article published that same day described how Patel ordered a team to ferry his girlfriend on errands and to events.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An Iranian envoy has said South Korean ships can pass through the strait of Hormuz only after coordinating with Tehran, the Yonhap News Agency has reported.

Such an agreement had to be reached in advance of the transit, said Saeed Khuzechi, the Iranian ambassador to South Korea, at a press conference in response to a question about guarantees for South Korean vessels to navigate the vital conduit for oil.

A trickle of cargo ships and tankers – mostly Iranian, but some from Thailand and China – have made it through the strait since the war began

• Middle East crisis - live updates

Malaysia’s prime minister Anwar Ibrahim said on Thursday he had spoken to the leaders of Iran, Egypt, Turkey and other regional countries and that Malaysian vessels were now being allowed to pass through the strait of Hormuz.

In a televised address, Anwar thanked Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, for allowing the passage of Malaysian ships. “We are now in the process of releasing the Malaysian oil tankers and the workers involved so that they may continue their journey home,” he said.

Navy searching for two boats that left Isla Mujeres last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board

Mexico’s navy said on Thursday it had activated a search-and-rescue operation in the Caribbean to locate two sailboats carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba after the vessels failed to arrive in Havana as scheduled.

In a statement, the navy said the two boats left Isla Mujeres, in the Mexican Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board.

• Hawkeyes had already beaten No 1 Florida

• Alvaro Folgueiras shines again for Iowa

• No 11 Texas almost shock No 2 Purdue

Alvaro Folgueiras converted a critical three-point play when Nebraska only had four defenders on the floor, and ninth-seeded Iowa continued their unpredictable NCAA Tournament run under first-year coach Ben McCollum, beating Nebraska 77-71 in the Sweet Sixteen on Thursday night.

Bennett Stirtz scored 20 points and Folgueiras had 16 for the Hawkeyes (24-12), who knocked off top-seeded Florida in the second round on Folgueiras’ three-pointer in the closing seconds.

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We are awaiting the start of Donald Trump’s latest cabinet meeting, which was due to start at 10am eastern time. This will be the 11th such session Trump has staged since re-entering the White House in January last year. Previous meetings have been open and freewheeling – as well as newsworthy.

The Pentagon is preparing plans for a “final blow” in the war with Iran that could include deploying ground troops and a massive bombing campaign, Axios reports, citing four sources – including two US officials.

Federal judge finds Pentagon's effort to cut off the AI firm's access to federal contracts "likely unlawful."

Donald Trump said he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages – key US politics stories from 26 March 2026

Donald Trump said on Thursday he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages that have snarled travel around the country.

The US president said he was instructing the Homeland Security Department “to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports. It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it!”

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Its counterproductive lack of upgradability will no longer grate on workstation buyers.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The plans for several data centers in Delaware have garnered backlash from residents who are worried about their potential impact on energy costs and the environment. The outcome of this fight over environmental law will impact several of those proposals. 

The plan for a massive data center near Delaware City received another major setback Thursday.

A state board unanimously upheld a decision from Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson that the data center is not allowed under the Coastal Zone Act, a landmark Delaware law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines. 

“I’m overjoyed,” said Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of Sierra Club Delaware, the environmental advocacy organization that has been critical of the project. “I think it was the right decision.”

But the case will likely be appealed to higher courts, and it could take years to fully resolve.

The verdict was delivered to a mostly empty auditorium after about 14 hours of testimony over three days.

Developer Starwood Digital Ventures earlier this month appealed Patterson’s decision to the Delaware Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board, a rarely-used administrative body in charge of deciding on appeals of the secretary’s decisions.  

The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s environmentally sensitive shorelines by prohibiting new heavy industry from them.

In his decision on the Starwood proposal, Patterson pointed to the data center’s proposed use of 516 backup diesel generators, which would operate in the case of a power outage or other emergency situation, as a reason for the heavy industry classification. 

Together, they would rely on 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling. 

Starwood’s attorneys from Wilmington-based Richards, Layton & Finger argued that the data center plan, dubbed Project Washington, does not have the characteristics of heavy industry. 

“The Secretary has distorted what Project Washington is… and ignored binding case law in order to find a way to prohibit this project,” said lawyer Katharine Mowery, who represented Starwood at the hearing. 

In recent years, the data center industry has been among the fastest growing in the country, with investors seeking the profits from an ongoing artificial intelligence boom. The exuberance appeared in Delaware in recent months with developers proposing several data center plans.

One of them, proposed near land that hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland north of Middletown, also sits within Delaware’s coastal zone boundaries and may have to comply with the provisions of the act. 

Kenneth Kristl, former director of the Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, said previously that he thinks the losing side will likely appeal the decision to the Delaware Superior Court, then the Delaware Supreme Court. 

He said he thinks the whole process will take between 18 months and three years. 

Arguments rely on definitions

The hearing was mostly a calm deliberation of the specifics of the Coastal Zone Act and whether data centers are a heavy industrial use. 

Starwood’s lawyers argued that Patterson misdefined the data center plans by calling its 516 generators a “tank farm.” They called PBF Energy Senior Operations Director Jeff Hersperger as a witness, who said the generators are “not even a cousin to a tank farm.”

“If I go out in the airport and there are 4,000 cars there, and each of the cars has a 3-foot-by-3- foot gas tank on it, can I calculate that into acreage and convert that into a tank farm? Because that’s what you’re doing,” Hersperger said to DNREC’s lawyers. 

PBF Energy owns the land slated for the data center. 

During the board’s deliberations, member Willie Scott said exact definitions of these phrases are “kind of irrelevant.”

“They’re emission points, and they’re emitting enough to constitute themselves, as a collective, as a major source of air pollution,” he said.

Starwood’s attorneys also argued that Patterson should not have relied on a worst-case scenario when calculating the potential emissions from the backup generators.  

In its Coastal Zone application, Starwood reported that the maximum possible hours the generators could operate would be 500 hours, or a little over 20 days, per year.

“Under this worst-case assumption, this proposed campus has the potential to emit more tons of nitrogen oxides than any other industrial use in the coastal zone, with the exception of the Delaware City refinery,” Patterson said in his decision. 

Experts who testified on behalf of Starwood said that the generators would very likely operate for less than 20 hours a year based on testing requirements and the amount of power outages Delaware has faced historically. 

But Suzanne Glatz, former director at the regional power grid operator PJM, testified on behalf of DNREC that data centers may need to use their generators more often than in the past because of regional power shortages. 

The U.S. Secretary of Energy earlier this year issued a notice that his department would begin requiring large energy users to start using their backup generators to prevent power outages, rather than waiting for them to happen.

That kind of proactive use of generators could happen more often as more energy-hungry data centers join the grid, Glatz testified. 

The post Delaware City data center environmental denial upheld by state board appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.