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Watching England against France – though, of course, defensive intensity was lower – it was still noticeable how dangerous Saka and Marcus Rashford were on the counter. Had Tuchel sent them on against Argentina soon after England scored, Lionel Scaolini’s men would’ve had to respect it and might well have feared it, forced, at the very least, to leave defenders back to mark them, while their own team would’ve had out-balls and a serious threat, meaning when they cleared their lines, it wouldn’t have simply been to face yet another attack.

It find it strange that, given his team struggled for control and also to break down tight defences, Tuchel didn’t give Mainoo a single second on the pitch – and seemed to have decided as much by the Panama game, when he brought on Henderson in preference. England desperately lacked midfield balance, control, poise and craft, a problem that eventually cost them – and is the main reason I’d have given them little chance of beating Spain had they made the final. Anderson and Rice are fine players, but given Bellingham is essential, I’d want only one, with the trio completed by a more technical and cerebral type – which needn’t be Mainoo, he was just the only one in the squad.

️Updates from the final day’s play at Royal Birkdale
️Official leaderboard | Mail Scott with your thoughts

The final few games are running late, due to a rules brouhaha in an earlier match. So if you’ve been hammering away at refresh waiting for news of Tommy Fleetwood, here he comes now. The usual hubbub on the tee, then he takes his fairway wood, hits the ball, and twirls the club in satisfaction. Not exactly sure why, because his ball disappears into a thick clump of grass atop a bank to the left of the fairway. Some tension in the shoulders no doubt.

Another birdie for Scottie Scheffler! He crashes his drive at 5 greenside, chips up to four feet, and rolls in the putt. No fuss. The defending champion is now -7, and if he continues like this, posts a number, and the late-starting leaders have to deal with the cranking up of both wind and pressure … well now, we’d have quite the Open. A long way to go yet.

IRGC says two ships have also been involved in ‘accident’ after defying strait of Hormuz warnings as Kuwait reports attack from Tehran

• Two US troops killed and one missing in Jordan after Iranian attacks

Jordanian authorities ⁠have not issued any decision ⁠to ​evacuate the airport or ⁠seaport in the city of Aqaba, and have not detected ⁠any potential threats ​in ‌the past ‌hours, the state ‌news agency cited the government spokesperson as saying.

This denial comes in response to the US embassy in Jordan earlier saying the airport and seaport in Aqaba had been evacuated by Jordanian authorities because of a “specific and credible threat” (see this post for more details).

NYC mayor says in Times interview that’s he’s in ‘active conversation’ with city’s law department about the matter

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he was reviewing whether his administration could arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if as expected the Israeli prime minister visits the city for the UN general assembly in September.

Mamdani’s comments on Saturday’s episode of the New York Times’s the Interview podcast echoed ones he had made to the publication as he successfully ran for mayor last fall.

One person was killed and 16 others wounded in the overnight Russian attack on Kyiv, local authorities said.

Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek: We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on their vehicles, especially those from a small company... So to waylay those fears, Aptera announced a partnership today that unlocks access to 4,300 service shops across the US, through a company called RepairPal. Aptera had been working on this partnership when we saw them at our factory tour, but today they're ready to officially announce it. RepairPal doesn't own its own shops, but instead certifies local shops to work on particular models of car... All shops will get access to Aptera-specific service procedures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Heavy smoke from several large wildfires blazing in Canada and Minnesota engulfed large swaths of the Midwest and East Coast.

Britain seeks extradition over charges including rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation and offences relating to extreme pornography

The controversial influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in the US as part of a UK police investigation into a number of alleged sexual offences.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it was bringing further charges in relation to four further individuals, and had requested the two men’s extradition.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

Calls grow for global regulation as rising numbers of westerners use surrogates in countries with different laws

• Why Mexico is at the heart of ethical debate over global surrogacy

The rise in the use of surrogates abroad is leaving more babies at risk of becoming stateless, experts have said, amid growing calls for urgent global regulation of the practice.

The warning follows the suspension of a 15-year effort by The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to establish a global surrogacy convention, which was paused due to divisions among member states.

ABS data show one in 10 people are not satisfied with life – but community cohesion and trust lift happiness scores

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Nearly 2.2 million Australians 15 years and older are living below the wellbeing poverty line, with the share of people reporting very low life satisfaction doubling over the past decade.

In 2025, 9.7%, or about one in 10 Australians, rated their general satisfaction with life at four or below out of 10, according to Guardian Australia’s analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s (ABS) general social survey.

A storm front largely moved the smoke out of the Northeast before the final between Spain and Argentina, but additional smoke lingered over the middle of the country.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Richard Stallman. My office at the MIT AI Lab was next door to his. Stallman's position was that the source code to software should be free for everyone to use, learn from, and improve. Software encapsulates knowledge, he argued, and no one should lock something so fundamental away. To hide software inside a company was to hide knowledge itself... What I missed was that software was not just a commercial asset; it was a body of knowledge, and bodies of knowledge grow stronger when they are shared. After about two years of on-and-off debate, Stallman convinced me I was wrong." "Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger," advises Siegel. "AI is software, and AI is increasingly closed. The frontier models — the most advanced, cutting-edge AI systems — are closed completely and the trend is accelerating. Viable open alternatives are few and far between." So, what to do...? "Yes, frontier models keep getting bigger and more expensive — that arms race may well stay with the giants. But open source AI does not have to match their scale to be useful. Much of what the world needs probably does not require the absolute frontier. And where keeping a credible open option does demand serious compute, that is precisely the kind of public good worth paying for. "What's missing is not a path but will. The government, the private sector, and nonprofits should invest heavily in free and open source AI — the way they once invested in open software: public compute grants for open research, corporate and philanthropic support for universities and nonprofits doing the work, and a simple rule that AI built with public money is open by default. "We have run this experiment before. We know how it turns out. Let's not unlearn it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following is the full transcript of an interview with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026. Editor's note: This interview was taped on July 16, 2026.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Tom Homan, Trump administration border czar, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

The following is the transcript of an interview with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on July 19, 2026.

Rolling Stone writer Barry Walters, author of the music history "Mighty Real," says the latest ballad by British singer Sam Smith is a step forward from LGBTQ love songs being marginalized.

Deputies in Brazos County have arrested Charles Medina, 31, charging him with manslaughter.

Investigators arrest 31-year-old man identified as Charles Medina in connection with death of Rapp who was 26

US boxer Hannah Rapp, who in June fought for the World Boxing Council women’s featherweight championship, was killed on Saturday while she bicycled in Texas after a motorist struck her with his car, according to authorities.

Rapp was 26, and investigators arrested a 31-year-old man identified as Charles Medina in connection with her death, the sheriff’s office of Brazos county, Texas, said in a statement.

Throughout family hardships, divorce, and losing her voice to Lyme disease, Shania Twain became the top-selling female country artist of all time. She talks about her biographical new album, "Little Miss Twain," in which she reflects on her life with a smile.

A longstanding bromance means the Liverpool regional mayor very much has the ear of the soon-to-be PM

When a new prime minister enters Downing Street, observers usually look to those around the cabinet table to see where influence lies. With Andy Burnham, they should look 200 miles north – not to Manchester, but Liverpool.

Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool city region, may not have a formal role in government but he has a strong claim to having the closest personal bond to the incoming prime minister, a man he calls his “bezzie mate”.

Rates may rise, but don’t be too concerned – a small increase is unlikely to change major decisions on investment or hiring

With the appointment of a new Federal Reserve chair, the latest concern is that interest rates will go up in the next few months. That decision will depend on many factors, including inflation, jobs and the economy’s overall growth. But when that happens, watch out! The media will go nuts and the president will go ballistic. Everyone treats every Fed meeting as an economic earthquake. But for most small businesses, it isn’t.

A 25-basis-point increase doesn’t meaningfully change borrowing costs for most established businesses. In fact, it changes nothing at all.

At 79, Ronald Gould, a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, shoulders a full caseload despite living with progressive multiple sclerosis – a condition he faces with grit and a healthy dose of humor.

FIFA rules state that World Cup matches must be played on natural grass. For this year's tournament, scientifically-engineered sod (that can withstand playing conditions and differing climates) was deployed in stadiums with artificial turf.

As Andy Burnham enters No 10, Guardian data analysis reveals the fissures with Labour’s traditional supporters, and the traps the new PM will want to avoid

Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing St on a wave of optimism after a landslide victory in the 2024 general election. His Labour party had overturned a defeat in 2019 in which the party crashed to its worst result since 1935. Labour won 412 seats, just a few shy of the 418 won by Tony Blair in 1997, a result that gave Labour a leader in office for a decade.

But a little more than two years after he came to power, Starmer’s tenure is over. Over the past 24 months the popularity of the human-rights lawyer turned prime minister has plummeted, from a net approval rating of -3 when he took office, to -66 by September 2025 – the lowest net approval rating recorded by Ipsos for any prime minister since 1977.

When this is all over, people will tell us to move on. But those who perpetrated this reign of terror must be held accountable

One day, when Maga is out of power and the conditions of political possibility have changed, there are going to be people who tell you that the best thing for the country is to move on. There are going to be people who tell you that attempts to hold the purveyors of Trumpism accountable are petty, vindictive, engaging in a kind of petulant recrimination and score-settling. There are going to be people who tell you that there must not be investigations, that it would be a waste of time to have trials. There are going to be people who tell you that it is not wise to change the law to allow for prosecutions and lawsuits; that too great an emphasis on the past will only divide the country, and keep us from looking toward the future. This argument was made after Watergate; it was made after the civil war. It was wrong back then, and it will be wrong again when it is delivered, with piety and smugness, after Trump.

When Maga leaves power, all of the officers, bureaucrats and leaders of ICE – from the uniformed thugs in masks on the streets, to the contractors guarding concentration camps, to the suited vultures directing the operation in Washington and drafting legal memos to justify it – all of them must be held accountable. Their immunity from criminal prosecution and civil suits must be eradicated, and their liability must be made retroactive. They must be investigated, tried, fined, punished and ostracized. Needless to say, ICE must be abolished – attempts to merely reform it must be resisted as betrayals of democratic values. But it is not enough to abolish ICE. Those who are responsible for ICE must be driven from public life.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Investigation continues after college freshman was found dead on Mississippi island after 4 July boat trip with friends

Two weeks after Nolan Xavier Wells was found dead, his family is still searching for answers.

On 4 July, Wells, an 18-year-old Mississippi college freshman, and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a barrier island a few miles off the Mississippi Gulf coast.

Reform leader says support from fraudster before last election is ‘totally undeclarable in every single way’

Nigel Farage has admitted his close friend the fraudster George Cottrell let him use one of his London homes and paid for social media filming before the last election but insisted it was “totally undeclarable in every single way”.

The Reform UK leader spoke in depth for the first time about his support from Cottrell and the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne in an interview with the anti-woke Triggernometry podcast.

Spain will face Argentina in the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup final match on July 19. Here's how and when to watch the soccer game.

Forty-eight nations​ competed in the largest FIFA World Cup in history and two are left standing, with Spain in search of its second World Cup title and Argentina shooting for back-to-back​ championships.

Surprisingly easy to manoeuvre and skilled at cleaning carpet and hard floor, Shark’s upright bagless model is one of the best corded vacuums I’ve tested

• The best vacuum cleaners

Corded vacuum cleaners aren’t as glamorous as their cordless cousins, but swapping battery power for a plug socket has its advantages. The device will never be short of power, so it can keep cleaning for as long as you need it to. Prices also tend to be lower because there’s no expensive battery to factor into the cost.

On the downside, there’s a cable to manage while you clean, and even the longest cords usually need to be switched from one plug socket to another if your home is any larger than a small flat.

Changes inside the Florida international airport are hardly evident as state and county hold back funds for full remodel

One of Donald Trump’s most grandiose vanity projects, a multimillion-dollar makeover of Florida’s Palm Beach international airport into a self-aggrandizing, gold-plated transportation hub, is running into turbulence, barely a week after the first plane’s wheels touched the runway.

At first glance, the rebranding of the airport less than 5 miles from his opulent Mar-a-Lago resort appears to be complete. Its website bears the name and oversized logo of the President Donald J Trump international airport, and state transportation workers were quick to erect highway signs leaving drivers in no doubt where they were heading.

The murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo shook Magnolia Park, but strengthened bonds in a barrio grappling with gentrification and a history of police violence

The vigil on Canal Street has grown every night since 7 July. It began when two neighbors nailed white roses to a utility pole. Within hours, streams of people brought candles and carnations. By the seventh night, the sidewalk was enveloped by votive candles painted with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexican flags flapping alongside Texas ones, and a wooden cross ringed with photographs of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old husband and father who was shot and killed by ICE on this corner of Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood.

“Magnolia Park is a tight-knit community. Neighbors know each other and they help each other,” said JoAnna Rodriguez, co-founder of the non-profit Magnolia Park Arts and Community, housed two blocks away from the site of the shooting. “So when we heard what had happened, our first reaction was, ‘Who was it?’”

The showcase library’s centenary was celebrated by thousands who filled the still-relevant public institution

The central library in downtown Los Angeles has seen its fair share of colorful moments.

The architectural gem, which turned 100 this week, has been the backdrop to the epic street battle between Pacino, De Niro et al in Heat, and was where the original Ghostbusters came across their first ghost, a friendly older lady librarian who was anything but. Television shows such as Moonlighting, Murder, She Wrote and LA Law filmed there too, when characters were researching or investigating a case.

People in Tunbridge Wells area face lower pressure, intermittent supply or no water after ‘instrument failure’

Thousands of homes and businesses in Kent are facing water supply problems for a second day, including a “complete lack of water” in some cases, South East Water said.

About 7,000 properties in the Tunbridge Wells area could face low pressure, intermittent supply or no water, after an “instrument failure” at a nearby water treatment works, SEW said.

CNBC reports: The automotive industry's increasing use of over-the-air technology to update vehicle systems makes it more susceptible to cyberattacks, analysts say, urging more intervention in the sector... Its use represents "a unique national security concern," Gabriel Lim, senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told CNBC. "Aside from data privacy concerns, the potential of a foreign actor sabotaging the controls of a moving vehicle is a possibility that countries like Norway, Denmark, and Britain have expressed concerns about," Lim added. In May, the American Enterprise Institute warned that safeguarding the automotive sector was crucial to limit foreign governments' espionage capabilities. "To protect against foreign espionage threats, the US should consider additional security reviews, implement restrictions on certain foreign-made hardware and software in vehicles, and mandate increased data-collection disclosures," the report said. The concerns come as real-life tests reveal vulnerabilities. Late last year, Norwegian bus company Ruter conducted tests on two buses and found that one had potential risks linked to OTA technology. "There is access to the control system for battery and power supply via mobile network through a Romanian SIM card. In theory, therefore, this bus can be stopped or rendered inoperable by the manufacturer," the company said. The investigation by Ruter then sparked the U.K. and Denmark to conduct their own investigations... While these investigations were conducted on buses made by Chinese firm Yutong, [Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, systems security professor at the UK's Swansea University] said the issue goes beyond one manufacturer or country, as the technology becomes more pervasive. "Other sectors adopting OTA include other transport modes [such as] maritime and rail, aerospace (particularly drones), industrial machinery and robotics," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S.-Iranian woman who was trapped in Iran on allegations of espionage and collaborating with a hostile state that her attorney called "bogus" departed the country earlier this week.

Top Democrat says findings show public ‘way ahead of the politicians’ as Trump dismisses global heating as ‘hoax’

Amid a summer of dangerous heat, drought and floods, a majority of Americans are connecting increasingly severe weather to the climate crisis, new polling shows, despite efforts by Donald Trump to dismiss global heating as a “con job” and a “hoax”.

It’s a sign that attempts to suppress polarize climate concerns may not be seeing full success, said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress.

From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.

The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.

Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implications

In January, the AI company Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a moral patient, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.

Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years.

The president no longer treats the people who defeated him as voters. He treats them as suspects

There is a version of this country in which Donald Trump tells Americans the truth he has been handed: that their elections are secure. Once, he apparently wanted to.

The Atlantic reported after Thursday night’s address that a February 2020 election-security briefing pleased Trump so much he wanted to announce the news himself. The press conference never happened. The election did, and Trump lost it.

From manufactured election insecurity to an outbreak of ‘explosive’ diarrhea, Americans are bearing the brunt of harmful policies

Between widespread cuts to vital government agencies, various disease and illness outbreaks, and new environmental disaster vulnerabilities, the United States is facing a convergence of crises with widespread repercussions.

Yet the Trump administration has hamstrung the federal government from addressing these crises – and in some cases is actively fanning them. Over the past year, the administration has moved to shrink the federal workforce, roll back environmental protections and policies intended to fight the climate crisis, reduced funding for scientific research and is seeking to advance legislation that would impose new voting restrictions.

Expectations that prioritize privileged identities keep women and people of color from even running for office

Since Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats have chased candidates who exude an ever-elusive “authenticity”. For many on the left, the answer was Graham Platner, a military veteran turned oyster farmer with a gravelly voice and deep hostility toward the political establishment.

Even as controversy after controversy emerged – racist, sexist, homophobic online posts; a tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, which he later covered up; sexually explicit messages sent to other women while he was married; and allegations from former partners of toxic and threatening behavior, which he denied – Platner’s momentum didn’t slow. It was only after a woman accused Platner of rape – which he denies – that his political support collapsed.

There is a tangible heat to being Black in America this summer. 

Every morning starts the same. A jolt of coffee and nicotine as my thumbs scroll a daily intake of Black death and indignity. 

It mostly comes dosed in tears. Tears of Black moms and aunties, projected behind stone-faced fathers and grandpops trying to hold it together behind press podiums. 

This summer, it was Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old who disappeared during a trip to Mississippi’s Horn Island over the Fourth of July. Wells, who traveled to the island with a predominately white group of friends, was found dead in the water two days later. Authorities have not announced a final determination of what happened, but Wells’s family has challenged the official timeline and sought an independent autopsy. The investigation remains ongoing, which is to say that another Black family is waiting for answers in the indeterminate dark. In a state synonymous with deep-seated anti-Black racism, and the highest number of recorded lynchings, speculators and community members have begun to fear the worst.

It’s an expectation that has set the tone for living while Black in this new era. Where at any moment you, as Black person, can be erased for the most negligible of offenses, and if you’re not careful, be discarded into the void.

Before Nolan Wells, we watched in June as another Mississippi family laid their Black boy to rest. Kohen Wiley, who was just a year old, was shot and killed by Senatobia police officers, who fired into the vehicle where Wiley was sitting on his mother’s lap. After a friend of Wiley’s mother was accused of shoplifting a box of diapers at a Walmart, police opened fire on their car under the pretense that the vehicle was “oncoming” toward the officers. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has said the officers were not in the car’s path, citing a photo from the scene. A month later, investigators have yet to release body camera footage of the incident or provide any new answers. No charges have been filed.

Black Americans had already borne witness to those familiar echoes. Earlier that month, a jury in South Carolina acquitted 61-year-old Rick Chow of a murder charge after he shot and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, 14, for the alleged offense of stealing bottled water. Video evidence of the 2023 incident shows the store owner chasing Carmack-Belton out of the shop after falsely accusing him of theft. Chow, who had twice before shot patrons he suspected of shoplifting, would go on to shoot the teenager in the back as he fled. 

Whether over a box of Pampers or a gulp of water, it is a startling reminder that for too many non-Black Americans, protecting even the most trivial property can take precedence over the sanctity of a Black life.

It’s an existential dread that has now turned into expectation, an anxiety meant for the mind to blunt the inevitable oncoming pattern of pain, disappointment, and injustice — in this case, being Black in America.

These deaths do not exist in isolation. They arrive amid a broader retreat from the institutions that, however imperfectly, once acknowledged Black Americans as a constituency deserving of protection and investment.

And the casualties of Black existence transcend more than just bodies. The Trump administration has waged full spectrum warfare on Black identity in every sense. 

Since Trump returned to office, Black workers have experienced rising unemployment, with Black men seeing some of the steepest job losses in recent memory, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Related

Trump Admin Wants to Make It Easier for White Men to Sue for Discrimination

This coincides with broader efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and contracts while encouraging similar rollbacks throughout the private sector. The administration has also sought to reshape how race is discussed across the federal government, from education and museums to civil rights enforcement. 

At the same time, the administration has continued to chip away at the legal architecture of voting rights, with years of court decisions making it more difficult to challenge racial gerrymandering and voting restrictions. The Supreme Court’s recent decision dismantling key Voting Rights Act protections has opened the door for states to erase Black-majority districts, which threatens to strip Black communities of congressional representation across the South. 

If there was anything novel to the current pulse of American white supremacy, it is that it doesn’t seek domination but to erase Blackness altogether.

Trump’s supporters have come out in droves to support this mission, from swarms of masked white supremacists descending on the U.S. Capitol in honor of our nation’s 250th birthday to the endless viral videos of white men brandishing guns at Black people doing anything from swimming at the pool to handing out flyers. 

It is no surprise that, under the constant reminder that the market value of Black life has plummeted, many Black Americans are succumbing to despair. Suicide rates among Black Americans — especially young Black men — have risen sharply over the past decade. Researchers point to a convergence of untreated depression, limited access to mental health care, economic instability, exposure to violence, and the cumulative weight of racialized stress.

Related

Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire 

None of those policies alone determine whether a police officer fires a gun, whether a jury reaches a particular verdict, or what pushes a broken down mind over the brink. But together they communicate something many Black Americans increasingly recognize: that America has further turned tail and ran away from its promise of an egalitarian society, or even the aspiration that it should be one. 

That departure has consequences well beyond Washington. It shapes who receives the public’s attention, which communities are viewed as worthy of investment, and whose fears are treated as matters of national concern. 

For Black Americans watching another summer marked by funerals, investigations, and courtroom disappointments, the sentiment is not simply that violence persists. It is that the country is becoming less interested in confronting why it persists at all. 

That is the understanding of it. But the feeling is something entirely different.

And that feeling is scary as hell.

The post It’s Scary As Hell Being Black in America Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Fans evacuated from sold-out open-air show as organisers promise full refunds

An open-air show by the Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny was abandoned in Italy on Saturday night because of a violent hailstorm, but the organiser said ticketholders would be reimbursed.

Videos posted on social media showed large hailstones hitting people at the sold-out show, along with strong winds and driving rain, after the star began his set at Milan’s Snai La Maura Hippodrome.

The Clean Air Act only covers outdoor air, but some pollutants lurk indoors. I consulted experts to determine whether air purifiers are enough to protect our airways.

As the 2026 World Cup draws to an end, take a look back at the memorable 2022 final match between Argentina and France.

The allocated payment will go to your PlayStation Network wallet after the final approval hearing.

The new Space Frame design should extend the life of the laptop, but doesn't alter the familiar X1 Carbon look and feel.

Health Foundation paper argues health is an economic asset and improving it could generate £72bn for public finances

Restoring the deteriorating health of the UK’s population to the level of 2014 would boost GDP by 2% and generate a £72bn dividend for the public finances, research suggests.

A paper by the Health Foundation thinktank, published on Sunday, argues the nation’s health should be valued by policymakers as an economic asset.

You don't have to put up with spam calls any longer.

When Spain and Argentina face off Sunday in the World Cup final, it will mark just the second meeting between the two sides in the tournament's history, and their first in 60 years.

The incoming prime minister takes office Monday with little foreign policy background and daunting global challenges to confront.

Data shows 32,559 earnings-related overpayments in 2025-26 after DWP’s measures to end carer’s allowance scandal

Scores of unpaid carers were hit with demands to repay sums of more than £20,000 and hundreds more put at risk of prosecution last year as a result of official failures in what appear to be continuing problems with carer’s allowance.

New figures showed carers were asked to repay £33m in 2025-26 as a result of 32,559 earnings-related overpayments, despite the introduction of measures over a year ago designed specifically to prevent carers falling foul of the system.

At least one person killed after dozens of missiles arrive in less than an hour and three-storey building catches fire

Russia has carried out one of its biggest-ever ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, launching a five-hour raid that left at least one person dead and seven injured, with fires and damage across the city.

Ukrainian officials said the capital was hit with about 40 Iskander-M and hypersonic Zircon missiles. Residents heard an air raid siren sound at 1.30am. There was the sound of air defences, followed minutes later by a series of booms and explosions.

A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post: The study followed more than 11,000 U.S. adolescents over a period of five years, with participants first asked about their own social media use at the average age of 12, and surveyed annually through the average age of 16. Researchers found that increases in addictive social media use were followed by rising ADHD one year later — particularly among boys who reported rising addictive social media use at ages 14 and 15. This association was not found consistently in reverse, meaning that ADHD symptoms did not appear to precede higher levels of addictive social media use... "When an individual adolescent's addictive social media use score increased from one year to the next, that same adolescent tended to show an increase in ADHD symptoms in the following year...." [said Jason Nagata, lead author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco]. He urged parents to consider: "Can their kids stop if they want to? Is social media interfering with their schoolwork? Is it impairing their social relationships? Are there addiction-like symptoms, like withdrawal and relapse?" Approximately 7 million American children between the ages of 3 and 17 have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and boys are diagnosed with ADHD at about twice the rate of girls. The study did not find a clear link between addictive social media use and ADHD among girls, Nagata said. "Some studies do suggest that teenage boys in particular may be more sensitive to immediate reward and sensation-seeking in adolescence," he said. And social media platforms are designed to provide exactly that: "It encourages frequent task-switching, and there's this constant stream of stimulation that might make it harder for adolescents to maintain and sustain attention that is needed for schoolwork and daily life," he said. "The design features of social media offer the constant reinforcement of impulsivity — it offers immediate gratification and novelty and it encourages multitasking, which can then override working memory and executive control." Experts have long noted that this kind of digital exposure is particularly significant during critical stages of mental, social-emotional and cognitive development... [I]t's especially important for parents themselves to demonstrate a healthier relationship with screens and social media. "One of our previous findings was that parental screen use is a very strong predictor of kids' screen use," Nagata said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigators say Larry Millete contacted spellcasters to try to put a hex on his wife Maya so she wouldn't leave him.

They are out to steal your password to commit further fraud such as crypto scams or phishing attacks

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

The fatal shootings of two men, both killed in their vehicles by ICE agents, have rekindled anger over the US’s militarized deportation push

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving to work with his brother and two other passengers in Houston, Texas, when immigration agents began tailing his car. They pulled him over and fired a fatal shot through the open passenger-side window.

Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, was driving around his neighborhood when agents stopped him at an intersection – right outside the laundromat where he’d often go with his three-year-old daughter – and shot him dead.

Campaigners hope move will force commercial banks to rethink holding assets linked to the fossil fuel

Climate campaigners have declared a victory after the Bank of England said it would no longer accept bonds linked to one of the most polluting industries on the planet for key loan arrangements.

The ban, which comes into force in October, marks a fresh crackdown on thermal coal, which is burned in power plants to create electricity, and has long been a target of green policy activists.

She was the young girl in that infamous photograph with Prince Andrew, and the best-known survivor of Jeffrey Epstein. As Virginia’s explosive posthumous memoir continues to reverberate, her brother Sky Roberts and his wife, Amanda, talk about her final tragic months

A British prince was arrested at 8am and was stripped of his title; ambassadors, politicians and numerous other high-profile men lost their prestigious jobs; millions of files relating to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released and a US president remains under scrutiny. So much has happened since the death of Virginia Roberts Giuffre in April last year, and the posthumous publication of her memoir Nobody’s Girl six months later, detailing for the first time the full story of her abuse by Epstein and his associates. “This year has been extraordinary,” says Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s younger brother. “I just wish Virginia was here to see it.”

He is determined that there will be many more advances to come. Giuffre had become one of the most recognisable survivors of Epstein; in the midst of grief, Sky and his wife, Amanda, have become accidental advocates. “She paved the way, and we want to keep paving that road forward for other survivors out there,” says Sky.

Sirens sound in Bahrain and Kuwait accuses Tehran of targeting civilian sites and infrastructure as Iran strikes US allies

The US retaliated against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) after two American troops were killed and one was missing in Jordan when Tehran launched a wave of attacks against US allies in the Middle East.

Iran’s attacks came as the renewal of US strikes on Iran entered a second week and fighting escalated over the strait of Hormuz.

In addition to the two U.S. service members killed, a third is missing in action, U.S. Central Command said.

Incumbent Carlos Vila Nova hopes to defeat his former party and secure second term as independent

Voters in São Tomé and Príncipe go to the polls for a presidential election on Sunday as one of Africa’s least populous countries seeks to burnish its democratic credentials.

According to the National Election Commission, about 142,000 people are registered to vote in the tiny African state’s elections, approximately 15% of whom live in the diaspora.

Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage." That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, promising to delete all data that Grok Build has ever stored and give users more choice over how their data is handled." SpaceXAI's data grab was first publicized Sunday [July 12] by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud storage... [Elon Musk] said SpaceX would open-source Grok Build to sow greater trust in the product, after the codebase was audited for security vulnerabilities... ["Open-sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness," SpaceX posted on X.com. "Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI."] In a separate statement accompanying the open source announcement, SpaceX said it has always respected Zero Data Retention (ZDR), which was applied to enterprise customers by default, and acknowledged that data retention was enabled by default for everyone else, which has now been corrected. It said: "In response to user questions about privacy: Since launch, Grok Build has fully respected zero data retention (ZDR). All users have always had the ability to disable data upload in the CLI. When data upload was disabled, this choice was respected. In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy. With all retained data deleted, retention default off, and an open-source harness, we are offering complete user privacy. You can also run Grok Build fully open-sourced and local-first with your own inference. "We disabled default retention for all Grok Build users starting on July 12th. Additionally, we are deleting all coding data that was previously retained, ensuring every user's preferences are respected. With these steps, Grok Build goes beyond other major coding products to protect user privacy." SpaceX also invited researchers to probe Grok Build for security issues and report them to its bug bounty program, which offers rewards ranging from $100-$20,000, depending on the severity. The article notes Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, wrote this week that the Grok Build codebase comprises 844,530 lines of Rust code. "There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud," Willison writes, "but they seem to have been disabled now." Elon Musk also posted Wednesday that "Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of X open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested by federal authorities Saturday in Miami.

One New York couple depleted their retirement and savings accounts, paying out-of-pocket for healthcare, before they were able to access Medicaid funds.

"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'" Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that the same model had deleted his entire production database. In response to these incidents, the company's engineering lead for Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, wrote on X that internal investigations have revealed that these deletion incidents are more likely to happen when "full access mode is enabled, and Codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled." In cases where full access mode is granted, the model, Sottiaux wrote, "attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory. The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead...." The company, however, according to Sottiaux, is taking steps to mitigate the risk. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," the engineering lead wrote on X. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk, including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards," Sottiaux added, noting that a detailed post-mortem outlining the root cause of the issue and the additional mitigation measures being implemented is expected to follow in the coming days, despite emphasizing that such incidents happen "extremely rarely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Coach suspended one game by WNBA

• Brondello apologizes directly to Angel Reese

• League cites professionalism standards

Toronto Tempo coach Sandy Brondello was suspended for one game by the WNBA for an inappropriate comment she used during a game against the Atlanta Dream on Friday.

She’ll miss Monday’s game against the Las Vegas Aces.

It will be the first meeting between President Trump and Sheinbaum since December after months of verbal sparring. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is also expected to attend.

France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on Polymarket's site.) In May Spain blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it launched a gambling license investigation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British runner Josh Kerr ran the mile in 3 minutes, 42.66 seconds on Saturday, breaking a record that has stood since 1999.

U.S. forces launched a new round of airstrikes against Iran Saturday evening at the direction of President Trump following the deaths of two U.S. service members.

Boston police are investigating the discovery Saturday of a dead body that was found at a property that is owned by the husband of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

We tested smart speaker audio, voice assistants and sensors to find the best for your home.

It was the highest-scoring World Cup game since Hungary beat El Salvador 10-1 in 1982.

This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy. The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had answered the ad. They discovered that at the time "Behind the scenes, unseen by the users at the U.S. government, it's not just one person who responds," explains ProPublica's podcast. "It's two people... The China-based engineer is the one who knows how to fix the problem. On their end, they produce a block of code to solve it and send it over to the digital escort in the U.S. The digital escort then just copy-pastes it... All of this so that they can follow the government's rule: that you have to be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to handle sensitive data." But amazingly to confirm it, ProPublica's researcher just had to input "Microsoft" and "escort" into the U.S. Patent Office search bar, and actually found patents related to digital escorts — along with names of the current and former Microsoft employees listed as inventors. Had the government signed off on the practice? "I could see what Microsoft actually told the government," the reporter says on the podcast, "And there was no mention of foreign engineers being used, and definitely no mention of China." ProPublic's story was published on a Tuesday, according to the podcast, and by Friday "Microsoft said it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud systems." And America's Defense Department "also opened up an investigation, looking into whether any of Microsoft's China-based engineers had compromised the government's national security.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The attacks mark the eighth consecutive day that U.S. forces have bombed Iran. The latest fatalities pushed the American military death toll from the conflict to 16.

Tamás Sulyok signed the constitutional amendment that cited ‘serious loss of confidence’ in him as leader

Hungary’s president, Tamás Sulyok, has agreed to step down after signing a constitutional amendment passed by the ruling Tisza party of the prime minister, Péter Magyar.

The amendment will end Sulyok’s term immediately, citing society’s “serious loss of confidence” in a leader elected in early 2024 by lawmakers from the former prime minister Viktor Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party.

Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taylor Farms does not specify where products were served or sold, as US braces for weeks more of outbreak

Taylor Farms recalled potentially contaminated shredded iceberg lettuce in 27 states on Friday, including lettuce distributed as recently as Thursday, as cases of cyclosporiasis continue rising in the US.

The US is likely to see at least another two weeks of possible cases, since infections may have happened in recent days. And the expanding outbreak investigation could point to other products in coming days.

• Green says Mets follow all MLB AI guidelines

• Ottavino alleges club used AI for pitch decisions

• MLB recently restricted dugout iPad functions

New York Mets interim manager Andy Green said the club is fully compliant with Major League Baseball when asked about a report that singled out his organization for using artificial intelligence for in-game strategy decisions.

“Whatever the rules are, we remain fully compliant and Major League Baseball makes those determinations,” Green said before Saturday’s game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

• American two shots clear of Ryan Fox and Kim Si-woo

• Burns playing because wife gave birth earlier than expected

After one of the more fiery 24 hours in Open history, how appropriate that a golfer named Burns leads going into the final round at Royal Birkdale.

While Rory McIlroy directed spicy barbs at Bryson DeChambeau, as the row over the American’s behaviour after he was docked two shots for a rules infringement rumbled on, Sam Burns was coolness personified.

Even if he does not lift the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale, the American will still be the player everyone is talking about

Whip, crack, whoosh, Bryson DeChambeau’s opening shot flies into the distance, pitches, skips, and tumbles into the rough left of the fairway. By the time DeChambeau has reached the ball a big crowd has gathered around it, they’re standing on tiptoes, perched on mounds, tilting sideways to peer around the people in front, who are pressed right up against the ropes and even spilling underneath them and on to the playing area where the marshals, hands out, are trying to usher them back.

“Careful Bryson!” someone shouts out as he wades into the rough and, it never takes much, everyone breaks out laughing. Looking around, you notice how many people are watching all this through their phones. I start counting: one, five, 10, 20, 50 – people don’t just want to see DeChambeau play golf, they want to be able to show everyone they know that they’ve done it. Did you even go to the Open if you didn’t get to see him?

Incoming PM will reallocate unspecified resources from unpopular plan to helping with cost of living

Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday.

The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 19 No. 868.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 19, No. 1,856.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 19, No. 1,134.

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

️Ryan Fox shot 62, Rory blasted Bryson, Sam Burns quietly took charge
️Official leaderboard
️McIlroy lashes out at DeChambeau over penalty row

It’s the same old story for Rory McIlroy: he just can’t keep any momentum going this week. He follows that chip-in eagle on 9 with bogey at 11. Back to -1, and a second Claret Jug continues to hover out of reach. At least he’s got one. Jon Rahm has a strangely underwhelming record at the Open: a couple of high finishes in 2019 and 2023 without ever really looking likely to win. And it’s threatening to happen again. He carves his opening drive over the bushes to the right and out of bounds, and starts with a double-bogey six. His fume is internal, but it is real, registering eight-and-a-half out of ten on Bryson DeChambeau’s patented R&A-o-meter™.

Ryan Fox speaks to Sky. “The game plan was to be aggressive … I hit driver a lot … your strategy changes with the wind around here … I had a couple of interesting shots on the back nine and kinda got away with them … pretty happy with 62 in the end, that’s for sure … had a lot of fun with [Xander Schauffele] … he played really well too and we kind of fed off each other … was pretty happy to make par [on 18] from that fairway trap … I haven’t really put four rounds together [at the Open] … hopefully this is a sign … I’m in a pretty good place to give myself a chance so we’ll see what happens!”

Congressman to run for seat despite Donald Trump backing Graham’s sister, Darline, should she choose to run

The Republican representative Ralph Norman, ⁠of South Carolina, has announced he will join the race to succeed the late senator Lindsey Graham, despite Donald Trump backing Graham’s sister, Darline, should she choose to run.

Announcing the launch of his bid on Saturday, Norman wrote on X: “I’m running to represent the people of South Carolina in the US Senate because we need a fighter who will stand with President Trump and carry on Lindsey Graham’s legacy!”

Poor air quality from wildfires continues to plague New York City as several neighborhoods hit by thunderstorms

Saturday is delivering a double dose of dangerous weather across the north-eastern US, with smoky skies from Canadian wildfires giving way to severe thunderstorms that have already triggered a flash flood warning as torrential rain pounds parts of the region.

After a brief break on Friday, smoke from the wildfires moved back into New York City and surrounding communities on Saturday, sending air quality back into unhealthy levels.

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Target said it received 23 reports of the sandal's pearls falling off the shoe.

Two brands win readers over, but for different reasons.

Donald Trump criticised Thomas Tuchel for England’s semi-final loss

I’m still getting my head around the 2007 photo of Lionel Messi, 19, bathing Lamine Yamal, four months, for a Unicef calendar shoot.

Sid Lowe has done some digging to find out how it all came out …

The photograph was taken around Christmas 2007. Sport newspaper was putting together a charity calendar on behalf of Barcelona and Unicef, a studio set up in the away dressing room at the Camp Nou. Each player had a month and appeared with a child. Ronaldinho, the star, was July. Messi was January. Lamine Yamal was four months old. His mum, Sheila, had put him into a draw to take part. Monfort got the idea the night before when bathing his daughter, taking a plastic tub and a rubber duck with him. Although the baby was tiny and Messi was timid, with Sheila’s help he got a shot he was happy with.

In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC: "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• ‘I won’t defend Bryson – I’m not fond of him’

• Masters champion says rival’s actions ‘not a good look’

Rory McIlroy has accused a “performative” Bryson DeChambeau of “holding the tournament hostage” after the incredible scenes which marked the end of the American’s second round at the Open.

DeChambeau’s antics were matched in noteworthy terms by the scathing sentiment of McIlroy on Saturday. “I won’t pretend to be up here and defend Bryson,” said McIlroy. “I’m not particularly fond of him.”

Kyle Bylin and Jeremy Morrison uncovered the truth after Bylin received an at-home DNA test as a Christmas gift

A DNA discovery has led two families to accuse a North Dakota hospital of changing the course of their lives after learning two newborns were allegedly switched at birth nearly four decades ago.

Kyle Bylin uncovered the truth after receiving an at-home DNA test during a Christmas gift exchange. The test connected him with his biological aunt through a genealogy platform, prompting her nephew, Jeremy Morrison, to take his own DNA test. The results confirmed the two men had been raised by each other’s biological families.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee join rally to support Justin Pearson’s bid for Congress

More than a thousand people rallied for Justin Pearson, a Democratic state representative running for Congress, in the wake of four fatal shootings by members of Donald Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force over the last two months.

Crowds packed New Direction Christian church in the city’s Hickory Hill neighborhood in support of Pearson, who is running in the now-fractured ninth congressional district’s Democratic primary.

Kyiv's forces are continuing their relentless aerial campaign​ against energy infrastructure and military targets inside Russia.

If you need to track your glucose, these are the CGM monitors to consider.

Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action: "Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Workers of America spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath... Speaking to Game Developer, CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth elaborated on the unions' misgivings... "Basically the employer cannot arbitrarily change working conditions while it is engaged in negotiating with the union. We will continue to file legal challenges if necessary, and do all we can to defend the rights of Bethesda Game Studios workers...." "I'm very proud of the hard work the bargaining committees and CWA staff have put in to evaluate the legality of how the layoffs were conducted," a current id Software employee and union member told Aftermath. "It's important, even for the world's largest and most profitable companies, that there are consequences for violating federal labor law. If we hadn't explored this avenue to hold Microsoft accountable, it would be a sign to all other game executives that they can break the law and get away with it." Legal action is just one part of unions' larger effort to hold Microsoft accountable for its decision to lay off thousands of workers. This week, CWA also hosted a series of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations outside the offices of affected studios like Zenimax, id Software, Bethesda, and Obsidian.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fifa says football brings the world together but the unhoused in Atlanta feel targeted and completely excluded from the tournament

“A lot of our community has been pushed out by the World Cup. We’re not just dollar signs, we’re more than that. We’re people and we’re frustrated that they’ve chosen to treat us less than human.”

“They dropped me off there in the middle of the night. They call them Mormon centres or whatever, but it ain’t nothing but a warehouse of cops. It looked like a Fema camp. When I saw it, I left, I walked all the way back here. It’s because of the World Cup. They’re trying to make it look good for tourists. They don’t want the eyesores around.”

Jens Spahn had criticised ‘rented wombs’ and his party is strongly opposed to surrogacy, which is banned in Germany

A senior German politician and ally of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has resigned as parliamentary group leader of the Christian Democrat (CDU) party after he and his husband used a surrogate mother to become parents, a practice he has criticised in the past and his party is vehemently opposed to.

Surrogacy is banned in Germany, a policy Jens Spahn refused to relax when he was health minister in 2020, so he and his husband, Daniel Funke, used a surrogate mother in the US.

Pete Hegseth announced that soldiers aged 30 and older in the US military will be screened for low testosterone

The US defense secretary, ⁠Pete Hegseth, this week ordered an annual testosterone-deficiency screening for active-duty and reserve service members aged 30 and older, which he says will help to maintain military readiness.

But many medical professionals warn it might do nothing of the sort and instead could increase service members’ risk of infertility or lead to other consequences if testosterone is prescribed inappropriately.

The license for another campus of the Provo Canyon School was revoked on Friday.

Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980." [T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox. At the same time, sporty cars — the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive — have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics. The stick shift's demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission... Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics... Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models. Other automakers have followed the same path. Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI. Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out — leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from. The articles adds that only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle): 83% for baby boomers but 39% for Gen Z. "Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill." But Ford CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only. "Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang." Farley said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rain could alleviate conditions in mid-Atlantic and north-east, with World Cup final expected to go ahead on Sunday

Warnings of dangerous conditions are expected to remain in place on Saturday across swathes of the US, amid uncertainty about where the heavy wildfire smoke swirling from the Canadian province of Ontario and the US state of Minnesota will head next.

Some parts of the US mid-Atlantic and north-east regions will continue to endure poor air quality until Saturday afternoon, where there is a high chance of thunderstorms, which could bring some reprieve from the poor air but come with other risks like flash flooding and high winds. Meanwhile, parts of the midwest and Great Lakes regions will continue to see dangerous air quality.

Disney has settled a lawsuit alleging it forced higher prices for live TV streaming subscriptions.

MPs and industry experts say potential reorganisation will waste time at critical moment for AI and economic growth

Andy Burnham’s plan to scrap the government’s technology department has triggered an angry backlash from MPs, Whitehall officials and tech experts.

The incoming prime minister has asked officials to draw up plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a wider Whitehall shake-up.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to four states alleging that a combined 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. Elections experts caution that could be a significant overcount.

As Cuba swelters under six-month oil blockade imposed by US, tempers are fraying and unrest is growing

When Cuba’s national grid collapses, as it did for the third time in 10 days on Tuesday, a collective groan spreads across its cities and people wonder, again, whether the island’s antiquated electricity system may soon become unrecoverable.

The 777-mile long Caribbean island of 9.5 million people has been sweltering under a six-month-long oil blockade imposed by the US, part of a pressure campaign to bring down its communist government. But the parlous state of Cuba’s infrastructure goes far further back.

As the climate crisis fuels more intense blazes, pushing them to new parts of the world, those tackling them are forced to ration resources and decide which to fight

César Alcaraz had only just become a firefighter in the late 1990s when he found himself ambushed by a fast-moving blaze. Barely able to breathe and with no more water left in his truck, he and his colleagues fled an inferno ravaging Spain’s Montgó mountain region, wishing their bosses had sent more support.

But nearly three decades on, as an officer with Alicante’s provincial firefighters, Alcaraz has more sympathy for the agonising choices that commanders have to make. When wildfires overwhelm an area, his job resembles that of a doctor in an emergency room with too few ventilators.

Two suspects, a father and his adult son who were allegedly armed with guns and knives, have been arrested, authorities said.

The $490 Unihertz Titan 2 Elite has a few quirks, but it nails that BlackBerry Curve feeling.

In a proof-of-concept demonstration, AT&T and Ericsson showed how existing 5G networks can track aerial objects that might threaten public safety.

A standout channel lineup and user-friendly features make YouTube TV a top live TV streaming service, but its value isn't what it used to be.

In a speech given on Wednesday in honor of Nelson Mandela Day, New York’s mayor reflects on what Madiba can teach us in a fractured era

What a privilege it is to be together to honor the leadership of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. For 27 years, this organization has insisted that Madiba’s legacy belongs not only in museums, but in movements for freedom too. I would like to recognize a man whose legacy lives on in the millions that he inspired.

Madiba lives in every protest for justice, every call for democracy, every march with a righteous demand. Madiba lives in every township and slum where dignity remains just out of reach, and he lives in each person who reaches for that dignity, who works all day and then returns home with food for the hungry and medicine for the sick. Madiba lives each time someone bears witness to oppression, or want, or misery, and does not accept it as inevitable, but rather as something that we each can fight. So many of us are only where we are today – can only conceive of the principled as possible – because Madiba showed us the path.

Alison McCullough was in the best shape of her life and preparing for New York Fashion Week when she found a lump under her arm.

Thursday’s speech about election integrity was a case in point, as the president seeks to undermine the system

America’s mad king is spiraling. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are mired in the 30s as the Iran war rages on with no end in sight. As prices rise and the US’s reputation tanks, Trump is building self-serving monuments and putting his face on new $1 coins to ensure he leaves a lasting legacy. Don’t worry, Donald, we’ll never forget you! Your name will forever be associated with corruption, crime and a nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea.

When the going gets tough, Trump tends to go into full-on victim mode. This week was no exception. On Thursday, the president gave a televised primetime speech in which he rehashed all his usual grievances. A random jab about trans people? Check. Boasting about how he’s single-handedly made America great again? Check. Demonizing the media? Check. Complaints about how unfair it was he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 coupled with accusations about Chinese interference and misinformation about election integrity? Check. “No country can be great without fair and honest elections,” Trump announced. “If there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. Unfortunately, the system we have falls catastrophically short of that standard.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Outgoing PM has joked about cookery classes and cutting hedges, but does the international stage beckon?

As his time in Downing Street comes to an end, Keir Starmer has been joking with friends about what he might do after he stands down as prime minister.

He has teased that he might take a cookery course. “He needs it, he only makes two meals,” one friend said. Another not entirely serious suggestion was cutting his father-in-law’s hedge in the expectation that if he did well, he could graduate to lawns.

Yet more consolidation means one less studio, inevitable redundancies and a blow to this city’s cultural heritage

There are simply too many companies in the world. Apple, Google, Amazon, Ryanair. I’m probably forgetting some. How could I not? There are so many companies. Thankfully, here in Hollywood, we’re culling the herd. My memory says thanks. My career, on the other hand, does not.

After Disney swallowing up 20th Century Fox (which is now just called “20th Century Studios”, making it sound like a company that makes gramophones), Discovery merging with Warner Brothers, and Skydance buying Paramount, you’d think the industry would be done kneecapping itself through strategic acquisitions. Wrong again, friend. Warner Bros Discovery – swimming in debt and loaded up with depreciating cable TV assets – put itself on the market only three years after its last merger. First they went to Netflix, then to Paramount, after Netflix realized they like profit too much. Now a Paramount-WBD merger is progressing. All of this means one less movie studio, inevitable redundancies and more consolidation of vision.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

It’s always worth lodging a complaint, despite government budget cuts, layoffs and the rollback of regulatory oversight

It might feel right now like there’s no one looking out for US consumers. But a wide array of federal, state and local regulators and watchdogs are tasked with targeting company fraud and deception.

If you have an intractable problem with a company, it is always worth filing a complaint to every relevant government office, consumer advocates say – despite government budget cuts, layoffs and the steady rollback of federal regulatory oversight.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) takes complaints on general product and service fraud and scams here. It often refers cases to other agencies and collaborates with states on investigations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) handles complaints within the financial services industry, including credit scorers and non-bank lenders, here and still appears to be actively contacting companies to resolve issues, despite cuts.

You can search the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of product recalls and warnings here and file a complaint about an unsafe product here.

Report airline travel delays, baggage problems and discrimination at the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) consumer protection office.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center takes complaints about criminal activity online, including fraud, here. The bar for the FBI to launch a criminal investigation is generally higher than at agencies that handle civil complaints.

Register complaints about moving companies, trucks, buses and other transport here.

You can request an “external appeal” of a health insurer’s coverage denial in some states; a federal appeals process was suspended by Health and Human Services on 1 July. More information is here.

Always-on devices can quietly boost your energy use. Here are some settings to change -- and some devices you might want to unplug -- to avoid wasting energy and money.

Upgrade your dorm room with smart lights, voice assistants and security sensors, all at reasonable prices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day. FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites. The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land. To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group once led by RFK Jr, still stands by Andrea Shaw after her indictment

An Idaho mother charged with the first-degree murders of her 18-month-old twins has blamed their deaths on vaccines they received eight days before they died. But doctors who reviewed details about the case at the request of the Guardian say vaccines did not kill them.

“This was not a close call,” said Dr Jake Scott, a clinical infectious disease physician at Stanford who specializes in vaccine science. “I can say with confidence what didn’t happen here. It was not the vaccines.”

White House Fifa taskforce chief defends Argentina footballers, saying US believes in free speech

The White House has backed Argentina’s footballers who displayed a banner supporting their country’s claim to the Falkland Islands after their World Cup semi-final victory against England.

After Argentina’s 2-1 win in a fractious match in Atlanta on Wednesday, some players held up a banner that said: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” – using the country’s term for the South Atlantic islands.

Labour leader examining proposals to overhaul gas standing charges and make heat pumps cheaper to run than boilers

Andy Burnham is considering radical plans that could cut household energy bills by £130 a year and make running a heat pump cheaper than a gas boiler.

In his speech on Friday as he became the new Labour leader, Burnham promised to reduce the price of “essentials”, and a cost of living package is expected to be one of his first announcements in Downing Street.

Government’s food security push is said to rely on animal feed imports with vulnerability to supply chain shocks

The government’s planned poultry sector growth plan is a risk to national security, campaigners have warned.

Earlier this month, the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, told the Groundswell agriculture festival that the key to improving food security was consuming more homegrown produce, and said this was why the government had set up the Farming and Food Partnership Board, whose members include industry leaders such as the president of the National Farmers’ Union and the chief executive of the Food & Drink Federation.

Fire crew in Gilbert to honor Royal Cothrun, 14, for helping elderly woman who became disoriented amid heatwave

An Arizona fire department is formally honoring a 14-year-old boy who recently helped save an elderly woman with dementia after she wandered miles off course amid potentially lethal temperatures, saying the teenager demonstrated “heroism … quick thinking and compassion”.

Royal Cothrun was riding his bicycle in June in the town of Gilbert when he encountered Theresa Morgan as she struggled to walk through 103F (39.4C) heat with a grocery bag dangling off one arm and a purse on the other, according to authorities as well as reporting by the local news outlet KNXV.

Since Trump deployed troops last August, Washingtonians have banded together to resist and support one another

Every night as dusk settles in Lincoln Park, the sound of spoons and ladles banging metal pots and pans fills the air for five minutes straight, followed by the chant “We’ll be back.”

This nightly ritual is known as a cacerolazo, a form of resistance that dates back to the 1830s, from France to Latin America. Residents all over Washington DC have been participating in it almost every night for nearly a year, starting when Donald Trump deployed thousands of national guard troops to the city.

Trump Adds to America’s Lethal Legacy of Treachery

Who can even remember it now? That giddy moment less than five months ago when President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and take on the ruling regime. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. America is backing you with overwhelming strength,” Trump promised on February 28. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

Like a million Trump pledges before it, it was part bluster, part bullshit. Last week, Trump admitted as much, stating he knew the Iranian opposition had no chance against the ruling regime. “Nobody is gonna take over. They have no guns, and the other side has machine guns,” he said at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “They can’t take over because they’re dead.” This was not, however, just a routine Trumpian lie; it was also part of a grand American tradition.

They say baseball is America’s national pastime, but you could make a solid case that it’s actually betrayal. Washington loves nothing more than to sell out its friends, betray its partners, leave its allies in a lurch, and call people into the streets and then abandon them to slaughter.

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Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel

In an interview with the Washington Post on the Iran war’s first day, Trump said that “freedom for the people” of Iran was the goal of the conflict. It never was. But what would be lost in luring Iranian activists into the streets — aside from Iranian lives?

This type of lethal double-cross has been America’s stock-in-trade since its infancy — and has continued across the globe no matter the conflict, era, or president.

During the American Revolution, most Native peoples viewed America’s colonial rebels with skepticism and attempted to remain neutral or sided with the British. But some placed a bet on the revolutionaries, assuming that they would be rewarded with fair, if not preferential, treatment in the event of a win by the colonies. They were, in the end, wrong to assume their allies would act honorably.

The Oneida, for example, split from most of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and others — who allied with the British. “There would have probably been a lot more death for the Continental Army,” according to Heather Bruegl, a public historian and citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin who noted that the Oneida altered the tide of the war by breaking the famine at Valley Forge.

Even the Pentagon lauds the Oneida Nation, noting its “support for American independence saw the Continental Army through its lowest point in the Revolutionary War” but admitted that while Congress offered thanks, “that gratitude did not always translate into equitable treatment.” This is nothing but a mealy-mouthed reference to the fact that at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Oneida Homelands were estimated at between five to six million acres of land but were reduced to just 32 acres by the early 1900s.

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Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire 

The Lenape people also threw in with the American rebels, signing a treaty that pledged their backing to the nascent United States in exchange for protection and the creation of a 14th state, governed by Native Americans. The agreement fell apart within weeks. As the official State Department history puts it:

First, the Lenape leader White Eyes died. While American officials insisted White Eyes died from smallpox as the cause, evidence indicated members of the [colonial] militia murdered him, and the circumstances remain unclear to this day. This act showed the Lenape that the Americans did not value nor honor the importance of kinship alliances.

Despite a failure by the Americans to protect Lenape lands, some Lenape warriors nonetheless assisted the Continental Army and a delegation went to the Continental Congress to attempt to repair the pact. But the Americans made no effort to salvage the agreement and said the Lenape had broken the treaty. Worse still, in 1782, Pennsylvania militia massacred a neutral, pacifist Christian Lenape community in Gnadenhutten, bludgeoning 96 unarmed people to death. Thirty-nine of those killed, many with a hammer to the back of the head as they prayed for mercy, were children.

Deception and Disloyalty

Still, it wasn’t until the 20th century that America hit its stride, selling out allies at an unbelievable clip. Approximately 250,000 Filipinos joined the U.S. military, for example, and fought for America during World War II. Washington promised them the same health and pension benefits as their American counterparts, a pledge that was even reaffirmed at the close of the war. But then Congress passed and President Harry Truman signed the Rescission Act of 1946 that said that the service of Filipinos “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or national forces of the United States or any component thereof or any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges or benefits.”

Also during World War II, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, armed, trained, and supported a guerrilla force in French colonial Vietnam fighting the Japanese and their French quislings. In 1945, with the Japanese defeated, the top local OSS agent — the charismatic Ho Chi Minh — proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, using the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as his template. “All men are created equal,” he told a crowd of half a million Vietnamese in Hanoi. “The Creator has given us certain inviolable rights: the right to life, the right to be free, and the right to achieve happiness.”

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The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later

Ho thought his allies would back him. He was wrong. They instead turned on Ho and his comrades, funded the French reconquest of Vietnam, and spent the better part of the next three decades propping up an ever more corrupt and repressive rump state in South Vietnam while advising, arming, training, and funding an allied South Vietnamese military, and fought a long, destructive war against revolutionaries in the South and Ho’s North Vietnam that left millions dead, wounded, or displaced.

Eager to turn the conflict over to the Potemkin state they fostered and extricate the U.S., President Richard Nixon pledged to re-enter the war with the “full force” of American power, to induce the despotic South Vietnamese government to sign a 1973 peace agreement with the North. Two years later, the U.S. ignored this guarantee and abandoned South Vietnam and millions of allies, collaborators, and hangers-on.

No single moment sums up this betrayal better than an incident recounted by Stuart Herrington, a counterintelligence officer who spent 30 years in the Army. Herrington made a vow to hundreds of Vietnamese who crowded onto U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon on the final day of the U.S. evacuation in 1975. “Nobody is going to be left behind,” he assured them. One of the 420 Vietnamese who was there remembered his words: “I promise me and my soldiers will be the last ones to leave the embassy.” Herrington promised them that a large helicopter was coming to rescue them and then excused himself to go “take a leak.” Scurrying off into the shadows, Harrington slipped into the embassy building and onto a helicopter, abandoning those to whom he’d just given his word.

A U.S.-backed military regime in neighboring Cambodia also crumbled in 1975 and was abandoned to face the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. A proxy army in neighboring Laos was similarly discarded in the 1970s. Decades later, surviving troops and their families were still in hiding and on the run. “We want America to give us a place to live,” Va Chang, a then-60-year-old veteran found in the jungle in the mid-2000s told a reporter. “If the Americans don’t want to do that, they should drop a big bomb on us and end our misery.”

Prior to a 1956 uprising, the CIA air-dropped leaflets into Hungary with messages like “The regime is weaker than you think.” János Rainer, director of Hungary’s 1956 Institute Foundation, said, “Hungarians clearly got the impression that, in the event of a rebellion, the U.S. would support them effectively.” But the U.S. stood aside as the Soviet Union crushed the uprising, killing and wounding almost 20,000, imprisoning 13,000, and executing 229 others following trials, according to one count. The writer Tamás Aczél, who fled to the U.S. in 1956, wrote that Hungarians had been naive to put their faith in U.S. calls for “liberation” in Eastern Europe, writing: “[W]e learned what we didn’t know — that the West had written off these countries and only their propaganda machines pretended otherwise.”

In an even more egregious exercise, the CIA trained and armed Cuban exiles, landing them at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The counterrevolutionaries were promised ample air cover — “the sky will be yours” — and led to believe they would be supported by 15,000 American troops. But the invasion of Cuba went south quickly, President John F. Kennedy canceled a second round of airstrikes, and the exiles ran out of ammunition, were pushed back into the sea, and were abandoned. Grayston Lynch, a CIA operative who participated in the landing, recounted that he called two American destroyers on the scene for help but was told by the captain of one: “My orders are not to become involved.”

While the U.S. has betrayed people the world over, one group stands preeminent in the sheer amount of American treachery. “Nothing in this world is certain except death, taxes, and America betraying the Kurds,” wrote Jon Schwarz for The Intercept in October 2019, recounting eight instances from the 1920s to that very moment when the U.S. used independence-seeking Kurdish peoples to further American aims and then cut them loose.

One of the most craven of these instances was a Nixon-era plot with then U.S.-allied Iran to use the Kurds to bleed the then-Soviet-aligned Iraqis.

Once the Kurds outlived their usefulness, however, U.S. aid was then cut and the Iraqi military killed thousands as the Kurds begged for help. As a congressional report later admitted, “Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise.” But Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shrugged at the slaughter, explaining “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Both Shias in southern Iraq and Kurds in northern Iraq answered the call, expecting U.S. military support. It never came, Hussein stayed in power, and some 20,000 Kurds and up to 60,000 Shias who rose up were slaughtered by the Iraqi military.

More than a decade later, another failed U.S. war in the Middle East fostered the rise of the Islamic State group and the creation of a brutal caliphate across a wide swath of Iraq and Syria. Between 2014 and 2017, Kurdish-led forces dismantled this quasi-state for the U.S. But after 93 percent of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence in 2017, America was nowhere to be found. Within weeks, Iraqi federal troops and Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militias launched a coordinated offensive. The Kurds lost the city of Kirkuk, the Nineveh Plains, and roughly 40 percent of the territory their fighters had held. Washington offered no military response and no assistance — not even a diplomatic protest to the government in Baghdad. Then in 2019, President Donald Trump withdrew U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, opening the door for a Turkish invasion of the very land the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had taken from ISIS at the cost of more than 20,000 lives.

Hundreds of thousands of locals also served alongside U.S. troops, diplomats, intelligence officers, and contractors during the failed Afghan War. Despite 20 years of Americans mouthing the phrase “shohna ba shohna” (“shoulder to shoulder” in Dari), it meant very little. In the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, most Afghans who fought on the side of the U.S. and its coalition partners were left behind as the Taliban retook the country.

But even those who made it out have been abandoned. In April, the Trump administration floated plans to send Afghan allies stranded at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar to the Democratic Republic of Congo. While that plan was reportedly shelved, rumblings of casting them to the winds elsewhere remain. And in May, the Department of Homeland Security formally ended Temporary Protected Status for roughly 10,000 Afghans who fled after the Taliban’s return to power.

“We made a promise to those who helped America in our time of need, and it’s wrong to turn our backs on them,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a combat veteran who fought in Afghanistan, said last month, noting that they will likely face torture, persecution, and even death if they are returned to Afghanistan.

Won’t Get Fooled Again?

The principal proverb of personal responsibility has been kicking around since at least the 1600s: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But what happens if the “you” — in this case the United States — is always the same, and the “me” is always someone or somewhere different?

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Trump’s Formula for Forever Wars

The viceroys, envoys, and foot soldiers of American empire talk a good game. And the carrots offered and sticks wielded by the superpower are immense. But the U.S. hasn’t won a significant military conflict since the 1940s and when its wars go south, its proxies and partners — particularly smaller, weaker nations that it sees as disposable — are the ones sacrificed. People around the world need to take this long history into account when the United States comes calling with money, weapons, and offers of friendship.

The Trump administration is currently waging a war on history, white-washing America’s past to cast the country in a more favorable light. But other nations would do well to study — really examine — how America treats its friends. The people of Iran, even dissidents and those with a grudge against the ruling regime, resisted the urge to put their faith in the United States earlier this year. But many in Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere have forged closer ties with the Trump administration. History suggests those taken in by Americans bearing gifts will pay dearly for it. For 250 years, Americans have been double-crossing partners and selling out allies; betrayal — the past has shown — is in the nation’s DNA.

The post The United States of Betrayal appeared first on The Intercept.

An Oregon teenager’s surprising find for $3 in a thrift store bin could make him $250,000 at auction.

Demonstrations planned across the US this weekend will focus on three issues likely to define the midterm elections

Thousands of Americans are expected to take to the streets this weekend in mass protests around issues likely to define the midterm elections: widespread violence from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, voter suppression and datacenter construction.

The protests – some recently planned in response to last week’s ICE shootings, others an annual event with new urgency – will take place not just in big cities and progressive towns, but also in rural and red areas.

The births are a boon to efforts to revive the species, which was once nearly hunted to extinction.

Cheerleading by the president, who made $1.2bn last year off uninsured currency, does not bode well for US economy

The scale of the graft is decidedly off the charts, but the revelation that Donald Trump raked in a personal fortune of $2.2bn during his first year in office should come as no surprise. The president didn’t even try to hide his venality. Not only did he refuse to sell businesses and put assets in a blind trust, as other presidents have done to limit opportunities for self-dealing; the quid pro quos with foreign governments and assorted magnates were exposed for all to see.

It is troubling that the president of the United States would so nonchalantly deploy his official powers to profit from dealings with money launderers and Middle Eastern princes. It is perhaps more so that the supposedly robust checks and balances upholding American governance proved powerless to stop him. (Here’s waiting for the supreme court to define Trump’s dealings as “official acts” in order to exonerate him.)

Incoming PM must seize chance to stop race discourse deflecting from class inequalities, says David Weaver

Andy Burnham has a historic opportunity to shift the national mood on racism, the chair of Operation Black Vote has said.

In an interview marking the 30th anniversary of the influential nonpartisan civil rights organisation, David Weaver, the chair of Operation Black Vote (OBV), said Burnham must seize the chance to change a UK political culture where race and migration discourse is used to deflect from class inequalities and ineffective leadership.

The Fifa president sought influence with the US leader. Instead, Fifa’s president has entangled football in politics and wounded the game’s credibility

Ever since the United States won the rights to co-host the 2026 World Cup, Fifa president Gianni Infantino has worked to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump at all costs, supposedly to secure preferential treatment for Fifa from the American government. Predictably, he suffered the same fate as everyone who has made a Faustian bargain with the US president: he learned that cozying up to Trump always backfires, tarnishing the entire sport along the way.

I love soccer because, at its best, it is inclusive, democratic and accessible to everyone. So do billions of other people; the sport’s universal cultural impact truly lends it the potential to be a force for good that “unites the world”, as Fifa loves to say. We saw this force in action at the start of the World Cup when, despite Trump’s hardline anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner policies, the prevailing sentiment showed that visiting teams and fans found most Americans really are warm and welcoming people.

Nathán Goldberg Crenier serves as the elected vice-president of the US Soccer Federation. This editorial represents his personal opinions and does not necessarily reflect the positions or views of US Soccer.

Less than a month after hailing a ceasefire, Trump resumed strikes on Iran, a move experts warn could prolong the war and hurt Republicans before the midterms

For half a century, Donald Trump has performed a public high-wire act based on high-stakes risks and shattering time-honored norms to get what he wants.

The approach has paid off handsomely, helping him survive multiple bankruptcies to reach billionaire status and numerous legal and political scandals to be elected US president twice.

CEO’s pay packet surges to £791,000 as union says public ‘sick of obscene pay’ and bosses ‘feathering own nests’

Wessex Water awarded its chief executive an above-inflation pay increase even as the company was banned from paying bonuses because of sewage spills, it has emerged.

Ruth Jefferson received a 14% base salary increase in October, from £590,000 to £670,000, before other benefits, according to accounts published this month. It was far above the 3.5% given to workers, and put her pay at 18 times that of the company’s median employee.

Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Phys.org reports: According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites. The analysis classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2. [...] Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals. "Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites." The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites. "A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes." In living organisms, organometallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites. Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Defence minister seeks three ‘Nahal’ outposts in Gaza as top commander says Israel now controls 65% of the strip, violating Trump ceasefire deal

Israel’s defence and finance ministers announced plans for three illegal settlements in Gaza and more than $400m (£300m) in funding to expand construction in the occupied West Bank, as Israel’s military commander for the region celebrated violent outposts as his “security partners”.

With national elections scheduled for 27 October, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is racing to expand control of land in occupied Palestine and drive out Palestinians before its mandate expires.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to “help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel”. The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation’s funds is long.

The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting.

Of the twelve platinum companies, six are “AI” companies or companies with massive investments in “AI”: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there’s Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the “AI” bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major “AI” company and makers of “Claude”, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools.

Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to “AI”, with very little indication they’re ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle’s debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its “AI” spending, while IBM’s shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, “AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to [US] GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion”.

Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country’s buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now.

Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald’s employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards “AI” to spend money on “AI” before the bubble bursts.

For some reason, I thought this was interesting.

As the bombing starts again, it’s clear the president has dragged the US into a limitless fiasco – and the world into an economic quagmire

Feckless and clueless, Donald Trump is lost in Iran, unable to find a way out of the disastrous war he started. Once again, the US military is pummelling the country and, increasingly, its civilian infrastructure. As before, this unlawful bludgeoning strengthens the resistance of a hardline regime that cares little for its people’s suffering. How often have Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s wildling lord of bones, hailed a bogus victory? The president claimed this week to be “winning big”. No one believes him. Even as it counts the vast human and economic cost of his Persian folly, a watching world scoffs at US impotence.

Control of the strait of Hormuz, closed due to Trump’s belligerence, is now the White House’s limited, elusive objective. The grander US and Israeli war aims – eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, degrading its regional militias, regime change – are less attainable than ever. It’s Trump’s craven leadership that renders US forces ineffective, not the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. If Iran really is the existential menace he claims, the logical course would be all-out conquest. When George W Bush decided Iraq posed unacceptable dangers, he invaded with 170,000 ground troops. It was a catastrophe. But at least Bush had balls.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Take a standing break throughout the day with one of the best standing desks.

Put one of the best desks in your office with the help of CNET experts.

Hand-painted works are often wildly unfaithful to the movies they portray – reinterpretations that sometimes resulted in threats, insults and even physical attacks from viewers who felt duped

Sitting on his porch in Teshie near Accra, Heavy J dipped a brush into red oil paint and dabbed it carefully on to his canvas – a flour sack – adding blood to a knife being wielded by a man. Higher on the canvas, he had started on an outline of a skull.

Heavy J was creating a poster, but not as you might have expected for a horror film. Instead, it was for the animated fairytale The Little Mermaid. The man with the knife was not a killer but the film’s kind-hearted prince, Eric. The skull was also unrelated to the story. “We add more to make people interested,” said Heavy J, whose real name is Jeaurs Affutu.

The Justice Department determined this week a federal law banning TikTok from government devices no longer applies to the social video app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe. Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue. The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.”

Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not reliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website.

“There simply was no evidence to support the allegation of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote.

Years after that ruling, Westrop made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that had applied to the state’s new voucher program. He alleged the school leaders had connections to Islamic extremist or terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his research as early as last fall with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which oversees the voucher program that awards eligible families taxpayer dollars for private education or homeschooling.

In December, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer if the agency could exclude from the voucher program an unnamed number of schools with supposed ties to the Chinese Communist government or that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that it could.

Westrop’s allegations, along with claims made by several others, were among the primary reasons the comptroller’s office investigated the schools and delayed their admittance in the voucher program, according to new legal filings.

The scope of the investigations was also far broader than what was previously known, the filings show. The state used taxpayer money to contract with two investigators to dig into the histories of nearly 50 private schools across the state with alleged ties to radical Islamic organizations and the Chinese government — a number that far exceeds what has been reported.

The extent of the state’s probe and Westrop’s involvement are detailed as part of a new trove of legal filings in a lawsuit four Islamic private school campuses filed against the state comptroller in March after the agency initially kept them out of the program. It draws heavily on an eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller’s chief counsel for general litigation, taken in May as part of the lawsuit.

While the comptroller has since accepted all of the investigated schools into the voucher program, the schools that pursued the legal action are still asking the judge to certify a class-action lawsuit to ensure the comptroller can’t discriminate against certain private schools in the future.

“Religious liberty is not a temporary pass issued after a lawsuit,” said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic schools. “We’re pressing on so equal treatment is the rule — not an exception granted under pressure.”

The comptroller’s office, which declined to comment for this story, has objected to certifying the lawsuit as a class action, saying it shouldn’t be allowed to continue since the four Islamic campuses were ultimately allowed into the voucher program. The state’s lawyers also maintain that a class-action claim is outside the jurisdiction of the current court and case.

“Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continuing ability to participate in the Program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing said.

The debate over whether to allow the schools into the voucher program has come amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some elected officials and prominent political candidates in Texas and across the country. At the state Republican Party convention last month, members tried to remove Muslims as delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. (Scarborough later clarified to The Texas Tribune he wanted him to leave the country and admitted he had some regrets about the interaction.) In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor soon followed with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the enforcement of the governor’s designation, saying he issued it “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.

In the months since the Islamic schools’ lawsuit was filed, the comptroller’s office has maintained that its leaders did not purposefully single out certain schools. Instead, agency officials said that the Islamic schools were swept up in a wider review of some 700 private schools that were accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that vets tens of thousands of schools worldwide. The agency has said it did not know which schools had Islamic connections but instead set aside the entire group after discovering not all had up-to-date accreditations, which are mandated to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Miller’s deposition, however, contradicts the state’s claim.

In the deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as far back as last summer that identified almost 50 schools with alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also confirmed that the third-party researchers hired by the comptroller only examined those particular campuses out of the more than 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.

The filing also said the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the lawsuit for the voucher program, Bayaan Academy, then later removed it two hours after Westrop shared some of his research in January via email.

Miller’s deposition cited a range of sources that prompted the comptroller’s investigations into the schools, including Westrop, a regional Homeland Security Task Force launched last summer to “combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas,” congressional hearings probing potential terrorist activities in Texas and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization combating “the threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”

Miller spoke with Westrop on the phone at one point this year. He told lawyers Westrop appeared credible.

“Did you Google Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during the May deposition.

“I did not Google, no,” said Miller, who added that the investigators the state hired confirmed his credentials.

“Did they make you aware of a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist?” Hudson asked.

“No, they did not,” Miller replied.

Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He has continued raising allegations on at least one podcast that extremist groups will take advantage of the school voucher program funding.

Westrop later published his research, which he had shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 that “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.”

Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller’s office is “not readily prepared to do investigations and to do deep research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other accusation.”

The comptroller, instead, handed over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, provided the agency with dossiers on each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders against government terrorism and extremist group databases.

The comptroller ultimately allowed in all of the schools alleged to have Islamic terrorist or Chinese Communist Party ties.

The Islamic school plaintiffs have said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed long term and they hope a class-action suit could help change the comptroller’s processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.

The filing pointed to a March 24 letter Hancock sent the state attorney general, in which he continued pushing claims linking the Houston Quran Academy’s principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he says the school had been “temporarily” approved for the voucher program but called for its removal. (The school could not be immediately reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no ties to CAIR and is “purely academic.”) Hancock asked Paxton, whom the comptroller had been feuding with over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school’s “terror ties.” He urged the attorney general to strip the school, “and any other school with documented ties to terrorism,” of its corporate charter. (Hancock has since announced he will step down from his position as acting comptroller at the end of this month.)

Of Hancock’s comments, Miller said in his deposition, “There’s a lot of mistakes and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I’m not the acting comptroller.”

“We,” Miller said, had determined the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. “This letter came completely out of the blue, and — and so this was a surprise to all of us.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs asked whether the comptroller has the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency’s own internal research. Miller opposed the notion multiple times before conceding at one point.

“It’s possible, yes,” Miller said.

The post How a Man Once Ordered to Pay Libel Damages Helped Launch an Investigation Into Islamic Private Schools appeared first on ProPublica.

This blog is now closed.

• DHS secretary doubles down on Trump’s baseless 2020 election claims

• Trump makes unverified claims of China ‘election meddling’

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Trump also took to Truth Social today to claim that there were “great reviews” of his address to the nation on Thursday – where he repeated baseless claims undermining the electoral integrity of the 2020 election, and the safety of the election process at large in the US.

During his speech, Trump also tried to unveil new information – with scant evidence – that China’s interfered in the race that he lost to Joe Biden. This despite assessments from intelligence officials that no foreign actor, including China, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process.

Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been charged with a misdemeanor hit-and-run count after authorities allege he struck a parked car and drove away from the scene.

President Trump threatened more tariffs on Canada for wildfires that have blanketed large parts of the Midwest and East Coast in smoke in recent days.

Tondra Madruga named as second victim in deadly capsizing as police continue search for two missing people

Police on Friday discovered the wreckage of a boat that sank this week in the San Francisco Bay after recovering the body of a missing person the day before.

The body was identified as Tondra Madruga, 58, also known as Tondra Miller, the San Francisco medical examiner said. She was one of three people missing after the Volare, a 49ft (15m) cabin cruiser, sank on Wednesday afternoon with 20 people onboard after being hit by a wave and capsizing. The group was on the boat to scatter the ashes of a loved one.

Central Command says attacks were designed to ‘continue degrading Iranian military capabilities’

The US military said it had launched a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iran on Friday night as fighting escalated over the strait of Hormuz.

US Central Command, in a post on X, said the strikes, which began at 7pm GMT, were designed to “continue degrading Iranian military capabilities”.

An AI expert said the telltale signs people once relied on, such as distorted fingers, unnatural eyes, or other obvious visual flaws, have largely disappeared as technology has improved.

Taylor Farms said none of its branded salads or kits contain the iceberg lettuce associated with the outbreak.

An employee of a group that operates an ICE detainment center in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested after police said he shot and wounded a woman who was taking part in a protest.

Officials haven’t released additional information about the person’s identity, age or details on when and how they fell ill

A legionnaires’ disease outbreak that has sickened dozens of people in New York City has claimed its first life, health officials said Friday.

Officials didn’t release additional information about the person’s identity, age or details on when and how they fell ill.

In a primetime address, President Trump alleged the U.S. election system falls "catastrophically short," revisiting a topic that has drawn his attention for years — and making claims that election experts have heavily disputed.

Billionaire Leon Black, who paid Epstein $158 million for tax advice, was subpoenaed for a second interview with the House Oversight Committee in September.

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's Woz Ed foundation is partnering with Realbotix, best known for their RealDoll-branded artificial companions, to deploy AI-powered robotic tutors in classrooms," writes Slashdot reader Hentes. "The doll will serve as a sort of artificial teaching assistant, helping students who get stuck or generating lessons. Students will be assigned an ID code, allowing the robot to provide personalized mentoring." NYS Focus reports: "This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics," said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. "[Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York] marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM education." The female robot, named Sally, will have a "lifelike appearance" with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions. [...] Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use curriculum developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level. The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump delivered a primetime address to the country on Thursday, claiming that declassified intelligence showed Chinese interference in US elections. The US president revived long-running attacks on election security, despite a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which he lost. The Guardian's voting rights reporter Sam Levine factchecks some of Trump's claims

Lawmakers press for review of hiring practices amid a spate of ICE-related deaths within the same week

Democratic lawmakers are pressing for a review of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hiring practices and continuing calls for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the killing of an immigrant in Maine by one of the agency’s officers after news media reported allegations of past violent and threatening behavior by the officer, according to his family members.

The Associated Press, the Portland Press Herald and National Public Radio (NPR) all identified the officer in question as David Brouillette, information that the publications attributed to his family. The outlets also reported allegations that Brouillette had a history of mental health issues and had purportedly subjected his ex-wife to violent, threatening behavior.

Forty-two-year-old Abdikerm Eidleh appeared in federal court in St. Paul on Friday, just weeks after he was arrested in Mogadishu.

As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…)

The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications.

Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC.

↫ David Oberhollenzer

The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I’ve used a ton more over the decades that I don’t remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments’ stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996.

I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class – I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class.

Good times, made possible by the Z80.

Fires are also blazing across the US and the Trump administration has repealed several climate protections

US Republicans are threatening to sanction Canada and Canadian government officials after smoke from devastating wildfires has drifted across huge swathes of the US, creating hazy conditions and dangerous air quality for tens of millions of Americans.

Donald Trump on ⁠Friday blamed ⁠his country’s northern neighbor for ​the smoke spreading from ⁠wildfires and said he planned to call ​Mark Carney, the Canadian prime ‌minister, ‌ to ‌ask about Ottawa’s plans for dealing with the blazes.

Science has discovered around 6,000 planets, and this is the first one, other than Earth, that is rocky and has an atmosphere.

Whereabouts of artist imprisoned after 2021 protests had been unknown following end of his prison term in July

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a prominent Cuban dissident artist whose whereabouts remained unknown after his prison sentence ended last week, has been given permission to travel to the US, according to his official Facebook page.

Otero Alcántara, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022 for insulting national symbols, contempt and disturbing the public order.

The smoke pouring into the U.S. made Detroit, Chicago and D.C. among the world's most polluted major cities as of early Friday.

The White House did not respond to questions about what legal mechanism he would use to impose the tariffs or how the administration would calculate the rate of the levies.

President Trump called China's acquisition of voter information "the largest compromise of election data in history." In 20 states, anyone can get this information with a simple public request.

Woman has non-life threatening injuries after Brandon Booth shot her with pistol outside ICE facility and drove off

An employee of a company that runs an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Colorado is under arrest after shooting and injuring a woman on Thursday evening. The incident happened after the woman participated in a protest in front of the facility earlier that day, according to the Aurora police department.

When officers arrived on the scene, they said they found the woman with a gunshot wound in her lower body. She had a friend with her, who was unharmed.

• American’s participation over weekend was in doubt

• DeChambeau: ‘I don’t agree with it, but it is what it is’

Bryson DeChambeau’s ongoing participation in the Open Championship was in doubt until after midnight on Friday, after extraordinary scenes at the conclusion of the 32-year-old’s second round at Royal Birkdale.

DeChambeau was handed a two-stroke penalty for improving the line of his swing in thick rough, with the scenario prompting a furious response from the American. The sanction shifted DeChambeau out of second place – one stroke behind the leader, Lucas Herbert – and left him in a tie for fifth.

Xi Jinping used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry. "AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," he said. Bloomberg reports: His presence at the gathering, attended by scores of tech and government leaders, conveys a potent signal of China's ambitions to dominate a technological sphere with the potential to revolutionize industry and economies -- an effort that's shot to the top of the nation's agenda. Chinese models are winning over companies worldwide, with their share of US firms' AI usage nearing a record 60% on the popular marketplace OpenRouter. Behind the rhetoric, Beijing is grappling with the balance between openness and national security as models grow more capable. Chinese officials recently discussed with companies including Alibaba -- developer of the popular Qwen models -- how to mitigate the security risks posed by their increasingly powerful models, people familiar with the matter said. The talks are early, with no enforcement planned, but restricting foreign access to top models was among the options raised, the people said. Reuters previously reported that Beijing was weighing curbs on overseas access. Earlier today, the Beijing-based AI company "Moonshot" released a massive new model that reset the AI race overnight, immediately vaulting into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's guests include Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and White House border czar Tom Homan.

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

The post Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe appeared first on ProPublica.

Two men arrested after taking federal employees hostage in Shasta-Trinity national forest

Two US Forest Service employees were released early on Friday morning after being held hostage for more than 12 hours, authorities in far northern California said.

Law enforcement officers arrested two men for the alleged kidnapping near Gumboot Lake in Shasta-Trinity national forest, Jeremiah LaRue, the Siskiyou county sheriff, told reporters on Friday afternoon.

In a July 16 prime-time speech that warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” President Donald Trump cast doubt on the country’s ability to hold “free and fair elections” but offered no evidence that widespread fraud had occurred.

He made one reference to never watching “a stolen election again,” but otherwise suggested, rather than outright claimed, that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been “rigged,” as he has often said and has never backed up.

Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded in 2020 that the election that year “was the most secure in American history,” a line the president mocked in his speech last night.

The White House released a trove of documents that Trump said showed the intelligence agencies had kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, but election experts said there was very little new information revealed in the president’s speech.

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

Still, Trump distorted the facts on several issues:

• Trump said the documents he released show that China had acquired “220 million U.S. voter files” starting in the 2020 election cycle, and that this had been kept “secret” by U.S. intelligence officials. But state voter files are mostly publicly available, and an April 2020 intelligence assessment said Chinese officials were analyzing state voter rolls.

• The president said released documents revealed that U.S. election infrastructure is “vulnerable,” “easily compromised” and “people within our government knew that.” But one of the documents Trump cited said the election systems, for several reasons, “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

• Trump said the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to “foreign interference.” It has been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to influence elections. Trump focused on China; it was a “minority view” in an intelligence assessment that China had acted to undermine Trump’s reelection in 2020.

• The president’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that a foreign country changed votes in a U.S. election, but Trump never explicitly claimed that. An adviser to the president said after the speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

• Trump claimed that a Department of Homeland Security investigation “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” DHS hasn’t explained its methodology, and experts warn the figure is likely highly inaccurate. Past DHS-derived lists have proven unreliable.

• He cited an alleged instance of fraud from 2020 involving fake voter-registration applications in Michigan. Authorities say no one actually voted improperly as a result of the alleged scam, which stemmed from employees of a voter-registration company trying to defraud their employer and was not a deliberate effort to alter votes.

• The president exaggerated the time it took California to count its votes in its June election and falsely suggested that the long timeline indicates something nefarious occurred.

• Trump said that Congress needed to pass the SAVE America Act, describing its voter ID requirements as “simple.” That’s a matter of opinion. The bill’s ID rules would be stricter than those in most of the 36 states that already have a form of voter ID.

China and Voter Registration Data

Trump said the released documents show that China, beginning during the 2020 election cycle, “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” The obtained data included names, home addresses, phone numbers and political party preferences of U.S. voters, he said, calling it an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” But state voter registration files are mostly publicly available, with most states having no restrictions on who can buy them and some states providing them for free.

His use of the word “compromise” implies China was able to change the data, but he presented no evidence of that.

Trump then said the information about voter data in several states being “bought, stolen or hacked by China” had been kept “secret and hidden” by U.S. intelligence officials.

But Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that information was not revelatory.

“It would be a shock if China didn’t have this data, and the idea that, one, they had this data and then it was somehow covered up is relatively laughable,” Becker said on a July 17 press call. 

He said it was publicly reported, and has long been known by the Intelligence Community, which has told U.S. presidents, including Trump, “that China has a policy of vacuuming up as much … data on Americans as it can.” 

Becker said an April 2020 intelligence assessment that would have been available to Trump as president at the time, had “confirmed China is collecting voter data.” The partially redacted document, which was declassified during the Biden administration in October 2022, says “Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states’ … election voter registration data … to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election.”

It’s unclear if the heavily redacted assessment said how China obtained the voter data, but Becker said it wouldn’t be difficult, as certain voter information is publicly accessible or can be purchased. 

Indeed, one of the declassified documents that the White House released on July 16 said that, in early 2022, a Chinese actor had downloaded state voter information from 2013 to 2021 that was available on commercial U.S. websites. That data, “in theory,” could be used for “election influence operations,” the document said, adding that the actual motivation was “unknown.”

In a report updated in October 2020, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission provided data showing that 30 states plus Washington, D.C., had essentially no restrictions on who could purchase their voter registration files. Sixteen states had some restrictions on who could buy their files, and four states completed restricted access for some groups. The prices for the files ranged from $0 (in 11 states) to $37,000 in Alabama.

Becker said, “Just having the data doesn’t give you an ability to access their voter record. You need many, many more private person identifiable information points, things like driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, which aren’t in this data, to even begin to think about doing that.” 

And if that had happened, he said, the public would likely know about it because it would cause issues for people trying to vote. “Altering records on a voter registration record or deleting a voter registration record would mean voters would go to the polls and have problems, and we’d be hearing reports of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American voters having trouble,” he said. “We’ve got no reports of that whatsoever.”

Election Systems

Trump also claimed that the newly released documents show alarming vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems and equipment. But those issues had long been publicized, and a document he quoted from said it was unlikely those weaknesses could be exploited to the degree necessary to change the outcome of an election.

“For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems,” the president said. “They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that.”

Trump then quoted a now-declassified January 2020 memorandum from the National Intelligence Council that said at least Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as other non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.” And voter registration databases, pollbooks and official election websites “are most vulnerable to exploitation,” the document said, adding that it could “disrupt election processes” if such systems were accessed.

However, the same memo said those systems “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

For example, it said, “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” While a foreign actor “could manipulate voting results across multiple jurisdictions and enough states to influence a presidential election,” officials judged that “conducting such a campaign would be difficult and that postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”

A similar assessment had been included in a classified Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election that was given to Trump, as well as administration and congressional leadership, on Jan. 7, 2021. The national director of intelligence at the time was John Ratcliffe, who now serves as CIA director. A declassified version was released in March 2021.

It said, “We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits.”

There were also “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the assessment said.

Foreign Influence in Elections

The president said that the documents he was declassifying showed that the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to, among other things, “foreign interference.” Later, he said: “China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections.” It’s been publicly known for years that other countries have tried to, or wanted to, influence U.S. elections through tactics like social media campaigns — most notably, Russia, a country Trump briefly mentioned once in his speech in a list of adversaries.

There is no evidence that a foreign influence campaign changed votes that were cast in any U.S. election. While Trump’s speech may have suggested to some listeners that this happened, he didn’t explicitly claim that it did. He made one vague reference to a “stolen” election, saying, “We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.”

John Solomon, an adviser to the president and a conservative journalist, told reporters outside the White House after Trump’s speech: “The Intelligence Community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ’22 or ’24.”

MS Now White House reporter Vaughn Hillyard asked Solomon to confirm that the results of the 2020 election were valid. “I’m still researching,” Solomon responded, saying there was “not yet” any intelligence suggesting otherwise.

As for foreign influence campaigns, the Intelligence Community assessment on “foreign threats” to the 2020 election, which, as we noted, was given to Trump before he left office in January 2021, explained how Russia, Iran and other countries likely sought to influence the election.

“We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment,” the Intelligence Community report said. Russia’s actions including using online influence actors to “amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.”

Iran, meanwhile, “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. We have high confidence in this assessment,” the report said.

China, the focus of Trump’s speech, “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment,” the assessment said, noting that China “did not view either election outcome,” meaning Trump or Biden, “as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.”

There was, however, a “minority view,” held by the national intelligence officer for cyber issues, who assessed that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media,” the report said. It’s this view that Trump emphasized in his speech.

The report said that the national intelligence officer for cyber issues “agrees that we have no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes” and had “moderate confidence in these judgments.” This assessment “gives more weight to indications that Beijing preferred former President Trump’s defeat and the election of a more predictable member of the establishment instead.”

Russia’s interference efforts in the 2016 election — involving an online propaganda campaign and a hacking operation targeting Democratic Party committees and Hillary Clinton’s campaign — were documented in the lengthy report by special counsel Robert Mueller, as we’ve explained.

DHS Claims of Noncitizens Registered to Vote

Trump continued to claim without evidence that there are large numbers of noncitizens on voter registration rolls.

“Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security,” Trump said. “According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”

As part of its data dump, the White House linked to a DHS document claiming that a “review” of “public data files” in four states — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada — found over 250,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The document provided no information about how that estimate was derived, or the methodology used. A DHS press release issued on July 17 said that “preliminary reviews of the four states’ records” revealed there “may be as many as” 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada; and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The release also shed no light on how DHS arrived at those figures, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not elaborate in a press conference on July 17.

In his July 17 press call, Becker of CEIR said he attended a background White House press briefing the afternoon before Trump’s prime-time speech and “they were not transparent about the methodology whatsoever.”

He said a White House official said only that the comparisons were done with commercial data.

“Commercial data does not allow a comparison to the public voter file in any conceivable way because of common names, because you lack … unique identifiers, like driver’s license numbers or Social Security,” Becker said. “You don’t even have dates of birth in some cases that are accurate to compare between the two because in many cases those are not included, and you’re going to create a lot of false matches because of that. Anyone who works with this data knows that.”

Becker called the 250,000 claim “an irresponsible number to share, given the opaque methodology that they claimed here.” Inevitably, he said, “I predict almost all of them are actually citizens.”

“I know about as much about voter data nationwide as almost anybody,” Becker said. “It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Sean O’Hara you have on that is the same person. You just get a huge amount of false positives, and so I suspect that 250,000 number is just their wild highest possible number.”

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar provided us a statement, saying, “We can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims. These numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shared anything that backs it up.”

“There are numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot,” Aguilar said. “The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work. They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”

Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, also pushed back on DHS’ claim.

“Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” Schmidt said in a statement to us via email. “In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place. All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

All four of the states in the DHS review declined to share their voting lists to participate in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, which the Trump administration has made available to states to help them identify potential noncitizens on state voter rolls.

According to the DHS document, as of June 22, 25 states that have used the SAVE tool have identified potentially 28,000 noncitizens on voter rolls — out of 68 million registration records. Even if that were accurate, that would be about 0.04% of voters. (The 250,000 discussed earlier plus the 28,000 identified through the SAVE program is how Trump arrived at his figure of 278,000.)

But as we have written, when those lists of potential noncitizens identified by the SAVE program were shared with states, county officials found U.S. citizens were among those identified. Some were recently naturalized citizens. In other cases, election officials determined some noncitizens were inadvertently added by county officials to voter lists, and still others were noncitizens who mistakenly checked a box for voter registration even after acknowledging on the same forms that they were noncitizens.

Neither Trump nor DHS claimed that any of those noncitizens who may be on state voter registration rolls have actually voted illegally. Noncitizens convicted of voting in federal elections face fines, jail time and deportation.

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, just under 100 noncitizens have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982.

“If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote for the Election Law Blog. “Claims of noncitizen registration often evaporate upon closer inspection (such as the systems’ failure to catch newly naturalized citizens). And he’s made no claims about noncitizens actually voting.”

Michigan Voter Registration Incident

Trump seized on an incident in which a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan, received a number of fake voter-registration applications ahead of the 2020 election.

But the applications did not actually result in anyone voting or registering to vote improperly, state officials have said: The clerk’s office quickly flagged the discrepancies and alerted the authorities.

Moreover, investigators concluded that the fraudulent applications were an attempt by low-level employees of a voter-registration organization to get paid for work they hadn’t done — not a deliberate effort to influence the election.

Here’s how Trump described the case in his speech Thursday night:

Trump: Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan. In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization, corrupt group, in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found … that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced. 

This case has been widely reported on by local media in Michigan for years. 

In late October 2020, days before the election, local news outlets reported that the Muskegon city clerk’s office had flagged “irregularities” in hundreds of voter registration applications, among several thousand that had been mailed or dropped off as part of an organized registration drive. 

City Clerk Ann Meisch told local station WZZM that the vast majority of those forms were valid, but “several hundred” had birthdays, addresses, signatures or other voter information that didn’t match what the state had on file. 

She said any such applications were invalidated, and no one was issued a ballot based on one.

State police later determined that around 8,000 to 10,000 applications had been dropped off by someone working for GBI Strategies, as local news outlet Bridge Michigan reported in 2023. Campaign finance records indicate GBI Strategies did work for Democratic campaigns in 2020.

Danny Wimmer, a spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, told Bridge Michigan that investigators determined the fraud had “occurred at the lowest levels of the company,” apparently by workers attempting to defraud their employer by claiming to have done work they hadn’t. The evidence did not suggest any intent to affect the election’s outcome. 

Wimmer reiterated that there is no evidence anyone voted as a result of the fraudulent applications.

“This attempted fraud was detected because the system worked,” he said.

State officials told Bridge Michigan that they turned their investigation over to the FBI because it was pursuing a national investigation related to GBI Strategies.

Trump, in his speech, accused the Biden administration of a coverup.

“The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow walked the investigation and killed it,” he said. 

Documents released by the White House on Thursday include partially redacted exchanges between federal law enforcement officials about how to proceed with the case at various times, including a November 2021 email from an unidentified FBI agent pushing back on the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section’s decision not to prosecute.

But the records also show that DOJ officials subsequently allowed the investigation to continue, and in 2023 approved a “full field investigation” that included interviews with canvassers. 

An FBI document dated September 2025, which was among the records released after Trump’s speech, states that the case was closed “because logical investigation and/or leads have been exhausted, and the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.” But it was unclear from the released documents when that decision was made.

California

As he has repeatedly done before, Trump pointed to California’s recent primary election as an example of a problem in the nation’s voting systems.

“As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor was held on June 2 – long time ago. But it was just completed a few days ago on July 10,” he said. “Think of that – much more than one month. Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.”

“This is worse than any third world country,” he falsely added. “There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

California does take a long time to count its votes, but July 10 is not when the state completed its counting, but rather when it certified its election.

Election certification, as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission explains, is “the process of election officials attesting that the election results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in a particular election.” Beyond just counting, certification involves various audits and tests to ensure that the vote is accurate.

By state law, California county election officials have 30 days to report their results to the secretary of state, who then must certify the results within another eight days. But county officials count and report on the vast majority of ballots within just 13 days, and news organizations are able to confidently call races well before that.

In the case of the June election, the Associated Press called the L.A. mayoral race on June 8 and the gubernatorial race on June 9. Both of those timelines are considered protracted, compared with other states, but Californians have known who will be on their ballots in November for more than a month.

“California wasn’t counting ballots up until last week. California finished counting weeks ago,” Becker of CEIR said. “It was just doing all of that work of auditing and reconciling and checking and double-checking, allowing for legal challenges if there were going to be any, before certifying.”

Becker said California has “one of the longer” certification periods, but that other states, such as Wisconsin, also have them. “Every state takes weeks to certify,” he said. “That’s normal because you need time to check and double-check and audit and recount and reconcile and do all of the things to make sure transparently that the count was the count that you’re reporting out is correct. You want states to take time with this.”

California’s slow vote-counting does not inherently mean there is an election integrity issue. In fact, some of the time is spent on tasks that increase confidence in the election. 

For instance, officials are “required to conduct a public 1% manual tally of the ballots tabulated by the county’s voting system in order to verify the accuracy of the automated count,” California’s secretary of state webpage says. The state also requires signature verification for mail-in ballots.

As we’ve explained before, the main reason why California is so slow is because the state sends mail-in ballots to all of its more than 23 million registered voters and 80% or more of votes are typically cast via mail.

Dealing with mail ballots is more time-consuming, as the ballots, which must be postmarked by the election day, are counted as long as they are received within a week and because the state allows voters to resolve any signature verification issues up to eight days before counties certify their results.

“The California primary went off very well. Fairly high turnout. The results stood,” Becker said, despite what he called Trump and his administration’s “slander of California election officials.”

“There are no notable legal challenges that I’m aware of with regard to the results of the primary. The people who got the most votes are advancing to the general election,” he said. “Everything actually went well. It’s just the bluster and the rhetoric that creates an image of chaos.”

SAVE America Act

Trump pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, saying that the bill “requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that?” The bill requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote, he added. But it may not be that simple for some voters. Election experts say the bill would make it difficult for some to register and cast a vote.

As we’ve explained before, 36 states already have some form of voter ID requirements, but most accept a wider range of IDs than the SAVE America Act would. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation, has said that the bill’s voter ID requirements “are stricter than those most states use.”

Acceptable IDs in those 36 states “often” include student IDs, or hunting and fishing licenses, NCSL said. Some states accept non-photo identification, such as a bank statement. The SAVE America Act limits acceptable identification for voting to: a state-issued driver’s license or ID card issued by the motor vehicle agency that includes a photo and expiration date, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a photo ID issued by a tribal government that includes an expiration date. Those voting by mail would need to submit a copy of a photo ID, or the last four digits of their Social Security number and an affidavit saying that they couldn’t obtain a copy of their ID.

Under the bill, Americans would need to prove citizenship when registering to vote or changing their registration. For most people, that would mean presenting, in person to an election official, either only a U.S. passport, or a certified birth certificate along with a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID. Election experts have raised concerns about millions of Americans not having a passport or ready access to their birth certificates, and the bill creating too many hurdles to cast a vote.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us earlier this year that the legislation wouldn’t meet the dictionary definition of “disenfranchise,” which is to “deprive a person of the right to vote.” But it would make registering and voting harder. “That extra hassle and expense would mean that some citizens eligible to register and vote will in practice not complete the needed process even though the bill does not take away their legal right to register or to vote.”

Trump also referred to an amendment to the bill that would eliminate universal voting by mail. “You would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel,” he said.

That’s more restrictive than the practice in the majority of states. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 29 states allow “no-excuse” mail-in voting, which means that voters don’t need to provide a reason when requesting a mail-in ballot.

As he often does, Trump made the unfounded claim that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt.” Election experts have told us that while fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than in-person voting, it is still relatively rare, and there is no evidence to support claims of widespread fraud. Trump himself has voted several times by mail, including once earlier this year.

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Australia’s Lucas Herbert leads the field after a record-equalling 62, while Bryson DeChambeau was hit with a late penalty

An opening birdie for the 2011 champion Darren Clarke. He’s +2. Apropos of nothing, and just because I happen to have the stat to hand, so may as well share it, Clarke is joint holder of the record for most appearances by an Open champion before his first victory. That’s 19, after his 2011 win, and he shares the number with Phil Mickelson (2013). Nick Price (1994) is next on the list.

Birdie for Jackson Suber at 2, and the leader stretches his advantage at the top! He tugged his drive into the rough down the left, but got a decent lie, and was able to wedge over the flag from 90 yards to 12 feet. One fairly straight roll later, and he moves to -6. Meanwhile Laurie Canter nearly aces the 4th. His tee shot lands just past the bunker guarding the front left and serenely glides to kick-in distance, though it was never threatening to drop, always on a route below the hole. The 36-year-old Englishman is -2.

Prefer full-size headphones to earbuds? These are the best over-ear headphones you can buy, according to CNET's headphones expert.

AWS says a billing software bug caused some customers to see wildly inflated estimated charges, including reports of accounts showing bills in the billions or even trillions of dollars. The Register reports: An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) popped up at 1:33 am Pacific time on Friday informing users that Cost Explorer was "reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data." As of writing, the issue is still unresolved despite AWS trying several different things to get it fixed. The company apparently identified the root cause within an hour and a half of beginning its investigation, only describing it as "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem." AWS followed up by pausing estimated bill updates, saying customers would continue to see the inflated figures already displayed, but that those estimates would not increase further. "The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges," AWS explained, noting that customers don't need to take any action, like, we imagine, flooding the help portal with tickets telling them what they already know, for instance. "Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data," AWS added. After we first published this article, Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue. The company says that it's begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console to correct billing numbers, and that all customers should see corrected amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon pacific time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sister of the South Carolina senator who died last Saturday has not previously held any elected office

Donald Trump on Friday said he had encouraged Darline Graham to run for a full six-year term representing South Carolina in the US Senate, after she was sworn in to office earlier this week following the sudden death of her brother, Lindsey Graham.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he spoken to Darline Graham at the White House. “I asked Darline, for the Good of our Nation, to run for the U.S. Senate in the Special Republican Primary,” he wrote.

The streaming video company with the world's most subscribers has leaned quickly into AI-assisted production.

109 million people face another day of poor air quality as smoke from blazes in Ontario drifts over the US

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Tens of millions of Americans are enduring another day of smoky skies, irritated eyes and bad air quality, as Canadian wildfire smoke spread again over huge swathes of the US, affecting about 109 million people across the midwest, mid-Atlantic and north-east.

The pungent smoke blanketed cities such as Chicago and Detroit, where residents on Friday were warned to stay indoors and reduce activity levels after the air-quality index reached a “hazardous” 361, according to the government website AirNow.

It's getting even more expensive to be an Apple loyalist.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has baselessly tied alleged declines in sperm counts among teenagers to a “fertility crisis” or an “explosion in infertility.”

There is very little data on sperm counts in teenagers, and there’s mixed evidence on whether they have changed over time in adults. Regardless, experts told us there isn’t reason to believe declining sperm counts are causing the falling rate of childbirths in the U.S., which has more plausible social and behavioral explanations.

On at least a dozen occasions since becoming HHS secretary, Kennedy has claimed there has been a dramatic drop in sperm counts, saying it’s evidence of a health crisis. His interest in this topic goes back nearly a decade.

“Male sperm counts, I think, in this country are down 50% for teenage males,” he said on a May 28 episode of his recently launched podcast, after introducing concerns about a “stunning” drop in the rate of childbirths. “I read the other day that teenage males today have less sperm than the average 65-year-old American man.” At a May 11 event at the White House, he discussed statistics on childbirths, while also claiming a “fertility crisis” involving falling sperm counts in teens. “This is an existential crisis for our country,” he said.

Contrary to Kennedy’s statements, there is very little data about sperm counts in teenagers in the scientific literature at all. The studies establishing sperm counts in healthy adolescents have “never been done,” Dolores Lamb, who studies male reproductive biology and urology at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, told us.

There are some studies that have found about a 50% drop in sperm counts in men over the past half century or so. Kennedy has linked to this research or coverage of it multiple times on X. HHS has previously cited these 2017 and 2023 studies to support Kennedy’s claims, although the agency did not respond to our request for comment.

But other studies have not found such declines, and comparisons to the past are complicated by inconsistencies in how sperm is counted. “I would argue that we don’t yet have consensus,” Allan Pacey, a professor of andrology at the University of Manchester, told us.

In any case, sperm declines are not likely to be a driving factor in today’s falling childbirth rates, experts said.

“Declining sperm count are expected to impact population birth rates significantly only at very advanced stage, as men have multiple opportunities to [conceive],” Dr. Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist and public health physician at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health who co-authored the studies HHS cited, told us in an email, even as he said that in his view, the “strong decline does indicate that there is a problem.”

Alison Gemmill, a reproductive epidemiologist and demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, told us that Kennedy is erroneously conflating the falling fertility rate with a decline in people’s biological ability to conceive. The rate of childbirths has indeed fallen, she said, but it has been driven by a drop in birth among teenagers and women in their 20s.

“What’s going on with people in their teens and 20s is they’re just waiting longer to have kids, and they’re using more effective contraception, and they’re having fewer unintended or unwanted births,” she said. “So, I think the overwhelming majority of evidence points to social and behavioral changes rather than biological changes.”

Nor has there been a recent “explosion,” as Kennedy said, in infertility by its medical definition, Katherine Tierney, an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Western Michigan University, told us in an email. While the fertility rate reflects the rate of childbirths in the population, infertility refers to difficulty becoming pregnant.

“[T]he prevalence of medically-defined infertility in the U.S. has remained fairly stable over time, despite the decline in fertility, which calls into question the proposal that rising infertility is a major driver of the fertility decline,” Tierney said, based on survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Uncertainty About Sperm Count Over Time

There has been controversy for decades about whether sperm counts in the population are falling.

In 1992, Danish researchers pulled together the available data and did a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from multiple past studies on a topic. The researchers concluded that sperm concentration had dropped by more than 40% between 1940 and 1990. (The term sperm count encompasses two related measures: sperm concentration, or the amount of sperm per milliliter of semen, and total sperm count, or the number of sperm per ejaculate.)

Shanna Swan, an environmental reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told us in an email that the 1992 study was “very strong,” adding that it was “further strengthened” by a reanalysis of the data she published five years later. She and her co-authors found an “even steeper” decline in sperm counts in the U.S. and Europe, according to the study. (Swan went on to co-author the more recent studies with Levine that showed a decline in sperm count.)

But Lamb criticized the 1992 study for including relatively little data from the early years of the covered period, among other issues, and said that the authors “assume that the data that’s published in these papers is accurate and precise.” 

In fact, sperm is quite challenging to count, Lamb and Pacey told us.

During much of this study period there was little standardization of sperm counting, Pacey explained in an editorial in 2013. The World Health Organization came out with guidelines in 1980, followed by multiple revisions. But even after this, studies showed that many labs did not follow the guidelines and that there was substantial variation between labs in counts even when they all looked at the same sample.

Ejaculate is a mixture of fluids from different glands, Pacey said. “It’s a viscous fluid, so it’s very difficult to pipette,” he explained, and there are multiple steps in sperm analysis that can introduce errors.

Lamb said that people are supposed to count sperm in specialized glass chambers with a grid after diluting semen and preventing sperm from moving. But labs may instead use disposable chambers to avoid cleaning or fail to properly immobilize the sperm.

Pacey said that he chairs a U.K. advisory committee to a national sperm counting quality assurance program, and there’s still “huge variation” among labs counting the same sample. “That makes me concerned about how accurate we are when we report [sperm count] in papers.” 

Pacey added that sperm counts can also vary within even the same person depending on a variety of factors, such as length of time since last ejaculation and level of sexual stimulation, complicating analyses. And Lamb said that sperm count is a genetic trait and varies geographically. “It’s just biology,” and it’s not that areas with lower sperm counts necessarily have more infertility, she said.

The 2017 and 2023 studies on sperm count from Swan and Levine looked at more recent data than the 1992 study, excluded studies reporting nonstandard methods, excluded men known to be infertile or with exposures implicated in infertility, and otherwise attempted to address prior criticisms.

Sperm counts have “declined by 50-60% between 1973 to 2018, globally, including in North America (mainly US),” Levine said.

Lamb said that the 2017 study’s rigor had improved “a little” but said it still had issues, such as those related to counting sperm.

Despite even further improvements to the 2023 study, which added new data and analyses, “poor data is still poor data,” Lamb said. She added that the authors do not take into account “methodological issues and lack of standardization for semen analysis performance and change in methods over the years.”

Another 2023 meta-analysis by different researchers looking at studies on sperm count in the U.S. and Western Europe between 1993 and 2018 did not find a significant change over this period, including when looking specifically at the U.S.

A 2025 meta-analysis by yet another group also reviewed the U.S. sperm count literature, finding what the authors called “remarkably stable” sperm counts from 1970 to 2018. The researchers generally found no change or increases in various measures of sperm count, with the exception of a decline in sperm concentration, after adjusting for region and fertility status, that was “less than half the annual decline that has been observed in previous global meta-analyses,” the authors wrote.

Pacey said that results from different meta-analyses can vary due to differences in methods and the time period and populations covered. Lamb said the 2025 paper was particularly well done, explaining that it excluded many studies that did not meet its “criteria for rigor, strong experimental design, original data, sample number, etc.”

When three different large meta-analyses are “telling you different things, I would argue we don’t have consensus,” Pacey said, adding that people like Kennedy “kind of cherry-pick the data to suit the argument that they’re making at the time.” 

Regardless, Pacey said, one wouldn’t expect the level of sperm decline that studies have reported to make a major contribution to falling birth rates. “It’s still a decline from normal to normal on average,” he said. 

“When we look at studies that are more well done, there is potentially evidence of a decline, especially a long-term decline,” Gemmill said of the sperm count literature. “But the main takeaway is that when we think of this measure of sperm count, it’s still at levels that we don’t think it’s going to really make an impact on people’s ability to conceive.”

A Lack of Evidence for Teen Comparisons

Kennedy has repeatedly compared today’s teenagers to older men, claiming that “the fertility of our kids is down” and that teens have half the sperm count of a 68-year-old, 65-year-old or 60-year-old man.

“We’re seeing an explosion in infertility,” he said at an event in West Virginia in March 2025, for example. “Teenagers today have 50% of the sperm count” of 68-year-old men, he added.

Despite this rhetoric, there simply aren’t data on sperm counts comparing teens from the general population to men in their 60s.

“The studies on that directly have not been done,” Lamb said, because the panels that review studies with human subjects for institutions are not going to “have parents consent for their boys to masturbate to collect semen samples” in a clinic.

Measures such as total sperm count and volume decline as men age.

There are limited data looking at sperm counts in adolescents with health problems who have given semen samples. Lamb was involved in one study that compared sperm counts in adolescents and adults who were storing sperm samples prior to cancer treatment that might damage their fertility. The study found slightly lower sperm counts in the younger age group than in the adults.

But Lamb said that this study was not meant to establish normal sperm counts for adolescents, but rather to better understand what very young patients undergoing fertility preservation might expect. “The important thing to realize is these boys were seriously ill,” she said, and their sperm counts cannot be taken as representative.

There have also been comparisons of data on sperm counts in young men being considered for military service, some of them technically teenagers, and those of somewhat older men. Researchers in Denmark — some of whom had co-authored the 1992 paper showing falling sperm counts — tracked sperm counts from young men presenting for medical examination with a median age of 19 between 1996 and 2010. They found these young adults’ sperm counts were lower than those of two groups: sperm counts collected between 1996 and 1998 from men whose partners were pregnant, and sperm counts from 1939 to 1943 in men who were part of infertile couples.

The men in the comparison groups were largely in their 20s and 30s, and not in their 60s. But the authors of the study did raise concerns about a generational decline, writing that “there is reason to be concerned about future fertility of young Danish men.” However, the study showed that sperm counts in successive groups of young men presenting for examination rose over the 15 years of the study.

“If you want to do the best study possible, you would do a prospective study where you would actively go out and recruit new cohorts of men every year of a similar age and a similar lifestyle and a similar demographic, and you would follow them over time to see whether sperm counts were declining,” Pacey said. That is what the Danish study did in looking at potential military recruits. And this didn’t show falling sperm counts, he said.

Meanwhile, he said he thought the researchers “overinterpreted” their data on young potential recruits in going back and comparing it to data collected on different groups of men. “If retrospective data is showing one thing and prospective data is showing another, that suggests we have a data problem rather than a biology problem,” he said, adding that he doesn’t think “the study is a sign of a reduction in sperm quality in young men.”

Why Are People Having Fewer Children?

Regardless of the trends in sperm counts, demographers said there are other factors that are likely leading people to have fewer children, despite Kennedy repeatedly connecting it to falling sperm count or infertility.

“We have fertility rates that are just spiraling,” he told Jesse Watters during a Fox News interview in April 2025, going on to reference a 50% drop in sperm counts. “The fertility rate is plummeting,” he said at a June 2025 press conference, again mentioning a halving of sperm counts.

“There’s no particular reason to think that physiological factors would be a big cause of [falling birth rates], when we know there’s lots of social factors that could be contributing,” Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told us.

She said that broadly speaking, birth rates have been falling for 150 years in high-income countries. In the U.S., there was a decline in the 1970s after the Baby Boom, followed by “pretty stable” birth rates through the early 2000s, supported by a relatively high teen birth rate compared with other high-income countries. Birth rates again declined during the Great Recession in 2007 to 2009 and, unexpectedly to demographers, continued to fall, primarily driven by declines in births to teens and young adults in their early 20s, particularly among unmarried people.

Fertility rates are measured in various ways, but one way is to estimate how many babies a woman on average would have over her lifetime using the current birth rates for various age groups of women, or what’s called the total fertility rate. By this measure, the fertility rate in 2024 fell to a low of 1.6 per woman, according to CDC data. Provisional CDC data on birth rates from 2025 indicate they continued to fall.

Kennedy has appeared to refer to these CDC statistics, as well as to Social Security Administration estimates of total fertility rates, when referring to the falling fertility rate.

“When my uncle was president, the fertility rate in this country was 3.5%,” he said at an October 2025 White House event on fertility treatment. “Today it is 1.6%.” He then claimed the average U.S. teenager has half the sperm count of a 65-year-old man.

Hayford said that there are likely multiple social and behavioral changes working together to impact birth rates since the Great Recession. For teens, she said, “it seems pretty clear that that’s about increased contraceptive use,” particularly long-acting methods such as IUDs and implants.

Meanwhile, economic and other factors have affected people’s choices around childbearing.

One possible factor is a sense of economic insecurity that never fully dissipated after the Great Recession, despite macroeconomic recovery, Hayford said. There has also been a decline in the rates at which people get married, she added.

“Global uncertainty has increased, and just general uncertainty about the future,” UCLA’s Gemmill said. ”We’ve seen study after study show that that is also tied to decisions and ambivalence about having children.” 

Gemmill added that studies have shown a rise in “intensive parenting,” or the idea that people feel “they need to give a lot more or … have more resources to support raising children in the United States.” At the same time, people are experiencing economic challenges in the housing market, the price of childcare and the availability of paid family leave, she said.

There’s also a trend toward people staying in school longer and getting more education, Hayford said.

In periods where people are shifting when they have children to later in life, the total fertility rate will likely underestimate the number of children women will have by the end of their childbearing years, Hayford said, as some people might “catch up.”

At the same time, delaying childbearing does tend to lead to a lower total number of children, as people are “more likely to run into problems” with their fertility, Hayford said. People also tend to “reduce their fertility intentions as they get older” based on the other things going on in their lives, she explained.

But apart from age-related declines in the biological ability to bear children, experts pushed back against the idea that there’s been a major rise in infertility, or the rate at which people have trouble becoming pregnant.

For one thing, Hayford said, the fact that declines in the fertility rate are concentrated in unmarried people “is an indicator that it’s probably not physiological processes going on.” If there were some chemical exposure “that was reducing fertility, you would expect to see that among married people as well as among unmarried people,” she said.  

Furthermore, the data that are available on infertility in the U.S. do not indicate any major rise.

It is “very hard” to measure the biological capacity for childbearing over time, Gemmill said. However, when researchers have attempted to track the rate of Americans meeting the medical definition of infertility, “there’s not really much change,” she said, referring to the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth.

Several studies using these data have looked at the rate of infertility — defined as no pregnancy following 12 months of regular, unprotected intercourse — among married and cohabiting women. The studies found no significant change between 1995 and 2019 or, in one case, a small rise between the first and second half of the 2010s.

Another study using this dataset looked at how long women reported trying to become pregnant, finding no significant change overall between 2002 and 2017. The time to pregnancy slightly increased over time for women who had prior children and women over 30.

The fact that both measures of infertility used in these papers “show no or little change in medically-defined infertility offers strong evidence against the idea of an infertility ‘explosion,’” Tierney said, despite increases in the rate at which people seek treatment for infertility and a small increase in people’s perceptions that they are infertile.

None of this is to dismiss the importance of better understanding infertility and reproductive health, Gemmill said.

“I fully think that we need more research on environmental contaminants and sperm and reproductive health conditions,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s at the level — at least based on the human studies that I’ve seen — where it’s going to impact birth rates at a population level. What is happening in the U.S. right now is because of social change.”

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FDA investigation identified a single supplier of the lettuce, but federal warnings did not name the company

Federal health officials have identified lettuce from Mexico served by Taco Bell locations across five US states as a source of the widespread outbreak of the diarrhea-causing parasite cyclospora.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the source late on Thursday and warned consumers not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

Mykhailo Fedorov, celebrated by many for innovative, tech-driven approach, was sidelined for military old guard

Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s abrupt dismissal of Ukraine’s youthful and innovative defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, at precisely the moment Kyiv appeared to be gaining advantages in several spheres of its war with Russia has exposed, not for the first time, a troubling flaw in the president’s leadership.

The move, which has startled senior European officials and caused consternation, and demonstrations, in Ukraine, is all the more shocking given Fedorov’s role in pushing a clear strategy to prosecute the war, leveraging Ukraine’s rapidly developing technological advances in drone and missile technology.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the earthquake had a magnitude of 7.3 with the epicenter 30 miles southwest of Aquiles Serdan, Mexico.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot and killed a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood, relatives say.

A lettuce supplier to fast-food giant Taco Bell has been linked to a nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened thousands of people, the CDC said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the $6.2 million Baby2Baby contract "went through a competitive bidding process." State records reveal it didn't. CBS California Investigates found dozens of similar no-bid deals in the state budget worth over $1 billion.

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

Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel will not ban AI-assisted coding tools, and if anti-AI absolutists have a problem with that, they can "fork it" or "walk away." An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Writing in a lengthy post on the Linux kernel mailing list this week, Torvalds said that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away." The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an "agentic Linux kernel code review system" that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits. But the tool can also waste maintainers' time by sending "false positive" reports of bugs that don't exist, at a rate Sashiko's maintainers estimate is "well within [the] 20% range." In discussing whether maintainers should be subjected to a flood of these kinds of automated, AI-powered bug report emails (true or false), one poster cited the Software Freedom Conservancy's recent statement that the open source community "should support, not just tolerate, those who outright reject LLM-gen-AI systems" and that "every FOSS contributor deserves self-determination regarding LLM-gen-AI." In the face of that statement, Torvalds said that he rejects those who demand that their open source projects not accept any LLM-generated code or revisions. "We're not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it," Torvalds said. Torvalds said his position on this is a pragmatic one that's "based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools." And when it comes to utility, Torvalds said that "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it." [...] While Torvalds acknowledged that "AI isn't perfect," he urged detractors to compare the output of these tools to the performance of human code maintainers. "Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time," Torvalds wrote. "Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for July 18, No. 867.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for July 18, No. 1,855.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for July 18 No. 1,133.

The attacks on Iran’s infrastructure came on the sixth consecutive day of U.S. strikes. A retaliatory attack by Iran caused damage to a power and desalination plant in Kuwait.

Darline Graham indicated in a White House meeting Thursday that she's weighing a bid, CBS News confirmed. A day later, President Trump wrote on Truth Social: "RUN, DARLINE, RUN! "

July 17, 2026 — Recently, the FastFlowLM team joined AMD, marking another key step in AMD’s strategy to advance AI performance and efficiency across the stack. FastFlowLM developed a lightweight, highly optimized inference software flow that delivers fast, efficient large language and multimodal model performance directly on AMD technology-powered AI PCs and workstations.

Credit: Shutterstock

FastFlowLM was built in the open-source ecosystem and made possible with IRON, the open-source NPU compiler technology developed and released by the AMD Research and Advanced Development (RAD) Group. Incubated by RAD and shaped through engagements with external researchers and developers, IRON underpins a fully open stack for AMD leadership agentic AI platforms.

That open foundation earned rapid traction with a vibrant community of developers and independent software vendors. FastFlowLM’s close alignment and deployment with Lemonade, the AMD open-source inference initiative, has been central to ecosystem adoption, making it easy to bring agentic, retrieval-augmented coding and multimodal experiences to AMD platforms.

The FastFlowLM team joins the AMD Artificial Intelligence Group, where their expertise will accelerate AMD’s client and workstation AI software stack and Day-0 enablement of the latest models. AMD remains committed to investing in this open ecosystem, and the company is thrilled to build the future of on-device AI with FastFlowLM.

More: To explore the latest news and capabilities this team is building, download their recent release of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B – the second mixture of experts model released on AMD NPUs. Learn more on GitHub.

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-optimised 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 FastFlowLM Joins AMD to Advance AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.

The European Union is using its Digital Markets Act to crack down on big tech companies that aren't being fair.

Markwayne Mullin at presser repeated many of Trump’s unverified claims from controversial primetime speech

Markwayne Mullin, the US homeland security secretary, doubled down on Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated election claims on Friday amid his agency’s efforts to support the president’s agenda.

Trump used a review compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the basis of many of his unsubstantiated claims on Thursday during his televised primetime address to the nation.

July 17, 2026 — Think of a professional athlete. What separates elite performers is what happens between games: continuous refinement, adjusting to new opponents and sharpening skills based on what the last game exposed.

Agentic AI works the same way. A model is no longer asked for an answer. It’s given a goal and has to keep adapting as environments shift, edge cases emerge and tools change. Unlike a generative model responding to a prompt, an agentic model must plan, use different tools and recover from problems it encounters mid-run.

Credit: NVIDIA

That’s why post-training, the phase that refines a model after initial training on raw data, is no longer a one-time finishing step. It’s continuous, because the environment that agentic models operate in shifts fast. The tools an agent uses can change week to week. Edge cases surface in production that no test set anticipated. Each deployment brings its own codebase, policies and environment.

Post-training runs loop back from production as new problems surface. The compute footprint grows not because any single run is larger, but because the runs never stop. Agentic AI introduces a new compute pattern for post-training, making it the central workload of the agentic era and the primary driver of intelligence per dollar.

The goal of post-training is to maximize intelligence per dollar by maximizing the yield of every forward and backward pass in the continuous learning cycle. The forward pass — inference — is measured in cost per token. That means that every improvement to cost per token flows directly into intelligence per dollar.

Agentic Post-Training Demystified

Post-training is where intelligence is built. In pretraining, the model learns to predict the next token, which gives it fluency but not intelligence. Post-training is where it learns to write code, plan a multistep task, use a search tool and recover when something goes wrong. Inference is what comes after: the model working on the job, priced in cost per token.

Because there’s no answer key to memorize, only a reward, the model learns by reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. When given a task, it writes out an attempt — the forward pass — the same work it does on the job. The attempt is scored, and the lesson updates the model’s weights — the backward pass. Across millions of attempts, intelligence grows.

Each step is compute intensive, and running this loop at scale is an orchestration problem: thousands of environments generating rollouts in parallel, rewards being verified and updated weights flowing back into training with accelerators fully utilized. NVIDIA NeMo open libraries, such as NeMo Gym for training environments and NeMo RL for distributed post-training, turn post-training from bespoke research code into repeatable infrastructure.

Why Intelligence per Dollar Extends Cost per Token

If inference is the revenue engine, post-training is the multiplier: the more capable the model, the higher the value of every token served.

Cost per token is the key metric for the inference factory: the all-in cost of delivering 1 million tokens. Intelligence per dollar sits one layer up, answering a different question: what does it cost to build a model worth serving, and keep it worth serving as its environment changes?

The two are nested, not competing. AI infrastructure that lowers cost per token also lowers the cost of every point of intelligence built into the model. And every point of intelligence built in raises the value of every token the inference factory serves.

In other words, cost per token measures operating yield; intelligence per dollar measures whether the investment in model intelligence is paying off.

Maximizing Intelligence per Dollar: Post-Training Nemotron 3 Ultra

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra — an open weight, 550-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, offers verifiable benchmarks and a fully disclosed post-training recipe run on NeMo RL. It scored 71.7% on a standard real-world coding benchmark, SWE-bench verified, where it produced a working fix for roughly seven in 10 real software bugs from open source projects, each one checked against the project’s own tests.

Illustrative 20 billion rollout tokens, based on prior-generation Nemotron 3 Super’s ~1.2 million rollouts at ~10,000 tokens each, scaled up for the larger Ultra model. Intelligence per dollar between platforms is independent of this assumption; the absolute values scale with the token count.

The NVIDIA Blackwell platform lowers cost per run and makes the frequent post-training the agentic era demands economically viable. That intelligence is reaped across every token served.

The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform extends the trajectory further, training the largest models with one-fourth the GPUs of the Blackwell generation. It was codesigned from end to end to maximize intelligence per dollar for the agentic post-training load: more rollouts per run, more environments in play and post-training cycles that never stop.

Post-Training Workflows in Action

Prime Intellect’s Lab continuously post-trains frontier open models on NVIDIA Blackwell and uses NVIDIA Dynamo for inference orchestration. With Vera Rubin, Prime Intellect plans to scale reinforcement learning environments, generate more rollouts per run and accelerate training-to-inference iteration loops to maximize intelligence per dollar for businesses.

Prime Intellect has optimized its sandbox infrastructure to integrate with NVIDIA Vera CPUs, enabling low-latency, energy-efficient reinforcement learning. Open source tools and models such as NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA NeMo Gym are also integrated into its software stack. When comparing realistic RL sandbox workloads against alternative x86 architectures, Prime Intellect found that Vera delivers, on average, 30% greater throughput per CPU.

Perplexity’s RL post-training stack runs asynchronously across hundreds of NVIDIA GPUs, with an RDMA-based weight transfer engine that syncs trillion-parameter models in under two seconds between training and inference compute nodes. The resulting post-trained Qwen3 235B models are then served on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems.

Together AI provides post-training as a service, including supervised fine-tuning, RL and direct preference optimization. The service is delivered via a feature-rich application programming interface and software development kit that supports the full range of post-training on its AI Native Cloud platform. It has been running on NVIDIA’s platform and optimized kernel libraries, and is looking to harness the Vera Rubin platform next.

Learn more about NVIDIA Vera Rubin, the platform for AI factories to maximize intelligence per dollar across workloads. And explore NVIDIA’s full-stack platform for training frontier models.

Source: Kirthi Develeker, NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA Vera Rubin Maximizes Intelligence per Dollar for Post-Training Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

Collaboration combines Rapidus’ AI-Agentic Design Solution with Cadence InnoStack AI Super Agent to target up to a 2X acceleration of design turnaround times

TOKYO and SAN JOSE, Calif., July 17, 2026 — Rapidus Corporation and Cadence today announced a collaboration to advance agentic AI for advanced-node system-on-chip (SoC) design by integrating the Cadence InnoStack AI Super Agent into the Rapidus AI-Agentic Design Solution (Raads). The joint effort combines Rapidus’ AI-native design and manufacturing ecosystem for advanced-node semiconductors with Cadence’s agentic AI design orchestration technology to help design teams improve productivity, accelerate time to market and enhance design quality across the SoC design lifecycle. As part of this collaboration, Rapidus is targeting up to a 2X improvement in design turnaround time (TAT) over traditional flows.

The buildout of AI infrastructure, and the coming wave of physical AI-powered systems, requires tight, system-level co-optimization across semiconductor design, manufacturing, packaging and systems. Agentic AI is critical for this next generation of advanced SoCs. As part of today’s announcement, Rapidus is extending its Raads lineup with the introduction of Raads Navigator and Raads Indicator to enhance quality assurance and support designers in resolving design issues and challenges. Significantly, the new tools have been integrated with the Cadence InnoStack AI Super Agent to enable agentic design orchestration across key SoC workflows, automating and coordinating tasks from early architectural exploration through implementation and signoff. By applying data-driven optimization across the design lifecycle, the integration is intended to help teams manage advanced-node complexity, improve design predictability and scale engineering productivity while driving toward Rapidus’ design TAT reduction goals.

“Advanced-node SoC design increasingly requires AI agents that can orchestrate complex workflows across the design lifecycle, not just optimize individual tasks,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO, Cadence. “By combining Cadence’s InnoStack AI Super Agent with Rapidus’ Raads platform, we are extending agentic AI into a leading-edge semiconductor ecosystem, enabling customers to improve productivity, accelerate design closure and bring more advanced silicon to market faster.”

Rapidus and Cadence will discuss the collaboration at CadenceLIVE Japan 2026, where Dr. Atsuyoshi Koike, representative director and CEO of Rapidus will deliver a keynote on how Rapidus is evolving Raads with Cadence Agentic AI and EDA to improve efficiency and quality in advanced-node SoC development.

“At its completion, our Innovative Integration for Manufacturing facility will be the most advanced, AI-native foundry where AI is incorporated at almost every stage of semiconductor manufacturing,” said Koike. “By evolving Raads and integrating it with Cadence’s InnoStack AI Super Agent, we are strengthening our AI-agentic design environment to help customers manage increasing SoC complexity, improve engineering productivity and realize the full value of Rapidus’ advanced process technologies. In working closely with Cadence on InnoStack and additional Cadence AI Super Agent solutions, we see a clear path to significantly reducing design turnaround time and enabling faster innovation on Rapidus’ advanced nodes.”

To learn more about the Rapidus Raads tools, visit the Rapidus website. To learn more about Cadence AI-driven design solutions and the InnoStack AI Super Agent, visit cadence.com/ai-for-design. For more information on this collaboration and CadenceLIVE Japan 2026, visit the CadenceLIVE Japan event page.

More from HPCwire: Cadence Completes Agentization of Chip and System Design Software

About Cadence

Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2025, Cadence was recognized by Fortune as one of the world’s top 100 best companies to work for. Cadence solutions offer limitless opportunities.

About Rapidus Corporation

Rapidus Corporation aims to develop and manufacture the world’s most advanced logic semiconductors. We will create new industries together with our customers through the development and provision of services to shorten cycle times in design, wafer processes, 3D packaging and more. We will continue to challenge ourselves in order to contribute to the fulfillment, prosperity and happiness of people’s lives through the use of semiconductors.

Source: Cadence

The post Cadence and Rapidus Partner on Agentic AI for Advanced SoC Design appeared first on HPCwire.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Axios: Kimi K3, a massive new model by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, threatens the foundations of Americas AI boom. Its release Thursday dazzled developers, jolted Silicon Valley and reset the AI race overnight. Kimi immediately vaulted into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests by AI evaluator Arena. In Arenas broader text ranking, Kimi finished ahead of Anthropics Opus 4.8 -- the company's flagship model until Fable 5 arrived in June -- while costing 40% less. Unlike the premium U.S. models its challenging, Moonshot plans to release Kimi as an open-weight model on July 27 -- allowing companies and governments to customize and run it on their own systems. Kimi's arrival suggests that cushion may have collapsed far faster than expected. "The entire game has changed. I expect this will trigger some code red for some," AI analyst Kim Isenberg predicted. For companies, governments and developers, a model that performs near the frontier, costs 40% less and can be customized or run in-house may be the more attractive option. Its very existence puts pressure on the pricing power of U.S. labs, the enormous valuations built around their technological edge, and the case for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on ever-larger data centers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Government has ‘last chance’ to get it right, says incoming PM, while anxiety surrounds his choice of chancellor

Andy Burnham pledged to lead a united Labour government free of infighting and factional politics as he took over as leader, despite anxiety on the left of party about the prospect of Shabana Mahmood as chancellor.

Burnham, who will become prime minister on Monday, set out a distinctly leftwing vision for Britain. He promised to undo the Thatcherism of the 1980s, bring in more public ownership of utilities, find the money to fix social care and build a new generation of council homes.

Former Meta employees allege the company penalized them for taking medical leave.

The president’s Orwellian speech on Thursday was just the latest instance of his denialism. It is up to us to resist

On Thursday night, Donald Trump did it again, trashing another American tradition with his primetime address from the White House’s East Room about election integrity. Other presidents have used such speeches in times of national emergency, to announce major new policies designed to improve Americans’ lives or to honor American traditions.

Not Trump.

Former Democratic Unionist party leader’s legal team has lodged documents with the court of appeal in Belfast

Jeffrey Donaldson is to appeal against his conviction for rape and other sexual offences against two children.

The former Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader’s legal team lodged documents with the court of appeal in Belfast on Friday, his solicitor, John McBurney, said.

I tried the new Knockoff extension to filter out all the cheaply made junk I don't want to buy.

Reform leader says he’s been ‘demonised’ since revelation he received £5m from billionaire before election

Nigel Farage has accused people raising questions about his financial backing of “demonising” him as part of a “coordinated pile-on” to stop Reform UK.

In one of his first speeches since the opening of two parliamentary standards inquiries into his financial support, the Reform leader said he had been “dehumanised in the most extraordinary way” in recent months, after the Guardian revealed in April that he had received a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before the last election.

The FBI arrested a Florida man accused of uploading fake Steam games containing malware that stole passwords, data, and cryptocurrency wallet credentials from victims. Prosecutors say the scheme infected about 8,000 people, compromised roughly 80 crypto wallets, and stole at least $220,000 through games that appeared legitimate but secretly carried malware. TechCrunch reports: On Tuesday, the FBI arrested Zyaire Wilkins, a 21-year-old Florida resident and student. On Wednesday, prosecutors accused him and a number of unnamed co-conspirators of hacking crimes. Over the past two years, Wilkins and his partners allegedly published several malware-laden video games on Steam, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, and PirateFi. Using that malware, says the FBI, Wilkins and his accomplices infected around 8,000 victims, and then hacked around 80 cryptocurrency wallets to steal at least $220,000 worth of crypto. Wilkins and the others marketed their malicious video games on Discord, LinkedIn, and Telegram, according to the authorities. [...] After the FBI identified another person involved in the crimes, according to the complaint, federal agents interviewed them. The unnamed person said they worked with other people to raise money to launch and market the malicious games in return for sharing some of the stolen cryptocurrency. The FBI identified a specific crypto account involved in the scheme, and then traced cryptocurrency payments made with that account to buy several gift cards, including for UberEats. After subpoenaing Uber, the feds were able to see that the gift cards were linked to an account that made deliveries to Wilkins, who went by the nickname Sibel.eth online, according to the complaint. The feds then got a search warrant for Wilkins' residence, where they seized his MacBook laptop, cellphones, other devices, and digital wallets. According to the complaint, he refused to speak or answer any questions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Cup comes down to final two games.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will attend the World Cup final to see his country take on reigning champions Argentina, his government said Friday.

Sanchez, a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump – who also plans to attend Sunday’s final in New Jersey – will then travel to Algeria for an official visit. AFP

World No 2 was in full flow off the tee but off colour on the greens and knows he needs to make a charge on moving day

One of the sweetest sounds in sport is the elongated swoosh that comes as Rory McIlroy’s driver connects with his ball. Really, it is a beautiful thing. You imagine the impact will be a violent clank. Instead it is more like a yogi softly exhaling having found nirvana.

But as McIlroy stepped on the 414-yard par-four 9th on Friday, he was still searching for inner peace. He was plus one for the tournament. The leaderboard was turning a sea of red. And he had substantial ground to make up.

Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, wildfires in Europe, ICE in Maine and the World Cup semi-finals – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Anthropic is reportedly in very early talks to lease computing power from Meta in a potential deal worth around $10 billion. The discussions follow Anthropic's recent compute deal with SpaceX and come as Meta explores selling excess AI capacity as part of a broader push to turn its massive infrastructure spending into a cloud business. CNBC reports: Access to enough AI chips remains a challenge for firms like Anthropic, which places usage limits on its most advanced models like Fable. [...] Meta could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures, including for AI infrastructure, in 2026. Last October, Zuckerberg said that companies are regularly "asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Lily Collins at Wimbledon to the cast of Love Island, heels-averse cohort is stepping it up a notch

Gen Z, the flats-only generation, has finally succumbed to the heel – albeit a tiny one. Long vocally anti-heel, the cohort who were born between 1997 and 2012 have famously shunned millennials’ obsession with Jimmy Choos in favour of pancake-flat shoes, from the Adidas Samba “It-trainer” to the split-toe Margiela Tabi and so-called “French girl ballet flats”.

But they now appear to be embracing a potential gateway heel, typically measuring in the region of 1.5in (3.8cm) or the height of a triple-A battery.

The bike isn't motorized and is completely toddler-powered.

£200,000 investment comes after harvests in Britain hit by wet winter, spring frost and hail, then heatwaves

The owner of Ribena is to invest £200,000 in helping blackcurrant bushes withstand stress after extreme weather put a squeeze on this year’s UK harvest.

That harvest is now under way in the berry’s main growing regions including East Anglia, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Kent and Scotland. It is expected to be about 10% below the average of 10,000 tonnes, as the climate crisis drives extreme weather across Britain and elsewhere.

July 17, 2026 — Digital Catapult has welcomed eleven leading organizations to the third cohort of its Quantum Technology Access Programme (QTAP), delivered in collaboration with the National Quantum Computing Centre’s (NQCC) SparQ program. Designed to accelerate the practical application of quantum innovation in industry, the cohort includes NatWest, the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), and Health Innovation North West Coast, part of the UK’s Health Innovation Network.

Credit: Digital Catapult

For the first time, the program will apply quantum innovation to financial services and banking operations. NatWest will explore how quantum solutions could help detect fraud and illicit activity across large transaction networks, while CTA Fintech Solutions will examine cross-system optimization of legacy-to-cloud transaction flows to improve cost efficiency and strengthen resilience in highly regulated environments. This focus on financial services reflects growing demand for quantum innovation and its role in building the UK’s sovereign capability while identifying new practical use cases for the technology.

One novel use case set to be explored through the program will apply quantum computing to improve diagnostic modeling, treatment pathways and outcome forecasting for thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), a rare and life-threatening blood disorder considered a medical emergency. Through its participation, Health Innovation North West Coast aims to improve health and care outcomes for patients with TTP, supported by innovation and technology consultancy and access to ORCA Computing’s PT-2 quantum computer.

The program will also trial and validate use cases across defense and security, supply chains and logistics, and transport and infrastructure, demonstrating the potential of quantum innovation across UK industry and its role in supporting the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy. The latest cohort will demonstrate how quantum as a frontier technology can be applied to all the high-growth sectors outlined in the Industrial Strategy, underpinning economic growth. QTAP provides UK-based companies with a guided pathway to understand quantum technologies, assess their sector-specific value, and move from concept to practical application through expert guidance and experimentation.

“Through SparQ, we’re helping organizations move towards practical exploration of quantum computing,” said Dr. Simon Plant, Deputy Director for Innovation for NQCC. “This cohort demonstrates growing confidence in quantum computing across UK industry, building the expertise, evidence and partnerships needed to accelerate responsible adoption and strengthen the UK’s quantum capabilities.”

Previous participants include Vodafone, Airbus, Rolls-Royce, the Port of Dover and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Now in its third year, the program’s latest phase will combine Digital Catapult’s expertise with the NQCC’s expanding national capability in quantum computing and testbeds. The cohort will explore two high-impact quantum use case streams: combinatorial optimization, addressing challenges such as logistics, resource allocation and scheduling; and quantum machine learning, focused on supporting next-generation data analysis and pattern discovery.

The program will run until February 2027, supporting new commercial and collaborative partnerships that will help advance quantum innovation across UK industry. This includes continued collaboration with NQCC and technical partner ORCA Computing, enabling deep tech companies to scale across the UK economy.

To learn more about the cohort’s progress and our work with NQCC and ORCA Computing, sign up to the newsletter here.

About Digital Catapult

Digital Catapult accelerates the practical application of deep tech innovation to equip the UK to be future ready. The organization bridges the gap between industry, government, investors and academia to unlock commercial opportunities and create new market pathways for startups with pioneering solutions that drive sustainable economic growth. Digital Catapult enables partnering organizations to think differently, build resilience and achieve success by challenging purposefully and using expertise to equip them with the deep tech capabilities they need for the long-term. Digital Catapult’s national reach focuses on the South West and Wales, London, the North East, and Northern Ireland. As part of the Innovate UK Catapult Network, Digital Catapult considers significant challenges and opportunities facing the UK where technology can provide meaningful and sustainable solutions.

Source: Digital Catapult

The post Digital Catapult Advances Industry Quantum Adoption with New QTAP Cohort appeared first on HPCwire.

• Australian sets clubhouse lead at eight under after a 62

• Sam Burns holed out on 18 to match milestone

Five feet and three inches sat between Lucas Herbert and the making of history. Another distance was far, far more relevant; that between the Australian golfer’s ears. Thousands have tried to produce a 61 in the long, celebrated history of men’s major championships. There is a reason no one has succeeded. Including, at 12 minutes past two on Friday afternoon, Herbert. No wonder his instant reaction was to slump with hands over his knees.

“I would back Lucas 100 times out of 100 to hole those,” said Herbert’s caddie, Nick Pugh. “He’s one of the best putters, if not the best putter in the world. He knocks them in with aplomb all day long. But when your heart is racing and you know what’s on the line, there’s probably just that little distraction.

Brenda Fricker won an Academy Award for 1989's "My Left Foot," played the Pigeon Lady in "Home Alone 2" and appeared in "A Time to Kill" and "So I Married an Axe Murderer."

Novak Djokovic talks to "CBS Mornings" about still competing at 39 years old, the U.S. Open and Serena Williams' return to the court.

Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., lost more than $630,000 in investment income last quarter after he put $3.7 million in campaign funds into the cryptocurrency industry, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission released on Wednesday. Amid those losses, bundlers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have stepped in to prop up his campaign.

Two-thirds of the money Thanedar raised in the last quarter came from AIPAC, which collects money from multiple donors and funnels it to the pro-Israel group’s preferred candidates, according to his campaign’s most recent FEC filing. Less than a quarter of those donors listed Michigan as their state of residence. Thanedar, who is facing a challenge from a democratic socialist in next month’s Democratic primary, was in the minority of House Democrats who voted against cutting $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel from a State Department spending bill this week.

“They’re not raising a lot of money from donors at this point,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at the watchdog campaign finance group OpenSecrets, about Thanedar’s filing. Asked about the investment losses Thanedar listed in the filing, Glavin said, “That’s a lot of money for a campaign to be losing, especially when the market is at record highs.”

Thanedar — who has made his money building, buying, and selling off companies — has heavily self-funded his campaign to stave off Donavan McKinney, a Michigan state representative aiming to maintain a wave of socialist success that’s seen challengers from the left topple establishment favorites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado so far this midterm cycle. Thanedar gave himself $800,000 in June, the latest in more than $12 million he’s loaned his campaign since he first ran for Congress in 2021. He outraised McKinney last quarter, though Thanedar’s campaign carries his personal loans as debt.

In his most recent campaign filing, Thanedar reported more than $3.9 million in investment income losses this cycle.

Related

There’s a New Democratic Machine. It’s Unabashedly Socialist.

The August 4 Michigan primary is among the next races to pit a democratic socialist candidate against an incumbent. McKinney — whose endorsers include Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Metro Detroit chapter of Democratic Socialists for America, several major unions, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — is running on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a national homes guarantee, opposing President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, and ending military aid to Israel. He has hit Thanedar for buying his seat in Congress, paying campaign expenses with taxpayer money, and spurning his constituents.

Deep-pocketed donors “get a massive return on investment when Shri Thanedar votes with 99.9% of Republicans and against a majority of Democrats to keep spending our taxpayer dollars funding Israel’s genocide, or when he votes for Trump’s crypto corruption, or even when he simply refuses to answer his constituent’s calls during a crisis,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi, calling Thanedar’s service in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District “representation for the 1% at the expense of one of the poorest districts in the country.”

“We cannot be the party of the working class when we’re represented by multimillionaires, bankrolled by AIPAC donors, doing the bidding of corporate interests,” he added.

It’s not unusual for candidates to put campaign funds into investment vehicles, but Thanedar’s decision to invest campaign funds in the cryptocurrency industry in 2024 was notable, said Glavin. At the time, the pro-crypto lobby was ramping up its spending on elections. 

“There are examples of candidates who have lost significant funds in putting their money into the market,” Glavin said. “But you’re usually going to find that they’re going to put it in something a little less volatile than the crypto market.”

The campaign’s investment losses were only partly offset by contributions from AIPAC bundlers. Glavin said the debt incurred from Thanedar’s loans to the campaign and the share of his most recent fundraising haul boosted by AIPAC suggest the campaign isn’t doing much on the fundraising front. 

“It’s not like the campaign is actually going out and soliciting those funds,” he said.

Thanedar was a target of AIPAC during his first congressional run; the group endorsed his opponent and its super PAC spent millions against him in 2022. Since then, however, Thanedar has faced scrutiny for his increasingly cozy relationship with the pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC endorsed him during his 2024 reelection campaign, and a pop-up political action committee funded by AIPAC’s super PAC spent more than $2 million against his opponent that cycle. 

The Michigan congressman is featured on AIPAC’s political portal for donors, which it uses to funnel contributions to its preferred candidates. As the primary election nears, Thanedar’s critics have recirculated a video he filmed while on an AIPAC trip to Israel in 2023. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Thanedar is facing a potential upset as some members of the Congressional Black Caucus reportedly consider endorsing McKinney against him — an unusual move given that the group tends to side with incumbents. Outside groups have spent just over $2 million on the race so far, all backing McKinney or opposing Thanedar. It’s not clear whether any other groups plan to spend for Thanedar in the final weeks of the race. 

In May, Thanedar requested an extension on this year’s financial disclosure until August 13, after the primary. Members of Congress are required to file reports each May, though it’s not necessarily unusual to ask for an extension. Thanedar also filed his last disclosure in August. 

At the end of 2025, Thanedar reported to the FEC $11.5 million in debt from loans he’s given his campaign since 2021, when he first ran for Congress and initially loaned himself $5 million. 

It’s becoming more common for candidates to spend upward of $1 million self-financing their campaigns, Glavin said. The massive spending of personal wealth became less risky after a 2022 Supreme Court ruling lifted limits on how much campaigns can spend to pay back a loan from a candidate.  

Before, candidates understood themselves to be on the hook for the money they use to self-finance, Glavin said. Now, they figure that with the power of incumbency, “I can start raising money, and then I build up a donor base, and then I can get some of that money back, even if it’s five, six years down the road,” Glavin said. “A campaign committee can carry that debt for any amount of time.”

The post Two-Thirds of Shri Thanedar’s Campaign Cash Came Through AIPAC as He Lost Over $600K appeared first on The Intercept.

Ronald Fischer, 70, was sentenced to life in his absence after telling lawyer he planned to ‘enjoy life in another country’

A “master yachtsman” who went on the run for more than two decades after fleeing a sexual assault trial in Rhode Island which resulted in his conviction despite his absence was captured on Thursday on a sailboat off New Jersey’s coast, according to authorities.

Ronald L Fischer, 70, had been considered one of Rhode Island’s most wanted fugitives before his arrest, state police officials said in a statement on social media. And his case had been mentioned repeatedly over the years on the true-crime television program America’s Most Wanted.

The Spanish-language broadcaster has won over millions of US viewers with its energetic commentary during games

Soccer fans looking to watch the 2026 World Cup on US television have been presented with two very different options this tournament.

The first is Fox Sports, a cousin of Fox News owned by the same parent company and the sole network airing matches in English in the US. Audiences tuning in to Fox, which acquired the exclusive English broadcast rights in 2015, are met with coverage that reflects the network’s “America first” aesthetic, with promos for pro-Donald Trump talkshows, advertising breaks during games and the frequent, grating presence of host Alexi Lalas.

Republican Josh Hawley accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s firm of relentlessly pursuing and attempting to bankrupt her

A US senator has accused Meta of using lawfare in “efforts to destroy” a whistleblower who made allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers.

In a letter to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded to know what measures Meta had taken to monitor Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former global head of public policy, and her family.

Even if you don't use AI, I found some useful features in the iOS 27 beta. They're smaller, quality-of-life changes, but you won't want to skip them.

With cries of malfeasance and injustice over referee decisions, Fifa actions and even Argentina’s run, the tournament is a mirror of a theory-pilled society

“Life is unfair.”

This was the first thing that Hossam Hassan, Egypt’s fiery coach, told the media after his country’s devastating 3-2 loss to Argentina in the last 16. The legendary striker turned manager had been minutes away from orchestrating one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history. The Pharaohs were up 2-0 against the defending world champions. Then, late in the second half, Argentina staged an extraordinary comeback, scoring three goals in 13 minutes, bringing Egypt’s storybook run to a sudden end.

Tehran bombs US allies in Middle East after US attacks on bridges, energy facilities and key port

The US hit bridges, energy facilities and a key Iranian port on Friday, expanding its aerial campaign against Iran, and prompting swift Iranian strikes against US allies in the Middle East.

US airstrikes hit bridges in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, killing at least seven people, Iranian state TV reported. The bridges were a key transit point for Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main port. Further US airstrikes brought down a tower in Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman that the US military claimed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) used to facilitate attacks on vessels in the strait of Hormuz. The US also targeted key electrical infrastructure and Iranshahr airport.

Another 22 reportedly injured while mourning Palestinian killed in Israeli attack earlier in the day

An Israeli strike on a funeral in the Gaza Strip has killed at least seven people and injured another 22, according to a local hospital.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

European Commission proposal to overhaul emissions trading system would give companies less demanding pathway to reductions

Europe’s most effective method of cutting dangerous planet-heating gases risks being weakened after the European Commission proposed an overhaul of its flagship carbon market, critics have said.

In a long-awaited review of the European Union emissions trading system (ETS), the European Commission proposed giving companies a less demanding and cheaper pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Certified refurbished tech can help you save on your device, but don't expect all-time-low price drops.

AI video generators are not created equal. These are the best ones we've tested.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI, telling them to preserve potentially relevant documents and communications as it continues to pursue its trade secret lawsuit against the AI company. The Financial Times (paywalled) reports that Apple has targeted around 40 former employees with legal preservation letters, acting on its belief that the alleged misappropriation of confidential information may extend beyond the individuals named in its original complaint. The development follows Apple's lawsuit filed last week against OpenAI, in which the company alleges a coordinated effort to obtain confidential information relating to its hardware engineering and product development. Apple claims OpenAI recruited key engineers, including former Apple executives Tang Tan and Chang Liu, and benefited from proprietary designs, manufacturing processes, and other trade secrets. Tan is OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer and a 24-year Apple veteran who led product design, while Liu is on the hardware team at OpenAI after working as a senior system electrical engineer at Apple.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trillions of wealth passed down by the baby boomers will likely go to younger Americans who are already rich. Here's how much they'll get.

Exclusive: Grants are part of controversial package criticised as misuse of public money to influence European politics

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.

The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration. Some former US officials have criticised the funding as a misuse of public money to seek influence over foreign politics.

July 17, 2026 — Last fall, Los Alamos National Laboratory unveiled plans for two new supercomputers, Mission and Vision, built by HPE and powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. This summer, the first Vera CPU server arrives at Los Alamos for installation in a test bed, the result of an ongoing, rigorous codesign collaboration between Los Alamos, NVIDIA and their partners. Vera is powered by NVIDIA’s custom Olympus core, and will support both HPC and agentic AI workloads that accelerate pressing scientific and engineering efforts at the Laboratory.

The Lab’s forthcoming supercomputers are the product of a rigorous codesign process with its partners.

“We’ve been engaged with our partners very productively over the long term on workload characterization, evaluation of design alternatives and preproduction assessments,” said Ben Santos, HPC Platforms program director at Los Alamos. “The Mission and Vision systems are designed to deliver over three times the per-CPU performance of our current Crossroads supercomputer while providing more than four times the memory per core and lower power consumption. Each Rubin GPU of Mission and Vision is designed to deliver over 12 times the AI performance over the Hopper GPUs of Venado, and that performance aligns well with AI workloads and agentic needs and means we can be efficient and agile in how we tackle critical problems of interest to the nation.”

“Scientific discovery is entering a new era where supercomputers must bring simulation, AI and agentic reasoning together to help researchers solve problems once beyond reach,” said Dan Ernst, senior director of supercomputing products at NVIDIA. “Through our codesign work with Los Alamos and HPE, the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform will bring Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs to Mission and Vision, delivering the memory bandwidth, energy efficiency and accelerated AI performance needed for the Laboratory’s most demanding HPC, AI and agentic AI workloads.”

“For decades, HPE and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have collaborated to target specific mission and workload needs by designing and developing state-of-the-art systems using diverse HPC architectures,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager of HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “We are proud to deepen our partnership on the latest codesign process for Mission and Vision to bring advanced supercomputing that will only further the Laboratory’s significant contributions to science.”

Los Alamos has a longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA and its partners on CPU technology, which provide high-memory bandwidth, low-latency compute and power-efficiency. That collaboration continues with the Arm-compatible NVIDIA Vera CPUs developed by NVIDIA and used in HPE’s build, which will support the Mission, Vision and Veritas high-performance computing systems forthcoming at Los Alamos.

“Focusing our codesign efforts on largely unmet needs, particularly high-memory bandwidth per core and strong support for irregular applications, has resulted in significant performance and efficiency improvements for our most challenging workloads,” said Galen Shipman, chief architect of advanced technology systems at Los Alamos.

AI-Era Supercomputing

Mission and Vision, to be built by HPE, will be based on the new HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 equipped with the next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, combining NVIDIA Vera CPUs with NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, and interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking. The Lab’s Institutional Computing program will deploy a third system, Veritas, which will arrive alongside Mission and Vision and serve the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

Los Alamos has been an early driver of high-performance, energy-efficient CPUs, and the codesign process, in focusing on applications specific to Los Alamos, has helped accelerate the technology as it finds a larger ecosystem of users. Los Alamos was the first major customer to deploy the Arm-based NVIDIA Grace Hopper platform in the Venado supercomputer, installed in 2025 and built by HPE.

Vera CPUs mark another milestone, extending NVIDIA’s CPU portfolio into agentic AI for modeling and simulation. Agentic AI represents the deployment of AI systems that can complete tasks in a self-directed way, reducing time-to-insight in some cases from months to minutes, freeing up experts to frame new questions and allowing researchers to probe previously inaccessible regimes of physics.

The delivery of the first Vera CPU blade for initial testbed deployment is scheduled for this summer at Los Alamos. Starlight, arriving later in 2026, is the first of three purpose-built architectures for the Mission system, built with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, a full-rack supercomputer featuring two racks, each with 18 nodes of Vera CPU, and with 72 nodes of Rubin GPUs. Full deployment of the Mission and Vision systems of Vera CPU and NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL4 rack scale systems built by HPE will follow in 2027 and 2028.

More from HPCwire

• LANL Taps NVIDIA Vera CPUs for Mission, Vision and Veritas Supercomputers
• HPE to build ‘Mission’ and ‘Vision’ Supercomputers for Los Alamos in Collaboration with NVIDIA

Source: LANL

The post Los Alamos to Begin Testing NVIDIA Vera CPU for Mission and Vision Supercomputers appeared first on HPCwire.

July 17, 2026 — The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, will host the inaugural Southeastern Quantum Collaborative (SQC) Colloquium on Monday, August 10 in Charger Theatre on the UAH Campus. The event will bring together leaders from academia, industry and government to explore the future of quantum science and technology. The gathering will highlight the growing role of quantum technologies in national security, aerospace, advanced manufacturing and workforce development while showcasing the Southeast’s emergence as a center for quantum innovation.

The event will highlight emerging research, workforce initiatives and new partnership opportunities across the Southeast and feature a keynote address by the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Multi X Office, Dr. Whitney Mason. Panel discussions and networking opportunities will be aimed at strengthening collaboration among universities, industry and government. The colloquium is free to attend, but registration through the event website is required.

Led through the UAH College of Science, the SQC is a regional consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of quantum technologies while developing the workforce needed to support this rapidly expanding field. The collaborative has grown to nearly 30 partners since its launch in December 2025 and brings together universities, companies and government organizations to position the Southeast as a global hub for quantum innovation.

Founding and inaugural members include UAH, Alabama A&M University, IBM, Davidson Technologies, IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Leidos, TVA and others, with additional government participation continuing to expand.

Scheduled to coincide with the week of the Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., the August colloquium will provide an opportunity for researchers, defense leaders, technology companies and educators to explore how quantum computing and related technologies can accelerate innovation in national security, aerospace, advanced manufacturing and other critical sectors. SMD is one of the nation’s premier defense gatherings, underscoring the close alignment between quantum technologies and Huntsville’s leadership in defense, missile systems and aerospace research.

The collaborative focuses on fostering partnerships that move quantum research from the laboratory into practical applications. Priority areas to be addressed at the colloquium include quantum computing, sensing, communications, networking and algorithms, with an emphasis on supporting national defense, economic development and workforce readiness.

Huntsville offers a unique environment for these efforts through its concentration of defense organizations, aerospace expertise, federal laboratories and technology companies. The region also benefits from nearby access to advanced quantum computing resources, including the D-Wave Advantage2 quantum system hosted by Davidson Technologies, creating new opportunities for collaborative research, student training and real-world experimentation.

“The SQC aims to leverage the region’s unique concentration of cleared defense infrastructure, advanced missile defense expertise and strong base of prime contractors to accelerate the transition of quantum information science and technology into field-ready capabilities for the warfighter,” explains Dr. Rainer Steinwandt, dean of the UAH College of Science. “The Collaborative’s goal is to transform the Southeastern United States into an applied quantum science leader.”

Organizations interested in joining the Southeastern Quantum Collaborative or learning more about the August colloquium are encouraged to visit SQC Membership.

More from HPCwire: Southeastern Quantum Collaborative Forms at UAH with Participation from IBM and IonQ

Source: Russ Nelson, UAH

The post Southeastern Quantum Collaborative to Convene 1st Regional Quantum Colloquium appeared first on HPCwire.

Shift in pecking order illustrates that investors are reassessing outlook for artificial intelligence

Apple overtook Nvidia on Friday to become the world’s most valuable company, reshuffling the top ranks of tech heavyweights as investors reassess the outlook for artificial intelligence.

Apple was last valued at $4.88tn as ⁠its shares held steady, while Nvidia ⁠was roughly at $4.86tn, ​after a 3.5% decline.

UK police adviser in the early 2000s and global consultant in ‘no-body’ homicide cases says he has narrowed down the outback search area

• Peter Falconio murder 25 years on: new footage shows dying Australian outback killer’s refusal to reveal body’s location

The former British government expert who consulted on the search for the remains of the murdered backpacker Peter Falconio says he has now identified a “most likely” potential burial location – an abandoned racetrack only 8km from the scene of the infamous outback attack at Barrow Creek.

In July 2001, Falconio and his partner, Joanne Lees, both from Yorkshire, were ambushed and attacked by Bradley John Murdoch as they drove along a remote stretch of road in Australia’s Northern Territory, about 300km north of Alice Springs.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 17, 2026 — Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters and ASICs, has announced its seventh-generation AI Interconnect Platform, comprising SmartNICs, Storage Controllers, and Data Processing Units (DPUs). Built on Chelsio seventh-generation Unified Wire architecture, the platform delivers native 400Gb Ethernet, Unified RDMA (iWARP and RoCEv2), storage acceleration, and AI infrastructure optimization for cloud, enterprise, storage, and hyperscale deployments. SmartNICs and Storage Controllers are available immediately, while DPUs are available today as an evaluation platform, with production availability planned for December 2026.

Designed for AI training and inference clusters, disaggregated storage, and high-performance networking, the platform combines SmartNICs for high-volume cloud and AI deployments, Storage Controllers for storage acceleration, and DPUs for advanced networking, storage, and security acceleration. Together, they share a common hardware and software architecture that preserves software continuity while enabling scalable, standards-based AI infrastructure.

Building on the proven success of Chelsio T5 and T6 families, the seventh-generation platform extends the company’s leadership in Ethernet networking, delivering higher throughput, lower latency, improved efficiency, and software continuity across SmartNIC, DPU, and storage controller deployments.

With this launch, Chelsio extends its leadership in Ethernet offload for AI, storage, and high-performance networking, enabling CPU-efficient, high-throughput connectivity across GPU clusters, storage, and network fabrics. By combining advanced congestion management, hardware offloads, and a programmable data path, T7 helps eliminate I/O bottlenecks across modern data center infrastructures. This positions Ethernet as a scalable, standards-based alternative to proprietary AI interconnects at 400Gb speeds.

“Chelsio seventh-generation AI Interconnect Platform represents a milestone in Ethernet evolution, combining programmable flexibility with the proven performance our customers depend on,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO of Chelsio Communications. “With T7, we are positioning Ethernet as a scalable, standards-based AI interconnect—delivering the performance required for large-scale AI training while preserving the flexibility and cost advantages of open networking.”

AI Interconnect Platform – Key Features & Highlights

• Ethernet Performance: Supports 1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400GbE with sustained line-rate throughput
• AI & HPC Optimization: Lossless Ethernet, advanced congestion management, and GPU-optimized data paths for large-scale AI training and real-time inference
• 400Gb RDMA Acceleration: Native iWARP and RoCEv2 support enables ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth communication for AI training, HPC, and disaggregated infrastructure
• Storage Acceleration: Hardware offloads for NVMe/TCP, iSCSI, RDMA, and TOE, delivering peak efficiency for JBOFs and enterprise storage
• Programmable Data Path: Workload-specific acceleration, including AI data pipeline optimization and inline processing
• Security: On-chip crypto engines for QUIC, kTLS, and IPsec/TLS/kTLS.
• Virtualization & Cloud: SR-IOV, vSwitch, and container offloads for multi-tenant performance isolation
• Energy Efficiency: Industry-leading performance-per-watt
• Deployment Flexibility: PCIe Gen5, OCP 3.0, and mezzanine form factors

Three Product Families

• SmartNICs – S7xx adapters based on S7x silicon, a memory-free single-chip , cost-optimized SmartNIC for cloud and AI deployments
• Storage Controllers – Dedicated storage acceleration controller adapters based on N7 Storage Controller silicon
• T7 DPUs – Fully programmable DPU adapters for AI networking, storage and security acceleration based on the T7 silicon.

Built on the seventh-generation Unified Wire architecture, the AI Interconnect platform introduces unified data paths that integrate networking, storage, and compute acceleration, creating purpose-built pipelines optimized for AI data movement, storage access, and distributed computing. With full software compatibility from T4 through T6, the platform protects existing software investments while enabling seamless migration to next-generation Ethernet and PCIe speeds.

Expanded AI Interconnect Product Family

The AI Interconnect Platform includes a broad range of SmartNICs, Storage Controllers, and DPU adapters built on Chelsio seventh-generation offload architecture:

Available Now

• S7250 / S7450 / S7450-OCP SmartNICs — Dual- and quad-port 1/10/25/50 GbE SmartNICs based on the S7 architecture, optimized for virtualization, embedded systems, and edge deployments.
• S72200 / S72200-OCP SmartNICs — Dual-port 40/50/100/200 GbE SmartNICs using the S7 silicon, ideal for high-volume cloud, HPC, and AI infrastructure.
• S71400 SmartNIC — Single-port 400 GbE SmartNIC supporting flexible 4×100 G and 2×200 G modes for ultra-scale fabrics.
• T72200/T7450 Storage Controllers — Dedicated storage acceleration controllers delivering hardware offloads for NVMe/TCP, NVMe-oF, iSCSI, RDMA, and enterprise storage workloads. Available in PCIe and OCP form factors.
• T72200 / T7450 Storage Controller Adapters — Dual- and quad-port T7 DPU adapters featuring hardware NVMe/TCP and RDMA offloads, zero-copy, and kernel-bypass acceleration for AI and storage workloads.

Early Access

• T72200-DPU / T7450-DPU DPU Adapters — Fully programmable T7 DPUs providing per-connection offload, direct data placement, and mixed stateful/stateless acceleration.

Each adapter supports TCP/IP, UDP/IP, Unified RDMA (RoCEv2 & iWARP), iSCSI, NVMe-oF, NVMe/TCP, NVGRE, VXLAN, and TLS/IPsec/kTLS/QUIC/RSA offloads, providing unmatched flexibility across traditional and AI-driven data-center workloads.

AI Interconnect for Training and Inference

With 400Gb RDMA, the Chelsio T7 DPU platform enables high-bandwidth, low-latency communication for distributed AI training and HPC workloads—reducing synchronization overhead, improving GPU utilization, and enabling efficient scaling of large clusters.

By combining lossless Ethernet, advanced congestion management, and full protocol offload, T7 delivers:

• 400Gb RDMA communication for distributed AI training and HPC scaling
• High-throughput, GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-storage data movement for large-scale training clusters
• Ultra-low latency communication optimized for real-time inference and microservices
• Improved GPU and storage utilization through CPU bypass and full protocol offload
• Seamless scaling using standards-based Ethernet as an alternative to proprietary AI interconnects

Availability

The SmartNIC and storage controllers adapter and silicon families are available through Chelsio global OEM, ODM, and distribution partners. The T7 DPU is available as an evaluation platform for early customer engagements, with production availability planned for December 2026.

About Chelsio Communications

Chelsio is a recognized leader in high-performance (1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400Gb) Ethernet adapters for networking, storage and AI infrastructure acceleration within virtualized enterprise data centers, public and private hyperscale clouds, and embedded and cluster computing environments. With a clear emphasis on performance and delivering the only robust offload solution, as opposed to simple speeds and feeds, Chelsio has set itself apart from the competition. The Chelsio Unified Wire and DPU solutions fully offload all protocol traffic, providing no-compromise performance with high packet processing capacity, sub-microsecond hardware latency, and high bandwidth.

Source: Chelsio

The post Chelsio Launches AI Interconnect Platform with 400Gb RDMA for Next-Gen Data Center, Storage, and AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

ABC News reports that White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez allegedly made more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi markets tied to what President Trump would say in speeches, using his access to prepared remarks and last-minute edits. ABC News reports: According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its "Mentions" market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. "Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators," Kalshi's head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News' report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a "disgrace" and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. Leavitt said she was unaware of any other White House staffers who have made such trades. "The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow," said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News. In addition to February's State of the Union address, sources said CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump's remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's how McLaren protects its team and what experts want F1 fans to know before race day.

Leaked US intelligence report concluded Iran retained 70% of missiles and launchers after 38-day spring campaign

Iran and the US have been trading blows for six consecutive nights and there are no shortage of signs that the renewed fighting will worsen further. Tehran and Washington remain far apart diplomatically, and though the US retains a significant military overmatch, Iran has more than enough capability to inflict damage.

Friday’s developments are a case in point. A wave of US attacks, with missiles launched from jets, drones and warships, targeted Iranian ports and the south of the country, collapsing a tower at Chabahar, on the Gulf of Oman, and highways and bridges into the strait of Hormuz port of Bandar Abbas, perhaps in an effort to cut it off.

When providing information about countries with restricted speech, the AI models behind chatbots and agents often sidestep prompts or offer responses trained on censored materials.

The acclaimed Irish actor started her career in Coronation Street and Casualty before a string of high-profile Hollywood roles

Brenda Fricker, who became the first female Irish Oscar winner for acting with My Left Foot, has died aged 81. Her agent Phil Belfield told the BBC in a statement: “We will never see her like again and the world is lesser for the lack of her … I was honoured to know, love and work with her and she will always have a place in my heart and in the heart of so many film and TV fans the world over.”

In My Left Foot, Fricker plays the mother of Christy Brown, whose cerebral palsy means he only has muscular control over one of his feet. The film, directed by Jim Sheridan, was released to enormous acclaim in 1989, winning the best actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis as well as best supporting actress for Fricker.

A cybersecurity incident has forced Coca-Cola to suspend Fairlife milk production in the U.S. An investigation is underway.

Democrats and advocates sound alarm at Trump rehashing false claims about 2020 election in his primetime address

Democrats and voting rights groups say Donald Trump’s primetime speech making unverified claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 election is the clearest sign yet that the president is laying the groundwork to tamper with the results of November’s midterms.

The upcoming elections to decide the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures will be a major test of Trump’s appeal to voters two years after he resoundingly beat the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to return to the White House. With polls showing that the president is disliked by majorities of voters and his Republican allies are at risk of losing their control of the House of Representatives, the president’s Thursday evening speech rehashing allegations about the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden sparked fears he was already looking for ways to ensure November’s results are in his favor.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here:

• US marines board tanker amid blockade of Iranian ports

The IRGC has threatened “more crushing” attacks against neighbouring countries hosting US bases, warning that they will pay a “devastating price” if American forces continue to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure.

In a statement carried by state media, it said:

The American enemy and the hosts of its bases in the region should know that crossing red lines and attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure will have a very severe and devastating price to pay. Should the enemy continue on this path, even more crushing responses are on the way.”

The appeals court in Washington, D.C., divided 2-1 in ruling in favor of the Trump administration in the legal battle over the Pentagon's escort policy for journalists.

Aircraft that transported team to match is same one used to deport dozens of Venezuelans to Cecot mega-prison

A plane used by the Portugal men’s soccer team to fly to a World Cup match is the same one used daily for the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, and brought dozens of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran mega-prison last year against a judge’s orders.

Video shows Portugal flying on a Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX) aircraft en route to Dallas on 4 July ahead of their match against Spain, with the plane’s tail number, N837VA, clearly visible. A review of flight records for that Airbus shows it flew removal-related flights both the day before and after flying the Portuguese athletes.

Escaped flowerhorn cichlids are causing concern for native species and about parasites capable of infecting humans

Escaped ornamental aquarium fish have integrated into a local ecosystem in the Philippines, but scientists say they may be threatening the native biodiversity of the lake.

Flowerhorn cichlids – human-bred hybrid fish prized for their bright-gold colour and prominent head humps – are believed to have escaped from breeding facilities into Lake Sampaloc, which sits in a volcanic crater, during a typhoon.

A repair cafe in a town recovering from a devastating storm helps to mend broken belongings and rebuild a community's resilience.

Ronald L. Fischer, who was featured on "America's Most Wanted," fled Rhode Island during his criminal trial for first-degree sexual assault in 2005.

Illness surging in Michigan and other US states is rarely life-threatening, CDC says – but it can have severe effects

• CDC investigates parasite that’s caused cases of ‘explosive’ diarrhea in 18 US states

Cases of cyclosporiasis – a parasitic illness that can cause “explosive”, watery diarrhea – have surged across the United States in recent days, health officials have said, with an abnormally large outbreak of almost 1,000 cases reported in Michigan.

Michigan typically reports about 50 cases a year, making the current outbreak the largest in the state’s history and one of the nation’s biggest in recent years. Ohio has also reported a sharp increase, with 177 cases as of 2 July, since the CDC’s last count.

July 17, 2026 — For grid-scale energy storage and national energy resilience, the U.S. needs better batteries. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are tackling that challenge in many ways, but one approach is making a significant impact: physics-informed machine learning.

In two recent publications, LLNL researchers examined how integrating molecular dynamics simulations with physics-informed machine learning can illuminate the relationships between structure and behavior in complex battery materials. They used the powerful combination of techniques to explore carbon anodes in sodium-ion batteries and liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries.

LLNL researchers examined how integrating molecular dynamics simulations with physics-informed machine learning can illuminate the relationships between chemistry, microstructure and behavior in complex battery materials. Image credit: Dan Herchek/LLNL.

“These studies show that the structural complexity of battery materials is not just an obstacle to understanding but a design advantage, laying the groundwork for high-throughput screening of next-generation energy-storage materials,” said LLNL scientist and author Liwen (Sabrina) Wan. “By encoding that complexity into physics-informed machine learning models, we can predict properties and identify design levers that traditional approaches simply cannot access.”

The first paper, published in Energy Storage Materials, examines sodium-ion batteries. Because sodium is abundant and domestically available, this technology is important for ensuring a robust U.S. supply chain.

Sodium batteries work by moving sodium ions back and forth from anode to cathode. The most commercially mature sodium anodes are made of hard carbon, which looks like a jumble of crumpled, disordered, graphene-like sheets. That structural disorder, full of tiny pores and empty spaces, makes the anode difficult to characterize and engineer.

“Sodium ions can move into all of that disorder, slipping between layers, settling on surfaces and filling nanopores,” said LLNL scientist and author Nikhil Rampal. “That complexity is part of what makes hard carbon so promising, but it is also what makes it so challenging to design.”

Researchers have long struggled to understand how the atomic features within the hard carbon relate to the transport of sodium ions. In this work, the team used LLNL’s high-performance computing to simulate how every atom in the material moves and interacts over time.

“We essentially created an atom-by-atom movie of sodium ions diffusing, clustering or becoming trapped inside the carbon,” said Rampal.

Then, the authors used those movies to train a machine learning algorithm to predict how the atoms interact. That algorithm can run much larger, longer and more accurate simulations affordably. It was used to classify sodium ion motion into eight different regimes based on their unique interactions with the hard carbon.

“As carbon density and sodium loading increase, ions cluster or become trapped in nanopores, with direct implications for rate capability and thermal safety,” said Rampal.

The result is a quantitative map between microstructure and ion transport that includes actionable ways to enhance the hard carbon. The researchers believe this work provides a concrete path to safely maximize the movement of sodium ions, and therefore the deployment of sodium battery technology.

The second paper, published in EES Batteries, applies the same philosophy to a different challenge: better electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries. Designing an ideal electrolyte is a combinatorial challenge because the endless possibilities of solvents, salts, additives and concentrations are too vast to screen exhaustively.

Conventional electrolyte models rely on text-based representations that neglect the 3D geometry of molecules. In contrast, the LLNL team generated realistic, 3D configurations of molecules with their molecular dynamics simulations. They fed those structures into a machine learning model, which predicted the statistical stability of each configuration.

The key insight is that electrochemical stability depends on the full ensemble of molecules, not just the sum of its parts.

“The salt or solvent identity and concentration can shift the predicted stability window dramatically, through mechanisms that text-based encoders simply cannot see,” said Rampal. “For example, swapping one lithium salt for another produced a 57% wider stability window, driven entirely by how the anion arranges itself around the lithium ion.”

The scientists envision this molecular dynamics and physics-informed machine learning pipeline as a high-throughput screening platform that replaces trial-and-error electrolyte design with physics-guided exploration. Incorporating experimental benchmark data would sharpen model accuracy over time, and the core principles transfer naturally to other battery chemistries and electrochemical systems.

“For national lab programs exploring large design spaces across lithium, sodium and multivalent battery chemistries, this could significantly accelerate discovery,” said Wan. “While these studies focus on batteries, the broader framework can be applied to many other systems.”

Other LLNL authors for the hard carbon work include Stephen Weitzner, Marissa Wood and Jonathan RI Lee. Funding support is partially provided by LLNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and partially by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Electricity, Energy Storage Division. Computing support was provided by the LLNL Institutional Computing Grand Challenge program and resources were sponsored by the DOE Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation and located at the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Combines HPC and Machine Learning to Accelerate Battery Design appeared first on HPCwire.

PLANO, Texas, July 17, 2026 — Siemens has announced a collaboration between Siemens Cre8Ventures and Cloudberry VC to help accelerate commercialization of Europe’s sovereign deep-tech innovation ecosystem and to further strengthen European industrial resilience and supply chains.

The collaboration brings together the industrial validation and customer access capabilities of Siemens Cre8Ventures with Cloudberry VC’s venture capital expertise in semiconductors, photonics and advanced materials. It is designed to help startups and university spin-outs reduce the time and risk involved in moving from early-stage innovation to industrial deployment.

Industrial organizations increasingly face challenges identifying and validating emerging technologies early enough to maintain competitiveness. This collaboration helps address those challenges by enabling earlier access to technically validated innovation and improving routes to industrial adoption.

“By collaborating more closely across the deep-tech ecosystem, we help bring innovation closer to industrial reality,” said Geoff Lee, vice president Europe, Middle East & Africa, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “This collaboration connects emerging companies with Digital Twin validation, engineering environments and potential customers, helping to accelerate their path to value.”

“Our specialization in semiconductors, photonics and advanced materials lets us go deeper with founders and connect them directly to industry,” said René Kromhof, founding partner, Cloudberry VC. “This collaboration with Siemens Cre8Ventures helps accelerate and de-risk their path to scale.”

The collaboration focuses on creating earlier visibility into emerging innovation across semiconductors, photonics, robotics, AI hardware, sensing and autonomous systems. It enables startups to benefit from Siemens’ collaborative venturing model, spanning proof-of-technology, proof-of-concept and proof-of-value, helping to reduce technical and commercial risk. For Siemens’ customers, the collaboration provides improved access to emerging technologies, earlier validation pathways and stronger engagement with deep-tech ecosystems. These capabilities help reduce integration risk and support faster adoption of differentiated technologies.

This is an ecosystem-oriented, non-exclusive collaboration with no equity investment or ownership structure between the organizations. The focus is on enabling industrial validation, fostering collaboration and improving access to customers and markets.

About Siemens Digital Industries Software

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.

About Cloudberry VC

Cloudberry VC is Europe’s first dedicated venture capital fund focused on semiconductors, photonics and advanced materials. The fund backs foundational deep tech companies at pre-seed and seed stage across compute and electronics, photonics, connectivity and sensing, and advanced materials and tools. Based in Helsinki with team members across Finland, Germany and the UK, Cloudberry VC works closely with founders from first cheque through follow-on rounds, drawing on a network of strategic LPs and corporate partners across the European semiconductor and photonics ecosystem. For more information, visit cloudberry.vc.

Source: Siemens

The post Siemens and Cloudberry VC Collaborate to Accelerate European Deep-Tech Innovation appeared first on HPCwire.

Visas will be shortened to 240 days, down from five years, and Chinese journalists will be limited to 90 days

The Trump administration has said it will drastically shorten visas for foreign journalists in the US to 240 days, down from five years, and cut those for Chinese journalists to only 90 days.

The rule announced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will do away with the “duration of status” system, which allows foreign journalists to stay and work in the United States as long as they meet eligibility requirements.

Aid workers are first known people to quarantine at facility, which sparked huge opposition in Kenya

Seven American aid workers who had been in Congo to fight the Ebola outbreak are quarantining at a new isolation facility in ⁠Kenya after the US government introduced travel ⁠restrictions, the head of a US charity ​employing them told Reuters.

The aid workers are the first known people to quarantine at the facility, which has sparked huge opposition in Kenya and is at the heart of a legal case in which a court has ordered the work to be ⁠suspended. Construction continued, however, according to US officials and satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters.

President Trump delivered a speech on election security Thursday night at the White House. Here are the facts behind some of his claims.

Shopping local ensures a future for cultures and communities, says Caroline Weaver, creator of the Locavore Guide digital directory

When I signed the lease for my new apartment in Brooklyn, the relief of having survived the brutal New York City real estate market was short-lived when my next task became clear: I needed to furnish the place.

My first instinct was to check everything off my list by shopping online. But the thought of waiting for deliveries and unboxing an endless mountain of packages seemed exhausting. And, I was moving to New York, where the streets are lined with a seemingly infinite number of stores.

The WatchOS 27 public beta is here, and Apple's revamped assistant finally does what Siri should have been doing all along.

Ah, so that's why we didn't hear about ChatGPT at WWDC this year.

Meta touts safety features – but for women, the dangers of these recording devices are obvious

Imagine if every time you left the house, you couldn’t be sure that the stranger you met at a bar – or even the person walking by you in the street – wasn’t secretly recording you. It sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but let’s face it, the era of wearable technology is fully upon us as everyday accessories have been developed to help track health and fitness data, receive smartphone notifications, and provide hands-free accessibility.

So when Meta announced their AI glasses a few years ago, it wasn’t too surprising that one of the biggest (and most embattled) tech companies on earth had begun cashing in on our obsession with watching others. And their AI glasses have already raised serious concerns over privacy, personal safety and even our sense of agency.

The emerald ash borer, which has devastated ash forests in North America, has been detected in the European Union for the first time.

Andy Burnham was officially declared leader of Britain's governing Labour Party, clearing his final hurdle to taking office as prime minister next week.

Pete Hegseth wants to win the war on Iran with a secret weapon: testosterone. Meanwhile, JD Vance is worried about how to eat an ice-cream

Are the men of the Trump administration OK? Feels like it’s been a tricky week for some of them. On the one hand, you’ll note the US is already rebooting its Iran war. Clearly, many will feel this latest version of the conflict is coming too soon after the last one, with fans simply not given enough time to miss the IP. A lot like the live-action Moana currently falling off the screen in cinemas. On the other hand, defence secretary Pete Hegseth seems to have moved the defence department beyond even its latter-day renaming as the department of war, posting a video entitled “The High-T Department of War” in which he announced mandatory testosterone screening for US troops aged 30 and over. We’ll get to JD Vance being unintentionally aroused by footage of Joe Biden eating ice-cream in a minute. Or as soon as I can face it.

Even the lower-ranking White House operatives seem to be spinning out. You may remember the UK’s political betting scandal, where various police officers, campaign officials and aides to former prime minister Rishi Sunak were arrested or investigated for putting bets on the last general election date. Everything’s bigger in the US, of course, so in some ways it’s not a surprise to learn that the guy who operates Trump’s teleprompter has allegedly made $100,000 on Kalshi by placing bets on words or topics appearing in Trump’s speeches. He is currently on unpaid administrative leave, according to press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who yesterday added solemnly, “there are very strict ethical guidelines here at the White House”. A statement so hilarious that I refuse to believe Leavitt herself didn’t say it for a bet. Probably with Hegseth. “Dude, I know I can get it in. I back myself. And if I do say it, you owe me $1,000 and an off-the-books testosterone shot.”

Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Burnham criticises ‘decades of neoliberalism’ and says he wants to give people ‘hope back’

When Andy Burnham first tried to return to the Commons, by applying to be Labour’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection, Labour’s national executive committee blocked him – in part because, they argued, Labour might find it hard to hold the Greater Manchester mayoralty in the byelection caused by his resignation.

When he next applied to be a candidate, for Makerfield, the NEC no longer felt able to say no because the results for Labour in the May elections were so bad that the case for having Burnham in parliament became overwhelming.

Film fanatics arrive from US, Switzerland and Ireland for midnight premiere of director’s critically acclaimed epic

Odysseus made his name by embarking on a perilous journey from Troy to Ithaca, plus a few unplanned diversions courtesy of the gods. But this is nothing on Christian Campbell, who last night travelled more than 4,000 miles to see the Greek king’s epic fable on the big screen.

The 22-year-old film graduate, who aspires to be an editor, made the journey from Atlanta to London to watch Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.

The debate about how old is too old to serve in public office has resurfaced this week after the shock death of the Republican senator Lindsey Graham and the surprise return of Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old senator who published a photo of himself in hospital after a long absence from the spotlight.

With rumours continuing to swirl around Donald Trump’s health, why is it US politicians seem to cling on to power for so long?

Jonathan Freedland speaks to Alexis Coe, a presidential historian and columnist for the New York Times Book review, about whether the US is becoming a gerontocracy – and what can be done about it

US president accused China of meddling in his 2020 election defeat and said system was ‘catastrophically’ unfair. Plus Christopher Nolan’s epic take on The Odyssey hits the big screen

• Don’t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up here

Good morning. Donald Trump accused China of interfering with the 2020 election in a primetime televised address that laid bare his continuing obsession with his defeat to Joe Biden, but which opponents warned was a smokescreen for him to meddle in the forthcoming congressional midterms. Trump’s claims are unverified.

In a 25-minute speech, the US president cast extraordinary doubts on the integrity of the US electoral process, saying it was “catastrophically” short of standards of fairness and trust, while vulnerable to trespassing by foreign powers. Democrats warned that Trump was trying to sow confusion, spread misinformation and lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the midterm elections.

What was the aim of Trump’s address? In this analysis piece, Sam Levine explains how the president is using his office and US intelligence agencies to try to undermine confidence in elections. Instead of offering smoking-gun evidence, the release of new papers seemed to be a return to a classic Trump strategy of flooding the zone with information in an attempt to muddy the waters.

What did US networks do about broadcasting Trump’s allegations? The US’s largest television stations split on whether to air Trump’s White House address, which was filled with unproven accusations. While CNN, ABC and NBC chose not to air the speech live, CBS, Fox News and MS Now (formerly MSNBC) aired at least large portions of the speech live.

What did Rubio say? “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist. It’s always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation – an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck, what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness,” he said. He called leftists “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization”.

The US state mourns its longest-serving senator while Republicans scramble to choose a successor

The South Carolina state house is a microcosm of the US’s contradictions. Outside there are memorials to the Confederate war dead and African American history. Below a statue of Strom Thurmond, a longtime US senator and racial segregationist, are the names of his five children including Essie Mae, whose mother, a Black maid, was 15 when Thurmond impregnated her.

Thurmond died at the age of 100 in 2003; his successor, Lindsey Graham, a lifelong bachelor who never had children, died last Saturday at 71. His sudden exit leaves a void not just in Washington but the state that molded Graham, elected him to the Senate four times and wrestled with his shape-shifting journey from Ronald Reagan Republican to Donald Trump sycophant.

The annual World Eskimo Indian Olympics draw hundreds of Indigenous athletes to partake in traditional games and celebrate their heritage

As Nicole Johnson prepared to compete in the Alaska sports arena, she visualized propelling into the air and kicking the ball with both of her feet simultaneously. The Iñupiaq athlete was partaking in the Arctic game of two-foot high kick, long practiced by her community of northern Alaska Natives. When she kicked the ball made of seal skin that dangled from a kickstand, the crowd erupted in cheers. That day in July 1989 at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO), Johnson set the women’s world record in the sport by striking the target at 6ft 6in.

For this year’s event, at age 57, she will compete in the dene stick pull, where she and another participant will hold on to the center of a stick covered in grease and attempt to wrest the object from their opponent.

Microsoft restored streamer Joshua Khane's 25-year-old Xbox and OneDrive account after it was compromised by a hacker and then suspended, putting years of personal data, baby photos, and thousands of dollars in games at risk. IGN reports: While he was "extremely happy" and thanked Microsoft for its help recovering his account and all the invaluable information therein, he levied some criticisms toward the brand for its initial response, claiming it had told him the suspension was "irreversible" at first. "It's unfortunate that such a big company can bring back your account if you ask them to," he said. "The way it all went, to me, is a little bit shady, because it's not that they can't bring back your account -- they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody." Khane credited the community for making his story go viral and bringing it to Microsoft's attention, but felt that without their help, he would have been up a creek without a paddle. He also tied the situation to the growing conversation surrounding digital ownership, comparing it to Sony's decision to stop printing physical game discs starting January 2028.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Attorneys general from 12 states are suing to block the Paramount-Warner Bros deal they say violates antitrust law

A last-ditch effort to block the merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) is heading to court as 12 Democratic state attorneys general attempt to stop the $111bn deal they say violates antitrust law and reduces competition in both the film and cable television industries.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday, faces a crucial hearing on Friday to determine if a judge will temporarily pause the deal or allow it to continue toward approval. The merger was already approved by the Department of Justice in June.

The state government condemned the murder of Josue Martinez, and called on prosecutors to launch a probe in order to find those responsible.

Plus, Trump pays out to E Jean Carroll, somnolent Little House on the Prairie, and why I’ll be avoiding salad in the US

It’s the last week of school and, in our case, the last week of primary school, ever, which I thought wouldn’t be a big deal but now we’re here, I’m sliding off my axis about the cruel passage of time. It’s not about my children, who can’t wait to crack on, it’s about me, me, me.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: How many small acts of silence does it take before fear makes us accomplices?

• Trump Again Threatens to Commit War Crimes Against Iran: A quick victory becomes a dangerous quagmire, followed by bluster that could make the world—and our grocery bills—worse.

• Todd Blanche Has Confirmed He’ll Do Trump’s Bidding. Will the Senate Confirm Him as Attorney General? Blanche’s record suggests he sees the Justice Department less as the people’s law office than as customer service for one very demanding client.

• How Much Are Nurses Worth? Hospitals and Patients Might Calculate Their Value Differently: Montefiore’s AI layoffs raise the question of whether hospital efficiency means anything when it comes at the expense of experienced nurses and patient trust.

• Red Scare by Clay Risen: Clay Risen’s brisk, unsettling history shows how readily a frightened country can turn suspicion into a machinery for destroying its own people.

• Jukebox Playlist: Lena Horne makes “Where or When” feel like a quiet conversation with memory, fate, and the person you hope you have met before.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965), American broadcast journalist

Once upon a time, Edward R. Murrow was the best known and most respected newsman in the United States. His CBS radio reports from London during the Blitz made him a legend from the start of World War II, and Winston Churchill thought so highly of him that he asked him to take over programming at the BBC, but he chose to stay with CBS. At war’s end, he was among the first journalists to report from a liberated concentration camp, and he pulled no punches describing the emaciated survivors, the children with their numerical ID tattoos, and the “bodies stacked up like cordwood” in Buchenwald’s crematorium: “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” he told the American people. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.”

Murrow’s greatest fame, though, came as a result of the role he played in bringing down Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man whose crusade against communism resulted in the persecution of thousands of Americans in government and education, and a blacklist that destroyed many lives in the motion picture and television industries. Murrow used a full episode of his prime-time show See It Now to attack McCarthyism, and is credited with turning public opinion against the politician and back in favor of constitutional norms. A footnote in the McCarthy story was a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who served as the senator’s chief counsel, and later went on to mentor a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, schooling him in all the ruthless, vindictive, and greedy ways that would eventually serve him so well in electoral politics.

These days, Trump has taken a page from McCarthy’s playbook, branding his political opponents communists in an attempt to scare the American people into voting Republican despite all the economic, social, and international issues that have exploded on his watch. Back in 2024, he called Vice President Harris “Comrade Kamala,” a ridiculous nickname that never stuck. Last week, at the NATO Summit in Turkey, he said, “I want to get the word out because what’s forming is communism in the country and communism’s easy to sell.” Trump is nothing if not a salesman. He went on:

“I would be the greatest communist in history. I’d be right up there with Lenin… I think this country, with this thing that’s going around, is in more danger than it was during World War I, World War II. If you talk about September 11th, if you talk about Pearl Harbor, that was big danger. I think this is—I think the concept of us going communist, because one thing that happens when you go communist, you never come back. You die in squalor. You die a horrible death. You die in squalor, and it gets very evil and very nasty.”

That’s our president, who thinks communism is the greatest threat we face today but he could be the best communist ever. We finally know how he’s going to make America great again: he’s bringing back the Red Scare. You certainly don’t need me to tell you he’s stuck in the 1950s.

What Murrow is saying in the quote above is that fear needs an audience to work. If a tyrant is standing alone in a room shouting at the mirror, he’s just a sad man with poor social skills, like Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Power arrives when fear is spread, repeated, rewarded, and absorbed into daily behavior. We are the accomplices Murrow is warning us against. It’s a provocation meant to startle us into action. How much of history’s destruction occurred because each person who saw it coming expected someone else to prevent it? Complicity grows through an accumulation of small, quiet retreats. Each retreat comes with a story we tell ourselves to make silence feel reasonable, rather than cowardly. But when did protecting our comfort become such a persuasive defense of surrender?

I am especially interested in the ordinary, mundane nature of complicity. History remembers dramatic denunciations like Murrow’s, or Army Chief Counsel Joseph Welch’s famous paraphrase to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Daily life instead gives us people staying quiet in a meeting, laughing along at a cruel joke aimed at someone else, or accepting a status quo everyone knows is unjust. Social pressure operates through consequences: things like a damaged friendship, a lost job, or not getting an invitation to a party everyone wants to attend. Too often, people go along to get along.

Edward R. Murrow didn’t worry about consequences; or maybe he did worry, but he didn’t let that stop him. He fought back with the weapons at his disposal, a microphone or a camera, against the Nazis and the red-baiters. We need more people like him today.

Read more

Over the last month, states across the country have experienced record rainfall and flash flooding

Climate change is driving increasingly common bouts of heavy rain in the US that cause deadly and damaging flash floods that will only become more frequent and intense as the crisis worsens, experts say.

A year after deadly flooding in central Texas that swept through a children’s summer camp, the state and other parts of the United States are again experiencing unusually heavy rain. Over the last month, states like Alaska, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania have all experienced record rainfall, causing flash flooding across the country.

Pollution levels in the city were elevated as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south across a huge swathe of the US

The sun shone feebly through the thick haze. The smell of burning wood hung thick in the air. Many New Yorkers donned masks as the air quality plummeted amid health warnings.

The National Weather Service issued an air-quality alert because pollution levels were elevated as smoke from raging Canadian wildfires drifted south across a huge swathe of the US, reaching all the way to New York City and even beyond out into the Atlantic.

A direct competitor to Sonos' Era 100 speaker, the attractively designed Lifestyle Ultra has excellent sound for its size and built-in Google Cast support -- but you'll probably want two.

Why Should Delaware Care?
No municipality has been dissolved in Delaware in more than 100 years, but some residents of Greenwood, a small town in Sussex County, are lobbying for such a seismic change after raising concerns about the town’s management.

Long-simmering tensions in the tiny, farming town of Greenwood are playing out publicly as a group of residents are calling for the town government to dissolve and its land to become part of unincorporated Sussex County.

Residents proposing the idea of disincorporation say the town government is secretive, running out of money, and not providing citizens with adequate services for the taxes it collects. Among those critics are some members of the town government, including the town council and planning and zoning commission.

Jordan Warfel, a Greenwood resident who serves on the town Board of Adjustment is leading the charge for disincorporation. Warfel described dissolving the town government as an opportunity to get “better services for fewer taxes.” 

But other town leaders strongly dispute these arguments. 

They say residents suggesting disincorporation are a small, misguided subset of Greenwood’s population, who don’t understand that the government is on a financially sound path, and is working on the spending and revenue issues that have plagued its past.

Town Councilman Dan Nelson wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that disincorporating Greenwood is an “extreme idea” and he does not understand why any town resident would support it.

The movement to disincorporate is an unusual one, with state records indicating that the last time a Delaware municipality became unincorporated was in 1921, according to Mark Cutrona, director of the state’s Division of Legislative Services.

To dissolve, a town would have to petition Delaware lawmakers to approve the municipality’s disbandment. 

But it is not entirely clear whether the group of Greenwood residents have the leverage to push state leaders to that end. Also unclear is how citizens’ lives would change in practice if they became a part of unincorporated Sussex County. 

Cristina Gomez-Vidal, a University of California Riverside professor who studies unincorporated communities, said she has found that residents often believe they will get more professional governance under the county, rather than a smaller jurisdiction. But they often end up lost in the bigger county conversation, she said.

“There is no obligation from the county to specifically respond to unincorporated communities and their specific needs,” Gomez-Vidal told Spotlight Delaware. 

She added that this effect could be magnified in a place like Sussex County, which prides itself on keeping taxes low, and, as a result, has a relatively lean county government. 

The disincorporation movement

Last week, about a dozen Greenwood residents gathered at the town’s popular central coffee shop to discuss the concept of disincorporation, and what it could mean for their finances, policing and government transparency.

Some were all-in on the movement to disband the town. Others said they believe there still could be a way for the town to resolve its alleged issues before disincorporation becomes necessary. 

Warfel, who organized the meeting, centered the discussion around the argument that the county could provide comparable services at a lower cost to residents, because they would no longer need to pay taxes to the town. 

At the same time, Warfel said he believes the town will soon become insolvent. He noted the town had roughly $500,000 in its general fund as of June 3, with $300,000 earmarked for capital improvement projects. He said that leaves the town without enough money to operate for the remainder of the year. 

Warfel further asserted during the gathering that if the town ran out of money, state lawmakers could have no choice but to dissolve the town government, whether residents call for it or not.

After Warfel laid out his argument for disincorporation, some residents brought up their frustration that town property taxes have increased recently. They attributed it to what they described as a resistance by the town council to attract more businesses and people to the area.   

The current property tax rate of 45 cents per hundred in Greenwood is comparable to the nearby towns of Bridgeville and Harrington – which have populations roughly three and four times larger, respectively.

Those municipal rates are added on to Sussex County’s property tax rate of 2.14 cents per $100 of assessed value. 

Beyond issues of finance, Warfel also told the group that Greenwood could seamlessly transition over to receiving services like planning and zoning decisions, water treatment, police coverage and street lights from Sussex County, without having to pay town property taxes. 

The Bridgeville wastewater system, which included Greenwood, was already taken over by the county in 2021.  

Asked how the county would take over land use, water treatment and other services from a town, a Sussex County spokesperson said many of the specifics would require “legal research” because it is an unprecedented process. 

Another resident at the meeting, Ellen Patterson, who is also a member of the town Planning and Zoning Commission, said she takes issue with how often the town council goes into executive session – or meets behind closed doors – so the public doesn’t know what they are discussing. 

Patterson said she is open to the disincorporation path, but also wants to see an effort for more “real, in-depth communication” between residents and the town government before they resort to dissolving the town. 

Anthony Massey, a current member of the five-person town council, was also in attendance at the meeting, and told the group he is in support of disincorporation, after having observed the way the town government functions from the inside. 

Elected officials react 

Some town leaders have dismissed claims of financial precarity as uninformed, and motivated by certain residents’ personal agendas. 

Mayor Donald Donovan, who has been serving on the town council for over two decades, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that having an incorporated town provides an important opportunity for local control over “municipal services, planning, and decision-making.” 

Donovan also described it as “inaccurate” that the town is on the verge of running out of money, and said he does not believe the small group of residents pushing for disincorporation are representative of what the majority of the town’s roughly 1,000 residents want. 

Nelson, another town council member, similarly said he does not understand why residents are accusing the town government of being ineffective, when “the Town is paying its bills, our Police Department is working hard to protect the residents, and our Town Staff is working with residents, developers and other interested parties every day in Greenwood.” 

Nelson said he believes residents are calling for disincorporation because they are frustrated with the town council’s decision to fire former town manager Janet Todd in January. 

He and Donovan have attributed the town’s challenging financial situation – including a $40,000 debt owed to the IRS – to Todd’s work as town manager. 

Todd did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment about the situation.

Sen. Dave Wilson (R-Lincoln), whose district includes Greenwood, struck a similar tone to the town elected officials when asked about the disincorporation discussion. 

Wilson said he has been hearing about some financial challenges in town and tensions between different groups of residents, but he does not view disbanding the town government as “the proper way to bail it out.” 

What’s next?

The process for a town to disincorporate would involve taking the idea to the state legislature, where two-thirds of both the House and the Senate would need to vote in favor of repealing the municipality’s charter, said Cutrona, the Division of Legal Services director.

There are no formal procedures for what the General Assembly does if a municipality runs out of money, Cutrona explained, though the state legislators who represent the municipality would likely want to “hear from the municipality” about how to move forward. 

Despite the skepticism from elected officials about the disincorporation idea, at the community meeting Warfel implored citizens to “show our local legislators” that the majority of Greenwood residents are in favor of disbanding the town by writing letters, making phone calls, and spreading the concept to more of the town.

Warfel said he also plans to have additional community meetings about disincorporation in the lead up to the General Assembly reconvening in January 2027.

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post Could a small Sussex town be the first to disincorporate in a century? appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars.

The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion.

Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the city’s prosecutors “did not engage in misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little over a year before that, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous kind of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is kind of glib in this case. … It’s so much worse than plain misconduct. This is tyranny.”

In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after delving deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are more “complex” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.

Lawyers on both sides of the Broadwater litigation declined to comment for this article.

Certainly, lawyers retain paid experts of every stripe for all sorts of actions. But it’s rare to see an expert take a position in court after expressing a different one to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics expert at New York University School of Law. But, he added, Gershman’s reversal is “an embarrassment and it’s going to undermine his credibility going forward.” A potential jury in the case might wonder what he truly believes.

Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, who specializes in criminal law and ethics, offered a similar view. She called it “odd” that Gershman would “be willing to give such a strongly worded comment and then take a position as an expert on behalf of one of the parties. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she views the role of being a commentator for a news story as different from being an expert in a legal case. Commentators should approach the task from a starting point of neutrality, she said. Being an expert, by contrast, has an inherently partisan aspect. “I think it gets confused if you do both,” Roiphe said.

ProPublica recently published an in-depth narrative investigation of the original criminal case that examined multiple lapses in the prosecution of Broadwater and uncovered a broader failure in the criminal justice system in Syracuse at the time, which allowed one or more serial rapists to continue their assaults — many of which bore similarities to the one that Broadwater had been convicted of — for years.

The original case dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse University freshman, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Initially, the police did not believe her, even though a medical examination and physical evidence supported her account. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police, and Broadwater was arrested.

From the beginning, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. But at a lineup, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened right after that misindentification is at the heart of the current litigation.

In the view of the current DA, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution should have halted the moment Sebold picked somebody else: “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy,” Fitzpatrick told me for the earlier article. “She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. Case is over. Stop.”

But the prosecution continued. Sebold identified him as her rapist at trial. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, and lived as a registered sex offender for nearly 23 more.

How Sebold described what happened after the failed lineup identification has remained broadly consistent over the years. But there have been different shadings in the account presented in her 1999 memoir about the case and in her 2025 deposition testimony in the civil suit. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by police officers and a prosecutor. In “Lucky,” she wrote that after the lineup she “searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether I had chosen the right one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had “chosen the wrong man.”

In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold testified that she knew before she spoke to officers or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, that she had gotten the lineup selection wrong. But she also testified that “there was no way for me to be sure at that time, and then certain things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had picked the wrong man, she said, including a look of disappointment from a detective and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.

These distinctions matter because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could constitute misconduct. And what happened in those moments is particularly relevant because the prosecution made no attempt to pause the case or investigate further after the failed identification.

Uebelhoer had Sebold write an affidavit in which she explained that she picked the man who had been standing next to Broadwater because he was looking at her. They looked “almost identical,” she stated in the affidavit. Uebelhoer then told her, according to “Lucky,” that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be included in the lineup because all the others differed from him noticeably in height or weight. “He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Uebelhoer said. (Both men maintain they had never been in a lineup before. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little memory of the Broadwater case.)

Sebold’s memoir later became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when producers decided to make a film version of the memoir, the book ultimately helped lead to Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.

After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. The city of Syracuse and its surrounding county, by contrast, have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit alleging that they violated his constitutional rights through a malicious prosecution.

Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to [Sebold] that led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements to themselves, which further undermined his defense.

That’s where Gershman comes in. As author of a textbook called “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. The textbook catalogs the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has also warned prosecutors to be wary of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the largest single source of wrongful convictions.”

I had previously interviewed Gershman for a series I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. It seemed natural that he’d have insights on the Broadwater case.

When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there were any elements of prosecutorial misconduct.

After he reviewed the materials (and also read a lengthy New Yorker story about the case), Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me that he had never seen anything quite like it in his 60-year legal career. “I can’t think of a case where a prosecutor has so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying against the person accused of a crime,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything so blatant; so grotesque as what I see here.”

That was 2024. Then came his assignment for the city and county and his 2025 report. (Gershman said he notified them at the outset that he had spoken to me.)

In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the lineup and was under no obligation to disclose what she said to the defense. She “behaved properly and professionally, and there is nothing in the record that could remotely be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”

When I called Gershman recently to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first talked and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He noted that he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.

His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. Most important, he said, Sebold hadn’t yet testified in a deposition for Broadwater’s suit. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have made contradictions between what we talked about way back then and what I later learned,” he said.

His new opinion fixates on the portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony where she said she recognized her erroneous lineup pick on her own. In our most recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the parts of her testimony that were more ambiguous.

In Gershman’s view today, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no impact on Sebold or the verdict. Anything that the prosecutor or officers said after the lineup was “totally, almost, gratuitous. It didn’t have any bearing on her identification,” Gershman said. He noted that Sebold was asked at trial about her botched identification.

A few hours after our interview last week, Gershman called me again, unprompted. He offered what seemed like another zigzag. This time, he told me that Uebelhoer did, in fact, commit misconduct, but that it hadn’t affected the outcome.

When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct,” he said he now wanted to qualify that: “The prosecutors did not engage in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I intended to say.” As he summarized it, “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter.” (Deeper in his report, he also referred to the statements from the detective and prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent.”)

Gershman emphasized that he had been asked to assess legality, not ethics. His assignment, he said, was to ascertain whether Uebelhoer should’ve disclosed her remarks to Broadwater’s lawyers before trial, not to render a judgment on whether it was appropriate to make them.

“I took a legal position that they didn’t have to be disclosed because they didn’t constitute Brady evidence,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the accused.

“I don’t do this for the money,” Gershman testified in his deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the assignment. “I do this because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m an educator.”

Should Broadwater’s civil suit ever reach trial, Gershman will likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that happens, one challenge will be to convince a jury that his current view is more believable than his previous one.

The post How a Paid Expert Reversed His View of a Notoriously Flawed Prosecution in the Rape of a Bestselling Author appeared first on ProPublica.

Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent police shooting of a 19-year-old in northeast Wilmington has become one of the city’s highest-profile use-of-force cases in years. A Delaware Department of Justice investigation into the incident is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers and justice.

The family of Kadir Skinner, the 19-year-old who was fatally shot by Wilmington police last month, announced Tuesday they will seek $25 million from the city in a wrongful death lawsuit.  

The announcement was made during a press conference the family held with their attorneys on the same day that state and city officials released body camera footage from the night Skinner was shot. 

The footage shows a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer leaves his vehicle to chase Skinner, before firing his weapon and handcuffing the wounded teen on the pavement of a Wilmington street. Another three-and-a-half minutes pass after Skinner was shot before officers place him into a patrol car and take him to Wilmington Hospital, where he died. 

During the press conference, the family’s attorney Harry Daniels referenced that the video also shows a loose dog behind Skinner as the officer begins his pursuit.  

“If they continue to shoot and kill our Black men down in the street as they’re running from a dog. If they do not want to hold those who do it accountable, then we’re gonna try to hold them accountable in their pocketbooks,” Daniels said.

The wrongful death lawsuit has not yet been filed. But the attorney said the family sent the city a notice of a claim on Thursday — a required step before the lawsuit can be filed.

Wilmington officials have said officers chased Skinner after they observed him walking out of a home and pointing a gun at a large crowd of people. The family disputes the claim. The body camera footage does not show the moments prior to the foot chase. 

Chance Lynch, another attorney for the family, said during the press conference that the body camera footage sparks new questions about the city account.   

“Where was this crowd that he waved a gun [at]? Why didn’t they (the city) mention the pitbull? And when he was running away from the police officer, how was he a threat to that police officer?” Lynch asked.

When reached for comment Thursday, Caroline Klinger, a spokeswoman for Mayor John Carney, said questions about previous statements made by police should be directed to the Wilmington PD. 

“The details of the incident are precisely what is being evaluated through the investigation,” Klinger said. 

Carney did comment on the situation in a Facebook post made before the family’s press conference Thursday. In it, he asserted that body cameras have “limitations” and that the footage from the Skinner shooting “does not capture the totality of the incident.”

The news of the family’s impending lawsuit comes after the June 24 incident sparked weeks of outcry from community members and elected officials who, until Thursday, had called on authorities to release body camera footage. 

Community members have also demanded the name of the officer involved, as well as police reform at the local and state level.

Many of those demands were repeated Thursday evening during a rally and march that began at the site of Skinner’s shooting and ended at the Wilmington Police station downtown.  

Four shots fired

Two hours before the Skinner family’s press conference, the Delaware Department of Justice, city officials and Wilmington police released three body camera videos from officers on the scene the night of the shooting.

The videos show two officers near 24th and Jessup streets exiting their police cruiser before pursuing Skinner on foot. 

One officer fired four gunshots while chasing Skinner. Wilmington officials have said Skinner sustained one gunshot wound to the buttocks.

The shooting officer then approaches Skinner, who is already on his knees with his hands up, pushes him to the ground, and puts a knee on his back to handcuff him. During that time, the officer tells another officer to “find the gun.”

Skinner is heard saying, “I don’t got nothing.” A crowd then begins to form in the area as Skinner repeatedly says, “I can’t breathe.”

A separate video from another responding officer shows her near the scene, stopping at a spot and reaching down. She then returns to the immediate scene as sound from her body camera turns on. The shooting officer tells her to “secure the gun.” She responds, “I have it.”

Police previously said they recovered a .45-caliber handgun with an extended magazine but did not say whether Skinner was holding it when he was shot.

The officer who fired the shot, who has yet to be identified, remains on administrative leave, according to police.

In a statement, state and city officials said the investigation into the shooting is still ongoing and noted that the officers involved will be identified once a detailed public report is issued at the end of the investigation. 

The post Family of Kadir Skinner to sue Wilmington over police killing appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Arrest in Pennsylvania of Wu Shaoping, who is awaiting asylum decision, raises fears of deportation and persecution

A Chinese human rights lawyer has been arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raising concerns he could be deported to China where he would face persecution.

Wu Shaoping fled China at the end of 2019 amid a crackdown on human rights lawyers. He travelled to the US on a tourist visa and made an asylum claim in 2020, for which he is still awaiting a decision.

Has Trump made the presidency too powerful? Audio sseth.drupal@c… 17 July 2026

In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss how the expansion of presidential power could reshape American democracy.

The 2026 World Cup final in New Jersey may represent the pinnacle of soft power for the USA and a moment of global prestige for President Donald Trump.

But at home, concerns are growing over his ever-expanding vision of presidential power. Is America now living with an ‘imperial presidency’? Has the Supreme Court given the president powers that future generations might find hard to take back? How might Trump’s autocratic style affect the November midterm elections? And why does he like to associate himself so closely with sports?

Bronwen Maddox is joined by Heather Hurlburt and Max Yoeli of Chatham House’s US and North America Programme to discuss presidential overreach, football red cards and the unitary executive theory of power.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

Ex-Concacaf executive Mel Brennan reflects on the Fifa corruption scandal, missed reforms and why football’s governance remains stubbornly opaque

Mel Brennan has seen every level of world football. “I know what the World Cup looks like from the 17th floor of Trump Tower … I know what it looks like from a grass-strewn field in Trinidad where children cannot play because money that was supposed to maintain it went somewhere else entirely,” he says.

Brennan worked as an executive at Concacaf during the corrupt reign of its infamous former president Jack Warner and the late general secretary Chuck Blazer, who once helped run the organization from Trump Tower.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Swapping in filtered water when brewing hot beverages improves the taste -- but that's only half of the story.

Democrats in Congress have remained largely silent and inactive in the wake of ICE agents’ fatal shootings of two immigrant men in Maine and Texas, displaying lackluster energy compared to the party’s response to the killings of two white U.S. citizens earlier this year. 

By early March, after federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, 32 Democratic members of Congress had called to either abolish or dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including three members who had previously voted to “express gratitude to ICE.” Democrats rapidly introduced legislation to restrict, defund, or abolish the federal immigration agency. And for months, Democrats in the House successfully blocked funding of the Department of Homeland Security with the unrealized goal of obtaining minor restrictions on immigration agents. 

Although protesters took to the streets in Maine and Texas in the ides of summer to object to ICE’s killing of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, that glimmer of enthusiasm for action appears to have died down in the halls of Congress.

“I’ll be honest. I’m not seeing [anger] to the extent I saw when Alex and Renee were executed by ICE in Minnesota. … I’ve seen some statements come up, and some conversations, but it has not been elevated to the extent that I would expect from a number of my colleagues,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. “It feels like we’re normalizing it.”

Democrats caved on DHS funding in April, and with some exceptions, most of the caucus has been silent on the existing bills to restrict the agency. Progressives have criticized their colleagues for not continuing to fight against funding the Department of Homeland Security, and for only acting in a moment of heightened political attention. 

Related

Would-Be Platner Replacements in Maine Rally Around “Abolish ICE” (or Something Close)

In January, Ramirez and Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., introduced the Melt ICE Act, a bill that would end DHS funding to detain or monitor immigrants. The legislation, which Ramirez says is “not all things” but represents a meaningful step toward dismantling the entire agency, currently has 12 co-sponsors, including members of the progressive Squad and two retiring members who will leave Congress at the end of the current term.

Ramirez said she had hoped to pick up additional backing in the wake of Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo’s killings, but she has yet to hear from any additional co-sponsors — even from colleagues who were calling to “Abolish ICE” in February and sharing press releases with the words “Melt ICE” in them.

The Chicago congresswoman said she worried that the lack of action had to do in part with the fact that Pretti and Good were white U.S. citizens, and Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo were noncitizens from Colombia and Mexico, respectively. She noted that one of the first fatal ICE shootings under the second Trump administration — of undocumented Mexican immigrant Silverio Villegas González last September in Chicago — rarely gets mentioned.

“Why is it that for some, when the person seems to be lighter-skinned, a U.S. citizen, the uproar seems to be deeper?” Ramirez said. “And why was it that his name seems to be a name that many people don’t know?”

While political energy remains low, the Department of Homeland Security continues to be a lethal force. On Tuesday morning, a man in Florida running from immigration officers was struck by a semi-truck, marking the third time a person had been killed during an encounter with immigration agents within a week.

Violence has surged within detention centers as well. Within the first 500 days of Trump’s second term, 52 people have died in ICE custody, the highest mortality rate in over a decade, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. On Monday, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan man died in a private prison used for ICE detention in Georgia in an apparent case of medical neglect. 

Meanwhile, ICE has punished protesters who object to its brutality with more violence. Physicians for Human Rights and the UC Berkeley Law School’s Human Rights Center documented 412 incidents between June 2025 and May 2026 where law enforcement agents used excessive force or chemical weapons on ICE protesters, children, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders.

Dr. Rohini Haar, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at UC Berkley’s School of Public Health and lead author of the use-of-force study, said lawmakers should not allow these attacks to be met with “impunity” just because there is less impending political pressure.

“Do not ignore this just because it’s less newsworthy,” said Haahr, who is also a medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights. “You’re going to keep getting [violence] when no one is held accountable.” 

Related

It’s Time for Concrete Action on ICE. Sadly, We Have the Democrats.

Progressives, including Ramirez, have criticized their colleagues for not anticipating that the violence would continue once DHS funding was fully restored. In April, House Democrats agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security under a two-track model that would immediately fund most of the Department and push ICE and Border Patrol funding through a separate process that would not require any Democratic support. In June, Republicans voted to fund ICE and Border Patrol to the tune of $70 billion.

“I said this a couple of weeks ago, that I would not be surprised if, when ICE funding started up again, we would start to see more civilian deaths at the hands of ICE,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who did not co-sponsor Melt ICE, told reporters on Monday. “And that’s exactly what has happened.”

The Intercept asked whether the congresswoman planned to co-sponsor Ramirez’s legislation and was directed to her public statements on the DHS funding measure. The Intercept also reached out to Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas., who is also not a co-sponsor of the legislation, to ask if he planned to co-sponsor the bill in the wake of the Texas shooting, but did not receive a response.

Although anger has bubbled up again in protests across the country, the public’s attention does appear to have waned since its peak in January after federal immigration agents fatally shot Good and Pretti. 

Manisha Sinha, an American history professor at the University of Connecticut, said there are several potential reasons for lowered attention on Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero’s deaths. The Trump administration has changed its tactics to deemphasize cities where protesters and local leaders could jointly resist immigration enforcement, as they did in Minnesota. And, undoubtedly, the fact that “Alex Pretti and Renee Good were citizens” added to the public outrage over their killings, said Sinha. 

Without the same intensity of pressure from voters as there was in winter and spring, Ramirez said many of her colleagues are not motivated to take principled positions on immigration that might anger their deep-pocketed donors. But she said she understands that people may also be wary of risking their lives while members of Congress go about their business as usual. 

“People in the street don’t feel like the members on the inside really have the pulse of what’s happening to them, and that frankly they’re fucking tired,” Ramirez said. “And I hate that I have to ask them to keep showing up. But knowing this body, I know that this body only moves from pressure.”

The post In the Wake of Fatal ICE Shootings, Democrats Drag Their Feet appeared first on The Intercept.

As unmanned aerial vehicles target Israel, Persian Gulf states and U.S. forces in the Middle East, Ukraine is selling equipment, giving advice and establishing joint production lines.

If you're on old AT&T plans -- or shopping around -- now's the time to see if you can save money or switch features with the new lineup.

Storms are typical during intense heat but this week’s have been extreme. Plus, deadly monsoon rains in Bangladesh

Hailstones the size of golf balls have been seen in French villages as, on top of the exceptional European heatwave, thunderstorms have struck across parts of Europe.

While thunderstorms are typical during and after a period of extreme heat, the storms across countries such as France, Germany and Poland have been particularly severe, bringing flooding, strong winds and heavy showers with large balls of hail.

Move would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to potentially profit from seeing president’s posts first

Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own, affecting national security and financial markets.

The move announced on Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news first from top Truth Social contributors so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates.

Opponents say president’s address about 2020 election loss is attempt to sow confusion ahead of midterms that could deliver big losses for Republicans

Donald Trump accused China of interfering with the 2020 election in a primetime televised address that laid bare his continuing obsession with his defeat to Joe Biden, but which opponents warned was a smokescreen for him to meddle in the forthcoming congressional midterms.

In a 25-minute speech on Thursday that had been hyped by Trump himself, the US president cast extraordinary doubts on the integrity of the US electoral process, saying it was “catastrophically” short of standards of fairness and trust, and vulnerable to trespassing by foreign powers.

Evil Empire creatives explain how it is playing to today’s ‘metroidvanias’ and honouring the original’s legacy with much fresh slaying to be done

Since the last Castlevania game hit the shelves (2014’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2), Konami’s dormant series has unexpectedly spawned a hit genre. With an entire generation raised on “metroidvanias” – a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania – millions of players have only ever seen the games inspired by Konami’s seminal games. Now with Belmont’s Curse, launching in October, Castlevania is finally dashing back to console, where Konami hopes to reclaim its side-scroller throne.

Set 23 years after the events of 1989’s Castlevania 3 – the same setting as the hit Netflix show – Belmont’s Curse shakes off the series’ 3D ambitions and takes the Belmonts back to basics. Dispatching players to the demon-infested streets of 1499 Paris, you’re placed in the tattered boots of Trevor Belmont’s daughter, Rose. As a bishop pleads with the Belmonts to rid Paris of the ancient evil besetting the city, Rose heads into the sewers, longsword in hand, and her demon-slaying adventure begins.

Two of the top four chess nations will go head to head in Miami on 27-28 July

The USA and Uzbekistan are among the world’s current four best chess teams, along with India and China, so the announcement that the pair will meet at Miami on 27-28 July in an all-play-all rapid and blitz Scheveningen format is sure to create interest as a guide to what may happen when the 200-nation classical Olympiad takes place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, from 15-27 September. Full details of the forthcoming match are here.

The two teams in Miami will both be at virtually full strength. The USA will field the world Nos 2 and 3, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, plus the world No 7, Wesley So, and the world Nos 17 and 22, Leinier Domínguez and Levon Aronian. Only the world No 19, Hans Niemann, might have made it stronger.

Astronomers have directly detected helium in the atmosphere of LHS 1140 b, a rocky exoplanet 48 light-years away that sits in its star's habitable zone. The finding marks the first confirmed atmosphere around a rocky, Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, strengthening the case that some planets orbiting red dwarfs can retain atmospheres and potentially support liquid water. "We have actually detected directly the helium present in the atmosphere itself, and that's the first direct detection for any rocky exoplanet, which is really exciting ... and then there's this added bonus that it's in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life," lead author Collin Cherubim, who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, told Space.com. "It feels kind of surreal." From the report: This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, was first discovered in 2017 by a team led by astronomer Jason Dittmann who is now a co-author on this new discovery. "This planet was found like 10 years ago, and we're just now saying, okay, that's an atmosphere," Dittman told Space.com. "We're slowly narrowing the gap and checking these boxes ... we're finding a planet that's rocky, a planet that's of the right temperature and now ... it's like okay, we finally found one that has an atmosphere." And being a rocky planet, "there's definitely a surface ... it's made of rocks," Dittman said. What does the planet's surface look like? We can't say yet, but the researchers who found this planet's atmosphere think there's a good chance it could have water. While it orbits a red dwarf star, which is smaller and cooler than the sun, it orbits closer than we do to our star, maintaining a temperature that keeps the planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water could exist on its surface. "It probably also has a lot of water," Cherubim said. "If it has some amount of atmosphere that can provide a bit of a greenhouse effect, which we know that it does now ... it will very likely be what we consider to be habitable conditions on Earth, and conditions that would likely support liquid water." So is it Earth-like? While it's certainly not an Earth copy, this planet can be considered Earth-like in two main ways, Cherubim shared. One: its overall composition. The planet is rocky, likely with an iron core and (now we know) it has an atmosphere. And two: the planet's temperature is just right for liquid water, which is necessary for life at least as far as we understand it on our planet. [...] "I'm not claiming this planet has life," Cherubim made clear. With further investigation, scientists could better understand what else might be in this planet's atmosphere, and they could confirm if it has water. Further observations might not be able to confirm habitability or identify any life on the planet, but they could at least help us to better understand planets like this. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Move dealt ‘severe blow to Chinese companies’ confidence in investing in the UK’, says Ministry of Commerce

China’s government has said it is “strongly dissatisfied” with the decision to nationalise British Steel this week, 15 months after the UK government intervened to prevent the closure of its steelworks in Scunthorpe and the loss of 4,000 jobs.

On Thursday, British Steel was brought under public ownership to protect “the future of steel production”, the government announced.

BBC Philharmonic/Havlat/Kaziboni/Piatti Quartet
(NMC)
Einstein’s field equations, Newton’s universal law and artificial intelligence are among the subjects of Laidlow’s ambitious orchestral works

Robert Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex.

Warp, a terse, 12-minute piano concerto, proposes a musical solution to Einstein’s field equations as the intrepid Joseph Havlat boldly goes where no pianist has gone before amid the distorting fabric of orchestral space-time. Strident orchestral lines spiral ever upwards, stretching instruments to their limits, while the piano maintains its course towards a serene conclusion. Handsomely recorded, the BBC Philharmonic and Vimbayi Kaziboni offer vibrantly detailed support.

British domestic holidays are being pushed to their highest levels since Covid

The start of the peak summer season is set to bring millions of drivers on to British roads, with concerns of traffic chaos as the port of Dover faces its biggest test yet of new EU border controls.

The semi-functioning entry-exit system (EES) is credited, along with the heatwaves and fears about flights after the war in Iran, with helping push British domestic holidays to its highest levels since Covid halted international travel.

President Trump gave a primetime address on elections tonight, as he remains focused on the 2020 race.

Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?

By Robert P Baird. Read by Simon Darwen

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Trump’s demands could derail progress on allied defense.

The Pentagon is broken, but Congress can fix it.

President Trump alleged voting machines and ballot-counting systems are "extremely exposed to attack" — but experts say voting machines are subject to intense controls.

Salad greens are the suspected source of the growing cyclospora outbreak, with officials warning people to avoid eating iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in five states.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Trump Media & Technology Group has unveiled a paid-for, licensed data feed that will give banks and trading firms "the fastest" access to posts from influential Truth Social accounts, such as President Donald Trump's, whose posts often move global markets. The product, called 'Truth API,' will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said. The feed is designed for organizations "most impacted by the cost of a delay in information," such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. "Until now... firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap." "Markets already move on Truth Social posts ... As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company," TMTG's interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iran said it would attack "all infrastructure in the region" if President Trump follows through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met with accusers of Jeffrey Epstein following a demand to do so by a Republican senator whose support is crucial to advancing his nomination to lead the Justice Department.

Vicki Brady told senators maintenance staff were unaware of mass outage risk as critical software failure ‘rippled slowly across the network’

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Telstra has blamed the lack of a software update on a key time-keeping system for an outage that caused nationwide chaos last week, with its maintenance teams also unaware of a design change that affected how it would reset.

Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, told a Senate inquiry into the mobile outage on Friday that 45% of all calls and data sessions last Wednesday were affected when the network went down shortly before 4.30am AEST.

Dozens of beluga whales are set to be relocated from the shuttered Canadian theme park to aquariums across the United States through an international emergency rescue effort, officials said.

Google's AI-powered editing tool and its new personal avatars feature let you cast yourself in videos without ever needing a camera.

Since the beginning of his second administration, the government has cut thousands of workers who were tasked with ensuring secure elections in the U.S.

Flock is setting up surveillance cams and drones in cities nationwide. Citizens are fighting back. Here's everything you should know.

Engineering has never had more computing power. Yet engineering transformation has never been more difficult.

Over the past four decades, engineering organizations have consistently responded to increasing complexity by investing in better technology. Faster processors. Larger HPC systems. Cloud computing. Artificial Intelligence. Digital Twins. Engineering data platforms. Agentic AI. And now Quantum Computing.

Each generation of technology has expanded what engineers can achieve. Today’s engineering teams possess computational capabilities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.

Yet a remarkable paradox has emerged. While technology has advanced at an extraordinary pace, many organizations continue to struggle with turning technological progress into everyday engineering practice.

The next bottleneck is no longer primarily technology. It is organizational capability. And that may become the defining engineering challenge of the AI era.

The Great Convergence

Perhaps the most significant development today is not another breakthrough technology. It is the convergence of many technologies. High Performance Computing has become the common foundation upon which Artificial Intelligence, engineering simulation, Digital Engineering, cloud computing, engineering data platforms, Digital Twins, and eventually Quantum Computing increasingly depend.

Each of these technologies is transformative. Together they are reshaping engineering itself. For engineering leaders, this convergence creates unprecedented opportunities—but also unprecedented complexity.

The challenge is no longer deciding which technology to adopt. It is learning how to integrate a continuous stream of new technologies into engineering organizations while maintaining productivity, collaboration, quality, and innovation.

(AntonKhrupinAr/Shutterstock)

This is no longer simply a technical challenge. It is becoming a leadership challenge.

Beyond Technology Leadership

For many years, competitive advantage was closely linked to technological leadership. Organizations differentiated themselves by acquiring faster computers, deploying larger clusters, improving engineering software, or expanding infrastructure.

Those investments remain essential. But increasingly they are becoming prerequisites rather than differentiators.

Tomorrow’s leading engineering organizations will not necessarily be those possessing the most advanced technologies. They will be those capable of continuously transforming engineering as technologies evolve. This distinction is subtle, but profound.

Technology creates possibilities. Organizational capability transforms those possibilities into everyday engineering practice. The difference determines whether innovation remains an isolated success—or becomes part of an organization’s DNA.

Engineering Transformation Is No Longer an Engineering Problem

Historically, engineering modernization was largely driven by engineers, simulation specialists, HPC administrators, and IT organizations.

Today, that perspective is no longer sufficient. Artificial Intelligence is reshaping workforce development. Engineering data increasingly influences enterprise strategy. Digital Engineering changes organizational structures. Cloud computing transforms operating models. Quantum Computing will eventually influence long-term innovation roadmaps.

These developments extend well beyond engineering departments. They increasingly require executive leadership. Chief Technology Officers. Chief Engineering Officers. Business transformation leaders. Human Resources. Boards of Directors.

Engineering transformation has become an organizational capability that must be intentionally developed rather than assumed to emerge automatically from better technology.

A New Leadership Imperative

This represents an important shift in how engineering leadership itself is evolving. For decades, engineering leaders focused primarily on optimizing technology.

Tomorrow’s leaders will increasingly focus on enabling people. Building organizations capable of continuous learning. Helping multidisciplinary teams collaborate effectively. Preparing engineering workforces for technologies that did not exist only a few years ago. Creating cultures that embrace innovation while maintaining operational excellence.

The engineering organization itself becomes a strategic capability. That requires a different style of leadership.

The Next Generation of Engineering Transformation

The first generation of engineering transformation initiatives concentrated primarily on operational excellence. Workflow automation. Infrastructure optimization. Operational best practices. Training. Certification.

These efforts have delivered substantial improvements and remain essential today. But they increasingly address only part of the challenge. Engineering itself is changing.

The next generation must therefore move beyond operational excellence toward developing organizational capability. That includes executive leadership. Continuous workforce development. Executive education. Cross-functional collaboration. Knowledge sharing. Communities of practice. Engineering capability becomes the destination.

A Different Kind of Best Practice

Future best practices are likely to extend well beyond technical operations. Increasingly, engineering organizations will ask questions such as:

• How should executive teams guide AI adoption?
• How do organizations prepare engineering workforces for continuous technological change?
• How can engineering cultures encourage innovation without sacrificing operational excellence?
• How should leadership teams balance technology investment with workforce development?
• How can industrial communities accelerate the responsible adoption of emerging technologies?

These questions cannot be answered by software alone. Nor by infrastructure. They require leadership.

Technology Creates Possibilities. People Create Transformation

Perhaps the most important lesson emerging from the last decade is surprisingly simple. Technology alone does not transform organizations. People do.

Technology creates possibilities. People create innovation. Communities create lasting transformation.

Perhaps the next great engineering revolution will not be defined by another breakthrough technology. It will be defined by organizations that continuously reinvent themselves as technology evolves. Operational excellence will remain essential. It is the foundation.

The Real Destination Is Engineering Capability

As Artificial Intelligence, Digital Engineering, HPC, cloud computing, and Quantum Computing continue to converge, competitive advantage will increasingly belong not to organizations possessing the most advanced technologies – but to those capable of transforming these technologies into everyday engineering practice.

That may well become the defining engineering challenge of the coming decade.

About the Author: Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch is Executive Director of the independent, vendor-neutral, non-profit SimOps Foundation. Over more than four decades, he has helped organizations adopt successive generations of advanced computing technologies, including High Performance Computing, grid and cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, engineering simulation, and digital engineering. His work focuses on helping engineering organizations develop the organizational capabilities required to translate technological innovation into lasting engineering excellence.

The post Engineering’s Next Great Transformation: Why Organizational Capability Will Define the AI Era appeared first on HPCwire.

The petition to Sundar Pichai, the CEO, included more than 4,500 signatures and included calls for buyout options

Google workers on Thursday delivered a petition calling for layoff protections as tech giants continue to slash their workforces while pouring billions into AI.

“Make no mistake: this is a company that is enjoying massive, unprecedented success,” Parul Koul, Google software engineer and Alphabet Workers Union president, said outside the company’s California headquarters after delivering the petition to the office of the CEO, Sundar Pichai’. Koul pointed to Google’s $4tn valuation, which has quadrupled over the last six years: “These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”

Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent police shooting of a 19-year-old has quickly become one of Wilmington’s highest profile police use-of-force cases in recent years. A Delaware Department of Justice investigation into the incident is expected to be closely watched as residents look for answers and justice. Newly released police body camera footage shows how the encounter unfolded. 

Three weeks after the police shooting of Kadir Skinner, the Delaware Department of Justice released footage from the body camera of the officer who fatally shot the 19-year-old in northeast Wilmington, as well as video from two other responding officers.  

The video of the June 24 incident begins without audio as the officer drives his police cruiser. He then comes to a stop, gets out, and begins to run. At that moment, Skinner is seen in the video, running down a sidewalk. A few frames from the video also show a dog running behind Skinner. 

A short foot chase ensues. About four seconds after leaving the cruiser, the pursuing officer is seen holding his gun, though the quality of the video is poor. About three seconds after that, the audio from the footage begins, just as the officer fires his weapon four times. 

Wilmington officials have said that Skinner was shot from behind in the buttocks. They have not stated why the officer shot the fleeing teen at that moment.

After firing his weapon, the officer yells “drop it” and “drop that gun,” according to the video. 

The officer then approaches Skinner, who had collapsed onto his knees saying, “I don’t got nothing.”

The shooting officer then tells another officer, “he threw something,” and “find the gun and get it,” while proceeding to handcuff the wounded Skinner on the pavement. 

Over the next 30 seconds, a crowd begins to form in the area. Skinner repeatedly says, “I can’t breathe.”  

About a minute after the shooting, the officer asks Skinner, “Are you hit?”

“I don’t know,” Skinner replies. 

A separate video from another responding officer shows her walking down the sidewalk where the chase had just taken place. She stops at a spot, and reaches down. The footage does not show what she reaches toward. 

She then returns to the immediate scene when sound from her body camera turns on. The officer yells toward bystanders to “back up now.”  The shooting officer then tells her to “secure the gun.” She responds, “I have it.” 

The third video is from the officer who was in the passenger seat of the shooting officer’s police cruiser. Shortly after it begins, it shows that officer drawing his gun while still in the car and pointing it out the window. The officer then climbs out of the car where he catches up to the first officer with his knee on Skinner’s back. 

The video then shows him walking to the spot along the sidewalk where the female officer would later stop and reached down. A black object is seen in the footage. 

In all, the videos depict a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer leaves his vehicle to when he begins handcuffing Skinner on the ground. About three-and-a-half minutes pass after Skinner was shot before officers place his limp body into a cruiser and take him to Wilmington Hospital.

Police have previously said that Skinner died at the hospital.

During the aftermath of the shooting, the videos also show a highly charged scene with police holding pepper spray and tasers while ordering distraught onlookers to back up. Some yell, “he’s dying.”

At point point, one bystander and one officer can be heard cursing back and forth toward each other.

Skinners’ devastated father also is at the scene watching as his wounded son lies on the ground in handcuffs. At one point, he tells officers, “You shot my fucking son.” 

Following the release of the body camera footage, Wilmington Mayor John Carney said in a statement that he and the state DOJ are “committed to transparency during this process and to conducting a thorough investigation.”

In the statement, Carney also asserted that body cameras have “limitations, and this footage does not capture the totality of the incident.”

This story will be updated.

The Delaware Department of Justice posted the three body camera videos onto Youtube. Each are distressing and Spotlight Delaware advises viewer discretion.

Officer Body Cam 1

Officer Body Cam 2

Officer Body Cam 3

The post Body cam footage shows fatal police shooting of Kadir Skinner in Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

There was a sense of deja vu as Argentina came from behind to win an intense semi-final. But the players also gave the nation some memorable highs

Historically, English football-supporting culture has had a well-known darker side. But in recent decades, as the England men’s team’s trophy drought has continued, some of its unofficial anthems have acquired an endearingly melancholy quality. “It was nearly complete, it was nearly so sweet”, as the Three Lions song had it in the 1990s, when England exited a World Cup and a European Championship at the semi-final stage.

This summer, Oasis’s Wonderwall has been the soundtrack as Harry Kane and co progressed to Wednesday’s climactic semi-final showdown with Argentina. This is a song which, very wisely in an England context, puts a heavy emphasis on the idea of “maybe”. In the end it turned out to be maybe not.

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.

Sixth day of fighting threatens to turn into all-out war and casts serious doubt on peace deal struck last month

• Chaos and confusion bring US no closer to resolution on strait of Hormuz

The US has intensified its attacks on Iran, hitting targets near Tehran and striking a ship it accused of trying to break its blockade, while Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at US allies in the region.

Six consecutive days of back-and-forth attacks threaten to pull the region back into a total war and cast serious doubt about an interim deal reached last month meant to achieve a permanent peace.

The Society of St. Pius X, excommunicated by Pope Leo's Vatican, has built an outpost of traditionalism on the prairie.

Part of President Trump's speech Thursday night is expected to touch on previously unreported alleged Chinese meddling in U.S. elections, according to sources familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump said at a June faith conference that “religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years” and “it’s going up.” The statement is misleading, as multiple surveys show lower religious affiliation and engagement than in past years — despite a recent rise in the perceived influence of religion in America.

The president made a similar claim during his February State of the Union address, in which he stated that, during both of his presidential terms, there had been “a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God,” especially “among young people.” We wrote at the time that recent polling showed the opposite.

But Trump has continued to present religion as gaining strength nationally, including in remarks in April, for Easter, and in May, for the National Day of Prayer. 

Then, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference on June 26, he said: “America is back. It’s back. It’s back, I believe, better than ever before. And I’m especially pleased to say that likewise, religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years. Been reading all of those reports. Religion’s really — it’s going up. If that were a stock, we’d be very, very rich, all of us. It’s been great to watch.”

We contacted the White House press office and asked which reports Trump saw that show increases in religious affiliation, beliefs or attendance. We did not receive a response.

On our own, we found little support for the president’s claim.

In late March, Ryan Burge, a political scientist and professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at the Washington University in St. Louis, posted October survey data showing that the share of Americans who are “nonreligious” dropped 3 percentage points from 34% in 2024, Joe Biden’s last year as president, to 31% in 2025. That was the lowest percentage since 2016, according to his numbers, which he attributed to the Cooperative Election Study, an academic survey partly funded by the National Science Foundation that interviews more than 50,000 U.S. adults.

The survey asked, “What is your present religion, if any?” It provided several religions as options, as well as “something else,” atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” The “nonreligious” in Burge’s post included the latter three categories. Over Trump’s first term, the percentage of Americans who are nonreligious went up slightly, by 3 percentage points. 

In addition, in late April, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research published the results of another 2025 poll that surveyed leaders representing 7,453 congregations in the U.S. It found that the reported attendance at religious services – which dropped to its lowest levels during the COVID-19 pandemic – had risen above pre-COVID levels. According to the study, the median size of U.S. congregations grew to 70 people last year – up from a median of 65 people just prior to the pandemic. (The median is the halfway point, meaning that half of congregations had more attendees and half had fewer.)

But the researchers said the survey results “should be interpreted with caution,” as the 2025 median of 70 attendees remained well below the median of 137 attendees in 2000. It’s also still lower than the more recent median of 80 attendees in 2015. “Therefore, this recent gain should be viewed within the much longer historical trajectory of a decline,” the researchers said.  

What’s more, other surveys don’t show a religious resurgence as Trump described.

Gallup reported in March that 47% of U.S. adults in a 2025 survey said religion was “very important” in their lives. That’s down from 48% in 2024 and down from Trump’s first-term high of 51% in 2017. “The reading has been gradually declining from 58% in 2012 and was as high as 70% to 75% in the 1950s and 1960s,” Gallup said.

Its surveys also found that 28% of those polled have said religion is “not very important” to them each year since 2022, “the highest proportion in Gallup’s trend and more than double the rate seen as recently as the early 2000s.”

An additional 25% said last year that they considered religion to be “fairly important.” But that was up just 1 percentage point from 2024, and still below Gallup’s recorded high of 32% in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Meanwhile, 24% of people in 2025 said they had no religious affiliation at all, a new high. Gallup’s monthly 2025 polls surveyed in total more than 13,000 American adults.

Gallup found a similar pattern in religious service attendance.

Of the people surveyed in 2025, 57% stated that they seldom or never attend religious services, an increase from 55% in 2024. Also, 31% said they attended services weekly or almost weekly in 2025, a decrease from 33% the previous year. 

The long-term trend “shows a steady decline in regular attendance alongside a sustained increase in nonattendance over the past two-plus decades,” Gallup reported. It added, “From the early 1990s to 2008, majorities of U.S. adults said they attended services at least monthly, but since 2018, majorities have said they rarely or never attend religious services.”

The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 religion census revealed similar trends.

In April, PRRI reported that “28% of Americans identify as having no religious tradition, similar to the previous year’s rate.” But it also said “the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans has steadily increased” over time; 21% said they had no religious tradition in 2013. 

Likewise, PRRI said, “The share of Americans who seldom or never attend religious services has increased substantially, rising from 42% in 2013 to 53% in 2025.”

And the Pew Research Center has also found no general spike in religiosity.

It reported in December that consistently in its surveys going back to 2020, about 70% of U.S. adults have said they identify with a religion. “While the numbers have fluctuated a little, there has been no clear rise or fall in religious affiliation over the last five years,” Pew said.

It said similar patterns were observed when asking about the praying habits of Americans, the importance of religion in their lives, and the frequency in which they attend religious services. “There is some bouncing around from year to year, as is to be expected in survey research. But there is no clear trend of either increasing or decreasing religiousness since 2020,” Pew said.

What About Christianity?

If the president meant Christianity is “bigger and stronger” in the U.S. now – since he mentioned protecting Christians from attacks and bias in his faith conference remarks – the survey data we reviewed don’t corroborate that, either. 

Pew Research Center’s 2025 National Public Opinion Reference Survey, conducted with 5,022 U.S. adults, found that 62% of people identified as Christians last year, including 41% as Protestant, 19% as Roman Catholic, 1% as Mormon and 1% as Orthodox. That was down from 63% who claimed Christianity in 2024 and 64% who did in 2020. The Christian share of the population was 78% as recently as 2007, according to Pew.

Gallup’s most recent figures were in the same ballpark.

Last year, a combined 64% of respondents identified as either Protestant, nondenominational Christian or Catholic, according to Gallup surveys. That was down from 67% who fell into one of those categories in 2024, and it was also much lower than the combined 82% who did in the early 2000s.

Burge, who is also a former pastor and whose research focuses on religion in America, has said that the percentages indicate that a religious “revival” is not occurring.

“I think we’re moving into a new era of what’s happening with American religion,” he said in a January podcast interview with the New York Times. “It was rapid secularization from 1991 to 2020. Now we’re in a period of stasis.”

The newspaper quoted him as saying that the nonreligious share of the U.S. population “has really stuck” at around 30% while the Christian share has been “in the low 60s” for five straight years.

“This is a plateau, not a reversal. This is not a revival. The directions are not reversing themselves. They’re just staying where they are right now,” Burge said.

What About Young Men?

Notably, in April, Gallup published survey data covering 2024-2025 that do show a sudden increase in religiousness among men between the ages of 18 and 29.

During that period, 42% of men in that age group said religion was “very important” in their lives, a 14-point increase from 28% in 2022-2023. That put young men back at nearly the same level as 2000-2001, when 43% said religion was very important to them. (Gallup says these “findings are based on biennial aggregates of Gallup’s religion data from 2000-2001 through 2024-2025, allowing for stable estimates across age and gender groups.”)

In addition, 40% of young men reported attending church or another place of worship monthly or more frequently in 2024-2025. That was the “highest level since 2012-2013,” Gallup said, and a 7-point increase from 2022-2023.

Gallup noted that much of the attendance growth was in young Republicans.

At the same time, Gallup said the data show that “women of all age groups and older men are at or near their historical lows” in terms of the importance of religion in their lives. And while young women also reported more regular attendance at religious services in 2024-2025 compared with 2022-2023, Gallup said that the attendance rates of older men and women remained “at or near their trend lows.”

Young men are “an emerging exception,” Gallup said, while noting that Americans’ overall religiosity “remains at a low ebb.”

Religion’s Perceived Influence

Finally, there is some evidence that more Americans now think religion is gaining influence in public life – if that’s what Trump was referencing.

A Pew Research Center survey in April asked about the perceived role of religion in society, not people’s religious identification. It found that 61% of adults polled said that religion is losing influence in American life, while 37% said religion is gaining influence – up from the 18% who said so in February 2024.  

“The share saying religion is gaining influence has risen 19 percentage points in the last two years and is now as high as it has been in Center surveys going back to 2002,” Pew said.

The researchers also noted that a majority see the perceived growth in the influence of religion as positive. They said, “Overall, 55% of U.S. adults express a positive view of religion’s role in American life – saying either that religion’s influence is growing and this is a good thing (21%) or that its influence is declining and this is a bad thing (34%).”

The 55% net positive view of religion in April is lower than the 59% in February 2025 but higher than the 52% in March-April 2019.

But perception doesn’t necessarily match reality. That data don’t mean that Americans are becoming more religious overall, as Trump suggested in his remarks.

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 No Clear Evidence Religion Is ‘Bigger and Stronger’ in U.S., Despite Trump Claim appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Financial regulators need to get ahead of the curve on private credit Expert comment jon.wallace 15 July 2026

The dramatic rise in private credit and its links points to a need for regulators to get ahead of the curve on monitoring systemic risk and protecting retail investors.

The assets within global Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFIs) increased to $257 trillion by the end of 2024 – or more than half of total global financial assets, according to the Financial Stability Board (FSB). Of that, private credit – that is, lending by dedicated funds to typically mid-sized companies – is said to be around $1.5–2 trillion.

However, private credit has grown rapidly (from around $40 billion in 2000) and is already greater in nominal value than all outstanding subprime mortgages in 2007. And, if the broader market is accounted for – including distressed debt, asset-backed lending, commercial real estate, consumer finance and commercial corporate finance – private credit can be far larger – in the $10–50 trillion range.

This rapid growth took place during the long period of ultra-low interest rates between 2009 and  2022, combined with more stringent regulations constraining bank lending and the related rise in private equity.

Private credit has played a valuable role filling gaps left by banks and offering customizable and timely credit lines to medium-sized companies. It offers diversification benefits to investors, lenders and borrowers through vehicles like the Business Development Company (BDC) – which can be publicly listed or non-listed – investment funds and private credit collateralized loan obligations (CLOs).

Most private credit originates in the US (over 87 per cent in 2025) with Europe, the UK and Canada accounting for most of the rest. Large institutions and ultra-high net worth families dominate the investor base.

Related work

The UK must guard against new risks to financial stability coming from the US

But the share of retail investors (individuals investing smaller volumes for personal accounts) in private credit funds has gone from near zero to 13 per cent in the last decade. 

And US workers are increasingly investing in private credit funds via their pension plans, after regulatory restrictions were relaxed. Access to private credit could open up even more: in March 2026, the US Department of Labor proposed opening 401k (retirement) accounts to alternative assets like private credit.

The risk involved is considerable: Investors in private credit funds do not enjoy protections such as deposit insurance. Nor do these funds have access to the emergency liquidity support extended to banks.

Private credit is also concentrated in the services, technology and healthcare sectors. These borrowers typically lack public credit ratings or cluster around high risk ‘junk’ B- ratings. And they usually are more leveraged than borrowers in the syndicated loan market.

Private credit is lightly regulated and untested by a genuine credit cycle, let alone a deep and prolonged economic downturn. Are regulators taking it seriously enough?

What are the concerns about private credit?

Private credit has been in the headlines following some high-profile defaults. The FSB warns of deteriorating credit quality indicators with opaque default and valuation practices. And liquidity risks are increasing, as US funds increasingly allow more periodic partial redemption windows – attractive to retail investors who want the ability to quickly cash out.

Some sectors are particularly exposed: One-fifth of private credit loans are to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies whose business models are threatened by AI. Large declines in software and BDC stock prices have been partly driven by fund investors, worried about the impact of AI, exiting through redemptions.

There are longer-term systemic concerns related to private credit too, due to its size and deep links to private equity, banks, pension funds and insurers.

Links between banks and private credit are numerous: Banks can partner with private credit funds, lend to investors in those funds, and invest directly in the funds themselves. They can also buy private CLOs. Synthetic risk transfers to banks can take place via credit-linked notes or credit default swap spreads. The complexity of these links could hinder banks’ risk assessments and stress tests.  

Insurance companies are also exposed: some private equity firms have taken over (or secured controlling stakes in) insurance companies that then invested in related private credit. In the US, private equity-based insurers control nearly $900 billion in liabilities – up from $67 billion in 2012.

Meanwhile many asset managers that specialize in private markets operate both private equity and private credit strategies under the same roof. That creates potential synergies but also raises the risk of conflicts of interest. Globally, five large asset managers account for one-third of aggregate loan commitments in the private credit sector.

And risk also emerges from the various jurisdictions straddled by private credit vehicles: US and UK funds usually have fund managers, borrowers and investors located in many different countries – making oversight difficult.  

What should regulators do?

Private credit is likely to follow the path of previous credit innovations, such as emerging market debt, high-yield bonds and subprime Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). That would involve a reckoning, followed by improved regulation, and eventual maturity into a regular asset class.

Opinion is divided about the systemic implications of a significant downturn in the private credit market. Some make the case that risk is contained, due to the largely institutional investors and the still (relatively) modest size of private credit.

However, the direction of travel – rapid growth, increasing links to the banking and insurance sectors, and participation by retail investors – suggests private credit will become systemically important.  

And the subprime crisis of 2008 demonstrated that opacity, hidden leverage, and underestimated financial linkages can turn into a significant threat to the international financial system. The 2008 crisis was far more serious than the estimated $1.3 trillion in subprime mortgages suggested, because of the layers of leverage involved.

Subprime mortgages were transformed into CDOs and CDOs of CDOs. Credit Default Swaps (CDS) – default insurance – were written that had a notional value many times that of the underlying mortgages. Banks and broker-dealers often financed these assets with high leverage ratios, magnifying the losses and systemic consequences. Similar opaque layers of leverage may make systemic risk from private credit significantly greater than it may appear.

An important lesson from 2008 is the need to prepare for a crisis in the market. How can policymakers do so today? The FSB was formed in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis in part to improve understanding of the linkages between the banks and NBFIs. It has done good work.

Related work

What can financial regulators learn from Formula 1?

But standardizing and harmonizing definitions of private credit would help understand the true size of the market and cross-country comparisons. 

Regulators and central banks have already moved to enhance reporting requirements for private funds. And central banks are attempting to look through the exposures of banks directly and indirectly.

An important additional measure would be for international and national agencies to coordinate a push to access the data needed to understand the systemic risks emerging from private credit – though in such a way as avoids overly onerous reporting requirements on private funds. And they should work to prepare appropriate cross-sectoral and cross-border financial stability architecture to contain spillovers from private credit and shadow banking more broadly.

Regulators need to ensure that retail investors are projected and better understand what they are buying. Some sophisticated ultra-high net worth ‘qualified investors’ have been scammed in private markets, so what chance do retail investors have? And funds that retail investors and 401k accounts are allowed to invest in should have diversified loans and sectors, liquidity provisions and high levels of transparency on the fund’s leverage and risks.

US refusal to renew USMCA trade deal brings uncertainty for Mexico. But the treaty is far from dead Expert comment LToremark 14 July 2026

The US–Mexico–Canada agreement now faces a decade of annual reviews. But the fact that the treaty will remain in place during negotiations is the most important outcome.

On 1 July, the US announced it would not renew the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) free trade deal in its current form. Mexico and Canada had each confirmed that they wished to extend the agreement for a further 16-year term, but the US declined. Its trade representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, said Washington would keep working with Mexico and Canada to address the agreement’s shortcomings and the trade imbalances with both. Crucially, the USMCA stays in effect while those matters are worked through. 

The USMCA will now be reviewed annually until 2036. But the Trump administration’s volatile policies intertwining trade and security matters will add to the complexity of these negotiations – especially for Mexico.

US–Mexico trade: from NAFTA to USMCA to tariff uncertainty

The USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in place between 1994 and 2020. US president Donald Trump referred to NAFTA as the ‘worst trade deal ever’, and during his first term he set out to replace it with a new deal. After three years of negotiations, the USMCA came into effect in 2020.

But since Trump returned to the White House last year, things have changed. There is renewed focus on industrial policy and domestic manufacturing, exacerbated commercial tensions with China, and use of tariffs to bring about improvements in non-trade areas such as national security. In this context, trade and diplomatic relations between the US and Mexico have become increasingly rocky and volatile. 

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Despite Trump’s threats, Mexico is of fundamental importance to the US economy

On ‘Liberation Day’ on 2 April 2025, Trump announced tariffs of 25 per cent on non-USMCA-compliant goods and 10 per cent on non-compliant energy against Mexico for its failure to stop flows of illegal migration and drugs across the border. Since then, Mexican officials have engaged in a series of negotiations, both through diplomatic and back channels, to achieve three main goals: preserve the free trade framework, cancel or reduce new tariffs and give as much certainty as possible to the future of the USMCA. 

So far, Mexico has been relatively successful in achieving these aims: most of the conversations have revolved not around the cancellation of the agreement – as with NAFTA – but rather around a renegotiation. Although different from the ideal outcome stated in the treaty – a ‘simple’ revision – it is not as existentially damaging as an abolition. 

Although US tariffs on Mexico are higher than before Donald Trump’s second term, they are far more competitive than those facing the rest of the world. Around 88 per cent of Mexican exports to the US enter duty-free under the USMCA. As a result, even though the headline rates on some sectors are steep – such as 25 per cent on steel and aluminium – the weighted-average effective tariff on Mexican exports is only about 3.4 per cent.  By way of comparison, the average effective tariff on Chinese exports to the US now stands at about 22 per cent, while comparable economies such as India and Brazil face 8.4 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively.

Mexico is also the main trading partner of the US and ranks between the first and third largest trading partner for 36 out of the 50 states, while the US accounts for roughly 80 per cent of Mexican exports. Meanwhile, migration flows have been significantly reduced from more than 2 million encounters reported by US authorities in 2022 to 237,538 in 2025, while US fentanyl deaths were halved during the same period, giving the US grounds to suspend new tariffs. 

Mexico therefore retains a clear comparative advantage – preserving it should be the cornerstone of its strategy when negotiating the future of the USMCA. 

Negotiating the future of the USMCA

Negotiations between the US and its two treaty partners have thus far been predominantly bilateral, although both Mexico and Canada are pushing for more trilateral talks. 

For Mexico, given the extreme uncertainty that characterizes US actions towards Mexico, the government should make every effort to truly understand US priorities and rationale. Understanding the motivations behind Washington’s actions will help determine Mexico’s room for manoeuvre in the negotiations. President Claudia Sheinbaum has also stressed the need to ‘keep a cool head’ when navigating tensions with US. Mexican officials must understand Washington’s concerns in relation to trade deficits and how Mexico is positioned in that rhetoric – but they must also stress Mexico’s stance of cooperation without subordination. Having as much clarity as possible will help distinguish noise from reality in the years of negotiations ahead. 

The US refusing to renew the USMCA was a disappointing but expected outcome, given the new context in which no country is exempt from Trump’s tariffs – not even treaty partners. The fact that the treaty will remain in place during the renegotiation is hugely significant in its own right. What is up for negotiation is for how long, what kind of treaty, and how often it is reviewed. 

The first point, the duration, was resolved in principle. The USMCA will remain in place for at least 10 more years, until 2036, unless the parties agree on something different in the coming years of negotiations. If the parties have not reached an agreement by 2036, the treaty will expire – although it seems unlikely this would be allowed to happen without something else in place given the importance of North American trade and economic integration. 

What kind of treaty it is will depend on the outcome of the negotiations. However, it is important to remember that there will still be tariffs – and markets know this. Mexico is likely to continue bilateral negotiations in which Washington presses for measures to narrow its trade deficit, raise US content in regional supply chains and tighten the rules of origin to curb trans-shipment, among other demands. Mexico, in turn, will push to broaden the USMCA tariff exemptions. The aim of its negotiators will be to confine tariffs to as few sectors as possible, and to keep them as low as possible. 

London Conference 2026: The Alliance after Ankara: Is NATO dead? Video thilton.drupal 14 July 2026

Just the day after the 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, the first session of Chatham House’s 2026 London Conference addressed the future of alliance.

The panel, hosted by Marion Messmer, the director of the International Security Programme at Chatham House, explored the following questions:

• Can NATO survive without the US?
• Has US pressure on allies to increase defence spending started to yield results?
• How do governments avoid procurement mistakes of the past?
• What war and conflict are governments rearming for? What are the most acute threats?  

Speakers:
General Sir Richard Barrons, Senior Consulting Fellow, International Security Programme, Chatham House
Paul Livingston, Chief Executive UK & NATO, Lockheed Martin
Kajsa Ollongren, Former Defence Minister, Kingdom of the Netherlands; Associate Fellow, Europe Programme, Chatham House
The Rt Hon Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen, Distinguished Fellow, Chatham House; Chair, International Relations and Defence Committee, House of Lords 
Chair: Marion Messmer, Director, International Security Programme, Chatham House 

To learn more about NATO and the key takeaways from the Ankara summit, register for our upcoming event, ‘Perspectives on Ankara: The security and defence implications of the NATO Summit’