The deaths have been at the heart of a bitter political dispute between RFK Jr. and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D).

At least two people were killed and about 15 remain missing or unaccounted for after flash floods swept through parts of Grand Canyon National Park over the weekend.

In a 5-4 decision, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court ruling that would have prevented work from being done on the ballroom

• US supreme court allows Trump to keep building $400m White House ballroom

• Sign up for US Breaking News emails

Chris Hippensteel

We’re watching today as Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and Kevin Warsh, the chair of the Federal Reserve, deliver their opening remarks at the G20 meetings in Asheville, North Carolina.

Comments signal president prepared to use dispute to push UK to raise defence spending and Nato contributions

Donald Trump has suggested he is reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, in a move likely to strain the “special relationship” between Washington and London.

“I always review every position – that’s just one of many,” the US president told reporters in the White House, in response to a question about whether he was reviewing the US’s position over the South Atlantic islands, an archipelago whose status has long been disputed by Argentina, which claims sovereignty.

Resignation comes after months of turmoil at Pentagon, from leaked investigation to ousting of senior officials

Army secretary Dan Driscoll has handed his resignation to Donald Trump, the White House said on Monday, becoming the latest high-profile figure to depart the defense department.

The army official, who is second in line to defense secretary Pete Hegseth, had reportedly been eyeing an exit from the Pentagon amid apparent friction with the secretary.

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

One jurist paid to construct a safe room after the floor plan of their home was posted on the internet.

The Supreme Court divided 5-4 in allowing construction of the new White House ballroom to continue.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is resigning, the White House confirmed.

Premium of nearly 10% paid by housebuyers comparable with cost of a cheaper private school over seven years

A house near a top state secondary school costs an extra £40,000 on average, according to research that reveals education premiums that rank alongside some private school fees.

The average property in a postcode district that includes a top 50 state secondary commands a price tag of £415,791, compared with £375,217 across the wider local authority areas in which those schools are located, a UK-wide analysis by the estate agent Yopa found.

Report calls for legally binding targets to cut microplastic pollution as soil ‘is a complex living ecosystem’

The accumulation of microplastics in soil presents an emerging threat to the UK’s food security, according to scientists, MPs and campaigners who have called for legally binding targets to cut microplastic pollution.

UK agricultural soils have been identified as among the most contaminated by microplastics in Europe, often as a result of repeated applications of sludge from water treatment works as fertiliser, according to a report published by the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on microplastics.

The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon, accusing the company of secretly inflating advertising prices through undisclosed changes to its auction system that may have extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers since 2019. "Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices," FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. "These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers." CNBC reports: The complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, centers on Amazon's sponsored products ads, brands ads and display ads that run alongside search results on its sprawling webstore. Amazon has amassed the third-largest digital advertising business globally, trailing only Google and Meta. The company hauled in more than $68 billion in ads revenue last year, with the lion's share coming from sales of sponsored products ads. Third-party sellers who hawk their wares on Amazon's marketplace have recently criticized surging advertising costs on the site, including a string of recent policy changes, which led to some top merchants withholding their ad spend in a boycott. The company has traditionally used a "second-price" auction system, wherein it told advertisers they "only pay the least bid amount needed in order to win," the complaint states, citing Amazon's own marketing materials. The FTC alleges in its complaint that Amazon in 2019 changed its auction rules without notice by adding an undisclosed surcharge it referred to as a "soft reserve price," which led to higher ad prices. "Amazon made this surreptitious change to its auction because it was unhappy about how much revenue its advertising auctions were generating," the agency said in its complaint, which cites internal communications between Amazon ad executives. In one exchange, a company executive allegedly acknowledged it uses an "invented auction participant" to increase prices, the FTC said. The FTC and the states alleged Amazon's practices violate federal and state consumer protection laws, and they're seeking civil penalties, restitution and other unspecified damages. In a blog post, Amazon called the FTC's lawsuit "misguided" and said the complaint "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate." The company added that the agency's lawsuit doesn't include evidence of consumer price increases. "We've provided advertisers with guidance about our auctions and pricing in the main tools they use to manage their campaigns, and we continue to update that guidance," the company said. "We look forward to making our case in court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prosecutors say the North Carolina teen allegedly helped plan and share the manifesto behind the attack.

Federal authorities allege that Daejon Love​ posed as an NFL player and real estate investor to defraud more than two dozen women of $1.3 million.

The wildfire, which has torn through Palo Pinto and Jack counties, has forced evacuations, closed roads and disrupted schools.

It’s time once again for HPC Career Notes, our monthly feature that’s designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the HPC community, including promotion, new company hires, and accolade. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!

Jay Kreps and Shaun Clowes

Shaun Clowes (left) and Jay Kreps

Jay Kreps, the Apache Kafka co-creator and former CEO of Confluent, announced he is stepping down from running the company, which was acquired by IBM earlier this year for $11 billion.

“After almost 12 years, I’ll be stepping back from my role at Confluent and handing over the reins to our Chief Product Officer Shaun Clowes,” Kreps wrote in a post on LinkedIn, where he and Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao created Apache Kafka more than 15  years ago.

“Confluent was founded to change how companies use data, and against all odds, it has,” he continued. “And we’re not done! There is an ambitious roadmap for what’s next and I’ll watch from the sidelines with a lot of pride and a little FOMO as the team achieves that.”

Clowes announced that he’s taken on the role of General Manager for Confluent and Data at IBM.

“I’ll be leading the next generation data products across both Confluent and IBM, introducing modern approaches for organizations to get value out of their data and work with it,” Clowes stated on LinkedIn. “That’s been a passion area for me for a long time, and this is the chance to do it on a much bigger stage, with IBM’s go-to-market expertise and some of the strongest R&D talent anywhere.

Rupal Hollenbeck

Rupal Hollenbeck

NextSilicon, a semiconductor startup developing chips for AI and HPC, announced that it has appointed Rupal Hollenbeck to be its president and chief business officer. Hollenbeck will lead all go-to-market activities, including sales, marketing, communications, strategic partnerships, business development, and customer engagement and success, as the company seeks to ramp up Maverick-2.

Hollenbeck brings more than 30 years of technology industry experience spanning enterprise computing, semiconductors, AI, cybersecurity, sales, marketing, and global operations. Most recently, she served as president of Check Point Software Technologies. Before that, she held executive positions at Cerebras Systems, Oracle, and Intel.

“As AI systems become more agentic and workflow-driven, NextSilicon’s Maverick product line is increasingly able to adapt in real time, so customers can keep pace without constantly rebuilding their infrastructure,” stated Hollenbeck. “What drew me to the company is a tremendously talented team that has proven that the technology works in production and delivers true global impact.”

Chetan Gupta

Chetan Gupta

Rackspace Technology has appointed Chetan Gupta to the role of chief AI officer. In this position, Gupta will lead the Office of AI, with responsibility for Rackspace’s AI strategy, research, innovation, governance, and adoption across the company and its customers.

Gupta joins Rackspace after nearly a decade leading global AI research at Hitachi, where he served as general manager of the Advanced AI Center in Japan, vice president of the Industrial AI Lab in North America, and head of Hitachi‘s Global AI Center of Excellence. He also spent seven years at HP Labs, translating advanced AI research into deployed solutions across logistics, manufacturing, energy, and mobility.

“AI has reached an inflection point. The hard problem is no longer capability. It is trust: taking promising research and turning it into systems that hold up in the real world, under real regulatory and operational constraints,” Gupta said. “Rackspace occupies a distinct position in the market, operating the full stack for institutions that cannot afford to get AI wrong. I look forward to leading our AI strategy and advancing enterprise and sovereign AI for our customers and across the business.”

Nicholas D’Imperio

Nicholas D’Imperio

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has named Nicholas D’Imperio as associate laboratory director (ALD) of the lab’s Computing and Data Sciences (CDS) directorate. The move recognizes D’Imperio’s expertise and service in HPC, scientific software development, and strategic infrastructure planning that are integral to the lab’s computing research enterprise.

D’Imperio served as the interim CDS ALD since 2024, leading the expansion of the former Computational Science Initiative and integration of the Scientific Data and Computing Center into the new directorate. He oversees 158 CDS staff members and continues to guide the directorate’s role in artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and data-intensive science to support Brookhaven Lab’s scientific programs and DOE Office of Science user facilities.

His leadership also involves positioning the lab’s computing capabilities to contribute directly to DOE’s emerging priorities, such as the Genesis Mission, the national effort to harness AI to accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, and advance energy innovation.

“I am honored to serve as CDS ALD at a time when advanced computing and AI are transforming how we approach science, where there are opportunities to accelerate discovery in ways that were unimaginable even just a few years ago,” D’Imperio stated. “Brookhaven Lab has a well-known passion for discovery sustained by an exceptional foundation of talent, world-class facilities, and collaborations across every scientific discipline. I look forward to working with our researchers and partners to further expand our computational science portfolio and strengthen our AI and HPC capabilities.”

Kate Evans

Kate Evans

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Kate Evans as associate laboratory director for the Biological and Environmental Systems Science Directorate (BESSD). Evans will lead the directorate as it advances the science and technology needed to strengthen energy security, safeguard infrastructure and accelerate biotechnology innovation.

For the past two years, Evans has served as the director of the Office of Institutional Strategic Planning (OISP), where she coordinated lab-wide science and technology strategic activities and the lab’s annual plan, report, and agenda. She was central to the creation of ORNL’s Quantum Roadmap while as director of OISP, and recently spearheaded the “Accelerating Southeast Resilience at ORNL” initiative.

Prior to OISP, Evans served as director of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division for nearly six years. She joined ORNL in 2007 as a research and development staff member before becoming the group leader of Computational Earth Sciences in 2013. She has been an active member in the laboratory’s community engagement efforts, serving as vice chair and then chairing the ORNL Gives campaign in 2022 and 2023.

“I am excited and honored to step into the BESSD ALD role,” Evans stated. “There are urgent challenges in critical minerals, scaled biomanufacturing and abundant, resilient energy systems, and BESSD is equipped to meet them. Our world-class team will draw on exascale computing, AI, advanced analytics and autonomous research capabilities to translate scientific discoveries into innovative solutions for DOE and the nation.”

Manish Bhatia and Scott DeBoer

Manish Bhatia (left) and Scott DeBoer

Memory maker Micron announced two changes to senior executive roles, including the appointment of Manish Bhatia as president and chief operating officer and Scott DeBoer as president and chief technology and products officer.

Since joining Micron in 2017, Bhatia has led the company’s global operations, overseeing manufacturing and factory construction, supply chain, procurement, quality, information technology, artificial intelligence and global government affairs. DeBoer, who joined Miron in 1995, has been a driving force behind the company’s technology and product portfolio, leading development and delivery of 15 technology nodes.

In his new role, Bhatia will lead Micron’s global operations and business units, with accountability for the company’s operating P&L, spanning capital investment, manufacturing execution, and customer demand, pricing and delivery. DeBoer, meanwhile, will be responsible for advancing the company’s industry-leading memory and storage roadmap, accelerating innovation to meet customers’ rapidly evolving requirements, and overseeing Micron Research Labs.

“Micron will always seek new ways to best deliver for our customers. Today’s announcement is about ensuring that we are strategically aligned as an organization to meet the needs of our customers in an AI-enabled future,” stated Sanjay Mehrotra, chairman and chief executive officer of Micron Technology. “Manish and Scott have each made extraordinary contributions to Micron’s growth, technology leadership and operational excellence. The Board of Directors and I have the highest confidence in their leadership, vision and ability to continue to work with me to guide Micron through its next chapter of innovation and value creation.”

Mohsen Moazami

Mohsen Moazami

Chipmaker SambaNova has appointed Mohsen Moazami as vice chair of global strategy and partnerships, a role that will see him reporting directly to CEO, Rodrigo Liang, to accelerate global enterprise and sovereign AI expansion.

Moazami brings decades of investment to the role. Most recently, he served in the Office of the CEO and was president of international at Groq before Nvidia acquired its intellectual property for $20 billion. Earlier this year, he was hired as vice chair at storage vendor DDN, a position he still has.

“SambaNova has reached the point every category-defining technology company works toward: the market need is clear, the technology is validated, and the capital is in place to scale,” Moazami stated. “Production inference is becoming one of the most important infrastructure markets in the world. SambaNova is uniquely positioned to serve enterprises, governments and sovereign AI programs that need performance, control and better economics.”

Lauren Bloch

Lauren Bloch

HPC storage vendor DDN has appointed Lauren Bloch to the role of chief people and culture officer (CPCO). In the role, Bloch will lead DDN’s global people strategy, including talent acquisition and development, organizational effectiveness, leadership development, employee engagement, workplace experience, and culture.

Bloch brings more than 15 years of human resources and organizational leadership experience. She joins DDN from Movable Ink, where she served as chief people officer and led the company’s People and Workplace Experience teams.

Bloch will report to Guido Torrini, DDN’s chief financial and operating officer, and will work closely with the company’s executive leadership team to build the organizational capabilities required to support DDN’s continued global growth. She is not related to Paul Bloch, a DDN co-founder and its chairman.

For the previous edition of HPC Career Notes, click here.

The post August 2026 HPC Career Notes appeared first on HPCwire.

As Moscow pounds Ukraine, the appearance by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov was “quite troubling,” said one attendee. U.S. officials cited a need for “dialogue.”

Company is offering cash reward for 40,000lb stolen cargo, and turns theft into lighthearted social media promotion

Pabst is offering a reward after tens of thousands of cans of its Blue Ribbon beer were stolen from the company’s southern California warehouse two weeks ago – if it is all safely returned.

In Instagram posts, Pabst put the weight of the stolen cargo at 40,000lb (18,000kg) and started a countdown seeking its return.

Dale Sanders said he fell 71 times on the trail, but completed the journey as ‘people are motivated … by my efforts’

A 91-year-old hiker has reclaimed his record as the oldest person to complete the more than 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail.

By his count, Dale Sanders, of Tennessee, fell 71 times during the feat, six of which he said were hard falls and one which required a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the end. The 2,193-mile trail runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine.

Justices’ 5-4 ruling permits Trump administration appeal to block lower court order halting above-ground work

A divided US supreme court has permitted Donald Trump to continue building his controversial $400m White House ballroom despite legal challenges, raising the likelihood it will be completed.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices permitted the Trump administration’s request to ⁠block a lower court order that had halted above-ground construction of the project while a lawsuit by a historic preservation group seeks to block it.

Aug. 31, 2026 — In dark skies at night, distant star light twinkles and speaks to vast cosmic histories almost as old as time itself. New data from instruments such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are helping astrophysicists probe deep cosmic mysteries such as the evolution of black holes and galaxies.

Using supercomputers to help make sense of the data, researchers from multiple institutions worked together to complete the largest cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, called ASTRID—a mind-boggling computational run that traces the evolution of the universe from its earliest time to the present.

Researchers completed the largest yet cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, called ASTRID, that traces the evolution of the universe from its earliest time to the present, designated as z = 0 and referring to a zero redshift of star light. Visualization shown of the ASTRID simulation at z = 0. The underlying background is the dark matter density, with the blue zoom showing the most massive dark matter halo in ASTRID; inset showing a trichromatic gas map of temperature, neutral hydrogen gas fraction, and metallicity; stellar density inset; and mock observations for the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera. Credit: DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae3c08

“The most important information about our recent study is that we’ve evolved the ASTRID simulation to z = 0, and that this data is available,” said Yihao Zhou, a PhD student in Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Department of Physics. Zhou and colleagues published their study in The Astrophysical Journal in February 2026.

The term “z” denotes the red shift of star light, in which light shifts toward the red end as its source moves away from an observer. High redshift corresponds to greater distances and earlier periods in the universe’s history, when the universe was expanding rapidly shortly after the Big Bang.

Zhou’s team started their cosmological simulations from z= 99, covering the ‘cosmic dawn’ of the universe. ASTRID traced 13.5 billion years of galactic structure and black hole evolution to z = 0, the present day.

“We have this very large simulation and piece of the universe, which captures the growth of black holes from the time at which they were formed all the way to today, as well as the galaxies that form, also from a very early time,” said study co-author and ASTRID principal investigator Tiziana Di Matteo, professor of physics and director of CMU’s McWilliams Center for Cosmology & Astrophysics.

The Frontera Supercomputer: A Virtual Universe At Unprecedented Scale

Di Matteo was awarded a 2024 Leadership Resource Allocation on the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The award gave the ASTRID team the computational power to model 166 billion particles across a volume of space 815 million light-years across, an enormous virtual laboratory for studying the universe.

Furthermore, the researchers solved complex physical interactions such as the gravity hydrodynamics for each time step, which necessitated building “gravity trees” to efficiently compute long- and short-range gravitational forces across billions of particles.

Scientists highlighted – Yihao Zhou (left) and Tiziana Di Matteo (right), Carnegie Mellon University. Credit: CMU

“This is a very demanding process, and only large compute clusters like Frontera can do this,” Zhou said.

The data input/output process for ASTRID was also computationally demanding with each simulation snapshot totaling 30 terabytes. “TACC’s Ranch archive system saved our ASTRID data,” Zhou added.

“The NSF has offered state-of-the-art resources in Frontera,” Di Matteo said. “That’s why we were able to simulate the biggest volume and the highest resolution over a mass range of seven orders of magnitude and with the full physics.”

The ASTRID team plans to carry out future simulations at TACC’s U.S. NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility using the upcoming Horizon supercomputer, which is expected to enter production later in 2026. Horizon will be deployed in two phases, with the first featuring graphical processing units (GPUs) and the second adding central processing units (CPUs).

“Our current code was designed to run on CPUs only,” Zhou said. “We are in the process of co-development to further refine our gravitational and black hole feedback models to make our simulation software more suitable for Horizon.”

“We are very excited about being ready to run on Horizon,” Di Matteo added.

Black Hole Evolution

The timing for ASTRID couldn’t be better.

As new data pours in from science missions such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is probing the earliest stages of galaxy and black hole formation, scientists are confronting a growing number of questions. JWST observations suggest that massive black holes were far more common in the early universe than previously thought, challenging existing theories about how these cosmic giants formed and grew so rapidly.

A slice of the Astrid simulation at redshift z = 5, and false color images of the Little Red Dot galaxies in Astrid. The three overlayed images are Little Red Dots present in this slice of Astrid and their position is indicated by the cross-hair. Credit: DOI: 10.33232/001c.155493

“We can look into the questions posed by JWST data using this very large volume of ASTRID simulations, with quite amazing resolution and physical realism, that allows us to make predictions and understand some of the current puzzles that are coming through,” Di Matteo said.

The ASTRID simulations can evolve the universe across cosmic history, revealing the most frequent periods when black hole mergers were most common.

“We care about black hole mergers because even if we don’t see the light or the accretion, we now have detectors that can see an event such as black hole mergers,” Di Matteo explained. “The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), which will be launched in 2035, will find most of the massive black hole mergers in the early Universe.”

ASTRID includes dynamical friction models that improve the resolution of how a black hole gradually sinks into the galactic center when a galaxy merger happens.

“Our simulations have realistic black hole merger orbits, and a better estimation of the black hole merger timescales,” Di Matteo added.

Listening to the Universe’s Ripples

The ASTRID simulations also enable predictions of gravitational waves, first directly detected in 2015 by the Nobel-prize winning LIGO and Virgo collaborations. Becausee gravitational waves can pass through matter that blocks light, they offer astrophysicists a powering new way to probe the universe’s most distant and hidden events, including the mergers of massive black holes. Di Matteo, Zhou, and colleagues use ASTRID to guide future planned gravitational detectors from LISA and the Pulsar Timing Array collaborations.

“With ASTRID, we make predictions for which environments would host gravitational wave sources that are most likely to be detected. In the future, people can use our predictions to discover gravitational sources,” Zhou explained.

What’s more, the ASTRID team has made predictions of galaxy evolution for large surveys currently running such as the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (SST).

“For the first time, ASTRID allows us to capture this piece of the process where galaxies merge,” Di Matteo said. ASTRID simulates the central galactic black holes, which approach each other. “Eventually they merge, and they produce this gravitational wave signal that we can produce in the simulation, as if we are already, observing a gravitational wave signal.”

ASTRID example false color images of galaxies from all 4 redshift samples, across a range of stellar masses. Credit: DOI: 10.33232/001c.129991

Keyhole Of The Universe

New data from JWST shows an abundance of black holes formed in the early universe, observed to co-evolve in almost every massive galaxy.

“Massive black holes are the key to the structure of the universe, and I would say the most interesting part of our universe,” Zhou stated.

Black holes are not merely cosmic consumers—they can transform the galaxies around them. As they grow by accreting gas, they unleash enormous amounts of energy through radiation and powerful jets, altering star formation and ultimately shaping the color, structure and evolution of nearly every massive galaxy in the universe.

“Our biggest question is about how, or what physical processes formed the ‘seeds’ of the early universe black holes,” Di Matteo said. “The simulations allow us to experiment with the seed models and look at the consequences that reveal the physical mechanisms that give way to predictions, something that the current generation and next generation telescopes or gravitational wave detectors can observe.”

Supercomputers transform the laws of physics into a living, evolving universe, one we can build, observe, and explore.

“We can’t replay the universe to study the deep past, and we’re limited in observing distant galaxies very directly because we don’t yet have very good resolution,” Zhou concludes. “With supercomputers, we can build the numerical universe that follows the gravity and evolution of stars and massive black holes over the entire cosmic time. Supercomputers help us to bridge our theory to real observations.”

The study, “The ASTRID Simulation at z = 0: From Massive Black Holes to Large-scale Structure,” was published February 23, 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal. It was authored by Yihao Zhou, Tiziana Di Matteo, Rupert Croft, Xiaowen Zhang, Patrick Lachance, Fatemeh Hafezianzadeh of Carnegie Mellon University; Simeon Bird, Yanhui Yang of UC Riverside; Yueying Ni of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian; and Nianyi Chen of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Funding came from a NASA FINESST grant, NASA ATP 80NSSC20K0519, NSF PHY-2020295, NASA ATP NNX17AK56G, and NASA ATP 80NSSC18K101, NASA Theory grant 80NSSC22K072, the Schmidt Futures Fund, the ITC Postdoctoral Fellowship, NASA ATP 80NSSC22K1897 and NSF AST-2509639.

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post TACC-Supported ASTRID Completes Largest Yet Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations appeared first on HPCwire.

Flash flooding in Arizona tourist destination was likely triggered by compounding climate factors, such as drought and warming in Pacific Ocean

• Remote Grand Canyon lodge hit by deadly flash flood boasts fabled history

A deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend was likely driven by a confluence of climate factors, including drought, wildfire scarring and warming temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can supercharge storms.

At least two people have died and 15 remain missing or unaccounted for after a surge of water and debris swept through the immensely popular tourist destination on Saturday, fueled by torrents of rain that hit the national park’s Bright Angel Creek area.

The first silicon spin quantum computer to operate in a shared commercial data center, bringing quantum computing a step closer to industry

Aug. 31, 2026 — Diraq and Equinix, Inc. today announced plans to deploy a Diraq quantum computer at an Equinix data center in Sydney, Australia. The deployment will mark the world’s first silicon spin quantum computer to operate in a shared commercial data center, bringing quantum computing one step closer to large-scale commercial adoption.

Andrew Dzurak, Diraq CEO & Founder and Jarrod Nink, Equinix Managing Director, Australia at the Equinix Sydney facility.

The installed quantum computer will feature a silicon chip containing eight quantum bits (qubits), with all cryogenic cooling and control electronics self-contained. The complete system fits within Equinix’s existing data center alongside standard servers, requiring minimal integration and drawing less than 20kW of power. Scaling to higher qubit counts requires only a chip replacement, with no changes to the surrounding infrastructure, making the system easily upgradable.

“Quantum computers are about to become as essential to data centers and computing infrastructure as data servers, CPUs and GPUs,” said Andrew Dzurak, Diraq Founder and CEO. “The data center is where quantum computing goes mainstream, and that shift starts now. It’s a first, and the milestone is in the simplicity itself. Diraq’s quantum computers integrate into operational data centers like any other rack. That’s the advantage of Diraq’s silicon spin qubits: as we scale to millions of qubits, our system is deployable anywhere in the world, right next to the AI systems that are reshaping the global economy.”

The collaboration is designed to:

• Test real-world performance: Evaluate how Diraq’s quantum system operates in a live commercial data center with open network connectivity, including remote monitoring and secure integration with the classical CPUs and GPUs that power today’s computing.
• Chart the path to commercial scale: Operating alongside the cloud and AI systems already in Equinix’s data center, Diraq will explore how quantum and AI can work together as both technologies scale, laying the groundwork for practical, hybrid quantum-classical computing.
• Begin partner and customer conversations: Once testing is complete, Diraq will give industry partners and customers the opportunity to see quantum computing in action and explore potential applications in an Equinix facility that already meets enterprise data sovereignty, security and compliance requirements.

Jarrod Nink, Managing Director, Australia, Equinix, said: “Quantum computing’s future depends not only on breakthroughs in hardware, but on proving how these systems can operate within the digital infrastructure enterprises rely on every day. Our collaboration with Diraq will demonstrate how quantum computing can be securely deployed alongside AI, cloud and high-performance computing environments. By combining Diraq’s pioneering silicon quantum technology with Equinix’s global footprint, we’re helping to define a new benchmark for quantum deployment while supporting Australia’s ambition to become a leading global hub for quantum innovation.”

“We believe the future of computing will be quantum-enhanced and AI-enabled,” said Diraq Founder and CEO Andrew Dzurak. “Rather than replacing today’s systems, quantum computers will work alongside AI and classical infrastructure to solve problems that are currently out of reach. By bringing quantum into a commercial data center, we’re helping pave the way for that future.”

Diraq’s qubits are made the same way as the chips in today’s phones and laptops, leveraging existing semiconductor foundries to manufacture and clearing a path to millions of qubits on one chip. Because they’re so small, Diraq can pack far more qubits into less space on a single chip than other quantum technologies: the resulting quantum computing system is small enough that many of Diraq’s systems can operate inside a standard data center, beside the classical compute infrastructure it works with. Importantly, Diraq sees data centers hosting not just one quantum computer, but entire fleets of them.

At utility scale, the point where a quantum computer delivers more value than it costs to run, quantum computers will solve problems beyond the reach of today’s most powerful machines, modelling molecules and chemical reactions to accelerate drug discovery, materials design and energy solutions. They won’t replace today’s computers but work alongside them, in a hybrid future where quantum, AI and classical systems each tackle what they do best.

Installation work at Equinix’s Sydney data center is on track to be completed in October 2026.

More from HPCwire: Diraq Outlines Utility-Scale Quantum Computing Roadmap with Silicon Spin Qubits

About Diraq

Diraq is commercializing quantum computing with a silicon-based approach that uses existing CMOS processes. By utilizing the same manufacturing methods that produce today’s semiconductor components, Diraq is pioneering a faster, more economical road to commercial-scale quantum computing. The company’s proprietary ‘quantum dot’ technology is based on 20 years of research by founder Andrew Dzurak, designed to enable millions of qubits on a single chip, for powerful and scalable deployments. Diraq’s mission is to revolutionize quantum computing by unlocking the scale needed for useful commercial applications. Founded in Sydney, Diraq has more than 100 team members globally, with operations in Melbourne, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Source: Diraq

The post Diraq to Deploy a Quantum Computer Inside an Equinix Data Center appeared first on HPCwire.

According to The Information (paywalled), Apple reportedly moved up the release of new Mac mini and Mac Studio models after unexpectedly strong enterprise demand for Macs capable of running AI workloads. MacRumors reports: Apple normally releases new Mac models in the autumn, closer to October or November, making this week's announcement unusually early, falling just before the anticipated arrival of new iPhone models. The Information says that the AI-driven boom in Mac Studio and Mac mini sales is behind the early launch. Apple noticeably promoted the ability to link multiple Mac Studios together into a single, more capable system for running large frontier AI models, a feature aimed at business and developer customers rather than everyday consumers. Apple highlighted the Mac mini and Mac Studio's shift toward business buyers in June, with a "Business at the Park" event involving executives from major companies Ford, Disney, and Anthropic. The Mac mini was said to be the "darling" of the event. Even so, enterprise's rush toward powerful desktop Macs more broadly took Apple by surprise. The company reportedly did not possess an engineering team dedicated to business customers or staff focused on developer relations, and lacked an enterprise AI strategy. Businesses that approached Apple asking to buy access to the company's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure were reportedly turned down. Apple is instead leaning on partners such as WebAI and Mount Thor, which provide AI tools and execution environments built on Apple hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 1 million advertisers were affected, the suit says. The online retailer says the Federal Trade Commission’s claim “fundamentally misunderstands” how its ads work.

Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka began their title defences with comfortable victories on Arthur Ashe

Sabalenka eases through on her serve, advancing to the net to secure her first game of the tournament with a forehand volley. It’s 1-1 in the opening set against Osorio.

Sabalenka and Osorio are underway on Arthur Ashe, with the Colombian serving. She records two double-faults before Sabalenka seizes upon the second serve, whipping a blistering forehand to make it deuce. But the defending champion finds the net and the stratosphere, too, as Osorio holds to go 1-0 up.

Naegleria fowleri is commonly found in warm freshwater, and if it enters through the nose, can cause brain damage

A North Carolina teenager has died after contracting a rare and often fatal brain-eating amoeba.

The state’s health department (NCDHHS) confirmed the boy’s death on Monday, saying: “NCDHHS has been informed that the teen who developed a rare illness, caused by Naegleria fowleri died on Aug. 31, 2026. We extend our condolences to the family, friends and community impacted by this loss.”

(The Center Square) – Federal law enforcement has seized core infrastructure reportedly used by a Chinese state-sponsored cyber platform to target high-profile U.S. government entities and critical infrastructure in a campaign dating back to 2018.

Republicans added 10 candidates after Aug. 1, including eight during the final week before the deadline; Democrats added two

By George D. Rotsch, Editor, Delaware LIVE

DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s November ballot became considerably more competitive during August as the Republican Party nominated candidates for 10 offices that otherwise would have lacked a Republican contender.

Eight of those nominations were filed during the final week before Delaware’s Sept. 1 deadline for major parties to fill vacant ballot positions, according to the state Department of Elections.

The Democratic Party also made two late nominations, adding candidates for a Sussex County Senate seat and a New Castle County-area House district.

Brent Burdge, chair of the Northern DEGOP region where many of these candidates are running and a newly added candidate himself, stated, “Most of the candidates came forward to give voters in these communities real options in November.  Incumbents and primary winners need to be challenged so voters can determine the future of their community.  That’s how democracy works.  These individuals are passionate about the neighborhoods and want to make a difference. They are knowledgeable about the community, local leaders, and understand the political process.”

“Contested elections allow voters to compare candidates, hear different positions and hold officeholders accountable,” concluded Burdge.

Republicans fill ballot vacancies

The 10 Republicans filed after Aug. 1 are:

The Democratic Party nominated Harry S. Gold for the 20th Senate District on Aug. 25 and Tori Parker for the 11th Representative District on Aug. 28. Both are listed as qualified.

Several of the newly nominated Republicans will face Democratic incumbents or the winners of Democratic primaries. Graham, for example, is positioned to face the winner of the Democratic primary for attorney general, where incumbent Kathy Jennings is seeking another term.

Some November matchups will not be complete until Delaware holds its statewide primary Sept. 15.

A rarely used route to the ballot

Ordinarily, Democratic and Republican candidates file by the July deadline and advance through a primary if more than one candidate seeks the same party’s nomination.

State law provides another route when no candidate from a major party has filed for an office. Party officials may nominate someone to fill that ballot vacancy by submitting a certificate of nomination to the Department of Elections by Sept. 1.

The late nominees do not go through a primary because no other candidate from their party filed for the same office.

Delaware’s online candidate records indicate that this year’s Republican recruitment effort is unusually large. Eight Republican nominations were filed during the final week before the deadline. No Democratic or Republican organization matched that total in the state’s date-stamped candidate lists from 2010 through 2024.

The closest comparison came in 2016, when Republicans filed five candidates during the closing days of the nomination period. That year’s late additions included candidates for Wilmington offices and Kent County positions.

That makes this year’s group the largest final-week addition by either major party in at least 16 years. Records before 2010 available on the Department of Elections website do not contain filing dates, making a longer historical comparison difficult.

More candidates, but difficult campaigns

Late nomination comes with disadvantages.

Candidates entering near the deadline have little time to raise money, recruit volunteers, introduce themselves to voters and develop positions on complicated state issues. Some will be challenging incumbents who have spent years building name recognition and campaign organizations.

A name on the ballot, therefore, does not necessarily create a competitive campaign. The new candidates will still have to demonstrate that they are prepared to serve and capable of making a serious case to voters.

Their presence nevertheless prevents several races from being decided without a general-election contest.

Unopposed candidates can still be held accountable by the public, news organizations and members of their own party. But an opposing candidate creates a more direct test. Debates become possible. Policy differences become clearer. Voters can evaluate competing records and priorities before selecting who will represent them.

That is a basic feature of representative government: Elections work best when voters have meaningful choices.

Some candidates remain provisional

Several late nominees are currently listed as provisional by the Department of Elections.

Provisional status does not mean a candidate has been rejected. It generally means the state is reviewing residency documentation or awaiting the results of a required criminal-history background check.

Candidates listed as qualified have completed those reviews and have been determined eligible to appear on the ballot. The Department of Elections periodically updates the list as reviews are completed and additional filings are processed.

Minor parties also added candidates during August. The Independent Party of Delaware nominated Austin Cassidy for auditor of accounts, Carolyn Frank for the 5th Senate District and Steven Washington for the 1st Senate District.

The result is a November ballot with more contested races than Delaware voters appeared likely to see only a few weeks ago. Whether the late nominees can build competitive campaigns remains an open question. But in the districts where they qualified, voters will at least have a decision to make.

To-go box:

• What happened: Delaware Republicans nominated 10 candidates after Aug. 1, including eight during the final week before the Sept. 1 deadline.
• Why it matters: The nominations give more voters a choice between major-party candidates in November.
• Historical context: It is the largest final-week group added by either major party in at least 16 years, based on Delaware’s available date-stamped records.
• What’s next: Several nominees must complete state qualification reviews, while some November matchups will be determined by the Sept. 15 primary.

NOTE:  Brent Burdge is a candidate in

Review: I wanted to love Onimusha’s return, but I got tired of engaging the same fight over and over again.

Just in time for Labor Day weekend, Google launches upgraded travel features to book flights, hotels and more.

Phantom Ranch, set up by Teddy Roosevelt, has welcomed exhausted hikers to its famed cabins for over a century

• Two dead and at least 15 missing in Grand Canyon flash flood

Phantom Ranch has been a solitary refuge visited by some of the most famous names of history. More typically, it’s been a beacon for the half-collapsed, exhausted and overheated hikers trudging down the Grand Canyon for more than a century.

The sole lodge at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon, the cabins long had a near mythical reputation. Located along the Bright Angel Creek, which tumbles into the mighty Colorado River at the base of the canyon, they served as a reminder of the long history of one of America’s most spectacular but savage environments.

A 17-year-old North Carolina girl has been charged with murder by aiding and abetting in connection with the deadly rampage at the Islamic Center of San Diego in May.

Management consulting firm EY said it will reward employees who demonstrate human skills, such as business acumen and judgment.

Letter from chair of joint chiefs of staff addresses concerns over Trump officials using military to interfere with vote

The highest‑ranking US military officer says there are no plans to deploy troops to polling places during the November midterm elections – responding to Senator Elissa Slotkin’s request for information amid concerns about whether the Trump administration might send service members to election sites.

In a letter obtained by the Guardian, first reported by the Associated Press, Gen Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, told Slotkin “the Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections”. He added that there are also “no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election‑related material”.

Broadcom is launching "TrueSource," an effort to curate and secure open-source components used with its Tanzu platform, including Spring, RabbitMQ, and libraries across Java, Python, and Node.js. "The idea is to provide a set of solutions focused on providing clean and secure artefacts," Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president of Broadcom's Tanzu Division, told The Register. "We choose and build every Spring library, databases, other Java components," she said. The Register reports: Padmanabhan said that promise means VMware will also provide "TrueSource trusted artifacts" for code that is not part of Spring, including the wider Java ecosystem, Python, and Node.js. "Broadcom's curation process ensures that the libraries conform to a reference architecture and are supportable by the maintainers of record," according to a company statement. "Thousands of engineers across Broadcom's software divisions scan, fix, contribute to, and consume them every day." A VMware spokesperson told The Register the Broadcom business unit "will work with and support maintainers on open source software and we will provide fixes to open source upstream for any active projects." "With Spring and RabbitMQ, we are the maintainers. For other open source software, we will work with the maintainers. We believe that the community maintainers must remain the source of truth," the spokesperson said. This is just the sort of contribution that the open-source community wants vendors to do to reflect the value they extract from software they did not create alone. It's also the sort of thing vendors sometimes conclude they need to do to keep products based on FOSS viable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(The Center Square) – A new report by the National Petroleum Council urges Congress to authorize a coordinated national program to map the country's resources deep underground as part of a broader effort to secure domestic supply chains for energy…

California lawmakers unanimously passed legislation last week to ensure that school administrators are informed about past accusations of misconduct against teachers as part of their hiring process.  

The legislation follows a KQED-ProPublica investigation revealing how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct. Our reporting found that at least 14 educators were hired by new schools after their former employers determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. 

The bill, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, is an attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen again, adding teeth to background check mandates in place since 2025. Under that law, applicants for jobs at public schools are supposed to list every teaching position they have ever held. The requirement expanded to private school teaching applicants this year. Top school administrators are required to check with applicants’ previous employers to see if they had ever been reported to the state for credible or substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct.

But the existing law relies on schools and teachers to follow the mandates without clear penalties for those who fail to do so. Muratsuchi’s bill specifies that the state’s teacher licensing agency may discipline teachers and administrators; that can include issuing public reprimands, or suspending or revoking their credentials if they don’t comply. 

“If there aren’t any penalties, there are no consequences,” Muratsuchi said in an interview with KQED and ProPublica after the legislation passed. “The bill makes sure that school districts prioritize this by putting in consequences for failing to do so.” 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the legislation. A spokesperson for Newsom said the governor does not typically comment on bills awaiting his signature.  

The measure is dramatically different from the bill Muratsuchi originally proposed in June, which would have gone further, creating a searchable database that would allow schools to see if applicants for public school teaching positions had been reported to the state after they were fired or had resigned over claims of misconduct. California is set to launch such a database by next summer for school support staff, such as bus drivers and janitors, with substantiated claims of egregious misconduct. But public school teachers are not included.

The Trump administration had singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children when it announced a national crackdown this summer on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers.

California’s powerful teachers unions, the California Federation of Teachers and California Teachers Association, had criticized Muratsuchi’s database proposal for public school educators, arguing it would violate teachers’ privacy and subject them to employment consequences if allegations are later determined to be unfounded. 

The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, also warned that complying with the proposed legislation to add teachers to the database would “require Commission staff to commit crimes” and expose the agency to liability because state law restricts what information it is allowed to share. 

After the pushback, Muratsuchi amended the proposed bill and scrapped the database idea. The revamped legislation ultimately received support from the California Federation of Teachers. 

School administrators, though, say the legislation does not address the burden on school districts to reach out to every previous employer for any reports they made to the state about a teacher applicant.  

“Many of us in this state have been faced with budget cuts and reduced staffing. We need a better system,” said Chris Calabrese, superintendent of Benicia Unified, a 4,500-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

He said a database for employers to check whether a teacher had ever been reported would be a more efficient way to vet applicants, allowing schools easy access to critical information that would keep students safe.

Currently, a red flag shows up next to a teacher’s name in the state’s public database of credentialed educators if the licensing agency has ever disciplined the person. But the state disciplinary process typically takes one year, according to the agency, giving educators who have been reported a window to apply for new teaching jobs without any warning to potential employers. 

Read More

He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.

In 2023, Benicia Unified reported former elementary teacher Matthew Shelton to the state after students accused him of touching them inappropriately. Shelton resigned and weeks later was hired as an assistant principal at a nearby middle school in West Contra Unified. A red flag did not appear next to his name until the following year, after his teaching license was suspended because he was charged with five felony counts of lewd acts on a Benicia student. The number of victims and charges has since grown, and Shelton, whose license has been revoked, is scheduled to go to trial in September.

Shelton, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, did not respond to requests for comment, and his attorney declined to comment. 

Calabrese, who started as superintendent last year, declined to comment on specific questions about Shelton.

The post California Lawmakers Pass Bill to Punish Administrators Who Fail to Vet Teachers for Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica.

The White House said the agreements will reduce costs to treat Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration, glaucoma, liver disease and other illnesses.

President Donald Trump and other administration officials are claiming credit for a recent drop in prescription drug prices, citing deals they’ve struck with drugmakers and the launch of the online direct-to-consumer platform TrumpRx. But experts are skeptical those measures have had much impact on prices overall, and they say other factors likely explain most of the decline.

Trump and his allies were quick to celebrate when the latest consumer price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released in mid-August, showed prescription drug prices falling 3.1% over the past year. The data measure prices paid by consumers and insurers at retail, internet or mail-order pharmacies.

“Under my most-favored-nation policy on drug prices, we are delivering the largest prescription drug price cuts in the history of our country,” Trump said during an Aug. 14 speech on Long Island, referring to agreements with companies to offer certain drugs at prices comparable to those in other countries. 

He repeated the claim during an Aug. 31 event at the White House at which he announced deals with additional companies.

Similarly, in an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Aug. 23, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz attributed the drop to the administration’s dealmaking and the launch of TrumpRx, which lists discounts on certain drugs for consumers paying cash prices.

“This increasing savings that we’re seeing, the additional amount of savings we’re getting — primarily driven not just by having the medications at most-favored-nation pricing, but available to the American people on TrumpRx.gov — is seismic in its nature,” Oz said.

Oz put it more succinctly in an X post two days earlier: “Why did drug prices DROP? The answer: President Donald J. Trump fulfilling his promises to the American people.”

But several drug pricing experts told us the reasons for that decline are a lot more complicated than the administration is letting on — and neither TrumpRx nor the agreements with drug companies are likely to have been major drivers.

They cited other factors they see as likely having a bigger impact, including market pressures driving down the cost of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, more generics entering the market and a Biden-era policy that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

“I think it’s totally possible that there are both some Republican policies — or, you know, Trump policies — as well as Biden policies that are at play here,” Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president at the nonpartisan health policy research organization KFF, told us. “But I think there’s also just market forces at play, in particular around GLP-1 drugs, that are really hard to ignore.”

Asked about the basis for the president’s claims that his policies are driving a major reduction in drug prices, White House spokesman Kush Desai rejected the idea that Medicare price negotiations implemented during the Biden administration, which apply to 10 drugs so far, made a big difference.

“President Trump’s Most-Favored-Nations deals, on the other hand, cover hundreds of drugs, including GLP-1s and fertility drugs that are enormously popular and not typically covered by insurance,” he said in a statement. “TrumpRx.gov has already saved real patients over $700 million, and the President’s MFN policies are set to save America over $500 billion in the next 10 years.”

We’ve previously written about the shaky assumptions behind that $500 billion number. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services referred questions to the White House.

Effects of Drug Pricing Deals, TrumpRx ‘Murky’

It’s true that prescription drugs have just seen the largest one-year price decline in decades, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. The CPI tracks prescription drug prices based on what individuals and insurers, including Medicare drug plans, pay to pharmacies. 

Those prices are down 3.1% since last July, the largest one-year decrease since 1963. Prices didn’t change much in the second half of 2025, but have dropped 3.3% since the start of this year — the steepest six-month drop since the BLS started tracking prescription drug costs in 1947.

Trump and other administration officials say the drop is due to deals they’ve struck with major pharmaceutical companies to offer certain drugs at so-called “most favored nation” prices, or prices that are comparable to those in other developed countries. The U.S. tends to pay significantly more than other wealthy nations for brand-name drugs. 

Since November, the Trump administration has announced agreements with 17 large drug companies, including Pfizer, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, to implement MFN pricing for certain drugs in exchange for three years of tariff relief. (The administration announced similar deals with nine midsize biotech companies Aug. 31.) Trump has sometimes described those deals in sweeping terms.

“For decades, Americans paid the highest prices for prescription drugs,” Trump said in his Aug. 14 speech. “We paid more for prescription drugs than anywhere in the world. And now we pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for prescription drugs.”

But as we’ve explained before, the agreements are much narrower than Trump’s description suggests.

Companies did pledge to release at least some new drugs at prices comparable to those in other wealthy nations. But for existing drugs, MFN prices apply in only limited circumstances — drugs sold to state Medicaid programs, direct-to-consumer sales through TrumpRx and certain GLP-1 weight loss and diabetes drugs sold to Medicare or Medicaid. The agreements do not affect the prices of drugs already on the market for the majority of Americans who use private insurance.

“Right now, the only places where those MFN prices would show up in the CPI would be through TrumpRx,” said Jeromie Ballreich, a health economist at Johns Hopkins University who studies pharmaceutical economics and policy. (As a measure of consumer prices, the CPI doesn’t factor in what Medicaid pays because it’s fully taxpayer-funded.) And he said TrumpRx is unlikely to have had major effects on the overall prescription-drug market because it serves a relatively small subset of patients. “It’s not a big factor in the market.”

TrumpRx, which the federal government launched in February, features discounts on a selection of brand-name drugs for self-pay consumers, i.e., those not using insurance. As we’ve written before, the site may offer savings for some patients buying certain drugs, such as those without insurance or those who need expensive medications their insurance won’t cover, including GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. But most people will get a better deal going through their insurance, and some drugs featured on the platform also have cheaper generic versions available elsewhere.

The White House says TrumpRx has already saved Americans more than $700 million, though it hasn’t released the details of how it calculated that figure. A spokesperson said it’s based on comparing what people paid when buying medications through the site to what the prior net prices would have been. Seven hundred million dollars would represent less than 0.2% of the $467 billion that was spent on prescription drugs in the U.S. in 2024, according to the government’s national health expenditure data.

Additionally, Ballreich said drug companies and the White House have been relatively vague about the details of the MFN deals in their public statements, so it’s unclear exactly how far-reaching they are. Some companies’ Securities and Exchange Commission filings suggest that only some of their products are subject to the agreements.

“They didn’t have enough detail about, is it all new drugs?” Ballreich said. “Only some new drugs?”

Similarly, Richard Frank, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the think tank’s Center on Health Policy, said the limited scope and lack of detail make it hard to assess the impact of these deals.

“There are an unknown, but probably small, number of drugs where there have been any negotiations with the Trump people, and it’s not even obvious that those have been implemented yet,” he said. “So all of this is kind of murky. It’s not that it’s implausible that they have some effect. But it’s really unlikely that they are the major drivers here.”

As for TrumpRx, Frank said there are still questions around its uptake and the extent of savings it actually offers.

“That’s an area where there could be a contribution,” he said. “But again, I would be surprised if it was very large.”

Cox, with KFF, said it’s possible that a newly launched pilot program to make reduced-price GLP-1 drugs available to certain Medicare beneficiaries factored into the most recent CPI prescription drug data, which registered a 0.8% drop in July.

The administration says Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly — the makers of Ozempic/Wegovy and Mounjaro/Zepbound, respectively — have agreed to provide the drugs to Medicare for $245 per month, and certain Medicare beneficiaries became eligible to access the drugs for weight loss for the first time at a $50 monthly copay, starting July 1.

“That would correspond with the timing of this particular [month’s] drop in the CPI,” Cox said, but not the declines that happened earlier this year.

Other Reasons for the Drop in Prices

Experts told us they see other factors as more likely explanations for the year-to-year drop in drug prices, though they cautioned that they don’t yet have clear empirical data on exactly what’s going on.

For one, Cox said, GLP-1 prices have been coming down for reasons other than the administration’s dealmaking, including heightened competition between drugmakers as new GLP-1s enter the market. 

“There’s competition within the class, there’s competition from compound pharmacies, there’s the fact that a lot of people don’t have insurance coverage for these drugs but really want them, and so they’re paying out of pocket and price-sensitive,” she said. “And there’s this kind of pressure from insurers and employers to bring down the prices, because they might want to offer that coverage but not at the current price.”

Frank likewise pointed to competition in the GLP-1 market lowering prices for those drugs. “Since their sales have been so high, they would get quite a bit of weight in the CPI,” he said. 

Another likely factor is that a number of bestselling brand-name drugs recently lost patent protection, Ballreich said. “So we had generics and biosimilars come on the market at cheaper prices.”

Ballreich also credits a policy signed into law by President Joe Biden as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which gave Medicare the authority to negotiate prices for certain expensive drugs. The negotiated prices for the first 10 of those drugs — which were dispensed to nearly 9 million beneficiaries in 2023 and accounted for about 20% of Medicare prescription drug spending that year — took effect in January. 

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated in 2024 that the negotiated prices would have saved the program $6 billion had they been in effect for the prior year. It also projected that beneficiaries would save around $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs on those drugs in 2026 because of the lower prices.

“For Trump to take credit in drug pricing, I do think one of the biggest things he did was he did not dismantle Medicare price negotiations,” Ballreich said.

Frank is less confident that the initial batch of Medicare price negotiations was a major driver of the decline in overall prescription drug costs. He views it as possible but unlikely, given the negotiations involved a relatively small, if costly, set of medications. Some of the impact would depend on how much those particular drugs are weighted in the CPI index, he said.

“On the Medicare side, there are 10 drugs. They were generally relatively big sellers,” he said. But as with Trump’s MFN deals, “we don’t know how quickly they’ve all worked their way through the supply chain.” 

Frank said other possible factors could be in the mix as well. Pharmacy benefit managers — the third-party companies that manage prescription drug benefits for insurers — have been under pressure to pass on more of the savings from rebates they negotiate with drug companies. He also said that we don’t know how a separate provision of the IRA — the Inflation Rebate Program, which aims to discourage drugmakers from raising their prices too fast — may have affected prices.

“There are a lot of moving parts here,” he said. “It would be surprising to me if the administration’s MFN negotiations played a big part of it, just like I wouldn’t have guessed that the IRA negotiations played a huge part of it.”

In his statement, Desai, the White House spokesman, called the idea that the Medicare price negotiations had made a big difference in the CPI “absolutely idiotic and unfounded.” 

“The so-called Inflation ‘Reduction’ Act negotiated prices just on Medicare for a whopping 10 drugs, and failed to deliver any meaningful price reductions beyond discounts that private insurers had already negotiated,” he said. “These discounts came into effect in January 2026 without making a dent in the prescription drug CPI for February 2026.”

The CPI’s prescription drug index dropped about 0.2% in February before registering a bigger decline of 1.5% in March.

Whether people notice a difference in what they’re actually paying at the pharmacy, of course, generally has more to do with the specific features of their insurance plan, Ballreich said. “That will have a much more influential effect on them as patients, rather than general drug pricing trends.”

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

The post Trump Claims Credit for Drug Price Decline. Experts Say It’s More Complicated. appeared first on FactCheck.org.

(The Center Square) – Search-and-recovery efforts are continuing in Grand Canyon National Park after the weekend's flooding left two people dead and at least 15 missing.

(The Center Square) — The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision Monday, allowed for continued construction on President Donald Trump's estimated $400 million White House ballroom.

• Beloved singer died last week at the age of 80

• Parton was born 30 miles from college campus

The Tennessee Volunteers will be honoring Dolly Parton with a helmet sticker this season, the college football team’s head coach, Josh Heupel, announced on Monday.

Parton, a Tennessee native, died last week at the age of 80 from cancer.

Aug. 31, 2026 — The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a procurement contract with Bull to deliver LUMI-AI, a next-generation supercomputer at the CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. data center in Kajaani, Finland. Powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC 256-core processors, the system is expected to provide 10 times the AI capacity and nearly twice the high-performance computing (HPC) capability of the current LUMI supercomputer. Deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2027.

LUMI-AI, a next-generation supercomputer at the CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd. data center in Kajaani, Finland, will be powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC 256-core processors. Photo credit: Mikael Kanerva, CSC.

LUMI-AI will serve as the computing backbone of the LUMI AI Factory, supporting industrial AI innovation, academic research, AI training and inference, and large-scale scientific simulation. Its combination of AI and high-precision HPC capabilities is designed to strengthen Europe’s capacity for data-driven research and innovation while expanding access to advanced computing for researchers, startups and industry.

“Europe’s next wave of AI innovation will depend on infrastructure that is open, efficient and trusted,” said Thomas Zacharia, senior vice president for AMD’s Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships. “LUMI-AI marks an important next step in the AMD partnership with EuroHPC JU, the LUMI AI Factory consortium and Bull. Powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, it will strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capacity, accelerate scientific discovery and give researchers, startups and industry the scale and flexibility to shape Europe’s AI future.”

The EuroHPC JU-owned system will be hosted by the six-country LUMI AI Factory consortium: Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland. A multi-tenant architecture, additional compute and storage resources, and extensive API-based access are intended to support diverse AI communities and modern development environments. The system will also integrate with the LUMI-IQ quantum computing platform.

LUMI-AI will be powered entirely by renewable energy. Its liquid-cooling design will capture excess heat for reuse in Kajaani’s district heating network, supporting the project’s goal of making LUMI-AI one of the world’s most energy-efficient and eco-efficient supercomputers.

LUMI-AI is scheduled for deployment in the second half of 2027 at CSC’s new data center in the Renforsin Ranta business park in Kajaani. The contract is valued at 387.8 million euros, including acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance, with funding shared equally by EuroHPC JU and the LUMI AI Factory consortium.

More from HPCwire: Bull Selected to Deliver Europe’s €387.8M LUMI-AI Supercomputer in Finland

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post AMD to Power €387.8M LUMI-AI System for European Research and Industry appeared first on HPCwire.

RFK Jr, the health secretary, has suggested the deaths were ‘fabricated’ while the CDC claimed it was reviewing them

Top US health officials and government agencies are currently not including the two recent measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania in their counts.

“This is highly unusual,” said Debra Houry, former chief medical officer of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She noted that this did not happen with the three deaths reported from measles in Texas and New Mexico last year.

Instagram is requiring fake models to carry an “AI-generated profile” label to show they’re not human.

The National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning for coastal Texas and Louisiana on Monday as a tropical depression formed in the Gulf.

As the death toll from the Nepal floods surges over 900, Americans with loved ones among the 4,000 people missing are still hoping for miracles.

Regulators allege that sellers and brands were overcharged by tens of billions of dollars through secretly inflated ad prices.

Kalshi has issued its first-ever lifetime ban to former U.S. Rep. George Santos after concluding he failed to fully cooperate with an insider-trading investigation. He is also being fined $71,356, according to a filing (PDF) on its website. Engadget reports: It was reported in June that Santos was under investigation from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over insider trading. Prediction markets like Kalshi allow users to buy contracts or shares in the outcome of events. Participants don't necessarily have to wait for an event to resolve before selling these contracts and cashing in. Santos allegedly bought contracts on Kalshi indicating that he would not attend this year's State of the Union speech after weather disrupted his travel plans. According to the CFTC, Santos then sold those contracts for a profit after claiming on social media that he would be in attendance. The former congressman is said to have made more than $17,500 through this scheme, which Kalshi reportedly detected and flagged to authorities. In July, Santos agreed to pay over $35,000 to settle the CFTC's claims against him. The agency also issued him a three-year trading ban. Kalshi, however, doesn't plan to allow Santos back on its platform in 2029 (or anytime after that). The company confirmed to The Wall Street Journal this was the first time it had given anyone a lifetime ban and that it did so because Santos didn't fully cooperate with its investigation. He can appeal the decision to the CTFC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The carrier also introduced Verizon One, a mobile and home internet bundle.

Earlier, authorities said about 15 people may be missing or unaccounted for.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 31, 2026 — Think today announced Think Fabric, a new category of unified AI infrastructure that combines intelligent software with high-performance hardware. Think Fabric is designed to address some of the most significant efficiency bottlenecks in AI infrastructure today, including cooling, density, GPU utilization and infrastructure cost, enabling enterprises, governments and AI-native organisations to deploy high-performance AI with greater efficiency, flexibility and control.

Think Fabric brings together Think’s three core technologies into a single, tightly integrated platform:

• Node is Think’s answer to the challenge of delivering high-density AI compute in a compact form factor without the need for extensive cooling infrastructure. Despite having the same GPU count and silicon as a typical AI data centre server, Node delivers radically higher sustained compute and dramatically higher sustained power density, enabled by Think’s patent-pending sealed-loop cooling. Each GPU uses a patent-pending high-density cooling topology to more efficiently extract heat from the GPU core and memory, enabling sustained, high-density AI compute in a form factor with up to 2.35x greater power density than any other server manufacturer with like-for-like specifications.
• ILM (Intelligent LLM Management system) is Think’s proprietary software orchestration layer designed to dramatically improve GPU utilisation. ILM intelligently optimises how workloads are distributed across AI accelerators, reducing the wasted energy and cost associated with expensive idle silicon operating below capacity. ILM can run multiple AI models on a single GPU, allowing multiple models to share GPUs that would otherwise sit idle, substantially reducing the total hardware required.
• Constellation links multiple Think Nodes into a unified supercompute cluster using a high-bandwidth fibre optic interconnect for low-latency, multi-node coordination, with ILM handling synchronisation and local orchestration. Constellation can also enable organisations to scale high-performance AI compute clusters without the footprint and complexity associated with traditional data centre infrastructure.

Think Fabric is being demonstrated publicly for the first time at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.

“This first era of AI has been defined by the rush to scale, but it’s clear that the long-term success of AI will only happen by addressing the issues around efficiency and cost,” said Ahmed AlSharif, Founder and CEO of Think. “Think Fabric was built around a simple principle: we should be able to do more with the compute we already have. The solution to the rising cost of AI infrastructure is not to spend even more or build bigger – it’s to maximise the investments already made, and to lower the cost of AI compute through increased efficiency.”

“AI adoption shouldn’t require organisations to compromise on sovereignty, economics or flexibility,” said Ammar Enaya, Co-Founder and COO of Think. “Fabric gives organisations a platform they can own, control and evolve over time, without sacrificing performance or operational simplicity.”

Think believes the billions already invested in AI compute capacity, the rising cost of essential components such as memory, and the growing power and environmental demands of data centres are pushing the industry towards a new phase in which the focus shifts from simply adding more infrastructure to extracting greater value from the compute already available.

“We’re moving into a world where efficiency matters more than raw scale,” added AlSharif. “The future of AI infrastructure will be defined by how much performance we can get from existing investments. The industry needs to shift its focus from how much raw compute it can build to the metrics that really matter: ROI and the cost per token of AI.”

Think Fabric forms the foundation of Think’s approach to the age of efficiency, bringing hardware, cooling, orchestration and interconnect together as a unified system designed to help organisations get more from every unit of AI compute.

About Think

Think is a Saudi AI infrastructure company building the engine room for the age of efficiency. Its unified approach brings together intelligent software and high-performance hardware to make AI compute more efficient, accessible and economically sustainable. Think’s technology addresses the fundamental bottlenecks limiting AI infrastructure today, including GPU utilisation, memory, cooling, power and cost. Through its Think Fabric infrastructure platform and Think Grid compute service, Think enables enterprises, governments and AI-native organisations to deploy high-performance AI with greater efficiency, flexibility and control. Founded by Ahmed AlSharif, a technology leader whose experience spans Meta, PlayStation, and EA, and enterprise technology veteran Ammar Enaya, formerly of Cisco, Aruba, and HPE, Think is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Source: Think

The post Think Unveils Fabric Platform for High-Density AI Compute appeared first on HPCwire.

Aug. 31, 2026 — AMD has released AMD ROCm 10, marking 10 years of the AMD software stack and making ROCm.AI generally available for users. First introduced at Advancing AI 2026, ROCm.AI is an AI-native software experience designed to accelerate development velocity and performance optimization on AMD hardware.

ROCm.AI brings together three core developer experiences: AMD Skills, the ROCm CLI and AMD Hyperloom. Together, they introduce AMD expertise and agentic workflows into the tools developers already use, enabling innovation to evolve at the pace of AI.

Credit: AMD

Through AI-driven optimization of kernels, memory management and scheduling, a system configured with ROCm.AI delivers an average 3.3x inference improvement and 2.4x training improvement over ROCm 7 on the same hardware.

A New Developer Experience for AI on AMD

ROCm.AI supports developers across three parts of the AI development process: optimizing inference performance, building with AMD expertise and running AI workloads.

Optimize End-to-End Inference with AMD ROCm Hyperloom

ROCm Hyperloom, a key component of ROCm.AI, is an autonomous agentic system for optimizing end-to-end inference workloads across host code and GPU kernels. Hyperloom profiles workloads, identifies bottlenecks, explores optimization options, implements targeted changes, benchmarks the results, and validates performance and correctness.

With ROCm 10, Hyperloom expands support across AMD Instinct GPUs, with support for vLLM and SGLang. Developers can target optimizations across HIP, Triton and FlyDSL, with reports describing proposed code changes and measured or expected performance improvements.

Hyperloom is available through standalone workflows and AMD Skills, giving developers multiple ways to incorporate agentic optimization into their development process.

Build with AMD Expertise

AMD Skills brings curated AMD knowledge and validated workflows into supported AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, giving developers AMD-specific guidance within the tools they already use. With ROCm 10, the AMD Skills catalog expands across three areas:

• Client-native workflows for local AI and application integration.
• Cross-stack workflows for diagnostics, routing, replay analysis and optimization.
• Server-native workflows for AMD Instinct GPUs and AMD EPYC processors, including serving, profiling and performance analysis.

The skills previewed at Advancing AI are now available through the Claude Code, Codex and Cursor marketplaces, as well as through the open catalog on GitHub. Each shipped skill passes structural and behavioral testing before release to help provide consistent, reliable workflows.

Run with Simpler Workflows

The ROCm CLI, a Technology Preview component of ROCm.AI, provides a stable, unified command-line interface for setting up, managing and operating AI workloads on AMD hardware.

Developers can use the same workflows manually, through an AI coding agent or in continuous integration (CI) environments. From a single interface, they can inspect systems, install and manage ROCm environments, serve models, run diagnostics, update components, and control runtimes.

The CLI is available on Windows as well as Linux as a prebuilt binary and does not require an existing ROCm installation. It delivers managed ROCm environments, supports multiple side-by-side runtimes including runtime activation and rollback, as well as integrated model serving and engine management. Adapters today support Lemonade on select AMD client systems and vLLM for AMD Instinct GPU serving.

The ROCm Console (formerly “dash”), included with the CLI, provides a real-time view of system status and workload activity. Developers can monitor ROCm runtime health, model serving, GPU utilization and benchmark telemetry, including metrics such as high bandwidth memory (HBM) usage, power consumption and tokens per watt on supported AMD Instinct systems.

Available as a Technology Preview, ROCm CLI provides a version-agnostic experience across ROCm releases, beginning with ROCm 7.13 software, with ROCm 10 official support coming soon.

Building on the ROCm 10 Software Stack

These developer experiences build on the broader ROCm 10 software stack that includes the ROCm Core SDK, providing a more modular foundation for building and running AI workloads across AMD platforms.

ROCm 10 also includes updates to libraries, compilers, frameworks, tools, model support, performance and hardware platforms.

For a deeper look at the ROCm Core SDK, including libraries, compilers, tools, framework and model support, performance improvements and platform updates, read the full ROCm 10 technical deep dive.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post AMD Releases ROCm 10 and Makes ROCm.AI Generally Available appeared first on HPCwire.

(The Center Square) – The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on a continuing resolution, preventing the government from shutting down in October and buying lawmakers more time to finish all 12 annual appropriations bills.

The company launched the email aliases feature, which forwards messages from a dummy address to your main email account.

We still don’t have Half-Life 3, though.

Singer, accused of murder and sexual abuse of teen Celeste Rivas Hernandez, to be represented by LA public defender

Singer D4vd lost his high-profile private lawyers on Monday at a hearing where he entered a new not guilty plea to charges that he killed, sexually abused and dismembered 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez.

It is not clear why Blair Berk and her colleagues Marilyn Bednarski and Regina Peter parted ways with the singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke. They were replaced by a lawyer from the Los Angeles county public defender’s office.

(The Center Square) – Massachusetts leads the nation with the highest health scores among residents while Louisiana is at the bottom, according to a new report.

Sony’s ad-supported service includes news, TV, movies, sports and anime.

The agentic AI platform is molting again.

Thinking of moving some money into a market account? Here's what a good rate on the account is considered to be now.

This September could usher in challenges for borrowers who are already struggling to make progress on their debt.

The new space telescope will work in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope to uncover more secrets of the universe.

Scripps Oceanography geoscientist Lisa Tauxe inserts samples into a thermal demagnetizer. (Scripps Institution of Oceanography via SWNS)

Researchers found a way to distinguish the magnetism that clay materials acquire over time from the magnetism materials acquired when made.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey is warning that advanced "frontier" AI models could materially increase cyber risk across the global financial system by making attacks faster, cheaper, and more scalable. In a letter to G20 finance officials, he said financial firms need stronger defenses and contingency plans for simultaneous disruptions. CNBC reports: Writing in his capacity as chair of the Financial Stability Board, an international body that coordinates policy and makes recommendations to national authorities, Bailey identified the potential impact of frontier AI -- which refers to the most advanced AI models -- on cyber risk as "the most immediate concern" for the financial system. "Frontier AI may have the ability materially to alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers," Bailey said. "Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond," he added. [...] Financial institutions and technology providers will need to improve vulnerability management, response and recovery capabilities -- "and prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruption across multiple firms or shared technology dependencies," Bailey said. Alongside new AI models, Bailey cited "fragilities" in sovereign debt markets, the growing use of debt by investors in equity markets and stretched asset valuations, particularly AI-related investments, as among his concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He joined the secret intelligence service in 1996 and wasn't able to tell his family what he did for a living.

He wasn't able to tell his family what he did and would often be operating abroad under another identity. (Pawel Spolnicki / Entertainers via SWNS)

The Argentine’s career with Argentina was singular, and his exit is a reminder that all good things come to an end

IIt was among the defining moments of the 2026 World Cup: Lionel Messi standing arms akimbo, looking up towards Argentina’s fervent supporters after losing the final. Tears streamed down his face after his team’s embarrassing loss to Spain in what we now know was Messi’s final match wearing that famous Argentina kit.

It was not the first time he’d cried at the tournament. There had been tears of joy in Argentina’s opening match, when Messi rolled back the clock to his glory days with a trio of spectacular goals against Algeria. There had been more when his brace against Austria pushed Argentina through to the knockout round as group winners, and even more when his equalizer against Egypt threw la Albiceleste a much-needed lifeline. Later, the world found out that Messi had been struggling all the while with the health struggles of his father, Jorge, a fact that clearly weighed heavily on him as Argentina made a dramatic return to the final in a bid to defend their 2022 title.

From a darling of the Tory right to a moderate former army officer, we profile the key players

• Andrew Griffith and Tom Tugendhat join Badenoch’s top team in Tory reshuffle

Kemi Badenoch has kicked off the return to parliament with a reshuffle of her top team in order to take on Andy Burnham and Reform UK. She has made sweeping changes to the shadow cabinet and ruthlessly axed her shadow chancellor. Here is a run-down of the new characters sitting across from Labour on the opposition frontbench.

Steve Jobs said in 2007 that “nobody wants a stylus” for the iPhone. That could change.

TCG Isin expected to play vital role in locating Filo Jet’s voyage data recorder 514 metres below surface

A deep-sea search and rescue vessel is on its way to Cyprus as Turkey joins efforts to retrieve the 20 people still missing after a passenger ferry capsized off the island’s northern coast.

The TCG Isin will join the vast operation to find survivors after the high-speed ferry sank on Sunday barely four nautical miles outside the port town of Kyrenia.

The Aug. 29 deployment ceremony recognized members of Alpha Company, 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced, as they transitioned to active mobilization. Image Courtesy of the Delaware National Guard

Nearly 100 members of the 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced were honored at a Harrington ceremony, marking Delaware’s second major Guard mobilization this month

HARRINGTON, Del. — Nearly 100 Delaware Army National Guard soldiers are preparing to deploy to the Middle East after family members, friends and community leaders gathered Saturday at the Delaware State Fairgrounds to honor their service.

The Aug. 29 deployment ceremony recognized members of Alpha Company, 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced, as they transitioned to active mobilization.

U.S. Sen. Chris Coons and Maj. Gen. James Benson, adjutant general of the Delaware National Guard, attended the ceremony.

The specific location, mission designation and expected length of the deployment have not been publicly released. Guard officials have said the soldiers are preparing to serve in the Middle East.

Providing battlefield connections

The 198th is a communications unit responsible for delivering the secure voice, data and network connections that military commanders and ground forces need to operate.

Its soldiers can establish satellite communications, secure wireless networks and other systems in places where military units do not have enough communications equipment of their own.

The “Enhanced” designation reflects a major modernization of the battalion’s technology. The new equipment is lighter, faster to establish and easier to tailor to missions of different sizes. It also reduces transportation requirements by more than 60% compared with the older equipment package.

The Delaware unit became the first Army National Guard signal battalion — and the sixth Army unit overall — converted to the enhanced configuration.

Although signal soldiers typically work behind the front lines, their mission is essential. Modern military operations depend on reliable connections among commanders, aircraft, intelligence systems and troops operating across large areas.

The battalion has a long history of overseas service. In 2019, about 250 members deployed to Southwest Asia in support of U.S. Central Command and Operation Inherent Resolve. The unit has also supported missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Second major Delaware mobilization

The Army Guard ceremony followed another large Delaware deployment ceremony earlier in August.

More than 160 airmen from the Delaware Air National Guard’s 166th Airlift Wing were honored Aug. 2 at the New Castle Air National Guard Base. Those airmen are preparing to join the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 171st Air Refueling Wing to form a deployable combat wing.

The 166th operates C-130H Hercules aircraft and provides airlift and airdrop support for troops, cargo and passengers. The wing also performs aeromedical evacuation and other support missions.

The Army and Air Guard mobilizations are separate assignments. Together, however, they mean that more than 250 Delaware Guard members are preparing for federal service — a significant commitment for one of the nation’s smallest states.

The ceremonies also recognize the sacrifice made by the families, employers and communities that support Guard members while they are away.

To Go Box:

• What: Delaware Army National Guard deployment
• Unit: Alpha Company, 198th Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced
• Number deploying: Nearly 100 soldiers
• Destination: Middle East
• Mission: Provide high-speed tactical communications and secure network connectivity to military forces
• Ceremony: Held Aug. 29 at the Delaware State Fairgrounds in Harrington
• Learn more: Visit the Delaware National Guard website or its Defense Visual Information Distribution Service page

Santos was accused of profiting from bets tied to his attendance at Trump’s State of the Union address

George Santos, the former Republican congressman whose political career collapsed under a mountain of lies, has become the first person ever handed a lifetime ban by the prediction-market platform Kalshi.

The company announced the permanent suspension on Monday, along with a $71,356 fine, after federal regulators accused Santos of profiting from bets tied to his own attendance at Donald Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, accused last year of fatally shooting a National Guard member and severely injuring another, has been refusing to eat for months while in government custody.

(The Center Square) – Inviting a lightning rod of a senator to spur North Carolina Democrats at their annual state convention, highlighted by support of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper, is reverberating again.

Exclusive: Prime minister wants to ‘bring back hope’ by tackling cost of living as MPs call for electoral reform

Andy Burnham will drive home his pledge to bring more essential services back into public control, telling MPs in the Commons on Tuesday that it will be the only way to improve growth across the country.

Burnham will address the house for the first time in 16 years from the frontbench, and six weeks since he became prime minister, after spending the summer recess announcing a slew of policies that will now be put before MPs.

Conservative leader sacks shadow chancellor Mel Stride and shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel

• Conservative reshuffle: who’s who in Kemi Badenoch’s top team?

Kemi Badenoch sacked her shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, and the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, in a sweeping Conservative reshuffle on Monday, replacing Stride with Andrew Griffith, and Patel with Tom Tugendhat.

Stride, who had been shadow chancellor since Badenoch became leader, was widely seen among Tories as failing to make an impression at a time when Labour had been under pressure over the economy.

Lander screamed at and verbally abused as he protested against Hindu nationalist rally in Madison Square Garden

The New York Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander was screamed at and verbally abused by protesters over his stance on Israel as he protested against a Hindu nationalist politician speaking outside Madison Square Garden.

As Lander attended a demonstration on Saturday against the event, organized by the Hindu nationalist RSS movement and where Mohan Bhagwat, leader of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was speaking, he was confronted by several protesters demanding that he leave the rally.

National Park Service confirms second death from weekend flash flood as area braces for more storms

A second death was confirmed by National Park Service officials on Monday after aflash flood sent a surge of water and debris through an area of the Grand Canyon over the weekend.

Dozens of visitors had to be evacuated by helicopter during the deluge that consumed trails and infrastructure. Fifteen people are still missing or unaccounted for, as more heavy rain and thunderstorms in the forecasts threaten additional debris flows, flash floods or rockfalls, the NPS said in a statement.

The post DOJ Subpoenas Comey Adviser in Renewed Leak Investigation appeared first on News Facts Network.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Today is Tim Cook's last day as Apple CEO, with John Ternus set to take over tomorrow. To mark his last day in the role, Cook penned an emotional memo to Apple employees today. In the memo sent to employees this morning and obtained by 9to5Mac, Cook reflects on his time at Apple and thanks employees for all of their work. He also says he takes "enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable" as John Ternus. "Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership," Cook writes. "There is something truly special about Apple," writes Cook. "I am most proud of what an annual report could never capture. This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it. That purpose is part of what makes this place extraordinary. Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here. It is what brought you to this company and what continues to drive the work you do every day." He continues: "Together, we have created something far greater than any one of us could have imagined or accomplished alone. And that's the secret to our success. We bring out the best in each other. We lift each other up. We have made it possible to leave our 'dent in the universe,' as Steve once described it, because of who we are and what we believe, because of what we value and how we see the world. How fortunate we are. How fortunate I am..." Cook also thanked the Apple community in a post on social media, writing: "Sending lots of love to the Apple community on my last day as CEO. My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will. Thank you for being a constant source of inspiration. My gratitude is endless, and I'm excited for the next chapter!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Body of victim thought to be in her 70s found in bin bag in walled garden area of Stanley Park on Friday

Police in Liverpool have urged members of the public to come forward with information after the body of an unknown woman believed to be in her 70s was found in a black bin bag in a popular park.

Merseyside police were contacted by a passerby who had found the woman’s body in Stanley Park, in the Anfield area of Liverpool, at about 5.25pm on Friday 28 August.

The deal involves developing 17 strategic oil fields in Venezuela, an undertaking that experts said could take years.

The new lawsuit is centered around what a fiber connection really means for customers.

President Donald Trump said that the United States, which had transitioned largely to economic warfare, would respond militarily to the Iranian attack on Jordan.

Three-quarters of Americans said in a recent poll that they oppose datacenters being built next to their homes

Donald Trump has criticized communities pushing back against datacenter projects across the US amid a growing backlash, warning those that reject them risk becoming “backwards and poor”.

As controversy surrounding local datacenter plans continues to swirl around election campaigns nationwide ahead of November’s midterm elections, the US president declared Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they are canceled.

Iran responded to an assault on its Larak Island by targeting US bases in Jordan

• Trump threatens further action as US and Iran exchange fire in new flare-up

Coinciding with this week’s G20 meeting, the EU has issued a statement saying it will work with the US and other allied countries to maintain economic pressure against Iran.

“The ‌EU welcomes efforts at ensuring that Iran ceases its destabilising activities and engages in peace negotiations with good ‌faith, also through additional economic pressure, including through ​the US-led Operation Economic Outcast,” it said in reference to the pressure strategy the White House describes as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining” the Islamic republic.

The 21-year-old singer is accused of killing the 14-year-old Inland Empire girl after a lengthy sexual relationship.

Washington says it acted after observing Iran was planning to deploy fresh mines in strait of Hormuz

The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.

The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is to trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks on Iranian missile launchers and radars.

“There isn’t much time left, and different chapters are coming to an end. This is one that hurts me a lot,” the 2022 World Cup winner wrote on Instagram.

The president’s deportation machine is creating a class of people inside the US who have fewer protections against the power of the state

Is the Trump administration creating a group in the US with fewer protections against executive power owing to their immigration status? Its often openly racist actions suggest so. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to target “the worst of the worst” – undocumented migrants who commit violent crimes. Yet the Guardian reported that over half of those arrested in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges. That month, ICE made record arrests and deportations, apprehending 1,500 people and removing 1,100 daily.

When campaigning, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitians were “eating the pets”. In office, his administration moved to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians. In June, the supreme court let the protection expire, leaving about 350,000 people at risk of deportation to a country gripped by violence and instability. The court’s decision means more than 1 million TPS holders from 13 nations previously considered too unsafe to return to are now at risk of deportation. Many have lived and worked legally in the US for years.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

New York, New York — Prediction market Kalshi has permanently banned former U.S. Rep. George Santos after concluding he likely engaged in insider trading by betting on whether he would attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

Kalshi said its compliance department found reasonable cause to believe Santos violated trading rules by wagering on an outcome he personally controlled. He earned $17,839 from the trades and was assessed a $71,356 penalty in addition to the lifetime ban.

Santos had repeatedly suggested publicly that he planned to attend the address. Kalshi said he placed large bets between Feb. 2 and Feb. 25 against his attendance while making statements that influenced the contract’s price. Shortly after Trump’s speech began, Santos announced on X that he had been delayed at an airport.

In March, Santos acknowledged that some traders lost money while others unexpectedly profited, describing the episode as evidence of how “fragile” prediction markets can be.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission separately penalized Santos in July over alleged manipulative trading connected to the same wagers.

Santos was expelled from Congress in 2023 and later pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft. He served 84 days of a seven-year prison sentence before Trump commuted his sentence in 2025.

Sources

• PBS NewsHour – MBFC Rating

The post George Santos Banned From Kalshi After Betting on His Own Plans appeared first on News Facts Network.

Frank Furedi announces resignation from MCC Brussels after organisation’s staff ‘not paid in July or August’

The head of Viktor Orbán’s favourite Brussels thinktank has quit, citing unpaid wages since the change of government in Hungary.

The sociology professor Frank Furedi said he was resigning as the executive director of MCC Brussels with “immediate effect” on Monday over “persistent failure to provide the contractually agreed funds”.

Churn out puffy poached eggs in under a minute with this habit-forming hack.

MapQuest's refusal to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America" has sent its app surging up the charts, making it the No. 1 navigation app in the U.S. and driving "hundreds of thousands" of new downloads. In contrast, Google Maps announced on Saturday that it was complying with the Trump administration's name change. TechCrunch reports: The "OG of online mapping," as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump's executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake's name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest's mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store's Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast. MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States. In Canada's App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening. The 30-year-old company remarked that it received "hundreds of thousands" of new downloads since its decision to keep the name Lake Ontario in place, and saw its app's usage climb to 50 times above its normal levels. "We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with," said Doug Berger, general manager of MapQuest, in a statement. "Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right by downloading our app."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MONTRÉAL and TEL AVIV, Israel, Aug. 31, 2026 — Anyon Systems Inc., a Canadian developer and manufacturer of full-stack superconducting quantum computing systems, and KMT Technologies Ltd., a Matrix Group company, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the international deployment of quantum computing infrastructure.

Under the agreement, KMT will serve as an exclusive representative and distributor for Anyon across a number of strategic international markets. KMT has also been appointed as an authorised installation, commissioning, integration, service and support partner for Anyon quantum computing systems.

The partnership combines Anyon’s vertically integrated quantum computing technology with Matrix Group’s capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC), AI infrastructure, data centres, networking, cybersecurity and systems integration.

Together, the companies intend to address growing demand from governments, research institutions, HPC centres and enterprises seeking to deploy quantum computing as part of their broader computing infrastructure.

Integrating Quantum Computing with HPC and AI

Anyon develops key elements of its superconducting quantum computing stack in-house, including quantum processors, cryogenic systems, control electronics, software and system integration.

The company’s architecture is based on the view that quantum processors will increasingly operate as specialised accelerators within heterogeneous computing environments, alongside CPUs, GPUs and other computing resources.

To support this architecture, Anyon is developing its fourth-generation quantum control electronics, designed to enable direct high-speed connectivity between its quantum computing systems and GPU infrastructure using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).

The architecture is intended to provide a high-bandwidth, low-latency data path between quantum and classical computing resources, enabling tighter integration of QPUs with GPU-accelerated HPC and AI environments.

Matrix and KMT bring complementary expertise in HPC, GPU infrastructure, high-performance networking, data centres and complex systems integration, providing the infrastructure and deployment capabilities surrounding the quantum system.

Alireza Najafi-Yazdi, Founder and CEO of Anyon Systems, said: “We believe the future quantum computer will operate as an accelerator within a heterogeneous computing environment, alongside CPUs and GPUs. Building a better quantum processor is only one part of that challenge — the QPU, control electronics, classical compute and high-performance network ultimately have to operate as one integrated system.

“That philosophy is driving our technology roadmap. Our fourth-generation control electronics are being developed to provide direct RDMA-based connectivity to GPU infrastructure, enabling much tighter coupling between quantum and classical computing resources. Matrix’s expertise in HPC, high-performance networking and data-centre integration makes them a natural partner for bringing this architecture into customer environments.”

Anyon’s Next Generation of Quantum Computers

The partnership comes as Anyon enters the next phase of its technology roadmap. Anyon has already deployed superconducting quantum computing systems in Canada, including MonarQ, quantum computer installed at Calcul Québec and integrated into Canada’s high-performance computing ecosystem.

Building on this platform, Anyon is developing an upcoming 72-qubit superconducting quantum computer, followed by systems designed to scale beyond 100 physical qubits.

The company’s roadmap extends beyond increasing physical qubit count. Anyon is advancing its processor, cryogenic, control and system technologies as part of its longer-term objective of developing scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing systems.

Beyond Distribution: Building a Quantum Delivery Capability

The relationship extends beyond conventional technology distribution. KMT will develop technical teams capable of installing, commissioning, integrating and supporting Anyon quantum computing systems. Anyon will train and certify KMT personnel, while continuing to provide advanced engineering and product support.

This structure reflects the signed agreement, which appoints KMT both as Anyon’s exclusive representative and distributor in the applicable territory and as an authorised installation, commissioning, integration, service and support arm.

The companies intend to combine Anyon’s quantum technology with Matrix’s HPC and data-centre capabilities to provide customers with an integrated path from quantum computing hardware through installation, integration and lifecycle support.

Addressing Demand for Sovereign Quantum Infrastructure

Governments, research institutions and strategic enterprises increasingly view quantum computing as an important component of future computing infrastructure, creating demand for sovereign and on-premises quantum systems that can be integrated with existing HPC and AI environments.

By combining Anyon’s vertically integrated quantum computing technology with Matrix’s infrastructure and systems-integration capabilities, the companies aim to reduce the practical barriers to deploying quantum computers and accelerate their transition from specialised research systems into operational computing infrastructure.

More from HPCwire: Anyon Systems Awarded $23M CAD Under the Canadian Quantum Champions Program

About Anyon Systems

Anyon Systems Inc. is a Canadian quantum computing company headquartered in Montréal, Québec. Founded in 2014, Anyon develops and manufactures full-stack superconducting quantum computing systems, including quantum processors, cryogenic systems, control electronics, software and system integration. The company has delivered quantum computing systems to Canadian government and research organisations and is developing its next generation of scalable systems as part of its roadmap toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

About KMT Technologies and Matrix Group

KMT Technologies Ltd. is a Matrix Group company providing advanced computing infrastructure and systems-integration capabilities for government, enterprise, research and other technology-intensive customers. Matrix provides high-performance computing, cloud and infrastructure solutions, networking, cybersecurity, systems integration and professional services across international markets.

Source: Anyon Systems

The post Anyon Systems and KMT Technologies Partner to Accelerate International Deployment of Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Before paying a debt collector for the balance on an old judgment, it pays to understand who you're dealing with.

Congressman says Thomas abandoned his principles to become an extremist, hard-right member of bench

The senior Democratic congressman James Clyburn said his decision to support Clarence Thomas for a US supreme court seat “was a mistake” and called for the expansion of the nation’s highest legal panel to 13 justices.

Clyburn, of South Carolina, spoke up for Thomas at his fiery 1991 confirmation hearings, calling him “a personal and professional friend” who would use their shared experiences lifting minorities and advancing civil rights to become a respected and accomplished jurist.

Both thefts occurred on 17 August at a distribution center east of Los Angeles

Thieves made off with tens of thousands of cans of Pabst beer in two separate heists from a southern California warehouse on the same day, police said.

Pabst Blue Ribbon has turned the thefts – valued by police at $70,000 – into a lighthearted social media promotion. But police in Montclair said on Friday that investigators were trying to determine whether they were part of a single operation.

Salesianum football competed in a preseason scrimmage against St. Joseph’s Prep school from Pennsylvania on August 26, to prepare for the upcoming 2026 Delaware high school football season.

Sallies quarterback Brady Nabb receives the snap as Salesianum football takes on the Hawks in a preseason scrimmage.

Nabb sets and fires to a teammate downfield.

Salesianum Junior EstherVell Cotton leaps into the air to haul in a pass.

The Sallies defense closes the running lane and makes a tackle, stopping the St. Joseph run.

St. Joseph’s quarterback surveys the Salesianum defense as he receives the snap.

The Hawks wide receiver looks in a pass from his quarterback, completing the catch along the sideline.

Cotton fights through a pair of tackles earning extra yards for the Sals.

The St. Joseph QB launches a deep pass toward the left sideline.

The Hawks wide receiver tracks the pass and looks in the catch.

The Hawks receiver completes the catch and scores a touchdown. St. Joseph’s Prep is the top ranked program in the state of Pennsylvania according to MaxPreps.

Salesianum senior Michael Brock breaks on the football hoping to break up the pass.

Cotton breaks a Hawks tackle and runs into the endzone for a score.

Nabb loads up for a deep throw to a teammate downfield.

Nabb’s pass flies over the outstretched arm of the Hawks defender and lands perfectly in the arms of senior receiver Tysir Jones.

Jones reaches for the goal line, scoring a Salesianum touchdown. Sallies begins the regular season on September 3, against Springside Chestnut Hill Academy from Pennsylvania.

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

Opponents of restarting negotiations to join the European Union argued that joining the bloc would undermine national control of fishing, farming and other top priorities.

George Santos faces a lifetime ban from Kalshi after failing to cooperate with the prediction market's investigation into his alleged unlawful trades.

The Met's decision to highlight the work by designer John Galliano sparked widespread controversy due to his history of antisemitic and racist comments.

Lionel Messi played in six World Cups and led Argentina to win the tournament in 2022 in Qatar.

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed deleted posts invoking 9/11 and the U.S. response.

Violent flash floods hit the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch area, the National Park Service said, leaving more than a dozen people missing.

Two people died and eight others were hurt in a shooting on Locust Street in Trenton early Sunday morning, officials say.

President Trump says the U.S. will hit Iran hard after it targeted American bases, which Tehran said was in retaliation for U.S. attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.

A trial consultant said the Lindsay Clancy jury will need plenty of time to deliberate because the case is "incredibly complicated​."

Response seeks to discredit Washington Post story that four generals and admirals advised against prolonging Iran war

Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran.

“Of course, we demand candid military advice,” Sean Parnell wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military.”

Technology trained on millions of routine ECGs could fast-track high-risk patients for treatment

Doctors have developed a “superhuman” AI tool that can spot heart disease in less than two seconds.

The groundbreaking technology has been trained on millions of patients and works by extracting more information from a routine electrocardiogram (ECG) than the human eye can typically see.

Some robot pool cleaners offer huge suction power and massive battery life. Our lab data shows why those features don’t matter as much as you’d think.

A massive 12TB archive of old Steam2 content has surfaced online, apparently containing nearly every version of games uploaded to Valve's servers between 2003 and 2013, including unreleased prototypes, playtest builds, and cut content. Early discoveries include deleted Portal 2 material, files tied to Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and beta builds of games like Left 4 Dead 2, CS: GO, Spore, and Dragon Age: Origins. Researchers claim much of the material was once accessible through an unsecured public API. Ars Technica reports: The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials. Publicly accessible early versions of some games released before this SteamPipe transition had been considered lost content by archivists, no longer accessible from Valve itself and living on only as local downloads on aging machines. Apparently all that content wasn't as lost as many thought, though. Longtime Valve watcher and data miner Gabe Follower (previously) wrote on social media this weekend that he had "verified that everything in Steam2 Teraleak was obtained via a publicly accessible [API] endpoint. It's Valve's fault..." Spanish-language Valve streamer and analyst Scolcer also said on social media (via machine translation) that the teraleak was "obtained from a site that was 100% accessible to the public. It was there for everyone to download. No passwords. Nothing. Hidden in plain sight, but with no protection whatsoever." What's unclear right now if that API and publicly available Steam2 server content were accessed recently or if this weekend's leak represents content that was privately archived before the 2013 server transition and is just now being made public. "It could more-so be a collection of different people that knew about it and accumulated whatever people had downloaded back then into this massive archive," said The One Epicplayer, a moderator on the Valve Cut Content (VCC) Discord, which has long followed Valve betas and leaks. "I haven't been filled in on the full details but my suspicion is that these depot [files] were downloaded a long time ago and sat in a private collection," CrazyBubba, another VCC Discord moderator, told Ars. "There were a lot of leaks a few years back and many folks hoarded files for years. ... historically there have been issues with people lording content over other members." A readme file included with the leak offers "warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection" and encourages users to mirror and share it as widely as possible. On the VCC Discord, a user purporting to be the original uploader of the teraleak (who offered screenshots of a 22TB server upload log among their evidence) wrote that "getting this out really took a significant amount of effort from me and I would like it if it didn't go to waste."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Home equity levels remain high, but using that equity to consolidate your debt can come with big trade-offs.

It can be tricky to save for an emergency fund while paying off debt. Here's how to strike the right balance.

Workers thought to be stuck in underground areas at 11 sites after last week’s devastating flash floods

Rescue teams are working to reach more than 900 missing hydropower workers, hundreds of whom are feared trapped in the tunnels and underground areas of 12 hydropower projects in Nepal after the devastating flash floods, ​the ⁠country’s disaster ​management authority has said.

The death toll from the ⁠unprecedented deluge of ice, rock, mud ​and debris on Wednesday last week has risen to 939 people, with 16 more dead reported in Tibet. More than 4,400 are missing on the two sides of the border.

REHOVOT, Israel, Aug. 31, 2026 — CollPlant Biotechnologies Ltd. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LightSolver Ltd., an Israeli deep-tech company pioneering a fundamentally new computing architecture based on lasers. The acquisition is expected to close this week.

CollPlant is acquiring LightSolver utilizing an equity-centric consideration structure comprising upfront closing shares, alongside pre-funded warrants and milestone-based warrants directly tied to LightSolver meeting specific technological and commercial objectives.

LightSolver has developed the Laser Processing Unit (LPU), an all-optical working computing platform that uses the physical interaction of lasers to perform computation. Rather than relying exclusively on electronic transistors to execute mathematical operations and move data between processing and memory, the LPU maps mathematical problems onto an optical system in which large numbers of variables can interact simultaneously.

By using light itself as the computational medium, the LPU is designed to perform massively parallel computation with exceptional speed and energy efficiency.

LightSolver’s quantum-inspired architecture captures certain advantages of physical, highly parallel computation in a room-temperature platform while avoiding many of the practical constraints associated with quantum computing.

LightSolver is targeting some of the world’s most computationally demanding problems, using its LPU to accelerate large-scale linear systems, optimization and PDEs-the mathematics powering everything from robotics and Physical AI, weather prediction to plasma physics, chip design, new materials and drug discovery, and real-time mission-critical decision-making.

“We are excited to announce this transformational acquisition of LightSolver, which opens an extraordinary new growth vector for CollPlant in the high-performance photonic computing and supercomputing space,” said Yehiel Tal, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of CollPlant, “While entering the photonics market, CollPlant remains fully committed to regenerative medicine and medical aesthetics. To this end, we are actively pursuing strategic collaborations with global leaders interested in advancing, integrating, or otherwise leveraging our technology and capabilities.”

Dr. Ruti Ben Shlomi, founder and CEO of LightSolver, commented, “Computing is reaching an inflection point. We believe the next great leap will come not from making transistors smaller, but from changing the very medium of computing – from electrons to light – unlocking a new era of speed and energy efficiency. We have turned that idea from fundamental physics into a working machine. As we move toward commercial availability, our ambition is for the LPU to become a new computing layer alongside CPUs and GPUs – compressing computational workloads that can take minutes, hours or even weeks into milliseconds of LPU computation.”

Eran Rotem, Deputy CEO and Chief Financial Officer of CollPlant stated, “This transaction marks CollPlant’s entry into a market with massive growth potential, executed through a highly disciplined approach to capital allocation. Our goal is to support the continued development and commercialization of LightSolver’s technology while creating a new strategic growth opportunity for CollPlant.”

About LightSolver

LightSolver is an Israeli deep-tech company pioneering a new generation of high-performance computing based on the physics of light. Founded in 2020 by Weizmann Institute physicists Dr. Ruti Ben Shlomi and Dr. Chene Tradonsky, LightSolver is the developer of the Laser Processing Unit (LPU), a proprietary all-optical computing architecture that uses coupled lasers to perform computation. The LPU is designed to accelerate computationally intensive workloads including scientific and engineering simulation, partial differential equations, large-scale linear systems and optimization, with applications across aerospace, defense, energy, advanced engineering, financial services and Physical AI. LightSolver is advancing its technology toward commercial deployment in collaboration with leading global organizations. For more information about LightSolver, visit lightsolver.com.

About CollPlant

CollPlant is a pioneering technology company operating at the forefront of both regenerative medicine and advanced high-performance computing. In the healthcare sector, CollPlant is ushering in a new era of medical solutions with a focus on 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs, tissue repair, and medical aesthetics. The Company’s products are based on its recombinant human collagen produced with CollPlant’s proprietary plant-based genetic engineering technology, addressing indications for the diverse fields of tissue repair, aesthetics, and organ manufacturing. For more information about CollPlant, visit collplant.com.

Source: CollPlant

The post CollPlant Acquires LightSolver, Enters Supercomputing and Photonic Computing Markets appeared first on HPCwire.

The news that the cave has now become inaccessible to visitors has been met with extreme sadness.

The rainbow-colored sea cave. (SWNS)

Fashion designer was convicted of hate crime by French court in 2011 after series of racist and antisemitic remarks

The controversial fashion designer John Galliano announced on Monday that an exhibition honoring his work that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had scheduled to open for the upcoming spring’s Met Gala is not going to go forward.

The museum’s decision to honor Galliano, who was convicted of a hate crime by a French court in 2011 after a series of racist and antisemitic remarks, had drawn controversy and backlash.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Berlin is being blackmailed by hackers who were able to compromise city systems and steal data earlier this month, its mayor has said. Kai Wegner said officials would not cave in to the ransom demand, which came on Thursday evening. He did not say how much was being sought, though Der Spiegel reports the hackers are demanding 30 bitcoin, worth around 2 million euros. Some of the German capital's online systems were forced to close down as a result of the attack, while investigators were working to understand what data had been taken. The Rhysida group, which is thought to operate from Russia and eastern Europe, and was behind a previous attack on the British Museum, has reportedly taken responsibility. It has said on its website it intends to begin auctioning the 5.79 terabytes of data it was able to steal from Berlin in seven days' time, according to news agency Reuters. [...] Officials for the city-state said an initial data leak occurred between August 7 and 12. Then, on August 14, two department networks were shut down, making applications for housing benefits and payments impossible for several days. "Berlin will not be blackmailed," Wegner said on Friday. He said state police, prosecutors and federal security services were working to investigate the suspected perpetrators "with the utmost urgency," adding that inquiries into the "content and scope of the compromised data are being pursued with great intensity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Majority of missing Australians were near Gyirong Port minutes before impact. Rescuers say the area is now destroyed, covered in metres of silt and debris

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It has been almost a week since the catastrophic floods in Nepal and not even a vehicle can get into the area where the majority of missing Australians were last heard from.

Gyirong Port, the border area between Nepal and China, was the first to be hit. Images from Chinese rescue teams who have managed to get in by helicopter or hiking show the area has been completely flattened. The immigration building, the power lines, everything, just wiped away.

Take a look back at Apple’s first water-resistant iPhone and how we made it Jacques Cousteau for a day with our underwater tests.

The 1930s Patek Philippe wristwatch smashed expectations after experts originally valued it at just $6,675.

(The Center Square) - Democratic attorneys general from California, 22 other states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. Postal Service over its rule on mail-in ballots.

PARIS, Aug. 31, 2026 — Bull, a leader in advanced computing and AI, has been selected by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the LUMI AI Factory consortium to deliver LUMI-AI, a €387.8 million AI supercomputer that will significantly expand Europe’s AI capabilities and strengthen its leadership in high performance computing.

Hosted by the LUMI AI Factory consortium and deployed at CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland, LUMI-AI will provide a tenfold increase in artificial intelligence capacity and nearly double the high-performance computing capability of the current LUMI supercomputer.

Serving as the computing backbone of the LUMI AI Factory, LUMI-AI will support industrial innovation, scientific research and the development of advanced AI applications across Europe. Designed to address a broad range of workloads, the system will accelerate AI training and inference while enabling large-scale scientific simulations essential to future breakthroughs in research and industry.

The system, owned by EuroHPC JU, is scheduled for deployment in the second half of 2027. Funding for the project is shared equally between EuroHPC JU and the LUMI AI Factory consortium, which includes Finland, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.

“With LUMI-AI, EuroHPC JU has now signed its sixth AI Factory procurement contract for a next-generation AI-optimized supercomputer,” said Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director. “Together, these systems will form a powerful European AI infrastructure ecosystem, enabling SMEs and startups to access world-class supercomputing resources, unlock the full potential of AI, and drive innovation, growth, and technological leadership across Europe.”

“The LUMI AI Factory consortium builds on the success of the LUMI supercomputer,” said Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC – IT Center for Science. “I want to thank the EuroHPC JU and the consortium for the great collaboration: together we can build this world-class infrastructure for European researchers. LUMI-AI’s modern capabilities combined with the LUMI-IQ quantum computer will help European researchers and industry tackle unforeseen research and innovation challenges in key fields such as health, climate and disruptive technologies.”

Advancing Sustainable and Sovereign AI Infrastructure

Sustainability is a core principle of the LUMI-AI project. To maximize the system’s energy efficiency, the supercomputer will rely on Bull’s Direct Liquid Cooling solution, a patented technology using warm water to cool the system.

Thanks to this patented solution, the heat generated by the system is captured and the excess will be reused to feed into Kajaani’s district heating network, significantly increasing the share of heating produced from recovered data centre energy. Powered entirely by renewable electricity and hosted in a facility built to ambitious environmental standards, LUMI-AI will be among the world’s most energy-efficient large-scale AI infrastructures.

Top-Tier Technology for Europe’s AI Ambitions

The liquid-cooled supercomputer will be based on Bull’s latest BullSequana XH3500 architecture, purpose-built for advanced AI workloads. Powered by next-generation AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC 256-core processors, the system will provide the performance and flexibility required for demanding AI and HPC applications.

Additional technology partners include IBM, providing a high-performance storage solution based on IBM Storage Scale, and Nokia, contributing data centre networking expertise alongside Bull’s BXI interconnect, Europe’s only high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect designed for HPC and AI environments.

“Europe’s next wave of AI innovation will depend on infrastructure that is open, efficient and trusted,” said Thomas Zacharia, Senior Vice President, Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships at AMD. “LUMI-AI marks an important next step in the AMD partnership with EuroHPC JU, the LUMI AI Factory consortium and Bull. Powered by AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs and 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, it will strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capacity, accelerate scientific discovery, and give researchers, startups and industry the scale and flexibility to shape Europe’s AI future.”

About Bull

Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.

Source: Bull

The post Bull Selected to Deliver Europe’s €387.8M LUMI-AI Supercomputer in Finland appeared first on HPCwire.

Transferring $150,000 into a 1-year CD account could prove to be a safe and lucrative move for savers who act now.

Google Maps shows it as Lake America in the US and Lake Ontario in Canada.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finds ‘reasonable cause to believe’ tech firm subjected workers who spoke up about Palestine to hostile work environment

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws, has found that Cisco, the global tech company, probably violated the civil rights of Middle Eastern, Muslim and other company employees.

The determination, reached earlier this summer, is believed to be the first by the federal agency finding a major company at fault in connection to pro-Palestinian advocacy that swept campuses and workplaces in recent years.

Build a home office you’ll actually enjoying working from with tried-and-true upgrades – from inexpensive speakers to a stand that can turn an iPad into a second monitor

• The best wireless earbuds in the US – tested

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

If you work from home, even just a few days a week, you need more than a laptop perched on a sticky kitchen table. A dedicated desk setup allows you to step away from distractions, plop in your office chair and get to work.

It also creates a vital separation between your personal and professional life. After spending my initial work-from-home days on a living room couch, I quickly realized the importance of creating a separate space, and I have spent seven years refining it. As a tech writer, I have tested dozens of products for my desk setup, and have found some to be totally invaluable. Here are the tried-and-true upgrades that will make working from home easier, more comfortable and even more productive.

Berlin expected to outline response to incident this month widely speculated to have been coordinated by Russia

The German government is imminently expected to announce who it believes was behind a suspected drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane earlier this month and to outline its response to the incident in coordination with its European and Nato partners.

The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told the public broadcaster ARD in an interview on Sunday evening: “We are in the process of concluding the investigations; we have reached a broad agreement within the federal government on how we will respond, and we will make this clear in the coming days. It won’t take much longer.”

The U.S. attack hit rocket launchers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran fired back early Monday, marking the first known clash in weeks.

After Lindsey Graham’s death, Democrat Annie Andrews finds herself in a closely watched race as she seeks to flip his Republican seat

Annie Andrews was a dark horse Democrat challenging a five-term Republican in the US Senate when 314 Action, a political action fund devoted to electing scientists and doctors, first backed her.

Now, after the unexpected death of Senator Lindsey Graham, Andrews finds herself in a closely watched race. Donald Trump persuaded South Carolina voters last week to select Graham’s sister, Darline, as the new Republican candidate. They will face off in November in an election still heavily favored to keep the seat in Republican hands in the conservative state.

Telecoms company to benefit from soaring prices for recycled metal recovered from full-fibre broadband rollout

BT is on track for an estimated £2bn-plus windfall over the next decade from selling off old copper cabling, as it cashes in on soaring prices amid the AI market frenzy and switches the UK’s network to full-fibre broadband.

Copper is one of the main beneficiaries of the “electrification of everything”, essential for the rapid growth of AI datacentres, electronics and the fast-growing renewable energy industry.

• Cape Town stunt sparks major debate over safety risks

• Airlink insists flyby conducted according to regulations

A pre-game stunt involving two passenger jets flying dramatically low over a stadium in South Africa drew huge cheers from the estimated crowd of 56,000 people, but also sparked a major debate over safety risks. The flyby by two Embraer jets, operated by the local airline Airlink, happened on Saturday before the second rugby union Test between South Africa and New Zealand in Cape Town.

The flight tracking service Flightradar24 estimated that the lead jet passed just 41-46 feet (12-14 metres) above the roof of Cape Town Stadium, with the crowd and the world’s top-ranked rugby teams below. The second jet, which was very close behind, flew through a cloud of pink dust that shot up from the stadium roof as part of the show.

ESPOO, Finland, Aug. 31, 2026 — S-Transistors, a newly launched Finnish startup originating from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has raised €2.6 million in pre-seed funding to pioneer a fundamentally new class of integrated circuits based on superconducting transistors. The technology has several promising applications, from energy-efficient classical computing to spacecraft electronics, but quantum computing, in particular, stands to benefit most.

Credit: S-Transistors

Today’s cryogenically cooled superconducting quantum computers need a paradigm-changing solution to break the scaling limit of the quantum processing unit (QPU) – the array of quantum bits that, by analogy to a conventional CPU, does the quantum computing. That limit comes from the power-hungry, poorly scalable way quantum processors are controlled today: multiple expensive, bulky cables per qubit, running from the processor inside the cryostat out to room-temperature electronics. This is exactly where S-Transistors’ superconducting transistor technology, which is already available at wafer scale, offers a solution that is radically more energy-efficient and compact than existing alternatives.

The funding round was led by Lifeline Ventures, a leading Nordic investor, and joined by an angel investor. S-Transistors is going to use the pre-seed funding to develop several product prototypes for cryogenic signal control and handling, set up its own cryogenic laboratory, establish a manufacturing pilot line for its unique integrated circuits based on superconducting transistors, and grow the team.

“Today’s efforts in scaling cryogenic quantum computers have delivered tremendous progress, with several practical use cases already demonstrated. However, further scaling is approaching a hard wall, as it still relies on power-hungry room-temperature electronics and separate wiring for each quantum bit (qubit) – both used to operate the quantum computer and link it to the outside world. The clearest path forward, for superconducting quantum computers in particular, is to bring the classical control and interface hardware down into the cryostat, right next to the quantum chip kept cold to protect its fragile quantum states. The catch is that such integration is extremely demanding in power dissipation, speed, and energy efficiency,” says Dr. Heorhii Bohuslavskyi, Co-founder and CEO of S-Transistors. “Superconducting transistors are exactly that missing piece of hardware for large-scale, energy-efficient quantum computing.”

Cryogenic quantum computers, including those based on superconducting quantum bits, are considered among the most promising platforms for scaling quantum computing. Unlocking their full potential will require quantum machines with hundreds of thousands of qubits, along with new technologies capable of supporting such computing systems at that scale.

One key challenge is the electronics used to control the qubits and transmit signals to and from the quantum processor. Today, much of this equipment operates outside the cryogenic environment that hosts the quantum-processing chip. Moving it closer to the quantum processor and operating it at extremely low temperatures could significantly improve scalability.

However, this is not simply a matter of placing conventional chips in the cold. Although some industrial silicon transistors can operate at deep cryogenic temperatures, they struggle to combine the performance needed to control large numbers of qubits with extremely low power consumption. Excess heat can disrupt the cryogenic environment and interfere with the quantum processor’s fragile operations.

Superconducting transistors offer a promising solution to this very problem. They combine ultra-low power consumption and high-speed performance with compatibility with the quantum processor’s cryogenic environment.

“When you think about it, the transistor is the most mass-manufactured device in human history. By combining the transistor functionality, with its unparalleled computing potential, and the superconducting property of near-zero power dissipation in a single device, we can reach a completely new level of energy-efficient cryogenic computing. In the near term, this already solves the cryogenic signal routing and delivery problems the superconducting quantum computer, but the real vision is the quantum motherboard: a completely new platform for scaling quantum computers, operating at mK temperatures, and controlling the operation of qubit-based QPU,” says Dr. Andrey Generalov, Co-founder and CTO of S-Transistors.

S-Transistors’ first product is a superconducting-transistor-based multiplexer that plugs into existing cryogenic setups and speeds up the development and prototyping of various quantum devices. It will ship to early customers and strategic partners within the company’s first year of operation. The multiplexer is the first logical step toward the quantum motherboard and, according to prospective customers and collaborators, it addresses one of the most acute pain points in scaling today’s superconducting quantum computers.

The potential reaches well beyond quantum computing and sensing. First theorised in the 1980s, a scalable and reproducible superconducting transistor technology today has strong potential across classical and quantum computing, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing hardware, spacecraft electronics, and fundamental particle detectors. S-Transistors intends to be the one to take that first step from lab to fab, toward customer adoption of superconducting transistor technology.

“S-Transistors is one of those rare companies built around a genuinely new piece of fundamental technology that could become an enabling layer for an entire industry. As quantum computers scale from hundreds or thousands of qubits toward commercially useful machines, we believe superconducting transistors can become a critical part of the hardware stack that makes that scaling possible,” says Jyri Engeström, Partner at Lifeline Ventures.

“Our strategy at VTT is to shorten the journey from idea to pilot, from pilot to commercial solution. We will continue to be a part of S-Transistors’ journey as the company approaches the manufacturing phase. S-Transistors’ superconducting transistor technology will allow us to reach the point where quantum computers finally provide real-world value,” says Erja Turunen, Executive Vice President at VTT.

About S-Transistors

S-Transistors is pioneering a new class of transistors for scalable, energy-efficient classical and quantum computing. The company combines patent-pending fabrication and early-product circuit architectures with 50+ years of combined experience across microelectronics, cryogenics, quantum electronics, and advanced manufacturing. Guided by the pain points of academics and industry quantum computing players from Europe to North America and Asia, S-Transistors is on a quest to build the world’s first quantum motherboard – and unblock the scaling of quantum computers into the quantum-utility era.

Source: S-Transistors

The post S-Transistors Launches with €2.6M to Develop Superconducting Transistors for Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Jasmeet Wadhwa, who fled Taliban persecution in Afghanistan, lost his life while trying to reach UK in April

A British family is pleading with French authorities to release the body of a relative that officials have held for five months after he died in the Channel in April.

Jasmeet Wadhwa, 32, died while attempting to reach the UK on a dinghy on 1 April with his mother, Harbans Kaur Wadhwa, after they fled Taliban persecution in Afghanistan in January.

Of the many lawsuits challenging the legality or constitutionality of actions by the Trump Administration this year, the case involving the Presidential Records Act is likely just a blip on the radar of most Americans, but it should loom larger.

The case–really two lawsuits consolidated by the lower court judge–seeks to block the Trump Administration from violating the Presidential Records Act (PRA), enacted in 1978 in response to concerns that President Richard Nixon would destroy Watergate scandal-related documents. The act mandates the preservation of materials related to the official duties of the president, vice president or their staffs, and establishes that those materials are public property.

What is happening with the act and the Trump Administration is a significant piece of an effort by the administration to control or impose its view of “history” now and in the future. Other efforts recently included:

–the replacement of an exhibit at George Washington’s home in Philadelphia that showed his ownership of slaves

–an order directing placement of warning signs at the Smithsonian Museum of American History and accusing the museum of inaccuracy

–the purging of books focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion at military service academies

–the ordering all military branches to scrub online images and articles, such as of the Navajo Code Talkers and Tuskegee Airmen

–the attempt to rename the Kennedy Center, which was built to honor the fallen President John Kennedy, to add the Trump name

–executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario as Lake America– both of which are legally questionable

The administration was forced to reverse course on some of these actions in the face of public criticism and outcry. But some of the efforts continue in the courts. Remember, too, the boxes of documents stacked in the bathroom at Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago? His retention of those documents at the end of his first term triggered a fight with the National Archives and led to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and indictment of Trump.

The current threat to the Presidential Records Act arose on April 1, 2026, when, at the urging of the White House Counsel, the Office of Legal Counsel within the U.S. Justice Department issued an opinion stating that the nearly 50-year-old act was unconstitutional. The opinion, advisory only, stated:

“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose. For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”

The administration quickly issued new guidance on how to preserve records and materials that was viewed by many as less burdensome than the Act’s requirements.

Lawsuits followed almost immediately seeking to defend the act’s constitutionality and to prevent the Trump administration from failing to comply with the act. The suits were filed in federal court in Washington D.C., by Freedom of the Press Foundation and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A second suit was filed by the American Historical Association and American Oversight.

The groups bringing the lawsuits warned that under the Justice Department’s opinion, public access to millions of records could be blocked, and lessons from how decisions were made and the ability to hold executive officials accountable for corruption or abuses of power would be lost.

The two cases were assigned to U.S. District Judge John D. Bates who in May 2026 ruled in favor of a preliminary injunction requiring the administration to comply with the act. In his opinion, Bates wrote that the act “democratizes the history of an indispensable institution. Access to those records allows future presidents to pick up where their predecessors left off, Congress to identify inefficiency and malfeasance, and the public to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

One of the key elements that courts must consider in deciding whether to issue an injunction is whether those seeking it are likely to prevail on the merits if the case goes to trial.

“On the merits, the Records Act is likely constitutional,” Bates wrote. “It was validly enacted by Congress under the Property Clause because Congress may prospectively designate presidential records as federal property and then regulate that property. And it is also a valid exercise of the Necessary and Proper Clause as it promotes the accountability and efficiency of Executive Branch operations. Moreover, it does not impermissibly intrude on any presidential prerogative, especially because Presidents– including President Trump in his first term– have complied without complaint for almost 50 years….”

The Trump administration has appealed the judge’s order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

When Judge Bates issued his opinion in May, he opened its 54 pages with a quotation from Goerge Orwell’s 1949 book, 1984, perhaps as a reminder or caution to all Americans. The quotation is:

“Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.”

Marcia Coyle is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. She was the Supreme Court Correspondent for The National Law Journal and PBS NewsHour who has covered the Supreme Court for more than three decades.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 31, 2026 — King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), represented by the National Center for Quantum Technologies (NCQT), has signed a research collaboration agreement with Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, to advance research and development across multiple domains of advanced quantum technology and enhance quantum cryptography readiness in Saudi Arabia. The agreement was announced during a ceremony held at King Salman Science Oasis in Riyadh during World Quantum Day.

The agreement marks the latest milestone in Pasqal’s rapidly expanding presence in Saudi Arabia as the company deepens partnerships across the Kingdom’s research, government and industrial sectors. The announcement comes as Pasqal CEO Dr. Wasiq Bokhari prepares to deliver a keynote address in Riyadh at LEAP 2026, one of the world’s leading technology events, highlighting the company’s growing role in supporting Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to become a global hub for advanced technologies.

Under the agreement, Pasqal’s neutral-atom quantum processing technology and cloud services will be paired with KACST’s national research infrastructure to develop and validate quantum-safe cryptographic solutions. The work will be carried out at KACST’s National Center for Quantum Technologies, with quantum cryptography serving as the first focus area of a broader multi-year research program.

As quantum computing capabilities continue to advance globally, organizations across government, financial services and critical infrastructure face increasing pressure to prepare for a post-quantum future. Through the collaboration, KACST and Pasqal expect to develop, test and package quantum-safe cryptographic solutions, with the shared objective of ultimately bringing commercial offerings to the Saudi market.

Dr. Talal Al-Sedairy, Senior Vice President for R&D at KACST, said: “This agreement reflects KACST’s commitment to building strategic research partnerships with global technology leaders, supporting the development of national capabilities, and translating scientific research in quantum technologies into impactful future applications.”

Prof. Manahel Thabet, Director of the National Center for Quantum Technologies, said: “This partnership represents an important step toward building an advanced national quantum ecosystem. It enables our researchers to conduct joint research across diverse quantum domains, leveraging world-class infrastructure and international expertise to elevate the Kingdom’s research capacity and global standing in this strategic field.”

The collaboration builds on a period of significant momentum for Pasqal in Saudi Arabia. In May, together with Aramco, Pasqal inaugurated Saudi Arabia’s first quantum computer at Aramco’s data center in Dhahran, alongside the Middle East’s first commercial Quantum Computing-as-a-Service platform. More recently, Pasqal and Eleven Ventures announced plans to establish a joint venture focused on deploying, commercializing and scaling quantum computing systems across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region.

The company’s growing engagement in the Kingdom has also included a recent visit by a senior Saudi ministerial delegation, led by His Excellency Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, to Pasqal’s headquarters and quantum computer production facility in France. Together, these developments underscore Pasqal’s expanding contribution to Saudi Arabia’s quantum ecosystem, spanning research, infrastructure, industrial applications and workforce development.

Dr. Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal, said: “This initiative builds on Saudi Arabia’s growing investment in quantum technologies and demonstrates Pasqal’s continued deep engagement and commitment to the Kingdom regarding the development and utilization of quantum technologies.

“Saudi Arabia is demonstrating a remarkable ambition to build the technologies and capabilities that will shape the next generation of computing. For Pasqal, our work in the Kingdom goes well beyond deploying quantum hardware. We want to build long-term partnerships, develop practical applications and contribute to an ecosystem capable of turning quantum computing into real industrial and economic value.”

As part of that ongoing commitment, Dr. Bokhari will deliver a keynote address today at LEAP 2026, where he will discuss the transition of quantum computing from scientific research toward industrial-scale applications and the growing role quantum technologies can play in supporting economic growth and innovation.

The KACST collaboration forms part of broader efforts to strengthen Saudi Arabia’s research, development and innovation ecosystem in quantum technologies, expand international scientific collaborations and support the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 objectives.

About Pasqal

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

Source: Pasqal

The post Pasqal and KACST Launch Multi-Year Quantum Technology Research Program appeared first on HPCwire.

Donkey named HeeHaw was shot and killed as authorities reportedly looked on property in search of a missing person

A police officer in the US state of Georgia was placed on leave after a family’s pet baby donkey was shot and killed during an early-morning search on their property.

The animal’s owner, Hannah Israel, said officers were at her pasture without notification or permission at about 12.45am on Sunday, reportedly looking for a missing person when they encountered the small male donkey named HeeHaw.

Exclusive: Dr Will Tullett says better understanding of scents can improve wellbeing and perception of the world

Children need a better education in sniffing aromas, a leading historian of smells has said, noting it may improve their wellbeing and help them understand the world around them.

Dr Will Tullett, of the University of York, said pollution had been found to impair people’s olfactory abilities, while many objects and substances today – from margarines to car interiors and even our own homes – were stripped of their original smells and “reodourised” with synthetic scents.

Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast is expected to push many Iranians into deeper poverty as food inflation soars

For many Iranians, the new US sanctions campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, seems superfluous given the grim economic situation in their country.

Iranians are facing runaway food inflation, closed petrol stations and a seemingly never-ending depreciation of the nation’s currency caused by a lack of foreign exchange reserves.

People in Canada will continue to see Lake Ontario on the company's maps, Google said, while those outside of the two countries will see both names.

Spotlight Delaware reporter Nick Stonesifer recently spoke with Ray Seigfried and Shay Frisby, who are seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate District 5 in Delaware in the Sept. 15, 2026, primary election.

Seigfried is a first-term incumbent who will be looking to defend his seat from Frisby, a progressive challenger backed by the Working Families Party.

Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.

Sen. Ray Seigfried

Shay Frisby

The post Senate District 5 Primary Conversations: Ray Seigfried & Shay Frisby appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

AI company faces multibillion dollar lawsuit over misuse of copyrighted songs to train Claude models

All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, are seeking damages for alleged misuse of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works by Anthropic.

Exclusive: Labour MPs believe SMC has become ineffective and its work ‘should be a core function of government’

Ministers are considering a shake-up of the government’s social mobility watchdog that could range from giving it more teeth to abolishing it outright.

The move comes amid concerns that the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) – originally conceived under Gordon Brown’s government in 2010 – has become ineffective.

Clacton, funding, internal divisions – party prepares for annual conference next week after a season of missteps

Senior Reform UK figures like to boast that the summer time – and parliament’s longest recess – is when the party makes hay.

Supposedly, it is when Nigel Farage and co can muscle in on the news cycle with provocative statements and new policies, painting “establishment” opponents as workshy layabouts.

The National Park Service said that it is seeking information about hikers or backpackers who were in the affected parts of the Grand Canyon National Park.

The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters, as examples from Japan and Scotland show

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.

Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.

Amelia Dimoldenberg says publicists ignored her interview show for years but she can now be picky over A-list guests

Just a decade ago, Amelia Dimoldenberg found it impossible to drum up any mainstream celebrities to come on her mock date YouTube show, in which she chats awkwardly with guests over chicken and chips.

Even persuading a local actor connected with her London youth club to come on took years of prodding. Managers of A-listers with movies or albums to push instead battled to claim a spot on the hallowed cushions of the primetime TV chatshow sofa.

Amid broad privacy concerns, new apps such as Zuckoff help detect smart glasses in the wild.

Guidance says states must implement ‘comprehensive measures’ to address legacy of racial discrimination

A UN committee has said countries are legally obliged to consider reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and take other ⁠measures to address the enduring ⁠legacy of racial ​discrimination.

Guidance published on Monday by the committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (CERD) said the obligations arose from ⁠a legally binding 1965 convention on racial discrimination, not from the legal standards that existed when the slave trade took place.

California's age-verification bill has passed in its legislature — but with its open-source carve-out intact, reports the blog Linuxiac: Back in May, we reported that California lawmakers amended Assembly Bill 1856 to carve open-source operating systems out of the state's upcoming age verification requirements. Three months later, that exemption survived the legislative process intact, and the bill has cleared both chambers of the California Legislature... sending the measure to Engrossing and Enrolling, the final legislative preparation stage before it can be presented to Governor Gavin Newsom... For operating systems that are covered, AB 1856 builds on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, which is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027. Under the current text, when an operating system runs on a device and includes an account setup feature, its provider must offer an interface that asks the account holder for the birth date, age, or both, of the device's primary user during account setup. The operating system must then be capable of providing a digital age signal to covered application stores and application developers through a reasonably consistent real-time API. Instead of exposing a precise birth date, the signal identifies one of four age ranges: under 13, 13 through 15, 16 through 17, or 18 and older... Covered application stores must request the signal from the operating system and make it available to developers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington, D.C. — The Pentagon has quietly hired several conservative military veterans with large social media followings for civilian government positions while the same figures publicly promote Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policies, according to The Washington Post.

Pentagon records reviewed by the newspaper showed retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness and retired Army Col. Kurt Schlichter with active government email accounts assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Retired Army Col. Thomas Anderson, who posts online as “Cynical Publius,” also previously appeared in Pentagon records.

None publicly disclosed the Pentagon roles while publishing commentary supportive of Hegseth and criticizing journalists, military officials and other administration opponents. The Pentagon declined to tell the Post whether they are paid, describe their duties or specify how long their assignments will last.

The men reportedly worked as special government employees or “highly qualified experts,” classifications that can allow temporary or specialized government service.

Maness, Schlichter and Anderson also participated in the Pentagon’s Senior Service College Task Force, which Hegseth established to examine military education for ideology he considers “toxic” or “woke.” The Defense Department publicly announced that task force in March but did not identify the three men as participants.

Another conservative online personality, Jennica Pounds, recently disclosed that she has worked as a Pentagon special government employee since July.

Sources

• The Washington Post – MBFC Rating

The post Pentagon Hires Pro-Hegseth Influencers Without Disclosing Their Government Roles appeared first on News Facts Network.

Spotlight Delaware reporter Nick Stonesifer recently spoke with Dan Cruce and Adriana Bohm, who are seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate District 1 in Delaware in the Sept. 15, 2026, primary election.

Cruce is a first-term incumbent who will be looking to defend his seat from Bohm, a progressive challenger backed by the Working Families Party.

Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.

Sen. Dan Cruce

Adriana Bohm

The post Senate District 1 Primary Conversations:​Dan Cruce & Adriana Bohm appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The Pebble’s return to my wrist after over a decade reminded me what I’d missed.

Hot summer evenings can drain your dinner motivation fast. These 13 weeknight dinners keep the work manageable with quick skillets, rice bowls, pasta, seafood, burgers, and pressure-cooked pork.The post 13 summer weeknight dinners ready before the heat talks you out…

Director Mark Mori followed coffee chain workers’ struggle to unionize: ‘These young kids are so inspirational’

As the food service industry was pushed on to the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, workers at Starbucks stores in the Buffalo region of New York went public to announce their union-organizing campaign.

Their efforts, and Starbucks’ responses, have culminated in one of the most expansive union-organizing campaigns – and one of the most aggressive union-busting campaigns – in modern US history.

War on Gaza and violence in West Bank is playing out in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, where the Arab American community has flourished

From his office outside Toledo, Ohio, Thamin Tim Ridi opens his phone to livestream the scene outside the besieged house of his brother, Loui, thousands of miles away in the occupied West Bank.

This month, with his property at risk of being destroyed by Israeli settlers, Loui traveled from Ohio to his ancestral home in Qusra, south of Nablus, where his mother and other family members have been living in constant fear of attack.

Unions say ban will take time to enact, while president also wants under-15s social media ban as key legacy

French high schools are rushing to put in place a ban on mobile phones this week as Emmanuel Macron pushes for children to spend less time in front of screens.

Education unions warned that banning mobile phone use in lycées – where children are aged 15 to 18 – would be hard to implement quickly.

Death toll from unprecedented deluge of ice, rock, mud ​and debris now stands at more than 900. Plus, was it a mistake to take away Pluto’s planet status?

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Good morning. Rescue teams are working to reach hundreds of people feared trapped in the tunnels and underground areas of half a dozen hydropower projects in Nepal as more than 900 workers were reported missing after the devastating flash floods.

The death toll from the ⁠unprecedented deluge of ice, rock, mud ​and debris that crashed through valleys of Nepal on Wednesday last week has risen to 903 people, with 16 reported dead on the Tibet side of the border. More than 4,000 are missing in Nepal, with another 500 in Tibet. Hundreds of bodies, many unidentified, have been buried in shallow graves.

How large is the rescue operation? Nepal’s prime minister, Balendra Shah, said almost 21,000 security personnel were involved in the rescue operations, besides civilian workers and volunteers. China’s state-run CCTV reported that Beijing had mobilised more than 2,100 rescue workers. The Red Cross has ‌estimated that more than 90,000 people are likely to have been affected by the disaster, which China and some experts linked to the effects of the climate crisis.

Why has the disaster sparked a racism row in Australia? A slew of racist social media comments have been made towards missing Australians. Most of them were on pilgrimages, including to Mount Kailash in Tibet. Mainstream media outlets including News Corp, Channel 7, Channel 10 and Nine have been hit with highly offensive and discriminatory comments on Facebook articles identifying the missing Australians.

What has Donald Trump claimed US forces are doing? Hours after the attacks, the US president, Donald Trump, claimed in a social media post that Iran’s energy hub of Kharg Island was being “blown to smithereens” but gave no further details. The White House and ⁠the US defense department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Attacking Kharg, which handled 90% of ⁠Iran’s oil exports before the war, would severely disrupt the Islamic republic’s energy trade and put huge pressure on its economy.

Pedro Sánchez says two countries cooperating and accuses Israel and Russia of spreading fake news about migration

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said there is no evidence to suggest the Moroccan government was behind last month’s massive border crossing into Ceuta but accused Israel and Russia of spreading disinformation.

As many as 141 people are thought to have died trying to enter the Spanish enclave at the end of July. The influx of about 70,000 men, women and children unleashed a political crisis, a humanitarian emergency and reignited tensions within the EU over immigration.

The space industry treats the sky as a place to dump what it no longer wants. We must develop a new model of accountability

On 5 August, a piece of a derelict SpaceX rocket traveling at 5,400 miles an hour met with the moon and punched a fresh hole into it near Einstein Crater. Astronomers were thrilled. The European Southern Observatory caught sodium and lithium flaring in the debris plume and called it a bonus. The media called it a light show. Nobody was physically hurt, so nobody is responsible, and within a week the story was gone.

I have spent 20 years tracking the junk humanity leaves behind in space for a living, and I want to tell you plainly what that crater actually is: a receipt. It’s what you get when an entire industry treats the sky, and now the moon, as a place to dump what it no longer wants, and calls the dumping “normal operations” or “space exploration”.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer has a level-headed reputation but commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and White House adviser Peter Navarro also have key roles

Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.

But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.

Kameron Glasgow of Florida honors wife Kenya and daughter Kennedi at local vigil after last week’s tragedy

A Florida man whose wife and toddler daughter were killed by a lightning strike while he was near them recently has implored people to “hold … tight” to their loved ones.

Kameron Glasgow made that arresting remark to local media at a weekend gathering honoring the memories of his wife, Kenya, and two-year-old daughter Kennedi after they died on 23 August from an exceedingly rare cause.

In mid-July testimony before Congress, Russell Vought boasted that, as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’d refashioned the agency’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans — the role Congress had created for the agency after the 2008 economic crash.

Vought had spent the first 18 months of the new Trump administration trying to dismantle the bureau, much as he and other appointees had done with the U.S. Agency for International Development. At CFPB, he’d ordered mass layoffs, tried to choke off the bureau’s funding and ended the lease on its headquarters, attempting to make good on his vow to put civil servants “in trauma.” But federal courts blocked Vought’s efforts to close the CFPB, with a judge at one point saying the administration had acted with “complete disregard” for Congress. 

So Vought, who is one of President Donald Trump’s top advisers, switched tactics: If there had to be a watchdog, theirs would be more of a golden retriever, friendlier to industry and less aggressive. Vought had accused the bureau of “thuggery” in the past, and said the “new” CFPB would focus on deregulation, embrace “humility” and adopt a “collaborative approach” to its dealings with companies that harm consumers.

As evidence of the success of this new approach, Vought singled out one company by name in his testimony, a buzzy startup called Bilt. The company, which offers credit cards used to make rent and mortgage payments, had fumbled a critical transition, leading to confusion and financial stress for its customers. In the past, the CFPB might’ve deployed examiners to ensure that every consumer harmed got relief, investigated Bilt’s technology platforms for potential flaws, questioned its third-party contractors or issued subpoenas — with the goal of finding the root causes of whatever went wrong and preventing it from happening again. 

The Trump-era CFPB took a different tack. “We reached out to the company,” Vought told Congress, “and before it got to the adversarial part of the process, they were able to fix their issues.” The CFPB even posted a feel-good statement on its website, touting its new approach and telling consumers that information provided by Bilt “appears to show” the firm was “back on track.”

Yet two weeks after Vought’s testimony, Bilt failed customers again. This time, Bilt cardholders received mistaken debt collection notices and saw their credit scores go down as a result, sparking more embarrassing news stories and angry complaints. It was Bilt’s second fiasco in six months, and as its customers scrambled to understand what had gone wrong, the CFPB was nowhere to be found.

The Bilt controversy offered an early test of CFPB’s new approach, and the results suggest that an ask-nicely strategy to consumer protection isn’t likely to protect consumers. What’s more, current and former CFPB officials say the bureau could’ve caught the issues that caused the second of Bilt’s two screw-ups had the previous playbook still been in use.

ProPublica sent the CFPB a detailed set of questions about its handling of the Bilt complaints and what actions it took to protect consumers and prevent future problems. The bureau did not respond to any questions or requests for comment.

The whole episode drives at a bigger question, according to consumer advocates and current and former CFPB employees: If the Trump administration can’t eliminate the CFPB, what will become of it in the hands of Trump officials, such as Vought, who have long believed the agency is unnecessary? (Vought termed out as acting director in early August but remains a senior adviser. The administration’s nominee for full-time director, Brian Johnson, is an executive at Capital One bank and a former CFPB appointee. At his confirmation hearing, Johnson said he could not think of a single decision that he disagreed with made by Vought at the CFPB.) 

“What we saw Vought do with Bilt is innovative — and I don’t mean that as a compliment,” said Mike Pierce, a former CFPB official who runs the consumer advocacy group Protect Borrowers, which has criticized Vought’s tenure at the bureau. 

A Rocky Transition

Bilt’s business rests on a simple premise: Consumers should build credit and earn rewards for what’s typically their single biggest expense — their rent or mortgage payment. “Prior to Bilt, that payment didn’t build anyone’s credit history, which is crazy,” Bilt co-founder Ankur Jain said in March. Jain added that it was “silly that you can earn rewards buying a round of drinks at a bar, but not paying your rent every month.”

Founded in 2021, Bilt is one of the hottest startups in the personal finance industry. Bilt says it has 7 million customers and has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital investments, at a $10.75 billion valuation. Investors include private equity giant Blackstone, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and a venture capital fund chaired by former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault. 

Forbes estimates Jain’s wealth at $3.4 billion. People magazine published exclusive photos of Jain’s 2024 wedding to Erika Hammond, a former WWE wrestler and cast member on the upcoming season of “The Real Housewives of New York City.” The event took place near the Great Pyramid of Giza; one photo shows the couple kissing at sunset with the Sphinx and pyramids in the background.

Earlier this year, Bilt suffered a serious crisis. The startup had signed a seven-year partnership with Wells Fargo to offer Bilt-branded credit cards that could be used to pay rent. Under its deal with Bilt, Wells Fargo agreed to absorb processing fees associated with rent transactions and make payments to Bilt because it saw the partnership as a way to attract new customers who might one day seek a mortgage from Wells Fargo, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

But revenue fell short of Wells Fargo’s projections, and the bank was losing so much money — as much as $10 million a month, the Journal reported — that it ended its partnership with Bilt four years early. (A Bilt spokesperson said at the time that the Journal’s reporting was “an inaccurate representation” of the Wells Fargo partnership.)

In February, Bilt relaunched its credit cards with new financial partners. But the rollout of “Bilt 2.0,” as the company called it, was a debacle.

Customers said their rent payments were paid late, double-charged or not paid at all. Credit limits had been lowered from one card to the next. Their cards were inexplicably frozen. “This unexpected double charge has caused significant inconvenience and financial distress,” one Bilt customer wrote to the CFPB in February after Bilt paid her rent twice in the same month. (A Bilt spokesperson said, “As soon as we were made aware of this issue, we resolved it and made the member whole.”)

Bilt’s customer support department struggled to keep up as tens of thousands of messages poured in. Customers fumed that they were unable to bypass chatbots and reach a human being for help. They also bombarded the CFPB’s website with complaints, which included accounts of how Bilt’s AI support system gave information that was “completely wrong” and “demonstrably … false.” (In a statement at the time, Bilt said its new card had “attracted unexpectedly high demand, and some of our members experienced gaps in service that are simply unacceptable to us.” The company told ProPublica it resolved all problems related to the new cards “months ago.”) 

In March, the consumer group Protect Borrowers sent a letter to the CFPB, demanding that the bureau’s supervision or enforcement divisions take “immediate action.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote to Bilt, pointing out a 1,300% increase in complaints about the company submitted to the CFPB in February and seeking answers about the Bilt 2.0 transition. Warren also said that Bilt’s practice of immediately debiting rent payments may have run afoul of the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act’s disclosure requirements for credit cards. A Bilt spokesperson said Warren’s assertions were “incorrect.”

It’s common for lawmakers and advocacy groups to fire off outraged letters about a company’s alleged wrongdoing.

The strange part is what the CFPB, then led by Vought, chose to do about it.

“Air Cover for the Company”

The law that established the CFPB, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, envisioned two tracks for the bureau’s work. 

On the supervision track, CFPB employees would periodically visit banks and other financial institutions to monitor their business practices and ensure compliance with the law. Supervision would be confidential, giving companies the ability to adjust their operations without public scrutiny. Contrary to Vought’s accusations, current and former CFPB staffers say the traditional supervision process has long been collaborative and nonpublic. Congress designed it that way when it wrote the law.

Supervision could examine the past or look in real time. In one notable instance, when two federal student loan servicers exited the industry in 2021, the bureau’s supervision division chose to proactively monitor the transition of more than 9 million borrowers’ accounts to new servicers. Bureau staffers caught problems mid-transfer, from inaccurate due dates to botched repayment schedules, and directed the companies to fix them. It later published a recap of what the CFPB did as well as a set of tips so that the rest of the industry could avoid the same mistakes.

On the enforcement track, CFPB lawyers would file lawsuits against or pursue consent decrees — binding settlements that courts can enforce — with companies that allegedly broke the law. By their nature, lawsuits and settlements are public, but the enforcement division didn’t speak publicly about its actions apart from its filings.

The Trump-era CFPB took neither of these tracks in response to Bilt’s first incident. A senior political appointee and Vought aide, Victoria Dorfman, took the lead in contacting Bilt and asking for information about the consumer complaints, according to a person familiar with the interactions who requested anonymity to share confidential communications. Dorfman was joined by Elie Greenbaum, another Vought adviser, and Deborah Morris, the deputy enforcement director. Having political appointees lead this process, instead of nonpartisan career executives and subject-matter experts, was “abnormal” for the CFPB “but is becoming normal” under the Trump administration, a current CFPB staffer told ProPublica.

Dorfman, Greenbaum and Morris met with Bilt’s executives, who explained how they were fixing the problems and supplied data to the bureau about the company’s customer communications and efforts to resolve problems. When Bilt assured the bureau it had fixed the issues, CFPB officials appear to have taken those assurances at face value, issuing a celebratory press release on the bureau’s website. 

But it was what the press release said, or didn’t, that alarmed some current and former CFPB officials. Nowhere does it mention whether the bureau dispatched examiners to help locate the root of Bilt’s problems, as it would have done in the past, or whether it conducted its own audit of Bilt data to ensure every harmed consumer got relief. 

Indeed, the CFPB’s statement stressed that the bureau did not open an investigation. Nor did it craft a consent decree or enforceable pledge to ensure compliance. Documentation provided by Bilt, the bureau said, “appears to show” that the company had fixed its problems and that its systems were “back on track.”

Austin Hinkle, a former supervision lawyer and section chief at the CFPB, said it’s easy for a company to identify a population of customers who were harmed, issue an apology and get them relief, as Bilt did. 

Understanding what caused the issue is more complicated — and arguably just as important. In a situation like Bilt’s, Hinkle said, CFPB examiners would normally conduct a root-cause analysis, asking, for instance, which system led to the late or double-charged rent payments and why had it failed. Financial technology companies often rely on third-party processors and banks, Hinkle said, so the bureau’s investigators would also scrutinize what outside firms Bilt uses and what the communications have been with those firms.

There’s none of that depth in the CFPB’s statement, Hinkle said. “The press release just looks like they’re providing air cover for the company without directing real fixes or systematic changes.”

The lighter touch appears, so far, to be a hallmark of the Vought-era bureau. It has brought just one enforcement action since Trump took office, which ended with a consent decree and a civil penalty of $1, while dismissing or resolving dozens of cases brought during previous administrations. A CFPB supervisor warned her subordinates that they would face “most unpleasant” consequences if they were too aggressive in their work, Reuters reported. Recently, the bureau announced it would no longer include narratives in consumer complaints that appear in the CFPB’s public database.

Meanwhile, a current CFPB staffer told ProPublica that the number of policy attorneys, who help direct supervision work and identify violations of law, had shrunk from typically between 40 and 50 lawyers down to five. The staffer said that examiners were no longer allowed to access the primary source level data and could only “check the checker now,” meaning they must rely on a company’s own findings. They also faced pressure to finish examinations as fast as possible, given only three weeks to complete their work when they used to have eight weeks.

The staffer added that, as far as they knew, the first time that front-line staffers on the supervision and enforcement tracks heard of CFPB’s handling of the Bilt case was either the public statement or when Vought mentioned Bilt in his Capitol Hill testimony.

Pierce, the Protect Borrowers director, said he viewed CFPB’s treatment of Bilt as an indication that the bureau had embraced a mindset similar to what Ronald Reagan’s presidency was known for: a wholesale deregulatory approach meant to strip away regulations and oversight of companies large and small. 

“It’s taking the government’s supervision and enforcement tools and figuring out how you can use them the way the Reaganites used them,” Pierce said.

“Sent Me Into a Panic” 

Roughly two weeks after Vought’s testimony, Bilt customer Jordan Carey, a 30-year-old who works in the hospitality industry, received an alert from Credit Karma, the credit-monitoring service. His credit score had dropped 50 points in a single day. The news “sent me into a panic,” Carey said. He had stellar credit and paid off his Bilt credit card the day charges were posted. “I was thinking there is no way this is real,” he said.

Carey dug deeper and saw that the hit to his score had happened after a debt collector, Tate and Kirlin, reported a supposed long-overdue payment. And when he looked at the collections notice, he saw it listed Bilt as the cause of the error.

When he alerted Bilt’s customer service to the problem, he said, “they were not aware of the issue [and] I’m pretty sure I was one of the very first people to report it.” A Bilt customer service agent initially laid the blame with Wells Fargo and told Carey to contact the bank for help. But when he posted on Reddit about his experience, he got a different response from Bilt about the source of the problem, blaming a different banking partner. He also heard from almost a dozen other people who said they had the same issue. 

Nearly 1,900 of Bilt’s customers received mistaken notices from a debt collector that said they owed hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unpaid credit card balances. On Reddit, people wrote about receiving one or multiple false collections notices, including, in one case, as the cardholder was closing on a new house.

Hinkle, the former CFPB section chief, said the more recent Bilt problem was the kind of situation the CFPB’s previous oversight model could’ve prevented or identified more quickly, instead of customers discovering the problem and self-reporting it. “The fact that there’s a seemingly related problem popping up now suggests to me that the normal supervisory process didn’t work here,” he said.

The CFPB has not made a public statement since Bilt’s second breakdown. 

Bilt, for its part, said the issue had to do with an earlier iteration of its credit cards that had stopped accepting customers. The company said it alerted the collection agency in question as well as the credit bureaus to the mistake. It also awarded customers an extra 2,500 points for their trouble, worth between $25 and $50. “We held the agency accountable, made things right for every customer involved, ensured each was notified directly and provided direct customer support along with courtesy Bilt Points,” a spokesman said.

Carey said his credit score had been restored within a few days but was unimpressed by the free points; 10,000, or about $100 to $200, would have felt more appropriate. “This is a multibillion-dollar company,” he said. “They can afford it.”

The post The Trump Administration’s Plan for Protecting Consumers? Politely Ask Companies to Behave. appeared first on ProPublica.

Lawmakers could also vote on condemning socialism and censuring GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware campaign finance rules require political organizations to disclose donors so that voters can know who is trying to sway elections. A recent ad blitz from the national Working Families Party is countering messaging from law firms, but it is not immediately clear whether the group is drawing dollars from any specific individuals within its donor base.

A progressive political action committee backing a slate of Delaware legislative candidates filed a long-delayed state campaign finance report last week that revealed nearly half a million dollars in political advocacy, but did not disclose who funded it.

An official from the WFP National PAC said it omitted its donors because Delaware regulators told the group that the disclosure was not required as long as it filed separately with the Federal Elections Commissions. 

Delaware Department of Elections spokeswoman Cathleen Hartsky-Carter called that a “misunderstanding.” She also noted that the state fined the PAC for filing last week’s report late. 

Despite the omitted donors, the report did outline how the WFP National PAC — an arm of the national Working Families Party — spent $455,000 during the past month to support six candidates for the Delaware legislature, five of whom are challenging incumbent Democrats. 

The spending comes as Delaware’s Democratic primary has increasingly become a front in a national battle over the party’s identity. Much of the recent fight in Delaware has centered on last year’s reforms to the state’s corporate law — which sets the rules for how the 2 million companies domiciled in the state are governed.  

Last month, Spotlight Delaware reported about corporate law firms’ million-dollar campaign to back their own slate of largely incumbent Democrats facing challengers from the left. 

In an apparent response, the WFP National PAC launched its own campaign, publishing online ads and sending out mailers in support of favored candidates and in opposition to their opponents.

Many of the ads highlight last year’s legislative battle over a proposed corporate law change that largely limited shareholders’ ability to sue the companies they own stock in.

Supporters of the reform said it would move Delaware’s prominent business courts back into alignment with rulings from a decade ago. They also said it could dissuade companies from leaving the state, following assaults on Delaware’s brand by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. 

Opponents derisively called the legislation a “billionaire’s bill.“

Among the incumbents targeted by the WFP’s campaign is Rep. Kim Williams (D-Newport) who recounted in an interview how she chuckled when first hearing about ads that linked her with Musk. 

She also criticized the Working Families Party for not revealing their donors in their state campaign finance filing.

“Our constituents should know where the money is coming from, and who’s funding it,” she said. 

Williams’ critiques add to others expressed to Spotlight Delaware over the past month from many within Delaware‘s more establishment circles.

Still, the WFP National PAC is not the only Delaware organization to file a recent campaign finance report that omits donors. The Delaware Building Trades PAC also submitted a report without donors on Wednesday, though its spending for the past month totaled about $23,000 — a fraction of the WFP expenditures. 

Local Working Families Party organizer Karl Stomberg declined to comment on the national PAC’s campaign finance report, stating that a firewall exists between his local activities working with candidates, and those of a PAC that cannot legally coordinate with those campaigns. 

“Messages that are put out by the PAC are not preapproved by the candidates or by me,” Stomberg said,

What do the federal filings show?  

In an interview with Spotlight Delaware on Thursday, the official from the WFP National PAC, who only spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the group will disclose its donors in an amended Delaware campaign finance report in the coming days.

As of Sunday, no new report appears on the Delaware campaign finance website.

The official also said the money funding its Delaware campaign came from a federal account that is targeted for independent expenditures, meaning it does not directly fund candidates’ campaigns.

The WFP National PAC’s federal campaign finance report shows that it raised more than $10 million in 2026 from more than 500 contributors.

The two largest were separate political organizations. The Democracy PAC has contributed $5.5 million to the group, while the Movement Voter PAC added $1.2 million, according to federal elections data.

The bulk of Democracy PAC’s contributions come from entities linked with the investor and political donor, George Soros.

The Movement Voter PAC derives its dollars from a more dispersed, left-leaning donor base.

The post National progressive group reveals $455K Delaware campaign, but donors unclear appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The planned reductions — targeting programs that combat the spread of deadly diseases — coincide with an administration push to make developing nations spend more.

Public lands belong to all of us. No one should plunder those lands for profit

Do people still say a car was “sold for parts”? Because the US is being sold for parts or just handed over to the oligarchy. It’s a fire sale, a bankruptcy auction, it’s a planned dismantling of everything from its military to its institutions of higher education to its scientific research to its public lands.

And while the threat to sell off part of Yosemite national park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel in the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Divers join search teams scouring deep waters for ⁠any survivors, with eight people so far confirmed to have died

Nearly 20 people are still missing after a ferry capsized ⁠off northern Cyprus, killing at least eight, as divers join search teams scouring deep waters for ⁠any survivors.

The double-hulled ⁠ferry ​with 267 people onboard took in water and flipped over on Sunday just off the port city ⁠of Kyrenia, leaving survivors clinging to the upturned hull. They were rescued by passing vessels and members of the coastguard.

US attacks Iranian rocket launchers on island in strait of Hormuz and Tehran targets US bases in Jordan and UAE

The US has reverted to military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, firing missiles and drones at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, prompting the Iranian military to attack US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

US Central Command said it acted late on Sunday after it detected the Iranians planning to fire fresh mines into the strait. Last week Donald Trump claimed the US navy had cleared the strait of mines for the first time since the conflict started on 28 February, a claim the Iranians rejected as lies.

Rights group claims 300 homes were destroyed in Tibet and number of missing people is ‘far higher’ than Beijing admits

A Tibetan advocacy group says hundreds of homes were destroyed on the Tibetan side of the border in last week’s deadly floods, raising questions about Beijing’s official account of the scale of the disaster.

Public discussion about the flash floods has been restricted, with security officials in Tibet announcing on Sunday that it had penalised at least 10 people for sharing “false disaster information”. There was no further information on the nature of the penalties.

Julius Mugabo launches landmark case as union says thousands in capital lost incomes due to ‘broken system’

An Uber driver who got into thousands of pounds of debt and feared losing his home due to delays in Transport for London renewing his licence to pick up passengers is taking on the organisation in the high court in the first challenge of its kind.

Julius Mugabo, 55, has been an Uber driver licensed by TfL since 2016. Under the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, all minicab drivers cannot work lawfully unless TfL has carried out checks on them and issued or renewed their licences. These licences must be renewed every three years.

Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

But, he said, “I feel safe here. I mean, I’ve been on death row. I feel safe anywhere.”

Duncan had spent the last three decades trying to prove his innocence after a jury convicted him of killing his former girlfriend’s toddler. An investigation by Verite News and ProPublica last year showed that prosecutors had relied on key evidence that appeared to be fabricated by a pair of forensics experts whose use of bite mark analysis has since been widely discredited as junk science.

Nevertheless, Louisiana prosecutors continued to argue that Duncan should be put to death. The threat became ever more real as Gov. Jeff Landry began expediting executions, despite the state’s track record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. It wasn’t until June that the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan’s murder conviction, ruling that the bite marks found on the child’s body, the only physical proof tying Duncan to the alleged crime, could not have been made by a human.

Chief Justice John Weimer was so outraged by the prosecution of Duncan that he compared it to 17th-century witch trials. “We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd” with “no basis whatsoever in logic,” he wrote. Some of the evidence against Duncan, he said, was “similarly specious.”

The trauma that the state imposed on Duncan as a result of his wrongful conviction continues today. Although Louisiana’s top jurist tore apart the state’s case against Duncan, the 57-year-old West Monroe native still isn’t truly free. Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita Parish, where the crime allegedly took place, had warned the justices during an April hearing that he would retry Duncan if the court vacated his conviction. Tew, who did not respond to requests for comment, has said in court that he still believes that Duncan is not only guilty but deserves to be executed. Tew has until next June to decide on a retrial, though his term ends in January and he is not running for reelection.

Until then, Duncan said, he is trapped in limbo, both mentally and financially. He came out of Angola with nothing in the bank and now makes $17 an hour working the night shift at Walmart unloading and stocking freight. While he enjoys the job — he was named employee of the month in June — Duncan said he is barely scraping by.

There is a state restitution program designed to compensate exonerees up to $480,000 over a decade for wrongful convictions, but he is not eligible until either the district attorney decides not to retry him or he is acquitted in another trial, which can take years. And even then, there is no guarantee he will ever be awarded any money. Attorney General Liz Murrill has opposed nearly all applications for compensation, telling lawmakers last year that defending the state against such claims consumes an enormous amount of time and resources and that the fund should be abolished altogether.

“The foreseeable future for me is the year between now and when they can’t prosecute me no more. That’s the only future I get to play with,” Duncan said. “I’m 100% factually innocent, but not 100% free from prosecution.”

Surviving His First Decade in Angola

Over the course of more than six hours of interviews with Verite News and ProPublica, Duncan described in harrowing detail the nightmare he lived since police arrested him on Dec. 18, 1993. By far the worst of it all, he said, was thinking that his neighbors, friends and even relatives could believe he had committed such an unspeakable crime against a child.

It felt as if everything he was as a person was “being torn out of you, violently, in an emotionally painful way,” Duncan said. “Just having your identity eviscerated.”

Duncan was babysitting Haley Oliveaux in the home he shared with the girl’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, in West Monroe when the 23-month-old died. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Police initially arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after pathologist Steven Hayne and dentist Michael West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty; months later, the 30-year-old was sentenced to death.

His first decade at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola was the hardest, Duncan said. Not only did he lose his initial appeal in 2002, and with it the dream he could convince the courts of his innocence, but he was forced to watch helplessly as his family gradually fell to pieces.

His mother, Barbara Oren, used to visit him every Thursday, and then in 2004, she stopped coming without explanation. Duncan would stare out the window across the hall from his cell, “almost obsessing, like my mom’s gonna show up any time now,” he said.

Three years later, Oren died of complications from excessive drinking, her sister, Elaine Whiteside, said. But in truth, Whiteside said, grief killed her.

“She fought for Chris for so long, and she turned to alcohol,” Whiteside said. “It’s been very traumatizing for everybody. For the last 32 years, how do you tell someone your nephew’s on death row for the rape and murder of a baby?”

Fourteen years after his mother passed, Duncan’s brother, David, died of an overdose. During the first several years of his incarceration, Duncan said he spoke with his brother often, but those calls grew less frequent as David’s addictions took hold.

“My brother ended up going from being the region’s No. 1 car salesman to being addicted to drugs to eventually dying of overdose,” he said. “He just couldn’t take it. He couldn’t escape being my brother.”

Duncan wasn’t allowed to attend either of their funerals.

Daily life on death row nearly robbed him of his sanity, Duncan said. Like all inmates awaiting execution, Duncan remained in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. This lasted almost 20 years. And there was never a set schedule for that one hour he would be let out and allowed to use the phone. Some days, it would be 2 a.m. Who could he call at that hour? (Death row inmates were eventually allowed to spend at least four hours outside their cells following a 2017 class-action lawsuit.)

The concept of time gradually disappeared. Duncan tried to keep a strict routine: wake up, drink coffee, watch the news, exercise and read books, mainly about other cultures and religions. He learned Hebrew so he could better understand the Bible. He became a tutor and helped other inmates earn their GEDs.

But the years of confinement began to take their toll physically. After about four years, Duncan started experiencing severe heart pain caused by a bacterial infection. “By the time I was 34 years old, my health had went all the way downhill,” he said. “A lot of nights, I went to sleep, said my prayers and really didn’t think I was going to wake up the next day.”

During the summer months, when the heat inside could rise to 115 degrees, Duncan said he experienced seizures. “I’m pretty sure I got brain damage as a result of it,” he said. “There were times when I got out of bed and I didn’t even know if I was left-handed or right-handed. There were a few times when I got up, I didn’t even know my name.”

In 2013, three death row inmates sued the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections for “appalling and extreme conditions” as a result of the high temperatures. Their experiences described in the lawsuit closely matched Duncan’s. For 85 straight days in 2012, the heat index in one section of death row exceeded 126 degrees, according to the suit. A judge ordered the state to provide air conditioning throughout death row, but a federal appeals court overturned the order. The corrections department did not respond to questions about conditions within the prison.

Instead of breaking him, Duncan said the brutal conditions hardened his resolve to keep fighting. But it didn’t seem as if anyone was listening.

“Sometimes the louder you scream, the more people look at you and laugh, like, ‘There’s another one claiming he’s innocent,’” Duncan said. “I was suicidal at one point because I was hopeless.”

Signs of Hope

Duncan had been on death row for about a decade when he learned from his lawyers and the news that there were others like him — people convicted based on inaccurate evidence, including discredited bite mark science, presented by Hayne or West. Four of them had been exonerated by 2008, and five more would follow.

In 2009 journalist Radley Balko wrote about Duncan’s case in Reason, a libertarian magazine, and how it was part of a larger pattern of “forensics fraud” perpetrated by Hayne and West. At the time, Duncan’s attorneys with a New Orleans nonprofit had filed a post-conviction appeal but did not have the resources to conduct a fuller investigation and uncover new evidence required to win. That left his case largely dormant.

Then in 2016, Duncan’s attorneys contacted the American Bar Association, which put him in touch with an Atlanta firm that took Duncan on as a client pro bono. (The Innocence Project in New York signed on six years later.) They filed a series of discovery requests that unearthed a trove of evidence pointing to Duncan’s innocence. This included expert witnesses who said the child’s death was an accidental drowning brought on by a seizure and a jailhouse informant who recanted his trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.

Most important was a recording of West’s 1993 examination of Haley. In that grainy black-and-white video, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed — the marks later used to secure a death sentence against Duncan. The trial judge had not allowed the jury to see the video on the grounds that it was not an indication of Duncan’s innocence.

West, who has not responded to multiple earlier requests for comment, had previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks. He admitted in a 2011 deposition in another case that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis. Hayne died in 2020.

Atlanta attorney Christian Bromley, who had joined the case, recalled the first time he was shown the recording in 2016 and being “horrified and surprised that the video had been available at that point for over 20 years and just essentially ignored and deemed not relevant.” The video would provide the foundation for Duncan’s latest bid for freedom.

Filmmaker Catherine Legge, who spent more than three years creating a documentary about his case, also played a pivotal role. Duncan said he’s indebted to her for tracking down Statham, Haley’s mother, and convincing her of his innocence. He knows it wasn’t easy.

“Allison spent 30 years being accused of being a partner to her baby’s killer,” Duncan said.

In April of last year, then-Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp overturned Duncan’s conviction, criticizing the “questionable” work of Hayne and West. Tew appealed, claiming that bite mark evidence was an accepted science at the time of Duncan’s trial and that some experts still consider it to be a useful forensic methodology.

At Duncan’s bail hearing last July, Statham told the court that the district attorney’s office had lied about her daughter’s death to make it look like murder and continues to perpetuate the lie. She said Duncan deserved to be free. He wept as he listened to his former girlfriend come to his defense.

“Just seeing her on the stand and hearing her voice engaged in the same struggle that I’ve been fighting for 30 years, knowing that what mattered to her was the truth,” he said, “That was the only thing that mattered to me.”

Four months later, Sharp granted Duncan bail. He was released into the embrace of his family the day before Thanksgiving. Then, this June, the state Supreme Court rejected the district attorney’s appeal and threw out Duncan’s conviction. Of the four people sentenced to death based in part on the work of Hayne or West, Duncan was the last to be freed.

Rebuilding a Life From Scratch

Since his release from prison, Duncan has been trying to piece together some semblance of a normal existence. There were the everyday logistics of finding permanent housing and a job. And then the deeper work of addressing the decades of pain that he — and his family — experienced.

At first, he slept on his aunt’s living room couch in Pineville in central Louisiana. But she broke her leg in June, which required twice-weekly visits from nurses and physical therapists, leaving little room for Duncan. That’s how Duncan ended up at the motel across the Red River in Alexandria, with half of his belongings packed into the back of a truck. In August, he moved into his own apartment, the first place he has ever lived by himself.

“I never really had a place to just be comfortable and relax,” he said.

Duncan’s main focus now is doing the best job he can at work. On most nights, he said he puts his earbuds in, listens to music, unloads the trucks and lets the world drift away. “Ain’t got to think about nothing else,” he said. But Duncan has his eye on the future and enrolled in a Walmart management training program that will bring additional responsibilities.

One day soon, though, he knows that he will need to shift his attention back to the flawed criminal justice system in Monroe and the conditions in Angola prison. He wants to make sure the horrors he experienced don’t happen to anyone else, including the guys on death row, men who were convicted of terrible crimes but with whom he still formed true friendships.

“I was under the same roof with those people twice as long as I was under the same roof with my own family,” he said.

He’s also rekindled a relationship from long ago. Recently, he was going through Facebook friend requests and saw a familiar face, but one he couldn’t quite place. He accepted, and the woman texted him a photo of herself when she was just a kid. It was his childhood sweetheart.

The last time he saw her was at a skating rink just after Christmas in the early 1980s. He had given her a pair of earrings. A short time later, her family moved out of town.

“She just disappeared,” Duncan said. “She’s one of the only people I remember from my past. I still missed her just the same as I always did.”

That part of his life seems at times to be more of a dream than reality, Duncan said. He lived a simple, country life. He hunted and fished. He drank beer, rode motorcycles and worked on hot rods. And he planned to become a firefighter like his dad.

But then Haley died.

“I can’t be a simple person anymore,” Duncan said. “I try to find ways to be happy, but nothing is simple anymore.”

The post He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next? appeared first on ProPublica.

The Toxic Inheritance of America’s Wars

Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. “This incident is only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he wrote on X. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages? Is it the nations that consume the inexpensive energy exported from our region, the shipping insurers, or the aggressors and their partners who have transformed the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman into a theater for military operations and the testing of highly destructive weaponry?”

Alongside death and destruction that has killed or wounded tens of thousands of Iranians, the U.S.–Israeli war has caused massive environmental devastation. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects.

Major commercial satellite companies have restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East data at the behest of the U.S. government. Likely intended to obscure the true extent of damage inflicted on U.S. military facilities across the region, the ongoing satellite blackout has also hindered the work of those tracking the environmental devastation that has accompanied the conflict since it began in February. Even with the limited data, the Conflict and Environment Observatory has concluded that “[a]ll parties to the conflict” have appeared to target “environmentally risky facilities,” including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants.

According to research by the Climate and Community Institute, U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in the first 14 days of the war emitted roughly 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. Put another way: In two weeks, coalition strikes produced roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the country of Iceland does over the course of a year. And as the war dragged on, missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, dual-use and civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were also increasingly struck.

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The environmental threats these targets pose is enormous. Damaged desalination plants jeopardize the civilian water supply and flood nearby land and marine environments with harmful chemicals like sulfuric acid. Bombed infrastructure fills urban streets with asbestos-contaminated rubble and dust, heightening the risk of respiratory illness and cancer among exposed populations. Damaged weapons facilities pollute surrounding areas with explosives, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals. And the targeting of nuclear facilities risks radiation exposure or worse, an uncontrolled nuclear disaster, like a meltdown.

Fossil fuel infrastructure has also remained a key military objective for all belligerents. Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March engulfed the capital city of Tehran in a cloud of toxic smoke that rained black carbon and sulfuric acid on the city’s 9 million residents. Attacks on oil tankers and other commercial vessels have leached oil and spilled fuel into myriad waterways from the Egyptian port of Damietta, where Iran struck two liquefied natural gas vessels, to the coast of Sri Lanka, where the U.S. sank an Iranian frigate. And such environmental damage is likely to increase as the conflict continues to sporadically flare up.

The U.S. has a long history of starting wars that leave deep environmental scars. And for decades, U.S. troops have paid for it with exposures to toxic substances, including defoliants like Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. sprayed across Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s; smoke from oil depot fires that dotted the landscape in and around Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War; and the military base burn pits of the post-9/11 forever wars. The PACT Act of 2022 extended healthcare access to millions of veterans who served from the last half of the 20th century to today and now suffer from a wide range of conditions related to such wartime exposures, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reproductive issues likely caused or exacerbated by their military service.

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Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

Health problems among U.S. veterans often mirror those of local communities in war zones as they are exposed to the same toxic substances. Just as American troops returned home from Iraq with higher rates of diseases like urinary and blood cancers, doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, reported higher birth abnormalities and miscarriages among the local population.

Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. A similar wave of destruction accompanied the ISIS takeover of the city in 2014. Fallujah was then besieged and heavily bombed in 2016 during the U.S.–Iraqi military operation that retook the city. Iraqis in Fallujah fled en masse in both 2004 and 2014. Those who returned were greeted by demolished homes, bomb craters, chemical spills, and houses with ash covered walls littered with bullet holes.

Since 2004, Fallujah has seen a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer rates and similar spikes in early onset cancer and respiratory diseases, according to a study co-authored by local physicians. Elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal birth defects that followed the initial U.S. invasion have never diminished. Reports on these poor health outcomes by doctors at Fallujah Women and Children’s Hospital led to the creation of a multidisciplinary study steered by researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. and Britain’s Newcastle University which tracked the intergenerational health effects of heavy metal exposure.

Depleted uranium munitions — which shatter and ignite on impact, allowing them to penetrate heavy armor plating — have been used by the U.S. in combat since the Gulf War. Spent rounds then release particles of radioactive uranium and other heavy metals, like titanium, into the surrounding earth, water, and air. Heavily bombarded areas in Fallujah were left with a greater percentage of heavy metals in their soil as a result.

Those who returned to the city after the battles, rebuilt their homes, reseeded contaminated farmlands, and drank and bathed in local waters now carry higher levels of radiation and heavy metals in their bodies. Indeed, uranium was found in the bones of one-third of study participants, all of whom were children during the 2004 siege — at levels roughly 300 times higher than their generational peers in America.

While highly toxic on its own, uranium levels are also often a marker for exposure to heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury, which have been known to harm virtually every organ in the human body. Today, elevated rates of miscarriages and lethal congenital anomalies plague families in Fallujah.

Related

Iraqi Children Born Near U.S. Military Base Show Elevated Rates of “Serious Congenital Deformities,” Study Finds

“War itself is always about combustion,” explained Kali Rubaii, a cultural anthropologist and Purdue University assistant professor who led the study on Fallujah. “The combustion of generally toxic materials redistributes these toxicants into people’s air, water and food. Every time someone breathes in everything in the air, they are inheriting the pollutants of war.”

Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. As the pollutants of war are largely universal, the study’s implications lie far beyond Fallujah. Recommendations for those returning to bombarded areas are included in the study’s appendix in both Ukrainian and Arabic. When I spoke to Rubaii in March — two days after Tehran was drenched in black rain — she hoped the study’s finding, and its recommendations for returnees, could be of help to those living near the Persian Gulf.

The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East, including a five-year-long drought, brought on by years of insufficient rainfall linked to human-induced climate change, that poses a severe threat to Tehran’s water supply. The Persian Gulf’s fragile coral reefs and mangrove forests have also, for years, suffered under rising water temperatures, intensive vessel activity, and growing industrial pollution.

The Persian Gulf’s ecosystems still bear the scars of oil spills from the U.S. battles with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, according to a recent study from the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, oil spills in the Gulf have increased dramatically since the beginning of the war to cover roughly four times the area in March 2026 as they did one year earlier. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come.

As Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.” While we live in an age where threats to civilian infrastructure are espoused and ordered by prime ministers and presidents alike, the illegality of these attacks — and their grave ecological consequences — cannot be ignored. The targeting of a country’s energy infrastructure, waterways, bridges, and homes makes it more likely that the attacked nation will respond with attacks on similar targets, placing civilians at risk in the present and, due to environmental contamination, for following generations.

The International Committee of the Red Cross — which works to uphold the laws of war — has repeatedly affirmed that the environment itself is a civilian object and must be protected. Under the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, to inflict disproportionate widespread and severe environmental damage is a war crime.

The Iran war has already sparked a global fuel crisis, threatened future harvests, and placed tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, imperiling this generation and the next. It has also subjected civilians to toxic smoke, black carbon rain, and other public health hazards. People can’t be healthy if they live on sick lands. Even after the final bomb of the Iran war has dropped, the ecological devastation and health hazards will haunt U.S. service members and local residents alike. Fallujah has shown that even long after the guns fall silent, war victims continue to suffer with the fallout of conflicts that have, quite literally, seeped into their bones.

The post Ecocide in Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Andrew Bailey, in role as financial stability watchdog chief, warns advanced models risk destabilising system

The Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has joined the throng of figures warning about the global risks posed by the most advanced artificial intelligence technology.

In a two-page letter sent to international finance ministers and central bank governors as part of his role as chair of the international Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bailey said “frontier” AI models were “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities”.

With traditional goals such as stability and home ownership feeling out of reach, young people are focused on the present

By now, we all know the shape of financial nihilism: the throw-your-money-at-anything reaction to the dissolution of the slow, linear path to wealth; the prediction markets, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and microluxuries growing in its place. We’re left in an economic no man’s land. But financial nihilism only describes where we put our money. What about how we earn it in the first place?

The modern economy has long relied on our need for stable employment – to pay the mortgage, to keep our kids fed, or, for some, to chase prestige and power – to generate the work ethic that keeps the wheel of production turning. None of this is going well for young people. Our jobs are insecure, we can’t afford houses, we’re deferring having kids (if we have them at all), and only 6% of us say a leadership position is our primary career goal. Hope is one of the economy’s most productive inputs, powering our willingness to endure long hours. When the production function of income – the mechanism that turns hard work into a stable salary, then a mortgage, then a pension – breaks down, so does our relationship with the input. I call this production nihilism: my generation’s growing indifference to the kinds of work we’re willing to participate in, and where we’re willing to earn.

Concern among staff that fragile artwork’s scarce ‘light hours’ given to someone with no known interest in museum

The British Museum privately hosted the Donald Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel in the exhibition space of the Bayeux tapestry earlier this month, the Guardian understands.

The museum’s director of development, Charlotte Appleyard, hosted the PayPal founder at a VIP viewing of the tapestry, which is yet to open to the public, on 18 August.

Organisers say people must revive spiritual relationship with food amid double threat of climate crisis and conflict

Mending the broken food system under the threat of climate-driven weather extremes will require more than economic fixes and intensive agriculture, according to the organisers of a pioneering summit this week, who say the world must revive its spiritual relationship with food.

Delegates from more than 60 countries and the UN will gather for the next five days in Paro in the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan for the world’s first “conscious food summit”, which will bring together governments and farmers, mindfulness experts and yoga therapists.

• Kenin wins 6-2, 7-6 (6) in late-night contest

• Williams loses 15th straight tour-level match

• First-round clash finally begins at 12.13am

Sunday had become Monday by the time Venus Williams finally emerged beneath the closed roof of Arthur Ashe Stadium, her entrance pushed deep into the night after Novak Djokovic’s bruising defeat by Argentina’s Mariano Navone went the five-set distance. The first ball was struck at 12.13am, the latest start to a match in US Open history, yet several thousand spectators remained to watch a player who has been part of this tournament for as long as the building itself.

At 46 years old, ranked 611th in the world and making her record-extending 26th US Open singles appearance, Williams has grown accustomed to making history simply by showing up. Even by those standards this latest installment was, as she would later describe it, “completely insane”.

More than 200mm of rain forecast in parts of South Korea, while parts of southern Europe to be 10C above average

South Korea’s prime minister, Han Seong-sook, met officials to prepare for heavy rain expected this week, with rainfall totals across central and northern parts of the country forecast to exceed 200mm in some areas.

South Korea was battered by heavy rainfall earlier this month and some areas were particularly hard hit. Over the weekend further thunderstorms pushed into the region and these are expected to cause disruption through Monday. This heavy rain is caused by a series of severe thunderstorms that developed over the Yellow Sea, on the western side of South Korea, and will slowly push eastwards on Monday before easing on Tuesday. These storms have been strengthened by the very warm Yellow Sea, which now has a surface temperature of 29C, 4C above the climatological average.

"OpenAI said on Friday that it plans to stop providing AI models to Cursor, the coding-tool company now owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX," reports Reuters: "We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts," OpenAI said in a blog post... However, Michael Truell, a co-founder of Cursor and now an executive at SpaceX, said on X that the company was speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this issue. Hours after OpenAI's announcement, Anthropic, which rivals both firms but has an ongoing partnership with SpaceX, said it planned to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor, according to Tom Brown, one of the co-founders of the firm... In its blog post, OpenAI said that X, formerly known as Twitter and now part of SpaceX, had breached the terms of its contract with OpenAI after Musk acquired the platform. "To work with a large partner like SpaceX, we typically rely on custom contracts to ensure compliance with our terms of service and that the integration provides for safety at scale," the AI company added. The article also notes Elon Musk's response Saturday in a post on X.com: "I couldn't care less." He accused Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman of being "untrustworthy," while repeating his assertion that they "stole an open source nonprofit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Secretive state begins repairs on ageing facilities after being revealed as worst country for leaks of potent greenhouse gas

Turkmenistan has started plugging the mega-leaks of methane that spew from its ageing oil and gas facilities, the latest UN data shows, in a move hailed as a breakthrough.

Methane, also called natural or fossil gas, is a potent greenhouse gas. It traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and causes 25% of global heating today. Stopping leaks can be quick and cheap and, because methane breaks down in the atmosphere far quicker than CO2, this has a rapid impact, with some experts calling it the climate “emergency brake”.

Amman, Jordan — Iran launched ballistic missiles Monday at military bases in Jordan used by U.S. forces, marking a renewed escalation after American strikes on Iranian targets near the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian state television said missiles targeted the King Hussein and Al-Azraq airbases in retaliation for Sunday’s U.S. attack on two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island. U.S. Central Command said those launchers were being prepared to deploy rockets and sea mines that threatened commercial shipping.

Jordan’s armed forces said eight ballistic missiles entering its airspace were intercepted. A U.S. official told Reuters that nearly all incoming missiles were destroyed, with no immediate reports of major damage or U.S. casualties.

The exchange ended a roughly month-long lull in significant direct fighting between Washington and Tehran. The conflict began six months ago and has repeatedly threatened shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global energy supplies.

Oil markets reacted quickly. Brent crude climbed above $90 per barrel as traders weighed the possibility of additional disruptions in the region.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard vowed further retaliation following the U.S. strikes, while American officials described Sunday’s operation as limited and defensive.

The renewed fighting comes as the Trump administration continues applying economic pressure on Tehran while facing growing domestic scrutiny over the duration and objectives of the war.

Sources

• Reuters – MBFC Rating

The post Iran Retaliates Against U.S. Bases as Six-Month War Escalates appeared first on News Facts Network.

The long-running drama reaches Hitler’s rise to power in its final season as its creators reflect on the unsettling parallels between Weimar Germany and the present day

It’s the global hit TV series that pulled audiences straight into the chaotic hedonism of 1920s Germany, dramatising the brilliance and brittleness of a newly built democratic system with unprecedented ambition.

But in the 13 years that the German makers of Babylon Berlin have worked on the show, modern democracies from the US to Hungary to South Korea have come under pressure in ways the creators say they could never have imagined when they started.

Exclusive: Patients identify errors in consultation transcripts that are missed by GPs, Healthwatch England finds

AI technology that listens to and transcribes patients’ consultations with doctors can put them at risk by getting the names of drugs and illnesses wrong, an NHS watchdog has warned.

In one case a woman was left badly shaken when the AI scribe’s summary of her conversation wrongly said she had demyelination – serious nerve damage that can lead to multiple sclerosis.

In today’s newsletter: As rescuers search for survivors after catastrophic floods, the disaster offers a stark warning about the climate risks facing the region, and the world

Good morning. Over the weekend, rescue workers in Nepal and Tibet raced to find people who are still trapped in villages affected by catastrophic flash floods. As of this morning, the death toll stands at 903, and more than 4,000 people are missing.

For those of you reading this in a place where life continues as usual, the scale of devastation is hard to fathom. In a matter of minutes, a torrent of mud and debris engulfed entire villages, snapped bridges and swept away people’s homes and families. Some survivors are marooned on top of buildings that rescue workers can’t reach. Others are trapped in tunnels beneath the ground. Many have no idea if their loved ones are still alive.

UK politics | PC Andrew Harper’s killers will remain in prison after Andy Burnham announced changes to the early release scheme that will see anyone convicted of unlawful killing, including all forms of manslaughter, excluded from the scheme.

Milo Yiannopoulos | Far-right British media provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the US back to the UK by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in connection with what the agency said was expired authorisation to be in the country.

US-Iran | Iran has launched retaliatory strikes on airbases in Jordan after the United States attacked Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, the first such strikes in a month.

Iceland | In a blow to Brussels, Iceland has held a referendum that has narrowly ⁠rejected ⁠the government’s proposal ​to hold ⁠accession talks with ⁠the ​EU.

Nepal-Tibet disaster | A headteacher in Nepal evacuated 900 children from a school moments before a deadly wall of water struck their town amid the devastating flash floods that have killed almost 800 people and left thousands missing.

Tuesday | Justice secretary Alex Norris is due to present the government’s revised plans for the prisoner early release scheme, which includes a headroom review aimed at freeing up more space in the system.

Thursday | In the first UK visit by an EU leader of Andy Burnham’s tenure, the prime minister is will host talks with French president Emmanuel Macron.

Saturday | Officials from Jamaica will visit the UK to lodge a petition with King Charles to seek legal guidance from the privy council on the country’s request for reparations over Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, on the anniversary of the 1781 Zong slave ship departure from West Africa.

We look at Grok’s latest models, AI agents, image and video features, controversies and what sets it apart from other major AI tools.

Dozens evacuated after flash-flood event near Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch, officials say

One person died and about 15 people were missing or unaccounted for after a major flash flood swept through the Grand Canyon national park in Arizona on Saturday afternoon, according to the National Park Service.

The flash-flood event occurred in the area of Bright Angel Canyon and the Phantom Ranch, where park staff and the Arizona department of public safety had evacuated more than 60 people as of Sunday morning.

Three of the four candidates running for the District 23 state House seat participated in a candidate forum at the George Wilson Center on Sunday, debating data centers, affordable housing, transparency, budgets and other issues.

More than 3,000 people are still missing after catastrophic flash floods hit following a glacial collapse high in the Himalayan region.

Checks at pharmacies for people aged 40 to 84 are aimed at identifying those at risk of heart attack or stroke

The NHS in England is to offer free finger-prick blood tests for cholesterol on the high street for the first time under plans to reduce heart disease and stroke deaths by a quarter within the next decade.

The seven-minute tests will be available at participating pharmacies as part of a national rollout to spot “ticking timebombs” earlier.

Richer countries might have more resources to deal with catastrophe, but this problem grips the entire planet, however much leaders may want to deny it

Climate breakdown is happening on one Earth, but two different worlds. In one, its impacts increasingly encroach on everyday life; longer periods of discomfort and shorter periods of sharp pain. Endless, hotter summers, and within them sudden wildfires, evacuations, homes burned to cinders in a matter of hours. In another, catastrophe. This summer has been a snapshot of that split-screen. The hottest day on record in parts of Europe, and a wave of water, mud and ice in Nepal that so far has claimed more than 750 lives. Thousands of people are still missing.

The difference is also one of resources. The climate crisis has an economic cost, but some places can absorb it better than others. Responses to this summer of wildfires in Europe included a rapid scrambling by the French government to provide everything from tax breaks for businesses affected by the fires to relocation costs and aid to rebuild homes. The UK government had deployed almost £100m before the summer to strengthen wildfire resilience.

In an Amazon News blog post, their HR leader describes using AI to write 100,000 lines of code — 25 years after she last coded. "Do you know how empowering it is to realize that after 25 years away from coding, you can actually build again?" First she built a calendar app for her family, but then used Amazon's AI-powered coding tool Kiro to write an app for Amazon's internal "Everyone Can Build" event. We opened the competition to every employee on our team, and within just a few weeks, more than 1,500 people were building. I couldn't believe what they built. One employee built an app that turned a nearly four-hour manual process into a one-second automated check, saving tens of thousands of hours annually. Another made a desktop pet named Momo that keeps your tasks, reminders, and shortcuts a click away. Since then, I've written over 100,000 lines of code with AI. What I've found is that the more you work with these tools, the more natural the process becomes, and the more you realize they're expanding what you're capable of, not replacing it. You don't need perfection to start. You just need to dive in. When I decided to build the submission app for our team competition, I didn't know how to begin, so I asked our internal AI workplace assistant, called Aza. It pointed me to the right tools and helped me take the first step. From there, I opened Kiro and started building. When you give employees the ability and tools to solve problems themselves, they will surprise you with what they create... At Amazon, every employee has access to AI tools. Whether someone needs a quick answer, wants to move faster in their day-to-day, or is ready to try building something new, the resources are there. The more people use these tools, the more capable they become with them, and that experience carries forward in their careers... We also want to make it easy for people to build credentials that are recognized across industries. That's why AI training is free for every Amazon employee. Amazon covers the full cost of one AWS AI certification exam per year, with options ranging from foundational AI concepts to professional-level generative AI. Employees can choose the path that fits where they are in their learning journey. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes that 7 months ago Galetti also took to Amazon News to announce the elimination of 16,000 corporate jobs, a move which CNBC noted coincided "with a push to invest heavily in artificial intelligence." The job reductions come just a few months after October's layoffs, when 14,000 employees were let go across Amazon's corporate workforce. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nationwide research also shows average 14% premium for housing in national landscapes of England and Wales

Housebuyers are paying a premium of almost a quarter to own a property located within a UK national park, with the New Forest the most expensive national park to live in, according to Britain’s biggest building society.

Nationwide found that a property located within a national park cost 24% more on average than a similar property elsewhere, while buyers were also stumping up a 6% premium for homes within three miles of a national park.

Will the UK ever rejoin the EU? Who is funding Andy Burnham? And will the bedroom tax be scrapped? In a special episode, Kiran Stacey and Peter Walker answer some of your questions

Please keep sending your comments and questions to Pippa and Kiran at politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com

As Russia hits another ammunition warehouse, killing at least 38, locals put blame on poorly placed depots

It is a day and a half since a Russian jet-powered drone smashed into an ammunition dump in Myla, a village 15 miles outside central Kyiv. Volodymyr, 61, a security guard, leads visitors from his family’s badly damaged home, its roof blown off, back windows shattered, through the garden towards the impact site 300 metres away.

The garden, like so many in Ukraine’s villages and suburbs, is a sizeable allotment. But today the greenhouse is shattered, a vegetable patch is blackened and crisp underfoot. Several metres of grapevine have been destroyed. Even so, Volodymyr finds two surviving bunches to hand to the Guardian.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

How Syria can capitalize on the post-Hormuz economy.

Spy hunting shores up Putin’s power—but paralyzes the state.

"Multikernel Technologies has put out mklinux v7.0-mk2, the first public release of the multikernel Linux tree it's been building since last year," reports the blog It's FOSS: The basic premise of the project is that one physical server can run several independent Linux kernels side by side, each with its own dedicated CPUs and memory. So, the same box could run a database on one kernel and a GPU training job on another without either kernel touching the other's resources... One kernel runs as the host, controlling the machine's CPUs, memory, and PCI devices. When it spins up a new kernel instance, that instance gets its own dedicated slice of hardware and boots straight onto it using Linux's kexec mechanism, running natively rather than under a hypervisor. The host tracks all of this through device tree overlays under /sys/fs/multikernel/, and it can shift hardware between running instances while everything stays up. That's a different setup from both VMs and containers. A VM still puts a hypervisor and a host kernel between the app and the hardware. A container skips the hypervisor, but every tenant on the machine shares one kernel... This release only supports x86_64 hardware, though Multikernel Technologies says the architecture-specific code is already modular enough for other ports to follow later. The article notes they're selling multiple products based on the kernel tree, including one for running AI agents in their own kernel with direct GPU access and one that promises to patch a running kernel without taking the system down.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fort Worth, Texas — Officials in Tarrant County will vote Tuesday on a proposal to reduce the number of Election Day polling places, drawing opposition from voting-rights groups and Democrats ahead of a closely watched U.S. Senate race.

The plan would eliminate 92 locations compared with the 2022 midterms while leaving more than 200 sites available across the county. Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare has argued the changes would eliminate low-turnout or duplicative locations and reduce unnecessary costs.

The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union urged commissioners Friday to reject the proposal, warning that fewer locations could create confusion and disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic voters. Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, has more than 2 million residents and is Texas’ third-largest county.

Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico also criticized the proposal Sunday. He is challenging Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in a race that has become increasingly competitive.

County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig has said officials prioritized sites near public transportation and locations that meet accessibility requirements.

The debate follows an earlier proposal that would have reduced Election Day sites from 316 in 2022 to 176. Commissioners delayed action on that plan in August after substantial public opposition.

Texas law gives individual counties broad discretion over how many polling locations to operate, and counties across the state have taken different approaches as they prepare for November.

Sources

• Associated Press – MBFC Rating

The post Texas County Polling Site Cuts Draw Voting Access Concerns appeared first on News Facts Network.

From the gaming news site Aftermath" Game developer and consultant Ryan Laley traveled to Cologne, Germany from Essex, England to showcase his upcoming horror social deduction game Mimic at the annual Gamescom event. He paid "thousands of pounds" to get a booth at the show, where other game developers and press could try the game ahead of its October release. But Laley's Gamescom was cut short when he realized Friday morning that his brand new Alienware laptop, purchased for the event, was missing. The laptop was stored in a cupboard in the booth, and Laley started asking nearby vendors to see if someone had moved it. That's when he realized it was stolen — and that he wasn't alone. Laley's booth in Gamescom's business area, specifically in the International Game Developers Association Lounge, had been hit in what appears to be a string of thefts at the convention center. The business area of the convention is not open to the public, only press and others with specific tickets. Laley said Gamescom advertised this area as having 24/7 security and limited access after hours... Publisher and merchandiser iam8bit, in a nearby booth showcasing Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School and Petal Runner, had two laptops with game builds stolen Thursday night from its booth, a representative confirmed to Aftermath. "Meanwhile, Tessera Studios had two laptops and a Steam Deck taken from its cabinet," reports Tom's Hardware: Gamescom organizers responded to the issues, saying that although they have arranged for uniformed guards to provide general security, individual booth security must be booked separately. They've also advised exhibitors to have insurance against theft, and said these warnings are noted in the terms and conditions for participants, as well as in the event's technical guidelines. "All cases have been reported to us and to the police, and investigations are already underway," the organizers' statement read. They also said that security is one of their priorities at the event, but also added, "At an event of this size, however, there will always be individuals attempting to take advantage of the situation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

At least 85 U.S. citizens remain missing in Nepal and Tibet after a glacier collapse caused devastating floods.

Jessica Pegula, the American third seed, began her campaign at Flushing Meadows with a straight-sets win

Krejcikova gets in a muddle after squandering a 40-0 lead on serve. Deuce. She fights back though. Wins the game with a lovely serve down the T. All square at 2-2.

Paolini delivers a dominant effort on serve to change ends at 3-2 up.

Washington, D.C. — U.S. forces struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island Sunday, marking the first American attack on Iranian territory since late July and triggering another round of retaliation from Tehran.

U.S. Central Command said American forces observed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel preparing launchers near the Strait of Hormuz and took what it described as “limited, precise action” against an imminent threat. The military said the launchers were connected to efforts to deploy sea mines in the strategically important waterway.

Larak Island sits near the Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant share of the world’s oil supply passes. CENTCOM said U.S. forces recently completed clearing sea mines from internationally recognized shipping lanes and remain positioned to protect commercial traffic.

Iran later responded by launching ballistic missiles at U.S. military installations in Jordan, according to Iranian officials. Reuters reported that most were intercepted and no significant damage was immediately reported.

The strike comes six months into the U.S.-Iran conflict, which has disrupted oil shipments and contributed to higher energy prices.

Sunday’s attack was the first known U.S. strike on Iran since July 29, when American forces targeted Iranian positions following an attack on a U.S. base in Jordan.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post U.S. Strikes Iranian Rocket Launchers Near Strait of Hormuz appeared first on News Facts Network.

The Kanneh-Mason family boasts seven classically trained musicians, each under the age of 30. The siblings have toured the world and recorded chart-topping albums.

The Cap Arcona, a Nazi ship, was attacked by British Royal Air Force planes near the end of World War II. Thousands of prisoners died as the ship sank in the horrific and little-known disaster.

The Linux Foundation's director of IT infrastructure says they now spend more CPU cycles "rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access." At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.... [W]hen a source is guaranteed to be LLM-free, like the entire history of kernel commits, it's worth its weight in gold as a source of training data... At the time of writing, linux.git is about 1.48 million commits. Oh, and we have about 922 forks of it on git.kernel.org — but don't worry, it's actually extremely efficient on the backend, since it's mostly the same objects in every fork. Unless, of course, you're a scraper, in which case you have, oh, several BILLION valid URLs you can scrape, only to get 922 duplicates of the same 1.48 million commits — which is exactly what the scrapers are doing. But wait, it's not just commits itself. You can also ask for patches, plain renders, diffs between arbitrary commits — cgit is happy to let you, which was perfect for the times when the Internet was for humans or crawlers who obeyed robots.txt, and is AWFUL right about now, because we can generate 1.2 METRIC BAJILLION valid URLs just for a single fork of linux.git. Initially, this was the solution — look through the logs, find out which IPs are obvious scraper bots, and fail2ban them. At first, this was easy, because the bots helpfully told you who they were via their user-agent. Then, they wised up and started pretending that they were random vanilla browsers. So, we started banning them by IP — after all, it's easy to figure out that an IP that is trying to grab every possible commit in a 8-year-old abandoned fork of linux is not really some lone Chrome on Windows user who is just furiously clicking every link that comes across their screen. The bots then started fanning out to entire subnets, but this was still meh, because obviously an IP coming from Google Compute is just pretending to be a Firefox user... And... that's when things turned really, really ugly. Suddenly, the crawlers were coming from millions of random residential or mobile IPs, all pretending to be random modern browsers. An IP like that would make 4-5 requests and then never show up in the logs again... They descended like swarms of locust, hit hard and fast until the system fell over and then moved on to the next target until you recovered. Then, they returned. Rinse. Repeat. They still do that — welcome to the wonderful world of "proxy SDK monetization." It's big business, and your TV is probably doing it... Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge... With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers... [W]e're turning off features to reduce the number of crawlable URLs and to gate off actions that are expensive for us to run. Expect to lose some functionality, at least when accessing our resources anonymously. Trust me, we hate it just as much as you, but at this point it's a necessity... [W]e promise to still offer all of our data for download to anyone who asks. You just may have to jump through more hoops to get it. Sorry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has criticized President Donald Trump but spoken warmly of the American people.

Trump officials shuttering three projects on foodborne parasite, two defunded by Congress, Politico reports

The Trump administration is shuttering ⁠two of the three US Department of Agriculture research projects studying cyclospora after the foodborne parasite has ⁠sickened tens of thousands of Americans during the summer, Politico reported on Sunday.

The two projects were defunded by Congress earlier in the year, while the third is ⁠due to be moved in coming months from Maryland to Iowa as part of a broader USDA reorganization, according to the ⁠report.

• Los Angeles were already Super Bowl favorites

• Defensive tackle was 10-time Pro Bowler with Rams

• 35-year-old aiming to win second Super Bowl in LA

Aaron Donald, one of the greatest defensive players in NFL history, is coming out of retirement to rejoin his only professional team, the Los Angeles Rams.

During a 10-season career with the Rams, who drafted him with the 13th overall pick in 2014, Donald was a three-time defensive player of the year and an eight-time first team All-Pro. He won a Super Bowl with the Rams at the end of the 2021 season before announcing his retirement in March 2024 at the age of 32.

Father of former boxer and NRL star Anthony Mundine had a heart attack on Sunday

• Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and names of Indigenous Australians who have died

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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Indigenous Australian boxing great Tony Mundine has died, aged 75.

The father of former boxer and NRL star Anthony Mundine had a heart attack on Sunday.

In May Chess.com "quietly launched" a free educational poker site named Gambit, reports The Verge, where players can learn the game and improve an Elo-like rating without risking real money. And next Chess.com will expand into more classic games, including go, backgammon, and mahjong: Like Gambit, Chess.com is developing Elo-style rating systems for these games, as well. [Chess.com's chief growth officer, Albert Cheng] didn't say when the new sites will launch but that "development is moving quite rapidly" on them, using the same playbook he used for Gambit... He and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks. "I think the biggest advantage that it's provided is essentially being able to read our existing codebase and our design system and apply consistent patterns to how we develop Chess.com over to a different platform and do so quickly," Cheng said.... "Just because code is easier to write doesn't mean that you just let it run on its own, but it certainly is a superpower in getting things off the ground." Cheng also said the version of Gambit that's live at the time of writing has "zero or close to zero" AI-created assets, which were used in early prototypes. According to Cheng, without help from AI, getting another site up and running would have required a bigger team or "would have been a lot more disruptive to the status quo of building and growing Chess." Now that a "small, scrappy" team can get a new platform off the ground much faster, it's opened the door for Chess.com to dip into more games, starting with poker. The poker site already has 75,000 members, according to a blog post Friday — and they've already played nearly 20 million hands and completed 100,000 lessons. The site is now holding a daily poker tournament, and on Monday will broadcast the event with live commentary on their Twitch and YouTube channels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dawn is champion after public voting of eight yellow-bellied marmots as they fattened up for long winter ahead

A marmot contest started by researchers who turned to OnlyFans to help save a decades-long research project has chosen its champion in its inaugural Fat Marmot Week.

Dawn was crowned the winner of Fat Marmot Week 2026 after securing back-to-back victories in both the mass-gain and popular-vote competitions, according to the organizers of the marmot project at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

In the two photographs, Venezuela's deposed leader Nicolás Maduro is wearing a gray tracksuit and making peace signs with his hands.

If Apple’s AI tech isn’t for you, here’s how you can disable all or parts of it.

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rode the Dubs for over a year and a half but I am 47 and not racing anywhere now and want to ride in comfort 😂 so have gone back to factory rails.
This board is my daily driver, I go to work on it and anywhere else I need to be ❤️

Tom Homan denies British far-right commentator, who was deported one day after arrest, got preferential treatment

The White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, denied on Sunday that deporting the British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos just a day after being arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) amounted to preferential treatment.

Homan said it was his understanding that Yiannopoulos, 41, had overstayed what he believed to be a visitor visa, had not appeared at an immigration hearing and was issued a final order of removal on 22 July.

An estimated 237 people have been rescued but 18 are missing after accident off the coast of northern Cyprus

• Fatalities after ferry carrying nearly 270 capsizes off northern Cyprus

Republican Turkish party MP Sami Ozuslu told the Guardian late on Sunday that the death toll had risen. “Sadly we are now hearing that there are nine or ten dead,” he said.

The families of passengers were converging on hospitals in Nicosia, Kyrenia and elsewhere, desperate for news of loved ones, he added.

Meanwhile, Trump posts video of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America sign

Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.

Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.

It's already happened — at least on Google Maps. Google's online maps reflect name changes in official government sources, Google posted Saturday. So when the U.S. Geographic Names Information System formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America," Google also renamed it "Lake America" — for visitors from the U.S. "Those in Canada will continue to see 'Lake Ontario'," Google said. And people from every other country in the world... "will see both names." Though here's how it will be written... Lake Ontario (Lake America) "These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now." Meanwhile, NPR reports that Ontario's Premier posted a billboard reading "Lake Ontario — Now and Always" on Canada's side of the lake (repeating the message in French). And The Daily Beast reports Google move has also drawn some criticism online: "Hey you gave one of the Great Lakes the wrong name; pretty embarrassing mistake so you might want to fix that," one user wrote on X... MapQuest has said it will not be changing the name, and instead launched a new tool that allows users to rename it themselves to whatever they want.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Critics say the move, which will keep PC Harper’s killers in jail, leaves number of prison spaces ‘too close to the bone’

PC Andrew Harper’s killers will remain behind bars after a critical intervention by Andy Burnham, but the move has led to warnings that overcrowded prisons will be left “one major event away from disaster”.

Announcing a U-turn on the early release scheme after weeks of intense pressure, Burnham said he understood “how strongly people feel about this issue”.

Robert Guanco, 41, a pastor at Jesus Living Water church in Eastbourne, described as having ‘touched many lives’

A 41-year-old man who died after a large wooden sign fell at a Christian festival on Friday has been named as Robert Guanco, a pastor at a church in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

A tribute from his church on Sunday described him as a respected pastor who was a “loving husband” and “a devoted and caring father”.

Total of 804 confirmed dead and more than 3,000 missing amid threat of fresh inundation

• ‘Their whole village has disappeared’: frantic hunt for survivors in Kathmandu hospital

Rescuers in Nepal and Tibet have battled through leg-sucking mud amid the threat of fresh flooding to search for thousands of people still missing after a deadly wall of water swept through the Himalayan border zone, engulfing entire villages.

The latest updates on Sunday put the number of missing at 3,048, including hundreds of foreigners. There was a total of 804 confirmed deaths across Nepal and Tibet, and reports of some bodies swept downstream possibly as far as India.

• Messi nets four goals, adds assist in 7-1 Miami win

• Dejan Joveljić scores twice on Sounders debut

• Minnesota United score three times in four minutes

Inter Miami interim coach Guillermo Hoyos ran out of superlatives for Lionel Messi after the ⁠Argentine playmaker scored four goals in a Major League Soccer match for the first time in his career to ⁠inspire a 7-1 thrashing ⁠of CF ​Montreal on Saturday.

Messi’s four-goal haul and an assist came at a crucial time for Miami, helping them snap a ⁠five-game winless run across all competitions.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. John James join Margaret Brennan.

Getting rid of old computers and printers responsibly is free, accessible and considerably simpler than most people assume.

‘Alt-right’ agitator and former Trump backer deported from US is said also to be too extreme for Reform

As he arrives back in the UK after being deported from the US by the Trump administration, the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos may be wondering what lies ahead for him in his native country.

The “alt-right” agitator, 41, made his name in the US by promoting Donald Trump and associating with his allies before the 2016 election.

Local police said early Sunday a manhunt was underway and the motives were still unclear.

America's public education system has become "an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas," argues a NewYork Times reporter who's covered that tech industry influence for over 10 years. Big tech companies "advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students..." The reporter concludes that "Silicon Valley's efforts to capture the attention of education professionals and provide student training materials can also double as marketing or indoctrination." They enable some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to spin rosy technology stories for administrators, teachers and students, giving them a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks. Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children's environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children's biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked. The article excerpts the soon-to-be-released book " Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools," with the reporter adding more thoughts on LinkedIn: Every few years, Silicon Valley has urged American public schools to quickly adopt the latest technology or teach the latest tech subject: Big Data analytics; laptops for every child; algorithm-driven math and reading apps; compter programming; virtual reality. And each time the urgent arguments sounded remarkably similar: if schools just adopted the latest tech tool, or taught the latest tech subject, it would democratize learning for every child and equip students with valuable career skills. Despite good intentions, "today we know some of those classroom tech drives did not exactly pan out as advertised." Now some of the same companies that urged schools to provide laptops and coding lessons are employing similar arguments to urge schools to quickly adopt A.I. tools. I've spent years covering Chromebooks and student chatbot use. And I'm troubled by our collective amnesia around school tech. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut urged the House to approve the Senate-passed Russia sanctions bill amid a "moment of extreme urgency" in the war in Ukraine.

Trump’s threat comes after host described success record of candidates whom president had endorsed as ‘mixed’

Donald Trump ⁠on Sunday said NBC’s Kristen ‌Welker – host of Meet the Press – should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Welker, during a live segment for a local Washington DC affiliate, described the success record of political candidates whom the president had endorsed as “mixed”. The segment aired before Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.

Rajendra Dawadi ordered students to higher ground with moments to spare after receiving warnings from upstream

A headteacher in Nepal evacuated 900 children from a school moments before a deadly wall of water struck their town amid the devastating flash floods that have killed almost 800 people and left thousands missing.

Rajendra Dawadi decided to halt classes and order children to higher ground after receiving warnings about the scale of the flooding heading their way.

Total number of missing Britons between Tibet and Nepal at 48 as Beijing mobilises more than 2,100 rescue workers

Fifteen British nationals are reported to be missing in China as the search continues for survivors of the devastating flooding in Nepal and Tibet.

Nepali and Chinese authorities confirmed an updated death toll of at least 810 on Sunday. More than 3,000 people are believed missing after flash floods triggered by a massive glacier collapse in the Himalayas on Wednesday engulfed Gyirong port on the Nepal-China border.

Keenan Allen, a longtime NFL player who recently signed with the Indianapolis Colts, was arrested early Sunday for operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, police said.

The deal cements the United States’ long-term dominance over Venezuela, which has become a neo-colony since the U.S. military’s capture of then-President Nicolás Maduro in January.

Relatives of those missing have been given PowerPoint slideshows of recovered bodies in effort to speed up identification of the dead

The bodies continue to wash up. But the morgues have already run out of room.

Since the deadly floods coursed through the Himalayan valleys of Nepal and Tibet, the numbers of people killed have continued to rise. The bodies have surfaced in their hundreds and continue to be pulled from the thick, tar-like mud that engulfed everything after the flood waters receded. By Sunday, the death toll stood at 804 in Nepal and Tibet.

ScienceDaily reports: A microchip about the size of a grain of rice can generate a highly organized "rainbow" of light, a capability that could eventually support faster, higher-capacity 6G communications and extremely precise timing for quantum technologies. Physicists at Loughborough University, working with an international research team, demonstrated a system that produces a series of precisely spaced light frequencies. Those optical frequencies can then be converted into multiple high-frequency electromagnetic signals known as millimeter waves. Millimeter waves are attracting growing interest for future communications because they can provide considerably more bandwidth, giving networks more room to transmit data. A major obstacle, however, has been producing these signals with the precision and stability required for advanced applications... "They could ultimately contribute to faster, higher capacity 6G networks," [said Dr. Luke Peters, of Loughborough University's Emergent Photonics Research Centre], "but the potential goes far beyond communications. These frequencies could also be used in radar systems as well as spectroscopy and astronomical instruments, helping scientists study materials and make extremely precise measurements of the universe. "These applications are still some way off, and there are challenges to overcome before the technology can be used in real-world systems — but our latest work has tackled a major one..." A microcomb generates an extremely precise set of light frequencies arranged somewhat like the colors in a rainbow, although the light itself is invisible to the human eye. A specialized antenna can then convert those optical frequencies into millimeter waves. Earlier research demonstrated that microcombs could produce a single precise millimeter wave frequency. Generating many frequencies simultaneously could be far more useful because each could potentially serve as a separate channel for transmitting information at the same time. Achieving that, however, requires a microcomb with exceptional stability and signal quality. In a new Nature Communications paper, the Loughborough led researchers report a system capable of doing exactly that. Their system connects its chip-based microresonator to a much larger loop of optical fiber where laser light continuously travels through both parts of the system, according to the article. "The team is now investigating how the microcomb system could eventually move from a laboratory experiment into practical technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Outsourcing the industry to China cannot continue, but Europe knows it can no longer count on the US for a solution

The alarm sounded 16 years ago. In 2010, China blocked exports of key rare earths to Japan in a row over disputed islands in the East China Sea. The critical minerals are essential to everything from advanced weaponry and iPhones to electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, so the rest of the world took note. But it didn’t take much action. China still accounts for about 70% of rare-earth mining globally and 90% of separation and processing.

Then, last year, Beijing forced Donald Trump to back away from his trade war – not with its retaliatory tariffs, but the curbing of rare-earth exports. A scramble for new supplies began in earnest. The year-long trade truce is due to expire in November. The price of erbium, an element essential to communications infrastructure, has already jumped because of fears that export controls will soon be renewed.

Conservative hopeful says Sadiq Khan has ‘lost passion for the job’ and Andy Burnham is ‘very anti-London’

James Cleverly has pledged to run a “classically Conservative” campaign to become the mayor of London, insisting that his victory in the capital would be a stepping stone for Kemi Badenoch to become prime minister.

The former home and foreign secretary denied he had resigned from the shadow cabinet to run for mayor following a shift to the right under Badenoch’s leadership.

The movement against datacenters is uniting Americans because they perfectly illustrate how a few individuals hold all the power to control decisions that affect our lives

Bryce Gustafson has been knocking on doors in Indiana for more than a decade. The lead organizer with Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), a consumer and environmental organization, he usually encounters a mix of reactions when he’s out canvassing; whatever issue he’s talking about, there’s always at least a few people on the other side. But at a recent festival in the rural town of Monrovia, Indiana, he was struck by an unusual spirit of unity.

He was there about a proposed datacenter, a 550-acre (222-hectare) Google project in this small town of 1,600 people. “I had 50 people I talked to,” Gustafson told me. “Nobody wanted that datacenter in their community. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’”

Google announced that it had begun rolling out changes to how its maps display Lake Ontario's name, after President Trump signed an executive order changing it to "Lake America."

The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 30, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. John James, Republican of Michigan, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 30, 2026.

Over a 10-day period, the Trump administration sent more than 100 deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba and other nations to eight countries across Africa, according to internal government documents obtained by CBS News.

Mountain View, California — Google Maps has changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for users in the United States following President Donald Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to adopt the new name.

Google said the change reflects an update to the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, the federal database it uses for official place names. Users in Canada will continue to see “Lake Ontario,” while users in other countries will generally see both names.

Trump ordered the renaming as tensions with Canada intensified over tariffs and trade. The move applies to U.S. federal usage and does not require Canada or state governments to recognize the new designation.

Several Canadian officials criticized the change, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford. U.S. governors from Great Lakes states have also pushed back, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul saying her state would continue using Lake Ontario.

Google followed a similar approach after Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” showing different labels depending on a user’s location.

The company said its longstanding policy is to update names after they appear in official government geographic databases. The change therefore reflects federal naming policy rather than an independent decision by Google about what the lake should be called.

Sources

• Reuters – MBFC Rating

The post Google Maps Adopts ‘Lake America’ Name for U.S. Users appeared first on News Facts Network.

Nathan Cofnas told by Ghent University to work remotely as US ambassador claims credit for lifting of suspension

Prof Jason Arday’s accuser Nathan Cofnas has been barred from teaching on Ghent University campus for three months but has been allowed to continue his research position.

Cofnas, an American academic, was suspended from his postdoctoral research position at the Belgian institution earlier this month pending a “preliminary investigation” launched after Arday’s death.

Citrix's Desktop as a Service (DaaS) product includes a lightweight, hardened second operating system called UniconOS (once called "eLux") to offer Windows customers a write-protected file system Citrix says is secure against computer viruses and other malware. Nerds.xyz reports: According to the company, the environment remains isolated from the Windows filesystem and uses Secure Boot protections covering the shim, bootloader, kernel, and initial RAM filesystem. That separation matters when ransomware encrypts Windows or a faulty update leaves the operating system trapped in a boot loop. Instead of repairing Windows immediately, an employee can boot into UniconOS and use Citrix DaaS to access virtual applications and desktops. Citrix SecurAccess with Chrome Enterprise provides access to internal web applications under the organization's existing security policies. In other words, UniconOS does not actually fix the damaged Windows installation. It gives employees another route to their applications while the IT department investigates or repairs Windows... [T]he installer shrinks the Windows volume, creates a new partition, copies UniconOS onto it, and registers the necessary boot entries. Windows remains the default operating system during ordinary use, although administrators can configure boot delays and fallback behavior... The approach could prove useful following a widespread ransomware attack or another defective Windows update resembling the CrowdStrike incident of 2024. Recovery would happen independently on every compatible endpoint instead of requiring IT employees to physically handle thousands of computers. Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A ferry carrying nearly 270 passengers and crew capsized off the coast of northern Cyprus.

Authorities say 237 people rescued and search under way for those who remain unaccounted for

At least eight people have died and 18 people are missing after a ferry carrying nearly 270 passengers and crew capsized off the coast of Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, local authorities said.

The territory’s prime minister, Ünal Üstel, told the state-run TRT news channel on Sunday that 237 people had been rescued. A search was under way for those who remained unaccounted for.

Check out the highlights of the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.

Deal that will reportedly see US take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil has provoked outrage in her country

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has defended her government’s highly controversial energy deal with Donald Trump, insisting the South American country will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.

Rodríguez, who assumed power in January after Trump ordered the abduction of the president, Nicolás Maduro, took to the airwaves on Saturday to push back against criticism of what the US president has called “the biggest oil deal in world history”.

Manhunt under way after Italian dies from her injuries in the town of Aarau in the early hours of Sunday

A manhunt is under way in Switzerland after a 22-year-old woman was killed ⁠and five people were injured, ⁠some seriously, in a ​shooting at a rave in the northern town of Aarau, local police have said.

In the attack in the early hours of Sunday at a techno party at a covered horse-racing track, an Italian woman died from her injuries at the scene, authorities said. All those caught up in the shooting were residents of Switzerland and in their 20s.

AI demand is eating memory supplies, so Google is cracking down on Android memory hogs.

Well-funded no camp prevails, winning 52.8% of votes and gaining plaudits from Eurosceptic figures across Europe

• Analysis: Definitely no or maybe yes – what tipped the Icelandic referendum

Voters in Iceland have ⁠rejected ⁠a government proposal ​to reopen ⁠accession talks with ⁠the ​EU after a closely fought referendum campaign that divided the country against a backdrop of global volatility.

After a long and anxious night for those on both sides of the debate, the no camp ended up with 52.8% of votes on Sunday morning and the yes camp with 47.2%. Voter turnout was high at 82.5%.

New company reportedly quickly fell behind with promised repayments to administrator

A recruitment executive who was allowed to buy back the assets of his bust company in instalments, despite it accumulating almost £3m of debt, has placed his new business into liquidation after falling behind with promised payments to the administrator.

The news is the latest event to raise questions about the practice of “phoenixism”, accounting’s controversial art of liquidating companies to allow directors to return with a new entity, free of debts.

A team of researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale engineered yeast to create cookies that were 3D printed out of plastic waste, reports Futurism: The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat. When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape. The researchers chose to print their cookies as the Greek letter Â, creating what they call "ÂBites" — or micro bites. They haven't actually eaten one of their ÂBites yet, as they wait for university approval... "I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," Lahiru Jayakody, a microbiologist at SIU who led the research, told NewScientist. "And it will taste good, too. We've not tasted it, but it smells good — that's for sure — like a real cookie...." The researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to reprogram yeast strains to eat polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a widely used form of plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, food packaging, and clothes, which is rich with carbon. Before the yeast can start feasting, the PET plastics are subjected to a process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution to break them down into smaller bits that the microbes can digest. The purported advantage of this approach is that it's environmentally friendly, using only heat, water, and oxygen. The yeast feasts on these stripped-down plastic bits, turning them into a slurry of proteins, fats, and acids that're combined with fiber, starch, and sweetener to make them more palatable. One of the yeast strains in particular was able to turn plant biomass into tasty vanilla flavorings... [R]ight now, it's an expensive process, costing around $60 to produce a kilogram of cookies, The Guardian reported. And some experts say it's wishful thinking to believe we can 3D-print, and then eat, ourselves out of these global problems with 3D-printed, delectable treats. "We produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste. You're not going to turn it all into cookies," Jason Hallett at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "So it's not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis. There's no way you could do this commercially. We're not gonna be eating plastic cookies." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what happens within muscle to create knots, also known as myofascial trigger points. But they do know some ways you can avoid or alleviate them.

"Sunday Morning" looks back at the astonishing career of the queen of country music, whose talent, warmth, wit, and philanthropy made her a genuine, once-in-a-generation luminary.

State and city lawmakers push to boost regulations after two outbreaks of the disease over the last two summers

New York lawmakers are now trying to better protect residents from the deadly legionnaires’ disease by increasing regulations and inspections of cooling towers after two outbreaks of the infection over the last two summers and a raft of new lawsuits.

Legionnaires’ disease is a serious pneumonia caused by a bacterium called legionella. It often comes from large air-conditioning systems, like those used in hotels, hospitals and high-rise buildings, because the cooling towers contain water to remove heat. If not well maintained, the liquid can foster the bacteria, which can then be swept into fans and circulated through the air.

Small business owners have watched large companies fumble – and sometimes succeed – with AI, and then use what works

One thing I’ve learned about corporate America is that what it succeeds at ultimately trickles down to benefit small businesses. Bleeding-edge technologies such as the internet, mobile transactions and the cloud were first perfected by large organizations – government and corporations – and now they’re available to the masses at a much lower cost and with better reliability.

The good news is that it’s also the same for what they fail at.

Democratic Senate nominee is eager to push past series of controversies involving allegations of antisemitism

Michigan’s Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed apologized to the state’s Jewish Democratic caucus on Saturday for comments he made after an attack on a synagogue in March, which he tied to Israel’s actions in the Middle East.

“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” El-Sayed told reporters after he addressed the caucus at a party convention in Lansing. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”

With a net worth of $11.1 billion, Tilman Fertitta, a great-grandson of Sicilian immigrants, is one of the wealthiest people ever to be a U.S. ambassador.

US republicans are tarnishing their plant-eating opponents at every opportunity. Yet vegans are perfectly suited to hold power – let me count the ways

Cool news, fellow soy boys and girls – we’ve been promoted from feeble, tofu-eating wokerati to dangerous radicals unfit for public office. Politico reports that US Republicans have started throwing “vegan” around as a tactic to tarnish their political opponents. “He’s a vegan,” Trump warned of Democratic Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico in May, while Talarico’s opponent, state attorney-general Ken Paxton, is trying to get the nickname “Tofu Talarico” to stick. Paxton also called him “a vegan who thinks God is non-binary”, which I find hilarious as a political put-down – give the man a Netflix special. (Sidenote: I investigated, and according to the Catholic catechism, God is “neither man nor woman”.)

Republicans have also been digging up past pro-plant-based statements from Colorado congressional candidate Manny Rutinel: a campaign committee press secretary described him on X as “a far-left vegan activist who wants to end animal agriculture”, posting an old pic of Rutinel bare-chested and wearing a Peta anti-meat banner. Other Dems have also been accused of, erm, liking animals and eating plants: Arizona congressional candidate Amish Shah has been attacked for his “wacky liberal agenda pushing vegan policies” and Lindsay James in Iowa drew heat for merely supporting the idea of “meatless May”.

Widely used chemical TBBPA may present a danger to US public, and especially children, independent research finds

The Environmental Protection Agency is manipulating safety data around a highly toxic flame retardant deployed across the US economy, public health advocates allege.

The chemical, TBBPA, has been found in dust in US homes and in consumer goods at combined levels that independent research has found may present a danger to the public, and especially small children.

Campaigners welcome plan to bring IPP sentences to a close but say the move is long overdue

Campaigners have hailed Andy Burnham’s pledge to bring an end to indefinite jail terms as “a day that thousands of families have spent years fighting for”.

The prime minister has said he will “end the injustice” of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences during this parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The latest iOS update includes a patch for an iCloud Private Relay issue.

The allocated payment will go to your PlayStation Network wallet after the final approval hearing in mid-October.

Plain chicken breast gets repetitive fast. These 13 dinners bring in creamy sauces, crisp coatings, noodles, curries, slow cooking, and bold skillet flavors for a restaurant-style change at home.The post 13 chicken breast dinners that read like a restaurant menu…

The Canadian province's premier, Doug Ford, installed a billboard-sized sign on the lake's shoreline after the US president signed an executive order on Thursday directing US federal agencies to change the lake's name on US maps, documents and databases to 'Lake America'. Ford told reporters that the lake's name, which is more than 400 years old, would remain unchanged. Trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed last week, with each side ‌blaming the ⁠other for derailing three days of intensive negotiations

• Trump signs executive order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America

Searching for exoplanets and clues on planet formation, the Roman telescope begins million-mile journey from Florida launchpad

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

The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope survived two rounds of proposed White House budget cuts, and began a million-mile journey into deep space from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday morning. .

Associated Press journalists on the Indonesian island of Batam, across the Singapore Strait, spotted the massive vessel as it transited waters near Singapore just after 1 a.m. local time.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope​ launched shortly after daybreak from Kennedy Space Center and blazed toward an observation point 1 million miles away.

A recent classified assessment advised that prolonged large-scale operations in the Middle East risk weakening U.S. capabilities elsewhere.

This no-frills pizza oven gets the basics right and is more than good enough for most people

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Ooni Koda 2 review

The market for pizza ovens tends to be dominated by a handful of specialist brands, so it can feel like a gamble to buy from a lesser-known manufacturer or a retailer that offers a wider range of goods.

The ProCook outdoor pizza oven is no gamble, though. It’s every inch a capable, compact and versatile pizza oven, despite being just one product in an offering that includes pretty much everything from storage jars to squeegees.

Record inundations wrecked homes and took seven lives but Trump has not approved emergency aid and the state has cut funds for environmental agencies

It’s been 10 days since the floodwater receded from Cambridge City’s main street and yet signs of disaster are all around.

Abandoned cars, toilets and bathtubs are strewn across parks and side streets on a recent visit to the city. Garages have been lifted from their foundations and moved by the rushing water. Dumpsters up and down the street are overflowing with people’s belongings, with red paint sprayed on homes indicating which houses have been cleared by water rescue teams.

Healthy eating gets easier when dinner still has plenty of flavor and substance. These 15 Mediterranean dinners cover grilled meats, seafood, vegetable-heavy skillets, pasta, feta, lemon, and fresh herbs.The post 15 Mediterranean dinners that made eating healthy feel like cheating…

SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket, with the launch window opening at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). NASA will carry the launch live on YouTube. CNN offers this mission overview from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "Roman will investigate dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself, and accelerate the future of discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system." In fact, "NASA anticipates that Roman will image more than 50 times as much of the sky in the next five years as Hubble covered in three decades," reports USA Today, noting that "every single image it beams back to Earth will contain the equivalent of 100 pictures Hubble would capture." The barrel-shaped Roman telescope is due to set up operations nearly 1 million miles from Earth and begin scouring previously unobservable areas of the cosmos... NASA will make all of Roman's data available for anyone to peruse, meaning astronomers from all over the world will have the opportunity to make use of the observatory for advanced research, NASA says... Spanning 42 feet long and more than 14 feet wide, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is outfitted with two primary instruments Its 300-megapixel near-infrared camera is built to look across the universe and study the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter, reports The Conversation. But it's also carrying a coronagraph instrument built to dramatically reduce the glare from distant stars "that will test the technology for future missions that plan to detect Earth-like planets around other stars." The mission's generating some excitement. "Nearly three decades after dark energy's discovery, astronomers are letting themselves hope that a breakthrough is almost at hand," writes Scientific American, adding that cosmologists "are increasingly questioning the validity of their vaunted standard model, although no one can decide exactly what comes next." Roman will chase down three different ways of detecting dark energy, seeking to more precisely define what its effects on the universe are and whether they're changing over time. The first one involves surveying the skies for a special variety of supernova that's so predictable that scientists can use it as a beacon for calculating what a host galaxy's distance is and how fast it's moving away from us — the same technique that first betrayed dark energy back in the 1990s. The second entails mapping large numbers of galaxies to discern huge, faint bubbles in the cosmos that represent the fossilized signatures of sound waves that froze out of the universe's primordial plasma as it expanded and cooled. The sizes of those bubbles scale with the size and growth of the very early universe, offering a powerful probe for studying cosmic change over time. The third tracer uses a technique called microlensing, which reveals clumps of dark matter via their warping of background starlight, to fill in scientists' still incomplete reckoning of matter's cosmic distribution. The Houston Chronicle reports that the telescope will also study rogue planets, isolated black holes, starquakes and planet-forming disks around nearby stars. "Almost regardless of what your scientific interest is, Roman is probably already planning to take observations," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA, said during a July news conference." NBC News reports that after the Roman telescope launches, "it's set to spend more than three months journeying to its final destination, located roughly 1 million miles from Earth." Three primary surveys are planned over the course of the Roman telescope's mission. During the largest one, which will last over a year, the telescope will peer through the Milky Way's dense, star-packed center, known as the galactic bulge, building a vast catalog of all the astronomical objects it observes. The second and third surveys will focus on dark matter and dark energy. Axios notes that Roman's primary mirror "is about the same size as that of Hubble's, but at 80% less weight — reflecting huge tech advancements since Hubble was built in the 1970s." And NPR reports NASA began planning the $4.3 billion telescope 15 years ago to search for supernovas to help explore dark energy — when "a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites." "The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," [remembers cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University], "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'" NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.... Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster. "That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Poor weather and challenging terrain have hampered aerial rescue operations in Nepal and Tibet.

Moscow has shifted to targeting shopping centers and food distribution sites, and markets in Kyiv and other cities are struggling to keep their shelves stocked.

City firms tapped for case studies to try to convince global watchdog that London has cleaned up its act

The government is asking bankers and lawyers to provide feelgood stories about how they blocked dirty money from entering the UK, as ministers try to prove the UK’s money-laundering controls are working.

The Treasury’s call for evidence is meant to illustrate that the UK has upped its game when it comes to preventing financial crime, particularly since its last dismal assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) global crime watchdog in 2018, which fuelled allegations that London had become a hub for “dirty money”.

More than 100 undercover officers spied on tens of thousands of mainly leftwing activists over decades

Prosecutors are examining whether to bring criminal charges against 12 former police officers who were involved in spying on political groups.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is examining a file of evidence that the officers may have committed wrongdoing while working in controversial undercover operations.

As Americans face an affordability crisis and war with Iran, the president is focused on … changing the names of things

Is it a key policy move which will “recognize the extraordinary contributions of the American people”? Or “real foolishness”?

Whatever the impact of Donald Trump unusual decision to retitle Lake Ontario as Lake America, days after Canada’s prime minister refused to be cowed by Trump’s punitive tariffs, it has certainly divided opinion – but perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Some young people are teaching in countries like South Korea as education funding is gutted and recent grads face a tough job market in their own countries

A year ago, Arianna Marie, 25, was struggling to control the students in her Florida elementary school classroom.

She was living with her parents to save on rent and quickly feeling her passion for teaching dry up, even though it was her first job since graduation.

The move sends the right signal. While we’re at it, can we ban using ringtones and scooting on the sidewalk?

Imagine driving in Italy, with its narrow, cobblestone streets and scooter enthusiasts. I find it hard enough to drive in Los Angeles, a city designed specifically with the automobile in mind. I’d probably squash a pedestrian or two trying to navigate Italian roads.

The modern world is just too hectic for the ancient streets of Europe, so Italy is considering doing the only sensible thing it can: outlawing texting in crosswalks. The Italian government’s updated draft of its highway code proposes fines of €75 or more for anyone caught sending a DM, updating their LinkedIn, finishing Wordle on the fifth guess, or anything else phone-related that might make them miss an oncoming metal projectile. I’m sure most people will risk the slap on the wrist to get that message off, but it at least sends a signal to the Italian people that paying attention to traffic is actually kind of important.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Deal agreed between Avanti West Coast and Aslef is first to be approved by Burnham government

Train drivers have secured a significant pay rise after the threat of strike action was floated on busy routes across the UK, including on the busy London-Manchester line.

The deal, which was agreed on Saturday between Avanti West Coast and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (Aslef) union, is the first to be approved by Andy Burnham in his premiership.

Inside the US state department, critics are still attacking a shuttered office established to counter foreign propaganda. Now, some of its work is also being resumed

A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.

Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.

Angie Nixon won one of the biggest upsets in US midterm primaries – and if elected, the Democrat would be the first African American senator in Florida history

The Democratic establishment had the money, the machinery and the candidate with national name recognition. Angie Nixon had a bookshop called Café Resistance and a grassroots campaign for the Senate. On primary election night in Florida, Nixon won in arguably the biggest upset of the primary season. But at least one person was not shocked: Angie Nixon herself. “We weren’t surprised,” the 42-year-old reflects after overcoming a vast fundraising disadvantage to defeat Alex Vindman, a combat veteran who testified against Donald Trump during his first impeachment. “We actually knew we were going to win; we just didn’t know that we were going to win by that much. We put in the work and so super excited about the outcome. It shows that good old-fashioned grassroots organising will beat big money each and every day.”

Nixon won 56.1% of the vote to Vindman’s 43.9%. The result stirred tensions within the Democratic party in a year defined by the struggle between moderates and economic populists. In Florida – a state that has trended increasingly Republican in recent years and is now Trump’s home state – Democrats have now nominated a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who speaks openly about class war.

Studies show a single well-placed security device makes a world of difference when it comes to deterring burglars.

Chloe Shapiro is one of a dozen former service members identified by The Washington Post who have waited months for full payments.

A repairman who showed his love through service. A grandmother who walked while balancing a book on her head. Intimate obituaries, in 150 words or less.

The country is already part of the European Economic Area and the Schengen Area, which allows frictionless movement of people, goods, capital and services.

The no campaign was well-funded and accused of scaremongering, but the wording of the question may also have made a difference

It was always going to be a close contest. But on the night, the figures showed just how divided Iceland was on the issue of whether or not to restart negotiations with the European Union.

After a nail-biting overnight count, the well-funded no campaign rejoiced on Sunday morning as the broadcaster RUV declared it the winner with about 52.8% of the vote. Given the size of Iceland’s population – barely 400,000 – the margins were tiny.

Breakdown recovery group’s private equity owners reportedly in talks with various suitors to sell company

The German-based financial services company ⁠Allianz is considering a £5bn takeover swoop for AA, ⁠the breakdown ⁠recovery ​group, Sky News has reported.

Allianz was ‌one of a small number of parties holding talks with advisers to AA about a deal, Sky News said, adding that ‌the private equity outfit EQT was another bidder.

Exclusive: Research says sector is fixated with young talent, with most women experiencing unconscious bias or sexism

Women working in the arts believe they do not have equal opportunities for roles, especially as they get older, according to a report saying that the industry is fixated with “young and emerging” talent.

Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. More than two-thirds (69%) felt that age negatively affected their career success – a figure that rose to 100% among those working in artistic rather than managerial roles.

A low fertility rate and a rapidly aging population have swelled the number of lonely seniors. Young companion workers and start-ups are stepping in to help.

The estate of Robert Wone says former defendants in a wrongful-death suit have failed to make agreed payments that help fund a scholarship in his name.

BMW is about to release their most screen-dependent vehicles ever, reports Car and Driver: Step into the BMW iX3, and you'll notice something is missing: real buttons. The climate controls are fettered to the center screen, as is nearly every other feature, save for a handful located in the center console — at least the window switches are still on the doors... But don't blame a desire for larger profit margins; BMW's move away from physical switchgear and toward touchscreen dependence is the fault of younger buyers, according to one executive. In an interview with CarExpert, Vikram Pawah, the CEO of BMW Group Australia, said that young buyers prefer the newer controls... According to the executive, younger customers are less patient with their technology. "They want things done quickly, and they're multitasking," Pawah said. "And we have to keep that in mind. That's how customers are evolving. They are multitasking...." Tesla has always forced functions to its center screen; newer players such as Rivian do the same. And in recent years, established brands like Mazda and Mercedes-Benz have moved more and more functions to touchscreens. BMW's iX3 also includes a new safety feature — a side-radar that detects if a cyclist or vehicle is approaching, and delays the release of the electronic door lock "until the danger passes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solomon Islands prime minister cancels his appearance, along with leaders from Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa

Several leaders have pulled out of a the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Palau at the eleventh hour.

The Solomon Islands prime minister, Matthew Wale, has cancelled his appearance after a no-confidence motion was lodged against him at home by the Solomon Islands home affairs minister, Manasseh Maelanga.

Protester Tess Asplund on the photo that made headlines, and why she sees it as a sign of the change in Sweden today

The striking photograph showed a lone Black woman, her fist raised, standing in the path of hundreds of uniformed neo-Nazis on parade in 2016, and it made headlines across the globe.

At the time, it was held up as a symbol of the resistance to the far right. But 10 years on, as Sweden gears up for elections in which the far right is expected to emerge as the second most-voted-for party, the woman in the photo sees it as a sign of the bewildering change that has gripped the Scandinavian country.

As with its approach to Hormuz, the US has mistaken applying pressure for an actual strategy. But Tehran has chips of its own to play

Donald Trump has found a new way to promise victory over Iran. After months of war have failed to force Iran’s capitulation or collapse, his administration has unveiled what the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, calls Operation Economic Outcast: an effort to cut it off from what remains of the global economy and threaten foreign governments, banks and companies with sanctions if they continue doing business with Tehran.

There is no question that Iran is vulnerable. Its economy has been battered by years of sanctions, war and a months-long US naval blockade. Iranian officials acknowledge that oil exports and access to foreign currency have been severely constrained. Ordinary Iranians are already enduring high inflation, currency depreciation and worsening living standards. Further economic strangulation will inflict significant additional hardship.

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues

Missing woman’s partner and daughters fundraise to join search in one of the hardest-hit areas of Nepal

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Clair Spry says her sister would hate the attention. She would want it focused on the Nepali people, who have been displaced or are in need of aid. She would want it to be on the impact of the climate crisis, especially on the world’s most economically vulnerable populations.

“Her focus right now would not be on her; it would be on the families,” Spry said. “So many people, the Nepalese people, that have been horribly displaced and traumatised. She would want the attention on them and how we are going to help them.

After Kevin Davis was found dying at the foot of the stairs in his Indiana home, police initially believed it was an accident. They did not search the room where a pit bull mix was secured.

The post Minnesota Supreme Court Rejects Mike Lindell’s Demand for Full Recount appeared first on News Facts Network.

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More traumatised civilians are arriving every day at ‘shockingly overcrowded’ El Obeid and camps on its outskirts

Humanitarian conditions in the Sudanese city of El Obeid and two camps on its outskirts are dire and deteriorating, according to people on the ground, as civilians displaced by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia continue to pour in from the surrounding countryside.

The UN says more than 15,000 families have arrived since mid-July, joining more than 200,000 people who arrived in the first half of the year, according to government figures cited by Save the Children.

Saga surrounding purchase for outspoken rightwing regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso refuses to go away

The outspoken rightwing leader of the Madrid region is under growing pressure to explain why her government spent €6.3m (£5.4m) on a residential penthouse purportedly to serve as a temporary workspace while her offices were being renovated.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a prominent member of Spain’s opposition conservative People’s party (PP), has been the president of the Madrid region since 2019.

Reform UK denies donor and crypto-billionaire’s global interests in arms and military could present a conflict of interest over its defence spending policy

As he struggles with questions about the millions he has received from the billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage has made no secret of his enthusiastic support for the industry that made part of his benefactor’s fortune – cryptocurrency. The Reform UK leader even urged the governor of the Bank of England to drop a crypto policy that may be costly for Harborne.

But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.

Google's AI assistant Gemini crawls your Google apps for "more personalized suggestions," in a feature they call Personal Intelligence. Now when given permission, an Android/iOS app called Dreambeans "uses Personal Intelligence to connect information from Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube and Search History, to curate a finite collection of daily stories designed to spark new ideas." In a slick new video Google says the app will "surface what matters to you." The blog 9to5Google notes that after previously requiring a subscription, Dreambeans "is now available for free Google Accounts in the US to test, calling it "very much like a hyper-personalized Google Now or Discover feed." Instead of using stock imagery, each Dreambeans story is accompanied by Nano Banana 2-generated artwork that uses an illustrated style. For example, if Dreambeans recommends a hike, you might see yourself and a group of friends at that location... There's also an "Ask anything" chat experience to get more information. You can leave feedback by tapping the heart or downvoting, while the chat interface allows you to provide more details. "Tune your feed" lets you tell Dreambeans what you "want more stories about" and what it should never show. Or, as TechCrunch senior writer Lucas Ropek puts it, you get a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" that "will turn your life into a cartoon" [Gozde Oznur, the product lead behind the new app, told TechCrunch the app] has also been built as a doomscrolling antidote, in that it only provides users with a limited number of stories per day — typically 10 to 14. The idea is to get a few inspirational ideas and then go out and live your life, she said. A lot of companies are currently trying to court the user that is sick of phone addiction. I recently reviewed a startup, Bond, which also uses AI to auto-generate lifestyle suggestions for the user. What about privacy protections? According to Oznur, they are pretty solid. The only person with access to the app's stories is the user, she said. Users can also delete their data whenever they want, and can choose which Google services they want to connect to the tool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One Southern California city is using a $17,000 drone that utilizes lasers and thermal imaging to pinpoint animal heat signatures over large areas.

Jukebox's free remove background tool now includes built-in 4x HD image upscaling, shown here on a fashion photo cutout. Users can remove the background from any photo in one click, upscale the image to 4x HD, and download a full-resolution…

This week Debian voted on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions. The winning proposal? "Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools" in its projects, documentation, and packaging... Generative AI "is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already expected of Debian contributors." "The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian." "We recognize that such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors when used responsibly, allowing volunteers to spend more of their limited time on work that requires technical expertise, judgment, review, and collaboration. The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian. Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian's established development practices. We enourage our contributors to disclose whether a contribution was made with AI assitance, but do not require them to do so. Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright... The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works. Instead, Debian continues to rely on the judgment and responsibility of its individual contributors. Project members are expected to exercise appropriate care when using generative AI tools, to consider the provenance and licensing implications of material they contribute, and to avoid introducing content whose legal status they cannot reasonably justify. Existing Debian policies governing licensing, copyright, software freedom, and the acceptance of contributions continue to apply irrespective of the tools used to produce those contributions. It also cautions contributors to keep keys, credentials, and embargoed security reports from leaking to third-party AI services. But discussion continues on Debian's mailing list. "I regret the loss of contributors," wrote the author of the winning proposition (while acknowledging it would have happened with either option winning). "It is just too early to take a final decision on the matter. Let's revisit this in two years or so, and let this mess of a GR be a warning for our future selves." Other comments from the mailing list: "On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web... [W]e have a lot of work ahead of us to act as a community and understand how we can continue to accommodate the very large minority that would have preferred to ban or discourage AI. "I also think that our next discussion should distinguish between locally running LLMs and cloud LLMs. The way things are going, locally running LLMs will be an alternative, and then you can much better control what was the training data and the Freeness of the thing." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Robbat2 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• New flood fears and a race to free group trapped in tunnel

Poor weather temporarily hampered aerial rescue operations in Nepal on Saturday as the search for thousands of missing people in areas devastated by catastrophic flash floods along the border with China continued.

The combined toll in Nepal and Tibet rose to 691 dead and more than 3,000 people missing after China’s latest update on Sunday. Chinese authorities reported 16 deaths and 546 missing, while Nepal’s disaster agency said late Saturday that the death toll had climbed to 675 with 2,498 people missing.

The price of losing yourself doesn’t become apparent until midlife, when the chaos of everything you’ve jammed into your capillaries, fibres, bodily cracks and crevices over time comes out to play like a line of processionary caterpillars emerging from the canopy of darkened oak trees.

If you’ve managed to plant your love somewhere along the way, sure, it might have felt good during those first walks, those first professions of love and affection, the love letters and birthday letters and rapid-fire texts. But when it all starts to fall apart, you realize that all you did was take your very last lifeline and recklessly plug it into another human being: a flawed, paper human who is, once you get past the model exterior, really no more impressive than yourself.

Not even the crescendo-laden love of a thousand ages, the soaring gulls of seduction and pedestalizing, can survive the midlife loss of yourself. Suddenly, all that you knew and loved reveals itself to be flimsy as a vintage windmill. A proper fool, you back away into an available corner with an aging laptop and a filthy compass, desperate for some kind of way forward.

Reminders abound that you are not a teenager anymore. You’re not 20-something, when you could cut your hair short and still look cute. When they used to swoon and hype you up all through every corner of the Big Bop and Reverb, those dirty downtown Toronto watering holes that we just accepted as places to go.

“What is this?” a friend said in the ’90s, of the gathering, tingling crowd of kids around me and my music in those places.

For it wasn’t fandom. It was something else. Something a little untrustworthy.

But okay. I can tell you what it was.

It was an extension of the monkey show that got rolled out in our family’s living room when I was a child. “Come and perform for company!” I’d be told, and, not aware there was a choice in the matter, I’d come down and knock out some song on the upright piano. Everyone would clap, rum and Cokes in hand, and I’d get the hell out of there, up to my room, back to gaze upon Michael J. Fox’s face in a teen magazine, or Stephen Pearcy’s leather pants which shone majestically from a poster on my wall.

Yes, they shone.

The monkey show should have ground to a halt. But instead, it turned into a magic carpet. I took a passion for songwriting a little too far, and it landed me on the inside walls of Worldwide Plaza in New York City. My manager, a jovial chap whose musicologist skills outweighed his business prowess, was unable to talk to presidents but very good at charming the college reps. This, unfortunately, couldn’t help him see me through an acquisition where a company that made a drink called Jamaican Me Happy acquired my record label’s parent company, PolyGram, in a $10.3 billion deal, firing everyone and dropping all the artists.

So that’s when the breakdown happened. It was exacerbated by going to L.A. and falling in love with a bald painter of large oil paintings from London, Ontario. Even in the wilds of California, I could not at least find an American to marry.

Then two planes hit the World Trade Center, and, clinging to one another, bald painter of large oil paintings and I retreated back to Canada.

As I crossed the border from Michigan into Ontario, radio reports of pending war and the political implications of 9/11 turned to soft voices talking about houseplants and the latest healthy recipes.

Thank you, CBC Radio.

My new normal was a sort of la-la land. I might as well have been living north of Dryden in a shack.

I carried on making music, writing songs, touring, but deep inside, my belief in all of my teenage dreams, the inflated post-Lilith Fair heyday of my thirties, was just a layer of paint, and another layer of paint, and some sealant, and some papier-mâché, and some goddamn insulation caked on a tiny seed, a pure moment, where beats of the ’80s, orchestral strings, galactic production met my broken young-girl heart.

Those beats and that heart: we were supposed to warrior through this world together.

But oh, how sensitive I was.

Too sensitive.

A lie here, a rationalization here. Five different managers there, and then came parenthood.

The most magical distraction of all.

I waited until the very, very last minute to put a human in my uterus. Let’s do this, geriatric pregnancy. Let’s have kids before it’s too late and play house and be happy.

That imploded eventually, too.

My hungry heart, which had darted all over the world looking for a home, got played. You see, the joke was on me when the father of my kids finally fed his hungry heart, and gone he was, quicker than a bright lightning bolt.

So then, Glastonbury 2000 came out, the album commemorating the concert. David sang to me from the dead in Alexander McQueen. Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie, came out. Whatever you think about it, fine, but anything that put Freddie back in the spotlight was enough to get me thinking about the miracle that is breath, voice, salvation.

The seed, that little seed, the pure joy. I realized it was still there underneath everything. It was still fighting so hard to push through all of the layers I piled on top of it.

I stopped drinking.

My friend Kim Mitchell said, just wait till week three. You’ll hear everything perfectly. You’ll hear a pin drop.

I didn’t hear no pin.

But I could feel, in my loneliness, my commitment to myself, the smashing and drowning of bottles of Irish whiskey, the seed, now a sprout, still pushing through.

I think I might have seen the tip of green, for a moment, and imagined a garden.

And then, I plugged in.

Everything, every last ounce of hope, joy, selfishness, music, fear, death, poetry, bass notes, stabbing violins, sweeping piano glissandos, body sweat, stretched-out breath, faith, Holy God—I plugged it into: him.

…

And you can’t just unplug, I realized. Not when you’ve done it like I did it.

And that is why now, I struggle to stand.

Why I’ve lost my will. My identity. My playful big choruses. My taffeta skirt.

…

The pals want me to come out and see Toto in the rain tomorrow. But I saw Toto last year, with him, my electric love. We saw them not in the rain. I already heard Lukather’s sobriety jokes. I already saw Dennis Atlas swing his hair around and outsing everyone.

I take a pass.

So now the only things that are taking my shortness of breath and weaving it into a way to see that precious little promise of a garden… are:

Making songs for the girls I’m coaching in the spare room at the car dealership in Stonetown. I’m taking their lyrics and recording them into my computer. It truly gives me joy.

I buy a gift for my vocal student, Lily, who is going to school in Bristol, and it’s a bracelet by Hen & Bear with stars. I remind her she is so many stars. I remind her to breathe and that she always makes it through.

I wait for Kara to come back from holiday because that means I should have done something on my record.

I see Darlene become a record producer overnight with her laptop and interface and MIDI dreams.

I hear Kelly’s whole life in all of her songs.

I hear Julie sing freely, finally.

And I re-read what I write here.

I see the sprout again and maybe tomorrow, drawing from the river that is female friendship, creativity, a sunrise over the gravel road that hugs the Ontario farmland around me, I’ll water it.

And finally make sure I clear the way for it to break through.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has apologized to the state's Jewish Democratic Caucus.

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

White House staff advise the president, manage daily operations, and coordinate communication with Congress, agencies, media, and the public.

Mandatory spending is set by law, not annual budgets. Congress must change the law to alter funding, benefits, or eligibility.

A ballot initiative lets voters propose state laws or constitutional amendments through petitions, then approve or reject them at the ballot box.

Discretionary spending funds federal agency operations and programs, with Congress setting funding levels each year through appropriations.

A PAC raises and spends money to support or oppose federal candidates and must register with the FEC after certain thresholds.

A referendum lets voters approve, reject, or repeal laws through state or local elections, giving the public a direct vote.

The presidential cabinet advises the president and includes heads of 15 executive departments, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

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

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

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

• Junior taken to hospital after first-quarter emergency

• Division II season opener suspended and later canceled

• School plans vigil for Barnett and his family

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

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

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

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

• Elena Rybakina has eyes on No 1 world ranking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Dolly Parton Airport Tribute Clashes With Tennessee’s LGBTQ Policies appeared first on News Facts Network.

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

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

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

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

Independent hockey company combines proprietary equipment development with a growing commitment to children, families and the hockey community

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

• The Washington Post – MBFC Rating

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the iPhone 18 lineup to the Apple Watch 12 and new AirPods, this is everything Apple could release in its anticipated September event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image generated via ChatGPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

• Scripps News – MBFC Rating

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

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

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