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Emotional tributes paid to PCs Matthew Blades and Tom Clough whose vehicle was in a head-on collision with car travelling wrong way

Cleveland police have published photographs of PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough who died when a car travelling the wrong way on the A66 crashed head-on into their police vehicle.

Two 17-year-old boys were among the seven people who were killed in the incident on Teesside.

PM Mark Carney says ‘we got attacked’ as tariffs come into force on items from hockey sticks to tongue depressors

• The lesson from Canada’s collapsed trade talks with the US: negotiation may be futile

Donald Trump has hit back at Canada after a breakdown in negotiations plunged the two countries into a trade war.

In his first public comments since negotiations collapsed on Friday in Washington, the US president wrote on social media: “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!”

After President Trump waved the green flag to start the competition at around 1 p.m., the rubber hit the road. Cars swarmed past spectators in a brightly colored blur that shook the pavement

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the MMR vaccine is "not a lethal vaccine," despite President Trump's claims in recent days.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and Senate primary candidate, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 23, 2026.

"Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack," reports the Telegraph. More details from the BBC: The government said that at no point was there a risk to the UK's energy system, but the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has contacted power companies to advise them about the risk of cyber attacks... DESNZ said the incident had affected a small-scale generator and at no point had there been a risk to the wider energy system. The UK's power network has a number of smaller gas generators which provide short-term power when needed. Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,972) for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Neel Kashkari, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 23, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida and candidate for Florida governor, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 23, 2026.

The following is the transcript of an interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 23, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is on the boards of Pfizer and UnitedHealthCare, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 23, 2026.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Reps. Byron Donalds and Seth Moulton join Margaret Brennan.

Hawk fire has covered more than 13,000 acres as blaze approaches University of Nevada campus in Reno

A fast-moving Nevada wildfire exploded to more than 13,000 acres (5,200 hectares) early on Sunday, pushing from the Sierra foothills toward the center of Reno and forcing nearly 42,000 residents to evacuate as flames threatened neighborhoods and reached the edge of the University of Nevada campus.

The Hawk fire’s “GO NOW” evacuation zone had expanded to the edge of the university campus as strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation fueled the blaze, according to Truckee Meadows fire and Rescue in Reno. An additional 45,000 people were in the evacuation warning zone, and encouraged to leave now and be prepared to stay away for several days to clear the roads for first-responders.

Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said the tariff fight with Canada could extend U.S. inflation, should the tense trade dynamic between the historically allied countries continue.

The open-wheel race is the latest of President Trump's celebrations this year to mark America's 250th birthday.

Group’s chief says vintage web name can help draw younger users

Economists criticise Fed chair’s communication strategy as policymakers prepare to gather at Jackson Hole symposium

Critics include Senator Chris van Hollen, ex-aide to Obama Tommy Vietor and ex-Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger

Democrats and other Donald Trump critics reacted incredulously to a New York Times report on Sunday that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries met with Jared Kushner, the president’s influential son-in-law, to discuss possible areas of collaboration.

The reported meeting comes months ahead of the November midterm elections in which Democrats are favored to retake the US House, a development that would make Jeffries speaker. If they are in the majority, Democrats are expected to use their oversight power to aggressively investigate the Trump administration, including self-enrichment by the president and his family.

Slovakia acquired speed cameras to modernize its traffic control-- but there was a surprise. Tom's Hardware cites this story from the Risky Bulletin Newsletter: Unfortunately, the country's national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary... [The cameras] are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon... reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations... Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access... [T]he SecureBoot feature is ineffective, and the web management portal can be accessed, exposing live streams, by anyone with the camera IP. Cameras that have been installed and set up have since been deactivated by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, for due diligence, an independent auditor will be called in to confirm the NBU's findings. It is thought that Croatia, and some other countries in Eastern Europe, may have undiscovered issues with traffic control cameras of similar origin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Collapse of talks threatens to raise prices even higher months before midterm election

Breakdown shows Washington now prioritises its own interests over any semblance of shared economic ground

• ‘No more!!!’: Trump lashes out after US-Canada talks devolve into trade war

The calamitous collapse of trade negotiations between Canada and the United States is a warning to nations worldwide that pursuing any kind of dialogue with the current US administration is doomed at the outset, according to observers who say this recent episode indicates seeking a fair deal is futile.

Andrea Lawlor, an associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Ontario, said: “No matter the closeness of the historical relationship, the American administration has signalled that it now prioritises its interests above those of some sort of global economic coordination or harmony.

Republican senator tries to assuage concerns but does not offer details of Graham’s national security experience

Tim Scott defended fellow US South Carolina Republican senator Darline Graham’s knowledge of national security issues ahead of their state’s runoff election on Tuesday.

Graham, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat held by her brother Lindsey Graham after his sudden death in July, is in a Republican primary runoff against South Carolina congressman Ralph Norman. During a debate between the two on Tuesday night, Graham struggled to answer a question about US national security interests in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Relatives of woman fatally stabbed on public transit allege death was preventable and Charlotte knew of violent crime issue

The family of Iryna Zarutska is suing Charlotte and a security company one year after the Ukrainian refugee was fatally stabbed onboard a light rail train in the North Carolina city.

A lawsuit filed on Friday in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg county superior court alleges Zarutska’s death was preventable. It also claims the city and the company that provides security for the Charlotte Area Transit System failed to put adequate protections in place despite knowing about violent crime on and around the municipal light rail line.

(The Center Square) – The race for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat is considered a “toss-up” and the governor race moved to “leans right” for seats previously considered solid Republican, according to a new Cook Political Report analysis.

Devoted Trump aide flooded her now-disabled profile urging people to ‘never concede’ on 6 January 2021

The Donald Trump aide Natalie Harp flooded a since-disabled social media account with pro-Trump posts on the day that the president’s supporters attacked the US Capitol in early 2021, years before she went to work for him and developed an extraordinary close relationship with him, a new report has revealed.

CNN on Saturday reported that a deactivated account which Harp had on what is now known as X was packed with fiercely pro-Trump messages on the day of the January 6 Capitol attack in Washington DC, including posts repeating his lies that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden toward the end of his first presidency, had been stolen from by fraudsters.

"There is still no sign of economy-wide job destruction," says economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Working with researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Brynjolfsson has determined an AI "job apocalypse" is unlikely, reports the Washington Post, "even though it will likely impact entry-level jobs." And Brynjolfsson "predicts that demand for experienced workers such as senior coders will still be high even if AI takes on more routine knowledge and coding work in the future." Earlier this month, Brynjolfsson and his colleagues at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab updated their widely publicized report, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," to reflect that they do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI... Brynjolfsson: What has moved on the upside is productivity. Nonfarm business productivity growth is running over 2 percent, the best sustained stretch since the late-1990s boom... The gains show up years after the investment, and they're starting to show up... By 2030, we will have enormously more capable AI, meaningfully faster productivity growth and an unemployment rate that looks unremarkable — somewhere in its historical range. That surprises people, but it's what the mechanism implies... [T]he technology is becoming much more powerful, and it's going to be even more powerful. Secondly, there are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. And then, thirdly, we must act now to address this gap. We can't just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us. And one of the things we can do is put in place institutions, policies and research to make the technology more complementary — using AI to complement people so it creates more jobs. A common misconception among business managers is AI, in order to be effective, has to reduce jobs. That's just not true. You can use AI to increase employment and productivity at the same time. It's kind of a win-win... Right now, tax policy is very skewed toward favoring capital versus labor — and, as a consequence, a lot of entrepreneurs and managers, they're basically being guided by the federal government to replace workers with machines. And I don't think that's necessarily what we'd like to have happen. From an economist's perspective, what you want to be doing is not mimicking and replacing things. You want to be extending and complementing — have humans do new things they never could have done before. He acknowledges "real, persistent and widening" effects on entry-level jobs, with a labor market "closing the on-ramp for people starting their careers... If companies don't hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they're not going to have those people later when they need them." One he points out that one company is instead using AI to speed up its training of young employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new head of Iran's supreme national security council issued the warning to countries who join the U.S.'s economic war on Tehran.

Twenty-five cars traveling at top speeds approaching 180 mph are zooming around the National Mall this weekend as IndyCar takes over downtown D.C.

The fire apparently began Saturday and grew significantly throughout the day, fueled by strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation.

New York City, New York — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a private meeting with Jared Kushner in recent weeks, prompting sharp criticism from progressives already frustrated with Democratic leadership’s approach to President Donald Trump.

The New York Times reported that Jeffries and Trump’s son-in-law and outside adviser discussed housing, immigration and affordability during a meeting arranged through a mutual friend. Kushner also suggested Jeffries meet with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles as Democrats position themselves for a possible House majority after November’s midterms.

Jeffries and Kushner have maintained contact since working together on the bipartisan First Step Act, a criminal justice reform law passed during Trump’s first term.

The meeting nevertheless triggered immediate backlash from progressive commentators. Former Obama administration official Tommy Vietor argued Jeffries should be seeking documents and subpoenas from Kushner rather than cooperation, while journalist Jeff Jarvis said Democrats need “fighters, not conciliators.”

The controversy comes while Jeffries and Trump publicly trade attacks. Trump recently posted an AI-generated image mocking Jeffries that the Democratic leader condemned as racist.

House Speaker Mike Johnson downplayed the meeting Sunday, saying conversations across party lines are routine in Washington.

Neither Jeffries nor Kushner has indicated that the private discussion produced any specific agreement or policy commitment.

Sources

• The New York Times – MBFC Rating
• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Progressives Erupt After Jeffries Holds Private Meeting With Jared Kushner appeared first on News Facts Network.

Several days of powerful storms walloped northwest Indiana, killing at least seven people and displacing about 1,000.

"It began life just a year after SimCity 4's 2003 launch," writes the blog PCGamesN. "Now, over 20 years later, it's still going strong with the arrival of Network Addon Mod update 50." The SimCity 4 Network Addon Mod, or simply 'NAM' among the community, has long been a de facto recommendation to anyone looking to pick up the classic city builder. It's a comprehensive overhaul to the game's transportation and infrastructure networks that combines key fixes with a vast set of additional build pieces such as overpasses, intersections, on-ramps, roundabouts, and so on.... [Y]ou'll be able to place down elements adjacent to one another that might previously have needed a one-tile gap between them. Streets can be dragged diagonally, slope tolerances have been improved, and you can build tunnels with the street network. The new version also includes a fix for the 'Eternal Commuter Loop' bug, which might sound fairly innocuous if you're not deep in the weeds. In actuality, it's a 23-year-long frustration that has plagued modders ever since launch. Essentially, it's a problem with the regional pathfinding across city boundaries in certain layouts, causing your Sims to bounce from location to location in search of work without actually taking up a job in any of them. Your zone demand is ruined, traffic builds to unsustainable levels, and the economy falls to pieces before your very eyes. Until now, the only real solution was to simply avoid building layouts that gave your commuters the chance to loop between locations. Now, by blocking specific neighbor-to-neighbor routes while allowing the rest to run as normal, the problem has been resolved... Equally impressively, the mandatory implementation of the DLL has reduced the size of the NAM codebase "by almost 90% and by more than ten million lines, making it easier to maintain and reducing the chance of bugs." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Striek for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security chiefs brief energy bosses with ‘advice, direction and next steps’ after cyber attack on small gas-fired facility

China's mission was planned as the country vies with the U.S. to land astronauts on the moon and secure a near-permanent presence on its surface.

Washington, D.C. — Education Secretary Linda McMahon says the federal government is intensifying enforcement against schools that fail to properly address allegations of sexual misconduct by teachers and other adults in positions of authority.

Speaking Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” McMahon criticized the practice of moving an accused educator to another school without placing the allegations in the employee’s record, saying the Education Department has been “cracking down” on the practice.

The department launched a nationwide K-12 initiative in July reminding federally funded schools that they must respond promptly to sexual harassment allegations and cannot help employees credibly accused of misconduct obtain new jobs elsewhere. The department says schools that violate federal law could ultimately lose federal funding.

The initiative followed reporting by ProPublica and KQED that found California had allowed dozens of teachers to retain their credentials even after school districts determined they committed sexual harassment or other misconduct. Some were later hired by other schools.

McMahon has also opened a federal investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District over allegations that its employment practices allowed some accused teachers to be reassigned rather than terminated.

The department says its enforcement is based on existing obligations under Title IX and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including requirements intended to prevent the practice commonly known as “passing the trash.”

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating
• ProPublica – MBFC Rating

The post McMahon Says Education Department Is Cracking Down on Teacher Sexual Misconduct appeared first on News Facts Network.

Many tools fail to help victims find hidden cameras, microphones and trackers, leaving them at risk of ongoing surveillance

Commercial detectors intended to help domestic abuse victims find hidden spying devices may actually give them a false sense of security, a study has found.

The consumer detection tools claim to identify hidden cameras, microphones or trackers through methods such as signal-strength readings, infrared lens detection and scanning for wifi or Bluetooth devices.

Hundreds of experts write to environment minister calling for stronger protections for ‘unique and distinct’ marine ecosystems

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The Australian government has been accused of leaving coastal waters largely unprotected by establishing the bulk of highly protected marine parks in remote areas.

More than 270 leading marine scientists from 84 research institutes have written to the environment minister, Murray Watt, urging stronger protections for marine ecosystems, as a once-in-a-decade review of marine parks gets under way.

Academics – and a former director of Australia’s Classification Board – say Halloween: The Game’s ban due to ‘incentivised drug use’ highlights an incoherent set of standards

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Halloween’s Michael Myers is one of film’s most feared boogeymen, responsible for some of the most brutal on-screen deaths in horror cinema. US video game developer Illfonic looked to reproduce those terrors in its upcoming title Halloween: The Game, with gruesome killings a major focus of the gameplay: for instance, you can stomp another player’s head through a toilet seat, or fry their brain by throwing them through a television screen.

But Australians will not be able to play Halloween: The Game, because it has been refused classification by the Classification Board, which means it is banned from sale within the country. And it’s not because of the violence or murders.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of "Braiding Sweetgrass" writes about embracing gratitude and reciprocity in our dealings with nature, and the importance of recognizing and sharing the many gifts the world gives us.

(The Center Square) – When Congress returns from recess in September, senators will have to decide whether to advance an aircraft safety bill that could also provide a tax haven for private jet owners.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It's FOSS: Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust." The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Jeffries is ruled mentally competent to stand trial after being hospitalized for months for dementia symptoms

The former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch has been ruled mentally competent to stand trial as he faces sex-trafficking charges after being hospitalized for months for dementia and Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Michael Jeffries, who is 82 and free on bond for now, is scheduled to be tried in late October, alongside two co-defendants: his partner Matthew Smith and staffer James Jacobson. A pretrial hearing was slated for Thursday.

The botanist's bestselling books, "Braiding Sweetgrass" and "The Serviceberry," advocate for living and working in collaboration with the Earth, and sharing the gifts of nature - ideas, she says, some may see as subversive.

Transport secretary asks ‘publicly owned operators to lay on extra services where possible’

CrossCountry cancelled almost all of its train services in Great Britain on Sunday after a power cut in Birmingham hit its control centre.

Most services were cancelled until further notice, including routes from Glasgow to Edinburgh, Manchester to Birmingham, Cheltenham to Cardiff and Newcastle to Edinburgh.

(The Center Square) – Democrats continue to favor former Vice President Kamala Harris over 12 other candidates if the 2028 Democratic presidential primary were held today, according to The Center Square Voters' Voice Poll.

False claims that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause cancer could, ironically, lead to worse cancer outcomes by undermining a promising tool to prevent and treat it.

Fears of a datacenter buildout debt crisis are exaggerated. The risks are different than in the past and they are recoverable

Some experts are warning of a looming “debt bomb” crisis because big datacenter builders such as Meta, Oracle, xAI and CoreWeave are not only raising billions to construct these facilities but are also not recognizing these long-term debt obligations on their balance sheets.

Should we be concerned? No. I know because I’ve seen this movie before.

When backyard tomatoes ripen all at once, these 15 recipes put them to work in pasta, soup, salads, baked dinners, fresh boards, relishes, and smoked sides.The post 15 tomato recipes that turned a backyard overflow into the best problem to…

PM sends video message to newlyweds instead after bride Sarah Burwin asked him not to ‘ruin’ vibe at Heron House

Andy Burnham fulfilled a bride’s wishes by not turning up for her wedding after she asked him not to spoil her big day as she got married at the building housing No 10 North.

Sarah Burwin had pleaded on TikTok in July for Burnham not to work from the building in Manchester that day, which hosts the government’s northern headquarters and the city’s register office.

Abbas Araghchi says country is unbowed but president Masoud Pezeshkian admits its people face ‘many problems’

Iran’s foreign minister has dismissed the threat of a fresh round of US economic sanctions as a “desperate” ploy, even as its president acknowledged that the Iranian people are facing “many problems” amid Washington’s efforts to isolate and debilitate the country’s economy.

Last week, Donald Trump announced a new campaign to increase the pressure on the Iranian economy, calling it “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country”. The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is expected to announce further punitive economic measures on Iran – which he has described as “the toughest sanctions in history” – on Monday.

When the main dish is settled but the side still is not, these 13 summer sides fill the gap with crisp vegetables, chilled salads, rice, breads, and cookout staples for easy pairing.The post 13 summer sides that end the what-goes-with-it…

Robert Lang, a physicist who became a leading figure in the world of origami, lost a lifetime's work of folded paper art to the 2025 wildfires in Altadena, Calif. He then set out to recreate his designs – and the origami community joined in.

Woman remains missing more than five days after police found officer she was married to dead in their home

An arrest warrant has been issued for a mental health advocate who remained missing on Sunday, more than five days after police found the Massachusetts officer she had been married to dead in their home.

Karen Solomon, 58, was last spotted in a doorbell camera video, walking down a street in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops early Tuesday morning, just minutes after Worcester police officers responded to a call from the home where Kurt Solomon was found dead.

This year, ER visits for tick bites have increased dramatically, corresponding with a new threat: a rise in Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), where one bite from a lone star tick can make you violently allergic to red meat. How can you best avoid tick bites?

Embassy in London says Andrey Kelin left last month after seven years in diplomatic post

Russia has withdrawn its ambassador to the UK, it has emerged, as the Kremlin continues to try to put pressure on Britain over its support for Ukraine.

Andrey Kelin left last month after seven years in the diplomatic post, according to the Russian embassy in London.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions probes an intriguing scientific question in relation to the climate emergency

Readers reply: Is it inevitable that consumerism will literally fill up the planet?

If all the vehicles on the planet had their tyres pumped up with CO₂, would this lock up enough carbon to lower the amount in the air significantly? Would there be other issues, such as the carbon cost of trapping it all into the tyres? Chris Coldwell, Lancaster

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.

Sinaloa Gov. Ruben Rocha Moya is accused of allegedly colluding with the infamous Sinaloa Cartel to distribute drugs inside the U.S.

(The Center Square) – Approaching the 25-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an entire generation of young Americans are alive who were born after Sept. 11, 2001, and they’ve only ever known the U.S. to be at war.

Incident marks apparent escalation by Tehran in its in retaliation against UK over allowing US to use British bases

Hackers linked to Iran have been blamed for a cyber-attack that caused a British power plant to be temporarily shut down.

The incident involved a small-scale energy generator, according to the UK government, which said that at no point was there a risk to the wider energy system.

Defense files motion to dismiss state case after federal guilty plea but prosecutors say they are prepared to litigate

After Luigi Mangione admitted in Manhattan federal court that he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, most experts believe that the state murder case against is highly unlikely to proceed – though some still see a slim possibility that it may yet happen.

Mangione, who pleaded guilty on 14 August to two federal stalking counts, was scheduled for a New York state trial on 8 September for murder and weapons charges in the December 2024 killing. In the wake of Mangione’s surprise plea, legal experts said New York’s state-level double jeopardy law – which means someone cannot be tried twice for the same crime – could derail his local prosecution.

Prime Minister tells country Donald Trump ‘miscalculated’ by escalating tariff attack

President sharply criticises proposal, saying ‘elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine’

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said holding elections in Ukraine during wartime would risk splitting the country at a time when Russia is amassing ballistic missiles and considering whether to mobilise an extra 300,000 soldiers.

The Ukrainian president, responding for the first time to a demand made by the sacked former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, sharply criticised an idea that he said was impractical given Russia appeared to have no interest in a ceasefire.

Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America's grids "are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in," with supplies straining for the necessary equipment. Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by data centers' booming energy needs and increasing electrification. It's also getting harder to get them connected to power grids... As those upgrades get delayed, storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast. For example, Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, says over the last two years the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300%... "The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked," said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab's research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015. The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years... [Shortages in key equipment] have driven up construction costs and time lines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down... In California, PG&E Corp., the state's largest utility, told regulators in January that a key driver of delays was long lead times for specialized equipment. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload compared to prior years. In Northern California, for example, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades to a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, according to PG&E. Last year New York's Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects will push power demand and strain infrastructure. But that also drew criticism: According to a survey conducted by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), the new methodology raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, according to the group. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President says wartime vote would ‘split Ukraine apart’ as he seeks to reassert authority

Grassroots groups to urge PM to break with Starmer policy and impose full arms embargo on Israel

Grassroots Labour groups are gearing up for a conference showdown with Andy Burnham over Gaza, as the party’s members seek to force the prime minister to recognise Israel’s actions as a genocide and impose a full arms embargo.

Momentum, Labour & Palestine, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) plan to ramp up pressure on Burnham before his first Labour conference as prime minister next month.

Without policy, there are few incentives to automate business functions where labour costs are low

Researchers say texts from 12th to 15th centuries ‘hint at a culture which has not even been imagined’

Unprecedented insights into the literary and intellectual life on the island of Guernsey during the middle ages have been revealed through the discovery of 17 medieval manuscript fragments.

Dating from between the 12th and 15th centuries, they offer evidence of wide-ranging reading tastes, with everything from an extract from a play and an Ovid poem to passages from the Bible and a travel text.

An 1857 decree to drain swamps and plant a monoculture, detritus from the trees and global heating combined to produce the conditions for the Gironde inferno

The ruinous fires that overran parts of France this summer have burned more land than ever recorded, forced more people from their homes than at any point since the second world war and caused what scientists suspect is the country’s first firestorm thundercloud. The smoke from France’s biggest inferno in nearly 80 years choked Limoges, a city 125 miles (200km) from the flames, with more toxic dust than Delhi residents inhaled on the city’s worst day of smog last year.

The blaze that tore through forests outside Bordeaux in late July took just a few weeks to reforge France’s relationship with fire, but the conditions behind it were centuries in the making.

Capitalism and the climate crisis are conspiring to destroy the concept of seasons. I’ll take solace in my pumpkin spice

Happy spooky season, everyone! Get those jack-o’-lanterns out, because Halloween is just around the corner!

Just kidding, no, it’s not.

Even products labeled ‘eco’, ‘green’ or ‘natural’ can contain dangerous compounds including Pfas

Common personal care products widely contain unlabeled toxic chemicals, results from a new peer-reviewed study suggest. The testing of more than 110 items ranging from shampoo to baby lotions found evidence of unlabeled toxic chemicals in about 85%.

Many contained multiple ingredients known to be carcinogens or health hazards, and even 26% of products labeled “eco”, “green” or “natural” contained at least one dangerous compound. The products averaged more than three times as many chemicals than were listed on labels.

Scaling back military exercises has undermined faith in America’s reliability

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s attempt to calm bond markets is a sign of weakness not strength

“Look, there’s nothing magic about that $40tn number,” the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told CNBC insouciantly last week, as the country’s debt mountain surpassed another bleak record.

Yet Bessent’s decision to intervene in government bond markets in an effort to combat soaring yields belied his studied calm in TV interviews – and reignited fears the US may be on the road to a debt crisis.

Rocks vs. Chips

When monsters square off, they are quick to showcase their asymmetrical superpowers.

Take Godzilla, for instance. Thanks to U.S. atomic testing in the Pacific, the dinosaur-like sea creature has explosive, radioactive breath that can destroy everything in its path. His archenemy Rodan, meanwhile, is a pterodactyl-like bird that can fly at supersonic speeds, a skill useful in avoiding atomic bad breath. Since the 1960s, the two giant monsters have duked it out across a series of Japanese films, causing much mayhem in the process.

Originally the product of Cold War fears of nuclear peril, these archetypal monsters can stand in for the principal geopolitical antagonists of today. Like their monster kin, China and the United States have very specific and complementary superpowers. China controls the majority of critical minerals in the world, with a special focus on rare earth elements. The United States has a technological edge when it comes to the most sophisticated semiconductors needed for artificial intelligence applications.

Put bluntly: China has the rocks, and America has the chips.

With these superpowers on display, the two countries have clashed in a series of trade negotiations, tense military standoffs, and high-level political meetings. They are engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war not to save the world — as in some comic-book universe — but in the service of their own national aggrandizement and transnational greed. While they dicker, the world slouches toward bedlam.

A Pause in Hostilities

When President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in mid-May, the exchanges were unexpectedly cordial. The two countries had been engaged in an on-again, off-again war of tariffs since Trump had begun his second term, a conflict that threatened to spiral out of control. At the same time, the Chinese were deeply concerned about the impact of the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran on international stability, given spiking oil prices and their ripple effects on the global economy.

Yet, at this meeting in China, the two leaders converged on a common goal of “constructive strategic stability.” In order to forge this condominium of superpowers — a G2 — Trump was willing to delay arms deliveries to Taiwan. He also greenlighted the sale of sophisticated (though not the most advanced) Nvidia computer chips to China. In turn, China agreed to increase its purchases from the United States, including 200 Boeing aircraft and $17 billion of agricultural goods each year through 2028.

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The hoopla surrounding the summit, generated by press offices on both sides, obscured the reality that the two countries completed few concrete bilateral deals. Trump did not secure long-term access to the critical minerals that China controls — specifically the rare earth elements that are essential to U.S. high-tech manufacturing and sophisticated military hardware — and the tech giants that accompanied Trump on the trip didn’t win any major concessions in the form of enhanced access to the Chinese market. Meanwhile, China failed to alter U.S. security policy in the Asia–Pacific region. The leaders of the new G2 might be expected to rethink or rework the global rules of the road, but this was not on the agenda in Beijing.

Still, the two superpowers stepped off the path of escalating confrontation. Perhaps more importantly, Trump has seemingly abandoned his earlier goal of decoupling the United States from the Chinese economy, which, along with ratcheting up containment of the “strategic competitor,” had become something of a bipartisan imperative.

For the time being at least, the world’s superpower monsters are not laying waste to the landscape around their feet. Given how much firepower they command, that’s no small achievement. The battle, however, continues to rage further afield in the mineral world.

Grabbing the Rocks

Rare earth elements, or REE, aren’t rare. But it can be quite difficult to extract any of these 17 unusual metals from their surrounding ores. The United States used to be the world’s leading extractor and processor of these resources, from a mine in California near the Nevada border. But that was back when REE were mostly used for such products as black-and-white televisions. The environmental damage caused by the extraction and processing — as well as the labor costs involved — impelled the United States, over time, to outsource operations to China. 

By the time REE had become indispensable to the manufacture of very powerful magnets used in everything from wireless iPhone chargers to the F-35 fighter jet, China was controlling upward of 60 percent of the extraction and 90 percent of the processing. It has filed more patents for the latest processing techniques than any other country. It has also expanded beyond digging up its own territory and, through its Belt and Road Initiative — a globe-spanning collection of interconnected infrastructure projects — secured access to mines overseas.

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In Tanzania, for instance, an Australian firm Peak Rare Earths discovered what may well be the largest untapped supply of REE in 2010. This is exactly what the United States and its allies had been looking for: ore that can be extracted and processed outside of China. Except that last year, the Chinese firm Shenghe Resources bought the Australian company — and the rights to the Tanzanian deposits — for a little more than $100 million. China is further cornering the market by importing ore from rare earth mines in Myanmar, exploiting new deposits in Brazil, and eying Malaysia and Indonesia for potential processing operations.

To guarantee access to the minerals that both the Pentagon and U.S. industry need, the Trump administration has ramped up the exploitation of U.S. REE deposits. Mountain Pass, the California mine previously shuttered after environmental lawsuits and Chinese outsourcing, restarted production in 2012, but it still couldn’t compete against China, which had flooded the market with REE to drive down prices. Last year, the Pentagon acquired a majority stake in MP Materials, the company that owns the mine, which now produces over 10 percent of the global supply of REE.

Trump has also pumped money into USA Rare Earths, which is developing the Round Top mine in Texas, which promises to rival the REE production of Mountain Pass. Even with an accelerated timeline, however, the new mine won’t start production before 2028. Meanwhile, the administration is playing the field: pouring money into a REE processing facility in Arizona, contracting with a similar operation in France, and hammering out supply contracts with a mining firm in Australia. This frenzied activity may lessen dependency on China but not eliminate it.

And it’s not just rare earth elements. China controls 95 percent of magnesium production, over 80 percent of tungsten, over 70 percent of graphite and silicon, and three-quarters of cobalt — minerals that are critical to pretty much all modern manufacturing. On the processing end, China is the leading refiner of 19 out of 20 of the most coveted minerals, with an average market share of 70 percent. And instead of being reliant on its control of raw materials and processed ores, China is also in command of the downstream production. For instance, it’s responsible for 94 percent of the manufacturing of the most powerful magnets that go into cars, computers, and medical equipment.

The new rush for “critical raw materials,” many of them essential for building out the infrastructure of a “clean energy” transition but also indispensable for the entire range of advanced military products to which the United States is addicted, has sharpened the competition between China and the United States throughout the mineral-rich Global South. Those countries generally see China as a willing provider of capital and finance. They view Trump — who has dismissed so much of the Global South as “shithole countries,” deported huge numbers of their citizens, and subjected nearly all of their governments to punishing tariffs — with considerable skepticism.

How long will it take for the United States to catch up and neutralize China’s mineral superpower? In the best-case scenario, America will only be able to meet half its need for rare earth elements by 2028, and it currently produces less than 1 percent of those powerful magnets. Until America catches up — or forges partnerships with other countries to meet its demand through initiatives such as the U.S.-led Pax Silica — China will be able to pinch off the supply of those key minerals more easily than Iran can close off the Strait of Hormuz.

Controlling the Chips

Silicon Valley has long been a byword for innovation: Apple’s iPhones, Google’s search engine, Facebook’s social media platform. But the heart of Silicon Valley was, at least originally, made out of silicon. Chips made the valley. In the 1980s, Japan produced semiconductors that were superior to anything American companies could get to market. Competition spurred Silicon Valley to leapfrog over Japan.

The chip-designer Nvidia began in the 1990s as a supplier of graphic processing units, or GPUs, for the video game industry. These Nvidia chips became, literally, the brain behind Microsoft’s Xbox. Later, they came to power Sony’s PlayStation 3, signaling that Silicon Valley had definitively surpassed its Japanese competitors.

Then Nvidia began developing the kind of hardware necessary for the next big tech revolution: artificial intelligence. The first major AI platform available to the public — ChatGPT — was built on the foundation of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs. Suddenly, Nvidia was the most sought-after supplier and the most valuable company in the world, now worth more than $5 trillion.

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It’s one thing to corner the market on the graphics necessary to play “Grand Theft Auto” or make the special effects of the 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” movie look terrifyingly real. It’s quite another to create the building blocks of the AI technology that is creeping into every corner of the economy, not to mention the military.

To maintain its economic and military edge, the United States has placed controls on the export of Nvidia’s most advanced semiconductors to China. It’s no surprise that, over the last six years, the People’s Liberation Army attempted hundreds of times to acquire those precious chips. To prevent China from producing their own, the Dutch also placed restrictions on the export of the machines used to print the chips.

There are two challenges to this strategy of restriction. The first is that, despite its name, Silicon Valley doesn’t actually manufacture the vast majority of these fancy computer chips. For more than 90 percent of advanced semiconductors, the world depends on Taiwan. It’s as if another monster has appeared on the scene with a superpower that can bring both Godzilla and Rodan to their knees.

The United States harbors a fear that the Chinese response to their chip dependency will be simply to invade Taiwan and take over its semiconductor industry. For its part, the Biden administration pushed through the CHIPS Act to re-shore computer chip manufacturing, which is turning Arizona into a real Silicon Valley. Intel and Taiwan’s TSMC are among the more than 75 firms building factories there, which will require considerable water (in a desert) and produce tons of “forever chemicals,” the synthetic compounds that do not break down naturally, polluting the environment and accumulating within people (amid a growing population).

Given Russia’s failure to seize Ukraine and the inability of the United States and Israel to achieve regime change in Iran, China is not likely to attempt a takeover of Taiwan any time soon. Instead, it has pursued a different approach, and this is the second problem with a restriction strategy. Prevented from acquiring Nvidia’s best chips, China is pouring money into making its own chip sector the best in the world.

Those considerable state investments produced a Sputnik moment in January 2025 when the Chinese company DeepSeek released its ChatGPT competitor. The big breakthrough, however, was behind the scenes: China was able to use its own domestically produced chips to create comparable AI results at a cheaper cost.

Private sector expenditures on AI in the United States still exceed China’s investments by a considerable margin. But the Trump administration’s cuts in science funding and restrictions on work visas will handicap U.S. technological progress for years and possibly decades. China, meanwhile, will likely have machines ready to produce what its AI models need by 2030, the target date Beijing has set to close the advanced chip gap.

The Sequel

Both China and the United States have landed a number of punches in their monster battle. The Trump administration has maintained export controls on its most advanced chips and has created a blacklist of Chinese companies it accuses of working with the People’s Liberation Army, including the car company BYD and the tech firm Baidu. China has retaliated by putting two American and 14 European companies on its own blacklist for the “dual use” of rare earth elements for both civilian and military applications. These come on top of Chinese export restrictions imposed in 2025 on seven rare-earth metals and an announcement that five more elements will be added in November.

These tit-for-tat exchanges might suggest that the two sides are evenly matched. And that may have been the case a decade ago. Today, however, despite its iconic status and devastating powers, the American Godzilla looks pretty wobbly. Trump’s fixation on cutting government and his failure to staff the remaining positions with competent officials has meant that the effort to deny China the most sophisticated chips has been compromised. Simply put, the Commerce Department has failed to enforce the export restrictions on U.S. companies, and thousands of those powerful chips have likely made their way into Chinese hands.

Even without government incompetence, the United States would be hard-pressed to maintain its advantage. The bottom line: China will be able to make its own chips sooner than America can acquire its own rocks.

The real superpower that China possesses, in other words, is its government’s ability to marshal resources to make the technological leap forward and maintain a substantive defense of its own material advantages. Thanks to this superpower, as Evan Osnos points out in The New Yorker, “China produces at least 70 percent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells.” So confident is China in this superpower that it has recently rolled out a sodium-ion battery that needs none of the critical minerals of the lithium battery that powers electric vehicles. Beijing is thus negating its own mineral advantages. Instead, the Chinese government is relying on its industrial prowess to prepare for a world where rocks no longer rule.

The Biden administration tried to copy this superpower with the CHIPS Act and the additional targeted subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump, too, has attempted to pursue a similar industrial policy with investments in critical minerals alongside scattershot tariffs and export controls. But he has also weakened the underlying superpower of government action through funding cuts and mass layoffs at critical government agencies. As a result, a lot of the shots that the Trump administration fires at China are actually blanks.

If this were a film, Godzilla would be teetering on the edge of a precipice, harried by a triumphant Rodan. In the final shot, Godzilla would live to fight another day, setting the scene for a sequel.

In real life, the United States is wasting billions of dollars on a war in Iran, the Trump administration is laser-focused on stuffing its own pockets from insider deals, and U.S. universities and companies are hemorrhaging funds and talent. At the same time, China is cornering the global market on renewable technology and consolidating its trade and investment relationship with the nearly 150 countries in the Belt and Road Initiative. The newer superpower seems to be making better use of its superpowers.

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Another great movie trope is enemies quickly morphing into friends when faced with an existential threat. Godzilla and Rodan eventually team up to fight King Ghidorah, a hydra-like extraterrestrial beast with three heads. Is it too late for China and the United States, inveterate frenemies, to do the same in response to the very terrestrial threat of climate change?

It would certainly make for a Hollywood happy ending. But the Trump administration, insisting that carbon emissions are no problem, is attempting to reenergize the country’s fossil fuel sector. And despite its buildout of renewal energy infrastructure and its expanding exports of solar panels and wind turbines, China remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, especially coal.

Let’s face it: Monsters are going to be monsters. If they’re not fighting each other directly, they’re laying waste to the environment and poisoning the communities that live atop precious resources. In the world of entertainment, Godzilla and Rodan learn how to use their superpowers for good when a planet-wide emergency pushes the monsters together to fight against an external threat.

The real world faces just such a red alert. Our monsters, however, just keep doing monstrous things.

The post The Dawn of a New Cold War appeared first on The Intercept.

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen broke record for farthest distance traveled from Earth

The crew of the historic Artemis II lunar flyby mission have earned the US’s top space medal, officials have announced.

Cmdr Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are set to receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on 28 August, the US space agency Nasa said.

President’s speech, declassification of documents and heightened claims of noncitizen voting have experts concerned

A series of moves by Donald Trump’s administration to sow doubt in the integrity of US elections have intensified concern among voting experts – and sparked hope among election deniers – that it could declare a national emergency.

The White House and US federal agencies have released a string of documents this summer – including disputed analyses of alleged voting by noncitzens and historical intelligence memos – stoking expectations that the US president could move to exert greater control over November’s US midterm elections.

Michigan Senate nominee and others have re-energized one-time Democratic voters who abandoned the party under Biden

Two years ago, Zainab Bibi Ahmed thought she had turned her back on the Democrats for good. Now, she is volunteering for the party’s US Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.

Ahmed was one of 100,000 people to vote uncommitted in the February 2024 Democratic Michigan primary, in a bid to send a message to then US president Joe Biden about his support for Israel, as people watched what Amnesty International later called a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza on their screens.

Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a growing labor movement has addressed the climate crisis and economic inequality

Ryan McElroen had spent years repairing the New York City subway underground when he got the opportunity to work in the middle of the ocean.

“I had no views other than the darkness at work,” he said. “Then I went polar opposite.”

A pastor with a childlike sense of wonder. A student who found strength in helping others. Intimate obituaries, in 150 words or less.

Nineteen months after the Palisades Fire leveled much of the seaside community, scars of the blaze are increasingly overshadowed by signs of progress.

New quotas to protect UK firms and jobs appear to be having opposite effect in products such as galvanised steel

At Tata Steel’s factory in Llanwern, south Wales, production lines that should be running full-time are now falling quiet for parts of the day, with workers being put on to maintenance and cleaning work while machines sit idle.

There aren’t enough orders to keep them running all the time, the company says, because of a surge of cheap steel coming from Asian countries that is threatening the viability of several UK sites that make similar products, and risk hundreds of jobs.

After Ukraine's fired defense minister publicly called for wartime elections, Zelenskyy said it would risk splitting the country.

Equity issuance follows a strong reception for its latest Qwen 3.8-Max model

• López wins majority decision to claim WBA crown

• Romero brands judges’ verdict a ‘robbery’

• New champion adds to previous 135lb, 140lb belts

Teófimo López became a three-division world champion on Saturday night, winning a 12-round majority decision over Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero to claim the WBA welterweight title at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

López prevailed by scores of 115-113 and 116-112, while the third judge saw the fight even at 114-114. Romero, making the first defense of his title won against Ryan Garcia 15 months ago, disputed the result in the immediate aftermath.

AI lab’s Fable 5 has met with sluggish demand from corporate clients

Move would allow mayors to greenlight large developments and have more say on national housing funding

Andy Burnham will give mayors new powers to take control of local planning decisions and greenlight large-scale developments in proposals to be presented next week.

The move will allow mayors to “call in” the decisions and direct councils to take them forward or refuse them. They will also be able to grant upfront permission so developers can start building without having to apply.

Chris Lehane tells Guardian of need to implement new safety standards as critics say AI firms acting ‘recklessly’

A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against “ongoing, persistent” cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives.

The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: “We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do.”

Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a "None of the above" option. The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct Debian work like packaging, software, documentation, translations, websites, and project communication. However, upstream projects made with AI help would not be affected. The proposal gives several reasons for the ban, such as unclear copyright and licensing, doubts about the reliability of AI-generated work, extra review work for maintainers, aggressive scraping of Free Software resources, and the high resource use of large AI systems... The second option would clearly allow contributions that are partly or fully made by an LLM, as long as contributors check their technical quality, security, licensing, and usefulness, fully understand the changes, and disclose major AI help. It would also ban sending private or sensitive Debian information to untrusted external AI services. A similar fourth option recognizes worries about generative AI but says banning it would be hard to enforce and not helpful. This proposal would accept AI-assisted Debian work if it follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines, is properly reviewed and understood by the contributor, and is marked as AI-assisted when needed. The fifth proposal is even more open. It says Debian should not support or ban generative AI tools, but should apply the same standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legality to all contributions, no matter how they were made... One unique proposal is called "Debian is created by humans." Instead of banning AI tools for contributors, it focuses on what actually gets included in Debian. With this approach, contributors could use generative AI for research, analysis, exploration, or critique, but could not submit AI-generated output directly as Debian packaging, patches, documentation, bug reports, project communications, or other Debian work. As the proposal says: humans create Debian. Another, much stricter proposal asks Debian contributors to avoid LLM use as much as possible. It would require all Debian communication, like bug reports, mailing-list messages, Salsa discussions, and Planet Debian posts, to be written only by humans. Any AI use in Debian work would have to be disclosed, and violations could be handled under the project's Code of Conduct. The CEO/founder of AI-native compliance management platform company Strike Graph believes a Debian AI ban is "the wrong fix for the actual problem" at hand, reports The New Stack: "Debian's ban isn't really about banning AI," [CEO Justin] Beals says. "It's an admission that nobody has built a reliable way to verify what an AI agent actually produced before it lands in a codebase this many systems depend on, including infrastructure running in orbit. That's a legitimate thing to be worried about...." He thinks that any policy statement that says AI isn't allowed simply won't hold up, as the tooling keeps getting harder to detect... Looking across the complete set of tabled propositions, proposal A (no LLM contributions to Debian via social contract) needs a 3:1 majority to pass; the other seven proposals (B to H) need a simple majority.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Similar initiatives have been launched from Barcelona to Bogotá, but they have misinformation, political pressure and vested interests stacked against them

Ten years ago, Alastair Harper was an advocate for young people’s health sitting in a stuffy meeting room in London planning an air pollution campaign. “My phone started buzzing,” he said. “I took the call, and then told the room I needed to leave immediately.

“I had to get to UCLH [one of London’s major hospitals]. My own child was headed there in a blue-lit ambulance because she was struggling to breathe London’s toxic air.”

Britons report that EES digital entry and exit system has led to frustration, visa mix-ups and long queues

On top of fears about extreme heat and possible jet fuel shortages, Britons planning summer holidays in the EU this year had another thing to worry about – long queues and waiting times caused by the bloc’s new border checks.

The EU digital entry and exit system (EES), which requires non-EU citizens to register and be photographed and fingerprinted on arrival and departure from the Schengen zone, has been technically in full force since April after launching last autumn, but has been beset by teething problems.

Two human records were smashed by robots competing in the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in China.

Retraction Watch reports: A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge. Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS' needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors' alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled "massive" financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper "failed peer review" under its "own standards," but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air. The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has "plausibly alleged actual malice" by Elsevier defined as "knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth." Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler's recommendation in July 2025... Citing internal and discovery documents, GPS alleges an assessment of 19 journals revealed Elsevier has published more than 1,200 articles either without any peer review, or against the recommendations of the reviewers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

European fund groups struggle as firms race to bulk up and expand globally

Washington, D.C. — The NAACP is condemning reported discussions inside the Navy about renaming a future aircraft carrier currently designated to honor Black World War II hero Doris Miller, with President Donald Trump reportedly considered as a replacement namesake.

CNN reported that Navy officials have discussed changing the name of CVN-81, which was designated the future USS Doris Miller in 2020. Two sources told CNN that Trump’s name has been considered, although no final decision has been announced. Naming an aircraft carrier after a sitting president would be unprecedented.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the possibility “a slap in the face” to military heroes and service members. Miller was serving aboard the USS West Virginia during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor when he helped wounded sailors and fired an anti-aircraft gun despite having no formal training. He became the first Black American awarded the Navy Cross.

The carrier would also be the first named for a Black American and the first honoring an enlisted sailor for actions performed while serving in the ranks.

CNN reported that Navy officials have considered honoring Miller with another warship and recommending him posthumously for the Medal of Honor.

Neither the Navy nor Pentagon has publicly confirmed that Trump will replace Miller as the carrier’s namesake, leaving the proposed change under discussion rather than finalized.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post NAACP Blasts Reported Navy Talks to Rename USS Doris Miller for Trump appeared first on News Facts Network.

Friends close to Margarita Reutt are shocked she could allegedly plant bomb that killed Ukrainian defector Robert Shageev, while others recall a stubborn grit to see any plan through

It was just after dawn in Sevastopol when a powerful explosion tore through a quiet square in a residential district of the Russian-occupied Crimean port city.

Hidden inside a rubbish bin, a bomb containing the equivalent of about 500g of TNT detonated on 13 August as Robert Shageev, the deputy commander of a Russian Black Sea fleet submarine brigade, walked past in naval uniform. He was killed on the spot.

Leveraged single-stock ETFs attracted billions of dollars of net inflows even as they plunged during market sell-off

The instinct is to bolt a dripping box to every building but there is a smarter, cooler way

Iran’s attacks exposed vulnerability of US military footprint spanning the region since the 1990s

U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is considering stepping down from his post by the end of the year, two people familiar with the matter told CBS News Saturday.

BleepingComputer reports: Microsoft says ongoing issues causing games to crash or fail to launch after installing the August 2026 Windows updates may be caused by peripherals with RGB lighting. As Microsoft explained when it confirmed it's investigating on Wednesday, this known issue affects games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2... "[Peripherals or internal device components with RGB lighting features] may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64. In systems where these drivers are found, the issue is then triggered by launching certain games," it noted. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weather service warns of flooding and mudslides, particularly in areas strongly affected by previous storm

Tropical Storm Moke is poised to slam into the south of Hawaii’s islands, with forecasters predicting heavy rains and strong winds on Saturday evening, just days after the region was hit by Hurricane Lala.

As with Hurricane Lala, the Big Island is expected to bear the brunt of Moke’s rain and heavy winds as it passes south of a direct hit late on Saturday and into Sunday.

The newspaper for the American military has long taken pride in its editorial independence. But under the Trump administration, restrictions have been imposed, and the Pentagon's chief spokesman has vowed to rid the paper of "woke distractions."

Pixabay image

• Player booed during team’s preseason loss to Bills

• QB has battled injuries during time in Cleveland

• Watson was suspended over sexual assault allegations

Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson has called the booing he heard from the team’s own fans during Saturday’s home loss to Buffalo “disrespectful” and “personal.”

Watson, who has a complicated relationship with Cleveland fans because of injuries, off-field issues – including an NFL suspension in 2022 – and a massive, $230m contract, was booed repeatedly during the second half of the 31-7 loss to the Bills.

Seal found dead at Beachport in South Australia presages ‘significant losses’, minister warns

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

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A long-nosed fur seal has died from H5 bird flu in South Australia, marking the first confirmed case in a mammal on the Australian mainland.

The seal was found dead at Beachport on Wednesday on the state’s Limestone Coast.

It marks a fresh escalation in the spread of the virus days after the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, announced three mass mortality events on offshore islands involving more than 1,000 greater crested terns.

The federal agriculture minister, Julie Collins, said the seal death was “not unexpected” as the virus begins to spread through the country.

Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from £150m in 2021 to £1bn today... The ESA is calling for a £5 deposit scheme on the sale of all vapes to ensure that vape users have an incentive to return used devices to retailers for safe disposal... [Patrick Brighty, the head of recycling policy at the ESA, said] "Vapes are among the biggest culprits because they're cheap, abundant and typically have a short use-life." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hawaii is still cleaning up from Hurricane Lala, which dumped massive amounts of rain on the islands.

The decision comes after both prosecutors and Anthony's new defense team revealed more details in a tense two-day hearing.

Exclusive: campaigners warn 600-year-old New Barn at Harmondsworth could be ‘shaken to pieces’ by vibrations

Six hundred years after it was built, England’s largest surviving medieval timber-framed barn could now be “shaken to pieces” by aircraft vibrations, campaigners warn.

The public has until 1 September to submit objections to the Heathrow airport expansion, which could threaten the survival of the New Barn at Harmondsworth, considered a remarkable example of medieval architecture.

• French youngster beats No 7 seed 6-3, 6-4 in Cincinnati

• Jessica Pegula battles past Swiatek to reach women’s final

In the middle of a tense, erratic start to a rain-delayed semi-final day in Cincinnati, Arthur Fils found himself locked in defence and miles behind the baseline on his serve at 3-3. He scurried from sideline to sideline, lunging toward the ball at full stretch, seemingly with no real chance of turning things around. As Flavio Cobolli swept to the net with the intention of finishing Fils off, however, the Italian soon learned that his opponent had another gear to reach. From far wide of the court, Fils pulverised a forehand passing shot winner beyond his astounded opponent, drawing a roar from the crowd.

That one point alone provided evidence of the athleticism, explosiveness and sheer audacity that have long marked Fils as such a rare, exciting talent, and it also set the tone for a monumental victory. From that moment onwards, Fils took control of the match and he marched into his first Masters 1000 final at the Cincinnati Open with a supreme performance, defeating Cobolli, the No 7 seed, 6-3, 6-4.

"AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time..." says the Verge's AI reporter. But AI systems "are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math... even the days of the week." If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won't see numbers... So they're still terrible, but they're now also very good at this other part. As to why, at some point you reach a critical mass of what these systems can do. We saw it with writing, we've seen it with programming. They're very good at forging connections between different areas, applying old methods in new ways, those kinds of things. It appears that the newer models they're training have apparently reached that level where it clicks, and now it can do math... There are areas now where it seems to be producing work that is on par with good mathematicians, alongside other parts where yeah, it can't count. All caught up in that is whether it's going to rewrite employment structures or funding structures... One would hope [math researchers] would branch out into all of these new exciting areas or pose new questions. But AI won't do that, and that's the concern. And then that would leave the field quite sterile, and it will have all of these things that have been done, and maybe nothing left to pursue... [A] lot are scared that it's closing off the field. So by definition, those breakthroughs that lead to something surprising and new that you can say, "Oh, this works here," may not be happening anymore... There were some bleak responses from graduate students I saw in essays posted online. Where's their place in this as future researchers? Do they have a place in this? Is it as glorified AI proof checkers? That will be quite an unsatisfying career, I imagine. Or maybe not, I don't know. We will see. I think anything used properly will be a net boon. They also had an interesting response when asked if AI democratizes access to high-level mathematical proofs: A lot of the mathematicians I spoke to were almost quite weary of this, actually. They love the idea, in theory, of democratizing access. They're also quite fed up with AI-generated or -assisted papers that are flooding every publication imaginable, as well as the pre-print servers that they use in these fields. Some of those I spoke to said things like, "Oh, I got three emails this week alone with people being like, 'Hey, is this legit?'" Because they thought they'd solved something with ChatGPT or with Claude, and they also don't have the mathematical skills to check whether they've actually solved something. On the flip side, there are parts where they said, "Well, we've got a talented undergrad who's done something that a talented undergrad would probably have never managed, and here they are doing grad-level work and they've produced a paper that is legit." And in the bigger scheme of things, a few I spoke to said, "Well yeah, a lot of these are in the ivory tower. Having access to this kind of thing globally could really boost access to the kind of things here." On the flip side, the cost. These things cost a lot to run.

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Duchess of Sussex was believed to have been under consideration for season three of Guy Ritchie’s crime caper

The Duchess of Sussex’s reported casting in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen has been withdrawn, it was reported.

Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, wrote on Saturday: “I learned this morning that the casting of Meghan Markle in season 3 of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen has been withdrawn. The backlash in the UK was so intense, it became untenable to go forward.”

Another new board to choose from? Is it legit? How does it do on trails?

Remember that rush rescue mission for NASA's $500M space telescope? It failed, reports CNN, and the LINK satellite won't be able to boost the telescope's orbit. NASA says its decades-old Swift telescope will now continue losing altitude, until it reaches Earth's atmosphere later this year and burns up. CNN reports: Just weeks after LINK lifted off on July 3, it started to spin out of control. [Satellite designer] Katalyst was able to regain control of the satellite, but the company acknowledged that the issue cost it time, which would delay LINK's rendezvous with Swift by about a month. However, that postponement — at least initially — did not seem to be a deterrent to the mission. Now, NASA and Katalyst have announced that LINK's mission will not capture and boost Swift to a higher orbit "due to ongoing attitude control issues," according to statements Wednesday. "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future...." The mission team is forging ahead with its plan for LINK to rendezvous with Swift — but as a demonstration rather than a rescue. "We are going to learn everything we can from LINK's rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow," Isaacman said... Swift wasn't designed to be serviced in space, which means that insights from the demonstration could be used for future missions... "We have already learned a tremendous amount," [said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space Technologies], "and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable — building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

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Kassebaum Baker became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. She was 94.

Kassebaum Baker died on Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

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The Buffalo Bills expressed their condolences to defensive tackle Ed Oliver on the death of his 2-year-old son.

The Sussexes are returning to the UK with significantly reduced media deals in an industry where fame alone can no longer guarantee success

Having settled in California in the aftermath of their dramatic decoupling from the royal family in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced a partnership that appeared to set a clear destination for their new lives outside the House of Windsor.

With every global media stable clamouring for their signature, the couple revealed a deal with Netflix reportedly worth $100m. The ambitions were lofty and broad, including scripted and unscripted projects, shows for all ages and documentaries.

Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired: [Flock] has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned... Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description... The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country... An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit... One prompt Flock preloaded into the system reads: "Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles)." An officer would fill in the blanks and submit it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense," exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and "do a workup on the top three individuals." The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. A "workup," in Flock's terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department's records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. Wired shares this reaction from a law professor at George Washington University. "It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing,"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Children's lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city's ultra-low emission zone found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution... "Traffic pollution in cities damages children's health and development," said Chris Griffiths, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and the study's joint senior author. "We provide the strongest evidence yet on how these harms can be prevented. Ambitious clean-air zones should be considered a priority for cities globally with traffic-related air pollution." Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.

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• Toddler was found unresponsive in residential pool

• Player has been practicing with team since June tragedy

Members of the Buffalo Bills have expressed their condolences to Ed Oliver after the death of the player’s two-year-old son.

“Obviously, very unfortunate what happened and as a teammate of him, as someone in this locker room, all we can do is love on him,” Bills quarterback Josh Allen said after Saturday’s win over the Cleveland Browns. “There’s nothing that you can say to make the situation any better except being there in whatever ways he needs.

Washington’s ambassador to Ankara says attack on air base could have been ‘aggressive . . . pre-election concept’ ahead of October polls

Federal agents boarded two cruise ships in Boston and arrested 11 workers in "Operation Tidal Wave."

Three other people wounded after 18-year-old man wielding sword assailed students in Fagersta school

A 17-year-old girl has been killed after a teenager brandishing a sword attacked students at a school in Sweden, police have confirmed.

Three other people were wounded in the incident during classes in the central town of Fagersta on Friday afternoon, including two boys aged 12 and 17 who sustained minor injuries.

Reuters reports "a major success in a new field of cancer treatment this week, as Moderna and Merck announced a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine "reduced the risk of recurrence and spread of melanoma in a late-stage trial". The vaccine was tested with Merck's widely used immunotherapy drug Keytruda: Thousands of patients who have undergone surgery to remove high-risk melanoma tumors could benefit as soon as next year if regulators approve the vaccine, Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview. This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells, and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone... Interim results of the ongoing study, released on Wednesday, found the treatment, Intismeran, met both its primary target of reducing cancer recurrence and its secondary goal of preventing tumors from spreading to other parts of the body, compared with Keytruda alone. When the vaccine is injected into a patient, the patient's cells produce copies of mutations for the immune system to recognize and destroy... Merck said the companies are already in talks with regulators about the treatment. "Merck, Moderna and other companies are testing similar approaches against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers," the article points out. It adds that Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, "said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers." More from CNN: The trial result is "a monumental leap forward," validating mRNA technology as a cancer treatment, said Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology... Roche and BioNTech, whose mRNA technology was used in the Pfizer COVID vaccines, are testing a similar treatment called autogene cevumeran in mid-stage studies in colon and pancreatic cancer patients who have undergone surgery. Results of the colon cancer trial are expected in 2027, with pancreatic trial results to follow in 2031. "We should be hearing results from multiple studies over the next few years and there's every reason to hope now, with this news, that many of them will be positive," said Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center and president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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WILMINGTON, DE — Six New Castle County Council seats are up this year. Three have contested Democratic primaries on Sept. 15. The table below shows which seats lead to a November matchup against a Republican, which are decided by the primary alone, and which one has no opponent from either party.

Residents can look up their district by address at the state’s official district lookup tool.

District 1: Uncontested

Councilman Brandon Toole, a Democrat, has no challenger from either party this year, so he keeps his seat without a primary or a general election.

District 2: No primary, Councilwoman Durham vs. Collins in November

Councilwoman Dee Durham, a Democrat, faces Republican newcomer Jamie Collins in the general election.

District 3: Republican Councilwoman Kilpatrick’s open seat

Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick is not seeking reelection after 16 years representing Hockessin, Yorklyn, North Star, Pike Creek and part of Newark. Democrats Kira Alejandro and Kyle Grantham are competing for her seat, with the winner facing Republican Melissa Brayman in November.

District 4: Councilman Hollins’ open seat, no fight in November

Councilman Penrose Hollins has represented District 4, which includes northeast Wilmington neighborhoods such as Penrose and Sellers Park, since 1990. He is not seeking reelection, retiring after 36 years of county service. While Hollins is stepping away from his own seat, he has notably crossed district lines to endorse Kyle Grantham in the neighboring District 3 race.

Three Democrats are running to replace Hollins in District 4: Jason Hoover, Curtis Linton and Helena Creamer. No Republican filed to run for the seat, so whoever wins the Sept. 15 primary wins the seat outright, with no November contest to follow.

District 5: Councilwoman George faces a primary challenge, also with no November fight

Councilwoman Valerie George, the Democratic incumbent, is seeking another term. She faces a primary challenge from Syam Kosigi. As in District 4, no Republican filed here, so the Sept. 15 primary alone will decide who represents the district for the next four years.

District 6: No primary, Councilman Carter vs. Gibbs in November

Councilman David B. Carter, a Democrat, faces Republican newcomer Alison T. Gibbs in the general election.

How to vote

Only registered Democrats can vote in the Sept. 15 primary. The deadline to register is Saturday, Aug. 22; early voting runs Sept. 2-13. Check your registration or district at the state’s voter portal, ivote.de.gov/VoterView.

(Updated at 10:13 p.m. Aug. 22, 2026.)

Former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker of Kansas was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office.

At 15,500 miles per second, it’s the fastest planet or star ever observed by science, but its true value is how close it is to our galaxy’s supermassive black hole.

47% of recent graduates say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to an April survey from ZipRecruiter. "But is AI really the problem, or is it more complicated?" asks NPR. "Here's what economists have to say." According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent graduates — which it defines as 22-to-27-year-olds with a new bachelor's degree or higher — was 5.7% as of June, more than the rate for all workers, which stands at 4.1%... Stanford University economist Erik Brynjolfsson says AI is impacting the labor market for entry-level roles. "AI is not the whole story, but it's part of the story and the evidence is building," he says. Using payroll data, Brynjolfsson and his co-authors found that since late 2022 — when large language models like ChatGPT started popping up — early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles, like software developers and marketing managers, have experienced a 16% relative employment decline. In comparison, employment rates for older workers in AI-exposed fields and for all workers in jobs that aren't easily automated — like home health aides, physical therapists and construction workers — remained stable or have grown over that same time period... [Though he also says often when companies pull back on hiring, they cut junior roles first.] Harvard University economist David Deming isn't convinced that AI is to blame for the challenging early-career job market. "If you look very carefully at the timing, it looks like the decline in junior hiring actually started a bit like six months before ChatGPT was released. And so what that tells me is it's something else," Deming says. "I think it's more like remote work." A recent analysis from the New York Fed found that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into roles that can be done remotely. As remote jobs increased following the COVID-19 pandemic, so did unemployment among younger college grads, the New York Fed found. The analysis also found that AI didn't explain the rise in unemployment among younger workers and that remote work was more of a driving force... Employers hiring for remote jobs may be less likely to choose an entry-level candidate because it's harder to train them from afar... [And with remote positions, there's many more senior candidates to choose from.] And here's another thing to consider: University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum says if AI were replacing entry-level jobs, you'd expect to see companies that rely heavily on AI to hire fewer workers. But that's not what the data shows. Humlum points to a study done by the financial accounting firm Ramp and the workforce research company Revelio Labs. The study examined AI spending and employee head count across more than 21,000 U.S. firms, from early 2021 to early 2026. It found that at companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level head count grew by 12% over the two years following AI adoption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PEN America condemns lawyers using passage from thriller to bolster claim ex-FBI director intended to harm Trump

A leading US free-expression group has hit out at federal prosecutors’ use of a novel written by former FBI director James Comey in their case accusing him of threatening to kill Donald Trump.

“Citing a novel to save an indictment that is constitutionally dubious is a desperate Hail Mary and should be rejected,” said a statement posted on Friday by Mara Gassmann, legal director of PEN America, using a term for a last-second heave in American football.

Watchdog launches inquiry into collision in which seven people died involving police car and another vehicle

Two police officers who died in a car crash near Middlesbrough in the early hours of Saturday have been named.

Police constables Matthew Blades and Tom Clough were among seven people killed after their marked police car collided with a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way along the A66 in North Yorkshire.

Tory leader rules out coalition with Farage’s party and says ‘drama queens’ who left will not be welcomed back

Kemi Badenoch has called defectors who left for Reform “some of the most dishonest people” she has ever met, as she ruled out allowing “drama queens” to return to the party.

Speaking at the Edinburgh festival fringe, the Conservative party leader again ruled out any prospect of an election deal with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, insisting there would be no coalition between the parties.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls on allies to pile ‘real pressure’ on Moscow to end the war

The U.S. and Canada have wrangled for decades over trade, and somehow, they still managed to remain friends, allies and trading partners.

Firefox 154 "brings a number of usability improvements," writes PC World: The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August... The free VPN is currently available to Firefox users in the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. In addition, the free VPN can now also be used in Firefox for Android (rolling out gradually) with iOS to follow soon. Firefox 154 also begins adding the privacy-focused search engine Startpage to its address-bar search options for desktop users in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (the home markets for the Netherlands-based search engine). And Startpage is also coming soon to Android and iOS. "When so much of the web experience is decided by a handful of very large companies, a search option that's private by design and European by origin isn't a small thing," explains a Mozilla blog post, with Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox, saying this now gives millions of people in Europe one-click access to "real results, zero profiling, AI-free." Queries aren't stored or linked to you, and there are no AI answers pushed above your search results. In fact, there's no AI at all. Based in the Netherlands, Startpage built its product around a simple idea: great search and personal privacy can go hand in hand... Firefox users were choosing Startpage long before today — to the tune of more than a billion searches a year, every one of them required some assembly: an extension, a manual setting, a workaround... Startpage ranks among the most-requested search engines in the Firefox community. When demand is this clear, our job is to remove the friction... Most browsers have already decided how you're going to search. Firefox hasn't. Pick your search engine, control what happens to your queries, decide who sees data about you, even turn AI on or off. It should always be your call. Not everyone wants the same thing from search, and a browser shouldn't pretend they do. "Firefox has always been the browser for people who want to make their own decisions about the web," said Startpage President Stewart Marlborough, "which makes it a natural home for private search." Nvidia's GeForce NOW cloud-gaming platform is also now officially supported on Firefox, expanding access across even more devices," according to a Nvidia blog post: Members can outfox big downloads and jump into high-performance PC gaming directly from the browser — no waiting on lengthy game installs or updates. The experience delivers GeForce RTX-powered performance at up to 1440p and 120 frames per second for GeForce NOW Ultimate members. Simply download the latest version of Firefox, head to play.geforcenow.com and start playing. The cloud handles the heavy lifting, so games are ready to play without taking up valuable storage space on the device. Firefox joins Chrome, Edge and Opera in supporting GeForce NOW on Windows browsers. Mozilla's own blog post even includes an animation of the Firefox mascot playing games: Gamers put real effort into making their rigs their own, and Firefox gets that. Users can choose themes, custom colors, and tab settings to customize their setup, instead of sitting there like just another window. We also know online gaming doesn't happen in just one window. It's social and sometimes spontaneous. With Firefox, you can have a Discord call running in Split View, a guide open in another tab, or Reddit pulled up between matches. Then go full screen when you're ready to play, no need to switch browsers to stream games. "In the security report for Firefox 154, Mozilla lists 58 resolved security vulnerabilities, 54 of which were discovered and reported by external security researchers," notes PC World. ("Mozilla classifies 17 of these vulnerabilities as high risk.") With Firefox 155 (scheduled for September 1), Mozilla is switching to a fortnightly release cycle for major versions, like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive: Voluntary use of sex drive-suppressing medication to expand to 20 prisons and expert says it could be rolled out widely by late 2028

• Chemical suppression: why the UK is exploring libido control drugs to treat sex offenders

Drugs that help control the libidos of people who have committed sexual offences could be rolled out for thousands of male prisoners in England and Wales from December 2028, an expert has said.

Prof Belinda Winder, who has evaluated the use of sex drive-suppressing medication in prisons, said about one in four sex offenders – equating to 3,750 current prisoners – would be considered for the treatment.

Treatment is already required by parole boards in several countries, but some feel the practice is unethical

• Thousands of sex offenders in England and Wales could get libido-suppressing drugs

For some prisoners with problematic sexual arousal (PSA), “images of sex flood their minds” all of their waking hours, according to Prof Belinda Winder, a leading forensic psychologist who has evaluated the use of drugs to control libidos.

“I remember talking to one guy a few weeks after he started taking the medication. He said: ‘It’s amazing. I followed a film plot. I wasn’t just looking for when I could see bra straps, when I could see nipples, when someone’s going to bend over so I could see their bum.”

Prestige Brand Holdings has voluntarily recalled a batch of its Clear Eyes eye drops after FDA alert

Nearly 40,000 bottles of eye drops are being pulled from store shelves across the US over concerns about potential contamination, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Prestige Brand Holdings, based in Tarrytown, New York, has voluntarily recalled 39,060 bottles of Clear Eyes Maximum Itchy Eye Relief eye drops because of a “lack of assurance of sterility”, an FDA enforcement report states. The FDA classified the action as a Class II recall, defined on the agency’s website as a moderate-risk situation “in which use of or exposure to a violative product may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences or where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote”.

(The Center Square) - The vast majority of Americans want hospitals and healthcare providers to publicly disclose prices before patients receive care, according to a new poll.

(The Center Square) – A Republican bill to force spending cuts alongside any debt-limit increase has been introduced in six of the seven Congresses since 2013. As standalone legislation, it has never once reached a vote.

33,124 residents still in the dark as utility company says it is working to restore power in north-west of state

Thousands of residents of north-west Indiana on Saturday were headed for their 11th day without electric power after storms swept through the state, toppling trees and power lines, earlier in August.

The powerless conditions have led to food lines, closed businesses, dead phones, no schools, spoiled food, dirty clothes, dry gas pumps and a multitude of other deleterious effects on life without energy.

Washington, D.C. — A federal appeals court Friday overturned a $130,000 damages award against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and an undercover reporter stemming from a 2016 investigation targeting Democratic political consultants.

The D.C. Circuit ruled that the damages improperly punished O’Keefe and reporter Alison Maass for publishing the “Rigging the Election” video before the 2016 presidential election. The video alleged Democratic operatives discussed tactics intended to provoke confrontation at Donald Trump campaign events.

Democracy Partners, founded by Democratic consultant Robert Creamer, sued after Maass obtained an unpaid internship using a false identity and secretly recorded conversations. A federal jury sided with the organization in 2022 on fraudulent misrepresentation and wiretapping claims.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote that imposing damages for publishing the resulting story violated the First Amendment. The panel also rejected the argument that Maass became a fiduciary of Democracy Partners simply because she obtained the internship deceptively.

The judges did not give undercover reporting unlimited protection. The panel agreed that some information Maass obtained was gathered through fraudulent means and therefore was not itself constitutionally protected. Judge Robert Wilkins partially dissented, arguing that liability for fraudulent misrepresentation should remain while damages were reduced to a nominal amount.

O’Keefe called the decision important for undercover journalism. Democracy Partners’ attorney told Politico the organization disagrees with the ruling and is evaluating its options.

Sources

• Washington Examiner – MBFC Rating

The post Appeals Court Tosses $130,000 Verdict Against James O’Keefe appeared first on News Facts Network.

fjo3 shares a report from SFGATE: The San Francisco Bay Area, epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, is home to a massive amount of tech workers employed by some of the world's most valuable companies, from Apple to Nvidia. But for the first time, New York has eclipsed the Bay Area as the home of the largest "tech talent workforce," a report by real estate and investment firm CBRE shows. The firm has published the annual report for 13 years. Last year, the New York Metro Area's tech talent workforce reached 394,300, surpassing the Bay Area's 375,730, according to the report. Fueled by mass layoffs, the Bay Area's tech talent workforce dropped by 6% from 2022 to 2025. New York's tech talent workforce, on the other hand, grew by more than 8% during that period "The Bay Area is likely to remain ... the central location for the AI industry and for innovation. But as we've seen during past cycles, as it tends to grow, that spreads out to all the key markets," Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center, said during a news conference Tuesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The attacks come a day after a two-wave drone strike on a shopping mall in Zelenskyy's hometown killed 16 people.

Serena Williams will team up with Carlos Alcaraz to create a powerhouse mixed doubles pair in her return to the U.S. Open.

An 18-year-old with a sword attacked a school on Friday in central Sweden, killing a 17-year-old girl and seriously injuring at least two others.

Molds and bacteria can produce dangerous toxins − and they don’t taste very good, either.

Heavy metals, phthalates and other potentially harmful chemicals have been detected in a range of menstrual products – the latest category of concern in the personal care aisle.

Collapse of trade talks could lead to job losses, but biggest impact on traditional allies is expected to be political

The US has imposed 50% tariffs on some goods from Canada, and Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, has vowed to match them “dollar for dollar” after the collapse of trade talks.

The tariffs came into force on roughly $20bn (£14.6bn) of goods – ranging from hockey sticks to tongue depressors – at 04.00GMT. Trade experts said the tariffs could result in some job losses, but the largest impact is expected to be political, driving a further wedge between the traditional allies.

Omaha police agreed to stop carrying electric shock gloves in the halls of state’s largest public school district

Omaha police recently agreed to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.

The decision affecting most Omaha middle and high schools came after the Associated Press first revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s plan to give officers the “Gloves” – or “generated low output voltage emitters”. The devices have also been used in recent years by some jails.

Store-bought sweets are convenient, but these 13 homemade desserts bring fresh fruit, browned butter, caramel, warm cakes, creamy bars, and just-baked texture that makes the extra effort worth it.The post 13 desserts that made my aunt admit store-bought never compares…

Delaware's housing market saw more homes sold, higher prices, and a larger pool of active listings compared to the same month last year, according to the Delaware Association of Realtors.

Saturday steak night can go far beyond one big steak on a plate. These 11 recipes cover tomahawk and reverse sear steak, tacos, sliders, nachos, steak bites, and saucy skillet dinners for a proper weekend spread.The post 11 steak recipes…

The state capital was struck by a rare tornado on Thursday night, which damaged a manufacturing plant, Route 13 businesses and Little League fields but no serious injuries were reported.

The National Weather Service confirmed Friday that a likely EF-1 tornado touched down in Dover amid a strong thunderstorm cell.

The city was briefly under a state of emergency overnight on Thursday, but it was lifted Friday morning.

The tornado tore through the Dover Little League fields, causing significant damage there and then continued east, where it picked up tractor trailers at the Kraft Heinz plant and smashed them into the block walls of the manufacturing plant.

The storm’s intense winds toppled tree limbs in downtown Dover, but did not appear to cause widespread damage. On U.S. Route 13, the winds ripped the roof off the Superlodge motel, dropping it on vehicles below. The neighboring Days Inn motel and car wash were similarly damaged.

The post Photo Gallery: Dover struck by tornado appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Detroit, Michigan — Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers’ allies have asked AIPAC not to run advertisements supporting his campaign, reflecting concerns that the prominent pro-Israel group could become a liability in his closely watched race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

According to Axios, Rogers spoke last week with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin. The following day, the organization shelved a completed television ad targeting El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel who defeated AIPAC-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary.

AIPAC and affiliated groups spent more than $30 million trying to defeat El-Sayed during that contest. Rogers’ advisers reportedly concluded that the spending helped El-Sayed portray himself as battling powerful outside interests and feared another visible AIPAC campaign could produce the same effect.

Rogers’ team has suggested alternatives, including directing pro-Israel donors toward outside groups supporting Rogers rather than advertising under AIPAC’s name. Talks between the campaign and organization have since cooled.

The tension is notable because Rogers remains strongly supportive of Israel. Michigan also has one of the nation’s largest Arab American populations, while polling cited by Axios found 55% of state voters oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel.

Rogers nevertheless told Axios he welcomes support from the pro-Israel community. The November contest is expected to be among the country’s most competitive Senate races.

Sources

• Axios – MBFC Rating

The post Mike Rogers Asks AIPAC to Stay Off Air in Michigan Senate Race appeared first on News Facts Network.

Separate criminal convictions come as domestic violence charities warn of tech-facilitated abuse and coercion

Two men have been convicted this week in separate criminal cases that revealed they had posted explicit content on OnlyFans without the full consent of the women whose images were uploaded.

In the first case, Alexander Tang, 37, took and uploaded 47 intimate images and four videos of a woman to OnlyFans without her consent, and was paid money for the material he posted to the website.

The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have revealed World War I and II ordnance lurking beneath the blackened landscape.

Boy, seven, had complained of feeling tired so father left him with snacks and a soft drink and continued his climb

A man who abandoned his seven-year-old son on Mount Fuji in Japan after the boy complained of feeling tired while on a family hike has been reprimanded by local police.

A worker on Japan’s highest mountain discovered the child sitting alone on a bench near the sixth station of the Fujinomiya trail at an altitude of more than 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) on Thursday.

PM tells regional mayors during informal discussions he is keen for tournament to return to British Isles

Andy Burnham has said he wants to bring the men’s World Cup to the UK in 2042, returning the tournament to Britain for the first time in almost eight decades.

During informal discussions at No 10 North in Manchester on Friday, the prime minister told regional mayors he was keen for the tournament to be played in the British Isles.

"I think we have about four to five passengers that were burned by the laptop," a pilot can be heard saying in air traffic control audio obtained by CBS News.

Alayna Riozzi-Bodine was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma the summer before her senior year of high school.

Streamed auctions offer a cheap way to buy the precious gems, but experts warn that quality is not guaranteed

The first time Andrea Greenhill came across a livestream auction for lab-grown diamonds while scrolling on TikTok, she was stunned. While the diamond engagement ring her husband proposed with years ago had cost thousands of dollars, these loose lab-grown diamonds were selling in seconds at a fraction of the price.

“I have two rings that are both natural diamonds and cost a fortune,” she said. I saw the prices they were going for in the auctions, and I was like, “This is insanity.’”

A Democrat’s remarks have resulted in impassioned defenses of the Trump aide. The right has discovered misogyny

Jon Ossoff is quite the miracle worker. Perhaps the Democratic senator can’t turn water into wine, but he has managed to turn whining conservatives into impassioned feminists.

During a rally last Sunday, the Georgia senator delivered a takedown of Donald Trump, which included a reference to his aide Natalie Harp. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said of the president. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Latest attack happened amid Islamophobic blowback against Arab and Muslim Americans running for office

Nashid Shakir describes how assailants used wire cutters to break into the Westwood Islamic Community Center in the early hours of 3 August.

“They cut the wire and broke the window to get in. They broke into the office, too. It was total disarray,” says Shakir, a board member, and member, at the community center since the 1960s.

Content creators are fighting proposal to boost traditional broadcasters in video platforms’ all-powerful algorithms

The millions who subscribe to the content creator Simon Squibb’s social media channels are usually delivered tips and hacks on how to turn their dream business idea into reality. But they were recently presented with something completely different.

In an Instagram post entitled “the government wants to control YOU”, Squibb issued an urgent call to arms. He asked his followers to fight against a proposal that he said could force content from the BBC and other traditional broadcasters into their social media feeds and recommendations whether they liked it or not.

A call revealing Todd Blanche’s plans to crack down on mifepristone lays bare the danger

The abortion pill is a miracle. Mifepristone, then called RU-486, was synthesized by a French lab in the 1980s; in combination with misoprostol, commonly used as ulcer medication, it cuts off the body’s supply of progesterone, halts the development of a pregnancy, and incites contractions, which empty the uterus. The drug allows pregnancies to be terminated with a shocking degree of reliability and ease. Gone are the concoctions of ergot and Spanish Fly dispensed by 19th century midwives, which only sometimes worked to induce a miscarriage; gone are the backroom procedures of the pre-Roe US, when drunk, lascivious, incompetent or cruel providers wielded bent coat hangers in dirty rooms. The abortion pill is safe, effective and cheaper than ever. And since Dobbs, it’s everywhere: even if you live in a state with an abortion ban, you can get the pills shipped to your house in the mail. Since Roe was overturned, there has not been a return to the terror of mass death that marked the pre-Roe era of septic abortion wards, where women routinely found themselves maimed, sickened or killed. There’s exactly one reason why: because illegal abortions were largely unsafe without the pill, and they are extremely safe with it.

So of course, the Trump administration and their allies on the American right are trying to get rid of it. And this month, they gained a powerful new ally when Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and an anti-abortion zealot, was confirmed as attorney general.

New CDC data shows MMR vaccination among kindergarteners declining slightly as non-medical exemptions climb to 4.2%

A week after Donald Trump made a series of misleading claims about vaccines – including that some injections look “like the size of a soda bottle” – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the latest data on national kindergarten vaccination rates.

CDC communications downplayed the changes – a three-sentence announcement said, “overall vaccination rates among kindergarteners remained high” – but medical experts immediately saw cause for concern in the trends.

Brazil’s president and US secretary of state exchange barbs ahead of the South American country’s election

According to a post from chief product officer Hari Srinivasan, "over a million people" have clicked on LinkedIn's new "Seems like AI slop" button, which launched after one analysis found 41% of the platform's longform posts were fully AI-generated. The Verge reports: In Thursday's post, Srinivasan said that users are overall "now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop from just a few weeks ago." LinkedIn is also adding a new message that will tell users who make a post if "Some members told us this post seems like AI." "We approached this assuming good intent; I know I'm increasingly conscious on how to not sound like AI & the goal is to provide helpful feedback," Srinivasan said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Breaking up with Google is easy with these free alternatives.

Alexander Vindman lost to Angie Nixon in the Florida Democratic senatorial primary on Tuesday, marking a long-overdue end to one of the worst liberal mass delusions of the Trump era: Russiagate.

Vindman’s loss offers a number of opportunities for schadenfreude, from the comeuppance for his wife’s sneering at Nixon’s clothes to the staggering spending advantage he had over his opponent, a Democratic Socialists of America member — but it’s the bell tolling for neocons cynically taking advantage of conspiracy theory-minded liberals that’s the most gratifying reason for the loss.

This cohort faltered at the ballot box in 2026. Vindman follows heroes of the Trump 1.0 #Resistance like George Conway and Dan Goldman, both of whom found that resting on the laurels of opposing Trump six years ago wasn’t enough to push back against more dynamic opponents who offered actual policy plans. 

Over the past decade, these conservative Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans relied on liberal fears of Russian election interference and shadowy Moscow kompromat over the president to leverage influence in the party. 

From the beginning, Russiagate was used by a shellshocked liberal establishment to explain away Trump’s victory in a way that didn’t implicate the Democrats. Rather than address what it was about Hillary Clinton’s political platform — and the preceding eight years of President Barack Obama — that opened the door to MAGA, many Democrats and their allies in the media fully bought into the idea that only a nefarious, Kremlin-driven plot could have led to America electing Trump. 

This was an attractive proposal, and it found an enthusiastic, if niche, audience. Democratic voters responded well, notably to commentators at MSNBC like Rachel Maddow, who went all in on the conspiracy and pushed it far beyond what was plausible.

Related

Those Russian Twitter Bots Didn’t Do $#!% in 2016, Says New Study

As MSNBC and, to a lesser extent, CNN, found ratings success with the largely fabricated scandal, the infection spread across legacy media. The New York Times published Louise Mensch, a serial fabulist whose Twitter feed was a laundry list of delusions, in the opinion section. The Washington Post reported an implausible story that Russians were targeting the Vermont energy grid. 

Grifters of all stripes quickly adapted their cons to the new game. In one notorious example, a Twitter user named Eric Garland skyrocketed himself to online notoriety by spinning up a “game theory” Russiagate fantasy where a secret, Avengers-esque team of liberal politicians were using the scandal to beat Vladimir Putin at realpolitik (how, exactly, this was going to happen went unaddressed). The thread was praised as “great writing” by notable media figures; today, Garland is a gutter-level antisemite aligned with far-right gadfly Chuck Johnson whose conspiracy theories are utterly incomprehensible.

In one of the more amusing, and egregious, examples of the hysteria, pundit Jonathan Chait improbably claimed that Trump may have been an agent of the KGB going back to the early 1980s — a preposterous story that nevertheless netted him primetime appearances on cable news. 

In Washington, Russiagate mania supplanted actual policy priorities for Democrats both before and after they retook the House in the 2018 midterms. As I wrote nearly nine years ago at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, establishment media allies like Maddow were so narrowly focused on Russiagate in the early Trump years that they often ignored or papered over instances of corruption and corporate power in lieu of fomenting the conspiracy theory. 

Whether this effort was intentional or not is somewhat irrelevant; the net result was the stifling of the Bernie Sanders wing taking over the party and a reassertion of the neoliberal, corporate-friendly establishment’s control of the levers of power. 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same figures are endorsing that approach again as progressives are winning primaries by focusing on affordability and ambitious policy proposals rather than simply “Trump bad.” In an essay for The Atlantic on Thursday, Chait argued Vindman’s loss didn’t detract from the correctness of resistance liberalism and its singular focus on Trump — and instructed Democrats not to try to offer voters any actionable policy: “Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness.”

That’s a message that’s soothing to the elite liberal class Chait writes for, but it’s unlikely to find much purchase among voters, Democratic or otherwise. The public is burnt out on one-trick-pony versions of escaping the Trump era. And Trump’s second administration has exposed the rotten house of cards keeping the U.S. state afloat, making systemic change an imperative. 

Related

Abdul El-Sayed on The Intercept Briefing

For Democrats, that has meant turning to candidates like Nixon, as well as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. It leaves the neocons who used Russiagate as a way to pivot and rebrand their way out of a party singularly devoted to Trump and into the welcoming arms of the Democratic establishment in a predicament. They’re realizing, with rising panic, that they’re not going to be able to dictate the party’s future as Democrats shift away from Israel and express their support for Palestine and a robust welfare state. 

Some of the Russiagaters are already pivoting back to the right, like Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who became the toast of liberal media after deciding to oppose the president in a self-serving effort when facing prison time. On Thursday, Cohen had his former client on the radio Thursday for a friendly chat. 

Others, like The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, are bullish on liberalism (although, as anyone who remembers the Iraq War knows, they still can’t be trusted an inch). Count Vindman, for now, in the latter camp; however, despite his disagreements with Nixon on Palestine and domestic politics, he endorsed her and promised to support her in November. 

If this is truly the end of Russiagate’s stranglehold on U.S. politics — and we should all hope that’s the case — then its beneficiaries had a good run. Grifters and partisans were able to use the conspiracy theory to push their agendas and further their careers. Neocons secured a foothold in the liberal establishment which will be difficult, though not impossible, to excise. And the Democratic leadership was able to put off actually offering voters tangible policy that would improve their lives for a decade by focusing on delusional fantasies — a strategy that’s now coming back to bite them at the ballot box. 

But for the rest of us, Russiagate was a black hole of political inertia at a time when the country needed strong moral leadership and new ideas. Let’s bury it for good by moving past the conspiracies toward more progressive policy prospects and to political change that does more than focus on Trump.

The post RIP to the Russiagate Liberals appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump transport chief’s YouTube show vowed to ‘celebrate America’s story’ – it’s debatable whether it celebrates anything besides the Duffys themselves

It would be fair to say that the Trump administration’s celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday has been unorthodox – involving, as it has, an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House, a poorly attended state fair, and a car race through Washington, before which the US president will take a lap of honor.

On Tuesday, however, Donald Trump officials dropped perhaps their weirdest 250th offering yet: a six-part travel show in which the US secretary of transportation take his entire family on a startlingly self-involved, creatively funded road trip around the country.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling near Covington, Louisiana

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.

Violet Hensley, who has died at 109, was one of the last links to a bygone era of foot-stomping American folk music.

Beach patrols report hundreds of stings a day as warmer waters and drought create favorable conditions for jellyfish

An unusually high number of jellyfish are crowding Delaware’s beaches this summer amid climate change and other environmental factors – keeping some beachgoers out of the ocean and stinging lifeguards as well as bathers.

Beach safety patrols in the state have reported hundreds of daily stings as the jellyfish have increased with intensifying environmental factors, including warmer waters, hot and dry conditions, and water circulation favorable to the invertebrates.

Residents in hard-hit Gary and other areas are scrambling for generators, lining up for gas and bracing for a long recovery.

English translation of Élisabeth, the New Wave director’s 1946 book about young lovers in prewar Paris, receives rave reviews as precursor to auteur’s cinematic work

In the dog days of the second world war, 24-year-old Maurice Schérer wrote a tale of young lovers in prewar small-town France. He described lazy August swims in the Marne River east of Paris. He wrote about age-gap affairs and semi-incestuous flirtations. Schérer gallantly used a nom de plume, Gilbert Cordier, to shield his Catholic family from scandal, but he needn’t have bothered as his concerns were unfounded. The finished novel, Élisabeth, barely made a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Undeterred, Scherer adopted a second pseudonym – Éric Rohmer – and decided to try his luck as a film-maker instead.

Now – eight decades on from its first publication, 16 years on from its author’s death – Élisabeth belatedly returns from the cold. Republished in an English-language translation by Aaron Kerner, Rohmer’s book has been greeted with glowing reviews, hailed as a lost modernist classic and a crucial origin story for the award-winning director of Claire’s Knee, The Green Ray and My Night at Maud’s. “It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar,” wrote Richard Brody in the New Yorker. The fact that it’s by Rohmer? That’s the icing on the cake.

• Incident happened when Inter Miami met Philadelphia Union

• Argentinian lashed out at Quinn Sullivan in 2-2 draw

Lionel Messi has been fined for slapping an opponent during a Major League Soccer game. The 39-year-old Inter Miami forward lashed out at Quinn Sullivan of Philadelphia Union during their match on Wednesday, catching the midfielder around the back of the head.

The Argentinian appeared to be angry Sullivan had elbowed him after he had played the ball, with the referee intervening before the situation could escalate. The match at Subaru Park finished 2-2.

Compact discs are back, with searches for players up 96% at John Lewis and popular models sold out online

With more than 800 million people subscribing to a music streaming service, wireless speakers have become a familiar sight in homes. But expect to get reacquainted with a different object to play music soon: the CD player, once consigned to obsolescence, is back.

John Lewis report that searches for CD players are up 96% since July, possibly owing to students heading to university and buying the systems for their rooms. The £79 Crosley Voyager, and the £129 Pure Classic C-D6 are both sold out online, with the Voyager scheduled to return in October. Portable CD players are also popular.

In letter to Macron and Burnham, more than 100 senior figures accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and call for measures including trade ban

More than 100 French and British former diplomats have said Palestine is being erased in front of the world’s eyes and called for urgent action including trade and arms sales bans to press Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

An unprecedented joint letter dispenses with diplomatic language by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and warning that the world no longer sees Israel as a genuine democracy.

Uphold the decisions of the international court of justice and the international criminal court.

Suspend the EU-Israel association agreement and the UK-Israel trade and partnership agreement for breach of human rights provisions.

Suspend arms transfers to and from Israel and all bilateral military cooperation.

Insist on unrestricted aid access to Gaza, led by the UN Relief and Works Agency, other UN agencies and international NGOs, with consequences for non-compliance, and access too for journalists, diplomats and parliamentarians.

Ban all trade with settlements, including goods, investment, insurance and other financial services.

Warn potential bidders for the “red line” E1 settlement or other settlement financing/construction that their interests in and with the UK and France will suffer.

Make it an offence for British and French citizens to buy property on stolen Palestinian land and remove charitable status from “charities” funding settlements.

MLS wants to build on the momentum of the World Cup. America’s top domestic cup competition is an obvious place to start

The new commissioner of Major League Soccer, Larry Berg, isn’t keen on the idea of promotion and relegation, but he is a fan of jeopardy. When asked the obligatory pro/rel question in his introductory press conference, Berg responded, “I don’t think it’s appropriate for our league, but I think there are other ways to create jeopardy during the regular season, [and] again in the playoffs.”

He referred to this summer’s World Cup, which was co-hosted by the US, and the excitement it provided, adding, “Millions of people across North America experienced that passion firsthand. They fell in love with the drama, the atmosphere, the supporter culture and the emotion that makes soccer unlike anything else. In the World Cup, we all enjoyed knockout games after the group stage. I call those games of consequence or games of jeopardy.”

As the president tries to extract the US from his Iran war quagmire, leadership in Tehran is only too happy to crush his midterm dreams

In the aftermath of his devastating election defeat, the US president remained haunted by regrets over Iran.

Months before Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan, eight US servicemen died in a botched high-risk rescue mission that failed to secure the freedom of dozens of US hostages seized in Tehran.

Trump aide Natalie Harp is estranged from her brother, Preston, who has used social media and recent interviews to criticize her and highlight his own left-wing politics.

Leaders claim scaremongering from business figures may cause key legislation to become ‘meaningless’

Trades unions are warning Andy Burnham that Labour’s policy on cutting zero-hours contracts risks failing to live up to the party’s manifesto.

Union leaders are seeking reassurances from the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, amid what the TUC has condemned as “scaremongering” from business groups.

In trial that opened on Tuesday, California and 28 other states accused the company of designing addictive sites and violating laws protecting children’s privacy

Meta’s business can be boiled down to four words that begin with the letter H: hook, hold, harvest, hide, according to a lawyer who is prosecuting the world’s largest social media company.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram “hooks” in users, “holds” them on its platforms for as long as possible, “harvests” their data and then “hides” the truth from the public, she argued.

A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. "The El Nino has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still several months in the future," writes renowned climate scientist James Hansen at Columbia University in New York in a newsletter sent today. Climate scientists disagree over whether it has already surpassed previous "super El Nino" events on every metric, but several say the signal is unprecedented in forecasts and could ultimately become the strongest modern event on record. New Scientist reports: There are different ways of measuring El Ninos, which occur when warm surface waters spread eastwards along the equator across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Hansen thinks the best measure is how much warmer than usual the upper 300 meters of the eastern tropical Pacific becomes. "Our preferred metric, the heat anomaly in the upper 300 meters of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean... already exceeds the 1997-98 super El Nino," he writes. [...] What's clear is that this developing super El Nino will soon exceed previous events on all measures. "I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts," [Adam Scaife at the Met Office, the UK's national weather service] said in a statement released today. "If the forecast is accurate... then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences." While Hansen is comparing the developing super El Nino to other modern events for which we have direct temperature records, Hayley Fowler at Newcastle University in the UK thinks it could also exceed historical events suspected to be even larger. "The super El Nino evolving in the Pacific will likely be the biggest ever recorded, reaching or exceeding the levels of the 1877-1878 El Nino which caused widespread impacts, including famines and around 50 million deaths (3-4 percent of the global population at the time), mostly across Asia and South America," Fowler said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experts say fires caused by wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are putting lives at risk

Fires at recycling centres caused by wrongly discarded lithium batteries such as those found in vapes are occurring at the rate of more than 10 a week, according to new figures.

Experts say the sheer volume of battery fires now occurring at waste facilities has reached a crisis that is putting lives at risk, costing £1bn a year and frustrating fire chiefs.

Amid a jobs slump, award-winning writers, directors and producers taking on sometimes lucrative temp work teaching AI skills such as screenwriting and production

Hollywood creatives are taking gig work to train AI models to replicate their skills in a bid to offset tightening earnings in a trend one compared to being “handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession”.

Experienced and award-winning writers, directors and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the intricacies of their jobs, from writing a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule.

It’s clear here in Silicon Valley that AI is advancing faster than humans’ ability to control it. That means even sober prophecies seem optimistic

Here in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we’ll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. “Welcome to the foothills of the singularity,” as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as “recursive self-improvement” – the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans.

As Robert Wright puts it in his book The God Test: “Never before has the near-term future … held such a wide array of not-implausible paths for humankind that would be so wildly transformative.” But will this be heaven or hell? Heaven, says Elon Musk, who predicts “an age of amazing abundance” – although he also sees a 10-20% chance of killer robots murdering us all. Hell is more likely according to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the intellectual founding fathers of AI. “My intuition is, we’re toast,” he told an interviewer in 2023. And talking to Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, a book about the quest for superintelligence, Hinton estimates p(doom) – the probability of human extinction – at 50%, “because I haven’t got a clue how to estimate the real number”. “As soon as evolution [of AI] kicks in, we’re fucked,” he adds cheerfully. But whether it’s God or Godzilla, artificial superintelligence is just around the corner.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

Social media platforms face public ire after fatal crash involving teenagers filming themselves driving on wrong side

Videos often begin with the camera panning across a glowing dashboard as a gloved hand starts the ignition. The camera turns to show figures with masked faces in the rear seat, who are also filming, and swivels back to show the windscreen. Beyond it, a dark cityscape.

The engine throbs, headlights puncture the night and the journey begins, first down a suburban road, then a motorway. The speedometer shows acceleration, the needle juddering as the car gathers velocity.

Mark Carney rejects ‘unfair’ deal as top Washington envoy criticises ‘missed opportunity’

Washington, D.C. — Outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will join the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC after leaving the administration at the end of August, returning to an organization where she previously served as a spokesperson.

Leavitt confirmed the move Friday while speaking with reporters before traveling with President Donald Trump to a campaign rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She did not disclose her new title but said reporters would continue seeing her frequently on the campaign trail.

MAGA Inc. has become one of the most financially powerful groups supporting Trump and Republican candidates heading into the 2026 midterms. The super PAC reportedly has more than $350 million available for political spending.

Leavitt announced last week that she would leave the White House to spend more time with her family after recently returning from maternity leave. Trump has said she will remain one of his top advisers and an influential voice within the Republican Party.

Before joining Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and later becoming White House press secretary, Leavitt worked as a spokesperson for MAGA Inc., making the move a return to familiar territory rather than a complete career shift.

The White House has not yet announced Leavitt’s replacement. Trump said Friday that the administration has received numerous applications for the job, while several Republican media figures and political operatives have been discussed as possible successors.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Karoline Leavitt Joins Trump Super PAC After Leaving White House appeared first on News Facts Network.

Federal officials announced sharp water cuts for the next two years on Friday for three Western states that rely on the imperiled Colorado River.

Wealthy Gulf nation has been hard hit by US-Iran conflict over Strait of Hormuz

Critics are calling for legislation to be tightened two years after the drug was partially liberalised

Despite Scott Bessent’s efforts, investors worry something is up

The president’s agenda is under strain as the Iran war pushes up prices and America’s finances worsen

A less seductive continent would not attract so many enemies

Gillian Tett on the president’s bid to reform the 10-year census, and the explosive politics behind who gets included and who gets to decide

Questions mount over management of mandatory pension schemes for professionals worth €300bn

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to a Bloomberg report, attributed to China's Ministry of State Security, the country has ordered some government agencies to drop Windows 10 China Government Edition for Chinese-made Linux distributions. Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty. In addition, even before the recent trend of governments outside America moving away from Windows, Beijing has started a long-running push to replace foreign technology in sensitive systems with domestic, open-source alternatives. [...] The Chinese government did not specify which Linux versions would replace Windows 10. However, the stock prices of Chinese Linux suppliers, Kylin Software and Tongxin Software Technology (commonly known as UnionTech), immediately jumped. These companies' respective operating systems, Kylin OS (no relation to Ubuntu Kylin) and UnionTech OS (UOS), were already positioned as domestic desktop and server replacements for Windows in government, state-owned enterprise, and critical-infrastructure environments. [...] Huawei's HarmonyOS 2, which began as an Android variant but is now a proprietary mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) operating system, is also being developed into a PC platform. HarmonyOS 2 won't be deployed anytime soon. Kylin and UOS are the only mature desktops that are ready for institutional desktop deployments. [...] ... this transition won't be easy. For agencies now moving off the government Windows build, the issue will be more demanding than simply swapping one desktop interface for another. Migration requires application testing, peripheral and driver validation, identity system integration, document-format compatibility, staff retraining and, in many cases, replacement or adaptation of Windows-dependent line-of-business software. The report provides no details on exactly how this transformation will occur. But the speed of the shift suggests that these issues are already being addressed in China's centralized managed desktop stack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington, D.C. — Nearly 200 activists aligned with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement are urging President Donald Trump to reconsider plans encouraging coal-fired power for the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence industry.

In a letter sent Friday, the activists said they support maintaining U.S. leadership in AI but argued that growing electricity demand from data centers should not increase exposure to mercury, soot and other pollutants associated with coal generation. The group asked the administration to consider alternatives including solar and geothermal power.

The letter also calls for transparent reviews of where data centers are built, how they obtain electricity and whether projects comply with existing environmental reviews.

Signatories include Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt and Charles Eisenstein, both former members of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. Their opposition represents another disagreement between parts of the MAHA coalition and the administration over environmental policy.

Trump has promoted what he calls “big, beautiful coal” as one option for supplying electricity to energy-intensive data centers, arguing that expanding AI infrastructure is essential for competing with China.

The White House defended Trump’s broader energy record while activists said their concerns center on public-health effects in communities hosting power generation and data centers.

Sources

• Associated Press – MBFC Rating

The post MAHA Activists Push Trump to Drop Coal Plans for AI Data Centers appeared first on News Facts Network.

The Central African Republic is one of more than 30 countries the U.S. government has convinced to accept third-country deportees arrested as part of President Trump's large-scale crackdown on illegal immigration.

Rule would require states to provide federal government with information on voters in return for delivering ballots

The US Postal Service prepared to publish a final ⁠rule late ⁠on ​Friday to impose new requirements on states to provide the federal government with information on voters before the November ⁠midterm congressional elections, despite a ​pair of court ‌orders ‌that currently block the ‌changes from taking effect.

The USPS acknowledged in the text of the final rule posted online Friday, which is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register next week, that two injunctions issued by federal courts in California and Massachusetts currently bar it from moving ahead with the changes to comply with a March executive order signed by Donald Trump.

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• Pentagon fires publisher and editor of Stars & Stripes

• Backlash as navy carrier set to honor Black war hero could be named after Trump

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US Senator Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican and a cattle rancher, has come out against a plan announced Friday by Donald Trump to allow for an increase in imported ground beef.

”I’ve advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them - most of whom are MAGA Republicans,” Sheehy wrote on X. “The President’s heart is in the right place on wanting lower prices for the American people, and beef prices have been impacted by the Mexican screwworm. But the reality is this action will make it more difficult for American ranchers to rebuild our herd and bring prices down for the American people. And most importantly, this will harm our ranching families who feed the nation.”

Trump announced a plan on Truth Social to allow 300,000 metric tonnes of beef to be imported without tariffs over the next 90 days, to be sold for hamburger at a 25 percent discount to current prices. Trump offered this agreement with an unnamed source as measure to lower prices while “as we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers.”

The US beef cattle herd is near historic lows, and beef prices have skyrocketed over the last year. The average price of ground beef in American cities is around $7.12 a pound, an increase of 9.4 percent year-over-year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is a slap in the face to every war hero and every service member who has worn the uniform. It’s beyond comprehension for a president to want his own name on a Navy ship while our armed forces are living in deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. For generations, millions of Black women and men have proudly served in the United States military, defending freedoms that too often were not even afforded to them, their families, or their communities. Donald Trump is making a mockery of that legacy by treating military service as another opportunity for personal branding. Our brave service members signed up to defend the nation, not the fragile ego of one man. America deserves better than this.

President at rally in South Carolina makes comments on key strategic waterway and jokes about bombing Iran

Donald Trump called the strait of Hormuz “an American territory” on Friday, as the US continues its military blockade of Iran’s shipping and ports while Trump’s administration struggles to end its war with the country.

“We don’t even know if we won, because I view the strait of Hormuz as an American territory right now,” Trump said, addressing a crowd in South Carolina. He was campaigning for senator Darline Graham, who is running to permanently fill her late brother Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, threatens harshest sanctions yet on Russia after strike on Kryvyi Rih, the home town of Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Russian drones have slammed into a busy shopping centre in central Ukraine, killing 16 people in an attack that Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned as “cynical and despicable”.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, condemned Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih – the president’s home town – as “terror by design” and said she was “putting forward the most far-reaching Russia sanctions listings since the start of the war” when ministers meet in Ireland next month.

President Trump's legal team is threatening to sue left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress for defamation over a report it issued that found "no evidence that National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime."

Sen. Darline Graham is facing Rep. Ralph Norman to replace her late brother on the ballot in November.

Chatbot gibberish is annoying. But it’s also a lesson in how AI works.

In south Minneapolis, a second-floor bedroom remains much as it was. For the parents of 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel, it's something every American should see.

The Microsoft Xbox Special Edition console price has leaked, revealing an unpleasantly high price.

A report released by thinktank Cap argues the deployment of the national guard failed to have a measurable impact on crime, despite costing billions

The Center for American Progress (Cap) received a letter from Donald Trump’s lawyer threatening a $5bn lawsuit unless the liberal research organization retracts a report criticizing the effectiveness of the president’s National Guard rollout.

The report released 13 July argues that the National Guard deployment in Washington DC, Memphis and Los Angeles failed to have a measurable impact on crime in these cities despite an estimated cost of $1.7bn. The report looks at the falling rate of crime in cities without a National Guard intervention and concludes that they are not statistically different from the rate of decrease in those that had the intervention, noting that violent crime began falling well before Trump took office in 2025.

Recall comes after Chinese authorities said it would ban hidden car door handles commonly seen on Tesla models

Tesla and other carmakers are making a major recall of more than 4m vehicles in China over safety concerns mostly related to their door handles, according to Chinese authorities on Friday.

The US carmaker is recalling about 2.98m China-made and imported EVs including Model 3, Model Y, Model X and Model S over door-handle safety risks, according to China’s state administration for market regulation.

OpenAI has a new feature that allows its AI chatbot to read your texts and write new ones.

Big Tech’s water guzzling to cool AI servers is serious, even if this viral ad isn’t.

Aerial photo of Diego Garcia. Image Credit: Shutterstock/Kev1ar82

A passport can take travelers to some remarkably remote corners of the planet, but it cannot open every door. Around the world, islands, caves, military installations, Indigenous territories, religious sites and underground vaults remain closed to ordinary visitors.

Bank of London. Image Credit: Deposit Photos.

The review included data from an anonymous survey conducted every other year that asks service members whether they've been the victim of unwanted sexual conduct or harassment.

Image Credit: Deposit Photos.

‘Civilian-contracted aircraft’ crashes in western Alaska killing two pilots and six passengers, officials say

A charter aircraft that crashed at a remote radar site in western Alaska on Thursday, killing all eight people onboard, was making its second runway approach in heavy fog when it lost contact, authorities said Friday.

The Cessna’s two pilots could not see the gravel airstrip and were flying solely by instruments when the plane crashed about midday Thursday, Clint Johnson, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska region chief, told a virtual news conference.

This week's guests include Dr. Mehmet Oz, Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida.

(The Center Square) - A Washington state marriage and family therapist will have another opportunity to challenge a 2018 Washington law that his attorneys contend censored his speech.

Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, has imposed a six-month moratorium on "major electric utility infrastructure" in its latest attempt to delay a proposed $1.2 billion University of Michigan-Los Alamos data center that would support nuclear-weapons research. Township leaders, who have already paused water service for data centers, say the project has moved forward without adequate consultation and want more time to study noise, grid impacts, and other effects on residents. 404 Media reports: Last year, the university announced it was partnering with LANL on the construction of a massive 220,000 square foot hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township and residents have been fighting it ever since. During a meeting of the Township Board on August 18, the council unanimously passed a resolution that will delay the construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days. Data centers need a lot of energy, and Michigan's power authority will have to build new substations in the Township to power the proposed facility. The moratorium asked the local power authorities to use the six month delay to study noise pollution and how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers. The moratorium is narrowly focused on "the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users." Earlier this month, the University of Michigan announced it had settled on a specific plot of land in Ypsilanti Township -- a 144-acre plot on Textile Road. In a press release about the decision, the University said the data center would have the "capacity to change the world" and insisted it would not be a "high value target risk" in a war, that it would not store any hazardous nuclear material, and was not a weapons production facility. LANL previously confirmed that the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told WEMU news that the selection of the site was a "travesty of justice" because it ignores constituents' concerns about environmental impact. During the August 18 moratorium vote, the Board projected a large stock photograph of an electric substation behind its members. The photo was meant to remind people of the size of the incoming infrastructure and the lack of communication from the university about it. "This picture's really important to think about because U of M has been so crystal clear that they've been communicating to us abundantly -- which is not true," Township clerk Debbie Swanson said during the meeting. "That speaks to the lack of respect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While students return to campus on Sunday, August 23rd to move into the dorms, MSU took to the streets of downtown Bozeman to spread some school spirit with the 14th annual Cat Walk.

An outbreak of E. coli and salmonella that has sickened dozens of people across 15 states has been linked to an alfalfa grower in Minnesota, federal health officials said Friday.

Saja El-Khawas had been in critical condition after being pulled from sea in West Sussex

A six-year-old girl has died in hospital three days after being pulled from the sea off Shoreham in West Sussex, in an incident that also killed her mother, father and sister.

Saja El-Khawas died on Friday after the deaths of her sister Sara El-Khawas, 14, and her parents Hassan El-Khawas, 55, and Zeina Alayn, 37, on Tuesday.

The body of Alisa Goods, a New York grandmother who went missing while visiting Las Vegas, has been found after more than a week, her sister told CBS News' Alice Gainer.

The DoJ sued TikTok and its former parent company in August 2024 for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy and collecting their information

⁠TikTok and its Chinese former parent company ByteDance on Friday agreed to a $400m settlement to resolve the US Department of Justice’s allegations that the short-form video app ⁠violated children’s online ⁠privacy.

The justice ​department sued TikTok and ByteDance in 2024 for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy and illegally collecting their information. The defendants were accused ⁠of violating a law requiring online services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13.

(The Center Square) – The Trump administration is temporarily lifting the tariff on beef to help lower prices for Americans at the grocery store.

Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs as it shifts resources toward a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and other future products. Roughly 100 positions are being eliminated from the Vision Pro organization, including much of its gaming team and some immersive-video staff. Another 100 cuts are hitting the Siri and software teams. Bloomberg reports: In a statement, Apple acknowledged that it was realigning some teams "to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users." "While we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles," the company said. "We are grateful to these team members for their contributions, and we are committed to supporting them throughout their transition, including opportunities to apply for other roles at Apple." The Siri reshuffling is tied to an upcoming AI-infused version of the assistant, which is built on a new technical architecture. That shift requires a change in the necessary expertise, prompting the company to eliminate a small number of existing roles, reallocate resources and create new positions supporting the updated Siri. The changes to the Intelligent Systems Experience team reflect an effort to reorganize work on AI-powered capabilities. As more groups bring AI functions to apps, features and services, Apple is realigning teams to match priorities and accelerate development. The restructuring will eliminate some existing positions while creating new roles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The dark lord – or someone dressed like him – said the technology would aid the empire in tracking ‘rebel scum’

A man dressed as Darth Vader appeared to poke fun at San Diego officials for using Flock Safety automated license plate readers at a city council meeting this week, a stunt that comes as the company faces growing backlash linked to spying concerns.

The man, whose real identity remains unknown, masqueraded on Thursday as the Star Wars villain at a San Diego public safety committee meeting.

World’s biggest cryptocurrency registers best week in more than three years as investors pile into ‘debasement’ trades

The requests target Discord accounts and a GitHub repository connected to the ongoing GTA 6 leak investigation.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott escalated his campaign against Muslim washing stations at the state’s major airports.

The Justice Department sued TikTok in 2024, alleging that it violated a U.S. law prohibiting the collection of kids' data.

UPTON, N.Y. and STONY BROOK, N.Y., Aug. 21, 2026 — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University) have successfully transmitted light particles containing quantum information through open air between the two institutions. This is the first demonstration of its kind in the United States and a key milestone toward extending the nation’s longest quantum network — already connecting eight nodes across several institutions — beyond the limits of fiber-optic cables.

Brookhaven Lab Associate Laboratory Director for Discovery Technologies Gabriella Carini (left) and Brookhaven Lab scientist Justine Haupt (right) stand in Brookhaven’s Quantum Lighthouse — a state-of-the-art rooftop facility equipped with lenses, mirrors, and other optical instruments. Researchers use this technology to transmit and receive particles of light carrying quantum information. (David Rahner/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

“The future of quantum information science will depend not only on what individual quantum computers and devices can do but on our ability to connect them,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “As DOE advances its Genesis Mission, we are building toward an interconnected research ecosystem where advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies can work together to tackle some of our most complex scientific challenges. The capabilities demonstrated by Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University today are an important step toward making that vision possible.”

During a daytime demonstration on Friday, Aug. 21, researchers used a laser to generate quantum states of light, each containing just a few individual photons, in Stony Brook University’s state-of-the-art Quantum Watchtower. From the Watchtower, located on the roof of Stony Brook’s Health Sciences Center in Stony Brook, New York, the photons exited the core of an optical fiber only about 5 microns in diameter — less than one-tenth the width of a human hair — and traversed 13 miles (21 kilometers) to Brookhaven’s Quantum Lighthouse in Upton, New York.

In the Lighthouse, Gil cut a ribbon blocking the receiving aperture, allowing the photons to reach the detector. Researchers and distinguished guests gathered in the Quantum Lighthouse — built on top of the only Brookhaven Lab building with a clear line of sight to Stony Brook University — to watch as an ultrafast camera marked the photons’ arrival in an equally small optical fiber.

The daytime demonstration showcased the extraordinary precision of this free-space optical (FSO) link between the two institutions, with researchers transmitting photons between fiber-optic cables that are only a fraction of a millimeter in diameter and separated by several miles. But the team has already progressed to the next phase of experimentation using entangled photons — pairs of light particles that are intrinsically linked by the laws of quantum mechanics.

During nighttime tests, when there are lower levels of background light, the researchers successfully sent entangled photons from the Stony Brook physics laboratory to the Quantum Watchtower via fiber, then distributed them across the new FSO link, and successfully received and measured them at the Quantum Lighthouse. This is a key advance toward achieving sustained “wireless” exchange of quantum information between the two institutions — and eventually beyond.

The FSO link — which includes the Quantum Lighthouse and Quantum Watchtower, along with a third facility under development at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut — adds a wireless component to the record-setting quantum network currently spanning 161 miles and several institutions across Long Island and the New York metropolitan area.

Using this network, pioneered by Stony Brook and Brookhaven Lab, researchers can transmit entangled photons through commercial fiber. Because the particles remain entangled even when separated by long distances, measuring one photon instantly reveals information about its counterpart. This property, often referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” is key for the future of ultra-secure communications, advanced quantum sensing, and networked quantum computing.

“In our long-distance fiber network, we routinely transmit entangled pairs of photons. However, such fiber networks are limited to the use of telecom wavelengths. In our new quantum wireless links, we are exploring the use of infrared wavelengths that are native to quantum processors and related technologies,” said Eden Figueroa, director of Stony Brook’s Quantum Institute, endowed presidential professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a joint appointee at Brookhaven Lab. “This will provide a direct route to create entangled atomic systems across long distances.”

State University of New York at Stony Brook President Andrea Goldsmith said, “Extending our quantum communication network to include a wireless link is a major leap forward in our development of the Quantum Internet of Things. I’m thrilled that our brilliant Stony Brook researchers, together with our partners at Brookhaven National Laboratory, have demonstrated impressive progress in overcoming the significant challenges of sending quantum information wirelessly via entangled photons. By unlocking wireless quantum connectivity and incorporating it into the world’s only metropolitan-area network that supports quantum communication via entanglement, we are transforming secure data transmission while igniting Long Island as an innovation hub. We are profoundly grateful to our elected officials, Governor Hochul, Senator Schumer, Senator Gillibrand, and Rep. LaLota for their generous support and for securing investments in Long Island’s quantum research. Ultimately, this places New York State at the forefront of quantum information science and its application to secure communication for finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity.”

Building the FSO link

In some ways, the classical internet’s evolution from wired connections to a complex network of wired and wireless technologies provides a roadmap for reaching milestones toward a global quantum network. But the researchers also needed to draw on expertise from a seemingly unrelated field: astronomy.

At the Stony Brook University Quantum Watchtower atop of the Health Sciences Center, pictured from left are Eden Figueroa Barragan, Dimitrios Katramatos, and Ph.D. student Rishikesh Gokhale. (Stony Brook University/John Griffin)

Today’s classical wireless technologies, including cell phones and orbiting satellites, use radio frequencies to transmit information without a physical connection. But radio frequencies are far too noisy to preserve fragile quantum information. Instead, the researchers turned to optical light for sending quantum signals through open air.

“People think of telescopes as tools for looking up into space, but the same technologies that allow astronomers to precisely collect and control light are essential for these quantum experiments,” said Justine Haupt, Brookhaven Lab’s lead scientist on the cross-institutional FSO link project.

Haupt and her colleagues at Brookhaven are experts when it comes to telescopes, having built key components for several high-profile astronomy projects. But because there is more turbulent atmosphere between Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook University than there is between Earth and the stars, the scientists needed to develop technology sophisticated enough to ensure the photons could travel between institutions without becoming distorted or losing their fragile quantum information. But that was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

“Both Brookhaven and Stony Brook needed to build specialized rooftop facilities for the telescope systems that were optimized for quantum experiments,” Haupt said. “We needed to integrate the optics, controls, communications, quantum sources, and detectors so equipment 21 kilometers apart could operate as one experiment. Bringing all those pieces together — and then adding the quantum layer — is what makes this capability unique.”

“New York State is committed to investing in cutting-edge research and innovation in emerging fields that move our society forward,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “The partnership between the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory serves as an excellent example of how collaboration can advance discovery and create transformative technologies.”

At 12:26 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Aug. 19, researchers at Brookhaven Lab’s Quantum Lighthouse detected entangled photons arriving from Stony Brook’s Quantum Watchtower. The graph’s uptick on the far right around 0:37, coinciding with the “Entanglement Source ON” text, marks the arrival of entangled photons. (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Looking Ahead

Yale’s facility — the third leg of the FSO link — was recently completed, and the researchers will soon begin establishing the Stony Brook-Yale connection so they can also transmit entangled photons 30 miles (48 kilometers) across the Long Island Sound.

“While completing this longer leg, the team is simultaneously moving toward one of our ultimate goals: transmitting quantum information through Earth’s atmosphere to orbiting satellites,” said Brookhaven Lab Associate Laboratory Director for Discovery Technologies Gabriella Carini. “Incorporating satellites into the network could help bring secure quantum communications to rural or remote locations with minimal ground-based telecommunications infrastructure, transforming the quantum network from a regional one to a global one.”

Phase-Folded Photon Analysis — On Wednesday, Aug. 19, researchers at Brookhaven Lab’s Quantum Lighthouse detected entangled photons arriving from Stony Brook’s Quantum Watchtower. The diverging of the red and blue lines in the top plot, as well as the difference between the red and blue bars in the bottom graph, indicate an increase in detected photons (red, on-phase rate) compared to the background counts (blue, off-phase rate). This data confirmed that researchers in the Lighthouse saw the quantum signal. (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Expanding beyond the limits of fiber also opens the door to new kinds of quantum experiments by enabling researchers to use photons with wavelengths, or “colors,” different from the telecommunications wavelengths optimized for commercial fibers. Many quantum technologies naturally operate at these other wavelengths, making free-space links a promising path toward linking quantum devices across long distances. Researchers ultimately envision using the FSO link to connect quantum computers at Brookhaven and Stony Brook — and beyond — enabling them to work together and tackle some of the nation’s most pressing scientific challenges.

“Brookhaven has long been at the forefront of quantum information science, and this achievement represents another important step in that journey,” said Brookhaven Lab Director John Hill. “This free-space link is a key milestone in its own right, but it is also part of a much larger roadmap leading to distributed quantum systems. We will continue advancing the network’s capabilities so that researchers can connect increasingly sophisticated quantum systems together to address a range of problems, from computation to communication to sensing, in ways that just aren’t possible today.”

U.S. Rep. Nick LaLota said, “Under Secretary Gil’s return to Brookhaven National Lab is another reminder that some of the world’s most important scientific work is happening right here in Suffolk County. Quantum research will play a major role in shaping the technologies we rely on every day, while strengthening our national security and ensuring America remains at the forefront of scientific innovation. At a time when Washington must spend taxpayer dollars wisely, I’m focused on prioritizing smart, targeted investments in projects and partnerships at Brookhaven and Stony Brook that support good-paying Long Island jobs, advance groundbreaking research, and keep America leading the world in innovation.”

Empire State Development Board Chairman Kevin Law said, “Long Island has long been home to some of the world’s most important scientific institutions, and today’s milestone demonstrates what is possible when those institutions work together. The partnership between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory is helping establish Long Island as a leader in quantum technology and positioning the region to attract talent, investment, and future economic growth for years to come.”

The work at Brookhaven Lab is primarily supported by the DOE Office of Science. At Stony Brook University, the work is supported by the National Science Foundation and New York’s Empire State Development.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

This press release is being jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Source: State University of New York at Stony Brook

The post Brookhaven and Stony Brook Researchers Demonstrate ‘Wireless’ Capability for Quantum Network appeared first on HPCwire.

(The Center Square) - Drivers will hit the streets this weekend for the IndyCar Freedom 250 Grand Prix in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C as part of more than $90 million in taxpayer funds spent over the past year…

Federal prosecutors have charged activist Samuel Tunick with obstruction after he gave Customs and Border Protection officers a duress passcode that wiped his GrapheneOS-powered Pixel during a border search. "His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered," reports The New York Times. From the report: "Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions," Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. "Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions." A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud and national security threats. "The border search will only include an examination of information that is present on the device at the time it is presented for inspection," the spokeswoman said, adding that it searched the electronic devices of fewer than 0.01 percent of all arriving international travelers in the last fiscal year. "Just the knowledge that the government is peering into your private life in this way, trying to dig up dirt on you, even though it's unsuccessful, is creepy," Tunick said, in response to a question about how the charges have affected him. His message: "The government doesn't own our communications, our relationships, as hard as they might try to. We have to defend our fundamental right to privacy; otherwise we can't say that we really live in a democracy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Israeli fact-finding mission declined to refer some other “exceptional” cases, including the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers, to military prosecutors.

The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former nurse accused of murdering her three children, is wrapping up its fifth week. On Friday morning, the defense rested, and the public attention to the case is at a fever-pitch — especially on social media. Clancy, 36, does not deny that she strangled her children, but has pleaded not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility, also known as an insanity defense. She argues that she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis, a rare and devastating condition that can go unrecognized and untreated. Host Carter Sherman speaks with Jenna Amatulli, deputy head of news for Guardian US, about how the case has renewed attention on the fundamental shortcomings in the US's maternal healthcare system, and about why Clancy's story has captivated – and polarized – so many people

Walmart will let shoppers use tap-to-pay methods, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, beginning later this month.

More of what you’re reading online could be written by an AI bot.

Police department for Navajo Nation neither identified the victim nor said what type of bear had killed him

In a rare kind of attack, a bear killed a man in Crystal, New Mexico, on Thursday, local police said.

The police department for the Navajo Nation said officers within its Window Rock district received a call at about 1pm that a bear had attacked a man.

The contactless payment method will be available starting Aug. 24 at select stores and clubs.

European regulators have imposed billions in penalties on US technology companies due to privacy, competition and digital market rules

The Dutch data protection authority has fined ⁠Uber €825m ($966m) for deactivating driver ⁠accounts through automated systems without ​adequately informing them, according to a 17 August decision.

The penalty would be the second-largest issued yet under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Max Lederer and Erik Slavin receive termination notices after publication reported on crew conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln

The Pentagon has fired the publisher and the editor of Stars and Stripes, the US military news outlet that has clashed with the Trump administration and armed forces brass over its partly taxpayer-funded reporting.

Publisher Max Lederer and editor Erik Slavin received termination notices, CBS News reported on Friday. The cause cited was insubordination, and they have been given five days to appeal against their dismissals.

Chief justice signs temporary order to permit work while court considers emergency appeal from administration

The US supreme court has allowed Donald Trump to continue construction of his controversial White House ballroom for now, temporarily pausing a lower court order that would halt much of the project.

Supreme court chief justice John Roberts signed a temporary order on Friday, permitting work to continue on the planned White House addition – a top priority of the president – while the court considers an emergency appeal from Trump’s administration.

President claims unnamed foreign suppliers will provide 25% discount in run-up to midterm elections

Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stay that will remain in place until the Supreme Court takes further action.

An alternative measure of unemployment that accounts for wages suggests the U.S. labor market is weaker than it looks.

Zelenskyy described the attack as a double-tap strike, in which an initial wave of drones hit the area, followed by a second wave as rescue workers responded.

Olympian Jenny Simpson said she won't be able to run again after being diagnosed with a rare heart condition earlier this year.

The Pentagon has given separation notices to both the publisher and the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, according to people familiar with the matter.

The defense rested in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial Friday in Massachusetts. The prosecution has started calling rebuttal witnesses.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Teachers report marking identikit essays that they suspect are churned out by ChatGPT. Yet firm evidence on AI's educational effects has been lacking. David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group. The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI's help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams. The takeaway: "AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently," reports The Economist. "Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

World powers gather to decide how to deal with potential threat to colonising Earth’s nearest celestial neighbour

Closing arguments could come on Monday as prosecutors seek murder conviction over deaths of three young children

Lindsay Clancy’s defense in her murder trial rested on Friday after calling witnesses to testify about the ailing mother’s mental state and attempts to seek help before she killed her young children.

The defense wrapped more quickly than some expected given that the prosecution rested their case on Monday.

Cash drop social media accounts have people racing to find money hidden across the country. Here's what's behind the viral videos.

Ed Martin, the pro-Trump lawyer who has been at the center of several controversies, is departing the administration, the president announced.

The 10-year blueprint mandates water cuts of up to 40% for California, Arizona and Nevada

It’s official: after years of tense negotiations and missed deadlines, there is finally a plan to govern the future of the imperiled Colorado River - or at least the makings of one.

With the previous framework set to expire in October, the US Bureau of Reclamation publicly released its proposal for a new plan on Friday.

Asking people to weigh in on adoption of different categories in move that will sow confusion and create access challenges, say experts

The Trump administration is asking for public feedback on changes to the ways it recommends vaccines – likely opening the door to greater access challenges and confusion, experts say.

In a notice published by the health and human services (HHS) to the Federal Register on Friday, officials say they are now seeking comments from the public about the current categories for vaccine recommendations, which so far fall into routine, risk-based and shared clinical decision-making.

David Campanale seeks damages after what he says was organised campaign against his faith in Sutton and Cheam

How much is a career in politics worth? The Liberal Democrats, despite admitting claims of religious discrimination, say about £22,800. A former Lib Dem candidate claims £790,000.

It is a question before the Central London county court after David Campanale argued that discrimination against his Christianity cost him his political career in a civil case against the party.

One woman is speaking out after she was secretly filmed, saying that technology like Meta's AI-powered smart glasses threatens personal privacy.

UN secretary general has said UN faces ‘imminent financial collapse’ due to unpaid contributions from member states

The Trump administration has started the process to transfer $725m to the United Nations, a congressional notification seen by Reuters ⁠showed – a move aid experts said ⁠was a welcome step towards paying ​billions in dues owed.

There was no immediate response from Washington DC to questions about the reasons for the payment from an administration that has slashed funding to many UN agencies and blasted the global body for not living up to ⁠its potential.

Four patients at Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown received incorrect medications last week, CBS affiliate WTVF reported.

Consumer advocates are urging the FTC to examine whether AI developers are hurting competition and reducing public access to source material.

The states must curb their use of water from the river starting in 2027.

A man dressed as Darth Vader used a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting in San Diego to mock the city's use of Flock surveillance cameras, sarcastically arguing that the technology would help the "emperor" track "rebel scum" and find Luke Skywalker. "This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and the hidden base on Hoth," he said. The Hill reports: He urged that the cameras be used to surveil any "rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium, because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers, they are following children." The plea for the cameras shifted to raising taxes to clear out storm drains and to the clearing of homeless encampments in the city. The man said the council members can use "doublespeak" to say the police department is humanitarian. "And how will the people trust this City Council when this City Council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them? Ms. Campbell, you must work on your Jedi mind tricks," he said, addressing City Council member Jennifer Campbell, before waving his hand to the audience. "Do it like this." His last plea was for the Flock cameras to be used to "help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing." "This technology is a necessary, necessary force," he concluded. According to DeFlock, San Diego has more than 550 Flock cameras across the city.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Masoud Pezeshkian’s comments reflect debate within regime over how much economic pressure country can endure

A federal appeals court said the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York was unlawfully serving when he subpoenaed state Attorney General Letitia James.

Micron says it will spend $10 billion over the next decade on a new research lab in Boise focused on advanced memory technologies, computing systems, and future chip manufacturing. Here are some details, as reported by Reuters: - Micron Research Labs will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs, the company said. - The latest investment builds on the more than $250 billion that Micron had separately committed to manufacturing and R&D across the United States. - The lab will be connected to Micron's research and technology footprint across the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, Singapore and Taiwan. - Growing adoption of AI workloads and infrastructure buildout have boosted demand for high-bandwidth memory, which rapidly feeds data to AI accelerators, making it a critical component of modern computing infrastructure. - The Trump administration has prioritized domestic chip manufacturing in a bid to reduce foreign dependence, boost the economic output and maintain its lead in the AI race. - Micron expects to break ground on the facility in 2027, which will be capable of hosting hundreds of researchers and facilitating international conferences and workshops.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(The Center Square) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed continued construction on President Donald Trump's estimated $400 million White House ballroom.

The department told Nevada officials that the 15,903 figure registered was ‘preliminary’ and more than 14,000 names still needed review

About a month after alleging Nevada had as many as 16,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials admitted they had confirmed that only 185 were actually non-citizens, according to records obtained by the Guardian.

In a primetime TV address on 16 July, Donald Trump claimed that a DHS review had found about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states.

(The Center Square) – More developments have been reported as the FBI investigates former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-San Francisco Bay Area.

A new space transportation policy from the Trump administration calls for a dramatic increase in launches, as well as working with the commercial space industry to send humans to Mars.

(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum to expand space travel, with the goal of facilitating more than 1,000 launches and reentries “on American soil” each year by 2030.

(The Center Square) - Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has a double-digit lead over U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Surprise, in Arizona’s gubernatorial general election, according to a new poll.

(The Center Square) – San Antonio fuel workers are the latest in Texas to oust union bosses from their workplace.

Experts say more must be done to adapt to changing climate, after two trains derailed within 24 hours during a recent heatwave

Railway companies are racing to prepare for another brutal summer next year, as a developing El Niño could see 2027 break more heat-related records.

Britain’s railway system has already been under stress from extreme heat this summer, with several operators reducing timetables and train speeds.

MPs receive Harry Styles concert tickets worth £858, Chelsea flower show tickets worth £1,839, and £3,432 of hospitality at Brit awards

MPs have been accused of failing to learn their lesson over freebies after taking almost £400,000 of hospitality to concerts, sport matches and other events this year, with Louise Haigh, Lucy Powell and Wes Streeting among those accepting tickets.

Despite the outcry in 2024 over Keir Starmer accepting football tickets and gifts of clothing, MPs appear to have been declaring hospitality since the start of the year on a greater scale than previously seen.

(The Center Square) — A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling blocking the U.S. Department of Justice from subpoenaing records from New York Attorney General Letitia James' office about her investigations.

(The Center Square) – Federal and state officials are questioning Illinois sanctuary policies after a Jordanian national charged with illegal possession of Molotov cocktails was released on electronic monitoring while he was unlawfully present in the United States.

Linus Torvalds says AI "enormously helped" him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. "I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit. "I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am..." Phoronix reports: The patch by Linus Torvalds is for the Xe kernel driver and the change is no longer hand out the flat Compute Command Streamer (CCS) storage as usable vRAM. On a Battlemage G21 graphics card, he was hitting a scenario where there was a mismatch where the usable memory ended and hit a case where the GDM display manager would end up being endlessly restarted. [...] Linus Torvalds views AI as a useful tool and in this case reaffirmed he found it "enormously helped" his effort in tracking down this Intel graphics driver bug. The Intel Xe driver fix is merged to Linux 7.3 Git and is also marked to back-porting to the stable kernel branches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another set of human remains was found in Lake Mead earlier this week. Both reservoirs are dealing with low water levels.

Wildfires in Europe, Russian strikes in Kyiv, the Meta trial and swimming in Gaza – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Pima county figures show highest number of monthly migrant deaths in two years as critics condemn US policy

According to newly released data from the medical examiner’s office in Pima county, Arizona, the remains of 19 migrants, including children, were recovered along the Arizona-Mexico border last month.

The figure accounts for the highest number of monthly deaths in that area since 2024 and brings the number of total remains found to 73 this year, 14 more than the same time period last year.

This article was updated on 21 August 2026 to correct the name of Octavio Fuentes.

• 39-year-old collapsed during event in June

• American won world title in 2011

Former 1500m world champion Jenny Simpson says she will not return to running after she collapsed during a track event in June.

Simpson, a three-time Olympian and one of the most accomplished American female runners in history, was pacing a mile group at an event in North Carolina when she went into cardiac arrest. She was given CPR before she was rushed to hospital, where she was placed on life support due to issues with her heart and lungs.

One of Donald Trump’s closest and most devoted aides, Natalie Harp, has faced intense media scrutiny this week, after a Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, name-checked her in a speech that went viral. So what do we know about Harp, who is often referred to as the ‘human printer’? And why is everybody talking about her relationship with Trump? Helen Pidd speaks to international news editor Paul Owen

President Trump plans to award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the crew​ of NASA's Artemis II mission​ in a ceremony Aug. 28.

ICE charter carrying more than 160 Haitian nationals landed in Cap-Haïtien, after temporary protection status was revoked

The first deportation flight to Haiti since the US supreme court upheld Donald Trump’s power to strip 350,000 Haitians – and others – of a key type of legal status in the US landed in the troubled nation on Thursday.

The flight was carrying more that 160 Haitian nationals and landed in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second-largest city, aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter.

Caption: A major shift in school funding and School Board decision making come as Delaware attempts to raise third-grade reading proficiency from 40% to 53% by 2028.

Greater local flexibility will require boards to balance student needs, community priorities and evidence about what improves reading

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of a three-part Delaware LIVE series examining Delaware’s literacy challenge, the state’s 2028 goal and the changing responsibilities of local school boards.

By George D. Rotsch, Editor of Delaware LIVE

DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s new school funding model will give local school boards greater influence over how education resources are used, placing more responsibility for literacy decisions closer to students, parents and communities.

That shift comes as Delaware attempts to raise third-grade reading proficiency from 40% to 53% by 2028 and as school boards have more information available to understand where students are performing, whether they are making progress and where additional support may be needed.

For school boards, those two changes are connected.  Assessment results provide a lagging measure of where students ended the year. Leading indicators collected throughout the year can show whether students are on track and whether the district’s strategy is working. Together, that information can help boards evaluate whether district spending is aligned with the needs of students and the outcomes the district is trying to achieve.

“The opportunity is to make a much clearer connection between what we know about student performance and where we invest our resources,” said Julia Keleher, executive director of First State Educate. “What are the results telling us? What does the district believe is driving them? What is the strategy for improving them? And does our budget put resources behind that strategy?”

From approving budgets to aligning investments with outcomes

School boards have always approved district budgets. Greater funding flexibility makes it even more important for boards to understand what need an investment is intended to address and what result it is expected to produce.

In literacy, for example, annual assessment results may show where proficiency remains low, while screening, student progress, attendance, intervention participation and other leading indicators can provide more current information about where students are struggling and whether existing strategies are working.

The superintendent and district team use that information to diagnose needs and recommend how resources should be used. The board’s role is to determine whether the proposed investments are aligned with the district’s student outcome goals, whether there is evidence supporting the strategy, and what information the board will receive to know whether the investment is producing the intended result.

Those decisions could include investments in classroom instruction, intervention for struggling students, professional learning, staffing, student supports or other strategies identified by the district.

“The budget should tell the same story as the district’s student outcome goals,” Keleher said. “If third-grade reading is a priority, the board should be able to see how resources are supporting the district’s strategy for improving it. Then, throughout the year, the board should be looking at the indicators the district has identified to understand whether that investment is helping move students toward the goal.”

Local flexibility creates different choices

Not every Delaware district faces the same literacy challenge.

One district may need to strengthen reading instruction across all elementary schools. Another may find that its greatest needs are concentrated in a small number of schools. Some districts may need to focus on students entering school without foundational skills, while others may need stronger intervention for children who have fallen behind.

The new funding model gives boards an opportunity to respond to those differences rather than applying the same solution everywhere.

But local flexibility also carries risk. Boards could spread resources across too many priorities, continue programs without sufficient evidence or focus on activities that are visible to the community but have little effect on reading.

The central question is not whether a district spends more. It is whether the board can connect its spending choices to a clearly identified student need and a measurable academic objective.

Parents can help define the problem

Greater local control also creates an opportunity for parents and community members to become more involved in setting education priorities.

Assessment data can show where students are struggling, but it may not explain why. Parents can help boards understand whether families receive clear information about reading performance, whether students can access additional support, and whether attendance, transportation, language, scheduling, or other barriers limit participation. That information can help a board evaluate whether the district’s proposed spending responds to the needs behind the data.

“Community engagement should help shape the decision, not simply react to it,” Keleher said. “Parents can help boards understand barriers and student needs that may not be visible in a spreadsheet. When resources are limited, that perspective matters in deciding where an investment is most needed and what problem it should solve. “Meaningful engagement would occur before the district commits to a strategy, not only after administrators have presented a finished proposal.

Complex decisions require the right expertise

Greater flexibility does not mean boards or districts are expected to have every type of expertise internally. Decisions about how to improve literacy and where to invest limited resources can involve student performance data, instructional research, implementation evidence, financial analysis, community input and governance considerations.

Districts can draw on the expertise needed to strengthen those decisions, whether from state education officials, educators and literacy specialists, researchers, financial experts, community organizations or others with relevant knowledge and experience. The question is not whether outside perspectives should influence the decision, but whether the district has assembled the information and expertise necessary to make a well-supported investment.

For boards, that expertise should strengthen, not replace, their governance role. The board still must understand what student need the investment addresses, why the proposed approach is expected to help, what it will cost, what results are expected and how progress will be monitored.

Measuring whether the decision worked

The new funding model also will require boards to think more carefully about results.

Annual state testing remains an important measure, but boards cannot wait until the end of the school year to determine whether students are progressing.

They will need regular, understandable information showing whether the district’s strategy is reaching the intended students and whether reading performance is moving in the right direction.

That does not require board members to manage daily instruction. It requires them to agree with district leadership in advance about what progress should look like, when it should be visible and how the administration will respond if improvement does not occur.

A literacy investment should begin with several broad questions:

• What student need is the district trying to address?
• Why is the proposed approach appropriate?
• How did parents and educators help shape the decision?
• What result should the board expect?
• When will the board know whether the strategy is working?
• What will change if progress falls short?

Those questions preserve the distinction between governance and management while creating meaningful accountability.

A test of local governance

Delaware’s new funding model is based partly on the idea that local leaders can make better decisions when resources and authority are placed closer to students.

Literacy will provide an early test of that premise.

Experts such as First State Educate can help boards understand data and strengthen their decision-making processes. Administrators can recommend strategies. Educators can explain classroom needs. Parents can identify barriers and community priorities. School boards must bring those perspectives together and make choices that reflect both local needs and the state’s larger academic expectations.

By 2028, the public will be able to judge the new funding model by more than the amount of money distributed or the percentage placed under local control. Its most important measure will be whether substantially more Delaware children can read at grade level.

• World No 1 makes ‘difficult decision’ to miss slam

• Draper still recovering from bone bruise in left arm

Jannik Sinner will miss the US Open with a right knee injury. The world No 1 has not played a match since beating Alexander Zverev last month to successfully defend his Wimbledon title, missing the Masters 1000 events in Canada and Cincinnati. Great Britain’s Jack Draper is also out of the event.

The news comes a day after his great rival Carlos Alcaraz, whom the Italian lost to in the final in New York 12 months ago, revealed he will make his comeback at Flushing Meadows after four months out with a wrist injury.

New framework lays the groundwork for secure scientific AI.

Aug. 21, 2026 — Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming capable of acting as ​“AI scientists,” helping manage many stages of the research process — from experiment design and data analysis to interpreting results and drafting publications. As these systems take on larger roles in scientific discovery, ensuring their reliability and security becomes increasingly important.

Conceptual multi-agent framework for vulnerability benchmark generation.

One challenge is that LLMs can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks — carefully crafted inputs designed to manipulate model behavior. In scientific settings, such attacks could lead to inaccurate findings, unsafe recommendations or reduced trust in AI-generated results.

Researchers have developed adversarial robustness benchmarks to measure how well AI systems withstand these attacks. Most existing benchmarks were designed for general-purpose AI applications, however, and often overlook the unique challenges of scientific research. As a result, scientists lack effective tools for evaluating vulnerabilities in AI systems used for research.

To address this gap, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a two-part framework: a multi-agent mechanism for generating scientific security and a multilayered defense architecture designed to protect scientific AI systems from malicious threats. Their work was presented at the Trillion Parameter Consortium 2026 workshop in June 2026 by Saket Chaturvedi, a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne.

Multiple Agents, Specialized Roles

Most current approaches for generating adversarial benchmarks rely on a single-agent system. While efficient, such a system can create competing responsibilities, with one model acting simultaneously as domain expert, attacker and evaluator.

The solution proposed by the Argonne researchers involves a collaborative system of specialized agents, each with a distinct role:

• Orchestration agent: Coordinates the process and works with scientific experts to identify realistic vulnerabilities.
• Domain agent: Contributes scientifically grounded concepts and threat scenarios.
• Adversary agent: Creates targeted attack prompt using domain-specific knowledge.
• Refiner agent: Reviews prompts for scientific plausibility and works with the adversary agent to improve them.
• Quality control agent: Removes redundancies and validates results across multiple LLMs.

“Using multiple specialized agents is important,” Chaturvedi said. ​“It reduces the limitations of single-agent systems by dividing benchmark creation into focused tasks that can be handled more effectively.”

A key feature of the framework is iterative refinement. If a generated prompt does not meet quality standards, it is returned to the appropriate agent with feedback for improvement. This process repeats until the prompt is accepted for inclusion in the benchmark.

A Multilayered Approach to Defense

Generating scientific security benchmarks is only part of the solution. In addition to evaluating LLM threats, researchers want to defend against threats. To this end, the Argonne team designed a multilayered defense architecture in which (1) a red teaming layer continuously tests the system with automated adversarial attacks, (2) an internal safety layer incorporates features such as safety-aligned LLMs to protect communication between agents, and (3) an external safety layer provides boundary controls and additional protections against outside threats.

“Together, these layers help address the different pathways an attacker might try to exploit,” said Joshua Bergerson, Infrastructure Security & Risk Analytics Team Leader at Argonne and coauthor of the study.

Building the Next Generation of Secure Scientific AI

The team is currently developing a prototype implementation of both the multi-agent benchmark generator and the three-layer defense system.

“The framework provides a foundation for secure scientific AI,” said Tanwi Mallick, a computer scientist at Argonne and coauthor of the study.

The work also opens the door to important future research questions. For example, can adversarial agents trained in one scientific domain be adapted to others? How can AI systems balance robust security measures with the need for rapid responses in an emergency? And what is the most effective way for human experts to provide feedback within automated workflows?

“By addressing these questions, we can move closer to realizing the potential of LLMs as safe, reliable and transformative partners in scientific discovery,” Mallick said.

Additional details about the framework are available in the preprint ​“Toward Reliable, Safe, and Secure LLMs for Scientific Applications” by S. Chaturvedi, J. Bergerson, and T. Mallick.

Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne

The post Argonne: Making LLMs Safer for Scientific Applications appeared first on HPCwire.

A Texas appeals court cut a $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones to $1.5 million. A much larger $1.4 billion judgment in Connecticut still stands.

Sources say US navy is working to rename carrier originally planned to honor second world war sailor Doris Miller

The Trump administration has been accused of delivering a “slap in the face” to US military veterans after reports that a navy aircraft carrier set to honor a Black war hero may, instead, be named after Donald Trump.

The US navy had previously announced that the carrier under construction would be called the USS Doris Miller, in tribute to a sailor celebrated for his heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor in the second world war.

Aug. 21, 2026 — On June 2, 2026, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, hosted the TPC26 Satellite Event, bringing the Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC) annual conference closer to the European AI for science community. The event gave researchers, practitioners, industry representatives and research organizations from across Europe the opportunity to engage with the global TPC community without traveling to the conference in Baltimore.

Keynote by Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller (LRZ)

The hybrid program featured recorded keynote presentations from Baltimore, including the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Argonne National Laboratory and RIKEN, together with live contributions from Europe and beyond. Highlights included a keynote by Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller from LRZ, which was streamed live to the main TPC26 conference, as well as presentations from TPC members at LRZ and online talks from C-DAC in India and NumPEX in France.

EuroTPC contributed to the live program with a presentation entitled EuroTPC: A Coordinated European Voice in TPC, delivered by Javier Aula-Blasco of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The talk introduced the EuroTPC initiative to the wider TPC community and highlighted Europe’s commitment to open, collaborative AI for science.

The event strengthened connections between European and international partners, encouraged new opportunities for collaboration and reinforced Europe’s role within the global AI for science ecosystem.

More from HPCwire

• EuroTPC Launches as Europe’s Strategic Voice for AI for Science
• EuroHPC Launches EuroTPC to Strengthen Europe’s Role in Global Trillion Parameter Consortium
• Exploring the Current Boundaries of AI for Science at TPC26

Source: EuroTPC

The post LRZ Brings TPC26 Conference to Europe with Garching Satellite Event appeared first on HPCwire.

We were going to write a constipation joke here, but it wouldn’t come out.

The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado struck Long Island's Atlantic Beach Thursday evening. It's the first confirmed tornado in Nassau County since 2021.

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

The crash of a small plane in Alaska chartered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is under investigation.

Meat producer closes facilities in Utah and Illinois as beef prices rise for consumers amid historic cattle shortage

• People in the US: how much do you spend on food per month?

Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the US, announced last week that it is closing two of its facilities in Illinois and Utah and selling a beef facility in Washington state, and will lay off hundreds of workers as the supply of cattle hits a 75-year low.

The historic cattle shortage has been driven by a multi-year drought, rising costs and severe economic pressures, including consolidation among cattle ranchers. Beef prices have soared over the last year due to the shortage, though economists said the Tyson plant closures likely won’t hit consumer prices so hard.

This article’s headline and text were amended on 21 August 2026. An earlier version said Tyson recently announced the closure of two facilities in Iowa and Utah, rather than Illinois and Utah. There was a closure in 2024 in Iowa.

New filings find the Democratic National Committee trailing its Republican counterpart by more than $100 million, with millions of dollars in debts.

I was on my way to Amsterdam Centraal when the email arrived. My Eurostar to London had been canceled due to a “power cut,” along with every other departure from Amsterdam that day.

After years of refusing to adopt tap-to-pay technology in its stores, retail giant Walmart announced today that it is finally accepting payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay. The rollout begins August 24 at select Walmart and Sam's Club locations and is expected to reach all stores by year-end. It will then expand to fuel stations by mid-2027. TechCrunch reports: The news is a surprise, as Walmart has long refused to adopt the ubiquitous payment technology to instead promote its own in-house solutions, like Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go. In years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to take down Apple Pay entirely with an alternative mobile payment system of their own, called CurrentC. The effort failed and was shut down back in 2016. All the while, Walmart customers have begged the company to support modern tap-and-pay technology, like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores. For Walmart, the decision reads as a defeat. As one of the world's largest retailers, it believed it could push customers to its own payment solutions despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and others of its kind. Ultimately, it had to admit that it was disadvantaging its own customers in the process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This blog is now closed. See all our UK politics coverage here

After Emily Thornberry’s call for the government to ban goods from the occupied West Bank (see post at 11:05), Peter Beaumont and Quique Kierszenbaum report on how Israeli settler attacks in areas designated for a future Palestinian state and currently under direct Palestinian control have almost doubled since 2025.

They wrote:

According to a report by the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, shared with the Guardian, data shows that almost two-thirds of incidents of settler violence so far in 2026 have taken place in the so-called Areas A and B – placed under Palestinian Authority governance in the 1995 Oslo accords.

The report, The Next Frontier, Violence by Israeli Civilians in Areas A and B, describes the “rapid shift” in “violence and pressure exerted by the government, military and settlers on Palestinians … from Area C into Areas B and even A”.

No 10 North is putting more power into every postcode across the country so communities can unleash and unlock their own potential.

I’m bringing together mayors from different political parties to work on these challenges, because people deserve problem-solving rather than point-scoring.

The days of Westminster hoarding power are over.

This government has kickstarted the biggest transition of power and resources in a generation, taking it from Whitehall and putting it back in the hands of local communities.

They were attempting to serve a warrant to a child sex offender.

US Marshals plummet to the ground when a wooden deck collapses. (US Marshals Service via SWNS)

Appeals court slashes judgment to $1.5m in a significant legal victory for the rightwing Infowars founder

A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut a hoax.

The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.

The effectiveness of a bolstered economic campaign​ against Iran may rest largely on one close U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates.

The executive aide’s relationship with the president symbolises a broader sycophancy around him

Audio recording of US vice-president apparently made at New York fundraiser and shared with Canadian Press

Leaked audio from a private event has reportedly captured the US vice-president, JD Vance, mocking Canada for apparently capitulating in a trade deal and taunting the prime minister, Mark Carney, for trying to “out-tough” Donald Trump.

The recording, which was reportedly made at a fundraiser and shared with the Canadian Press, comes in the last stretch of a difficult negotiation in which the US president has threatened to impose 50% tariffs on Canada.

As the trial of Lindsay Clancy brings renewed attention to postpartum psychosis, Haley Ashcom shares her experience with the dangerous condition.

The dog hurt his leg and was unable to walk after slipping into the grassy ravine.

(KMSRT via SWNS)

Ground beef prices, now averaging nearly $7 a pound, remain historically high due to shrinking cattle herds.

The rare Asiatic lion named Sahee is recovering after successfully undergoing the procedure to fix the issue.

Sahee the lion's eye operation while he was sedated. (Hertfordshire Zoo via SWNS)

Police investigating after two cars set alight in attack caught on CCTV

Firebombs were thrown at supercars outside a wedding venue in Birmingham, setting two alight and prompting guests to sprint out of the building.

West Midlands police said they were investigating the incident, which happened in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham at around 8.30pm on Wednesday.

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus helps canine units get used to the sound, vibrations and downwash of the rotors.

Rescue dogs are gently introduced to a H145 recue helicopeter at Donauwörth, the German headquarters of Airbus Helicopters. (Cara Irina Wagner / Airbus via SWNS)

Brandywine Museum photo.

Late actor in May said beauty brand cut off its relationship with her after she spoke out about postpartum depression

The beauty brand Neutrogena has acknowledged making its former ambassador Hayden Panettiere “feel unsupported during a very difficult time” – alluding to when the late Hollywood actor said the company severed ties with her after she spoke about enduring postpartum depression (PPD).

Neutrogena issued a statement addressing the situation four days after the 36-year-old actor was found dead at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.

Joint statement issued after IDF said it will not pursue criminal investigations into April 2024 strike that killed seven humanitarian workers

Britain, Australia and Canada have called the decision of the Israeli military authorities not to open a criminal investigation into the April 2024 airstrikes that hit a convoy of aid vehicles in Gaza “shameful”. The strikes killed seven humanitarian workers from the US-based World Central Kitchen (WCK) organisation.

WCK staff from the three countries were among the casualties of the attack, which prompted global outrage.

Japan's justice ministry said it will cancel a collaboration with "Badly in Love," a Netflix dating show featuring ex-juvenile delinquents.

Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a "Preferred Sources" button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. "The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they're searching for content or interacting with Google's AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news," reports TechCrunch. "As of May's launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method." From the report: Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers' websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses. Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google's app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they'd like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aug. 21, 2026 — University of California San Diego researchers will lead one of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) new Genesis Mission projects focused on accelerating fundamental physics and quantum computing by deploying intelligent AI agents.

Aobo Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) at the Halıcıoğlu School for Data Science and Computing, is the principal investigator (PI) on the project. A team of experts will build SIDERIUS, an AI scientist that can analyze data, design AI models, and deploy them onto specialized chips for applications in fundamental physics and quantum computing. Associate Professor of Physics Yi-Zhuang You is co-PI on the project.

“The next frontier of AI for science is learning how to translate scientific challenges into a form that AI can solve effectively,” said Li. “This DOE award allows us to bring together an interdisciplinary team in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Our vision is to translate challenges in physics and quantum computing into AI-ready tasks that can be tackled by SIDERIUS, our LLM agent system. Our long-term vision is to build a general AI framework that can be adapted to many other data-intensive scientific domains.”

In addition to this project, Li and several other UC San Diego researchers are co-PIs on four projects led by other institutions. These projects, listed below, will support the creation of AI tools that can meaningfully impact the way science is conducted and the rate at which discoveries are made.

• Co-PIs Javier Duarte (associate professor of physics) and Daniel Diaz (computational data science and research specialist) will work with the University of Colorado Boulder to develop ultra-fast AI tools that can process enormous rates of data input during particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
• Co-PI Li will work with UNC Chapel Hill to deploy AI agents and surrogate models to automate and speed up optical simulations for LENGED, an experimental collaboration that will lead the effort to search for neutrinoless double beta decay, an extremely rare process that, if discovered, would explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.
• Co-PIs Liang Yang (professor of physics) and Li will work with the University of Hawaii to build a unified foundation model based on AI-ready datasets from five different neutrinoless double beta decay experiments – CUORE, EXO-200, Majorana Demonstrator, NEXT and SuperNEMO.
• Co-PI Li will collaborate with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to develop ultra-fast AI tools that identify and preserve neutrinoless double-beta decay signals while rejecting unwanted background noises from the LEGEND detector in real time.

The number of Genesis projects UC San Diego is a part of underscores the university’s deep bench of AI expertise.

“AI is impacting scientific discovery in fundamental ways,” said Rajesh K. Gupta, dean of the Halıcıoğlu School. “The Halıcıoğlu School is proud to assemble a team across Physics, Data Science and Supercomputing at UC San Diego in an institutional architecture that is uniquely matched to The Genesis Mission. SIDERIUS will drive research in physics through new AI tools and methodologies that are bound to significantly advance our understanding of nature and invent new applications.”

Source: Michelle Franklin, UCSD

The post UC San Diego Receives DOE Genesis Mission Award to Fund New Scientific AI Tools appeared first on HPCwire.

Germany seeking to extradite suspect from Romania over guns it is feared could have been used ⁠in assassinations

Germany is seeking to extradite a suspect from Romania over the discovery of an underground stash of weapons in a forest near Berlin that German media reports have linked to Russian intelligence.

Two weeks after German authorities found a drone carrying explosives at Leipzig airport, the interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, confirmed federal prosecutors had opened an investigation related to the secret cache of guns “on suspicion of preparing a serious act of violence that threatens national security”.

Ken Griffin’s hedge fund has executed more than $4bn worth of block trades in recent weeks

Private equity group launched probe that determined names, home addresses and social security numbers had been stolen in cyber attack last month

Losing a job can make your debt harder to manage, but your unemployment benefits may come with unique protections.

Activists who targeted bank in Burnley were found guilty in June of causing damage exceeding £200,000

Five Palestine Action activists who vandalised a Barclays branch in Burnley will not be sentenced as terrorists, a judge has ruled.

Dubbed the Barclays five, Brendon O’Hagan, 28; Amanda Kelly, 31; Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31; Mohammed Malik, 28; and Alma Yaniv, 70, were all found guilty in June of causing damage exceeding £200,000, after breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire in August 2024.

Aeroplane maker said to have watered down plans to restrict working from home to one day a week

Airbus has bowed to employee demands on remote working, after a series of strikes over its chief executive’s return-to-the office orders.

The world’s largest aeroplane maker is said to have watered down plans to restrict remote working to one day a week from September. At present, staff are able to work remotely for two.

Polls suggest growing scepticism around net zero, with politicians uncertain how to proceed

• UK politics live – latest updates

Britain has experienced a summer of record-breaking wildfires, deadly heat and drought, with almost 2,900 heat-associated deaths recorded in England during May and June alone. Homes have been destroyed by fires in the West Midlands, and deadly wildfires have swept across Europe.

Despite the ever more visible impacts of the climate crisis, there is widespread concern that there has been no big political push at the centre of British politics or a renewed case for net zero.

Reports say Duke and Duchess of Sussex may have returned to Britain due to ‘top secret’ acting role for Meghan – we try to guess what it might be?

In 2022, two years after she and Prince Harry bolted to California in an unhappy exit from the royal family, the Duchess of Sussex was asked if she could foresee ever returning to acting. “No, I’m done,” she told Variety magazine. “I guess never say never, but my intention is to absolutely not.”

Well guess what – she’s back! At least according to news reports that claim the couple’s otherwise wholly unexpected return to the UK can be explained by one key factor – a new acting role for Meghan.

Researchers hope contest – similar to Fat Bear Week – starting Monday will be latest wildlife watching craze

Monday sees the start of what researchers hope will be the latest wildlife watching craze – Fat Marmot Week.

Last winter was tough for marmots living high in the Colorado mountains, where researchers say two-thirds of one population died while hibernating because of insufficient snow cover.

After the dreamworld of the 2010s, the link between power and fiscal capacity is back

Aug. 21, 2026 — SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) is playing a key role in a new national research initiative led by Rice University, which has received a $19.9 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project will use artificial intelligence, robotics, and cloud-based laboratories to accelerate the discovery and manufacturing of next-generation electronic and quantum materials.

The four-year project, “Revolutionizing AI-Driven Autonomous Experimentation for Next-Generation Semiconductor Synthesis” (READINESS), begins on August 1 and brings together researchers from Rice University, SUNY Poly, and the University of Texas at Austin to develop an AI-powered research platform that will accelerate the discovery of advanced materials while expanding access to cutting-edge research infrastructure.

As part of the collaboration, SUNY Poly will leverage its expertise in semiconductor materials processing and workforce development. Vice President for Research and co-Principal Investigator Dr. Michael Carpenter will help lead development of the autonomous PVD system for oxide thin film synthesis and oversee installation of the autonomous CVD system for two-dimensional materials, developed by Rice University Materials Scientist and Principal Investigator Dr. Jun Lou. A key feature of the project is that both SUNY Poly and Rice University will operate identical autonomous PVD and CVD systems, expanding research capacity and workforce development opportunities at both institutions. SUNY Poly will also help create short courses and stackable credentials that prepare students and industry professionals for careers in semiconductor manufacturing, laboratory automation, and AI-enabled materials research.

The READINESS platform will integrate automated synthesis equipment, robotics, advanced characterization tools and digital twin technology, allowing researchers to simulate and remotely conduct experiments while AI continuously improves future testing.

“This award reflects the growing recognition of SUNY Poly as a national leader in semiconductor innovation, advanced manufacturing, and applied artificial intelligence,” said SUNY Poly President Dr. Winston Soboyejo. “Through strategic partnerships with leading research institutions, we are accelerating scientific discovery while expanding opportunities for students, researchers, and industry. READINESS exemplifies our mission to integrate cutting-edge research with workforce development, strengthening both America’s semiconductor ecosystem and the talent pipeline that will drive future innovation.”

READINESS further positions SUNY Poly as a key contributor to advancing national priorities in semiconductor innovation, artificial intelligence and workforce development as part of SUNY’s growing research enterprise, supported by The Research Foundation for SUNY.

“READINESS represents exactly the kind of collaborative, high-impact research that is driving SUNY Poly’s continued growth as a leader in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, semiconductor materials and technology innovation,” said Dr. Carpenter. “By bringing together expertise in AI, robotics and advanced materials across leading institutions, this initiative will accelerate scientific discovery and industry adoption of next-generation materials while creating new opportunities for collaboration, innovation and workforce development.”

“The collaboration between Rice University and SUNY Polytechnic Institute is at the heart of the READINESS PCL node,” said Dr. Lou. “Together, we are creating a new model for AI-enabled autonomous laboratories that will transform semiconductor manufacturing while educating the next generation of scientists and engineers who will lead this technological revolution.”

The initiative will initially focus on developing advanced materials, including two-dimensional materials, oxide semiconductors and diamond thin films, with applications in faster electronics, lower-power computing and quantum technologies.

“The future of semiconductor leadership depends not only on breakthrough research, but on preparing a highly skilled workforce to translate those discoveries into real-world impact,” said Senior Director of Workforce Development Erica Schoff. “Through READINESS, SUNY Poly will help develop flexible educational pathways that equip students and working professionals with the technical skills needed to succeed in semiconductor manufacturing, laboratory automation and AI-enabled research.”

The NSF award is part of the agency’s Programmable Cloud Laboratories Test Bed initiative, a national effort to create a network of remotely accessible, AI-enabled research laboratories designed to improve the speed, reliability and reproducibility of scientific experimentation.

More from HPCwire: Rice Receives Nearly $20M NSF Award for AI-Powered Materials Laboratory

Source: SUNY Poly

The post SUNY Poly Partners with Rice on NSF Autonomous Laboratory Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

• Transgender woman has never played in the league

• Engelbert says league being used as ‘political football’

The WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has denounced people she said are trying to “sow divisiveness” as the league grapples with a debate over transgender athletes.

Engelbert made the comments on Thursday before the Indiana Fever’s loss to the Dallas Wings at the home of the Dallas Mavericks. Demonstrators showed up outside American Airlines Center, as they have at other venues since the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham voiced support for barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports.

Hayward, California — State Sen. Aisha Wahab won Thursday’s special election for California’s 14th Congressional District, becoming the first Afghan American elected to Congress and filling the seat vacated by former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Wahab defeated Bay Area Rapid Transit Director Melissa Hernandez with roughly 53% of the vote to Hernandez’s 47% with about 95% counted. The district covers parts of Alameda County in the East Bay and strongly favors Democrats.

The progressive Democrat previously became the first Afghan American elected to public office in the United States when she won a Hayward City Council seat in 2018. She later joined the California Senate, where housing affordability and tenant protections became central issues.

The race drew substantial outside spending. AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project spent about $2.5 million supporting Hernandez, according to Reuters, while other groups also spent heavily in the contest. Wahab had previously said she considers Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, while Hernandez took a more moderate position.

Swalwell resigned in April after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced, which he denies. Federal agents recently seized his electronic devices as part of an ongoing investigation.

Wahab and Hernandez will face each other again in November for a full two-year House term.

Sources

• Associated Press – MBFC Rating

The post Aisha Wahab Wins California House Seat in Historic Victory appeared first on News Facts Network.

New filings highlight iPhone maker’s global tax liabilities

• Kai Spears incorrectly linked to death of young mother

• Times says it had not lost libel case in more than 50 years

An Alabama jury has awarded $9.25m in damages after finding that the New York Times defamed a college basketball player by incorrectly reporting that he was at the scene of a fatal shooting.

Kai Spears, who played for the University of Alabama men’s team, sued the Times in 2023 after it published a report, citing a person familiar with the investigation, that said he was a passenger in a car involved in the shooting. The Times reported that the person had spoken “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

The question is more important than the answer

I could just delete the addictive social media apps, but what’s the fun in that?

Many males are returned even if they have been trafficked but Home Office must now consider new legal guidance

• UK politics live – latest updates

  
  

The Home Office could be blocked from deporting many young male trafficking victims to Albania after a major court ruling.

Thousands of Albanian males have been identified as potential trafficking victims in the UK in recent years. Many are sent back to their country even if they are potential or confirmed victims of trafficking, as the Home Office contends they will be safe there.

A Sacramento County judge ordered her into a UC Davis program for formerly incarcerated students. She was arrested seven months later, accused of dealing drugs from her dorm, where officers found ammunition.

The US is engaged in a lawless quest to protect American and Israeli officials

The Trump administration has taken another step in its crusade against the international criminal court by imposing sanctions on two more senior ICC officials. The growing number of sanctioned jurists – now 13 – does not change the lawless nature of this quest.

Donald Trump and his henchman, Marco Rubio, want to make the world safe for US and Israeli war criminals. No one should let them.

Ahead of the Practical Magic 2 movie this September, Ninja is commemorating the iconic franchise with new spellbinding shades.

The U.S. has deported more than 160 people to Haiti for the first time since the Trump administration won a legal battle to end Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians.

Jurors heard Duane "Keffe D" Davis tell detectives his nephew Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson fired the shots that killed Tupac Shakur.

An Alabama jury awarded $9.25 million in damages after finding that The New York Times defamed a former college basketball player, Kai Spears, of the Alabama Crimson Tide, in a story about a fatal shooting.

The far-right convener on his violent upbringing in South Africa, why he admires Vladimir Putin and Tommy Robinson — and his on-off relationship with his son

Sunao Takami set fire to the crowded pachinko parlor in Osaka by spreading gasoline and throwing a lit match, engulfing the building, killing five and injuring 10 others.

The US navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington transits the strait of Malacca on 13 August.

The post Tennessee THCA Ban Could Create $110 Million Budget Shortfall appeared first on News Facts Network.

The tabloid boasted in a now-deleted article that they found White and promised to reveal her ‘secret new life’

The Daily Mail newspaper secretly tailed and photographed a woman in Detroit and then published an article and photographs falsely accusing her of being former The White Stripes drummer Meg White, even after she told the newspaper it had mistaken her identity, multiple sources have told the Guardian.

The rightwing British tabloid quietly removed the article and photographs, first published on 6 August, from its website last week. The Mail did not issue a correction or editor’s note explaining the removal.

Business owner Assim Alkhawaja was arrested by ICE as he dropped off Lyft passengers at a military base. Now he’s stuck in a terrifying fight to stay in the US

Deep within the bowels of San Diego’s federal courthouse, Assim Alkhawaja sat on the floor outside a nondescript office, waiting to be called for his ICE-mandated immigration appointment. He stared straight ahead, his posture tense, his face a mask.

The hallway was brown, as was the carpet. Above Alkhawaja’s head hung a framed stock photo of a waterfall. A few paces away, official government signs encouraged people without legal status to self-deport. “Leave on your own terms,” they read, in several languages. “Claim a free flight and an exit bonus for each member of your family.”

Microsoft is expanding Windows Task Manager to show per-process NPU and GPU neural-engine usage, giving users more visibility into which apps are consuming hardware for AI workloads. The Register reports: The Processes tab can show NPU use alongside CPU and GPU activity, while the Performance tab displays overall utilization. [...] Microsoft was keen to point out the metrics that can be monitored. "As AI workloads become more common on Windows devices, visibility into NPU and GPU neural engine utilization can help you make better-informed decisions," the company said. "With the latest Task Manager improvements, you can monitor AI processing activity alongside CPU, memory, storage, and networking data from a familiar interface."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S; Konami
This second collection remasters another three titles from the illustrious stealth espionage series, but their world has changed little since the original releases

‘War has changed,” claims Old Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Back in 2008, the team at Kojima Productions waxed poetic about people recruited to fight in proxy wars they have no political or ideological stake in. As these mercenaries follow their orders, traders get rich out of the so-called war economy. The more disastrous the conflict in a specific area, the higher the bidding price.

I expected my time with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol 2 to be nostalgic and, in good old MGS fashion, abundant with fictional events that sound eerily familiar to our current reality. Twenty minutes in, I was having an existential crisis.

UK Foreign Office condemns use of national security law to convict activists Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung

Two Hong Kong activists who organised annual vigils marking China’s deadly Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 have been found guilty of “incitement to subversion” in one of the most high-profile cases in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed its national security law in 2020.

Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power”, a press summary handed out to reporters said. The defendants each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail, with sentencing expected at a later date.

Min Zin is the second American academic to be designated as wrongfully detained in recent months.

The resignation and death of the Cambridge professor is the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle over originality and intellectual ownership – one intensified by the rise of generative AI.

Testimony at Lindsay Clancy's trial ended early Thursday and closing arguments are now expected next week.

The decision to trade what appeared to be an idyllic life on the sunny California coast for the Tupperware-gray skies of Britain came as a startling reversal.

New York City, New York — President Donald Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen publicly reconciled Thursday during a surprisingly friendly radio interview, years after Cohen became a key witness in criminal and civil cases against his former boss.

Cohen interviewed Trump on his WABC radio program, repeatedly referring to him as “boss” and saying their relationship was being “resuscitated.” Trump praised Cohen for recently recanting or criticizing portions of his past testimony and said prosecutors had “weaponized” Cohen against him.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal crimes including campaign-finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress. He later testified against Trump in the Manhattan hush-money prosecution, helping prosecutors secure Trump’s 2024 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has appealed that conviction.

The relationship has shifted dramatically in recent months. Cohen has increasingly criticized Manhattan prosecutors and questioned how his testimony was used against Trump. He also confirmed that he has resubmitted a presidential pardon application after an earlier request was denied by President Joe Biden.

Trump, who once called Cohen a liar and attacked his credibility, struck a markedly different tone Thursday, telling his former attorney that he understood the pressure he had faced.

Cohen’s full interview with Trump is scheduled to air Sunday.

Sources

• Reuters – MBFC Rating

The post Trump Says Michael Cohen Was ‘Weaponized’ as Former Allies Reconcile appeared first on News Facts Network.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: George Orwell was warning us against the Soviet Union, but he also saw the Trump Administration coming.

• At Least He Didn’t Call Her Piggy: Trump’s contempt for a free press is matched only by his contempt for women who dare to question him.

• An Indefensible Secretary of War: Pete Hegseth’s campaign appearance is less public service and more Hatch Act violation/audition for higher office.

• Ye in Russia: His planned Russian concerts make a grim kind of sense, pairing an antisemitic provocateur with a regime hungry for propaganda.

• The Death of Stalin, directed by Armando Iannucci: This brilliant farce finds both the laughter and the terror of men scrambling for power after Stalin’s death.

• “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” - Phil Alvin with Sun Ra and His Arkestra: This Depression-era anthem holds the force of a history lesson that still knows how to swing.

  ---

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“Remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

George Orwell (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and critic

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, who was born to English parents in India in 1903. He described his family as “lower-upper-middle-class,” which tells you something about his sense of humor, and also his discomfort with the English class system. He disliked his father, whom he described as a “gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don’t,’” and who worked as a minor functionary in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, which oversaw the sale of opium to China. Perhaps this father-son relationship was the start of his anti-authoritarianism, which reached full flower with his anti-Soviet satire Animal Farm and his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian vision of a surveillance state ruled through propaganda, thought control, and an iron hand.

Those books were written after World War II, when the Soviet Union was no longer a Western ally, and progressives not in thrall to its socialist fantasy had already recognized its dark underbelly. But the quote above was written during the war, published on September 1, 1944, in his As I Please column for the British magazine Tribune, and was an early example of the foresight displayed in his most famous work.

It’s a lesson President Trump’s present allies would do well to study. Campaign managers Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, trade advisor Peter Navarro, and longtime aide Roger Stone are just a few of the Trump friends who spent time in prison, once Trump’s first regime ended. Are this term’s boot lickers taking greater care to stay on the right side of the law? Either way, they won’t be readily welcomed back into polite society, though I suppose Trump will always have a room for them at Mar-a-Lago, as long as his health holds out.

I’m thinking particularly of people like Todd Blanche, who has sacrificed a respectable law career to do Trump’s bidding by persecuting his enemies and moving his friend, child molester Ghislaine Maxwell, to a minimum-security prison. Or Marco Rubio, once considered presidential material, who abandoned his integrity to become Trump’s Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, while also serving stints as Acting Administrator for USAID and Acting Archivist of the United States. Or poor Natalie Harp, the cancer survivor turned human printer who is routinely cited as Trump’s most loyal aide and is rumored to stay up late with the President, typing out his Truth [sic] Social posts.

Harp has been in the news a lot lately, especially since Trump brought her along on his secret flight out of Turkey, leaving Rubio behind on the decoy Air Force One. Some people find her story heartwarming; others consider it heartburning. She rose to fame by saying Trump saved her life with his Right to Try legislation, which gives terminally ill patients the right, in their treatment, to use drugs that aren’t FDA approved. Sure, fussbudgets pointed out that she herself said she was using drugs that were FDA approved, and her treatment took place before the Right to Try Act was actually passed into law. (In fact, while Trump claimed the law would save hundreds of thousands of lives, in its first six years on the books the FDA could only confirm 16 treatments/drugs that may or may not have been given to patients.)

In the more conspiratorial corners of the internet, some wonder if Harp actually had cancer, or what the precise nature of her relationship with Trump might be. But unless her doctors or his publicists comment, I’ll leave such speculation for more suspicious minds. I will, however, speculate on Natalie’s future: in my crystal ball I see a regular chair on Fox News (or perhaps the One America News Network) and marriage to a multi-millionaire, if not an outright billionaire. She’ll probably also be heckled every time she goes out in public, once Trump is no longer President. But then, as Orwell warned, she can’t very well imagine that she could make herself the propagandist of a criminal régime year after year and then suddenly return to mental decency. It’s just not possible. Once a boot-licker, always a boot-licker.

Read more

With plentiful jobs and community support, one Mexico City neighbourhood has become a haven for those who have lived much of their lives in the US

With its wide avenues lined with tall palm trees, its quaint cafes and old-school cantinas, as well as the mix of English and Spanish spoken on the street, the Tabacalera neighborhood in downtown Mexico City has a certain US feel – so much so that it is has become known as Little LA.

The nickname is about more than appearances, however. In recent years, this corner of the metropolis has become a haven for many Mexicans deported from the US, particularly those who spent years or decades living across the border and for whom Mexico feels like a foreign country. In Little LA, they have found a more familiar place to belong.

Two years ago, abortion opponents in Missouri tried to defeat Amendment 3, a ballot initiative to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution, by falsely telling voters that it would allow gender transition surgeries for minors — even though it wouldn’t.

Voters approved Amendment 3 anyway, overturning the near-total abortion ban enacted by Missouri’s GOP-dominated legislature that had taken effect after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Now Republican leaders in the state are trying to repeal those rights again, using the same issue. They placed a new amendment on the November ballot, also called Amendment 3, that would restore Missouri’s abortion ban while allowing limited exceptions but also constitutionally prohibit gender transition care for minors — though the state has banned surgeries and new prescriptions of puberty blockers and hormones by law since August 2023.

For the Missouri GOP, Election Day can often seem like Groundhog Day. The party holds a supermajority in the legislature and controls every statewide office, yet voters have repeatedly used the initiative petition process to enact policies Republican leaders oppose. By gathering enough signatures, citizens have placed proposals directly on the ballot, then persuaded voters to expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, raise the minimum wage and restore abortion rights.

This month, that disconnect became an electoral humiliation for Republican leaders. More than 80% of voters rejected their attempt to make it nearly impossible for citizens to amend the state constitution. It was even worse for Gov. Mike Kehoe’s plan to phase out the state income tax: More than 83% voted no.

Missouri Republicans have become “drunk with power,” said Ken Warren, a professor emeritus of political science at Saint Louis University and associate director of the SLU/YouGov Poll. “Because they control everything, they think they can do what they want — and they can’t.”

The new Amendment 3 on the November ballot shows how Republicans, using misleading language, a carefully chosen distraction and even a recycled name, are trying to undo one of those defeats. In 2024, a yes vote on Amendment 3 protected abortion rights. In November, voters will again be asked to vote yes on Amendment 3 — this time to take them away.

Republican leaders say voters never intended to approve a nearly unlimited right to abortion. They argue that Missourians would prefer an abortion ban with limited exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies — particularly when it is paired with restrictions on gender transition care for minors.

It would not take much to reverse the 2024 result. Abortion rights passed 51.6% to 48.4% — meaning a shift of about 48,000 voters would have defeated the measure.

Critics call the inclusion of gender care “ballot candy,” a way to make an unpopular proposal easier to swallow. They say the tactic is especially cynical because it promises voters a prohibition that, in large part, Missouri already has. State law already bans gender transition surgery for minors and, through August 2027, bars minors from starting puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for gender transition. Amendment 3 would place the restrictions in the state constitution without an expiration date.

The two provisions bundled together differ enormously in scope. Repealing reproductive rights would affect the healthcare options available to a state with about 6.3 million people. The restrictions on gender transition care concern a small number of minors receiving highly specialized treatment.

Yet supporters want voters focused on the specter of children being used as lab guinea pigs, not the abortion rights the amendment would repeal. A new billboard in the St. Louis suburbs urges them to vote yes and “ban transgender surgeries for minors.”

A website for the political action committee behind the campaign, Her Health, Her Future — whose treasurer is Missouri first lady Claudia Kehoe — declares “OUR CHILDREN are not LAB EXPERIMENTS.” It says Amendment 3 would protect children from “harmful, sterilizing medical procedures” and restore “common sense health and safety standards” for women’s health clinics.

Neither message explicitly says that the amendment would repeal the constitutional right to abortion that Missourians approved two years ago.

Claudia Kehoe did not respond to requests for comment submitted to the governor’s office and the PAC. In a written endorsement posted on the Her Health, Her Future website, she called the amendment “a critical step toward strengthening our pro-life protections and safeguarding our state’s future.”

In response to a list of questions that ProPublica submitted to the governor’s office, a spokesperson defended the amendment using much the same language that critics call deceptive. The spokesperson emphasized protecting children from “sex-change procedures,” safeguarding women and restoring the state’s power to “regulate” abortion providers. The response did not acknowledge that Amendment 3 would repeal the constitutional reproductive rights Missourians approved in 2024 and replace them with an abortion ban that contains limited exceptions.

Polling suggests the strategy could work. A survey in February of Missouri voters by the SLU/YouGov Poll found that nearly 60% supported legal abortion during the first eight weeks of pregnancy. But 67% opposed gender transition medications for minors, and 73% opposed gender transition surgeries. Presented with the amendment’s provisions together, voters favored it 47% to 40%.

Rep. Brian Seitz, a Branson Republican who guided the amendment through the House, denied that supporters were trying to trick voters. He said the gender-affirming treatment was itself a reproductive issue because some procedures could affect a minor’s ability to have children.

Seitz also disputed that Missourians knowingly approved abortion rights through fetal viability in 2024. He said voters were primarily seeking exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies — not what he called “abortion on demand.”

The new amendment, he said, better reflects what voters intended.

Abortion rights supporters call that argument a pretext for restoring the state’s abortion ban. A coalition of groups called Stop the Ban has raised more than $5 million to try to explain what the amendment would do and persuade voters to reject it. That total includes $1.25 million contributed on Aug. 3 by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans are always “moving a goalpost to sort of get their way, and it is my hope that actual patriots are growing tired of it,” said Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Democrat from Ferguson. “You shouldn’t have to do this if what you’re planning is righteous and in the best interest of people.”

The effort began with the ballot summary written by lawmakers. It did not tell voters that Amendment 3 would repeal the reproductive rights they had approved two years earlier. Instead, it said the measure would “guarantee access” to emergency care, “ensure women’s safety during abortions” and “protect children from gender transition.”

The summary also mentioned exceptions for rape and incest but omitted that they would apply only during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Michael Wolff, a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court who is advising the campaign against the amendment, said the language appeared to be “intended to deceive people into thinking that they were going to protect women having abortions.”

“If you just flat-out tell them that you’re going to repeal nearly all of the protection for reproductive health,” he said, “the people would vote no.”

A judge ruled the legislature’s summary unfair and ordered it rewritten. He later approved revised language written by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a former state legislator who introduced a measure that became part of the 2023 law restricting gender transition care and has publicly endorsed Amendment 3.

But a state appeals court found Hoskins’ language still failed to explain the amendment’s effects and rewrote it to lead with the fact that it would “repeal the 2024 voter-approved amendment providing reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion through fetal viability.”

In an interview, Hoskins defended his initial choice to use the word “amend,” rather than “repeal,” because he felt it was more accurate. Asked how his endorsement of the new Amendment 3 squared with his duty to write neutral ballot language, he said his anti-abortion stance was no secret among Missouri voters.

“I can’t all of a sudden erase my conservative views of the past 16 years in the Missouri Legislature,” he said.

The intervention was hardly an isolated one. During Hoskins’ first 1.5 years in office, courts have rejected or rewritten five ballot summaries from his office involving abortion, education, the initiative petition process and a referendum on the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map.

Hoskins said in an interview that the rulings reflected differences of opinion over what constitutes fair and accurate language, noting that the appellate courts had also sometimes rejected revisions made or approved by lower courts.

But the disputes have gone beyond language. Hoskins has also unilaterally blocked two citizen-led measures from reaching the November ballot. He rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it harder for lawmakers to alter measures approved by voters, saying it was unconstitutional. And he refused to certify a referendum on Missouri’s new congressional map, drawn at President Donald Trump’s urging to help Republicans gain another U.S. House seat, declaring that putting a congressional map to a public vote would be unconstitutional. 

Both campaigns sued in state circuit court, where a judge on Wednesday ruled for Hoskins in both cases. In the initiative case, the judge held that Hoskins had the authority to block an amendment from the ballot because it violated Missouri’s requirements that an initiative address a single subject and amend a single constitutional article. He also found that its restrictions on lawmakers’ ability to reconsider voter-approved policies was unconstitutional. And in the redistricting case, the judge agreed with Hoskins that voters cannot use the state’s referendum power to overturn the legislature’s power to redraw congressional maps. 

Both cases are expected to reach the state Supreme Court on expedited appeals.

Hoskins said he disagreed with any suggestion that he and Republican leaders were defying the will of voters, noting they, too, had been elected. He criticized the opponents of Amendment 3 as “liberal special interest groups” financed by “out-of-state sugar daddies” like Bloomberg.

State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said Hoskins’ actions reflected a broader pattern of interfering with voters’ ability to use the ballot box to reject the Republican agenda.

“That’s quite frankly what is maddening to me, is that politicians over and over again are trying to trick voters,” she said.

The post Missouri Republicans Are Trying to Repeal Abortion Rights by Leaning Into Anti-Trans Sentiment appeared first on ProPublica.

Spam calls, who needs them?

It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest “ceasefire” began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, United Nations experts reported earlier this month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more recently rejected President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace agreement with Hamas for Israeli troops to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

“The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.” 

This week on the podcast, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, and director Poh Si Teng about their new documentary “American Doctor.” It follows three U.S. physicians from three different states who volunteer to enter Gaza to provide emergency medical care as best they can, with the insufficient supplies they have, to save lives — under the threat, as healthcare workers and hospitals have repeatedly been the target of strikes, of losing theirs.

The American doctors were not just targeted by the Israeli military, however. Upon returning home and trying to share the atrocities they had witnessed in Gaza, they were “pummeled,” says Teng, in interviews with mainstream media outlets and ignored by lawmakers in Congress.

“There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars, and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare,” says Ahmad. “We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.”

Teng says, “For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do. But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.”

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

Transcript

Jonah Valdez: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jonah Valdez, a reporter at The Intercept who covers politics and foreign policy.

BBC: Breaking news. A senior Hamas official tells the BBC it has agreed to disarm in Gaza.

FOX 10: President Trump says he’s doing something long considered impossible: disarming Hamas, forging a stable peace, and beginning a withdrawal of Israeli forces.

JV: Let’s go back to July. President Donald Trump announces that his so-called Board of Peace has reached a deal with Hamas to disarm, a primary goal of the ceasefire agreement.

Donald Trump: Most people said that would be a deal that would be undoable. 

JV: By August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the plan and the demand to withdraw troops from parts of Gaza.

It’s worth reminding Israel controls nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.

PBS: President Trump’s Board of Peace says it’s in ongoing discussions with Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Mr. Trump’s new Gaza peace plan in yet another public break with the White House.

BBC: Saying it won’t withdraw from the territory until Hamas gives up all its weapons.

Benjamin Netanyahu, translated VO: Israel rejects the 15-point plan. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.

JV: It’s been nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians and still no step closer to its end. Since the latest ceasefire began in October 2025, Israel has continued to bombard Gaza and has killed more than 1,200 people, according to U.N. experts.

In all, since the start of the war in October 2023, at least 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza and 171,000 wounded. That doesn’t count the untold numbers buried under rubble. Still, the Israeli government has tight restrictions on who and what aid enters Gaza.

A new documentary called “American Doctor” follows three American physicians who travel to Gaza to provide medical care and save lives where healthcare workers and hospitals have been targeted.

When the three American doctors — Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian — enter Gaza, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.

[Clip from “American Doctor” plays]

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: I want to take you through what Gaza looks like when a hospital is totally overwhelmed.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: As a Jewish physician, I knew nothing about Gaza. I thought everybody out here were nothing but terrorists. 

Dr. Thaer Ahmad: We’re just asking that hospitals not be targeted.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa: This is a political problem. We need a political solution. We do not have to accept that as Americans.

Dr. Mark Perlmutter: This is what my tax dollars did, what your tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.

[Clip from film ends]

JV: I’m joined now by the folks behind “American Doctor.” Director Poh Si Teng is the producer of the Oscar-nominated “St. Louis Superman” and Emmy award-winning executive producer of “Patrice: The Movie.” “American Doctor” marks her debut as a feature documentary director. Poh, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Poh Si Teng: Thank you for having me, Jonah.

JV: Also joining us is Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in conflict zones including Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Kenya. He’s conducted five medical missions to Gaza, most recently in early 2024, and has since been denied entry four times by Israeli authorities due to his Palestinian heritage.

Thaer, welcome to the show.

Thaer Ahmad: Thank you, appreciate it.

JV: So in the opening scene of “American Doctor,” we see an ambulance and two severely injured children, bloody and in shock. They are carried into a hospital, and next we’re introduced to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon sitting in front of his computer and speaking to the person filming him.

There’s this back and forth that happens between Dr. Perlmutter and you, Poh, of this debate of, should we blur the images? The image that they’re looking at and talking about is of six dead babies. Dr. Perlmutter goes on to say that Israel took away their dignity, and you’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide.

Poh, I’m wondering if you could talk about that scene, that conversation with you and Mark, and why you started the film there.

PT: Firstly, thank you, Jonah, for asking that question. I think as journalists, we often grapple with, what do we show? What do we write about? What do we capture?

You show too much, and it’s gratuitous — and people turn away. If we want to be effective, we want people to watch. But at the same time, if we show too little, then it’s not real. Then we’re not actually telling people what was happening.

Related

Americans Rarely See the True Face of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza

So this scene that you’re talking about, Jonah, which, actually we recorded it — it was my second day with Mark. And I remember him being really, really furious with me because I was trying to see, like, how much should we show? 

Part of the conversation was like, “Maybe we should film this creatively. Maybe we should pixelate it.” And he was very mad at me — and understandably so. He’s like, “What is the point? Why are you here?” And so it made me think “Why am I here?” If the reason for me wanting to make this film is to be effective, then I need to do right by those who have passed on, and maybe it is to show. And so that pretty much, Jonah, set the tone for what the film was going to be.

JV: On that note, that early scene really signaled to me, and I’m assuming the audience, that this film is very aware of and cares deeply about who gets to tell these stories, who gets to shape the narrative from the Israeli and U.S. military, powerful media institutions involved. To me, aside from showing the actual events and atrocities, that layer of the film really drove it forward.

[Thaer], the film follows you and two other American doctors, Dr. Mark Perlmutter and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon, as you three decide to return to serve in Gaza during the short-lived 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Remind us what the situation in Gaza was like at the time, and it’s worth mentioning that in March 2025, the death toll had already surpassed 50,000 people in Gaza, which at that point had been a little over a year into Israel’s genocidal campaign.

TA: It’s important for folks to remember that around this time, the Trump administration had brokered this sort of ceasefire deal, announced on the heels of the inauguration.

As we were slowly getting towards the end of that first phase of the ceasefire deal, which was March 2025, it had become abundantly clear that the Israeli military was getting ready to create another offensive. In fact, by the time I think the resumption of bombing had taken place, the Israeli military had already implemented a suffocating siege on the Gaza Strip.

The rise of malnutrition was so widespread that the Famine Early Warning System program that exists had already been sounding the alarm — that this is very concerning, that starvation was being used as a weapon of war, and this is all happening as the fighter jets were being fueled up and getting ready to carry out this offensive.

Many people who were involved in the emergency medical teams that were entering into the Gaza Strip at the time, they had really no inclination in terms of, would this be a resumption of the war on Gaza and the people of Palestine, or would we somehow get this miraculous 11th hour extension of the ceasefire deal?

Many of us — me, Feroze, and Mark — at the time, were planning on going back in March. We were traveling to Jordan, where every single doctor who is an international or nurse, that’s where they go. And they wait in Jordan to get approval by the Israeli military, and then they will cross in from Jericho and make their way towards Gaza.

We’re sitting there in Jordan, and we’re there with the film crew. Mark and Feroze get approval, and they’re able to enter. Then ultimately, I receive a denial. And that’s something that’s happening in the backdrop, not just of this film, but that’s happening consistently when it comes to access into the Gaza Strip.

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“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

You are talking about everything from food, water, doctors, nurses, diesel fuel. All of these things are arbitrarily being denied and restricted, even people like myself who had been to Gaza many times since 2008. That was kind of the circumstances that we were facing: There was a “ceasefire,” and there was trucks maybe entering — but what was needed in the Gaza Strip was not being supplied. It was not happening on a scale that needed to happen. Once they started cutting that off and the Israelis implemented this siege, we started to see people really struggling.

JV: Poh, I know as we said at the top, this film marks your debut as a feature documentary director. Just wondering, were you able to travel with doctors to document their work in Gaza? If so, could you talk a bit about that experience?

PT: I knew very early on that it would be impossible for me to get into Gaza. Even though the Jewish doctor, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, he’s ever the eternal optimist. When we met early on, he’s like, “I’m going to train you as a scrub nurse and take you into Gaza.”

Now, we know who controls the borders into Palestine. And anybody doing a cursory search on my name, what are they going to find? Journalist for the New York Times, former commissioner for Al Jazeera English, and I’ve worked for The Associated Press. I was an executive for ABC Disney. It was never going to happen for me.

So fortunately, I have this incredible producer: Reem Haddad. Reem and I used to work at Al Jazeera English. She looked after MENA [Middle East and North Africa], that region. She was working at that time, this was I would say end of 2023, with this incredible Gazan team: our co-producer Mohammed Sawwaf, and our director of photography, Ibrahim Al-Otla. They had made this short doc at the end of 2023. And I was like, “Reem, can we work with this team? We are trying to film in Gaza.” That sort of marked how we got to film inside Nasser Medical Complex.

Honestly, this film is really to honor what they saw and what they are living through, not just what they are trying to document. So that’s how we were able to make this film. 

I should also add: At the end of the day, too, this entire production, it spans teams, from our team, from eight different countries. Not one person, not one country could have made this happen. It took everybody coming together from different parts of the world who wanted to do something in regards to what was happening in Gaza.

JV: To your point, Israel has continued to block international journalists from entering Gaza up to this point. Palestinian journalists have been the eyes and ears documenting the war, as have doctors, like yourself Thaer, and medical workers and the both of you and those who were let in.

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Israel’s Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza

I don’t know if you recall, but Thaer, you and I connected over text and voice notes in March of this year when I was writing about the Israeli government delaying doctors from leaving Gaza, which interrupts the entire process of care. And as you were explaining, that wasn’t the first time you were blocked from there. That was after the most recent ceasefire that was brokered in October of 2025.

From what you’re hearing from colleagues, how have things changed since when you were there during the first ceasefire? How are things the same?

TA: The burden has really continued to devastate the healthcare system in general. So you’re hearing from colleagues every day. They don’t have the materials that they need to serve their patients. They don’t have the space that they need. They don’t have even the basic sort of guarantee that there is a cloak of security allowing them to operate in the traditional ways that they would like to.

I would say that probably the biggest sign that the healthcare system has been attacked in such a devastating way would be the list of people who need to be evacuated out of Gaza to get medical treatment. That list is anywhere from 15 to 18,000 people, depending on what list you’re using. These are people who urgently need to leave Gaza because the medical care that they need is not able to be provided because of the siege and the blockade that continues to exist by the Israeli military.

We’re talking about kids with cancers that are completely treatable that will die from their cancer because they’re not allowed to go to an East Jerusalem hospital like Al-Makassed or Augusta Victoria, where that corridor had existed prior to October 7, but the Israelis are intentionally shutting down that corridor.

You’re talking about physicians who would want to perform basic procedures for their patients with heart disease or diabetes or whatever it is. They’re not able to do so because that material is actively being blocked by the Israeli military. They’re on the back of a truck somewhere, either in Egypt or Jordan, and not being allowed to enter.

These conditions continue to proliferate, and this is all happening, I should say, while the public services that should exist in any society, like water, sewage, electricity, even shelter, all of those things are not — to say “adequate” is not the right word, but I would say it’s absolutely horrifying in Gaza.

Related

The Performative Ceasefire in Gaza

We are talking about things like chickenpox breaking out in these camps. We’re talking about kids who continue to be malnourished. We’re talking about all of these different communicable diseases that run through these overcrowded shelters and tent cities. These continue to be the conditions that people are living in, despite the fake ceasefire that was announced that saw more than 1,200 Palestinians killed since October 9, 2025, when it was first announced.

I’m even worried about what happens next because, as you probably have seen, Netanyahu announced that he’s rejecting that sort of ceasefire or the agreement to move on to the next phase that was brokered by this Board of Peace. And so I anticipate that conditions will worsen.

When we think about so many of the people that we worked with, that will appear in the film, that are in the background of the film, or even actually the cinematographers that Poh mentioned — I just don’t feel that they have the things that they need to sustain life in their homes, in their tents. Things continue to deteriorate, and it’s fallen out of the news cycle.

JV: Thaer, there’s scenes in the film of you and your colleagues packing basic medical supplies like scrubs and rubber bands, and Mark even hides antibiotics in his luggage. The film does a really good job at just laying out that reality and this targeting of hospitals. It’s pretty wild to think that even the mere fact of targeting of hospitals was a point of contention among much of Western media at a certain point. 

The film features quite a bit of footage from sit-down interviews between doctors featured in the film and broadcast media. There’s these subtle framing biases that I think, Poh, you highlighted really well. 

Related

The New York Times Repeated Israeli Claims of Hamas Stealing Aid Without Evidence

There’s that clip in the beginning where a CNN anchor caveats Dr. Perlmutter’s accounts of Israel targeting civilians as “extreme allegations” that CNN cannot independently verify. Later in the film, also on CNN, Dana Bash tees up a question to Thaer about getting aid into Gaza by saying, “Will Hamas allow the critical aid to get to the civilian population?” — completely ignoring the Israeli blockade on Gaza. There’s that sit-down where Mark grills the CNN anchor live on air about not doing enough coverage. 

Poh, I want to start with you. Could you speak to this bias, this molding of the narrative that often benefits the Israeli government, and why that was important to show in the film?

PT: I’m so glad you asked this question. And I should say that long before I became a documentary filmmaker, I was a journalist. I’ve worked for so many of the established media organizations, and I’ve learned so much from my time there. But also, when the genocide started and there was pin-drop silence about the murder and execution of journalists, Gazan journalists, I’ll be honest with you: It hurt.

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Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death

What happened? Why is it when journalists are kidnapped, taken in Russia, or killed in Ukraine or different parts of the world, all of a sudden, our peers, we come together. Why was it so that Gazan journalists or journalists in the West Bank or even Lebanon, for that matter — people weren’t rallying together. What was happening? 

The whole film, I should say is a vérité in-scene film, so you’re in the world of Dr. Thaer, Dr. Mark, and Dr. Feroze. But in these clips, when we were filming them as they were being interviewed by media, I really wanted to show what they were up against.

As a former documentary commissioner for Al Jazeera, seeing my colleagues get targeted and executed was very, very, very hard. Now, as we were making the film, seeing the doctors trying to save lives and speak up for life, and then seeing them get pummeled like that, like basically the weight and structure of media crushing them — I was upset.

Of course, I’m filming, I’m just observing. But it was very important to have that in the film because there are individuals, regular people — Thaer, Feroze, Mark — just trying to do all they can. And then there’s the weight of structure.

For everybody who’s trying to do something in this moment, it’s not like as individuals we have no agency. We do.

But it’s also important to remind people of the systems in place that make it very hard for us to do the right thing. If there was any path forward or a glimmer of inspiration, I felt, follow these doctors.

[Break]

JV: Thaer, there’s another scene where you acknowledge that you, “Always get nervous when Mark talks during interviews,” because he really, you called it, gets into the weeds of things like Zionism, and you’re worried about essentially bad-faith critics making you, what you say is, guilty by association.

Could you say more about that, and how in this media framing, how a pro-peace, anti-genocide message can get twisted, and also how those critics may complicate that message even further because of your identity as Palestinian American?

TA: Yeah, I think that’s something that we all have grown up with in terms of the Palestinian community. It’s understanding there’s a degree of dehumanization that is pervasive in not just the media, but in art and literature.

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Dozens of Gaza Medical Workers Are Still Disappeared in Israeli Detention

I remember being in medical school and having assigned reading before we started medical school, and then it was about a Hmong child who was dealing with a seizure disorder. And nestled in the middle of that book was a comment, a very brief passing comment, about a Palestinian who was a terrorist and was doing something extremely violent. Most med students in the country were assigned this reading. This is the backdrop of understanding this is how the world views you. Yes, of course, we reject it, but Palestinians know very well how they’re being portrayed and also what you’re stacked up against. 

For me, I think something that I appreciate about Mark is that he understands there’s a privilege that he has, especially just how he looks, and that he can say things that I think can go farther than anything I could ever say. It can resonate with more Americans than anything I can ever do. 

What I worry about, too, is the fact that you’ve got this conversation that the media and so many people try to make complicated. They want to say, “It’s complicated. There’s two sides.” Really what we’re trying to talk about is, “Hey, there’s an objective fact that something horrifying is unfolding here, and that really horrendous things are happening to this group of people by this institution. It’s a straight line. There’s not really, actually, so much dark and gray area here.” 

The one thing I really wanted to make sure that we were communicating effectively — because again, so many people are working on this project, trying to get this film out there — I wanted to make sure that that message was as clear. 

I would always worry knowing that Mark is somebody who shoots from the hip; he’s somebody that says what’s on his mind. Just in the back of my mind, just thinking about, every time we’re landing in Chicago O’Hare, every time you’re getting questioned by border control. All of these things were always at the top of mind for me. So it’s something I admire about Mark, but it’s also something that I know I just can’t do it myself. That’s not the world that we live in.

PT: To add to that, and one of the things I have so much respect for Thaer, because it takes a leader, to be really honest with you, to know whose word can go far because of the context and of our time and how things are.

As a woman, as a person of color, as somebody who’s barely 5 feet — I am acutely aware of when I step into the room as a journalist, as a filmmaker, perception. But I can only imagine what it’s like for a Palestinian; I will never be able to understand.

So those are one of the things where I thought about a lot in the making of the film. It was something that I was learning from as well, especially from Thaer, who, I don’t mean to embarrass you, Thaer, but, I really look up to you in many ways in how you are able to navigate this, because I feel like I’ve tried it in my entire — I’m 42 this year — and I’ve been challenged in navigating it.

Seeing you being able to do that and work with Feroze and Mark, even though you’re so different — and they’re very different doctors, very different personalities — it gives me a lot of inspiration on how to work with others who are also different, and also to know when does one take a step back and let others go forward.

JV: Thaer, did you have anything to add?

TA: Something that I’ve noticed for Palestinians, one of the things that really helps us get going, especially motivates us, is seeing other people step up and use their platforms and really put their money where their mouth is.

So despite me having real concerns that this project would be stifled, and it would never be able to see the light of day because of all of the things working against it, when you see Poh and Reem and you see all of the people that worked on this just continue to push and continue to say, “No, we’re going to be here from the beginning to the end. We’re not going to abandon you” — I think for my community here in the States that felt like we’ve been silenced for so long, and, even when anybody wants to talk about this subject, that you don’t even want to bring a Palestinian or invite a Palestinian because it could be [viewed as] biased, which is absurd.

You talk about who shapes the narrative — we are prevented from having control over our own narrative because of this disturbing narrative and structure that was built. When you see that and other people who are willing to put their money or their life on the line like Poh or Mark or Feroze — for me, it really gives you that energy when you just feel like everything is stacked up against you, and there’s a genocide unfolding. That’s a really heavy thing.

JV: I’m curious, Poh, how you initially contacted the subjects of the film there and others. How did that process unfold?

PT: So I’ll tell you how it began. I chanced upon Mark. I saw him being interviewed, and a reporter had asked him, this was fall of 2025, this was last year, and a reporter had asked him, “So Dr. Perlmutter, you have just returned from Gaza. Why do you think there’s no ceasefire?” Mark, who doesn’t mince words, straight up, he says, “There’s no ceasefire because politicians are (expletive) to lobby groups.” And I was like, “Oh my, who is this person? Who is this doctor?”

He was actually speaking in New York a few days later, and I went to meet him. Then very soon after he introduced me to Thaer and Feroze, and I just wanted to see how these three people, who couldn’t be more different in many ways, were able to work together.

JV: Thaer, you and your colleagues go to Washington to try and sway congressional members to act, and you all are met with indifference and platitudes, “dead ears,” as one person puts it.

But what do you make of the current political landscape in which we’re seeing U.S. support for Israel decline sharply even on the right, and where political candidates who have campaigned on and been proudly pro-Palestine are winning primaries?

TA: It’s just been incredible to see how the shift has emerged over the last two and a half years. You’re talking about early on, I remember November 2023, I had a Zoom call with eight senators. It was with the members, eight of them, all Democrats, and I remember saying that we need a ceasefire.

This was when Shifa Hospital had first been surrounded, and there were 38 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit in the newborn nursery, and several of them were in incubators. I remember being desperate at that time and saying, “We really need a ceasefire.” One of the senators, who was a member of the Armed Services Committee, cut me off and said, “Ceasefire is a military term. We’re not prepared to call for a ceasefire at this point. We’re more interested in maybe helping secure humanitarian aid.” 

It went from that to when the images emerged for when the famine was in full-blown effect, where you had several members of Congress and the Senate sort of speak very publicly. They were outraged by what they saw, despite us telling them this information very early on, this is where we were heading, this is what was happening unless they did something. So to see the rhetoric even change has been remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

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Then to see progressive candidates who really explicitly say that our policy in Palestine has been an utter failure and has contributed to the development of a genocide, that’s been amazing to see how much traction that’s getting, how much money they’re able to raise, how these races have really flipped the establishment on its head. 

But I will say there are a couple of things that concern me, which I think the timing of this film could not be more perfect. And that is, you’re still seeing the very core of whatever, I don’t even know what they’re moderate in, but like, these “moderates” on the Democratic side or on the Republican side, you still see them try to stick to the status quo and go back to the old ways.

There’s this refusal to acknowledge what most American people are interested in — and that is money out of the Middle East in terms of military and wars and into our communities here, into healthcare, and into some of the services that we are deprived of, that, for example, Israeli society is able to provide for their citizens: free education, free healthcare. We don’t even have that here, and yet we’re still providing a significant amount of aid.

You’re still seeing some people try to resist that, try to resist this natural popular movement that’s at play here. Again, which is why I hope that this film could be that vehicle for people to be able to continue to push and understand we need to be activated and we need to advocate.

So we’re continuing the fight, and we’re still trying to push this forward. But there’s still, even though the rhetoric has changed, the policy is still well ingrained and institutionalized in a really significant way that’s going to take a long time to reverse. So that’s something I would encourage people to think about.

Abdul won the primary. Awesome. He’s going to be up for a huge fight in Michigan for that Senate race. There’s going to be a lot of money poured in against him. Mayor Mamdani was elected, and you can see how he is put under such a microscope for every single position or statement or even whatever his wife does. All of that is under a microscope. 

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There’s going to be this huge battle because it has been so ingrained in this country to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine as well as the Israeli military, but also to continue to fester and make the entire Middle East a very, I would say, a violent playground, for lack of a better term. That’s just how this country has faced things. That’s why the power of film, I hope, is something that can translate into action, and people can feel activated.

JV: There’s this thing that Dr. Feroze says at the end of the film where he is at that conference for Jewish Voice for Peace, and he expresses doubt that any of his mainstream media hits have really done anything. Then this audience member from the conference says it’s done a lot, and he refuted that and encourages him to keep going. I don’t need you to talk for Feroze, but I’m wondering where you stand on that and that idea of awareness or maybe its limits of media and that we need to keep doing what we can. Do you wrestle with that still? Is that a battle for you?

PT: I’ll say this. In embarking on this endeavor, I stopped thinking a long time ago about, what’s the outcome? Obviously, I hope that something good will come out of it. In the making of it, especially when we started, when it was really bleak, I told myself, “You know what? I’m just going to focus on doing.” I cannot fight against the structures, systemic structures, so many things, and I cannot be sorry for how I was or we cannot be sorry for our past actions or whatever it is, and we cannot predict the future. We have the power of now, and that is everything, and so just focus on the moment. Of course, think short-term, medium-term, long-term, but now is all we have, and so be true to oneself. 

I feel like this film, in the making of this film, I finally feel like I have found my voice, free of the constraints of everything. I can finally be. I hope that this film, for those who are going to watch — and it’s going to be across theaters across the United States and Canada, which is massive, thanks to Watermelon Pictures — I hope that when people watch, they realize that too. Just focus on the now and keep going, because you don’t know how far you can go until you try.

JV: We’re going to wrap it up there. Thank you both for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. 

TA: Thank you, appreciate you.

PT: Thank you, Jonah.

JV: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Until next time, I’m Jonah Valdez.

The post What American Doctors Saw in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. But its expansion has sparked years of pushback from residents who say a new port terminal could damage their environment and health. Two recent lawsuits from neighbors highlight that the fight over Edgemoor is not yet over. 

For years, neighbors of what was once a DuPont chemical plant in Edgemoor watched warily as plans to transform the site into a port container terminal inched forward, buoyed by the political force of thousands of promised jobs.

While state officials saw the project as transformational to Delaware’s economy and to its blue-collar job base, neighbors feared it would bring heavy trucks onto their streets and diesel fumes into the air. 

In response, many spoke out at community meetings. Some challenged state permits. And others pushed port officials to sign an agreement guaranteeing community benefits.

Now, with construction on the project having begun, two lawsuits filed by separate groups of residents who live around Edgemoor and in Wilmington mark their latest efforts to force the state to revisit decisions that had cleared the way for the port’s expansion. 

One suit challenges a ruling earlier this year from Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board that upheld a previous permit allowing the state to dredge the Delaware River and to construct a new wharf at Edgemoor. 

In an opening brief filed Monday, the residents’ attorney blasted the ruling from the appeals board, calling it “analysis free, and wholly inadequate.” He also suggested that dredging for the Edgemoor terminal could destroy critical sturgeon habitat, and that the port’s ultimate operations could pollute the air.  

“Trucks and tugboats pollute, and the record shows that truck traffic will increase by 2,400 trips per day and tugs by 472 per year,” the attorney said in the brief.

The state has not yet filed its response to the lawsuit. 

Delaware Secretary of State Charuni-Patibanda Sanchez declined to comment for this story. She serves as chair of Diamond State Port Corporation, a state entity that oversees the Port of Wilmington.   

The second recent lawsuit claims that Delaware officials in past years broadly failed in their oversight of the Port of Wilmington, leading to a string of mishaps that occurred under the facility’s previous operator, Gulftainer. 

Among those, the lawsuit lists missed lease payments to the state, a mortgaging of the publicly owned port, and the temporary use of the Edgemoor property as a scrap tire dumping ground.

The lawsuit calls on a Delaware judge to now appoint an independent monitor to oversee the Port of Wilmington, and to declare that the state’s 50-year lease contract with the port’s current private operator, Enstructure, is invalid and void. 

Officials from Enstructure declined to comment for this story. 

Taken together, the lawsuits show that the yearslong effort by residents to push back against the $669 million Edgemoor plan is not yet over – even after construction began at the site earlier this summer. 

Simeon Hahn, a Bellefonte-area resident and lead plaintiff in each of the cases, said the lawsuits could be “our last straw to get this project stopped.” As a retired environmental scientist, Hahn has been lobbying against the port construction plans for years, including through the launch of the organization StopTheEdgemoorPort.com. 

“We’re concerned a lot about the truck traffic and the infrastructure problems that’ll be here,” he said. 

The lawsuits also add to two other pending legal challenges to the Edgemoor project filed over the previous year by the Holt family of Philadelphia – the biggest port operator on the Delaware River with operations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 

Earlier this month, Hahn’s group also sought to intervene in support of the federal challenge brought by the Holts. In response, the Philadelphia judge issued an order stating he could not consider their views as part of the legal process. 

“We just wrote a letter, like a friend of the court-type brief,” Hahn said. 

Years of doubts

Neighbors have been raising questions about Edgemoor since at least 2018, when then-Gov. John Carney announced that Delaware would privatize operations at the Port of Wilmington through a 50-year lease with Gulftainer, an Emirati company.

As part of the deal then, Gulftainer promised to privately finance construction of a container terminal along the Delaware River in Edgemoor that could accommodate the bigger container ships that were becoming more commonplace in the industry.   

By 2020, community doubts about the plans became clear when dozens of residents crowded into a public workshop in the Bellefonte community. There, many expressed fear that trucks leaving the future port toward the Pennsylvania Turnpike would bypass the adjacent Interstate 495, and instead take Edgemoor Road through their neighborhoods to U.S. Route 202. 

Some also claimed at the time that state officials had not been forthright about the port’s dependence on heavy trucks. 

Among them was Ed Mulvihill, a liquor store owner and now a candidate for state legislature. He told port officials at that meeting that he initially had supported the Edgemoor project, but then learned that trucks, and not trains, would be the primary way goods left the facility. 

“We were told 80% by rail and then we were told (later), ‘no it’s going to be 20 to 30%.’ So, to me, it’s the bait and switch,” he said during that meeting in 2020, as reported by the News Journal.

Today, Mulvihill is running in a three-way Democratic primary against Rae Krantz and Ralf Santana to replace the retiring Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte). 

Asked recently about the port expansion, Mulvihill said it is an issue that from “day one we weren’t super happy about.” But, he argued, there is little a newly elected legislator can do now to stop it.  

Krantz, a software engineer, said she does not support the port expansion, asserting that state officials had not formed a sufficient plan to mitigate the impacts of truck traffic and other harms on neighboring communities.

And Santana, a security officer for the Social Security Administration, said he opposes the plans because of what he called the state’s lack of transparency around various data, including air quality studies.   

In all, the candidates’ similar sentiments highlight a sharp divergence from the broad support the project has generated among other Democratic politicians, including the local incumbent legislator Heffernan.

Who has the right to challenge a project?

A year after the 2020 public workshop, a group of four residents living in the Wilmington area formally challenged the Edgemoor dredging permit before the Delaware Environmental Appeals Board — a little-discussed administrative board that hears challenges to permits issued by state agencies.

In response, attorneys for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control argued the residents lacked legal standing to bring the challenge — essentially meaning that they couldn’t prove that they would be directly impacted by the permit’s issuance.

The assertion shocked the group who questioned how people living near the existing Port of Wilmington or near its expansion site could lack standing to challenge the environmental impacts.

Marie Reed, a longtime leader in Wilmington’s Southbridge neighborhood, said during a hearing that her community had suffered for years from poor air quality and high cancer rates that she attributed to the current port facility along the Christina River.

“As a lifelong resident of Southbridge, how can you say that I don’t have standing?” Reed asked. “How can you say that the residents and the people of my community don’t have standing?”

Ultimately, the residents successfully defended the question of their legal standing before a Delaware court. The case was then sent back to the Environmental Appeals Board, which ruled earlier this year that state regulators properly awarded the dredging permit. 

In June, the residents appealed the decision, leading to the pending case in front of the Delaware courts. 

Jeffrey RIchardson, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he is part of the legal challenge in order to ensure that environmental and health concerns are addressed before an Edgemoor port is allowed to be operational. 

He said he is not against a Port of Wilmington expansion in Edgemoor, in principle, but argued the current plans do not amount to a good deal for residents.

“We think it is an unfair exchange to say you take the jobs, but you must ask no questions about potential harms to your family, your children, your environment, your community,” he said.

Richardson also serves as chair of a Delaware Community Benefits Agreement Coalition — an organization that is trying to convince port officials to sign an agreement with neighboring communities that would guarantee certain protections and benefits.

The critiques from Richardson and others have appeared to resonate with port officials recently.

During a meeting of the Diamond State Port Corporation on Monday, board member David Burt said the state is discussing a plan to direct heavy trucks from the port to an interstate on-ramp on 12th Street in Wilmington to ensure they do not drive along roads near Edgemoor. 

“It’s a good step, significant, and hopefully a powerful step to address the community’s  predominant question,” Burt said.

A judge reassigned

The second lawsuit, challenging the management of the port, launched last month with a spicy opening salvo when attorney Darrel Baker filed a motion for the judge to recuse himself because of his previous career with the Delaware Department of Justice. 

Baker argued that the case had the potential to raise conflicts for Delaware Superior Court Judge Sean Lugg because DOJ attorneys have been key figures in defending past state decisions about the port’s operation and expansion. 

“We want to respectfully request that your honor recuse and step aside from this particular case and not be dragged in as a potential witness or have to make adverse rulings against the Delaware Department of Justice,” said Baker, who also has served as a lobbyist for the Holt family of Philadelphia.

Opposing the request was the Diamond State Port Corporation’s attorney who argued that such a recusal is “neither warranted nor appropriate.” 

“Plaintiffs do not have standing to bring this action, let alone request that your honor voluntarily recuse himself due to his prior association with the Delaware Department of Justice,” the attorney Elise Wolpert said. 

Ultimately, the court sided with Baker and reassigned the lawsuit to Judge Sheldon Rennie.

As part of the case, Rennie will be confronted with the question of whether to declare Enstructure lease to operate the port void.

In their complaint, the Edgemoor neighbors argued the state’s awarding of the contract in 2023 had violated government procurement rules.

The state and Enstructure have until Sept. 16 to file their responses to the complaint. 

Two days before that, they are scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Edgemoor project. It comes the day before a contentious primary election throughout the state.

The post New lawsuits highlight yearslong backlash to Edgemoor port expansion appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Exclusive: Planning documents show annual emissions from North Ockendon project would be equivalent to 8,480 flights to New York

A “hyperscale” datacentre in outer London would generate more than 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to the carbon footprint of 8,480 flights from London to New York, planning documents show.

The East Havering Data Centre Campus (EHDCC) in North Ockendon would be one of the largest datacentres in Europe if approved by Havering council, using 218 hectares of green belt to run servers and data storage systems for AI and cloud computing. Its developer, Digital Reef, has described the scheme as “a unique opportunity to create a sustainable datacentre campus of the future”.

I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. But employees are right to be concerned

Last month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself.

They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services. A few days after that, Anthropic announced that some of their models had also broken out and hacked other companies during testing.

Department of Justice plan raises questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do

• US politics live – latest updates

Former officials and voting rights experts have expressed skepticism over a pledge by the Trump administration to dispatch 1,000 monitors across the country to scrutinize November’s US midterm elections.

While the Department of Justice (DoJ) has expressed hope that the operation will be the largest in its history, its plan raised questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do.

Advocates say legislation in the nation’s most populous state would carry particular weight in the national movement to curb tech’s influence on young people.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Temporary Protected Status is a federal, humanitarian program aimed at protecting individuals from countries deemed unsafe. The Trump Administration has been ending such protections for individuals from several countries, most recently Syria and Haiti. With those protections now gone, Delaware’s Haitian community, which nears 5,000 people, has been left reeling.

For a Haitian mother of three living in Dover, the past two months have been full of fear and uncertainty. 

She lost her work permit, her driver’s license and protection from deportation all with a single Supreme Court decision. 

The woman, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity, was living in Delaware under the U.S. government’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, a federal immigration policy that allows those residing in countries deemed to be unsafe, to live and work in the U.S. temporarily. 

But since that program ended for several countries earlier this summer, the future for Delaware’s TPS holders has become much less clear. 

“A bunch of us have already bought a home and bought a car and have several businesses,” the woman said. “I know it may sound dumb since we are going through all that, but if we weren’t comfortable in the country, we wouldn’t do all of that. I believe this is not fair because we’re here without hurting anyone.”

A country may fall under TPS protections for undergoing a civil war, extraordinary conflict or some kind of major environmental disaster. Protections can last for up to 18 months, and can be extended. Individuals in qualifying countries can apply to enter the U.S. and obtain a work permit. 

Until last month, that list of countries included Haiti. But a Supreme Court decision issued in June allowed the Trump administration to remove both Haiti and Syria from its list of TPS designees. Currently, only citizens in four countries — El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine – qualify for TPS.

That June Supreme Court ruling has called the future into question for the more than 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S. — including nearly 5,000 of those in Delaware.

A disruption of day-to-day life

Guy Danjoint, a pastor at the Haitian Evangelical International Ministries Church in Dover, spent his evenings last week driving across the Delaware-Maryland border to bring groceries to Haitian homes. 

Many immigrants fear that being caught driving will lead to their deportation, Danjoint said.

This reality has changed the shopping habits of local Haitians, said one local Caribbean food store owner in Southern Delaware, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity. Her storefront would attract an average of about 300 customers per week. 

Now that number has dwindled to just a handful.

“They’re going hungry now,” she said. 

Along with delivering groceries, Danjoint said he is advising former TPS holders against attempting to go back to work. 

“You can’t,” he said. “If you do that, it’s going to be worse. Because what happens? If they catch you, you will never, never be able to get a green card here in this country.”

The Dover-area mother said her day-to-day life has been marked by both a financial and mental strain since losing federal protections.

She has been living in the country for seven years, and she has been in central Delaware for six. She settled in the state with her husband, and the couple has since had three children. 

Despite her kids being U.S. citizens, the woman said she and her husband fear sending them to school.

She said she does not know what will come next, but that ultimately her family is likely to return to Haiti.

Spotlight Delaware previously reported about Haitian immigrants leaving the U.S. for Canada in the wake of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, but the Dover woman said she is not sure if that is an option.

She said she would rather move back to her home country than start from scratch again somewhere completely new.

For Haitians who were living in America under TPS, relocating to Canada also comes with its own struggles. Agreements between the U.S. and Canada prevent Haitian immigrants from immediately seeking refugee status after arriving there if they first passed through America. 

Immigrants would need to remain in Canada illegally for 14 days without being detected before they could then apply for refugee status there.

Trying to keep the lights on

For the past eight years, Danjoint’s church has not only served as a place of worship but also as a home for Haitians. 

He cooks spaghetti on Sundays for children and supports the church’s choir and youth group. But it is getting harder and harder to build that home for his community. 

Last week, the church held a concert that normally would have brought in up to 100 attendees. Events typically become so full that people are standing around the chairs, leaning on doors and trying to squeeze inside the church. 

But only around 20 people showed up that day. 

“We got people from New York and Florida, some artists, and some from Silver Spring, Maryland,” Danjoint said. “They were here, but we didn’t have enough people.”

After years of working multiple jobs and trying to outsource the money to find a location for the church, Danjoint said it saddens him to see that laws can have this much impact on the livelihood of his place of worship. 

But he remains optimistic because if he survived during the COVID pandemic, he said his community will do it again. 

The grocery store owner, however, is less optimistic.

“It’s so sad,” she said. “Where am I going to find the money to pay my bills?”

How did we get here?

Humanitarian relief programs have long existed in the U.S. As different presidential administrations have come and gone, designations and eligibility criteria have changed. 

Fritz Lamour is an accountant who has been here since the 1980s, like Danjoint. He has seen the push and pull of TPS designations for Haitians for several years now. 

“When the government cuts the TPS, for one part I’m happy because it seems like they were ripping off these people,” he said. “It helps them work, but it is a rip off too.” 

Instead, he would like to see a reform to the system. He knows TPS is only a temporary program, and he said he has heard of lawyers not letting their TPS clients know they can attempt to obtain a permanent immigration status instead of renewing TPS every two years.

“People on TPS, they buy houses, they pay taxes,” Lamour said. “Come on, you have to give them something too.” 

Is returning to Haiti an option?

Lesly Marcelin, a Haitian pastor at Delaware Gospel Assembly Ministry, said self-deporting is not an option for some TPS holders. 

“That’s why people willingly suffer. Some of them suffer here. They cannot go back because they don’t have no place to go,” he said. “Some houses the gangs take over, they place people out of their own home.”

The main issue, Danjoint and Lamour said, is arriving at Haiti’s airport safely. 

The Federal Aviation Administration has banned U.S. commercial flights to Haiti’s capital through Sept. 3, 2026, ignited by gangs opening fire at the Port-au-Prince airport. 

Haiti also is under a “do not travel” advisory by the U.S. Department of State due to risk of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.”

Tensions in Haiti are at a political high point currently because the country is set to hold elections for the first time since then-President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a group of mercenaries in 2021. 

Since then, Haiti has had no president. Armed gangs have taken over the country’s capital along with some of its rural areas. This leaves civilians at risk of being kidnapped or killed or dealing with loss of access to resources like healthcare, according to The Haitian Times. 

What comes next?

Emily Houde, supervising attorney at the Community Legal Aid Society’s immigration unit, is working on letting people know their rights if they get detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or determine what other legal protections exist now the TPS has largely been rolled back. 

But it is not easy.

“We are sure that there are more people who probably qualify for our services that we just haven’t been able to reach or haven’t felt comfortable coming forward,” Houde said.

For now, Danjoint is working with other pastors to encourage local and state leaders to push Congress to continue the TPS program. 

He also said he is working to open up a food pantry at his church and will continue to deliver groceries to his community. 

“But we don’t want people to be too sad about what is happening,” Danjoint said. “We want them to enjoy and stuff like that, but the reality is the reality.”

There is a Senate bill currently on the floor to extend TPS protections for Haitians until 2029, though it is unlikely to move forward because it is currently only supported by Democrats. Delaware Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester are among the co-sponsors of the bill.

With Haiti’s TPS designation removed, uncertainty remains for the Delaware Haitians who were living under the program.

“We didn’t think it was gonna go like that, so we are not so sure of what to do,” the Dover-area mother said. “But we have to come up with a plan because it’s not getting any better.”

The post Delaware’s Haitians face uncertain future after Trump strips immigration protections appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

President Trump appeared on the radio show of Michael Cohen, his fixer-turned-foe, in a stunning public reunion that would have been impossible to imagine several years ago.

The summer of '26: A turning point for the climate crisis? Audio sseth.drupal@c… 21 August 2026

In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss the record-breaking temperatures seen across Europe this summer and what it means for the climate crisis.

The climate crisis has seldom been dramatized so vividly as in the summer of 2026. Apocalyptic fires, widespread droughts and drained rivers in Europe made clear a worsening situation that even the most fervent denier can’t wave away. But is there the necessary time, commitment and technology to slow or reverse the climate spiral – even in the face of a US administration that is committed to fossil fuels? How do the two approaches of mitigation and adaptation translate into real life on the ground? And is there any good news amid the smoke and gloom?

Bronwen Maddox is joined by water and climate specialist Dr Beatrice Mosello and sustainability expert Dr Patrick Schröder from Chatham House, and special guest Oliver Morton, The Economist’s planetary affairs correspondent.

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.

South Korean chipmaker has come under pressure to distribute more of its bumper profits from AI boom

Art of international significance planned for £17m redevelopment of museum whose closure sparked uproar

Works by Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen and Olafur Eliasson have gone on display at a new contemporary art gallery and museum in north-east England which aims to show works of international significance.

The Light is a £17m redevelopment of a museum in Durham that closed 10 years ago to local uproar.

Boxing’s most mercurial star is putting an old friendship aside as he moves up to 147lb to challenge Rolly Romero for the welterweight title he won against Ryan Garcia

For more than a decade, Teófimo López’s friendship with Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero endured through amateur tournaments, Las Vegas sparring sessions and the mismatched peaks and troughs of two volatile careers. That friendship ended, López says, the moment they signed to fight one another.

On Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena along the Vegas Strip, the 29-year-old López will challenge for Romero’s World Boxing Association welterweight title. The former lightweight and junior-welterweight champion is moving up to 147lb in pursuit of a belt in a third division. For Romero, himself a three-weight belt-holder after stacking titles at 135lb and 140lb, a victory would add another marquee name to a résumé transformed by last year’s upset of Ryan Garcia. The fight will be broadcast globally on Dazn pay-per-view and will see the champion go off as a roughly 2-1 underdog.

Bob Iger and Josh Kushner’s $12.5bn bid to buy the Lakers shows that NBA teams are no longer family dynasties, but quick flips for private equity sharks

For years, the NBA was built on the alliance of patient money and marketing pizzazz, and no team captured that curious mixture better than the Los Angeles Lakers. Through Showtime in the 1980s and the dominance of the Shaq-Kobe years, the Lakers became the benchmark for a league and a sport intent on global conquest: charismatic, ambitious, and flashy, a sporting-cultural amalgam in which athleticism and celebrity held equal rank. Through careful front office recruitment, savvy coaching, and the harnessing of Hollywood’s star power, the Lakers evolved from a team into a “brand,” establishing a template that virtually every other outfit in the NBA has felt compelled to mimic in the years since. But the razzle-dazzle on the court – the Laker Girls, Magic flinging no-look passes, Shaq smashing the glass, Jack Nicholson smiling his Joker smile in the front row, all eyebrows and mischief – depended on a far more staid and stable arrangement off it. Real estate investor Jerry Buss bought the Lakers for $16m in 1979, and remained the majority owner until his death in 2013, when his children assumed control of the franchise.

When Jerry Buss died, the Lakers were valued at $1bn. Now, the team looks set to be sold to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared, for $12.5bn. The sale is still under negotiation and will need to be approved by the NBA’s board of governors; the Buss siblings are also now bickering over whether to join the stampede and sell their minority 17.8% stake in the franchise to Iger and Kushner, which has added a subplot of Shakespearean family intrigue to proceedings. But in the likely event it goes through, the sale would make the Lakers the most valuable franchise in basketball. It would also signal an acceleration in private equity’s scramble to get its claws into the world of sport.

Oregon’s spending on low-income housing has exploded in the past five years. The state has given developers an unprecedented $1.4 billion, and the cost of developing each apartment has nearly doubled, to $540,000. Dozens of projects are lined up for an additional $850 million in future state funding. Federal tax credits, which the state oversees, will bring even more money to bear.

Yet one thing has remained constant: The public isn’t allowed to see the details of how all these dollars are being spent.

Oregon is one of the only states in the country with a carve-out in its public records law that prevents disclosing the financial details of subsidized housing projects, thwarting researchers and journalists who have tried to examine their costs.

The issue is especially pressing in the Pacific Northwest, where leaders have tied the lack of affordable housing to the region’s dire homelessness crisis. Understanding and controlling the cost of construction could make it possible, with the same amount of money, to either build more rent-restricted apartments or to discount rents more steeply.

Margaret Van Vliet, a former director of Oregon’s state housing agency, told ProPublica that lawmakers should revisit the exemption. Despite all the state’s spending on housing, Oregon’s homeless population continues to grow.

“For all the public money, we seem to be digging a deeper hole,” Van Vliet said.

In other states, researchers and journalists have used developers’ financial records to investigate spiraling costs of subsidized housing.

Los Angeles Times reporters in 2020 revealed that the cost of some low-income housing units in California had grown to more than $1 million each, driven in part by government rules that pushed construction prices higher. The Times found that 12,000 more low-income families could have received homes between 2011 and 2015 had costs been as low as they were elsewhere.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley showed earlier this year that California was spending $300 million a year just in development fees on subsidized housing, enough to have financed another 1,250 apartments each year. In July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that aims to slash those fees.

A study published last year and co-authored by Jason Ward, an economist who directs the nonpartisan Rand Corp.’s Housing Center, compared the costs of constructing subsidized housing among California, Texas and Colorado, finding that California’s highest-in-the-nation prices were driven by requirements to pay “substantially above-market wages and unusually large architectural and engineering fees.”

If California had Colorado’s production costs, the study found, it could have built four times as many rent-subsidized apartments.

Those types of analyses are impossible to perform in Oregon.

Ward said Oregon’s secrecy is difficult to defend. He said cost information about subsidized housing is typically public. In his research, he said, he’s gotten such data from 17 states and been denied it only in New Jersey.

“When you’re just looking at how public funds are used, there should be an incredibly strong bias towards transparency,” he said. “And when you see costs going up and up and up and the outcomes aren’t good, there’s an almost unqualified public case that these things should be open to scrutiny by taxpayers, policymakers, the media, whomever.”

Oregon’s Legislature approved the exemption in 1997, when Oregon’s state housing agency had a staff and budget that were both one-fifth what they are today.

State housing officials warned about the consequences of revealing the finances behind low-income apartment projects.

“Not that we’re concerned that there’d be something in there,” Lynn Schoessler, then the deputy director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, told lawmakers in a public hearing.

But Schoessler said there could be problems if the public were allowed to see detailed financial information that developers submit to the state while applying for funding. Disclosing the records might “give somebody an indication whether this corporation was ripe for takeover or a buyout or whatever,” Schoessler said in a hearing. “So we’re concerned on the corporate level.”

Lawmakers almost unanimously agreed to exempt the records from disclosure.

Not all details about subsidized housing in Oregon were made secret.

The Portland area’s regional government, which manages a local low-income-housing bond, publishes the costs of projects the bond has funded, showing some units have reached $900,000 apiece. And fine-grained cost information may be obtained, on request, if the project is run by a public housing authority like Portland’s. But these account for just 20% of the subsidized housing units that Oregon is building. The bulk are sponsored by private developers and funded through the state housing finance agency, Oregon Housing and Community Services.

Although the state agency will divulge how much a developer said a project would cost when it applied for funding, it redacts the itemized expenses — things like the costs of construction materials, the contractor’s profits or the fees paid to lawyers, brokers, loan agents, developers and the state agency itself.

A spokesperson said the agency knows the cost per unit, per square foot and per bedroom for each development it has subsidized. But the state said that information, which would allow the public to see which projects were the most expensive, is not subject to disclosure.

Oregon has a sunshine committee that reviews public records exemptions and identifies ones that should be rolled back. Charlie Fisher, its co-chair, said the committee should examine the low-income housing carve-out.

“Verifying how public dollars are being spent, especially at this scale, is one of the fundamental reasons why people should have access to public records,” Fisher said. “Given the amount of money we’re talking about, the case is even stronger.”

The secrecy mandate in state law shrouds more than just the financial details of a project.

When we requested financial records for three apartment projects around Portland, the agency redacted a list of languages spoken by the tenants that a developer hoped to attract. In  application material for that developer’s project, the agency also redacted the plan for translating tenant outreach brochures from English. And it blacked out an explanation of any financial risks the project might face, along with the developer’s plan for covering cost overruns.

It turns out that the developer, in this case, was Home Forward, the Portland housing authority. The local agency released a copy of its application material to ProPublica without redactions, revealing mundane details the state had tried to keep secret. Here’s a sample of what Home Forward identified as the project’s financial risks: “market volatility, site-specific challenges, and unforeseen design modifications. Economic factors such as inflation, material price fluctuations, and labor shortages could impact overall construction costs.” 

A spokesperson for the state said the information about languages and financial risks was redacted because the public records exemption shields “market studies and analyses” as well as pro forma statements, which show a development’s anticipated cash flows.

Andrea Bell, the state housing agency’s director, said in an emailed statement that she is committed to transparency and expects her agency to be open, accessible and accountable to the public. But she said she takes seriously the agency’s responsibility to comply with the exemption in Oregon records law for housing financials.

Asked to comment on whether she supported the exemption and thought it was necessary, Bell said in a statement: “The cost of construction is a topic of growing interest. We will take your request under consideration as we assess ways to proactively share construction costs so that they are more readily available to the public.”

In the meantime, the agency charged ProPublica $130 for the cost of collecting and redacting the documents it provided us. It denied our request to waive the fees, saying that “the interest of the general public would be better served by preserving public resources.”

Transparency hasn’t slowed development in other West Coast states.

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A Low-Income Housing Program Is Pouring Billions Into Housing Many People Can’t Afford

In California, where the financial details of housing projects are public records, the funding remains highly competitive, with more than half of shovel-ready applications being turned away because demand exceeds available funding. “We have not encountered any difficulty in developing affordable housing because those documents are public,” said a spokesperson for the California state treasurer’s office.

In Washington state, officials have repeatedly released financial information about the housing projects they’ve funded to developers, researchers, media and other members of the public. A housing official there said developers know the information is open to the public, and it hasn’t been an issue.

ProPublica asked the Washington counterpart of Oregon Housing and Community Services for financial documents for three projects around Seattle. They were released without redactions — and for free.

The post Oregon Is Spending More Than Ever on Low-Income Housing. A State Law Keeps the Details Secret. appeared first on ProPublica.

Video recordings and documents detail how investigators pursued the case, and the possibility of abuse, for months but failed to identify a perpetrator.

Volume of goods sold in stores and online dropped 0.5% in July, ONS says

• Business live – latest updates

Retail sales across Great Britain weakened last month despite the men’s football World Cup and record temperatures boosting the demand for food and drink.

The Office for National Statistics said the volume of goods sold in stores and online fell 0.5% in July. That is down from 0.7% rise in June – revised down from initial estimates of 1% – and a 1.3% rise in May.

A state attorney general challenging the controversial mega-merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery is under attack from a newly created mystery nonprofit accused of being an “astroturf” front group.

The group sent text messages in recent days calling on Californians to pressure Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta in support of the merger, which he has sued to block in court.

The text messages are the latest escalation of the increasingly bitter battle between Bonta and Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has threatened to move his movie studio to Texas or Tennessee, according to reports from multiple outlets, if a coalition of state attorneys general led by Bonta keeps fighting the merger.

The group behind the text campaign, Neighbors for Strong Communities, cited Ellison’s threat in messages encouraging support for the merger.

The group denied the allegations that it is mounting an “astroturf” campaign, but declined to reveal its donors. The lack of transparency led free-speech advocates to issue a scathing press release this week.

“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story,” Rashad Robinson, co-chair of the Committee for the First Amendment, said in a statement. “The more the public understands what’s at stake — fewer jobs, fewer stories told, and even more power in the hands of a few billionaires — the harder the deal becomes for Paramount to defend.”

A spokesperson for Neighbors for Strong Communities, Tanner Kelly, declined to disclose the group’s donors.

“We don’t disclose funders, but this campaign is operated independently of Paramount,” he said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Warner Bros. Discovery denied funding the text message campaign. Paramount Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.

Neighbors and Nemeses

Ellison’s merger plans have divided Hollywood unions, leading proponents and opponents to engage in a heated war of words over who speaks for the entertainment industry’s working class.

Into that fray jumped Neighbors for Strong Communities, which was incorporated in Washington in June, a little over three months after Paramount launched its takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

Related

CNN Could Be Next Up for a Right-Wing Reboot Thanks to the Ellisons

The national debate over the mega merger has focused on suspicions that Paramount CEO David Ellison might be willing to tilt coverage at Warner properties like CNN in favor of Donald Trump. Ellison, whose billionaire father is a close ally of Trump’s, has courted favor with the White House as the merger moves forward.

The debate over the Paramount merger in California, however, has often centered on jobs.

In text messages to Californians that went out earlier this week, Neighbors for Strong Communities asked recipients to send Bonta messages raising the concern that his opposition to the merger will cost the state thousands of jobs — because of Ellison’s reported threat to move Paramount to Texas.

Those messages and the group’s generic website offer little insight into Neighbors for Strong Communities’s origins. Its incorporation papers in Washington show that several listed directors have worked as political consultants.

In a statement to The Intercept, one of those directors, Tanner Kelly, described the group as a “community advocacy organization that helps everyday people participate in public decisions affecting their lives, livelihoods and futures.”

Bonta is months away from an election he is expected to win handily. Kelly said the group’s pressure campaign against Bonta is “not related” to the pending attorney general election, and Neighbors for Strong Communities has not filed campaign finance disclosures with the California Secretary of State.

Kelly pushed back on the idea that entertainment industry professionals are uniformly opposed to the merger by sending messages from actors who have spoken out in favor of it.

“To the claims this is AstroTurf, tell that to the hundreds of real people participating in our movement who have real concerns, real struggles, and real livelihoods on the line that just want to be heard,” said Kelly, who was registered as a lobbyist in California last year.

“Grassroots Opposition”?

Advocates who oppose the merger suspect there is something more at play, pointing to the circumstances of the group’s creation.

“The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database,” the Committee for the First Amendment, an anti-merger group co-founded by Jane Fonda, said in a press release earlier this week.

The Committee said that Neighbors for Strong Communities has the “classic hallmarks of a corporate-backed astroturf campaign designed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition.”

The effort to make it seem like the merger has popular support will fail, predicted Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press Action.

“These corporations know where the grassroots movement actually is: with the industry professionals fighting to block this merger,” she said. “This PR campaign is yet another face-off between the many and the money.”

The post This Mysterious “Astroturf” Group Popped Up to Defend the Paramount Merger appeared first on The Intercept.

Downpours break records and cause transport chaos, evacuations and deaths, as people get trapped inside vehicles

South Korea and Japan were hit by extreme rain late last week and into this week. On 13 August in the city of Chiba near Tokyo there was a record-breaking 115mm of rainfall in just one hour, while the nearby city of Sakura broke its own record with 97mm in one hour. Local authorities issued a level 5 emergency warning for heavy rain, the highest alert level and the first time one has been issued since the system was implemented in May.

More than 100,000 households were asked to evacuate, with more than 20,000 in the Chiba prefecture left without power, while thousands of people were stranded at Tokyo’s Narita airport. Thirteen people have been confirmed dead, at least three of whom were found trapped inside their vehicles. One person is still missing.

Film emerges as France says it has stopped 185 small boat ‘events’ in three months since new £660m deal with UK

Footage has captured the moment French police officers clashed with people on a beach in northern France as the authorities tried to intercept a dinghy attempting to reach the UK.

Men wearing lifejackets appear to throw objects at the police to try to keep them away from their dinghy. The officers then use Pava spray before slashing the inflatable boat with a knife.

Iran has shrugged off President Trump's threat to hit the Islamic Republic with an "economic D-Day" as a "doubling down on failed policies."

Washington, D.C. — The U.S. national debt has crossed $40 trillion for the first time, prompting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to argue that stronger economic growth can make the burden more manageable without focusing solely on the headline figure.

“There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that,” Bessent told CNBC on Thursday. He argued that debt and deficits are better evaluated relative to the size of the economy rather than through the total alone.

Treasury data show roughly $32.3 trillion of the debt is held by the public, while about $7.8 trillion is owed within the federal government, including obligations to programs such as Social Security.

Bessent blamed much of the fiscal deterioration on the Biden administration and said tariff revenue should rebound after the Supreme Court required refunds tied to some Trump-era emergency tariffs.

However, the debt increase spans both Democratic and Republican administrations. Reuters reported that federal debt has roughly doubled since 2017, driven by persistent deficits, pandemic spending, tax cuts and rising costs for entitlement programs. Interest payments have also climbed above $1 trillion annually, increasing pressure on future federal budgets.

Economic growth can reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio, but sustained deficits mean growth alone may not prevent the total debt from continuing to rise.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Bessent Says U.S. Can Grow Its Way Out of $40 Trillion Debt appeared first on News Facts Network.

As the couple plans their return to the UK, Montecito’s whirlwind stint on the global stage may be coming to an end

The bucolic coastal California town of Montecito was thrust into the limelight six years ago as the backdrop for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s second act following an acrimonious split from Buckingham Palace.

But as the couple plans their return to the United Kingdom, Montecito’s whirlwind stint on the global stage may be coming to an end.

China's Chang'e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon's south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region's dark craters for water ice. "It's an amazing mission," says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. "There has never been a landed mission to find water [on the moon]." If successful, China "will be the leader in lunar science," Schorghofer adds. Scientific American reports: Chang'e 7, China's seventh moon mission, is scheduled to launch on a Long March 5 rocket from the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, with the launch window opening on the morning of August 24 local time (the evening of August 23 EDT). The mission includes an orbiter, as well as a lander, which totes a rover and a novel "hopping" robot. The spacecraft will take up to six days to reach lunar orbit, where it will then spend two months preparing for a November landing meant to be a near bull's-eye on the lunar south pole. The mission also includes equipment from several international partners, highlighting China's growing global influence -- both on and off Earth. The mission's lunar target is Shackleton Crater, a 21-kilometer-wide (13-mile-wide) pit with a rim that grazes the moon's south pole. No other spacecraft has ever landed so close. That proximity should allow Chang'e 7 to prospect for water ice trapped in smaller depressions near Shackleton that, because of the moon's tilt, never see sunlight and have temperatures just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. "There are big reservoirs of ice water at the poles," says Simone Dell'Agnello, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics. No one knows, however, just how big those reservoirs are or what their actual distribution is across the lunar south pole's crater-pocked desolation. And because that ice might be used as for manufacturing rocket fuel or to make potable water for thirsty astronauts, answering those questions is key for the U.S.'s and China's competing plans to construct crewed lunar outposts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Report says violence is moving from Israeli-controlled areas to those earmarked for a future Palestinian state

Violent Israeli settler attacks in the two areas of the occupied West Bank under direct Palestinian rule have almost doubled since 2025, as settlers pursue a self-proclaimed “great settlement revolution” in the very heart of the territory earmarked for a Palestinian state.

According to a report by the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, shared with the Guardian, data shows that almost two-thirds of incidents of settler violence so far in 2026 have taken place in the so-called Areas A and B – placed under Palestinian Authority governance in the 1995 Oslo accords.

Bluey, Bingo and the rest of the Heeler family are in full 3D and ready for the big screen.

Atlanta, Georgia — A healthcare staffing company owned by Republican gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson’s business empire has agreed to a $3 million settlement with thousands of immigrant nurses who alleged they were underpaid and trapped in restrictive employment contracts.

Avant Healthcare Professionals, acquired by Jackson Healthcare in 2018, reached the agreement June 22 after nurses accused the company of using “stay-or-pay” provisions requiring substantial payments if they left before completing their contracts. The lawsuit also alleged workers were threatened with reports to immigration authorities. Avant denied wrongdoing.

A judge approved the settlement in July, covering 5,219 current and former workers. Most individual cash payments are expected to be about $500 or less, while Avant also agreed to waive certain unpaid contractual damages and fees.

The case has drawn political attention because Jackson campaigns on strict enforcement against illegal immigration while his healthcare businesses recruit thousands of foreign workers through legal immigration programs. His campaign says there is no contradiction.

“Avant nurses come to America legally,” spokesperson Garrison Douglas said, adding that they “pay taxes and save lives.”

Jackson Healthcare has extensive ties to Georgia government. State agencies have paid its subsidiaries nearly $1 billion since 2020, largely for healthcare staffing during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sources

• KRDO – MBFC Rating

The post Rick Jackson’s Company Settles Immigrant Nurse Lawsuit for $3 Million appeared first on News Facts Network.

Free from a big brand’s audience expectations, new studio GPTrack50 has created a wacky action-packed romp through a monster-filled world for its first game

Love is blind. In Stupid Never Dies, it is also frozen solid and technically dead as Davy, the weakest zombie in monster society, discovers Julia’s body in a shopping centre and falls in love at first sight. He wants to bring her back to life and take her on a date. Unfortunately, that means defeating the King of Monsters (KOM) and accidentally saving humanity along the way.

This is the gloriously ridiculous setup for this forthcoming action RPG from GPTrack50, a new studio founded by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Its world looks much like ours, except that monsters have always been part of everyday life: whereas we might find a bear in the mountains or a stray dog in the woods, residents here encounter werewolves and zombies.

Pacific fleet launched missile drills near what Moscow calls the Kuril Islands but Japan regards as its Northern Territories

Japan has criticised missile tests carried out by Russia’s navy around the disputed islands visited by Vladimir Putin last week amid continuing tensions between the two countries.

Russia’s Pacific fleet said on Thursday that it had fired Bastion surface-to-ship missiles from Etorofu, the largest island in the disputed archipelago, simulating an attack on enemy vessels, hitting all of its targets approximately 300km away.

Tallahassee, Florida — A political polling aggregator has permanently dropped a Florida pollster after determining that the firm altered how some respondents were counted in a Republican gubernatorial primary survey and failed to disclose that candidate James Fishback’s campaign funded the work.

FiftyPlusOne said Thursday it would no longer use polls from The Public Sentiment Institute, or TPSI, accusing the firm of “falsified data” that boosted Fishback’s standing. TPSI rejected the characterization but acknowledged both a disclosure failure and what it called a methodological error.

According to TPSI’s own review, the firm applied an “experimental layer” after its raw results did not match its expectations for the race. Respondents who selected Lt. Gov. Jay Collins but whose demographic profiles appeared closer to Fishback’s coalition were shifted toward Fishback, moving him into second place behind Byron Donalds.

TPSI said no raw responses were deleted or fabricated and that the experimental method has been discontinued. FiftyPlusOne nevertheless said the practice warranted a permanent ban.

The tracker also temporarily suspended Patriot Polling after finding evidence that it had conducted polling for Fishback without properly identifying the campaign as a sponsor.

The controversy follows a separate episode involving Median Strategies, which recently acknowledged publishing fabricated Los Angeles mayoral polling as a “social experiment.”

Donalds ultimately won Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday.

Sources

• The Hill – MBFC Rating

The post Florida Pollster Banned After Altering Results in GOP Governor Primary appeared first on News Facts Network.

Value of banknotes in circulation rises from €1tn in 2016 to €1.6tn in 2026 as people advised to keep stash of cash

The number of banknotes in circulation in the EU is increasing despite widespread smartphone payments, new data shows, with wildfires ripping through parts of Europe fuelling demand for an emergency stash of cash.

While cash plays second fiddle to contactless payments in many cities across Europe, the amount in circulation is actually going up, Philip Lane, the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), said at the MacGill summer school conference in Ireland.

Starlink-equipped drones could strike targets up to 200km inside Russia

Reduction came as Europe’s largest lenders shed largest number of highly paid bankers since 2020

Young non-graduate men face unique setbacks

Wall Street investors say move to buy more long-term US debt is a ‘band-aid on a bullet hole’

And why Beijing can’t—or won’t—crack down.

RAMageddon could soon push car prices higher as modern vehicles rely on ever more RAM and powerful centralized computers to run everything from infotainment to driver-assistance systems. Analysts cited by The Atlantic estimate the shortage could add a few percentage points to vehicle prices, which might not sound like much, but could potentially translate to around $2,000 on a $50,000 vehicle. The broader shift toward software-heavy vehicles could also make used cars even less affordable. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Just like laptops, cars depend on microprocessors and RAM, or random-access memory, to run all of their computations. "There's just a baseline level of tech, and thus a baseline level of cost, required of every vehicle," Karl Brauer, the executive analyst at iSeeCars, an automotive-research platform, told me. Technology is a major reason the average price of a new car in the U.S. has reached some $50,000, and that was before RAM became one of the most prized commodities in the world. AI companies are snatching up as much memory as possible for their data centers, causing a RAM shortage that has significantly raised the prices of phones, laptops, and just about any consumer-electronic device. Cars are next. [...] Over the next year, the memory shortage -- sometimes known as RAMageddon -- will likely raise vehicle prices by a few percentage points, on average, [said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Telemetry and a former automotive engineer]. The relative amount would be smaller than the shocking double-digit jumps for gaming consoles and MacBooks but in some ways more significant: A 4 percent price hike for cars amounts to some $2,000 on average. Cars with those centralized computers will be affected the most, but no vehicle will be spared. "Even if you don't need the high-end chips, you're going to pay more even for the low-end chips just because of the supply constraint," Abuelsamid said. On a recent earnings call, Ford's chief financial officer said that the company had paid $1 billion in higher materials costs due to the memory shortage and inflation. GM and Volkswagen, too, have noted rising chip costs to investors. (Ford and GM did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Volkswagen told me that the company has "recognized an increased demand for memory chips, primarily driven by growing requirements in other industries," and that in recent years, Volkswagen has taken measures to "mitigate supply risks.") RAMageddon is poised to last for several years, but the consequences for car buyers may be permanent. Consider what happened during the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions and rising demand for electronics produced a major chip shortage. Nearly every major car company had to slash production because they simply couldn't procure enough chips, and shifted their focus to selling higher-end and higher-profit vehicles. Potential customers already willing to spend six figures on a car are much less likely to care about a 5 or 10 percent price hike, [said Ivan Drury, the director of insights at Edmunds]. Even now, car companies are continuing to focus on selling more profitable models. Since the pandemic, the average price of a new vehicle has jumped $11,000. The AI-fueled chip crisis could play out more severely. The average price of a new car could, before long, jump to $60,000 and beyond. These rising costs are making cars even more similar to computers and all of the software they run: Perhaps in an effort to mitigate higher prices, some automakers are also introducing in-car advertisements and putting certain features, such as heated seats, behind a paywall. As cars have morphed into computers, the inevitable next step is for automakers to behave like modern tech companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kim Jong Un’s backing for Russian war on Ukraine fuels construction boom and sales of luxury goods

Heavy rain and winds were pounding the Northeast U.S. as storms tore through a beach on Long Island and knocked out power in Delaware's capital city.

The West African nation of Liberia received the first group of "third country" deportees from the U.S. on Thursday, including migrants from Latin America, U.S. officials told CBS News.

Despite previously comparing him to a ‘mobster’, Trump’s former personal lawyer showers him with praise. This blog is now closed.

• Trump administration faces questions over top aide Natalie Harp’s security clearance

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An FBI team seized electronic devices from former US representative Eric Swalwell at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, then raided his home in Washington, DC, the next day, CNN reported Thursday.

The raid is part of a federal investigation into the sexual assault allegations which ultimately drove the Bay Area Democrat to resign from office in April, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department subsequently opened criminal investigations on Swalwell.

Fawning, deferential, oleaginous – this was the Untruth and Reconciliation Commission as Trump called in to 77 WABC

“Our next guest is a ‘racist’, a ‘conman’ and a ‘cheat’ – someone who behaves more like a ‘mobster’ than a president. Please welcome Donald J Trump!”

That is how Michael Cohen could have introduced Trump on his New York radio show on Thursday. After all, Cohen used such terms to describe the US president in his testimony to Congress in 2019. But now Trump’s former personal lawyer and self-described fixer had different words: “boss” and “sir”. Just like old times.

Washington, D.C. — A former CIA officer who served nearly two decades in the intelligence community says President Donald Trump’s personnel changes are weakening national security by driving experienced analysts from government and discouraging officials from challenging the White House.

Julia Curlee, the first CIA officer to transition openly while continuing to serve, told PBS NewsHour that experts are being removed either because of who they are or because their assessments conflict with administration priorities. Curlee previously briefed Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and later worked on the National Security Council.

Curlee said she was removed from her White House role during Trump’s second term after initially being retained because of her expertise. She argues her transgender identity ultimately became a factor in her dismissal, a claim she also detailed in a recent Atlantic essay.

The White House rejected her criticism. Spokesperson Anna Kelly told PBS that Trump has broad authority to remove executive branch personnel and suggested Curlee’s public criticism showed she did not belong in government service.

Curlee also criticized the administration’s handling of intelligence surrounding Iran and said officials have increasingly been punished for presenting information the president does not want to hear.

Her broader warning is that losing career analysts, briefers and regional specialists could create long-term gaps that cannot quickly be replaced.

Sources

• PBS NewsHour – MBFC Rating
• The Atlantic – MBFC Rating

The post Ousted Transgender CIA Officer Says Trump Is Driving Out Intelligence Experts appeared first on News Facts Network.