A California bill would let adults demand the removal of social media posts about them that were created by paid family content creators when they were minors. Supporters say Senate Bill 1247 addresses privacy, dignity, and safety harms caused when parents monetize their children's lives online. The Los Angeles Times reports: The legislation would require the parent or other relative to delete or edit the content within 10 business days of receiving the notification. Petitioners could take civil action against those who fail to comply and statutory damages would be set at $3,000 for each day the content remained online. Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), who introduced the bill last month, said it would help protect the dignity and mental health of those who had their childhood shared on social media. The measure was referred to the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee and is slated for a hearing on April 6. "The evolution of these applications and technology is incredible," Padilla said. "But it's changing our social dynamic and it's creating situations that, while very productive for some folks, also need some guardrails." The bill would build upon previous legislation from Padilla that was signed into law two years ago and requires content creators that feature minors in at least 30% of their material to place some of their earnings into a trust the children can access when they turn 18.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Trump administration expects Iran's formal response to its 15-point peace proposal today, as Tehran continues blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
Force issues strongly worded rebuttal after Tory former cabinet minister alleges ‘egregious failures’ in call for review
The police force that conducted the investigation into Lucy Letby has made a strongly worded public statement rejecting criticism after David Davis called in parliament for a review of the case.
The Conservative former cabinet minister, who last year said Letby had suffered “a clear miscarriage of justice”, said Cheshire constabulary had approached the investigation into deaths of babies at the Countess of Chester hospital with too much focus on suspecting Letby, and made “egregious failures” in not following guidelines and best practice, including in the appointment of expert witnesses.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Brent crude trades over $110 a barrel for first time since Monday
Middle East crisis live: Israel to ‘intensify’ strikes on Iran, says defence minister
UK car production falls 17% as industry warns of ‘worrying’ decline
The UK’s car industry is at “crisis point”, economists are warning, after a slump in production in the run-up to the Iran war.
Vehicle production fell by 17.2% in February, with 68,061 units leaving factories, data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders shows.
Today’s SMMT figures are further evidence that the UK automative industry is at crisis point.
At a time when it was already struggling, the war in the Middle East will add to its woes, not only pushing up energy prices but also disrupting the supply chains of key input materials with car makers “panic-buying” aluminium amid fears of a supply shortage.
Continue reading...If passed, the deal would mean TSA staff, who screen airport passengers, baggage and cargo, would start being paid for the first time since mid-February
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.
The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.
Continue reading...  | Veteran rider here. I sold my old GT a few years ago, but have had the itch recently, so… I bought a Pint X and I almost immediately realized I need more power. I already ordered another GT So I want to sell my pretty much brand-new Pint X. It has only 21 miles on it, and comes with all original packaging. There’s barely a scratch on it. Hoping to get $900 if I include free shipping within the US? I can include original reciept/ proof of purchase. Regrettably FM doesn’t take any returns no matter what the reason after the box has been opened… Comes with: - Fender Installed (replace base plate will be in the box too) - Charge plug - Charger - All original Packaging - original receipt/ proof of purchase within the last few weeks Edit: I’m in south central Wisconsin if anyone is local [link] [comments] |
Stocks are heading for a fifth straight weekly loss as oil prices climb and mixed signals on Iran raise fears about inflation and growth.
Campaigner criticises ‘shortsighted and self-defeating’ decision and says it increases risk to the UK public
The polio virus was detected in London sewage for the second time this year, days before ministers withdrew funding for global polio eradication efforts.
Its detection reveals the spending cuts to be “shortsighted and self-defeating”, campaigners said. Polio is an extremely infectious viral disease, which typically affects young children under-five. It can cause paralysis by damaging nerves in the spine and base of the brain, and can be life-threatening if it affects muscles used for breathing.
Continue reading...The pressure now shifts to the House to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that has severely disrupted air travel in some major airports. Follow live updates.
Iran-linked cyber criminals accessed FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email account, sources said.
The Iranian response to the U.S.' 15-point peace proposal is expected on Friday, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
A Democratic National Committee member is proposing a symbolic resolution for consideration at a DNC meeting next month to reject the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s massive spending on Congressional races.
The measure, sponsored by a young DNC member from Florida, could put party leaders on the spot about the pro-Israel lobbying group’s outsized role in Democratic primaries.
A lobbying behemoth that for decades courted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, AIPAC has become an increasingly toxic brand in the Democratic Party.
In recent years, Israeli leaders and their backers in Washington have become more closely aligned with Republican politicians. At the same time, however, AIPAC’s super PAC has focused tens of millions in spending on Democratic primary races.
“This could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party.”
Allison Minnerly, the committee member sponsoring the resolution, said it is time for the party to formally distance itself from the group.
“At a time when Democratic voters might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict, this could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party,” she said.
Neither AIPAC nor the DNC immediately responded to requests for comment.
Minnerly’s resolution follows on the heels of another measure she sponsored last August calling for an arms embargo on Israel. That resolution was defeated, but not before it sparked a high-profile debate on the party’s relationship with Israel.
Democrats have soured on Israel while becoming more sympathetic toward Palestinians, surveys show.
That has not stopped AIPAC, through a super PAC called the United Democracy Project and other campaign arms, from plowing cash into Democratic primaries to elect pro-Israel candidates. Most recently it spent at least $22 million on Democratic primaries in Illinois, where its preferred candidates won two of four contested races.
“Given the recent primaries in Illinois, but also what we’ve seen across the country, I think it’s important that we specify that AIPAC as a growing force in our primaries needs to be specifically addressed when we talk about dark money,” Minnerly said.
Minnerly’s resolution notes that AIPAC has expended massive amounts on political campaigns, then adds that “corporate money PACs have concentrated spending in primary races to oppose candidates who have advocated for Palestinian human rights, ceasefire efforts, or changes to U.S. foreign policy, raising concerns about the role of large outside spending in shaping Democratic Party positions.”
It later adds, “Democratic elections should reflect grassroots participation and the will of voters, rather than the disproportionate influence of wealthy donors or special interests.”
While the resolution’s is couched as a condemnation of dark money spending, it could nevertheless open a tense debate over AIPAC’s role in the primaries that some party leaders would rather avoid.
Ahead of the debate over the Israel arms embargo resolution last year, Minnerly was pressured to withdraw her proposal. DNC Chair Ken Martin put forward a competing resolution.
The ultimate product of that debate was the creation of a working group that has yet to produce any public findings. Critics have derided the group as a stalling mechanism.
This time around, Minnerly fears that the timing of the DNC resolution committee meeting could curtail debate of the measure. Her measure is set for discussion on the morning of April 9, as many DNC members will still be arriving for the meeting in New Orleans.
As high-ranking Democrats distance themselves from AIPAC, the group is hiring a new director of political operations and trying to defend itself against the critiques.
Michael Sacks, a Democratic megadonor who helped bankroll two secretive dark-money groups affiliated with AIPAC in the Illinois primaries, alleged that the group’s critics are trying to “chase” Jewish people out of the party in a Chicago Tribune op-ed on Tuesday.
“Let’s be clear: The campaign against AIPAC is not a policy discussion,” he wrote. “It’s a thinly disguised effort to make support for Israel politically toxic in the Democratic Party, to chase Jews and their allies out of our big tent coalition.”
AIPAC shared the op-ed on social media.
Jim Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, said the criticisms of AIPAC and its dark-money affiliates were about the group’s “hardball” tactics.
“Having been a witness to AIPAC handling of campaigns going back to the 1970s and ’80s,” he said, “it takes a certain degree of chutzpah to play victim, when in fact what they have done is victimize candidates and incumbents who didn’t fall in line behind their positions.”
The post DNC Resolution to Reject AIPAC Funding Puts Democratic Leaders in the Hot Seat appeared first on The Intercept.
London mayor could however join the House of Lords while still remaining in his current role
Allies of Sadiq Khan have dismissed reports the London mayor could join Keir Starmer’s cabinet after being made a peer, although it remains possible he could join the Lords while keeping his current job.
Downing Street said reports that Khan could become a peer after crucial elections in May across England, Scotland and Wales were “speculation”, while a Labour source also declined to comment.
Continue reading...Two vessels part of convoy that organisers say was bringing food and medicine to island in face of ‘criminal US blockade’
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has said his country will do everything it can to save the people on two missing sailing boats that disappeared while transporting humanitarian aid from Mexico to the Caribbean island.
The boats, which set sail from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo last Friday as part of an international aid mission, had been expected to arrive in Havana by Tuesday or Wednesday, the Mexican secretariat of the navy said in a statement.
Continue reading...The FBI executed a search warrant last month at a Fulton County elections office, seeking to take "all physical ballots" from the 2020 vote as well as tapes from vote-tabulating machines, ballot images and voter rolls.
Paul Quinn in 2003
Allan Leighton predicts food prices will inevitably rise as group’s full-year profits dive by a third to £764m
Asda’s executive chair has called on the government to “stand up and start doing stuff” to support farmers and ease the price of fuel as he warned that food prices would inevitably rise as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.
Allan Leighton said farmers were under pressure but the supermarket had so far received “a trickle of requests not an avalanche” of cost price increases from its suppliers, as they were under pressure from higher fertiliser, energy and fuel costs.
Continue reading...A debt lawsuit can lead to big financial issues, but in some cases, the threat may be less serious than it seems.
Move by state education officials picked by Republican governor removes the course as a graduation component
Education leaders in Florida have removed sociology as a graduation component at state universities in Ron DeSantis’s latest attack on what the Republican governor sees as the “woke” indoctrination of students.
The move on Thursday by a majority of DeSantis’s hand-picked university board of governors effectively relegates the stand-alone Introduction to Sociology course to a makeweight elective instead of a core component subject that has been a popular choice for generations of students.
Continue reading...The price of gold has changed significantly this month. Here's where it sits as of March 27, 2026.
Intelligence reports find Russia is close to completing phased shipment of drones, medicine and food
Intelligence agencies in Europe believe Russia is in the final stages of preparing to supply supply drones to Iran for use in its war with the US and Israel, according to a senior European official.
Russia has already been providing intelligence sharing with Tehran to help it target US forces in the region, the official said, but the upcoming delivery of explosive-laden drones would mark the first evidence of lethal support since the start of the war.
Continue reading...The tightened supply of helium due to the Middle East conflict has started to expose a weak link in the AI and data infrastructure stack – helium. While most of the industry stays focused on chips and models, helium plays a small but crucial role in the manufacturing of semiconductors and cooling systems.
When chips are being manufactured, helium acts as a stable gas to keep the process as procise as possible. As helium is chemically inert (does not react with other materials), it creates a clean and controlled environment where even the smallest variations could otherwise ruin an entire batch of chips.
Helium also plays a critical role in cooling. It helps carry heat away from servers and critical components before they overheat. The chemical properties of helium make it more efficient than regular air in removing heat. It is also safer to use in high-density environments such as AI data centers that have sensitive electronics.
Helium is used during wafer fabrication in processes such as plasma etching and chemical vapor deposition. It is also used for heat transfer and backside wafer cooling, enabling uniform temperature control during lithography and other high-precision steps. In simple terms, helium helps keep modern data centers running, from making computer chips to keeping servers from overheating.
(Roman Zaiets/Shutterstock)
Commenting on the supply risk for helium, the Semiconductor Industry Association wrote in 2023 that “helium’s unique properties as an inert gas and a high thermal conductor make it ideal for use in functions that require preventing unwanted chemical reactions and ensuring control and precision of wafer temperatures.”
As HPC systems push toward higher density and performance, even small disruptions in cooling or chip supply can ripple across research workloads, AI training clusters, and national supercomputing facilities. These systems run at extreme power density, where even small inefficiencies in cooling can quickly impact performance and stability.
How bad is the helium shortage? It’s not looking great at the moment – especially with no end in sight for the conflict. Qatar produces nearly one-third of the world’s helium supply, according to data from the US Geological Survey. The country is the largest exporter of LNG (liquefied natural gas), and helium is extracted as a byproduct during that LNG process.
While the United States is the largest overall producer, much of its supply is consumed domestically, which limits how quickly it can offset disruptions in global exports.
The ongoing Middle East conflict has disrupted this system at multiple levels. There are reports that the energy infrastructure in Qatar has had some direct strikes causing physical damage, especially around the Ras Laffan Industrial City – the key hub for LNG processing.
Along with production issues, the shipping routes, especially through the Strait of Hormuz, have become risky. It has forced slowdowns, rerouting and temporary pauses in tanker movement.
On top of that, helium requires specialized liquefaction, storage, and transport infrastructure, so even minor disruptions can halt exports. Since Qatar is one of the world’s largest helium suppliers, there is very little spare capacity elsewhere to make up for the shortfall – which is why the impact is being felt so quickly.
“A helium shortage is an absolute concern,” said Cameron Johnson, senior partner at supply chain consultancy Tidal Wave Solutions, at Semicon China in Shanghai, one of the industry’s largest annual gatherings. “As there’s a shortage, companies might start slowing production or ultimately shutting production down, making chips.”
QatarGas reported “extensive” damage to their facilities, and shared that it will take years to repair and cut annual helium exports by 14%. Some industry analysts expect that it will take the country around five years to regain lost capacity due to the damages.
According to Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, “Your best case scenario would be you’re back producing some helium in six weeks or something like that. As it looks right now, that’s highly unlikely.”
Other industry analysts are more optimistic. They believe that tech companies have inventory buffers, recycling systems, and alternative production regions to help absorb some of the impact of the supply chain disruption.
Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence for the supply chain services firm Circular Technology, suggested the current disruption of helium is more of a “yellow flag rather than a red alert.”
(Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock)
The key factor in determining the severity of the impact would be the length of the disruption. If the Middle East conflict continues, it could create more sustained pressure on semiconductor production timelines and large-scale compute infrastructure.
As a result of the supply chain disruption, helium prices are on the rise. They have doubled since the conflict started and are likely to rise further.
What about alternatives? It is not straightforward. Helium is typically sold through long-term contracts, which limits flexibility in shifting supply. At the same time, chipmakers require extremely high levels of purity, and any new supplier must go through a rigorous qualification process before it can be used in production.
The post Global Helium Shortage Begins to Constrain High-Density Compute and Cooling Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
The full committee will recommend sanctions for Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat, after the House's April recess.
Experts see potential hallmarks of Iranian involvement in firebombing of four ambulances in Golders Green on Monday
To some it was the moment the mask slipped. Wearing an open-necked white shirt, Mohsen Rafighdoost, former minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was filmed last March fondly reminiscing with an interviewer from the Tehran-based Dibdan Iran news website about the assassinations he had organised around Europe.
There was Prince Shahriar Shafiq, the last Shah of Iran’s 34-year-old nephew, who was shot twice in the head outside his mother’s home in Paris in 1979.
Continue reading...Agency uses devices, which are uncomfortable and interfere with employment, to push people to self-deport, advocates say
For five years, an asylum-seeking woman attended routine check-ins with immigration authorities without issue. At her most recent appointment in October, she was unexpectedly ordered to strap on an ankle monitor, according to her attorney, Deepa Bijpuria.
Bijpuria, a supervising attorney in the immigration unit of Legal Aid DC, described the client as a single mom who fled her home country because of severe domestic violence, escaping while pregnant with her young daughter.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A federal judge in California has indefinitely blocked the Pentagon's effort to "punish" Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk and attempting to sever government ties with the AI company, ruling that those measures ran roughshod over its constitutional rights. "Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government," US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in a stinging 43-page ruling. Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said she would delay implementation of her ruling for one week to allow the government to appeal. But in her ruling, she made it clear she disapproved of the government's actions, which she said violated the company's First Amendment and due process rights. [...] "These broad measures do not appear to be directed at the government's stated national security interests," she wrote. "The Department of War's records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its 'hostile manner through the press.'" "Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation," she added. "We're grateful to the court for moving swiftly, and pleased they agree Anthropic is likely to succeed on the merits," an Anthropic spokesperson said after the ruling. "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stock market volatility is hitting higher-income Americans, driving a sharper drop in consumer sentiment.
From budget-friendly options to high-end smart models, these are our top picks.
Alicia and Jon Langenhop's three children were each diagnosed with a rare disorder. A clinical trial was "a no-brainer."
Alen Zheng, a US citizen, allegedly planted device that went undiscovered for a week at MacDill air force base in Florida
A man who allegedly planted a bomb that went undiscovered for a week in the visitors center of the Florida headquarters of US Central Command, which oversees the ongoing war in Iran, remained at large on Friday after fleeing to China.
Authorities charged Alen Zheng and his sister Ann Mary Zheng, both US citizens in separate indictments this week for their alleged role in planting the explosive device at MacDill air force base. Ann Mary Zheng was arrested in the US after a short trip to China, and was arraigned on Thursday in a federal court in Florida.
Continue reading...The comet originated in the outer solar system and visits the inner solar system every 5.4 years.
Economists say the conflict in Iran is making a recession more likely, with higher energy prices hitting consumers and businesses.
On Aug. 23, 1990, Cheryl Henry, 22, and her boyfriend Andy Atkinson, 21, were found dead in what has been called the "Lover's Lane Murders."
26-year-old is set to join NWSL side immediately
Forward has 16 goals in 29 appearances for USWNT
US international forward Catarina Macario has joined the San Diego Wave on a deal worth $8m that runs through the 2030 season. The contract is reportedly the largest by total value in women’s soccer history.
The Wave announced the move Friday. Sportico first reported that the Wave were nearing the acquisition last week. ESPN reported that Macario would join the NWSL side immediately rather than in the summer, on a transfer fee of about $300,000.
Continue reading...Anti-authoritarian rallies standing up to Trump have broad objectives and no leaders. Organizers say that is by design
More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.
Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.
Continue reading...The Justice Department has made public millions of pages from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Government, industry and opposition see growing public support for a new gas tax but the industry is fighting back
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The gas industry is mobilising in opposition to a potential new tax on the sector as political momentum builds – including among Labor MPs – for the government to use the May budget to prevent producers profiting from the Middle East war.
The Australian Energy Producers (AEP) chief executive, Samantha McCulloch, claimed a new tax would punish the same Asian trading partners Australia was leaning on to supply more fuel amid the global energy crisis.
Continue reading...President’s move, dubbed Trump Always Chickens Out, appears to have soured as he loses hold on situation in Iran
From Wall Street to the White House, the dish everyone’s talking about this week is the Persian Taco. It’s what’s served when Trump chickens out in Iran.
In the early hours of Monday morning, witnessing oil prices surge, stock futures plummet and bond yields climb due to his threat to pummel Iran’s civilian power infrastructure, the president hurriedly walked it back, announcing he would put off the bombing because talks with Iran were actually going great. After the bombast and bloodshed, it was time for Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out), a move he first put on display during the tariffs crisis last year.
Continue reading...Researchers believe behavioral gap, which may hold true across species, is probably product of less fear of harassment in cities
Anyone who has lived long enough in a city can tell you – with time, you just stop noticing strange new things. A unicycling bagpiper. A person changing clothes on the subway. Murals that transform streets into art.
Coyotes in cities seem to be bolder as well and less afraid of new experiences. That’s according to a new study that researchers conducted at more than a dozen sites across the US, comparing urban and rural coyotes’ reaction to new stimuli.
Continue reading...Here's everything you need to know about navigating the complex web of VPN jurisdiction, including how much influence the 14 Eyes actually have.
The third installment of the No Kings anti-Trump rallies will take place Saturday. Organizers insist they are achieving more than just big crowds.
TORONTO, March 27, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, today became a publicly listed company on Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “XNDU,” following the completion of its previously announced business combination with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.
This transaction provided Xanadu with approximately $302 million in gross proceeds, alongside negotiations for up to C$390 million in potential funding from the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario, to support continued technology development, expand manufacturing capabilities, and accelerate the commercialization of its photonic quantum computing platform.
“Going public on Nasdaq and the TSX marks a defining moment for Xanadu as we open the door to a broader global investor base and take a significant step forward in bringing our technology to market. Our dual listing strengthens our platform for growth and positions us to scale with greater speed and ambition, while continuing to deliver long-term value to our shareholders,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “As quantum becomes increasingly relevant to AI, cybersecurity, and advanced computing, this milestone reflects the growing importance of these technologies globally. Xanadu is built on the idea that light-based quantum systems offer a path to scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing, and by combining photonic hardware with an integrated software and cloud platform, called PennyLane, we are advancing toward practical, real-world use cases.”
Xanadu’s systems and software are already in use by a broad portfolio of industry-leading customers and partners spanning defense, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and automotive sectors, including Lockheed Martin, AMD, Rolls-Royce, Tower Semiconductor, and Applied Materials. Further collaborations with Mitsubishi Chemical Group, Volkswagen, Toyota Research Institute of North America, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory underscore the breadth of Xanadu’s commercial and government traction. DARPA has advanced Xanadu to Stage B of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, recognizing Xanadu as one of a select group of organizations with a credible path to utility-scale quantum computing, and awarded the Company up to $15 million in associated funding. In addition to this, Xanadu has secured up to C$23 million through the Canadian Quantum Champions Program to support continued advancement of its photonic quantum computing platform.
Following its public listing, Xanadu will focus on scaling its technology platform and advancing toward quantum computing applications that are useful and available to people everywhere.
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The Company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu Becomes 1st Pure-Play Photonic Quantum Computing Company to Go Public appeared first on HPCwire.
Kimberly Carroll ‘truly sorry’ after calling in to court hearing via Zoom from behind the wheel of a moving vehicle
A woman who dialed into a court hearing in Detroit while in her car this week was berated by the judge, who asked “Do you think I’m that stupid?” when she appeared on video apparently driving the vehicle.
Fox2 Detroit reported that defendant Kimberly Carroll called late into a hearing relating to a financial matter, and was asked by the judge, Michael K McNally, to turn on her camera.
Continue reading...The findings appear to be the most comprehensive estimates yet of the growing toll of dead and wounded civilians in the month-long war.
Both sides want to dictate the terms—but neither truly can.
Ban includes two exceptions: AI can still be used for translations, and to make minor copy edits
Wikipedia has banned the use of artificial intelligence in the generation or rewriting of content for its voluminous online encyclopedia.
In a recent policy change, Wikipedia said that the use of large language models (or LLMs) “often violates” its core principles and will not be allowed. The English language version of Wikipedia has more than 7.1m articles.
Continue reading...Welcome to the world of the $650 PS5, $900 PS5 Pro and $250 Portal.
The price hike raises the cost of the standard plan with ads by $1 per month and the cost of the standard and premium plans by $2.
• UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’
Despite resistance from states who had role in chattel slavery, many feel this is an idea whose time has come
John Mahama knows a thing or two about beating the establishment. On Wednesday, less than two years after completing a remarkable comeback as Ghana’s president with a landslide defeat of the ruling party candidate, he rallied the world to ratify a landmark vote against transatlantic chattel slavery, despite major opposition from the same western entities that drove it for centuries.
The resolution to declare the practice as “the gravest crime against humanity” passed with a decisive majority at the UN general assembly and has been largely welcomed across Africa. Yet the details of the tally reveal a world still deeply divided on the gravity of the sin of enslaving more than 15 million people as chattel over the course of 400 years.
Continue reading...Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer, is promoting a legally dubious plan experts say could sharply restrict voting rights
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.
The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.
Continue reading...March 27, 2026 — A bubble floating on the ocean looks calm and delicate, like a tiny glass dome catching the sunlight. But inside its thin skin, fast, powerful flows of liquid are moving because of tiny chemical differences you can’t see. A recent Princeton University study, using the ACES system at Texas A&M University through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, uncovered simple rules that explain when these fragile films stretch, thin or suddenly pop.
Credit: Shutterstock
What Is a Surfactant?
Surfactants are molecules that like to sit at surfaces, such as the boundary between air and water. In the ocean, they come from natural sources like phytoplankton and microbes, as well as from human pollution and runoff. These molecules gather at the water’s surface and form a kind of chemical “skin” on bubbles and waves.
When surfactants are spread unevenly, they pull more strongly in some places than others. This difference in pull, called surface tension, makes water rush from areas with more surfactant to areas with less. Scientists call this motion Marangoni flow, but you can think of it as the surface trying to smooth itself out.
“At first glance, a soap film or sea foam seems gentle,” explained Luc Deike, an associate professor in Princeton’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. “But when surface tension gradients are strong in low-viscosity liquids like water, the motion turns violent.”
From Slow Syrup to Wild Water
In a thick liquid like syrup, these flows move slowly and are quickly damped out. In water or seawater, however, the liquid is much less viscous, so inertia takes over and the flows can speed up dramatically.
The Princeton team created a mathematical model of a very thin liquid film, like the skin of a bubble, that suddenly gets a patch of extra surfactant. The film then begins to thin and spread outward, and the changes in thickness, speed and surfactant concentration all sharpen together over time.
Shocks in a ‘Calm’ Liquid
Under conditions where inertia dominates, the math that describes this flow starts to look a lot like the equations used for compressible gases. In this analogy, surfactant behaves like pressure and the film thickness behaves like density. That means sharp, wave-like fronts (shocks) can form, where differences in the film suddenly pile up, similar to how a traffic jam forms on a busy highway.
Near the point where the film is about to rupture, its behavior becomes universal, meaning it follows the same patterns no matter what the original surfactant distribution looked like. “You don’t usually associate shocks with liquids at rest,” Deike said. “But the math shows they’re unavoidable without added physics.”
Surfactant properties then step in to shape what actually happens. The exact relationship between surfactant amount and surface tension can either soften these shocks or make them stronger.
How Nature Keeps Things from Blowing Up
In the real world, films don’t develop infinite spikes or infinitely thin regions. Effects such as the film’s bending stiffness and the ability of the liquid to stretch smooth out the extreme behavior predicted by the simplest equations. Instead of razor-sharp shocks, the system develops moving boundaries where conditions change quickly but not infinitely.
Behind these moving boundaries, the surfactant spreads out and becomes more uniform, while ahead of them, the film remains thicker and intact. The way the film thins near these boundaries follows specific, predictable laws. “There’s order emerging from complexity,” Deike said. “Regularization yields universal rules.”
Why This Matters: Ocean and Industry
Ocean waves constantly create bubbles that rise and burst at the surface. When a bubble cap breaks, it throws tiny droplets (sea spray aerosols) into the air. These droplets can help form clouds, move chemicals and organisms from the ocean into the atmosphere and influence both climate and air quality. The surfactants produced by plankton play a major role in how these bubbles form and burst.
Lead author and Princeton graduate student Jun Eshima said U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS allocations on the ACES supercomputer system were crucial. “It enabled parameter sweeps to verify predictions via simulations,” he noted, referring to the ability to test many different conditions quickly.
The same physics show up in many industries, including:
Understanding how thin films behave helps engineers design more reliable processes, reduce waste when films fail and better control how products form and break up.
Back to That Shimmering Bubble
That glistening bubble you see at the beach is more than just pretty. Inside its film, only microns thick, complicated flows and shock-like fronts are playing out in fractions of a second. The Princeton study, Similarity Solutions and Regularisation of Inertial Surfactant Dynamics, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, shows that even this complex behavior follows clear physical rules.
To learn more about getting an allocation on ACCESS, visit the Get Started page.
Resource Provider Institution(s): Texas A&M University
Resources Used: Expanse
Affiliations: ACES
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): OCE140023
The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.
Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC; ACCESS
The post ACCESS Powers Princeton Simulations of Surfactant Flows in Ocean Bubble Films appeared first on HPCwire.
The stars Arcturus, Spica and Regulus are three of the brightest in the sky.
Savannah Guthrie stepped back from her NBC duties almost two months ago when her mother, Nancy Guthrie, disappeared. The investigation is ongoing.
Mohammed bin Salman said to consider war a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake Middle East. Plus, Senate passes funding package for Homeland Security that excludes ICE
Good morning.
Saudi Arabia has urged Washington to intensify attacks on Iran, a Saudi intelligence source has confirmed, while it considers whether to join the war directly.
Have there been reports of active Saudi military involvement? Not so far. But a Saudi analyst said the kingdom was likely to intervene if peace efforts led by Pakistan failed. Mohammed Alhamed said: “If [Iran] rejects the conditions and continues its attacks, the threshold for Saudi action will be crossed.”
What is the latest on the strait of Hormuz? On Tuesday, Tehran said it would permit “non-hostile vessels” to pass: here is a visual guide.
For the latest updates, follow our live blog.
Why has there been no DHS funding? Democrats have blocked it as they demand changes to its immigration crackdown, particularly after agents in Minneapolis killed the US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Continue reading...Commentary: Vince Vaughn leads the hilarious new gangster movie, alongside James Marsden, who find themselves fighting to survive the wildest night of their lives. Because, well, time travel.
Fans of the sci-fi series will get a chance to try out the action RPG game in an open beta next month.
Exclusive: Research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards and destroying emails without permission
AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.
AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Safety Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.
Continue reading...Israel Katz says his country will step up its attacks and Iran will pay a ‘heavy price’
More now on India slashing taxes on diesel and petrol amid the global disruption in energy supplies: finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the move would “provide protection to consumers from rise in prices”.
The country is one of the world’s largest crude oil importers and relies on foreign suppliers for more than 85% of its oil needs, with Russia being the biggest supplier.
Continue reading...A helicopter crashed Thursday afternoon on a remote beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, killing three people and injuring two, authorities said.
The Senate agreed early Friday to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to end a standoff in Congress that led to massive lines at many airports.
For years, Utah allowed government officials to do something other states banned: ask a person who reports a sexual assault to take a polygraph test.
That will change soon. Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill that prohibits police and other government officials from requesting polygraph tests for alleged sex assault victims. Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on Thursday, and it goes into effect in May.
Experts say these tests are known to be especially unreliable with victims of sexual abuse. That’s because victims may have stress and anxiety recounting their assault that the polygraph may interpret as deception. Other states don’t allow them to be used with assault victims for this reason.
It took two years and three legislative sessions for Utah state Rep. Angela Romero, the House minority leader, to get the bill across the finish line. When she first sponsored it in 2024, she cited reporting from The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica as she told her fellow legislators the damaging effects polygraph tests can have on people who are reporting sexual abuse.
In the case covered by the news outlets, state licensors asked a man to take a polygraph test after he reported that his therapist, Scott Owen, had touched him inappropriately. The test results indicated he was being deceptive, and that led the patient to drop his complaint. Owen was allowed to continue to practice for two more years, until others came forward with similar allegations. Owen is now in prison after admitting he sexually abused patients.
Romero said in a recent interview that she was determined to bring the bill back for that former patient.
“For me, it was really specifically for that one individual who was not believed,” Romero said, “and then their perpetrator went on to harm other people.”
Cox signed the legislation during a small ceremony at his office, telling Romero that she “has been such a champion, and made a difference and saved lives.” The governor also nodded to The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting driving change.
Provo police began investigating Owen in 2023 after The Tribune and ProPublica published a story that detailed a range of sexual assault allegations from the man given the polygraph test, identified in previous reporting under the pseudonym Andrew, and three others.
Former patients who spoke to the news outlets said they sought Owen’s help because he was a therapist who had built a reputation as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They said he touched them inappropriately during those sessions, some of which were paid for with church funds.
Half of states have laws that explicitly prohibit law enforcement from conducting a polygraph test with someone reporting a sexual assault. Some go further, barring a broader group of government employees beyond law enforcement from requiring an alleged sexual assault victim to take one.
Although Romero’s bill had support from prosecutors and police each session she proposed it, there was pushback from defense attorneys and some fellow legislators who wanted to keep polygraph tests as an option because alleged sex assaults often have no other witnesses.
Polygraph test results are not admissible in court because of their unreliability. But Steve Burton, with the Utah Defense Attorney Association, said in a recent legislative hearing that it is still valuable for prosecutors and investigators to consider those results before deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.
“This is often one of the only things that a defense attorney can ask for or use in order to try to show that their client may be telling the truth,” he said.
Romero pushed back on that idea, saying there are other kinds of interview techniques that authorities can use to help determine whether someone’s account is truthful.
“This is not a way,” she said. “Especially when you’re dealing with someone who has been a victim. You could revictimize that person. And it also could discourage that person from going forward and participating in the process of criminally prosecuting their perpetrator.”
Reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica showed the damaging effects a polygraph test had on the man who reported Owen to state licensors.
Andrew reported Owen to Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing in 2016. As part of the investigation, licensors offered polygraph tests to both Andrew and Owen.
Owen declined. Andrew agreed, recalling that an investigator told him passing would bolster what was essentially one person’s word against another’s.
But the polygraph results, Andrew said, suggested he was being deceptive. Polygraph tests generally function to record signs of internal stress, which could suggest someone is not telling the truth.
“I had so much trauma,” he told The Tribune and ProPublica. “And so, certainly, when they asked me questions about the particular things that happened in therapy, it’s going to elicit a very strong emotional response.”
The result affected his mental health, he said, and he told an investigator he no longer wanted to pursue the complaint.
In a 2016 public reprimand from licensors, Owen admitted giving Andrew hugs — touching he called inappropriate but “non-sexual.” Andrew had reported that Owen groped him, encouraged him to undress and kissed him during sessions.
Officials with DOPL said they believe they responded appropriately to the complaint. But communications between Andrew and an investigator suggest that the agency’s decision not to more harshly discipline Owen rested largely on his denial and on Andrew’s polygraph results.
Owen pleaded guilty to felony charges in February 2025, admitting he sexually abused two patients and led them to believe that sexual touching was part of therapy. He pleaded no contest in a third patient’s case.
Andrew was among more than half a dozen men — mostly former patients — who spoke during Owen’s sentencing hearing a month later about how he had harmed them.
“The experience with Scott Owen has been the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” Andrew said. “I don’t think he belongs in society anymore.”
A judge sentenced Owen to at least 15 years in prison. He’s currently at the central Utah prison facility.
The state is addressing some of the shortcomings identified by The Tribune and ProPublica in another way as well: creating a task force to look into a rise in sexual misconduct complaints that state licensors say they’ve seen against licensed professionals. The task force will focus on health care, mental health and massage therapy, professions state officials say have historically received the highest percentage of sexual misconduct complaints.
The news organizations reported that more than a third of mental health professionals who received discipline from licensors beginning in 2012 were accused of sexual misconduct. In 2023, DOPL spokesperson Melanie Hall said the agency was aware that certain license types “have a tendency towards certain types of violations.” The agency, she said, “takes these factors into account when investigating complaints, and takes appropriate disciplinary action when necessary.”
The task force, which was announced earlier this month, will focus on suggesting changes to the law and creating resources to help victims more easily report misconduct to the state.
It also plans to develop a standardized process for sharing reports among agencies that might have knowledge of an accusation — something that is not currently legally required. The Tribune and ProPublica highlighted this gap in their reporting on Owen’s case: Although Andrew and at least two others reported Owen to DOPL, licensors never shared those reports with Provo police.
Margaret Busse is the executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, which houses DOPL. She said in a statement that licensed professionals who engage in sexual misconduct violate not just their clients’ trust, but the public’s confidence in their profession.
“These heinous acts inflict profound harm to victims and damage the reputations of entire industries,” she said. “This task force is our unequivocal declaration: Utah will hold licensed professionals accountable to protect our communities and the integrity of state-regulated industries.”
The post Utah Bans Polygraph Tests for Those Reporting Sexual Assault appeared first on ProPublica.
The real defining image of this presidency should be the bank statement of the average American citizen
Shockingly, inexplicably, Donald Trump keeps finding new places to put his face. Also, his name. Or initials. Or one of those drawings of a turkey a kid does by tracing the outline of their hand. He’s got his ballroom, the Kennedy Center and a proposed 250ft arch that would become one of the tallest buildings in all of Washington DC – a city with longstanding height restrictions for development. His signature will be on US dollars later this year, in a first for a sitting president. I’d ask if he was getting tired of all the attention, but I think we know the answer to that. Up next is a commemorative gold coin – worth exactly $1 – featuring Trump’s scowling visage looming menacingly over the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
It’s a pretty classic Trump pose, designed to make a nearly-80-year-old man with a variety of mystery bruises who eats McDonald’s on a regular basis look physically intimidating. Beyond the president sporting a classic gen Z pout, the Commission of Fine Arts (a panel appointed by You Know Who) recommended this coin be “as large as possible”, which immediately makes me think of the giant penny Bruce Wayne keeps in the Batcave. Good luck trying to feed a parking meter with that.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Continue reading...Broadcasting regulator has become one of the nation’s most prominent newsmakers – he seems to relish the spotlight
During a ceremony at the White House late last week honoring the US Naval Academy football team, Donald Trump gave a shoutout to the man he said was “perhaps the most powerful man in this room”: Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman.
“You are doing some job,” Trump said. “He’s trying to make the fake news real and respected again, which is not an easy job.”
Continue reading...Let's see if it's better than LinkedIn.
From the best beginner point-and-shoot through to which SLR or medium format camera to pick, these film cameras are superb.
Weak demand and global trade pressures hit ouput, with energy price rises expected to bring further drop
Fewer cars rolled off UK production lines in February in what the industry called an “extremely worrying” slump even before the impact of the Iran war was felt.
Vehicle production was 17% lower last month on the same period in 2025, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, as exports dropped sharply.
Continue reading...In a rare interview, Michael Jordan discusses settling his antitrust fight with NASCAR, his passion for racing and more.
The government has published new guidance for parents that says under-fives should be limited to one hour of screen time a day
Josh MacAlister, the minister for children and families, said there has been “a complete rewiring of childhood” over the last decade due to social media and screen time.
Speaking on the new government guidance for parents of young children, he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “We’re trying to help create some new social norms.
Continue reading...People’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, says Treasury committee
Lloyds Banking Group exposed the personal data of nearly 500,000 customers in an IT glitch that left people’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, a committee of MPs has revealed.
A letter from Lloyds, published by MPs on the Treasury select committee on Friday, blamed the glitch on a software defect introduced during an IT update to its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland mobile banking apps overnight into 12 March.
Continue reading...Rex Heuermann, 62, who is accused of murdering seven women over 17 years, is due to appear in court next month
The man accused in Long Island’s infamous Gilgo Beach serial killings intends to plead guilty in the case next month, according to two people familiar with his decision.
Rex Heuermann, a former architect charged with murdering seven women over 17 years, is set to change his plea from not guilty at his next scheduled court hearing on 8 April, they said.
Continue reading...Two others injured after sightseeing aircraft comes down on remote beach on Na Pali Coast
A tourist helicopter crashed on a remote beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, killing three people and injuring two others, authorities said.
The helicopter was carrying one pilot and four passengers when it crashed on Thursday afternoon at Kalalau Beach, the Kauai fire department said. The beach is on the Na Pali Coast on Kauai’s north shore. The area is otherwise reachable only by hiking or boat.
Continue reading...Prime minister says government needs to show it is on families’ side as new screen-time guidance launched
• UK politics live – latest updates
Keir Starmer has promised a “fight” with social media companies amid efforts to limit children’s use of mobile phones, tablets and TVs, as new official guidance recommends children under five spend no more than an hour a day on screens.
The guidance, developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza and children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner, advises screen time for children under two should be avoided other than for shared activities.
Continue reading...Liz Kendall urged by online safety figures to give job to Jeremy Wright ahead of Labour peer Margaret Hodge
Ministers are facing pressure to appoint a Conservative former cabinet minister as the new chair of the media regulator Ofcom, as he battles for the role against a Labour peer.
The job of running the regulator has become a key post in public life amid concern over the rapid growth of online content and the rise of more politically partisan broadcasting. No successor has been named to replace Michael Grade, the former BBC chair who has just weeks left in the job.
Continue reading...Papers reveal how chemical lobby influenced policy, reversing Biden-era limits on a common carcinogen
A new trove of chemical producer and US Environmental Protection Agency documents reveal an elaborate industry operation that killed strong regulations around formaldehyde, a highly toxic carcinogen widely used in everyday goods from cosmetics to furniture to craft supplies.
The Biden EPA in late 2024 determined any exposure to formaldehyde increased the risk of cancer and other health problems. The Trump EPA in late 2025 moved to undo those findings and replace them with less protective figures.
Continue reading...Apple said this is temporary and not unusual.
OpenAI has indefinitely paused plans for an erotic mode in ChatGPT as part of a broader strategy shift away from side projects and toward business and coding tools. TechCrunch reports: The proposed "adult mode," which CEO Sam Altman first floated in October, had inspired considerable controversy from tech watchdog groups as well as from OpenAI's own staff. In January, a meeting between company executives and its council of advisers got heated, with one of the advisers cautioning that OpenAI could be in the process of developing a "sexy suicide coach," The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Amidst all of the criticism, the release of the feature was delayed multiple times. FT notes that the erotic feature now has no timeline for release. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company had "nothing further to add."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Oakland and New York campaigns for $30 minimum wage gain steam as workers battle high costs and pushback
Mark Dorsey, a lifelong East Oakland resident, works two jobs to make ends meet. The 35-year-old Californian relies on manufacturing and service work through temp agencies and tries to work overtime or 10- to 12-hour shifts because “that’s the only way you can see a paycheck that’s worth something”.
Dorsey often makes minimum wage or close to it. The city of Oakland’s minimum wage is currently $17.34 an hour, higher than the minimum wage for the state of California, currently $16.90 an hour, but still not enough to support Dorsey.
Continue reading...The US president’s tactic could put this fall’s elections at risk. A supreme court decision could go far to protect them
Hating legal constraints, Donald Trump has repeatedly taken unilateral actions for which he had zero legal authority unless he found some national emergency to declare. So Trump, no stickler for the truth, has conveniently invoked numerous national emergencies to justify his unilateral actions – whether imposing tariffs on dozens of countries or deporting immigrants without due process – even when there wasn’t anything close to a real emergency.
A recent example involves Trump’s anger at Spain. Early this month, Trump was so furious at Spain for not letting the US use its airbases to help his illegal war against Iran that he called for cutting off all trade with Spain. Trump said he would order a trade embargo, with his treasury secretary suggesting that he would invoke a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
Continue reading...March 27, 2026 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) have announced the creation of their new spin-off Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which designs chips for critical sectors in infrastructure and emergency services where a system failure could have significant consequences, both at a human and economic level.
Credit: BSC
Sectors such as automotive, telecommunications, airports, railway traffic management, or civil protection alert systems, among others, require increasing computing capabilities as they use more autonomous systems and more complex applications. Now, this spin-off brings together a set of hardware technologies specifically designed to allow medium and high-performance processors to be used in critical applications where design and validation processes are particularly demanding and often regulated by standards that guarantee functional safety and cybersecurity.
“The hardware we developed can only fail under very exceptional conditions, and when it does, it detects it and interrupts the process in a controlled manner before giving erroneous instructions. In an air traffic control system, for example, this can be crucial to saving lives,” explained Jaume Abella, co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. and co-director of the High Performance Embedded Systems (HPES) laboratory at BSC.
The project’s flagship technology is “Safety Island” which provides the reliability and monitoring and control capacity necessary to enable the use of high-performance hardware in critical applications. It combines technologies that spent more than 10 years in development at BSC jointly by researchers from BSC and UPC, within the context of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects such as De-RISC, SELENE, ISOLDE, and FRACTAL.
Strategic Autonomy: European Chips Without Dependencies
In a first phase, the spin-off will focus on chip design, leaving physical manufacturing for a future stage. All of this is under the RISC-V open-source architecture standard, which allows for progress toward European technological sovereignty by eliminating dependencies and licenses from external multinationals. This approach guarantees full control over the hardware—an autonomy that is crucial for the critical sectors where the company operates, allowing it to offer high-performance solutions free from the technical and legal restrictions of traditional closed technologies.
“The creation of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. is an example of one of the main drivers of BSC and UPC: making technology that serves society,” said Mateo Valero, BSC’s director. “By working with the RISC-V ecosystem, we confirm the commitment of both institutions to achieve a European technological sovereignty free from external dependencies.”
Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., which is already incorporated and seeking investors, is now the fifteenth spin-off promoted by BSC, reflecting the center’s firm commitment to transforming scientific results into real impact for society. Since the creation of Nostrum Biodiscovery 10 years ago, fourteen spin-offs have employed more than 610 highly qualified professionals and managed to raise more than 44 million euros in private investment, consolidating a deep-tech innovation ecosystem in the region. UPC, for its part, spent more than 25 years creating knowledge-based companies and has a portfolio of more than forty investing companies.
Furthermore, the launch of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L. highlights the sustained collaboration between BSC and UPC and their commitment to technology transfer, which already promoted the creation of five spin-offs jointly.
In 2020, Abella himself along with Francisco J. Cazorla, co-director of the HPES laboratory at BSC and co-founder of Safe and Secure Technologies S.L., founded another spin-off, Maspatechnologies SL, which became in 2022 the first company emerging from BSC to be sold, after being acquired by Danlaw Inc., a leading global provider of electronic solutions for the automotive and aerospace sectors.
Source: BSC-CNS
The post BSC Launches Safe and Secure Technologies Spin-Off for RISC-V Chips in Critical Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
The youth-led Sunrise Movement is seizing on the U.S.–Israel war in Iran to boost challengers to sitting Democrats, joining a coalition of progressive groups arguing that lawmakers who take money from defense contractors and AIPAC cannot meaningfully oppose the war.
In Denver, Sunrise is endorsing Melat Kiros, an anti-war candidate and attorney who was fired for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine, the group shared exclusively with The Intercept. Kiros is challenging longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.
“Voters today, they want to see their candidates and their representatives refusing AIPAC money and refusing [military industrial complex] influence,” said Kiros. “They’re seeing how much it has dragged us into these endless wars, and how much it is dragging our taxpayer dollars into funding this violence as well.”
Kiros is among a growing list of insurgent candidates — including William Lawrence in Michigan and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, also both Sunrise-endorsed — who are taking Democrats to task on their complicity in the endless wars in the Middle East.
Sunrise’s endorsement is part of a broader strategy shift in which the activist group, founded in 2017 to fight climate change in particular, pivots to fighting authoritarianism more broadly.
“There’s just no winning on climate unless we address how absolutely broken our political system is,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Focusing on corporate PAC money and the wars it fuels abroad is an essential part of the organization’s broader mission, she added. “The path towards winning climate legislation lies towards having a functional democracy, and that includes having a democracy that doesn’t prioritize endless wars abroad over the very real constraints of people right here.”
“The path towards winning climate legislation lies towards having a functional democracy … that doesn’t prioritize endless wars abroad over the very real constraints of people right here.”
Shiney-Ajay said Sunrise Movement organizers are “really excited” about Kiros, 28, because of her moral clarity. “She is really clear about standing up for working people,” she said. “And she’s very clear about not taking corporate PAC money.”
Historically, foreign policy issues have not been top of mind for Democratic primary voters, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. But as the Trump administration wages its unpopular war on Iran, he said, “candidates that are able to mesh together affordability and war, and opposition to support for Israel, I think, are gonna be the ones that might be able to break through.”
This argument requires nuance, as most Democrats — at least publicly — oppose the Trump administration’s war with Iran, often citing affordability as a concern.
“This war is costing at least $1 billion every day,” said DeGette, Kiros’ opponent, in a public statement about her support for a War Powers resolution to block the administration’s violence. “That is billions of dollars that could go towards affordable health care and housing. I refuse to support this war.”
DeGette’s statement “rings hollow,” Kiros told The Intercept. “Democrats like DeGette had the opportunity to cut the military budget by 10 percent for that very reason — especially during Covid, when we needed that money for health care — and still voted no,” she said.
Kiros blames the “military–industrial complex” and actors like AIPAC for pushing lawmakers to support defense contractor spending and wars that line their pockets.
“There are corporations that are actively profiting from the war,” she said. “And I think it also has to do with the impact and the influence that we have seen from AIPAC and from Israel.”
Kiros has criticized DeGette for receiving over $5 million from corporate PACs. The incumbent’s top contributor is the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which is founded and chaired by former AIPAC vice president and board member Norman Brownstein, according to OpenSecrets. “At the end of the day, the people who get you into office are the ones you are going to be accountable to,” said Kiros.
Nicole Shea Niebler, a Sunrise Movement organizer in Denver, recently confronted DeGette at a meet and greet for declining to support Block The Bombs, a bill that would limit offensive weapons transfers to Israel. Niebler said voters are right to be worried about candidates who take money from the groups pushing for war with Iran.
“If you’re not willing to say no, what else are you willing to do that is not in the interest of your constituents?” she said.
Niebler sees her organization’s broader shift toward supporting anti-war candidates like Kiros as a moment of “clarity” for the organization, calling the U.S. military “the true number one danger to our environment.”
Sunrise is hoping to reverse its luck in recent races, where two of prominent endorsed anti-war candidates, Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam in North Carolina and activist Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois lost their primaries.
Allam, in particular, centered anti-Iran war messaging in her advertisements. “I will never take a dime from defense contractors or the pro-Israel lobby,” Allam said in an ad days ahead of the election earlier this month. “I have opposed these forever wars my entire career.”
Abughazaleh and Allam both lost by relatively narrow margins, which Shiney-Ajay said she doesn’t see as a broader defeat for their cause.
“We’re up against a really steep battle and … millions and millions of dollars being poured in, and that is causing us to lose several races,” she said. “I do think there’s something happening where the narrative is that AIPAC money is poisonous, that corporate PAC money is poisonous, and that wasn’t true a few years ago.”
“There’s something happening where the narrative is that AIPAC money is poisonous, that corporate PAC money is poisonous, and that wasn’t true a few years ago.”
It’s challenging to parse out how successful the anti-war messaging was, because there were so many other factors in the races, Haider-Markel noted. “These challenger candidates also tend to be significantly younger and significantly more liberal than the incumbents they’re challenging. So all of those wrapped together,” he said. “It’s hard to distinguish which one actually played a role in some of these early defeats.”
In Denver, Kiros said she sees the anti-war and anti-military–industrial complex movement as a perpetual battle, one that will be fought in this election and others to come.
“The anti-war movement is one that has had to have this fight cyclically,” she said. “And so for me, it’s about understanding the military–industrial complex … and how we have allowed the military–industrial complex to influence our foreign policy, and to not just wait until it’s convenient, and it’s popular among the American people to be anti-war as it is right now.”
The post Sunrise Movement Pushes Anti-War Candidates, Endorsing Melat Kiros in Denver appeared first on The Intercept.
Police said they found two bodies a day after stopping Cedric Prizzon in a car with his two children.
Syria’s successful foreign policy masks a deeper risk Expert comment jon.wallace
2025’s National Dialogue failed, its outcomes unpublished. But without a new effort to resolve internal conflicts, the country will remain vulnerable to external intervention.
Syria’s transitional authorities have achieved notable foreign policy gains. President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has restored diplomatic ties, eased sanctions and insulated the country from the military spillover of the ongoing war in Iran.
Yet recent events expose the limits of this outward-facing stabilization strategy. On 19 March, Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on government forces in Sweida, following clashes between government forces and Druze factions – demonstrating how Syria’s unresolved internal conflicts can still draw in external actors.
Rather than addressing the root causes of the Sweida conflict through a domestic process, the authorities have sought to resolve them through deals brokered with other countries.
At its most effective, this approach can contain escalation. But it leaves the underlying tensions intact. Without a credible national process to address internal divisions, Syria’s transition will remain fragile, and vulnerable to repeated external intervention.
Syria now stands out in the Middle East for an unexpected reason. While neighbouring countries are increasingly entangled in the fallout from the war on Iran, Syria has, for now, avoided direct involvement – remaining largely insulated from its effects.
This shift is striking given Syria’s recent history. For over a decade, the country served as the central arena where regional and international rivalries played out. Today, by contrast, it has repositioned itself as a neutral actor.
This outcome is the result of the al-Sharaa government’s highly effective foreign policy. Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the transitional authorities have recalibrated Syria’s external relations by restoring diplomatic ties, engaging regional actors and limiting the presence of foreign-aligned armed networks. Such measures have reduced the risk of Syria being drawn back into wider conflict dynamics.
President al-Sharaa made this clear in his address following Eid prayers on 20 March, arguing that Syria’s changing position reflects a more effective management of regional and international relations. In this sense, foreign policy has become a central pillar of efforts to stabilize the country – helping to shield Syria from external shocks at a moment of heightened regional volatility.
But recent developments in Sweida highlight the limitations of that strategy.
Violence escalated in July 2024, when Damascus deployed forces to the province. The government presented the move as an effort to restore order after clashes between Druze and Bedouin groups.
Locally, however, the intervention was widely seen as an attempt to impose central authority following months of stalled negotiations over governance and security arrangements. Subsequent confrontations – and reported abuses – deepened mistrust between local actors and the authorities.
Rather than addressing the drivers of the conflict through inclusive local dialogue, the authorities have sought to contain it, through external, elite-level agreements. Damascus agreed to a roadmap with Jordan and the United States to address the issue in September 2025, while parallel efforts to limit Israeli intervention intensified.
The approach failed to resolve the crisis. Implementation of the Jordan–US roadmap stalled, rejected by de facto local authorities who had been excluded from its negotiation. The result has been a pattern of recurring tensions and periodic violence – conditions that continue to invite external intervention and complicate Syria’s negotiations with Israel.
The Israeli airstrikes of 19 March followed alleged clashes between Syrian government forces and a Druze armed group. Israel framed its attack as an effort to protect the Druze community, though Damascus condemned what it called ‘interference in internal affairs with the aim of undermining security and stability’.
While its motives remain contested, what is clear is Israel’s willingness to intervene whenever Syria’s local conflicts intersect with its strategic priorities. As such, no amount of diplomatic balancing on Syria’s part can fully shield it, if domestic conflicts remain unresolved.
Crucially, the issues at the heart of the Sweida conflict are not local anomalies. Questions of governance, security, representation, power-sharing and the identity of the state are national in scope. Addressing them through closed-door bargaining – whether with domestic elites or external actors – risks producing outcomes that lack legitimacy and durability.
This is where Syria’s stalled national dialogue becomes central. Launched in February 2025, the process was intended to provide a platform for addressing precisely these questions. Instead, it was rushed, narrowly structured and insufficiently consultative.
More than a year later, its outcomes remain largely unpublished. Beyond general statements, Syrians still lack a clear account of what was discussed, what priorities emerged, or what conclusions were reached.
The result is not just a missed opportunity, but a widening gap between the transitional authorities and society.
Without an inclusive national framework, Syria’s political actors will continue to approach negotiations as a zero-sum game – where compromise is seen as loss rather than a route to shared stability. Reversing this dynamic requires widening participation beyond political elites to include civil society, displaced communities, refugees and the diaspora.
Even if an earlier opportunity to launch a credible national dialogue was missed, it is not too late to try again. A renewed process could offer a peaceful pathway to address the core questions shaping the emerging state. If conducted transparently and inclusively, it could help build national consensus and prevent negotiating parties with narrow agendas from claiming to speak for their constituencies.
Substance will be critical. Any renewed dialogue must confront the issues that continue to drive conflict – governance, power-sharing, participation, justice, economic reform and the role of security institutions. These are not technical matters; they lie at the heart of Syria’s future political order.
Process will matter just as much. Consultation must be tied to outcomes, with clear mechanisms to translate any agreements into policy. Transparency is essential – without clear understanding of how decisions were reached, trust cannot be rebuilt.
The most immediate step is also the simplest. The outcomes of the previous dialogue should be published. Doing so would signal intent, restore credibility and lay the groundwork for a more meaningful and inclusive process.
Syria’s foreign policy success has been significant, but it cannot, on its own, secure stability. A transition built primarily on external positioning rather than internal cohesion will remain inherently fragile. Lasting stability depends on the state’s ability to resolve domestic disputes, build a shared national vision and establish a political order that commands legitimacy across the country’s diverse society.
Transitional justice for Ukraine: Supporting survivors of war crimes and building international solidarity 27 April 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.
Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.Thirteen years into Russia’s aggression and four years since the full-scale invasion against Ukraine, the humanitarian toll is staggering. Systematic atrocities - including torture, sexual violence, and forced deportations - have resulted in over 200,000 documented war crimes.
With the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, domestic and international responses are unprecedented. However, the sheer volume of cases threatens to overwhelm the pursuit of justice. Current efforts face the tension of how to balance rigorous legal procedures with the urgent, immediate needs of survivors.
Transitional justice offers a holistic framework to bridge this gap by harmonizing prosecutions with truth-seeking, reparations, and institutional reform. Despite several stalled attempts to formalize a national vision (2016–2021), the current situation demands action.
This session will explore why Ukraine must now endorse a comprehensive transitional policy to support survivors, deliver justice, and advance domestically (streamline EU accession, and secure broader support from the Global Majority).
This event is supported by International Center for Transitional Justice.
Justice for Ukraine: Supporting survivors of war crimes and building international solidarity 27 April 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.
Following the launch of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, the Register of Damage and the Claims Commission in The Hague, experts explore how a comprehensive transitional justice policy can bolster survivor support and global solidarity with Ukraine.Four years after Russia’s full‑scale invasion, the humanitarian toll remains immense. More than 200,000 documented atrocities – including torture, sexual violence, and forced deportations – pose an overwhelming challenge for justice efforts.
The new tribunal faces immense challenges. The scale of violations raises urgent questions about how to deliver meaningful, victim‑centred justice without overloading the legal system.
Transitional justice offers a holistic approach, combining prosecutions with truth‑seeking, reparations, and institutional reform.
This session will examine why Ukraine should adopt such a framework now. Key questions include:
This event is supported by the International Center for Transitional Justice.
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Wine on top of the fridge is as good as cooked. Here are the six biggest wine storage danger zones, according to an expert.
Retail sims aren’t my thing, but the tactile, nostalgic pleasures of hit indie title Retro Rewind have me yearning for the era of physical media, smoking indoors and uncomplicated geopolitics
It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.
I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports.
Continue reading...CEO of a merged team in a US men’s competition shrunk to just six, the ex-Wallaby hooker is still at the sharp end – right where he likes to be
One day in March 2012, Adam Freier sat down to write a column for the Sydney Morning Herald. His Melbourne Rebels were on a losing streak and though he had 25 caps at hooker including a World Cup campaign for Australia, he was nearly 32 and staring at the end of a career at the coalface, 12 years in the front row of the scrum at the highest level. Describing a body breaking down, a struggling club, the agony of endless defeats, he imagined group therapy in front of “strangers in the local hall”.
“My name is Adam Freier, and I hate to lose.”
California Legion v Anthem RC kicks-off 6pm ET on Saturday, live on ESPN+
Martin Pengelly writes about rugby in the US on Substack, at The National Maul
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Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to allegedly assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply the most minimal of reforms to ICE. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle,” Nikhil Pal Singh tells The Intercept Briefing. “They smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something.” The professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War” joins host Akela Lacy in a conversation about protests and movement-building in the latest Trump era.
Trump “said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home,” says Singh. “The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.”
“What we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, ‘No, this is not OK in my city,’” says Singh. With the upcoming nationwide No Kings protests on Saturday, Lacy brings up the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces.
“We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy,” notes Singh. For there to be long-term meaningful change during this increasingly hostile environment to dissent or opposition, big alliances are needed, including with parts of the Trump coalition, he says. “Those kinds of cross-class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Akela.
AL: I don’t know about you, Jessie, but I honestly feel like I’ve had constant whiplash the past few months. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners if we start with just breaking down exactly where we are right now in the world. I’ll do a quick recap.
We are, as many people know, in a full-blown war with Iran after being told for years that that would effectively mean the beginning of the end. The U.S. has killed more than 150 people in boat strikes around the world and successfully kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife. Trump has consolidated the nation’s largest paramilitary police force and unleashed it on U.S. cities and now airports. The number of people being detained by ICE is at an all-time high. Federal agents have killed two protesters, and more than a dozen other people have died this year alone at the hands of ICE.
At the same time, prices are soaring. The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent, in case you missed that, which I certainly did. The government is still partially shut down, and Trump and his allies are still withholding documents from the public on Jeffrey Epstein.
And in case anyone forgot, we’re knee-deep in a midterm cycle that’s seen unprecedented levels of dark money and efforts by corporate lobbies to influence elections. So how are you feeling about all of this? How are you processing all of this?
JW: Yeah, it’s a lot to process as a journalist and a person in the country.
The way that I’m thinking about this is really in the context of protests, and whether or not we’re going to see a real resistance to the Trump administration emerge. Obviously, what we’ve seen in Minneapolis has been a real resistance to their efforts from everyday people. What I’m thinking about now is just how can we exist in this society and push back against some of these really awful things, when there’s so much repression of protests and of activism in general, and of journalism?
AL: The conventional wisdom for moments like this is that this is when the opposition should theoretically be at its strongest. Is that the case right now? What is the opposition right now, and how are regular people responding to this, and is it having any effect?
JW: Yeah, we can talk about poll numbers. Certainly Donald Trump is historically unpopular, so we are seeing people react in that way. But I think we have to take into account the real ways in which the Trump administration, but also the Biden administration — and if we’re going to talk about college protests — university administrators really clamped down on college campus protesters, on protest in general. And we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the Cop City case; we’ve seen the indictment of protesters in the case in Chicago, where we saw Kat Abughazaleh indicted. So there’s a real risk to protest.
I mean, we interviewed Momodou Taal on this very podcast, a Cornell student who had to flee the country in order to escape being detained by the Trump administration because of his actions on college campuses. So there’s real fear.
I think there’s also real movement organizing. We’ve seen it in Minneapolis, we’ve seen it in even deep-red places like Hagerstown, Maryland, which I’m interested in talking a little more about.
There’s certainly still activity, but there’s a lot of fear and a lot of that fear is understandable.
AL: Jessie, you mentioned the Cop City case, and I think those indictments were obviously an effort to intimidate those protestors. I will just note that a judge dismissed most of the charges against them, but the Georgia attorney general is trying to appeal that dismissal. So the intimidation tactic continues, whether or not the charges were dismissed.
JW: No, I think that’s a really good point that a lot of the early intimidation we’ve seen of protesters has been unsuccessful in terms of actually getting them detained and locked up. We’ve also seen many of the students who were detained by the Trump administration for protesting have since been released or have fled the country and are no longer within the administration’s grasp. But nonetheless, it still has this chilling effect on protest on college campuses, but obviously across the country when people have to worry about whether or not they’re going to end up in prison for trying to protect their neighbors, I think that becomes a really difficult decision for a lot of people.
AL: Specifically on this question of protest or how communities are responding to the increasing state violence that we’re seeing, you’ve been doing some reporting on a rapid response ICE watch group in a red county in Maryland. Is that right?
JW: Yes. I have been covering the potential development of an ICE facility in technically Williamsport, Maryland, but the closest, largest city would be Hagerstown. But what’s been really fascinating about this story — the ins-and-outs of how this warehouse is going to become habitable for human beings is a large part of what I’m focused on. But we’ve seen in this county, which is Washington County, where the warehouse ICE facility would exist — it’s this deep red county where they’re trying to build this ICE warehouse, and you’ve actually seen massive resistance.
So first, I would really point to this Hagerstown Rapid Response group. There’s this group that emerged really in the wake of what they watched in Minneapolis. They saw the successful ICE observers and ICE watches that were going on in communities in the Twin Cities, and they wanted to build something similar to that. So they developed the Hagerstown Rapid Response.
But over the course of developing their group, they realized that there was this ICE detention facility that was going to be potentially built in their community. So they really organized these pinpoint protests against the county commissioners where they live. So they’ve held weekly protests outside of the county commissioner’s office, but they’ve also worked to surveil the warehouse. They have drones they have used to get images to send out to the press, to the public, to really raise public awareness about this issue.
So we are seeing people in communities, even in conservative communities, really coming together and finding ways to protest and organize against ICE and against the Trump administration.
AL: We touch on all of this and more with our guest today, Nikhil Pal Singh, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War.”
Nikhil, welcome to The Intercept Briefing
Nikhil Pal Singh: Thanks for having me.
AL: Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by this overwhelming sense of chaos. As we speak, the war in Iran and the broader Middle East stretches into its fourth week. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to — it’s unclear exactly how — assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply even the most minimal of reforms to ICE.
Meanwhile, Trump is minting a new coin with his face on it, continuing to renovate the White House, and his sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It’s a lot to keep up with. You’ve written that the question facing the American public today is less about whether what we’re seeing is unprecedented and more about what purpose the chaos serves, and how we respond to it. But what effect has this constant whiplash had on the public and its ability to organize or to respond?
NS: It’s a good question, and it’s where I began the piece that I wrote. You didn’t even mention “Operation Total Extermination” in Latin America and Ecuador, which Nick Turse wrote about this week. And of course, the signs that insiders have been trading on information in Trump’s tweets, making directional trades against them in the oil market and in the futures markets.
AL: Right.
NS: It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle. The term that the Trump administration likes to use, and Pete Hegseth’s favorite term, is “kinetic action”: We’re moving fast and breaking things all the time and showing and asserting our dominance over every situation. Those of us who try to comment upon this, report on it, analyze it, are always trailing behind it, trying to keep up, trying to make sense of the next thing — it does induce a state of whiplash. It does induce a state of paralysis by design.
One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to try to think about: How do we create a broader framework to understand what’s happening? Not a framework that tries to say this all makes sense, or it has some rationality, because there is a substantive irrationality to all of this, but I do think there is a method in their madness. And that method is really about keeping us off balance.
“Everything they do has a short-term calculus associated with it.”
It’s about allowing them to continue to raid the Treasury. It’s about destabilizing the institutions that create a sense of organization, order, coherence within our society that then allows them to have more room to maneuver, at least within the short term. It’s hard to say what the long term’s going to look like, because everything they do has a short-term calculus associated with it.
I think the long term looks quite grim for them and for us, especially if we can’t get a handle on this. I think that’s part of what we need to try to understand. We need to almost not take a step back, but balance ourselves against the impulse to constantly be shaken and reactive in relationship to everything that they do and the next thing that they do and the next thing that they do.
I will say, as a last point in this opening, that I think in the Iran war they might really have met their match. That smash and grab, which has essentially been the mode right? “We’ll seize Maduro. We’ll send an ICE team into Minneapolis.” Of course, they met their match in Minneapolis too, and we can come back to that.
AL: Yeah, we will.
NS: But they smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something. That is going to have long-term consequences for many, many, many of us, and political consequences for them that they’re not going to be so easily left behind.
“We need to … balance ourselves against the impulse to constantly be shaken and reactive in relationship to everything that they do and the next thing that they do and the next thing that they do.”
AL: This is a great segue into what I wanted to ask you about.
So for our listeners, we’re talking about this essay you wrote for Equator magazine in January, really central to which is the idea of “Homeland Empire” that you write about. This notion — which is linked with your last point about the long-term ripple effects in Iran and beyond that we can’t necessarily account for yet — this notion that you cannot understand Trump’s project if you separate the realms of the domestic and the foreign.
That what we’ve heard for years about the U.S. turning its global wars back on its own citizens is happening now. That it’s more than a disturbing phenomenon. It’s a symptom of this broader rot at the core of U.S. institutions, which Trump is an outgrowth of.
You write, “Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: Call it ‘Homeland Empire.’”
What is the utility of that specific framing, and what does it tell us that we don’t already know or understand about Trump?
NS: I do think that the concept of the “homeland,” which really comes into focus in the global war on terror. And there’s a great book by Richard Beck called “Homeland,” which has been really important for me. It’s suggested that national security and the security complex needed to be in some ways reshored.
You have the development of the Department of Homeland Security, which is a massive government reorganization, creating a whole new government department that you might even think of as being on par with the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. So there’s the beginning of a reorientation institutionally in terms of policy. Of course, [George W.] Bush frames it in a very telling way. He says, we have to be able to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. That’s still within the old model, even though the model is shifting.
It’s the old model which tells us Americans are going to be safe as long as we keep our power projection and fighting the enemies and the bad guys all around us. That idea that there are threats everywhere, and that the United States has this global mandate and remit to fight them — that really does go back to the end of World War II and the Cold War. So there’s a long arc of that thinking. But what begins to shift in the global war on terror, and partly because of the attacks of 9/11, is this sense that the homeland is actually under a real threat. That it actually can be attacked. It can be destabilized.
Now, that doesn’t just come out of 9/11. If you think about the period since the end of the Cold War, the search for new enemies dissipates. If you’re as old as I am, you remember when they were promising a huge peace dividend. Of course, the wars in the Middle East immediately begin to ratchet up. But the other thing that begins to ratchet up is the war on crime and the war on migrants. If you track the government spending — that precedes the origins of the Department of Homeland Security — on the prison complex and on the border–control complex, those are also going through the roof. They’re being imagined, again, in terms of this primary sense that Americans are being rendered insecure by street criminals, by migrants coming across the border, and now also by terrorists who might infiltrate.
If you remember back to the war on terror period when Bush was fighting in Iraq, some Republican congressmen then were already running ads saying terrorists and migrants were essentially the same thing — that brown people coming across the border wanting to do us harm. So the idea that the terrorists, the migrant, the criminal represent this new nemesis that is actually now much more proximate, that has been building up for a long period of time. It’s been helping to produce spending streams, funding streams, institutions. And Trump has cemented it into a single ideological complex.
“The idea that the terrorists, the migrant, the criminal represent this new nemesis … has been building up for a long period of time. It’s been helping to produce spending streams, funding streams, institutions. And Trump has cemented it into a single ideological complex.”
One of the things Trump was very, very clear about, even though he promised that he was going to be a peace president and wind down the wars and the forever wars, not be involved in overextension of American power overseas, et cetera, et cetera, which he numerously described as foolish, reckless — even though he did support the Iraq War, let’s not forget that.
He also said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home. He began to imagine bringing the fight home through the framework of a mass deportation campaign through the idea of making what was already a paramilitary organization in a sense — Customs and Border Protection, but more or less confined to the border — bringing that into the interior of the country. Adding huge amounts of funding to DHS to build up an immigration police with paramilitary characteristics.
We’ve seen the results of that over the last year. The idea is that it’s only the illegals who are being governed violently or the only the criminals. They’re always careful to say that, but that’s actually not how it’s played out at all. The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.
AL: Right. The end result is the expansion of state power and state violence.
NS: Right.
AL: So this brings us to Minneapolis. We’re seeing this massive escalation of state violence at home and abroad, while the public is also weathering increasingly difficult economic hardship, which is being exacerbated again by the war in Iran.
That is the same issue that many people argued posed such an obstacle to former President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, and what brought us a second Trump term, right?
NS: Yeah.
AL: This economic hardship issue, this is the time that you would expect the height of mobilization by the opposition. While we’ve seen massive public opposition to ICE raids. We have “No Kings” protests; there’s another one planned for this weekend. But we’ve also seen the state deploy intense violence in response to that opposition, obviously killing two protesters in Minneapolis.
Do you think that the state’s response has effectively crushed whatever opposition has come up? Whether the answer to that is yes or no, where does the opposition go in this increasingly hostile environment?
NS: I think it’s a good question, and it’s definitely one that I’ve been mulling over. We would all like to see the streets filled with people again like 2020. I do think Americans have proved more attuned to violence at home and violence against their own neighbors and in their own neighborhoods. I think that’s been amazing and inspiring.
It really gives the lie to what the Trump administration professes when JD Vance says something like, anybody would be uncomfortable, having someone next door to them who speaks another language. It’s actually not true. Actually Americans, even in small towns, even in rural spaces, have grown accustomed to living alongside people who are very different and figuring out how to either live and let live, or sometimes even more affirmatively, to cooperate, to play soccer together, to be in civic organizations, to go to church.
I’m not saying the United States isn’t still a segregated country, or that there isn’t racial animus or distrust or any of those things. But I think we really underestimate the degree of ordinary comity among people.
Obviously what we saw in Minneapolis and in Chicago and other places is almost like a really spontaneous emergence of that civic energy where people are basically like, “No, this is not OK in my city.” These might even be people who have sensitivities and anxieties about unauthorized migration, which is a legitimate issue to debate. But the violence and impunity and lack of due process and disruption is offensive to people. We’ve seen the results of that in public polling data. We see it in the ways in which people act on the streets.
I think wars overseas are more difficult for people in the United States. They feel more distant. The propaganda is so thick. You’ve been told for decades that Iran is some alien power that is irrational and in search of a nuclear bomb that might be eventually fired at like New York or something. It’s absolutely worthless propaganda, but it does its work. It’s very, very tied into the protection and safety of Israel, which is the most heavily propagandized topic in the U.S. foreign policy realm. People don’t really know what to think. And it doesn’t seem to affect them in the immediate sense — especially when you’re bombing from the sky and using remote warfare.
But now they’re really at a crossroads. They are amassing troops in the region. If American troops start going into combat situations and getting killed, you’re going to see people start to pay a lot more attention as gas prices rise, as the cost of everything increases.
“It’s very, very tied into the protection and safety of Israel, which is the most heavily propagandized topic in the U.S. foreign policy realm. People don’t really know what to think.”
Trump is going to be bedeviled with all the problems that Biden faced because people are going to feel that very profoundly. People who, as you say, are living paycheck to paycheck who are struggling to make rent, for whom a $1 increase in the price of gas when they have to commute two hours each day is actually a huge amount of money on a weekly basis. Trump owns that.
So they’re extremely reckless people, and I have to think that politically they will pay a huge price. They already are. As long as we — that is, those of us who are opposed to this — are able to exercise our civil and political rights both in the streets and at the ballot box. That obviously is going to be a real question. Is repression going to ramp up? Is there going to be chicanery around the elections? I think we can expect both of those things. Then we’re going to see where the balance of forces are. But I don’t think we should interpret the current quietness around the anti-war stuff necessarily as evidence that civic energies and oppositions has been beaten.
AL: To that point, these No Kings protests are taking place around the country on Saturday. Co-founder of the group, Indivisible, which organizes the protest, Leah Greenberg, told The Guardian, “Every No Kings is going to be about the issues that are driving people most at that moment and it’s also going to be about the collective ways in which they begin to harm our democracy.”
I want to talk a little bit more about the challenges. We touched on this a little bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper in the challenges of protesting under the second iteration of the Trump administration, and whether it’s fair for us as journalists and analysts to question the efficacy of protests at a time when they’re being met with paramilitary forces. I’ve seen some questions about the specific demands of the No Kings protests or lack thereof. I’m curious, what do you make of that?
NS: I tend to be a little bit on the side of, let a thousand flowers bloom. Anybody who wants to organize something and signal their opposition, that’s great. But I do think the opposition has to be sharpened and has to become more pointed around what the issues are.
I think, by necessity, the anti-ICE protests have become that way. There’s obviously synergies between these different things. People find their ways into different kinds of organization and different senses of action that may not always be strictly compatible with each other.
Again, the anti-war stuff is very specific. We’ve lived through a period where the protests against the war in Gaza were pretty brutally suppressed by the Democratic Party and by the very institutions that the Trump administration is trying to destroy. So the ways universities responded, the ways nonprofits and civic organizations often remained very silent on Gaza, the way the Democratic Party was obviously complicit fully with the genocide in Gaza — all of these things have left a mark on some of the most militant people who were out there in front and who were right, and who were correct in the positions that they were taking after October 7 about the Israeli response and the disproportionality of it, and the mass killing of civilians and the way in which it had the potential to unleash a regional war. And of course, Israel started this regional war three years ago.
That’s a huge problem for some of these big-tent protest projects, which are very tied into the Democratic Party — a Democratic Party that in some ways we are now engaged in a huge battle over. Israel has split the Democratic Party. We have one side, which is the side I would say that I’m on, that really thinks that there has to be an extremely hard red line around future funding for Israel, around AIPAC and the use of PAC money that is flowing into candidates and races on behalf of Israeli interests.
This is very divisive because of the way in which it pricks this whole set of arguments about whether it’s antisemitic and so forth, and it’s a real dilemma. But I think we have to be able to win this battle in the Democratic Party. Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves in just another situation where even if the Democratic Party is back in power, it is still like the controlled opposition.
[Break]
AL: I wanted to touch on the same thing basically that happened with Gaza protests, we can map that back onto BLM protests in 2020, which is that Democrats were nominally supportive of this. But when it came down to brass tacks, they were still sending police to crush these protests. Then when it was time to actually pass legislation, at least at the federal level, there was basically like a do nothing bill that Democrats calculated would pacify this movement for the long term.
Now we’ve seen that so much of that momentum was basically co-opted or diluted and that all the things that people were calling for in terms of police reform, the evidence that none of that happened is the paramilitary police that we’re seeing respond to all these protests today.
NS: For sure.
AL: People still have a bit of that taste in their mouth of OK, even when Democrats were in control or even when these protests seem to be taking off, what was the legislative payoff? I’m curious today, whether we need to be thinking differently about what we are going to count as a positive result of a protest or as an effective protest, whereas we could argue that community resistance in Minneapolis and backlash to the agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti led to in some ways DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Officer Greg Bovino losing their jobs, while there’s still been very little change to DHS policy. So I wonder how we value those outcomes — those cosmetic outcomes versus long-term legislative change and knowing that the Democratic Party that we have is the one that we have? Does that alter the calculus with these protests or should it?
NS: When you think back to BLM, you could say they helped Biden win 2020, even as then, it not only translated into the very anemic policy wins, but then also there was a belated or delayed backlash, which exploited some of the weaknesses of the movement itself, of course. The ways in which it had already had some of these problems internal to it around leadership, around nonprofit funding, around internal corruption and so forth, and the sidelining of grassroots protests — that really going back to Ferguson — really emerged out of direct community action and need based upon the experience of being under police occupation.
We have to be able to learn from these cycles. I don’t think the lesson necessarily is that protest is ineffective or irrelevant. Protests are going to happen. We live in what my dear old friend who passed away last year, Joshua Clover called the “age of riots.” People are under stress. A lot of this emerges very spontaneously. There’s obviously a viral environment that allows people to gather in outrage — the outrage is palpable throughout the society. It crosses left and right.
Public opinion is what they like to call thermostatic. It can change and switch very quickly. We haven’t really been able to figure out on the left how to harness that and develop that for a more ambitious and large scale transformation. To harness it for a larger scale transformation, we really have to be able to start thinking across different kinds of divides. That would be my view.
The modalities of certain kinds of identity politics have not served us well, ultimately. The hierarchies of oppression have not served us well, especially when they’re advanced by people who are not actually interested in economic redistribution or anti-war politics. It’s quite easy and we’ve all encountered this, someone who will talk about priorities of anti-racism or anti-sexism or homophobia or whatever else. But actually basically just has mainstream Democratic Party politics at this point. So the Democratic Party succeeded in harnessing and appropriating protest energies that legitimately came out of the experience of people who are being racially brutalized. But people being racially brutalized — and this is something that, someone like even [Martin Luther] King, understood very well at the end of his life — need a big alliance to be able to make any real change in this country.
That big alliance is actually going to involve an alliance with poor white people, many of which who have been part of the Trump coalition, and have been hailed by a certain Trumpian politics. I’m not saying all poor white people. But those coalitions, those kinds of cross class alliances that cross the parties that are oriented around what we might call left economic populist politics and anti-war politics are going to have to be built.
In my view, there’s really not much hope for us without building those without some root through mass politics that allows us to change the dispensations of the political reality we live under, which, for all the ways in which people talk about polarization, there’s a lot of bipartisan consensus between the Republicans and the Democrats around war, around economic policy, around taxes around monopolies, around feeding donor interests and around a willingness on both sides to use a culture war polarization discourse to keep their own base close while not really doing much for them. Unless we can really demystify that and really think about solidarity and alliances even with people we don’t necessarily agree with on everything or even like very much.
AL: This is something we’ve been talking about in our newsroom as well, like this bipartisan consensus on these issues, even when it’s coming from the conservative movement, like with people like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or even Megyn Kelly particularly criticizing the war in Iran and Israel’s influence. Sure, you can say that’s interesting, but I think the more instructive approach to thinking about something like that is OK, what do we take from this? Are people doing that because it’s politically expedient for them or because they’re trying to appeal to their base, or because they’re actually looking for a way to advance some counter policy at the national level? I feel like every other day I see news about the fact that these Republicans are breaking, but it’s like OK, does that actually matter?
NS: I want to be really, really, really clear about this. I think it’s a really important point to be clear about.
AL: Yeah.
NS: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Kelly, Candace Owens. I’ll leave Marjorie Taylor Greene on the side. I’m not sure, something about the sincerity of her conversion convinces me a little bit more for whatever reason.
AL: Interesting. OK. Yeah.
NS: These are odious people. These are reactionaries. These are people who actually would want to advance many of the same policies that Trump is advancing, particularly around deportation and mass incarceration. But who knows? President Tucker Carlson might preside over the final war against Iran.
Trump was anti-war until he was pro-war. Once these guys get hold of the machinery of state, which is what interests them, they’re absolutely interested in prosecuting a vision of the country that does not include people like us. That is deeply and profoundly hostile to democracy. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to the poor. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to immigrants and people of color. That’s deeply and profoundly hostile to women. There’s no question in my mind that that’s true and that we shouldn’t be paying much attention to their antagonisms towards Trump and the splits within MAGA, except in so far as those become tactically useful.
What I’m talking about when I say, public opinion is thermostatic, people who voted for Trump, who are working class and poor and stressed, don’t necessarily have an absolutely ideologically sealed and impenetrable view of the world, that those are the people that have to be admitted as possible parts of a bigger coalition.
My model there would be Zohran Mamdani going out into Queens, the day after Trump was elected, and talking to people who voted for Trump and trying to figure out why and trying to say that he could offer something different. That to me is really different than saying that the Megyn Kellys of the world, these cynical influencers, are people that like we should take any sucker from.
AL: That we need in our coalition.
NS: Or that we need in our coalition. No, I think and I’m absolutely not saying that we don’t continue to draw really hard red lines around certain things. You’re not allowed to be racist, you’re not allowed to be sexist. Like these are not acceptable positions.
I don’t want to get back into an argument about whatever cancel culture and all of that, but that has been not useful ultimately, for our side, like we have to be able to be people who can allow an internal differences in dialogue, even over issues that are really contentious and painful to people and allow people to move forward and grow. That’s how you develop solidarity. That’s how you build it.
AL: I’ve spoken to people on the left who think that it’s a good idea to go on Tucker Carlson’s show because he reaches all of these people and I think we have to be able to differentiate between having an inclusive tent and allow for growth and allow for change. The difference between that and enabling people who will betray you when it’s convenient for them. And I think that’s difficult in some ways. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, but I do think it’s frustrating to me that I see so many people like, “You gotta hand it to these people for coming out against the Iran war.” Do we? I don’t know that we really have to do that.
NS: It’s a super tough question, and I don’t think anybody has a single clear program for how to deal with it. I remember back to when people on the left were condemning Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan. I remember thinking at that time Bernie should go on Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan has some terrible attitudes and some terrible views and some very misinformed conceptions of the world. Maybe in an ordinary sense too, as a reactionary, the reactionary guys I like grew up with in New Jersey who I played soccer with or whatever. Just normal reactionary opinions that you encounter, if you talk to ordinary people. He’s like that and that’s why he’s popular. So should Bernie go on there and talk to him? I thought so, and a lot of people really condemned Bernie back then. I think that was when we were in a much more stringent cancel culture mode.
Now would I say the same thing about Tucker Carlson? No, because I think Tucker Carlson has serious political ambitions and is actually like a master manipulator of media. That’s my call, that’s how I would judge it. Somebody else might judge it differently.
I don’t think it’s super easy. I feel like we have to believe in the possibility of building bigger coalitions through dialogue, through change, through struggle sometimes. Yet I think the questions you’re asking and the way that we will pose these questions in public, we should be very clear about what we think.
AL: I’ll close with this question. I’m going to quote your wonderful essay one more time. For Equator, you write that the future is really up to the leadership of the opposition that Trump has turned America toward, “the vulgar, predatory, racist, great-power conflicts of old. He does not transcend history, but affirms what [Stephen] Miller calls its ‘iron laws.’ Reversing this will require something more than a return to normalcy, particularly as the American security state tends to be accretive – recent history suggests that it only metastasises. A more profound and comprehensive democratic renewal and reconstruction is needed.”
What does that mean? What does the democratic renewal and reconstruction entail? Who is involved and what are they doing?
NS: I think we’ve been talking about it. It’s clearly going to have to be at multiple scales. There’s a civic scale to all of this, a local scale to all of this, that I’m seeing in New York City where I live, and extremely, heartened by it. It also has its limits.
There’s a national electoral scale. Our government, which accesses billions and billions of dollars of our tax money to do all kinds of terrible things with it. We have to be able to transform and change that. A lot of people I know have given up on electoral politics altogether, but I don’t see any way to not work also at that scale.
So to me it’s always we’re all always thinking about something like a dual power struggle, like a struggle within civil society and civil society organizations, and a struggle to actually affect the dispensations of our government. For me, primarily right now, that is the struggle inside the Democratic Party to change what it is to make it a true opposition party in the current moment, to make it a party that will really actually try, actually, not try, but succeed in constructing a real majority for the kinds of policies that we would support, which would involve shrinking the defense budget, which would involve something like Medicare for all, which would involve investments in the ordinary things people need to live and work in this country, including various kinds of social insurance, including transportation, including energy.
There were some elements of this in the Biden program. I think it’s really clear how those went off the rails, particularly in the foreign policy arena. The foreign policy arena often does derail domestic reform in the United States. That’s why we need to think of these things together.
So I have an analysis, for what it’s worth. I don’t really have a program because we’re so far — it feels like we’re so far — from being able to affect the change that we need. That leads a lot of people to say “Well, let’s do the best we can. Let’s win this race or that race and maybe eke out another bare majority.” But I think every time we do that — and I think those of us who have lived long enough through enough political cycles see this — every time we do that, we’re left with something that’s just a little bit shittier.
AL: [Laughs]
NS: Now with Trump, I think we see that the bottom is potentially going to drop out here, Americans are going to be poorer after this war. They’re going to be more stressed, they’re going to have fewer resources, they’re going to be more afraid. The challenge then is going to be even greater politically because the ability of politicians to exploit these kinds of stresses and anxieties is obviously immense, particularly in this media ecosystem that is now essentially owned by billionaires and manipulated through algorithms. We really face a serious challenge. We have a lot of decentralized power, but we haven’t really been able to figure out how to get hold of some of the real levers of power in this country.
AL: The evergreen story of the left.
NS: Yes.
AL: Nikhil, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you for joining us. This was a wonderful discussion.
NS: Thanks for having me, Akela. I really appreciate it.
AL: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy-editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.
Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.
Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.
The post Protesting the Smash-and-Grab Presidency With Nikhil Pal Singh appeared first on The Intercept.
More than 850 Tomahawks have been fired in just four weeks, people familiar with the matter said, alarming some Pentagon officials because the weapon’s supply is limited.
Thousands of No Kings events will be fueled by anger over ICE violence, the Epstein files released and a war in Iran. These protests have power
Things have changed since the last major No Kings protests, in October 2025. Back then, an estimated 7 million people poured into the streets to protest against the Trump administration; this Saturday, at more than 3,000 events planned nationwide, the crowds are likely to be even bigger. In part, that’s because the Trump administration keeps pursuing more and more unpopular agendas, often with a sadism and indifference to popular opinion that becomes prominent in the news.
In January, ICE agents in Minneapolis killed two protesters – first Renee Good on 7 January and then Alex Pretti on 24 January – who were in the streets trying to obstruct the agency’s kidnappings and voice their opposition to the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing program. The two dead Americans were among the thousands who have become enraged at ongoing revelations of the extent and cruelty of Trump’s mass kidnapping, detention and ethnic cleansing program, which has swept up tens of thousands of men, women and children.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Miriam Liliana Molina Mendez now owns the café inside the Delaware Art Museum where she has worked for 10 years. She’s working to make her coffee shop, and the museum, more accessible for the Latino and immigrant communities.
Miriam Liliana Molina Mendez found herself speaking Spanish.
The “Hola, buenos dias,” directed toward a stocky man in his mid-60s with a thick black mustache, escaped her mouth before she realized it wasn’t her usual, “Good morning, how can I help you?”
The man stood inside Molina Mendez’s coffee shop, Kaffeina Café, which occupies a corner of Wilmington’s Delaware Art Museum — facing the sculpture garden — on a recent March morning.
She quickly began apologizing for the slip-up.
Molina Mendez had welcomed a customer into her coffee shop in Spanish. She had never done that before.
But without skipping a beat, the man brightly responded, “Buenos dias,” and rattled off his coffee order in Spanish.
“I love it when people come and speak Spanish with me,” Molina Mendez said in her native tongue.
Molina Mendez has worked at the museum’s café for about a decade. The mother of four began there in 2016 as a chef, holding down two to three jobs just to make ends meet.
She weathered the COVID pandemic and multiple café owners. When the opportunity came to take over the business, Molina Mendez was scared. Maybe it was not the right time. Maybe she did not have enough money, or maybe her English was not the best, she thought.
Despite her fears, she bought the shop in 2024. Now, Kaffeina is all hers.
Molina Mendez overhauled the café’s fare to focus on fresh ingredients and innovative dishes with dashes of her home country, Mexico, sprinkled throughout. She hopes the change differentiates Kaffeina from most other museum cafeterias that offer the same basic fare.
Molina Mendez wants to welcome more customers from Latino and immigrant communities into her establishment. Many Spanish-speaking Latinos and immigrants are often afraid of trying new places because they are worried they won’t be understood — just as Molina Mendez felt when she first came to Delaware.
There are so few places where Latina mothers can gossip for the whole day, or where people can swing by to pick up their breakfast on the way to work, she said.
Kaffeina, she hopes, can be that place.
“It is a reflection of our community growing,” said Iz Balleto, a longtime customer of the café and cultural program manager at the Delaware Art Museum.
“After all,” Balleto added, “the American dream is real for those who understand what perseverance is about.”
Molina Mendez first became a mother when she was 17 years old. Two years later, at her mother’s urging, she fled a domestic violence situation and came to Delaware from her home in Mexico City.
She started cleaning hotel rooms off U.S. Route 13 for $6.50 an hour — she still remembers the exact rate. Relatives told her only to go from her house to work, and back again, advising her not to go out.
From the hotel, Molina Mendez began working at a nearby Johnson & Johnson factory and worked multiple jobs from then on, ranging from McDonald’s and Arby’s, to the University of Delaware cafeteria and as a chef at the Newark Country Club.
In 2016, she began working as a chef at the museum café in the mornings. The coffee shop then closed after the onset of the pandemic, but Molina Mendez returned once it reopened under new ownership.
She helped change the menu, suggesting more diverse offerings and fresh food like tamales, ramen and empanadas. Then, she took over when the previous owner retired.
Molina Mendez was “very scared” to take on the café from the previous owner. What would happen if it failed? What would happen if it succeeded?
She spoke with her family as she mulled the decision. They reassured her that she should buy the shop — it would be doing work she was already familiar with.
“And here I am,” Molina Mendez said.
Seeing Molina Mendez evolve into Kaffeina’s owner after working at the shop for so long was “amazing,” said Balleto, who has known the chef since she started in 2016.
Molina Mendez comes to work every day with a smile on her face and is always willing to try new things, said Heather Morrissey, director of operations at the Delaware Art Museum.
She started implementing different initiatives at the café, such as an after-hours Valentine’s Day dinner and a monthly tea party on the last Wednesday of every month — complete with porcelain teacups and delicate finger sandwiches.
Customers also do not need to pay the museum’s entrance fee to enjoy the café. Kaffeina has a separate entrance near the sculpture garden and is open from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
“I want everyone to know that they’re welcome,” Molina Mendez said.
Molina Mendez hopes her café becomes a generational heirloom, passed down to her children and grandchildren. She hopes to eventually open a separate breakfast locale, too.
But for now, she wants to make her place a mainstay for Wilmington’s Latino community.
As Molina Mendez finished speaking in her coffee shop on that recent March morning, a man with a white goatee and a baseball cap walked up to the counter. He retrieved his takeout order, sitting in a brown paper bag, and headed toward the exit.
Upon hearing Molina Mendez chat in Spanish as he headed out the door, the man turned around with a gleeful smile.
“Esta bonito hablar el espanol, verdad?” he said.
“It’s nice to speak Spanish, right?”
The post From employee to owner: How an immigrant-owned café is attracting more Latinos appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Low pressure brings unsettled conditions to southern Europe, and rain and snow to western and central areas
Southern Europe has been under a variety of severe weather warnings this week owing to widely unsettled conditions driven by an area of low pressure in the region. This area of low pressure – previously part of the system that brought colder conditions to swathes of the UK earlier this week – moved southwards across Europe through the middle of the week.
In doing so, it brought a cold front across western and central parts of Europe, with spells of rain and hill snow across the Alps on Wednesday, followed by snow showers on a brisk north-westerly wind. By Friday morning, accumulations of 20-40cm were expected above 600 metres, and 60-100cm above 1,000 metres in the Swiss Alps.
Continue reading...Former talent agency boss had closer relationship with sex offender than thought, and supported him after 2009 arrest
A female executive at the top of the modelling industry had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and introduced him to women on the agency’s books, a Guardian investigation has found.
Until last November, Faith Kates ran Next Management modelling and talent agency, which has represented the likes of Alexa Chung, Milla Jovovich and Billie Eilish, a position she held for decades as the founder of the business. She stepped down quietly just weeks before the first major Epstein files were released, saying she intended to focus on charity work.
18 July 2009 10.18am
I am and will always be your friend...Unconditionally...will always be there for you.
5 September 2009 7.47pm
Thinking of you a lot and hoping you are finally enjoying some please [sic] and quiet..know you are always in my thoughts and prayers. You are a good friend my dear friend..
5 September 2009 7.54pm
thanks,, lets get back to work.
Continue reading...Cuban officials have petitioned Pope Leo XIV to help persuade the Trump administration to ease its oil embargo, which is causing crippling fuel shortages and blackouts.
Sarah Strong has the most jump-off-the-page talent in the women’s game since Caitlin Clark, and UConn greats say she could be the best of them
Former WNBA All-Star turned Boston Celtics executive Allison Feaster was recently asked about the differences between high-level female and male hoopers.
“This is a very basic example,” the Celtics’ vice-president of team operations and organizational growth told the Far From the Tree podcast. “But most of the women have had exposure to different types of leadership. Most of the professionals have four-year degrees and even advanced degrees. Many of the professional women have lived outside of the US. Some of them are parents who are the primary caregiver. That is a very general observation, but I venture to say that’s not the same with the NBA players.”
Continue reading...This story works best on ProPublica’s website.
Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks.
When immunization rates drop, however, plagues from the past can come roaring back, as measles has in American communities where parents decided not to vaccinate their children.
Imagine what would happen if even the people who wanted shots couldn’t get them.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt the handful of companies that make most shots for American children to stop selling them here. Over the last year, he has been transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of vaccines into one that questions their safety here and around the world.
Shortly after Kennedy was nominated, questions swirled over how he might overhaul America’s immunization system. Two Stanford University researchers wondered how many people would suffer if vaccination rates dropped or shots became entirely unavailable for four of the most infamous diseases: polio, measles, rubella and diphtheria.
Outbreaks often start when an American catches one of these illnesses abroad and returns home. So epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, who is also an infectious diseases doctor, built a model to simulate how the four contagions could spread from sick travelers based on each state’s vaccination rates.
Since a sizable chunk of the population is currently vaccinated, some of the infections wouldn’t get a foothold right away. But over time, as more babies are born and not vaccinated, a larger share of the population would become susceptible.
The professors ran thousands of simulations for each disease, producing a range of possible outcomes. From there, they figured out the average number of deaths and disabilities over a 25-year period.
Their model shows that at current vaccination rates, the nation is already teetering on the brink of an explosion in measles cases — one that would be virtually wiped out with just a 5% increase in vaccination. But if current rates drop by half, all four diseases could return.
The researchers’ modeling of the worst-case scenario assumes a quarter century where no one could get the shots. It doesn’t account for the likelihood of parents going abroad to find vaccines or politicians intervening to ensure drugmakers offer them again.
But the results demonstrate in stark terms how vital shots are and what’s at stake if policy changes interfere with Americans’ ability to vaccinate their kids.
ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with the Department of Health and Human Services. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and continues to routinely recommend the shots for children.
When they published their paper in early 2025, Kiang and Lo emphasized the outcomes from less extreme drops in vaccination rates, in part because the peer reviewers suggested those were more realistic. Back then, Kennedy was in his earliest days at HHS.
A year later, though, a scenario where no one can get these vaccines doesn’t feel as far-fetched, Kiang said. “Every week that goes by,” he said, “that seems more plausible.”
Lo said that their goal was to show policy makers, “if we make certain decisions, this is what could happen.”
So ProPublica decided to illustrate what a future without vaccines could look like.
Polio, which mainly affects young children, can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis in the limbs or in the muscles needed to breathe. In the 1950s, many people were kept alive in iron lungs, huge metal contraptions that encased the body up to the neck and used pressure to force air in and out of the lungs.
Ventilators have since replaced the antiquated equipment, but modern medicine can’t reverse the paralysis. The model assumes 1 out of every 200 unvaccinated people who catch polio would become paralyzed.
Imagine if this group of kindergartners became paralyzed by polio.
They would be a tiny sliver of the 23,000 people the model predicts could be paralyzed by polio over 25 years if no one is getting the vaccine.
That 23,000 is the model’s average. It’s the equivalent of more than a thousand kindergarten classes. (The model results range from 0 to more than 70,000 cases of paralytic polio.)
Measles is among the most contagious diseases in history. A child can spread it before they even get a rash, and the virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after they leave a room.
Famous for its blotchy spots covering the body, measles is a respiratory disease that can lead to pneumonia and swelling of the brain. Before the vaccine, just about everyone got measles, and every year 400 to 500 Americans died.
The model assumes that 3 out of every 1,000 people infected with measles would die.
Over the last 25 years, six people who contracted measles in the U.S. died from the disease.
If Americans could no longer get the vaccine, the model predicts measles would spread quickly.
The model shows that measles could kill about 290,000 people over 25 years.
Rubella, also known as German measles, is usually mild in kids and adults. But it’s devastating to a developing fetus. If an infection occurs very early in pregnancy, there’s up to a 90% chance that the baby will be born with congenital rubella syndrome. These children frequently have heart defects, deafness or blindness — and sometimes all three. Many have intellectual disabilities, too. About a third of babies with the syndrome die before their first birthday. A U.S. rubella epidemic in the mid-1960s left 20,000 newborns with congenital rubella syndrome.
If the vaccine went away, we wouldn’t see babies born with congenital rubella syndrome right away. The unvaccinated children would first need to grow into their childbearing years.
The model shows that cases would begin to climb after about 15 years. And within 25 years, 41,000 babies could be born with congenital rubella syndrome.
Diphtheria, a major killer of children in the 1900s, was known as the “strangling angel.”
The disease’s name comes from the Greek word for leather because diphtheria’s toxin attacks the respiratory tract. Dead tissue builds up in the throat like a thick piece of hide, sealing off a swollen airway.
For those who escape suffocation, the toxin can damage the nerves and heart. Patients who seem better can drop dead weeks later.
An antitoxin made from the blood of horses needs to be given promptly, but it is in short supply. Children elsewhere in the world have died waiting for it.
The disease is rare and much less contagious than measles or rubella. But it’s also far more deadly. The model assumes only one infected traveler would arrive every five years and that 1 out of every 10 unvaccinated people who catch diphtheria would die.
The researchers found it’s very possible nobody would die of diphtheria in the 25-year period their model covers. But we would be playing a game of high-stakes roulette if we lost the vaccine. There is a chance that the strangling angel could become devastating again.
Remember the 23,000 people who could be paralyzed without a polio vaccine? A world without a diphtheria vaccine could be even worse.
On average, the model predicts 138,000 deaths from diphtheria.
In the worst-case scenario, though, the model shows that more than a million people could die from diphtheria in 25 years without a vaccine.
The chance of that is remote, but it’s the gamble we’d all be taking.
The post The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish appeared first on ProPublica.
There is a growing network of New York City activists who clean up garbage for fun.
Merlin, a miniature Vietnamese potbellied pig, was recognized by Guinness World Records for his large Instagram following
Senate approved package in rare overnight session but House needs to act to end partial shutdown and fund TSA
The US Senate has passed legislation that will finance most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but withhold funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The Senate approved the funding package by a voice vote in a rare overnight session, ahead of Congress’ scheduled two-week recess on Friday. The agreement would fund the DHS subagencies affected by the lapse in funding which has lasted almost six weeks, such as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), US Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa).
Continue reading...Undercover reporter gets a taste of the sprawling fraud industry in which cryptocurrencies play a crucial role
The holiday flat near(ish) the Roman ruins of Pompeii was “disgusting”, and smelled of “a mix of dampness and sewage”, according to one reviewer on Google Maps. I never visited, but I gave it five stars.
I did the same for a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel across the River Thames, an Ibis budget hotel in east London that is part of the Accor group, a central Travelodge and the nearby Hyatt Place – some of the best-known hotel brands in the world. Scattered in there were requests for reviews for hostels and B&Bs in Genova, Naples, Maastricht, Krakow and Brussels. For a few days I had a new job: writing fake reviews on Google Maps in exchange for cryptocurrency.
Continue reading...Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is said to view US-Israeli war as ‘historic opportunity’ to remake Middle East
Saudi Arabia has urged the US to ramp up attacks on Iran, a Saudi intelligence source has confirmed, while it is weighing a decision on whether to join the fight directly.
The Saudi source confirmed reporting in the New York Times that said the kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has urged Donald Trump not to cut short his war against Iran, and that the US-Israeli campaign represented a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East.
Continue reading...Piece by late South African artist Dumile Feni is part of new series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme
On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.
While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unnerving juxtaposition of man and beast, light and dark, and innocence and cruelty, are every bit as disturbing.
Continue reading...Keir Starmer promises to help parents limit children’s online activity as government issues guidance to families
Children under five should spend no more than an hour a day on screens, new government advice says.
Screen time for children under two should be avoided except for shared activities encouraging interaction, families are advised.
Continue reading...CERN has confirmed it will host an expanded version of Open Research Europe, the EU-backed fee-free open access publishing platform that works to "keep knowledge in public hands." Research Professional News reports: A little over a year ago, 10 European research organizations announced that they would add their support to Open Research Europe, to broaden eligibility beyond only those researchers funded by the EU research program. Earlier this year, RPN reported that this group had expanded further and that Cern was set to host the broadened version of ORE, currently provided by the publisher F1000. On March 26, Cern itself finally announced the news, saying it will "provide the technical and operational infrastructure" for the broader version. It said this will build on its "longstanding experience in developing and maintaining open science infrastructures and community-governed services." [...] In its own announcement, the Commission said ORE will have a budget of 17 million euros for 2026-31, with the EU providing 10 million euros. Since it launched five years ago, ORE has published more than 1,200 articles. Cern said the platform is "expected to support a growing number of research outputs each year." Last month, experts told RPN they thought uptake of the increased eligibility will depend on how the newly participating national organizations engage with their communities. Eleven members of Science Europe, a group of major research funding and performing organizations, are part of the expansion.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Trump has extended a pause on striking Iranian energy infrastructure until April 6.
President claims talks with Tehran regime are ‘going very well’ and says he is pausing ‘Energy Plant destruction’
Donald Trump has extended his deadline for Iran to open the strait of Hormuz by 10 days to 6 April after saying talks are “going very well”.
The president made the statement on Thursday in a social media post, saying: “As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days to Monday, April 6, 2026, at 8 P.M., Eastern Time,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
Continue reading...World No 1 wins semi-final 6-4, 6-3 at Hard Rock Stadium
American beats Muchova 6-1, 6-1 to continue domination of rival
Aryna Sabalenka believes she is ready for the challenge of facing her rival Coco Gauff in the Miami Open final as she stands one win away from winning Indian Wells and Miami in the same year for the first time.
“She’s a fighter,” Sabalenka said of Gauff. “She’s a great player, of course. We played a lot of matches, a lot of tight matches, a lot of big finals. And, yeah, she’s a great player and I’m really excited to face her in the final. I think it’s going to be a great battle and I cannot wait to play that match.”
Continue reading...The land mines were photographed outside Shiraz, a city located about three miles from one of several nearby Iranian ballistic missile sites.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 27.
The dangers of a strategy with no doctrine.
For America, the war’s benefits won’t outweigh its costs.
How America can avoid a Russian-style quagmire.
Malcolm Turnbull asks defence department official what Australia would do if the promised Virginia-class and Aukus-class submarines don’t arrive
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Australia will be left with no submarines if it abandons the Aukus deal with the US and UK, a senior defence official has warned, declining to publicly countenance an alternative plan if Australia’s promised nuclear-powered fleet does not arrive under Australian command.
“Defence has been directed to pursue Aukus and we are pursuing Aukus and that’s our plan. I would not venture into the space about ‘Plan B’ or ‘Plan C’,” defence department deputy secretary, Hugh Jeffrey, told a Sovereignty and Security Forum in Canberra on Friday.
Continue reading...Since last week, activists from several countries have left Mexican ports on vessels loaded with food and other supplies for Cuba, which faces a humanitarian crisis in the face of a U.S.-imposed fuel embargo.
A search is underway for an American Airlines flight attendant whose disappearance while on a layover in Medellín, Colombia, has left his loved ones desperate for answers.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Apple provided the FBI with the real iCloud email address hidden behind Apple's 'Hide My Email' feature, which lets paying iCloud+ users generate anonymous email addresses, according to a recently filed court record. The move isn't surprising but still provides uncommon insight into what data is available to authorities regarding the Apple feature. The data was turned over during an investigation into a man who allegedly sent a threatening email to Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel. "On or about February 28, 2026, Person 1 received an email from the email address peaty_terms_1o@icloud.com," the affidavit reads. Earlier on, the document explicitly says that Person 1 is Alexis Wilkins. [...] The affidavit says Apple then provided records that indicated the peaty_terms_1o@icloud.com email address was associated with an Apple account in the name of Alden Ruml. The records showed that account generated 134 anonymized email addresses, according to the affidavit. Law enforcement agents later interviewed Ruml and he confirmed he had sent the email, the affidavit says. Ruml said he sent the email after reading a February 28 article about how the FBI was using its own resources to provide security to Wilkins. The specific article is not named or linked in the affidavit, but a New York Times article published that same day described how Patel ordered a team to ferry his girlfriend on errands and to events.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Just got the board about 3 weeks ago, put about 189 miles on it. I'm not sure how I fell, I was only going about 10-14mph and the nose dropped and I fell forward. I rolled out of it but nowi well enough because I broke my clavicle in 2 spots and I have to call surgeon tomorrow. I'm so upset, everyone in my life (Girlfriend, mother, friends and even the nurse) say I should give it up and sell the onewheel but I don't want to. I just don't know what I did wrong but I don't want this to happen again. Ugh RIP to my daily streak Edit: more info if helpful Stock XRC, and 56% battery at time of crash. I had already been riding for about 25 minutes/7 miles from 99%
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An Iranian envoy has said South Korean ships can pass through the strait of Hormuz only after coordinating with Tehran, the Yonhap News Agency has reported.
Such an agreement had to be reached in advance of the transit, said Saeed Khuzechi, the Iranian ambassador to South Korea, at a press conference in response to a question about guarantees for South Korean vessels to navigate the vital conduit for oil.
Continue reading...  | With a couple years worth of additions it’s reached its final form(For now). Top: Wowgo 3E 300 miles Middle: Pint X ~150 miles Bottom: XRC ~150 [link] [comments] |
Navy searching for two boats that left Isla Mujeres last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board
Mexico’s navy said on Thursday it had activated a search-and-rescue operation in the Caribbean to locate two sailboats carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba after the vessels failed to arrive in Havana as scheduled.
In a statement, the navy said the two boats left Isla Mujeres, in the Mexican Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board.
Continue reading...Hawkeyes had already beaten No 1 Florida
Alvaro Folgueiras shines again for Iowa
No 11 Texas almost shock No 2 Purdue
Alvaro Folgueiras converted a critical three-point play when Nebraska only had four defenders on the floor, and ninth-seeded Iowa continued their unpredictable NCAA Tournament run under first-year coach Ben McCollum, beating Nebraska 77-71 in the Sweet Sixteen on Thursday night.
Bennett Stirtz scored 20 points and Folgueiras had 16 for the Hawkeyes (24-12), who knocked off top-seeded Florida in the second round on Folgueiras’ three-pointer in the closing seconds.
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We are awaiting the start of Donald Trump’s latest cabinet meeting, which was due to start at 10am eastern time. This will be the 11th such session Trump has staged since re-entering the White House in January last year. Previous meetings have been open and freewheeling – as well as newsworthy.
The Pentagon is preparing plans for a “final blow” in the war with Iran that could include deploying ground troops and a massive bombing campaign, Axios reports, citing four sources – including two US officials.
Continue reading...Federal judge finds Pentagon's effort to cut off the AI firm's access to federal contracts "likely unlawful."
Donald Trump said he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages – key US politics stories from 26 March 2026
Donald Trump said on Thursday he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages that have snarled travel around the country.
The US president said he was instructing the Homeland Security Department “to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports. It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it!”
Continue reading...Sign, scan and send official documents, straight from your iPhone -- no scanner necessary.
Its counterproductive lack of upgradability will no longer grate on workstation buyers.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The plans for several data centers in Delaware have garnered backlash from residents who are worried about their potential impact on energy costs and the environment. The outcome of this fight over environmental law will impact several of those proposals.
The plan for a massive data center near Delaware City received another major setback Thursday.
A state board unanimously upheld a decision from Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson that the data center is not allowed under the Coastal Zone Act, a landmark Delaware law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines.
“I’m overjoyed,” said Dustyn Thompson, chapter director of Sierra Club Delaware, the environmental advocacy organization that has been critical of the project. “I think it was the right decision.”
But the case will likely be appealed to higher courts, and it could take years to fully resolve.
The verdict was delivered to a mostly empty auditorium after about 14 hours of testimony over three days.
Developer Starwood Digital Ventures earlier this month appealed Patterson’s decision to the Delaware Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board, a rarely-used administrative body in charge of deciding on appeals of the secretary’s decisions.
The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s environmentally sensitive shorelines by prohibiting new heavy industry from them.
In his decision on the Starwood proposal, Patterson pointed to the data center’s proposed use of 516 backup diesel generators, which would operate in the case of a power outage or other emergency situation, as a reason for the heavy industry classification.
Together, they would rely on 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling.
Starwood’s attorneys from Wilmington-based Richards, Layton & Finger argued that the data center plan, dubbed Project Washington, does not have the characteristics of heavy industry.
“The Secretary has distorted what Project Washington is… and ignored binding case law in order to find a way to prohibit this project,” said lawyer Katharine Mowery, who represented Starwood at the hearing.
In recent years, the data center industry has been among the fastest growing in the country, with investors seeking the profits from an ongoing artificial intelligence boom. The exuberance appeared in Delaware in recent months with developers proposing several data center plans.
One of them, proposed near land that hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland north of Middletown, also sits within Delaware’s coastal zone boundaries and may have to comply with the provisions of the act.
Kenneth Kristl, former director of the Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, said previously that he thinks the losing side will likely appeal the decision to the Delaware Superior Court, then the Delaware Supreme Court.
He said he thinks the whole process will take between 18 months and three years.
The hearing was mostly a calm deliberation of the specifics of the Coastal Zone Act and whether data centers are a heavy industrial use.
Starwood’s lawyers argued that Patterson misdefined the data center plans by calling its 516 generators a “tank farm.” They called PBF Energy Senior Operations Director Jeff Hersperger as a witness, who said the generators are “not even a cousin to a tank farm.”
“If I go out in the airport and there are 4,000 cars there, and each of the cars has a 3-foot-by-3- foot gas tank on it, can I calculate that into acreage and convert that into a tank farm? Because that’s what you’re doing,” Hersperger said to DNREC’s lawyers.
PBF Energy owns the land slated for the data center.
During the board’s deliberations, member Willie Scott said exact definitions of these phrases are “kind of irrelevant.”
“They’re emission points, and they’re emitting enough to constitute themselves, as a collective, as a major source of air pollution,” he said.
Starwood’s attorneys also argued that Patterson should not have relied on a worst-case scenario when calculating the potential emissions from the backup generators.
In its Coastal Zone application, Starwood reported that the maximum possible hours the generators could operate would be 500 hours, or a little over 20 days, per year.
“Under this worst-case assumption, this proposed campus has the potential to emit more tons of nitrogen oxides than any other industrial use in the coastal zone, with the exception of the Delaware City refinery,” Patterson said in his decision.
Experts who testified on behalf of Starwood said that the generators would very likely operate for less than 20 hours a year based on testing requirements and the amount of power outages Delaware has faced historically.
But Suzanne Glatz, former director at the regional power grid operator PJM, testified on behalf of DNREC that data centers may need to use their generators more often than in the past because of regional power shortages.
The U.S. Secretary of Energy earlier this year issued a notice that his department would begin requiring large energy users to start using their backup generators to prevent power outages, rather than waiting for them to happen.
That kind of proactive use of generators could happen more often as more energy-hungry data centers join the grid, Glatz testified.
The post Delaware City data center environmental denial upheld by state board appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
With two unprecedented trial defeats, big tech firms face crisis akin to that faced by cigarette makers in the 1990s
In the span of just two days, the most powerful social media company in the world faced a more severe public reckoning than it has in years.
Jurors in California and New Mexico gave back-to-back verdicts this week that for the first time ever found Meta liable for products that inflict harm on young people. For years, lawmakers, parents and advocates have raised red flags over how social media can hurt children, but now the tech firms are being held to account via court rulings that could set long-lasting precedents.
Continue reading...Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann is likely to change his plea to guilty when he next appears in court, a source with knowledge of the case tells CBS News New York's Carolyn Gusoff.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 27, No. 1,742.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 27, No. 1,020.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 27 No. 550.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 27, No. 754.
Amazon's Spring Sale has deals on just about anything you could want, from vacuums to TVs and anything in between, and we're filtering out the fluff to find the real bargains.
A judge has blocked the Trump administration from labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and cutting off all federal work with the artificial intelligence firm, an early win for Anthropic in its bitter feud with the government.
United Airlines said the pilots saw the helicopter, received a traffic alert and leveled the aircraft.
President Trump announced the extension of the pause "per Iranian government request."
Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida is accused of using part of the $5 million to bolster her campaign and on luxury goods.
President Trump said he will sign an executive order to restart pay for TSA officers, who have gone more than a month without a full paycheck.
The decision follows activist pressure as Palantir faces growing scrutiny over NHS and UK government deals
New York City’s public hospital system announced that it would not be renewing its contract with Palantir as controversy mounts in the UK over the data analytics and AI firm’s government contract.
The president of the US’s largest municipal public healthcare system, Dr Mitchell Katz, testified last week before the New York city council that the agreement with Palantir would expire in October.
Continue reading...As Apple continues reimagining Siri for today's AI landscape, a Bloomberg report says it may be trying to include every chatbot on one platform.
Face-off is over company’s refusal to let defense department use its Claude AI model in autonomous weapons systems
A federal judge in California sided with Anthropic in its case against the Department of Defense on Thursday, ordering a temporary pause on the government’s punitive measures against the artificial intelligence firm.
Judge Rita Lin granted Anthropic’s request for a temporary injunction while the northern district court of California hears the company’s case. Anthropic argued that the Department of Defense and Donald Trump violated its first amendment rights in declaring the company a supply chain risk and ordering government agencies to cease using its technology.
Continue reading...President says order will ‘address this Emergency Situation’ as TSA employees have gone without pay during dispute
Donald Trump announced Thursday he will sign an order instructing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pay Transportation Security Administration agents immediately.
“I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports,” Trump wrote on social media. “I want to thank our hardworking TSA Agents and also, ICE, for the incredible help they have given us at the Airports.”
Continue reading...I’ll never grow tired of reading about the crazy tricks the Windows 95 development team employed to make the user experience as seamless as they could given the constraints they were dealing with. During the 16bit Windows days, application installers could replace system components with newer versions if such was necessary. Installers were supposed to do a version check, but many of them didn’t follow this guidance. When moving to Windows 95, this meant installers ended up replacing Windows 95 system components with Windows 3.x versions, which wasn’t exactly a goods thing.
So, they came up with a solution.
Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement.
↫ Raymond Chen
All of this happened entirely silently, and neither the installers nor the user had any idea this was happening. The Windows 95 team tried other solutions, like just making it impossible to replace system components with older versions entirely, but that caused many installers to break. Some installers apparently even went rogue and would create a batch file that would replace the system components upon a reboot, before Windows 95 could perform its silent fixes. Wild.
I used Windows 95 extensively, and had no idea this was a thing.
The Treasury Department plans to add President Trump's signature to new U.S. paper currency, a first for a sitting president.
Regular events at the Tasmanian festival, including the Winter Solstice Nude Swim and the Night Mass party, joined by Australian and international musicians and artists in a program dominated by Latin American art
A hallucinatory experimental film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling that can only be watched by one person at a time is heading to Australia as part of Tasmania’s 2026 Dark Mofo festival.
It’s estimated that only 500 people in the world have seen French artist Loris Gréaud’s film Sculpt since its premiere at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016 – though the exact figure is hard to know, since he later supplied the files to hackers to distribute over the dark web.
Continue reading...Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro and says it has no plans for future models. "The 'buy' page on Apple's website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac's homepage, where all references have been removed," reports 9to5Mac. From the report: The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | Got this board from my boss as a gift it was brand new in box but had been sitting for a while and was unfortunately out of warranty. It was giving the green light even after having plugged in for 48 hours. I was able to do the wheel spin trick and get the light to flicker white then red momentarily. I decided to open it up and trickle charge the battery which started at 17 v I then trickled it for 30 mins or so with a rc car battery charger it measured at 40v after charging it. I reconnected everything and plugged it in and it starting charging and I was able to connect my phone to the board. I am Mildly afraid of a battery fire and wasn’t sure if this charging temp is to high. Any help or success stories would be mad appreciated. [link] [comments] |
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over security concerns.
China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home routers, boxes that connect computers, phones, and smart devices to the internet.
↫ David Shepardson at Reuters
I’m sure the American public will be thrilled to find out yet another necessity has drastically increased in price.
Trump’s statement follows an Iranian report that it had rejected a 15-point U.S. ceasefire proposal, a move that still left the door open for a counteroffer.
Trump has yet to nominate a permanent CDC director and the Senate confirmation of his pick for top doctor is in limbo
The Trump administration’s “Make America healthy again” (Maha) agenda appears to be stalled as two of the government’s most influential public health positions sit empty.
Donald Trump has yet to nominate a permanent director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), leaving an agency that has been plagued by turmoil for the past year without a leader. At the same time, the president’s controversial pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, remains in limbo as her nomination stalls in the Senate.
Continue reading...It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.
↫ Chance Miller at 9To5Mac
If a Mac Pro falls in the back of the Apple Store and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Other winners include Raye for video of the year, Central Cee for best hip-hop act and Ezra Collective in jazz category
British golden girl Olivia Dean was the biggest winner at the 2026 Mobo awards, scooping best female act, album of the year and song of the year for the No 1 hit Man I Need.
Other big winners at the ceremony honouring the best of black music included Raye, whose song Where Is My Husband! won video of the year; Central Cee, who was awarded best hip-hop act; and Ezra Collective in the jazz category.
Best male act – Jim Legxacy
Best female act – Olivia Dean
Album of the year – Olivia Dean, The Art of Loving
Song of the year – Olivia Dean, Man I Need
Best newcomer – DC3
Video of the year – Raye , Where Is My Husband! (directed by The Reids)
Best R&B/soul act – Flo
Best alternative music act – Nova Twins
Best grime act – Chip
Best hip-hop act – Central Cee
Best drill act – Twin S
Best international act – Ayra Starr
Best media personality – Niko Omilana
Best performance in a TV show/film – Stephen Graham, Adolescence
Best African music act – Wizkid
Best Caribbean music act – Vybz Kartel
Best jazz act – Ezra Collective
Best electronic/dance act – Sherelle
Best gospel act – DC3
Best producer – P2J
Mobo global songwriter award – Pharrell Williams
Mobo lifetime achievement award – Slick Rick
Continue reading...Treasurer’s signature to be removed for first time since 1861 in change made to mark US’s 250th anniversary
Donald Trump’s signature will soon appear on US paper currency, the treasury department announced on Thursday.
The move marks the first time a sitting US president’s signature will appear on legal tender. To accommodate this change, the treasurer’s signature will be removed for the first time since 1861.
Continue reading...Petition seeks accountability from Salvadorian authorities over human rights violations at notorious Cecot facility
A group of 18 Venezuelan men whom the US expelled a notorious Salvadorian mega-prison are demanding that Salvadorian authorities be held internationally accountable for violation of human rights – detailing new allegations of torture, sexual assault and medical neglect.
A new petition, filed on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleges that El Salvador violated the human rights of these men, who were expelled to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) last year without charge.
Continue reading...The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is ramping up the need for more data centers across the US.
The midfielder is determined to make his mark for the US men’s national team, despite struggles in club soccer
Gio Reyna admitted on Thursday that news of his call-up to the US national team may have come as a surprise.
“I guess you could say it was sort of one of [Mauricio Pochettino’s] more difficult decisions, or I guess controversial decisions to maybe bring me in,” he told reporters in Atlanta, where the US national team has gathered ahead of friendlies against Belgium and Portugal. “Again, I can’t appreciate it enough. Love this team, love this staff, love this group of people. So just always honored to be here.”
Continue reading...Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley are pressing the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the EIA on Thursday, the two senators press the agency to publicly collect "comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures" on data centers, saying it's "essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from increasing electricity costs for American families." Wired reports: In December, EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said at a roundtable that he expects the EIA "is going to be an essential player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers" with respect to data centers. The agency announced on Wednesday that it would be conducting a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington, and Virginia, which will cover "energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, and cooling systems." While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information on behind-the-meter power. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to make sure that big tech companies that signed the agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers won't bear the costs of data center electricity use will stick to their promises. "Without this data, policymakers, utility companies, and local communities are operating in the dark," the senators write. The EIA mandates that other industries, including oil and gas and manufacturing, provide regular data to the agency; Hawley and Warren assert that the EIA should be able to collect similar information from data centers under the same provision. The provision is broad enough, Peskoe says, that it could absolutely be interpreted to encompass data centers. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill that would "enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity." It calls for a federal moratorium on AI data centers until stronger national safeguards are in place around safety, jobs, privacy, energy costs, and environmental impact.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The feature is aimed at artists who want to vouch for their releases.
Very basic edits, such as fixing typos or adjusting formatting, as well as certain full-article language translations, are permitted under the rule.
It’s an actual short term data logging, stored in the VESC RAM. That’s why it needs a special firmware, to allocate the buffer and expose it to the package. It’s logging at the native Control Loop frequency (so you have complete data), though especially with the frequency increasing the time period it captures is really short. I’ll be adding a sampling rate divider for the final 1.3 Refloat release to increase the captured time span by dropping samples.
The way it’s wired (by default) it starts logging on board engage and stops on disengage, so it can be used to diagnose nose dives even if you aren’t connected.
Gavin Newsom set to sign bill to rename 31 March holiday following sexual abuse allegations against labor leader
California lawmakers have voted to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day in the wake of shocking allegations that the labor leader sexually abused women and young girls.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, is expected to sign the bill on Thursday authorizing the renaming ahead of the state holiday on 31 March. The state has observed the holiday honoring Chavez, who in the 1960s built a major farm-worker labor rights movement California’s agricultural heartland, for more than two decades.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Continue reading...As AI use rises, many see it decreasing the number of jobs available.
OpenAI is reportedly pausing the erotic chatbot feature "indefinitely" in the latest example of shifting priorities.
Dow closed 450 points down and S&P dipped 1.7% while Nasdaq fell 2.3% into correction territory
US markets saw their biggest slump since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran on Thursday as Donald Trump said the conflict’s impact on oil prices had not been as bad as he expected.
The Dow closed 450 points down, while the S&P 500 dipped 1.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 2.3%, plunging into correction territory, which happens when an index falls at least 10% below its most recent peak.
Continue reading...JPMorgan is piloting a system that monitors junior investment bankers to avoid burnout (source paywalled; alternative source). "[T]he bank will seek to match up hours claimed by the bankers with digital activity," reports Bloomberg. "The tool won't be used for evaluation purposes, but is designed to provide a better estimate of employee workloads." From the report: The program will monitor the weekly digital footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings, the Financial Times reported earlier, adding JPMorgan plans to roll out the effort more widely across its investment bank. Banks on Wall Street are known for heavy working hours, but can in return offer salaries of as much as $200,000 for entry-level analyst and associate roles. "Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness -- not enforcement," a representative for JPMorgan said in a statement. "It's designed to support transparency, well-being, and encourage open conversations about workload."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Arm Holdings this week unveiled the AGI CPU, a new chip designed to serve the booming market for AI inference and agentic AI workloads. The AGI CPU marks a first for Arm, as it’s the first silicon Arm is offering directly to customers in its 35-year history (as opposed to selling IP or full subsystems). The UK company, which also launched a reference design for AGI CPU-based servers, clearly is bullish on the chip’s potential to capture a share of the AI boom, as its CEO predicting the new chip will bring in $15 billion in revenue by 2031.
The new AGI CPU boasts some impressive stats. The chip, which Arm co-designed with Meta, is based on a chiplet design using TSMC’s 3nm N3P process. Each of the 136 Neoverse V3 cores runs at 3.5Ghz (or 3.7 Ghz in a dual-chip configuration) and sports 2MB of L2 cache per core. Each core provides 6GBps in memory bandwidth, while the chip as a whole can tap into 6TB in DDR5 RAM across 12 lanes per chip, delivering 800 GBps of aggregate memory bandwidth at 100 nanoseconds of latency or less.
Arm AGI CPU blade for a rack-scale reference architecture
The new AGI chip features 96 lanes of PCIe Gen6 connectivity, and support for CLX 3.0 for memory expansion. Arm has bundled all of this within a 300-watt TDP. Arm is touting its new AGI chip’s memory bandwidth and per-thread performance, which it says will help customers meet emerging agentic AI workload requirements while staying within the energy budget.
The market for CPUs is hot at the moment, as the AI boom has increased demand for general-purpose chips that can handle a range of tasks that are required for AI inference and agentic AI. While powerful GPUs are favored for AI model training and the first stage of AI inference (called prefill), they are not ideal for the second stage of the AI CPUs (called decode), which requires a multitude of tasks to be completed, such as spinning up sandbox environments, running generated code, pulling data from the KV cache, processing SQL queries, and monitoring all these functions so they can be improved upon as part of the machine learning feedback cycle.
Last week at its GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia made a big deal out of Vera, its new 88-core ARM chip that its says delivers 1.5x the performance of standard X86 chips with 3x the memory bandwidth (which at 1.2 TBps per chip surpasses Arm’s new AGI CPU). Nvidia is also selling a full rack of Vera CPUs to handle tasks as part of its customers’ AI factory buildouts. It’s all part of Nvidia’s “inference king” economics.
Arm’s launch of the AGI CPU shows it’s also getting keen into “inference king economics.” The company, which traditionally has partnered with companies like Nvidia, Meta, Google, and Microsoft in the development of custom chips based on its ARM design, is now venturing forth into the chip business on its own.
Arm this week also rolled out new reference server configurations for super-dense rack deployments. The first reference design is based on the Open Compute Project DC-MHS design and uses the two-chip AGI CPU configuration that supports up to 272 cores per blade. With up to 30 blades per 36kW air-cooled rack, the reference design delivers a total of 8,160 cores. Arm is also working with Supermicro on a liquid-cooled 200kW rack capable of housing 336 AGI CPUs for over 45,000 cores, the company says. At 1 gigawatt AI factory scale, that translates into $10 billion in capital expenditure savings compared to X86, Arm claims.
“Delivering AI experiences at global scale demands a robust and adaptable portfolio of custom silicon solutions, purpose-built to accelerate AI workloads and optimize performance across Meta’s platforms,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “We worked alongside Arm to develop the Arm AGI CPU to deploy an efficient compute platform that significantly improves our data center performance density and supports a multi-generation roadmap for our evolving AI systems.”
Arm is working with a range of other partners on the AGI CPU rollout, including Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom. Chipmaker Cerebras clearly sees its Wafer Scale Engine as the preeminent chip for AI inference, but it also recognizes the need for smaller CPUs to handle the range of other tasks needed for successful AI deployments.
“These systems need purpose-built AI acceleration alongside efficient, scalable CPUs orchestrating data movement, networking, and coordination at scale,” said Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman. “Extending the Arm compute platform into AGI-class infrastructure is a positive step for the ecosystem and for customers deploying AI at global scale.”
In a launch even in San Francisco on March 24, 2026, Arm CEO Rene Haas said sales of the new AGI CPU chip alone would bring in $15 billion to the Cambridge, UK-based company by 2031. Haas forecast that his company, which had about $4 billion in total revenue for 2024, would total $25 billion by 2031.
Haas predicted that emerging AI inference workloads would quadruple demand for CPUs in the foreseeable future. “We may be under-calling that number,” Haas said, according to a story in CNBC. “I think the demand is higher than we think it is.”
The day after the announcement of the new chip, Arm’s stock (NASDAQ: ARM), increased by 16%. The company currently has a market capitalization of $166.8 billion.
While the Arm AGI CPU will undoubtedly assist with customers’ agentic AI workloads, it likely won’t result in achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) alone, as AGI is still considered by most AI experts to be decades away.
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Agentic AI Is Driving Workloads and Infra On-Prem and to the Edge
The post Arm Flexes with New Data Center CPU for AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.
Conservative former cabinet minister says nurse convicted of murdering seven babies has suffered a miscarriage of justice
The police force that conducted the investigation into the nurse Lucy Letby made “egregious” failures and did not follow official guidance or best professional practice, David Davis has said in parliament.
Speaking in the final parliamentary debate before the Easter recess, the Conservative former cabinet minister made a series of criticisms of Cheshire police and said Letby has suffered a miscarriage of justice.
Continue reading...President’s popularity top of mind at another weird and wild cabinet meeting – riff on merits of Sharpies included
They have become so notorious for displays of flattery and obsequiousness that critics have drawn comparisons with North Korea. Thursday’s cabinet meeting at the White House was no different.
Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, outflanked his fellow praise singers by saying he believes that Venezuela – which the US attacked in January – intends to honour the president with a statue.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Delaware Economic and Finance Advisory Council is a state panel responsible for estimating budget revenues, which consequently sets the bounds of state budget negotiations. While it was created to remove politics from the budget forecasting process, the dismissal of an appointee by the governor has sparked political tensions.
Gov. Matt Meyer fired a longtime Delaware budget forecaster on Wednesday, a day after a news report stated that he criticized the Meyer administration over transparency surrounding the state’s prominent corporate franchise.
In response, Delaware Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola issued a statement calling for the reinstatement of the official, Michael Houghton, who had served on the state’s budget forecasting committee for the previous nine years.
Sokola also indicated in his statement that Meyer’s decision amounted to “undue political interference.” He asserted that the termination was “for publicly asking questions about our State’s corporate franchise tax revenue.”
The critical comments could reopen tensions between the governor and senators within his own Democratic Party that have gone dormant following an acrimonious first year of the Meyer administration.
Meyer’s office declined to comment for this story.
Established in the 1980s, Delaware’s budget forecasting committee – known by its acronym, DEFAC – provides periodic reports estimating the amount of money Delaware could bring in annually from taxes and fees. Those figures are crucial to budget negotiations carried out each spring between lawmakers and the governor’s office.
The committee is made up of academics, business executives, and public officials who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Delaware Senate.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Houghton said he had asked during a DEFAC meeting last week why the Division of Corporations had not provided up-to-date revenue figures.
Houghton said he was confused that the numbers presented to the committee then did not include information from January and February. He also stressed his comments were not alarmist, saying he did not claim the “sky was falling.”
The Division of Corporations oversees Delaware’s sprawling, and lucrative, corporate franchise – an industry of attorneys, registered agents and millions of companies’ legal headquarters that generate about a third of Delaware’s general fund revenue.
In recent months, the Meyer administration has publicly celebrated a jump in the number of companies that domicile in Delaware to 2.2 million entities.
Following last week’s meeting, WHYY reported that Houghton was among three current or former DEFAC members who said “the absence of data is ‘unusual,’ ‘confusing’ and ‘lacks transparency.’”
Houghton said he did not explicitly mention transparency concerns. Still, he told Spotlight Delaware that he is troubled about an apparent “nexus between asking questions about available information” and his subsequent removal.
“I didn’t say anything about transparency. What I said was I thought there was more information that was available,” he said. “And it would be best to have it.”
Houghton also noted that over the past year he was the only DEFAC member who had also served under the previous administration of Gov. John Carney.
Carney and Meyer have held a tense relationship, at least since the former governor publicly supported former-Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall Long during the 2024 race for governor.
While it is typical for incoming governors to appoint new members of the committee, Houghton said that Alan Levin – DEFAC’s current chair – had asked Meyer to keep him on, despite the gubernatorial transition.
When reached for comment, Levin confirmed that last year that he had asked the governor to keep Houghton on as a member of DEFAC. Since then, he said, Houghton has proven to be “very helpful” on the committee.
Asked if he believed Houghton’s dismissal amounted to “political interference,” Levin noted that DEFAC members served at the pleasure of the executive branch, and said that governors have regularly swapped out members who had served under their predecessors.
Still, Levin also noted that he shared Houghton’s concerns about the revenue figures presented by the Division of Corporations. During last week’s budget meeting, Levin noticed that certain figures matched numbers presented in December, he said. That led the committee to surmise that the information presented did not include data from recent months.
“There is no way in hell it would be the exact same number,” Levin said.
Levin said DEFAC has since received assurances from Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez that members will receive up-to-date information at the committee’s next meeting.
Donor Notice
Alan Levin has supported Spotlight Delaware with a donation of at least $1,000. The funding bears no impact on Spotlight’s editorial decision-making per our Editorial Independence Policy.
The post Meyer removes longtime budget official following critical comments appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
BMA’s decision to withdraw from talks with government and NHS chiefs has sparked a war of words
NHS bosses have accused resident doctors of seeking to cause “maximum harm” to patients by striking for six days next month over pay and jobs.
Wes Streeting has given resident – formerly junior – doctors in England until 2 April to reconsider their rejection on Wednesday of his “generous” offer to end the dispute. It would have given them £700m in extra pay over the next three years.
Continue reading...Get ready for the Lyrids and the Eta Aquariids, coming soon to a sky near you.
Experts say the rulings could expose tech companies to more litigation and pressure them to make changes to their apps.
MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, is home to U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command and the Air Force's Air Mobility Command.
Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife appeared Thursday in federal court in Manhattan. Here's a look at his life behind bars.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Prospective Vizio TV buyers should know there's a good chance the set won't work properly without a Walmart account. In an attempt to better serve advertisers, Walmart, which bought Vizio in December 2024, announced this week that select newly purchased Vizio TVs now require a Walmart account for setup and accessing smart TV features. Since 2024, Vizio TVs have required a Vizio account, which a Vizio OS website says is necessary for accessing "exclusive offers, subscription management, and tailored support." Accounts are also central to Vizio's business, which is largely driven by ads and tracking tied to its OS. A Walmart spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica that Walmart accounts will be mandatory on "select new Vizio OS TVs" for owners to complete onboarding and to use smart TV features. The representative added: "Customers who already have an existing Vizio account are being given the option to merge their Vizio account with their Walmart account. Customers with an existing Vizio account can opt out by deleting their Vizio account." The representative wouldn't confirm which TV models are affected. Walmart's representative said the Walmart account integration is "designed to respect consumer choice and privacy, with data used in aggregated, permissioned, and compliant ways" but didn't specify how.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Research suggested resurgence in Christianity, especially among young people, but some respondents found to be ‘fraudulent’
A YouGov survey showing a significant rise in church attendance in parts of the UK has been withdrawn after some respondents were found to be fraudulent.
The poll was central to a Quiet Revival report, published by the Bible Society last year, which prompted news stories about an apparent resurgence in Christianity, particularly among young people.
Continue reading...YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., March 26, 2026 — IBM today announced new results that its quantum computer can simulate real magnetic materials with results that match neutron scattering experiments, marking a significant step towards using quantum computers as reliable tools for scientific discovery. The work, reported in a pre-print, was conducted by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee and IBM.
Credit: IBM
The ability to design new materials—such as better superconductors, more efficient batteries, or novel drugs—depends on understanding quantum behavior that is often challenging for classical methods to model. While quantum computers are expected to address this challenge, it has remained unclear whether today’s processors could deliver quantitatively reliable simulations of real materials. These results show that current quantum hardware, combined with new algorithms and quantum-centric supercomputing workflows, can already simulate properties of materials, which in general, can be difficult to predict using classical methods alone.
“There is so much neutron scattering data on magnetic materials that we don’t fully understand because of the limitations of approximate classical methods,” said Arnab Banerjee, assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. “Using a quantum computer for better understanding these simulations and comparing experimental data has been a decade-long dream of mine, and I’m thrilled that we have now demonstrated for the first time that we can do that.”
The Experiment
Scientists have long used neutron sources to reveal the quantum properties of materials by measuring how incident neutrons exchange energy and momentum with spins in the material. In this study, the team focused on the well-characterized magnetic crystal KCuF3 and directly compared neutron scattering measurements with simulations on a quantum computer. The agreement between experiment and simulation demonstrates that quantum processors can now capture key dynamical properties of real materials. “This is the most impressive match I’ve seen between experimental data and qubit simulation, and it definitely raises the bar for what can be expected from quantum computers,” said Allen Scheie, condensed matter physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “I am extremely excited for what this means for science.”
These results begin to establish quantum computers as reliable computational tools for material simulation. “Quantum simulations of realistic models for materials and their experimental characterization is a major demonstration of the impact quantum computing can have on scientific discovery workflows,” said Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Lab.
The study also highlights how improvements in the scale and quality of quantum processors were crucial for the simulation accuracy achieved. “These results were really enabled by the two-qubit error rates that we can now access on our quantum processors,” said Abhinav Kandala, principal research scientist at IBM. “We expect further improvements in error rates and extensions to higher dimensions to enable predictions of material properties that are challenging for classical methods alone.” Leveraging the programmability of a universal quantum processor, the team has already extended the approach beyond KCuF3 to simulate material classes with more complex interactions.
Building Toward the Quantum Era
This experiment is part of a broader shift in how quantum computers are being applied toward scientific problems defined by laboratories. Recent results include the first quantum simulation of a never-before-seen in nature half-Möbius molecule and a large-scale protein simulation with Cleveland Clinic. Across chemistry, materials science, and molecular biology, quantum simulation is beginning to engage with problems that matter to scientists.
The quantum-centric supercomputing approach demonstrated here is designed to deliver scientific and commercial value by combining today’s quantum hardware with classical computing in workflows that make productive use of both.
Read more about IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing work here.
More from HPCwire
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.
Source: IBM
The post IBM Quantum Computer Accurately Simulates Real Magnetic Materials, Reproducing National Lab Data appeared first on HPCwire.
March 26, 2026 — Electrochemical deposition, or electroplating, is a common industrial technique that coats materials to improve corrosion resistance and protection, durability and hardness, conductivity and more. In new research published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, a Los Alamos National Laboratory team has developed generative diffusion-based AI models for electrochemistry, an innovative electrochemistry approach demonstrated with experimental data.
Training data for the AI model included high resolution images captured by a scanning electron microscope.
“Electroplating is central to material development and production across many industries, and it has particularly useful applications in our production capabilities at the Laboratory,” said Los Alamos scientist Alexander Scheinker, who led the AI aspect of the work. “The generative diffusion-based AI model approach we’ve established has the potential to dramatically accelerate electrodeposition development, creating efficiencies by reducing the need for extensive physical experiments when optimizing new materials and processes.”
Electroplating is a complex process involving many coupled parameters — solvents, electrolytes, temperature, power settings — making process optimization heavily reliant on time-consuming trial and error. The team trained its AI model on parameters and on the electron microscope images those settings produced, building the model’s capability to predict the structure, form and characteristics of electrodeposited materials.
Rhenium Samples Train AI Model on Crack Formation
The research team’s model used data from experiments on the electrodeposition of rhenium through pulse and pulse-reverse waveforms, techniques that use specialized electrical signal patterns for electroplating and surface treatment. Adaptable to other electrodeposition, electropolishing or corrosion methods, the process can — with various degrees and combinations — fine-tune the grain structure and morphology of the material; create a smoother, higher quality surface; and add corrosion protection.
Rhenium is a heavy, dense transition metal with the second-highest melting point (after tungsten), lending it utility in alloys in high-temperature settings such as jet engines, and with low-temperature superconductivity in emerging fields like interconnects in quantum computers. The AI modelers worked with the Lab’s Sigma team, steered by experts Dan Hooks and Michael McBride, leveraging Sigma’s advanced metallurgical capabilities to prepare 57 rhenium samples for training or test data. The samples were imaged at high resolution with a scanning electron microscope.
The team trained a highly accurate variational autoencoder (VAE) network, a type of AI network that uses neural networks to compress and reconstruct data, to compress the images down by a factor of 64 to optimized latent representations, or simplified models of the data. They then trained a generative diffusion AI model, which learned to map processing parameters to their corresponding latent representations, from which the VAE was able to reconstruct the images.
Looking specifically at crack formation on the rhenium electroplating, the team demonstrated that the resulting model is able to quantitatively match surface roughness and the crack formation for unseen data sets and provide information for which process variables mattered most to achieve that result; the model proved able to extrapolate with accuracy even with a small data set. The researchers plan to build on their proof-of-principle work, applying this success to other processes. The proof-of-principle research offers potential for using their AI model in materials discovery, optimization and real-time guidance of electrochemistry experiments.
Paper: “Conditional Latent Diffusion for High-Resolution Prediction of Electrochemical Surface Morphology.” Journal of The Electrochemical Society. DOI: 10.1149/1945-7111/ae36fb
Source: LANL
The post LANL Develops Diffusion AI Model for Electroplating Process Optimization appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 26, 2026 — Lumentum Holdings Inc., a global leader in optical and photonic solutions for cloud and networking applications, today announced plans to establish a new U.S. manufacturing facility in Greensboro, North Carolina. The 240,000-square-foot facility will produce advanced indium phosphide (InP)-based optical devices that serve as critical components in the world’s largest AI data centers.
The Greensboro site was acquired from Qorvo, a semiconductor chipmaker, and was selected for its highly skilled workforce, robust infrastructure, and supportive federal and state economic development environment.
The facility is currently operational and will be retrofitted to manufacture Lumentum’s InP-based optical products including continuous wave (CW) and ultra-high-power (UHP) lasers. The purchase agreement includes the transfer of an experienced workforce, enabling Lumentum to accelerate capacity expansion and ramp production efficiently.
NVIDIA will serve as a customer of the facility, helping to expand U.S. critical infrastructure and support R&D through previously announced strategic agreements with Lumentum. Lumentum also plans to support other leading AI infrastructure customers for their scale-out and scale-up optical requirements through this fab.
Strengthening U.S. Manufacturing and AI Infrastructure
By expanding its domestic manufacturing footprint, Lumentum is enhancing supply chain resilience, advancing its onshoring strategy, and strengthening its ability to support hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure networks.
The new facility will significantly expand Lumentum’s manufacturing capacity leveraging 6-inch InP wafers. The facility is expected to ramp production in mid-2028.
“Our customers are building the infrastructure that will define the next era of computing,” said Michael Hurlston, Chief Executive Officer of Lumentum. “Adding this new InP manufacturing facility significantly expands our capacity, deepens our strategic partnerships, and ensures we can deliver the performance, reliability, and scale required for the AI revolution.”
“As AI workloads scale at an unprecedented pace, secure and reliable access to high-performance optical components is critical,” said Debora Shoquist, Executive Vice President of Operations at NVIDIA. “Lumentum’s investment in expanded U.S. manufacturing capacity strengthens supply continuity and positions us to meet growing infrastructure demands with confidence.”
Economic and Community Impact
Lumentum plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years to scale production and strengthen advanced manufacturing capabilities at the site, while preserving and creating over 400 US manufacturing jobs.
New roles are expected to include fabrication process and equipment engineering, manufacturing technicians, operations, supply chain, quality, management, IT, HR, and finance. The project has been supported by state and local economic development programs.
“I am appreciative that Lumentum chose North Carolina for their next and largest US semiconductor manufacturing plant,” said North Carolina Commerce Secretary Lee Lilley. “Having a strong semiconductor presence and a skilled workforce allows us to deliver the talent that industry leaders like Lumentum need to fulfill their expansion goals for serving the rapidly growing advanced AI market.”
“Lumentum’s decision to invest in Greensboro signals that our city is competing and winning in the industries shaping the future of the global economy,” said Marikay Abuzuaiter, Mayor of Greensboro. “Advanced manufacturing tied to smart technology infrastructure represents the next frontier of innovation, and Greensboro has the talent and collaborative leadership that companies need to grow. We are proud that Lumentum has chosen our community as a place to build, invest, and create high quality careers.”
About Lumentum
Lumentum (NASDAQ: LITE) is a global leader in optical and photonic technologies that power the networks and infrastructure behind AI, cloud computing, and next-generation communications. Built on decades of photonics innovation, Lumentum delivers high-performance lasers, modules, and optical subsystems that enable scalable, energy-efficient data center connectivity, advanced telecom networks, industrial manufacturing, and sensing applications. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company operates R&D, manufacturing, and sales facilities worldwide. Learn more at www.lumentum.com.
Source: Lumentum
The post Lumentum Announces New US Manufacturing Facility to Produce Advanced Lasers for AI Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.
The streaming service last raised prices in January 2025.
Keir Starmer responds after Kemi Badenoch spokesperson says she ‘raised eyebrow’ in relation to account of theft
Keir Starmer has said it is “far-fetched” to suggest that the theft of his former chief of staff’s mobile phone is somehow connected to a subsequent push for the release of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador.
Downing Street has come under pressure to say whether key messages between Morgan McSweeney and the former ambassador were lost after it emerged that the government-issue phone was stolen last year.
Continue reading...On March 23, the Supreme Court heard extended arguments in a closely watched case about the ability of states to count late-arriving ballots in the upcoming fall federal elections. The justices’ numerous questions raised constitutional issues and spurred a debate over the meaning of two words: Election Day.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and others sued Michael Watson in his capacity as Mississippi Secretary of State over a state law that allows Mississippi to count mail-in ballots up to five days after Election Day under certain circumstances.
The RNC believed only federal statutes define the power of Congress to set the date for federal elections and any policy to permit the counting of ballots received after Election Day. The Mississippi state law allowing the counting of late-arriving ballots for up to five days after Election Day, they argued, violated the rights of candidates to stand for office protected by the First and 14th Amendments.
A federal district court agreed with Watson and the state, deciding there was not a conflict between the Mississippi state law and several federal statutes. However, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of the RNC, concluding that federal Election Day “is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.” The full Fifth Circuit denied a case rehearing in a 10-5 vote. The Supreme Court accepted the case on Nov. 10, 2025.
In briefs submitted to the court prior to arguments, the Supreme Court was presented with several issues to consider. The arguments from both sides took into account the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 4, Elections Clause, which allows individual states to establish the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.” However, Congress can at “any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” Congress has passed statutes 2 U.S.C. § 7, 2 U.S.C. § 1, and 3 U.S.C. § 1, that set the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in every even-numbered year, as the “election” day for federal offices.
One basic issue for the court were the requests from Watson and the RNC for the justices to decide when a federal election happens. In the state of Mississippi’s view, an election happens at the time when voters fill out and submit ballots on or before Election Day. Citing Newberry v. United States (1921) and historical precedents, Mississippi argued that it had the ability to count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day that are tardy because the election outcome “does not depend on when ballots are received.”
The RNC took a different view. Citing the two federal laws that set the “election” day for federal offices, the RNC argued that an election for federal offices ends on Election Day. Citing another Supreme Court precedent, Foster v. Love (1997), the RNC argued that extending an election deadline set by Congress conflicted with the intent of federal lawmakers, and that federal Election Day statutes govern when states must close the ballot box, not allowing states to count late-arriving votes.
The extended arguments at the Supreme Court
After Mississippi solicitor general Scott G. Stewart’s opening statement on March 23, Justice Clarence Thomas posed the basic question presented in the briefs to the Court about the definition of Election Day in federal elections.
“Just to be clear, you have said in your opening statement sometimes, you said, the decision—the choice has to be made by Election Day, and at other points, you say on Election Day. Which is it?” Thomas asked. Stewart replied that the election was held by Election Day, leading Justice Thomas to offer an example of a person giving their mail-in ballot to a neighbor to submit in the mail as seemingly conflicting with the state law.
The follow-up questions from the court focused on several issues. One line was focused on complications related to policy scenarios posed by Justices Thomas and Justice Amy Coney Barrett about how mail-in ballots were submitted.
Barrett posited that while the Mississippi state law required a mail-in ballot to be “deposited in USPS or with a common carrier,” it could easily be included in a group of ballots collected by an HOA to be deposited as a group, which presented conflicts.
Another line of questioning centered on precedents. Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited practices during the Civil War that permitted officers to submit ballots on behalf of other military members. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited other precedents dating back to the Founding era.
“Congress permitted in 1792 about a month to elapse between the casting of votes, which, by the way, it called Election Day, and … the electors submitted them to the president of the Senate up to a month after,” Jackson argued. That example presented “significant and compelling historical evidence of Congress's understanding of what was required by Election Day versus the receipt of those ballots at some subsequent point,” she told Mississippi solicitor general Stewart.
Justice Samuel Alito also asked Stewart about the appearance of impropriety if states could set extended deadlines for receiving ballots. “Some of the briefs have argued that confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of the election on the day after the polls close is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots that flip the election.” Stewart replied by pointing to the case brief of United States Solicitor General D. John Sauer: “They haven't cited a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.”
Military and absentee voting and other scenarios
In its arguments, the state of Mississippi also pointed to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), a law that permits the late receival of overseas military and absentee ballots.
Justices Jackson and Sotomayor had direct questions about the UOCAVA precedent. “I think we have several federal statutes that suggest that Congress was aware of post-Election Day ballot deadlines that the states had enacted and, in fact, incorporated those in several circumstances,” she told Stewart.
In later questioning with Paul Clement, who was arguing for the RNC, Sotomayor asked if Congress by passing UOCAVA that allowed for the states to establish a “process in the manner provided by law for absentee ballots.” Justice Elena Kagan echoed similar comments about UOCAVA: “What [Congress] took from that is that they thought that this state function of setting ballot receipt deadlines was something that was a state function.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch also asked about a scenario where states that had extended ballot receipt deadlines could also allow for a voter recall. Chief Justice John Roberts wondered if the Court’s ruling could affect the status of early voting laws in the states that allowed the counting of late-arriving votes.
And Justice Brett Kavanaugh voiced concerns to Clement about how the Court’s decision could affect the upcoming fall elections under the Purcell principle. Based on Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), courts are not expected to change voting rules and guidelines prior to an election in an effort to avoid confusing voters while presenting conflicts for people administering elections. Clement believed a June decision from the court left adequate time for state officials to prepare for the fall general election.
After two hours of arguments, these and other questions presented to the Court will be subject to much speculation as will the Court’s decision, given the high profile of elections that will decide the control of Congress.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Noelia Castillo, 25, a paraplegic, had suffered from psychiatric illness and lived in constant pain
A Spanish woman who spent months fighting her father for the right to euthanasia after being sexually assaulted and becoming paraplegic has finally ended her life on her own terms by means of an assisted death.
Noelia Castillo, 25, had struggled with psychiatric illness since she was a teenager and tried to kill herself in October 2022 after being sexually assaulted. The attempt left her in constant pain and using a wheelchair. Eighteen months later, she used Spain’s euthanasia law, which was introduced in 2021, to secure permission to end her life.
In Spain, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 900 525 100. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie
Continue reading...DOJ plans to turn over voter data it's collecting from states to DHS for use in immigration and criminal investigations, sources say.
Announcement comes after IOPC said it was examining force’s response to allegations made in 2014 and 2015
A police force under investigation over its handling of sexual abuse claims against the self-professed misogynist Andrew Tate has reopened an inquiry into allegations against him.
Hertfordshire police said they had made the decision to reinvestigate alleged rape and sexual assault offences in the light of previous failures in 2014 and 2015.
Continue reading...RNC representatives toured the American Airlines Center last month.
The company previously announced a $600 billion commitment to build in the US through 2030.
Ministers not on course to meet their objectives, including to shift power from Whitehall to local areas, says IfG
Keir Starmer’s drive to overhaul public services is failing to live up to its aims of shifting power from Whitehall to local areas, a report from the Institute for Government (IfG) has found.
Last summer, the government set out its three guiding principles for reform aimed at making public services such as the NHS, court system and children’s social care easier to access and better at helping people.
Continue reading...BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla just teamed up with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to push open source AI -- and it feels like a direct response to Big Tech tightening its grip on the space. Instead of relying on closed models, the goal here is to build "sovereign AI" that's more transparent, privacy-focused, and actually under the control of developers and even governments. They're starting with things like private memory for AI agents, which sounds niche but matters if you care about where your data goes. Big question is whether open source can realistically keep up with the billions being poured into proprietary AI, but at least someone's trying to give folks an alternative. "Canada has what it takes to lead on frontier AI that the world can actually trust: the research depth, the values, and the will to do it differently. The next frontier in AI isn't just capability, it is trustworthiness, and Canada is uniquely positioned to lead on both. This partnership is a concrete step in that direction. Open, trustworthy AI isn't a compromise on ambition. It's the higher bar," said Valerie Pisano, president and CEO of Mila.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | I was wondering why the lights were not working on my kit until i got the replacement 😂 [link] [comments] |
The 15-inch M4 MacBook Air has dropped to its lowest price yet, and it's still one of the best laptops you can get at this price in 2026.
Investigative reporter Szabolcs Panyi covered story alleging foreign minister had passed information to Sergei Lavrov
The Hungarian government has filed charges against one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists, accusing him of spying for Ukraine, as officials grapple with the fallout of allegations that Budapest shared confidential EU information with Moscow.
The claims of espionage cap off a tumultuous week in Hungarian politics, in which relations with the EU plummeted to new lows and polls suggested that Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party is still lagging behind in support before next month’s election.
Continue reading...US president says he is ‘very disappointed’ as he again lashes out at allies’ lack of involvement in Iran war
Donald Trump has dismissed British warships as “toys” in his latest jibe at Nato countries for their lack of involvement in the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Speaking at the White House on Thursday, he claimed he had told the UK: “Don’t bother, we don’t need it.”
Trump has previously alleged that he requested two aircraft carriers from the UK that Keir Starmer had initially rejected and then offered to send. No 10 has denied that a request was made or denied.
Continue reading...Marine biologists found detectable levels of caffeine, cocaine and the over-the-counter painkillers in the blood of 28 sharks.
Wikipedia has banned the use of generative AI to write or rewrite articles, saying it "often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies." That said, editors may still use it for translation or light refinements as long as a human carefully checks the copy for accuracy. Engadget reports: Editors can use large language models (LLMs) to refine their own writing, but only if the copy is checked for accuracy. The policy states that this is because LLMs "can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited." Editors can also use LLMs to assist with language translation. However, they must be fluent enough in both languages to catch errors. Once again, the information must be checked for inaccuracies. "My genuine hope is that this can spark a broader change. Empower communities on other platforms, and see this become a grassroots movement of users deciding whether AI should be welcome in their communities, and to what extent," Wikipedia administrator Chaotic Enby wrote. The administrator also called the policy a "pushback against enshittification and the forceful push of AI by so many companies in these last few years."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exceptionally strong metals, also known as multiple principal element alloys (MPEA), are a new class of metals that scientists believe could change how advanced machines, nuclear systems, engines, and even spacecraft are built.
The traditional method of making an alloy involves mixing one primary metal with a small amount of others. This is different from how MPEAs are made. Several elements are combined in nearly equal proportions. This creates structures that behave in unusual – and sometimes remarkable ways. They stay strong under extreme heat, resist cracking under stress, and remain stable in environments where ordinary materials fail.
Researchers from Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University have collaborated to design a new MPEA with what they call “superior mechanical properties” using a data-driven framework that leverages the power of explainable AI and supercomputing.
The team was led by Sanket Deshmukh, associate professor in chemical engineering at Virginia Tech. Their findings, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), show that combining simulation data and machine learning can dramatically reduce the time required to identify promising alloy compositions. This allows researchers to search through thousands of possible material combinations far more efficiently than with traditional trial-and-error methods.
(From left) Sanket Deshmukh, associate professor in chemical engineering, and Fangxi “Toby” Wang, research scientist in chemical engineering (Photo by Hailey Wade for Virginia Tech)
The difficulty is that the number of possible MPEA compositions is enormous. Even choosing five elements from a small list and changing their ratios slightly can create thousands of different materials, each with its own mechanical and thermal behavior. Testing every combination one by one would take years, and in some cases decades. That is why the Virginia Tech group turned to a data driven approach.
“This work demonstrates how data-driven frameworks and explainable AI can unlock new possibilities in materials design,” said Deshmukh, the Erin Michelle Lohr Faculty Fellow. “By integrating machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, and experimental validation, we are not only accelerating the discovery of advanced metallic alloys, but also creating tools that can be extended to complex material systems such as glycomaterials — polymeric materials containing carbohydrates.”
The researchers emphasize that use of explanatory AI was key to their work. When Deshmukh and his team were exploring vast possibilities of creating a new MPEA they wanted to understand the reasoning behind the AI analysis. According to the team, traditional AI often behaves like “black boxes”, where they generate predictions but do not provide the explanation on how or why those predictions are made. Explainable AI addresses this limitation by providing deeper insights about the decision making process used by the model.
“Leveraging explainable AI accelerates our understanding of MPEAs’ mechanical behaviors. It could transform the traditional expensive trial-and-error materials design into a more predictive and insightful process,” said Fangxi “Toby” Wang, postdoctoral associate in chemical engineering and researcher on the project.
“Our design workflow, combining advanced machine learning and evolutionary algorithms, provides interpretable insights into materials’ structure-property relationships, offering a robust approach for the discovery of diverse advanced materials.”
The researchers used a method called SHAP analysis to understand how the AI was making its predictions. This allowed them to go beyond the results. They could see which elements were having the biggest effect and how the surrounding atoms were changing the strength of the alloy. This helped them see why certain combinations worked better – not just which ones worked.
(Panksvatouny/Shutterstock)
AI can look at the composition of a new alloy and quickly predict how it might behave. Learning from large sets of data taken from experiments and computer simulations, the model can help researchers find the best mix of elements without having to test every possibility in the lab.
According to the researchers, a key factor in their success was collaboration across disciplines and institutions. “Our interdisciplinary collaboration across two National Science Foundation Materials Innovation Platforms not only allows us to develop transferable tools and platforms, but also highlights how partnerships at the intersection of computation, synthesis, and characterization can drive transformative breakthroughs in both fundamental science and real-world applications,” said Deshmukh.
The researchers are already extending this computational framework to design more complex materials, such as new glycomaterials – which are sugar-based materials inspired by biological molecules and can be used in food additives, personal care items, health products, and packaging materials.
This article originally appeared on BigDATAwire.
The post Data-Driven AI Framework Speeds Discovery of Metals Built for Extreme Conditions appeared first on HPCwire.
Moscow internet blackouts: the Kremlin tightens its grip on Russia’s digital space Expert comment LToremark
The outages are part of the Kremlin’s efforts to control Russia’s internet architecture and communication networks – but also reveal the regime’s growing anxieties.
Across Russia, partial internet shutdowns have persisted for months, disrupting everything from cashless payments and bank transfers to taxi apps and digital courier services. But since early March, mobile internet blackouts have also hit central Moscow and St Petersburg, forcing locals to turn to landlines, pagers and paper maps.
The true reasons behind the blackouts are unclear. Officially, authorities cite security concerns, likely due to Kyiv’s use of mobile-guided drones to strike targets deep inside Russia. Targeted shutdowns were previously confined to regions bordering Ukraine and areas near strategic military bases across the country. The fact they are now happening in Russia’s key centres of wealth and power shows that the war is increasingly affecting the everyday lives of ordinary Russians previously distanced from it. But the outages are likely about more than security concerns. The blackouts also align with recent legal amendments on ‘centralized management’ of the internet, which empower the state tech regulator, Roskomnadzor, to assume full control over Russia’s internet and public communication infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the government has rolled out a curated ‘whitelist’ of state-approved websites and essential online services that remain accessible during outages. Designed to create a closed and tightly controlled internet architecture, these measures speak volumes about the regime’s mounting anxieties in the face of domestic and foreign political pressures.
The outages are part of Moscow’s broader campaign to cut off independent sources of information and horizontal networks of communication, designed to protect the regime from civil unrest and weed out foreign influences. Social media platforms and messaging apps such as YouTube, Instagram, Signal, Discord and Facebook have already been banned, with the country’s most popular messaging app Telegram reportedly being fully blocked from 1 April 2026, cutting off access for those without a virtual private network (VPN).
At the same time, officials have been urging Russians to switch to state-backed MAX messenger, an app widely believed to be monitored by the Federal Security Service (FSB) that comes pre-installed on all devices sold in the country. Amid serious privacy concerns, some senior officials are rumoured to rely on separate SIM cards and devices to install the app, while ordinary citizens are compelled to use it for access to government portals, school chats, and community services.
Still, Russians are finding ways to adapt. Many use VPNs to circumvent restrictions, while others turn to lesser-known, still-accessible platforms like the South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk. Ironically, the Kremlin’s efforts to restrict access to information by targeting Telegram have disproportionately hit the viewership of pro-state channels, while audiences of opposition outlets – toughened by years of restrictions – continue to circumvent controls.
Yet public expressions of discontent have so far been blocked. Authorities have rejected several applications for peaceful rallies for internet freedom in the Moscow Region, citing a 2020 ban on mass gatherings due to COVID-19. Last week, an 80-year-old protester was detained and fined in Perm for organizing an unsanctioned rally, while Moscow police briefly detained the administrator of a Telegram channel mobilizing support for protests against internet restrictions and censorship. Any future restrictions and blackouts will test the country’s potential for protest, especially among younger, digitally connected generations.
But the regime’s quest for self-preservation is taking its toll on the Russian people. Beyond disrupting livelihoods, the nearly three-week Moscow shutdown cost local businesses up to 1 billion roubles (£ 9.4 million) per day, with courier services, taxis and retail sector hit hardest. Disruptions to mobile payment systems left many retailers unable to process transactions, compounding pressure on already strained small businesses. Reflecting this downturn, the Bank of Russia’s business climate indicator fell to -0.1 points in March, its first negative reading since 2022. As the economy absorbs the mounting costs of the war, the shutdowns are likely to push more small and medium-sized enterprises towards bankruptcy in the near term. Soaring fossil fuel revenues amid the ongoing conflict in Iran may provide some immediate relief to the Russian economy, but whether they can meaningfully offset the strain on businesses and households remains an open question.
A new study in the journal Science found that AI models are socially sycophantic.
A surprise IRS tax bill can derail your retirement budget fast. Here's how to keep that from happening.
I was riding my pint x through the woods in the fall when I hit a root and it died completely. had to walk all the way back home.
it won't respond to the charger and won't turn on. the wheel still has resistance when I try to turn it like it does have power. I took it apart and unplugged the batter and sure enough the wheel loosened up. plugged the battery back in and it had resistance again. as it gets warmer I would like to start riding again and I was wondering if anyone had a similar experience and how they fixed it. any advice or help is greatly appreciated.
Deposed Venezuelan president and his wife, who both pleaded not guilty, were captured by US military in January
The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro appeared in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday for his “narco-terrorism” case after his capture by US military forces earlier this year.
The hearing opened with the defense and prosecution arguing over whether Maduro should be allowed to use Venezuelan government funds to pay for his defense. The defense has insisted that the US is violating the deposed leader’s constitutional rights by blocking government money from being used for his legal costs.
Continue reading...Critics mock Mike Johnson and Republicans for presenting the president with the newly concocted award
Amid an aggressive war in Iran, heightening and devastating pressure on Cuba, immigration enforcement operations throughout the country and a partial government shutdown, the lead Republican in the House has given Donald Trump a newly concocted award.
Democrats, lawmakers and commentators are criticizing and ridiculing the “America First” award given to Trump on Wednesday evening during the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser.
Continue reading...As oil prices surge, some experts are urging consumers to take energy-conserving steps like working from home or driving less.
Balendra Shah, 35, is a symbol of change in country whose government was toppled last year in youth-led uprising
Nepal’s rapper turned politician Balendra Shah, who is about to be sworn in as prime minister, has issued his first post-election message in the form of a rap urging unity.
Hours before the release he swore an oath as a newly elected lawmaker, and he is due to become the Himalayan republic’s new prime minister on Friday.
Continue reading...An amendment that would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot failed to advance in the Senate on Thursday.
Iran war: regional shock or global crisis? Independent Thinking podcast Audio john.pollock
David Lubin and Grégoire Roos join the podcast to discuss the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and the impact of the Iran war on the global economy.
One month on from the start of the US and Israeli war on Iran, governments worldwide are trying to assess the scale of its long-term impact on the global economy and political system.
Much will depend on how long the conflict continues, and how long Iran blocks fuel exports and other cargo vessels from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The White House and Iran have sent conflicting signals about whether negotiations are under way, even as thousands of US troops head to the Middle East. And even if President Trump secures a ceasefire with Iran, it is unclear if US and Israel are aligned on their visions for an end game.
Our panel assesses whether the world is headed for a 1973-style shock to the global economic system, pushing up inflation and cutting growth. And how Europe, Russia, China, and other nations will deal with a crisis that has disrupted energy flows and supply chains.
Joining regular host Bronwen Maddox are David Lubin, senior research fellow in Chatham House’s Global Economy and Finance Programme, and Grégoire Roos, director of our Europe and Russia and Eurasia programmes.
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: Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind
To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.
Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.
Continue reading...Quebec’s legislature passes vote calling on Michael Rousseau to step down, citing ‘lack of respect for the French language’ and families in mourning
The chief executive of Air Canada has apologized for his inability to express himself in French after politicians called for his resignation for his English-only message of condolence after Sunday’s deadly crash in New York.
But lawmakers in Canada’s lone francophone province rejected the mea culpa as “too little too late” and overwhelmingly passed a motion calling for the head of Canada’s flagship carrier to step down.
Continue reading...European parliament votes in favour of sending refused asylum seekers to offshore hubs, in ‘historic setback for refugee rights’
People with no right to stay in the EU could be detained for up to two years or sent to offshore centres described by experts as possible “human rights black holes” under plans voted for by the European parliament on Thursday.
An alliance of mostly centre-right and far-right lawmakers voted for a proposal to increase returns of undocumented migrants to their home countries, in a further sign of strain on the grand coalition of centrist political forces that has traditionally driven EU lawmaking.
Continue reading...RICHLAND, Wash., March 26, 2026 — A research effort to explore how artificial intelligence can offer an advantage to cyber defenders has made the leap into computing operations at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The PNNL program knits together thousands of data points into a stream of data that protects computing systems. Illustration credit: Mahantesh Halappanavar, PNNL.
“Every large company has a vulnerability management life cycle for detecting and remediating issues over time, but new threats pop up constantly. How can our actions be triaged and prioritized? Which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited, which ones hold the most risk?” said Joseph Aguayo, deputy chief information security officer at PNNL and a partner in the new approach. “Our technology organizes the information and delivers it to your desktop multiple times a day so defenders can stay updated right up to the minute.”
The work being implemented by Aguayo’s operations team has its roots in research led by Mahantesh Halappanavar, a chief computer scientist at PNNL whose research using AI links several databases related to cybersecurity. His team used graph theory combined with AI to build bridges between databases and to train the program to extract key information while constantly adapting to new information and settings. The technology brings together available threat intelligence with the unique configuration of a company’s computing assets.
The award-winning basic research, first published four years ago, uses AI to connect several strands of independent information in the cyber world to create a free-flowing stream of data that better protects against unwanted intrusions into computing systems.
PNNL information technology professionals—the hundreds-strong team that keeps PNNL’s computing operations safe and stable day to day—evaluated Halappanavar’s research and decided to put it to the test on the PNNL network.
Early results are promising, with quicker identification of the most pressing threats and the instant creation of roadmaps that show likely attacks and how they can be stopped.
The new approach takes advantage of a blizzard of data available to defenders, all of it updated regularly:
These information sources, plus a mind-bending amount of daily news about cyber breaches and risks, is pulled together to give PNNL security officials a clear, unobstructed view of the biggest cyber threats they are likely to face. Once an attack is recognized, the system enables defenders to stop it more quickly.
AI Brings Clarity, Focus to Threat Intelligence
The transformation of AI research into active laboratory operations comes at a time when the Department of Energy has launched the Genesis Mission to accelerate discovery science and enhance national security and energy innovation through the power of AI.
“Our program consumes a huge amount of threat intelligence and breaks it down into useful nuggets of information that defenders can act on immediately,” said Aguayo. “This helps us know what the bad guys knocking on our door are doing and gives us insights to quickly determine whether their actions are relevant or not.”
One key area of focus: zero-day attacks that exploit previously unknown or undisclosed software vulnerabilities. Security teams rely on layered defenses to protect against broad attack categories, but they need real-time threat intelligence to adapt those defenses when zero-day attacks emerge and no patches exist yet.
The 2021 Log4Shell vulnerability showed how quickly attackers can act: More than 1 million attacks targeted networks worldwide within 72 hours of its public disclosure. The new system is designed to identify such high-profile attack campaigns quickly while also increasing detection of lower-profile but network-relevant threats.
“The threat surface is huge, as AI is unleashed by both adversaries and defenders. With a massive number of vulnerabilities and undisclosed exploits, it’s a much bigger underworld than we want to think about,” said Halappanavar. “With knowledge graphs and AI, we are much better prepared; we know exactly what we need to know in a specific situation and environment. We can accurately predict missing information as well.”
Aguayo added, “You size up the attacks and tactics, and you take stock of your network environment—your users, your endpoints, your assets. And then you bring those two sources together to ask, ‘What 10 things can I do today to protect my network?’”
The team has presented the work at several scientific conferences, including the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining and NODES 2025. The new technology, dubbed MERU—Multimodal Entity Relationship Unification for robust cyber defense—is available for licensing through PNNL’s Office of Collaboration and Commercialization.
From Sailing Ships to Steamships
Aguayo joined PNNL two years ago after holding executive cybersecurity positions at several large companies and federal agencies.
“The change to AI from more traditional technologies is like the age when the world transitioned from sailing ships to steamships,” said Aguayo. “People were very good at rigging up the sails and charting by the stars, but then a whole different world with new capabilities emerged. That’s where we are with technology. I wanted to be at a place like PNNL where leading researchers are leveraging AI in new ways to protect critical domains, including national security and the energy grid.”
In addition to Aguayo and Halappanavar, PNNL scientists Siddhartha Das and Moqsadur Rahman contributed to the research. This work is funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Source: Tom Rickey, PNNL
The post PNNL: AI Effort Moves from Novelty to Front Lines of National Lab’s Cyber Protection appeared first on HPCwire.
 | I just need a motor and that’s it. Also the lights you see are ones I can connect by Bluetooth and change the modes and I got them off eBay by the seller named charged up and if you wanna know if you can use the regular oem strip light in the front you can because that’s the only one it will work with :) [link] [comments] |
Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Cloud Workspace expands access to large-scale biomedical data, accelerates discovery in human health research
March 26, 2026 — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Galaxy Team at Johns Hopkins University and Penn State University, as well as CloudBank at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has announced the public launch of the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) Cloud Workspace.
The new platform enables researchers to seamlessly access, analyze, and integrate datasets from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund, lowering barriers to data-driven biomedical discovery.
The CFDE Cloud Workspace brings together powerful cloud and high-performance computing resources, a rich suite of analysis tools, and simplified access pathways for researchers at all experience levels. The platform supports a wide range of research workflows, both for exploring datasets interactively, as well as executing complex large-scale analyses.
“This platform represents a significant step toward democratizing access to the full breadth of data collected across the NIH Common Fund programs,” said James Carson, principal investigator of the CFDE Cloud Workspace and Director of Life Science Computing at TACC. “The workspace can enable more researchers across all levels of experience to pursue innovative studies that were previously out of reach.”
“By simplifying access and providing introductory compute resources at no-cost, we’re opening the door for new ideas, new collaborations, and faster progress toward improving human health,” Carson added.
The CFDE Cloud Workspace offers an extensive and extensible environment for biomedical data exploration and analysis, including:
The platform allows researchers to load their own data, connect it with resources across the CFDE, and build, share, and publish fully reproducible scientific workflows.
By bringing together mature technologies, advanced computing infrastructure, and broad training support, the CFDE Cloud Workspace can cultivate a larger and more collaborative biomedical research community.
The platform is designed to enhance scientific rigor, promote data sharing, and improve reproducibility while accelerating progress in human health research.
Researchers can begin using the platform today at: https://cfdeworkspace.org.
Learn more about this award and other NIH CFDE initiatives on the Funded Research page. The Cloud Workspace Implementation Center (CWIC) is funded under NIH Award #OT2OD037936.
Source: Faith Singer, TACC
The post TACC Launches CFDE Cloud Workspace for NIH Common Fund Datasets appeared first on HPCwire.
LONDON, March 26, 2026 — NTT DATA, a global leader in AI, digital business and technology services, today released its new report, Cloud-led innovation in the era of AI: The new rules for driving value with cloud, revealing that just 14% of organizations have reached the highest level of cloud maturity despite nearly two decades of cloud adoption.
Based on a global survey of more than 2,300 senior decision-makers across 33 countries, the findings highlight a paradox as cloud takes on a new and critical role as the execution layer of the AI operating model. While 99% of organizations say AI is increasing demand for cloud investment, 88% say current cloud investment levels are putting AI, cloud-native and modernization initiatives at risk.
Additionally, while cloud is seen as essential for innovation, fewer than half of organizations are satisfied with its impact or with their modernization progress, signaling a disconnect between ambition and reality as expectations rise.
Cloud leaders, or organizations that indicated they are “cloud evolved” — the most advanced in terms of cloud adoption and impact, with solid business performance – are significantly better positioned to capitalize on AI.
“AI is accelerating faster than enterprise cloud maturity,” said Charlie Li, President, Global Head of Cloud and Security, NTT DATA, Inc. “Cloud has moved well beyond infrastructure and is now the execution layer for AI. Organizations that fail to evolve their cloud foundations risk constraining the growth and value of their AI investments. Our clients who are succeeding are treating cloud as a value creator, not a technology initiative.”
Six Imperatives for Driving Value with Cloud in the Era of AI
NTT DATA outlines six rules organizations must adopt to turn cloud into a strategic value engine:
Together, these imperatives provide a framework for unlocking value in an AI-driven world. To explore the full findings, download the report: Cloud-led innovation in the era of AI: The new rules for driving value with cloud.
About the Report
Respondents include C-suite, senior executives and other senior staff from enterprises spanning technology, manufacturing, banking, financial services, healthcare, consumer and other sectors.
About NTT DATA
NTT DATA is a $30+ billion business and technology services leader, serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100. We are committed to accelerating client success and positively impacting society through responsible innovation. We are one of the world’s leading AI and digital infrastructure providers, with unmatched capabilities in enterprise-scale AI, cloud, security, connectivity, data centers and application services. Our consulting and industry solutions help organizations and society move confidently and sustainably into the digital future. As a Global Top Employer, we have experts in more than 70 countries. We also offer clients access to a robust ecosystem of innovation centers as well as established and start-up partners. NTT DATA is part of NTT Group, which invests over $3 billion each year in R&D.
Source: NTT DATA
The post NTT DATA Study: Only 14% of Enterprises Fully Realize Cloud Value for AI appeared first on HPCwire.
HELOC interest rates are closing in on the 6% range. So, how much will a $20,000 line of credit cost right now?
March 26, 2026 — International Computer Concepts (ICC) recently showcased the Aquarius R-117A at two major industry events, ICC Connect during GTC and the Rice University Oil & Gas Show. The system is an ultra-dense 1U server engineered specifically for dielectric oil immersion environments and built to serve the most demanding AI and HPC workloads across any industry.
The Aquarius R-117A is ICC’s flagship immersion-native 1U server, integrating six NVIDIA H200 GPUs alongside an AMD EPYC Turin processor with up to 192 cores and 3TB of DDR5 RAM.
Unlike the vast majority of servers used in immersion deployments today, which were originally designed for air-cooled data centers and adapted afterwards, the Aquarius R-117A was conceived, designed, and validated exclusively for immersion from the outset. The result is a level of compute density that would be thermally impossible through any other means.
Six NVIDIA H200 GPUs in One Rack Unit
The centerpiece of the Aquarius R-117A is its GPU configuration. Six NVIDIA H200 SXM GPUs are fitted into a single 1U chassis, each carrying 141GB of HBM3e memory at 4.8 TB/s bandwidth. Across all six cards, that amounts to 846GB of aggregate GPU memory, enough to hold the largest AI models, simulation datasets, and complex workloads entirely in GPU memory without distributing across multiple nodes.
Under full load each H200 dissipates up to 700W of heat, meaning the system manages more than 4.2kW of GPU thermal output in a single rack unit before accounting for the CPU, memory, and networking. This is only achievable because the chassis was designed around oil immersion from day one, with component placement and chassis geometry optimised for fluid-based heat transfer rather than airflow.
The six H200s are interconnected via NVLink fabric, enabling high-bandwidth GPU-to-GPU memory access that far exceeds what PCIe can offer. For distributed AI training, large model inference, or data-intensive simulation where information must move continuously between accelerators, this fabric is what makes the system behave as a unified compute platform rather than a collection of independent cards.
AMD EPYC Turin: Built to Keep Up
Hosting six H200 GPUs demands a CPU that can match them. The Aquarius R-117A is built around a single-socket AMD EPYC Turin processor offering up to 192 Zen 5 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process node. Its 12-channel DDR5 memory controller supports the system’s 24 DIMM slots and up to 3TB of ECC RAM, while its PCIe Gen 5 lane count ensures the OCP 3.0 networking expansion and NVMe storage operate without contention. The single-socket configuration also eliminates NUMA complexity, which can quietly degrade performance in multi-socket GPU server deployments.
Immersion Native, Not Immersion Adapted
Most servers in oil immersion tanks today were built for air-cooled environments first. Their layouts, PCB stackups, and power delivery architectures assume airflow, and the immersion is an afterthought. The Aquarius R-117A has no such constraint. There are no airflow assumptions in its design. Components are positioned to maximise contact with the circulating dielectric fluid, and the chassis promotes natural convective flow even in passive tank setups. This co-designed approach to thermal and compute architecture is what enables the density figures the system achieves.
In optimised immersion deployments, this design approach yields a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) profile approaching 1.03, compared to 1.2 to 1.4 for the best air-cooled facilities. Over the lifetime of a high-density deployment, the difference is significant.
Power and Connectivity
To sustain the full system power envelope, the Aquarius R-117A ships with a choice of Dual 3200W PSUs or Dual 5200W PSUs with Anderson connectors. The Anderson connector option is well suited to facilities where high-current DC distribution is standard and connector durability in demanding environments is a requirement.
On the networking side, the system’s OCP 3.0 x16 expansion slot supports dual 100GbE or single 400GbE NICs, providing the fabric bandwidth needed for multi-node distributed workloads. Onboard connectivity includes two 10GbE ports via Broadcom BCM57416 and two 1GbE ports via Intel i210 for management.
Full Specifications
Who It Is Built For
The Aquarius R-117A is built for any workload that is memory-bandwidth bound at scale. That covers a broad range of industries and use cases.
For AI and machine learning teams, the 846GB of aggregate GPU memory combined with NVLink fabric and a 192-core host CPU makes it a serious platform for large model training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads that would otherwise require multiple nodes.
For HPC and simulation, the system handles complex multi-physics modelling, computational fluid dynamics, and large-scale scientific workloads with the kind of in-memory capacity that eliminates the need to partition jobs across a cluster.
For financial services and trading, the combination of raw compute throughput, high memory bandwidth, and low-latency fabric makes the platform well suited to quantitative modelling, Monte Carlo risk engines, derivative pricing, and real-time analytics at the speeds modern trading infrastructure demands.
For industries like oil and gas, the same architecture supports seismic processing, full-waveform inversion, and reservoir simulation at resolutions that previously required whole HPC clusters.
The system delivers three to four times the compute density of comparable air-cooled infrastructure, with a direct impact on infrastructure economics. Fewer rack units, fewer power feeds, fewer switch ports, and a much smaller physical footprint per unit of compute delivered.
To find out more about the Aquarius R-117A, request a spec sheet, or discuss deployment, get in touch with the ICC team at sales@icc-usa.com or visit www.icc-usa.com.
About ICC
ICC delivers high-performance computing solutions tailored to the needs of enterprises, research institutions, and data-driven industries. For more details, visit: www.icc-usa.com.
Source: ICC
The post ICC Launches Aquarius R-117A Immersion-Native 1U Server with 6 NVIDIA H200 GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.
Christian Democrat Päivi Räsänen, who was fined €1,800, was supported by conservative US group Alliance Defending Freedom
A Finnish member of parliament has been found guilty by the country’s supreme court of inciting hatred after claiming that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder”, in a conviction that prompted criticism from far-right government ministers.
Päivi Räsänen, of the Christian Democrats, made the claims in a pamphlet first published in 2004 and reproduced on the website of the Luther Foundation Finland and the Finnish Evangelical Mission Diocese in 2007.
Continue reading...Donald Trump insists Iran is still interested in cutting a peace deal despite Tehran rejecting the US plan. Iran has now put forward a five-point counterproposal and says the war will end on its own terms. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Julian Borger
Continue reading...Mortgage rates have climbed back up in recent weeks, but several forces could pull them lower before April ends.
European Commission says social messaging app is exposing children to grooming and sexual exploitation
Brussels has opened an investigation into Snapchat over concerns the social messaging app is exposing children to grooming, sexual exploitation and other criminality.
In a separate decision on Thursday, the European Commission also said four pornographic websites were failing to prevent minors seeing adult content, harming young people’s mental health and fuelling negative gender attitudes.
Continue reading...The Minnesota Secretary of State's Office has been ordered to turn over certain voter records.
I used CNET's lab test data to calculate the cost-per-megabit for each router generation. The results showed me I was wrong about the value of Wi-Fi 7 routers.
If you want to completely eliminate dead zones in your home, upgrading to a full-fledged mesh system is the best option. We lab-tested these mesh routers to see which had the best range and speeds.
Ancient Slashdot reader wiredog writes: Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine," has died at the age of 80. "The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic. "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First time soon to be rider iv seen a lot of good things about the classic xr and was wondering how hard it is to ride
American on course for victory after short program
21-year-old had disastrous skate at Winter Olympics
Ilia Malinin bounced back from his disappointment at this year’s Winter Olympics by leading after the short program at the figure skating world championships on Thursday.
Malinin, sporting a new haircut, gave fans what they expected from the defending two-time world champion at O2 Arena in Prague.
Continue reading...Some people are opting not to travel at all amid what they call ‘a manufactured crisis by the Trump administration’
Passengers across the US have had their travel plans upended by the latest Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which has triggered widespread staffing shortages at airports as security employees go weeks without pay.
“We are returning from St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, to Boston today and it took fully three hours to get through US customs. Absolutely insane,” Boston-based passenger John Hildebrandt told the Guardian.
Continue reading...New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are among the metro areas seeing steep declines in net immigration amid the Trump administration’s crackdown.
Rebecca Liquori and Rachel Mariotti worked together to remove the exit door and help passengers off the plane after the deadly collision at New York's LaGuardia Airport.
Today show host calls 84-year-old mother’s disappearance ‘unbearable’ in first interview since possible kidnapping
Savannah Guthrie says she fears her own fame could have been the reason for her mother Nancy’s disappearance, which she has called “unbearable” in her first interview since the possible kidnapping.
Guthrie, a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show Today, discussed the possible reasons for the disappearance of Nancy, who is 84 years old and was reported missing on 1 February from her home near Tucson, Arizona, in an interview with Guthrie’s colleague Hoda Kotb.
Continue reading...March 26, 2026 — Analyzing and managing the electric power grid are complex tasks. They involve many different types of simulations, from reliability checks to scheduling and contingency planning. Each simulation requires specialized tools, programming skills and deep technical knowledge. These disconnected workflows can slow down decision-making when fast, clear actions are most needed.
Credit: leolintang/Shutterstock
But recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially in systems that can act independently (called “agentic AI”), offer a way to simplify this complexity. These AI agents can orchestrate multiple tasks at once, understand and reason across different types of analysis and support decision-making — all through natural conversations in plain language. They also use proven tools and methods to ensure that results are accurate and reliable.
To harness this potential, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have created GridMind, an agentic AI system that brings these capabilities together to serve as a reasoning co-pilot for power system operators — a step toward the control room of the future.
Why GridMind Is Different
Although AI and natural language tools have been used in technical fields before, applying them in highly technical, cross-disciplinary engineering tasks — like those in power grid operations — is still new. GridMind integrates them into a coherent reasoning engine for power system operations. It does not simply display numbers but interprets them, connects them across tasks and explains what they mean.
“GridMind is designed to be a reasoning partner for grid operators,” said Kibaek Kim, a computational mathematician. “It keeps the analysis rigorous but allows operators to interact with it using natural language — essentially turning technical analysis into conversational, explainable support for their decisions.”
How GridMind Works
At the heart of GridMind is a multi-agent system — a group of AI agents each specializing in a different task. For example:
These agents are coordinated by large language models (LLMs), which understand the task, analyze the situation, reason across different analyses and suggest explainable strategies. However, using LLMs in technical areas raises concerns about “hallucination” — when AI produces something that looks right but isn’t. In critical systems like the power grid, mistakes like this can have serious consequences.
“GridMind is built to avoid this,” Kim said. “All numerical results and recommendations come from trusted, tested tools and are verified before they’re shared with the user.”
A New Way Forward
To test GridMind, researchers ran experiments on various standard power grid models, using multiple state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-5, GPT-o4 and Claude 4 Sonnet. The system was evaluated for accuracy, speed and reliability. The results were promising — GridMind consistently produced correct results and clear reasoning, even across different AI models.
GridMind represents a shift in how the grid can be managed. Instead of navigating multiple disconnected tools, operators can rely on GridMind to reason across tasks, explain outcomes and co-pilot the decision process. This human-AI partnership strengthens situational awareness and speeds up response time, advancing DOE’s vision of the “control room of the future.”
“GridMind doesn’t replace operators; it empowers them,” Kim said. “It provides reliable, explainable recommendations so operators can make better, faster decisions with confidence.”
This research supports a multi-lab project to develop self-improving AI models as part of the Transformational AI Models Consortium (ModCon). ModCon is a cornerstone of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a bold national initiative to double America’s research and development productivity within a decade by harnessing AI, quantum computing and world-leading supercomputers. Funding comes from the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.
Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne Researchers Develop AI System to Enhance Electric Grid Efficiency and Reliability appeared first on HPCwire.
As a searing heat wave slowly expands over the western two-thirds of the U.S., more than 100 daily temperature records are forecast through Sunday.
Spectator, beneficiary, player: Russia’s strategy in the Iran war, from oil to drones Expert comment jon.wallace
Carefully calibrated involvement in the Middle East amplifies Moscow’s leverage from Havana to the frontlines in Ukraine.
‘Speed is necessary, and haste is harmful,’ said Russian Marshal Prince Alexander Suvorov in The Science of Victory (1765). That captures a tension that has remained embedded in Russian strategic culture: how to combine long-term endurance with timely opportunism.
Russia is often portrayed as a ponderous bear. But in practice, it frequently resembles a more calculating predator – patient, adaptive, and inclined to strike when the cost-benefit ratio turns decisively in its favour.
Those instincts are clearly visible in Moscow’s conduct since the outbreak of the Iran war. Rather than committing decisively or remaining aloof, Russia has calibrated its engagement to extract advantage while limiting its exposure – mindful of the risks of pushing Washington too far.
Nowhere has this calibrated approach been clearer in recent years than in Russia’s relationship with the Mullahs. Moscow has provided sustained diplomatic backing, expanded military-technical cooperation, and deepened economic coordination between their two heavily sanctioned systems. A strategic partnership, alongside collaboration in nuclear energy and defence-industrial sectors, reflect a convergence of interests shaped by opposition to Western pressure.
Yet this support has been deliberately bounded – with no mutual-defence commitment. That has allowed Russia to avoid direct military involvement in Iran’s confrontation with Israel and the United States (US).
This is not hesitation but design. Tehran is valuable to Moscow as a partner that complicates Western strategy and reinforces a sanctions-resistant axis. But Russia is not willing to incur open-ended risk on Iran’s behalf.
President Vladmir Putin’s objective is to remain close enough to shape outcomes in the war, but distant enough to preserve freedom of action.
As strikes between Israel and Iran intensified, Moscow issued public condemnations and stepped-up diplomatic engagement with Tehran. And some discreet forms of support, including intelligence exchanges, have likely taken place. But no additional Russian forces were deployed, no air defences activated on Iran’s behalf, and no direct attempt made to challenge Israeli or US operations.
Meanwhile, Russia maintained deconfliction channels with Israel and a limited posture in Syria, insulating its assets from the conflict. The result is visible alignment without operational exposure – enough to retain influence in Tehran, but not enough to become a belligerent.
A Financial Times report of 25 March suggests Moscow may be providing drones to Iran. If true, this would represent a shift in Russian calculations – perhaps based on Iran’s continued resistance to US pressure – and raise the level of strategic risk Moscow is willing to take in the conflict. But this support would be hard to prove: some Russian drones are copies of Iranian models. And it would fall far short of the kind of military backing the US has provided to Ukraine.
A similar logic underpins Russia’s posture in the Western Hemisphere, particularly towards Cuba.
As President Donald Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Cuba this year, Russia has despatched oil shipments as ‘humanitarian aid’ and provided political backing to the regime.
But such steps can be achieved at relatively low cost. Unlike Soviet commitments, current Russian support to Cuba is limited, reversible, and primarily symbolic. Recent Russian oil deliveries are modest and intermittent in nature.
Russian actions do not really alter the regional balance of power. But they introduce friction into the US strategic environment and serve as a reminder: that geopolitical competition can never be geographically contained, and that Moscow retains options beyond its immediate theatre.
From a US perspective, Russia’s behaviour over the past weeks appears opportunistic, if not deliberately provocative. Moscow has combined diplomatic backing for Tehran with continued oil flows to Cuba, while simultaneously benefiting from tighter global energy markets.
This undermines the premise that Russia can be effectively isolated. And it reinforces Moscow’s claim to relevance across multiple theatres.
Perhaps more importantly, this posture exploits a moment of US overstretch. Washington continues to bear some share of the political, military, and financial burden of sustaining Ukraine’s war effort, albeit significantly smaller since the return of Donald Trump. Simultaneously it is responding to escalation in the Middle East and maintaining commitments in the Indo-Pacific.
Russia’s approach has been to act selectively within each theatre without triggering direct confrontation. The objective is not to confront the US everywhere, but to demonstrate that it cannot be excluded anywhere. The effect is cumulative: each calibrated action reinforces a broader narrative of Russian resilience and indispensability, to which Moscow knows Trump cannot stay insensitive.
The last three weeks of conflict in the Middle East have undeniably strengthened Moscow’s hand, albeit unevenly. Disruption in the Gulf has tightened global energy markets, increasing demand for Russian crude among those buyers willing to operate within or around sanctions constraints.
At various points, the now traditional discount on Russian oil has narrowed, and in some cases disappeared. This has translated into higher export revenues for Moscow and a short-term improvement in Russia’s fiscal position.
However, these gains should not be overstated: economic fundamentals remain constrained by structural factors. Russia is still dogged by limited access to technology, labour shortages, and ongoing fiscal pressures linked to the war in Ukraine.
Growth has slowed, and the government continues to reduce non-priority expenditure. Planned cuts to civilian and administrative spending will likely go ahead, to preserve fiscal space for defence and strategic sectors.
The Middle East crisis has therefore provided a tactical windfall rather than a strategic transformation. It has enhanced Russia’s room for manoeuvre but not resolved its underlying vulnerabilities.
These dynamics ultimately converge on the war in Ukraine. Under Donald Trump, US policy has shown a greater emphasis on transactional outcomes and visible leverage.
In this context, Russia’s ability to demonstrate resilience under sanctions, maintain influence in energy markets, and project strategic reach strengthens its relative standing.
Recent US decisions to ease certain restrictions on Russian energy flows are primarily aimed at stabilizing global markets amid disruption caused by the war. They are not intended as support for President Putin. Nonetheless, by being forced to alleviate pressure on Russia’s most critical revenue stream, Moscow’s economic resilience is reinforced to Washington.
Ukraine, by contrast, risks being framed less as a US strategic partner than as a protracted liability that is resistant to rapid resolution. The longer external crises sustain elevated energy prices and divert political attention, the more credible Moscow’s argument becomes that it is the more durable and consequential actor.
The implication is not necessarily a reversal of US commitments, but a shift in emphasis. If Washington moves from seeking to weaken Russia to managing it, the balance of pressure may increasingly fall on Kyiv to accept compromise. In this sense, Russia’s gains in the Middle East are not peripheral to the Ukraine war; they feed directly into the diplomatic and strategic situation.
Russia’s approach to the Middle East war is best understood as selective engagement structured across three layers: spectator, beneficiary, and player.
By avoiding full entanglement and intervening only where the returns justify the risks, Moscow has positioned itself to extract maximum advantage without assuming proportional costs.
Shifting from regular income to disability has a big impact on your paycheck, but what about your credit card debt?
Chinese authorities have barred two Manus executives from leaving the country while investigating whether Meta's reported $2 billion acquisition of the Singapore-based AI startup violated foreign investment reporting rules. "Manus was founded in China but last year relocated its headquarters and core team to Singapore," notes the Financial Times. "Meta acquired it for $2 billion at the end of last year." The Financial Times reports: Manus's chief executive Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao were summoned to a meeting in Beijing with the National Development and Reform Commission this month, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. They said Xiao and Ji were questioned on potential violations of foreign direct investment rules related to its onshore Chinese entities. After the meeting, the Singapore-based executives were told they were not allowed to leave China because of a regulatory review, while they remain free to travel within the country, two of the people said. No formal investigation has been opened and no charges have been brought. Manus is actively seeking law firms and consultancies to help resolve the matter, said a person with knowledge of the move.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Study into how fertilisation could work in space finds sperm may get disorientated when trying to find an egg
Sperm in space are likely to get disoriented and lost while struggling to find their way to an egg, a new study has found.
When exposed to microgravity in experiments, sperm tumble around like an untethered astronaut, according to Adelaide University researchers.
Continue reading...Role as minority owner of Raiders causes problems
Former QB says he is ‘very happily retired’
Tom Brady says he explored the idea of making a return to the NFL as a player but the league “don’t like that idea very much”.
Brady’s last NFL game came in a defeat to the Dallas Cowboys in January 2023. Since then he has become a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders as well as a television analyst for Fox. A spokesperson for the league said that Brady, who turns 49 in August, would need to divest his stake in the Raiders if he was to return to playing.
Continue reading...Justice Department lawyers said in the memo that it was a "regrettable error" to cite the memo in monthslong litigation.
We now know 42 of the 48 of the teams that will play next year, but for a host of teams the race goes on via playoffs
All nine of the automatic places have been filled by the nine group winners, with the four best runners-up – DR Congo, Gabon, Cameroon and Nigeria – competing in November’s playoffs in Morocco. Nigeria beat Gabon 4-1 in the first semi-final, while Cameroon fell to a last-gasp 1-0 defeat by DR Congo in the second tie. DR Congo upset Nigeria after a gripping penalty shootout in the final, and go through to represent Africa in the intercontinental playoffs in March.
Egypt
Mohamed Salah scored twice as Hossam Hassan’s side beat Djibouti 3-0 in Casablanca in October and made up for missing out on Qatar 2022 by reaching the finals with a game in hand. This will be Egypt’s fourth finals, even though they have yet to win a game. Bizarrely, the Pharaohs did qualify for the first World Cup, in 1930, but missed their boat from Marseille to South America after a storm delayed them.
Remarks come after defense secretary calls for changes to military’s chaplain corps, which had been ‘watered down’
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, prayed during a religious service at the Pentagon that there be “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.
The Christian worship service, held on Wednesday before military and civilian workers at the Pentagon, was Hegseth’s first since the Iran war began, the Associated Press reported.
Continue reading...Laurence Gray was charged with attempting to provide material support to terrorist organizations
An Arizona licensed gun dealer was charged this month with attempting to provide material support to terrorist organizations after federal agents caught him allegedly selling a series of rifles and guns to two Mexican cartels.
The federal charges against the American firearms dealer come amid years of pressure by the Mexican government to stop the flow of weapons into the country. Mexico’s violent and bloody internal conflict, between drug cartels and the Mexican government, has been largely fueled by American weapons smuggled into the country.
Continue reading...The Boys in Green travel to Prague for a do-or-die clash.
The Azzurri stand in the way of Michael O'Neill's team taking a step closer to reaching their first World Cup in 40 years.
The comments were part of a broader address in which he condemned Nato allies
Yesterday the Conservative party said that it wanted to ban political parties from distributing campaign literature in a foreign language. Announcing a plan to propose an amendement to the representation of the people bill to make this law, the shadow communities minister Paul Holmes said:
Campaigning in a foreign language as the Greens did in Gorton and Denton only fosters greater division. A coherent national culture relies on shared values, and an inclusive electoral process relies on a common tongue.
I think it’s for political parties to choose how they campaign and communicate with British voters. If they’re using British money that is funding their campaigns and they’re speaking to people who have the right to vote, then why would you not show those voters the respect of communication?
What fuels division is Nick Timothy standing up and singling out Muslim forms of worship for a ban when he’s not applying that to forms of worship that other religions are talking about.
It just doesn’t compute, does it? I worked in Number 10. Briefly, I had a Number 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.
And so whether it was the Met Police, whether it was Morgan McSweeney, and what sounds like pretty evasive set of reporting, even when you look at that transcript, or whether it was the Number 10 security team following up something that at the time they could not have been sure had not been taken by a state actor, a phone with all sorts of government secrets potentially in it, that’s precisely why people in government have two separate phones.
I don’t believe McSwindle had his iPhone stolen
Honest believe, Matt. It’s smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’. We mustn’t take the public for fools. And I am afraid this smacks of too convenient by far. I won’t do it. I will say what I actually think. And I don’t believe it. End of!
I believe the report was made. McSwindle didn’t mention that he was the chief of staff to the PM. A significant omission of he’d wanted the police to prioritise the offence.
Continue reading...The comments came after the US president lashed out as Nato, saying it didn’t help to open the strait of Hormuz when requested
Meanwhile, the US president, Donald Trump, has once again lashed out against Nato allies saying in a social media post that they have “done absolutely nothing to help” in Iran campaign.
“The USA needs nothing from Nato, but ‘never forget’ this very important point in time,” he warned.
“NATO NATIONS HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO HELP WITH THE LUNATIC NATION, NOW MILITARILY DECIMATED, OF IRAN. THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO, BUT “NEVER FORGET” THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Continue reading...New partnership aims to create a secure, made‑in‑Canada system to power the country’s artificial intelligence future
KINGSTON, Ontario and BURNABY, British Columbia, March 26, 2026 — Queen’s University and Simon Fraser University (SFU) are partnering to design and build a national sovereign, secure, and sustainable high-performance supercomputing system to grow Canada’s research and development capabilities. The two universities have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to work together, sharing expertise to deliver scalable, high-performance computing to academia, government, and industry from coast to coast.
Credit: Shuhan/Shutterstock
AI supercomputers are the powerful engines that train AI models, analyze massive amounts of information, and support innovations in areas such as healthcare, clean energy, defense, manufacturing, dual-use technology and public safety. As demand for AI grows, so does the need for strong computing infrastructure that keeps data secure and ensures it stays within Canadian borders.
SFU and Queen’s bring deep, complementary experience to this work. Both universities currently operate trusted public high-performance computing platforms that support some of Canada’s most advanced AI projects, including those focused on critical infrastructure, life sciences, and next generation technologies. With this agreement in place, Canada would become home to its first global top-10 supercomputer, hosted by Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario, and a global top-25 supercomputer in B.C, hosted by SFU. Together, this distributed model will operate as a coordinated, “made in Canada” system, working with Canadian vendors and suppliers, and driving innovation in sustainable computing.
SFU currently operates Canada’s largest public supercomputing system, supporting more than 24,000 researchers and industry partners nationwide. The Cedar Supercomputing Centre is powered by clean energy and is part of Canada’s most sustainable data centre, with an industry-leading power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.07. This means the facility uses only about 7 per cent more energy than the IT equipment itself, far below the industry average PUE of roughly 1.56.
For the past five years, SFU has been ranked as Canada’s top university in the World University Ranking for Innovation (WURI), reflecting its leadership in AI, quantum technologies, and climate-change related research.
Queen’s is the only university in Canada home to researchers who have helped design and deploy some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, including systems ranked among the global top-10 in the United States, Europe and Asia. Queen’s also runs the Centre for Advanced Computing, a research data centre and analytics hub, as well as CAESAR Lab, the country’s largest group of experts on the design and build of exascale systems in Canada and leaders in research advancing energy-efficient supercomputing.
Together, this partnership aims to accelerate Canada’s leadership in AI, attract global talent, work with leading supercomputing sites worldwide, strengthen national digital sovereignty, and ensure Canadian researchers and businesses have the tools they need to compete globally.
This collaboration aligns with the Government of Canada’s Sovereign AI Compute strategy to build a state-of-the-art, public supercomputing infrastructure and mobilize private sector investment. As part of the strategy, Canada is investing in a new AI supercomputing system through the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program. SFU and Queen’s plan to jointly apply to the program, which is expected to launch in 2026.
“Queen’s is pleased to partner with Simon Fraser University to help strengthen Canada’s sovereign, sustainable AI supercomputing capacity,” said Nancy Ross, Vice-Principal, Research, Queen’s University. “This collaboration, which brings together complementary expertise in high-performance computing and AI, will help cultivate talent and train the next generation of Canadian experts. As we have seen from global leaders in the space, advanced computing infrastructure that is partnered with research and academia will strengthen Canada’s economic competitiveness, enable breakthrough research at scale, safeguard digital sovereignty, and ensure we have the infrastructure needed to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world.”
“Canada needs secure, world‑class computing infrastructure to lead in the next generation of artificial intelligence,” said Dugan O’Neil, Vice-President, Research & Innovation, Simon Fraser University. “By partnering with Queen’s, we’re bringing together the expertise, talent, and the national-scale facilities needed for a sovereign platform that Canadians can trust. This collaboration strengthens our research community, supports industry innovation, and helps ensure Canada remains competitive in a rapidly evolving global landscape.”
More from HPCwire
About Queen’s University
Founded in 1841, Queen’s University, Canada, is an internationally ranked research-intensive university with more than 31,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff. Queen’s is known for research in areas such as cancer detection and treatment, geoengineering, materials science, AI and supercomputing, and is home to the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Queen’s welcomes researchers and students from around the world and is one of Canada’s leading universities. To learn more, please visit queensu.ca.
About Simon Fraser University
SFU is a leading research university, advancing an inclusive and sustainable future. Over the past 60 years, SFU has been recognized among the top universities worldwide in providing a world-class education and working with communities and partners to develop and share knowledge for deeper understanding and meaningful impact. Committed to excellence in everything we do, SFU fosters innovation to address global challenges and continues to build a welcoming, inclusive community where everyone feels a sense of belonging. With campuses in British Columbia’s three largest cities — Burnaby, Surrey and Vancouver — SFU has 10 faculties that deliver 368 undergraduate degree programs and 149 graduate degree programs for more than 37,000 students each year. The university boasts more than 200,000 alumni residing in 145+ countries.
Source: Queen’s University
The post Simon Fraser University and Queen’s University Join Forces to Build Canada’s National Supercomputing Capability appeared first on HPCwire.
Lawmakers consider latest bill that targets trans people for using the bathroom that matches their gender identity
Idaho lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it a crime for transgender people to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity – even inside privately owned businesses.
At least 19 states, including Idaho, already have laws barring transgender people from using bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their gender in schools and, in some cases, other public places. The LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Movement Advancement Project’s tracking of the laws shows that three other states – Florida, Kansas and Utah – have made it a criminal offense in some circumstances to violate the bathroom laws.
Continue reading...Banks, governments and tech providers urged to upgrade security because current systems will soon be obsolete
Banks, governments and technology providers need to be prepared for quantum computer hackers capable of breaking most existing encryption systems by 2029, Google has warned.
The tech company said in a blogpost that quantum computers would pose a “significant threat to current cryptographic standards” before the end of the decade and urged other companies to follow its lead.
Continue reading...  | I recently bought a used GT and when I connect to the app it shows I only have a few miles of range despite being almost fully charged. Could this be a bad battery, or is there some kind of calibration that I need to do? [link] [comments] |
Transgender women athletes are now excluded from women's events at the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy on Thursday.
Russia is providing intelligence support to Iran in the Middle East war to "kill Americans," Kaja Kallas said Thursday.
The new album draws from the musician’s early childhood memories of growing up in Liverpool and his relationship with Lennon, with musical styles that span his entire career
• Alexis Petridis on single Days We Left Behind: ‘As McCartney-esque as possible’
Paul McCartney has announced his 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane – its title a reference to the route from Liverpool to the Speke shoreline, the area where the former Beatle spent his young childhood.
A press release described the 14-track record as McCartney’s most introspective album yet, a “collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared, along with some newly inspired love songs”, presumably about McCartney’s third wife, Nancy Shevell, whom he married in 2011. The musical styles are said to span his entire career, including “Wings-style rock, Beatles-style harmonies, McCartney-style grooves, understated intimacy, melody-driven storytelling, character songs”.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Physics World: Researchers at the CERN particle-physics lab have successfully transported antiprotons in a lorry across the lab's main site. The feat, the first of its kind, follows a similar test with protons in 2024. CERN says the achievement is "a huge leap" towards being able to transport antimatter between labs across Europe. [...] To do so, in 2020 the BASE team began developing a device, known as BASE-STEP (for Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment-Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable Antiprotons), to store and transport antiprotons. It works by trapping particles in a Penning trap composed of gold-plated cylindrical electrode stacks made from oxygen-free copper that is surrounded by a superconducting magnet bore operated at cryogenic temperatures. The device, which also contains a carbon-steel vacuum chamber to shield the particles from stray magnetic fields, is then mounted on an aluminium frame. This allows it to be transported using standard forklifts and cranes and withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. In 2024, BASE researchers used the device to transport a cloud of about 105 trapped protons across CERN's Meyrin campus for four hours. After that feat, the researchers began to adjust BASE-STEP to handle antiprotons and yesterday the team successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h. With further improvements and tests, the team now hope to transport the antiprotons further afield. The first destination on the team's list is the Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in Dusseldorf, Germany, which would take about eight hours. "This means we'd have to keep the trap's superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2 K for that long," says BASE-STEP's leader Christian Smorra. "So, in addition to the liquid helium , we'd need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility." If possible to transport to HHU, physicists would then use the particles to search for charge-parity-time violations in protons and antiprotons with a precision at least 100 times higher than currently possible at CERN.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scisters Salon & Apothecary in the San Diego area is committed to sustainable beauty and going low-waste
The first thing you notice when you walk into Scisters Salon & Apothecary is what isn’t there. No wall of glossy plastic bottles promising “repair” or “shine”. No sharp chemical tang or aerosol haze. The only trash can is a tiny basket that mostly collects coffee cups and gum wrappers clients bring from home.
Instead, the shelves of this southern California salon are lined with large refill containers of shampoo and conditioner, houseplants dot the space, hair clippings are swept away for compost, and the air carries a trace of bergamot and vanilla.
Continue reading...Terms of reference are to seek fullest disclosure of information and to produce a report by spring 2028
The government has announced the formal start of the promised official inquiry into the violent policing at the Orgreave coking plant during the 1984-85 miners’ strike and the discredited prosecutions of 95 men that followed.
Yvette Cooper, who was then the home secretary, announced the inquiry in July with Pete Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield, as the chair. The government has since worked on appointing an expert panel to consider the evidence.
Continue reading...The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose board is filled with the president's allies, announced Bill Maher will receive the prize in June.
You may have more leverage with your credit card issuer than you think, but only under very specific conditions.
Nigeria and UK look to strengthen trade and economic ties amid growing calls from Africa and Caribbean for reparative justice
“There are chapters in our shared history that I know have left some painful marks,” King Charles said during a state banquet to welcome the Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to the UK, in a year in which the monarch is expected to come under renewed pressure to make a formal apology for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.
But while demands grow from African and Caribbean nations for the UK to further reparative justice, Nigeria and the UK are looking to the future of global trade.
Continue reading...Shaine March fatally stabbed Alana Odysseos, who was in early stages of pregnancy, after being released on licence for killing teenager in 2000
A man who murdered his pregnant girlfriend after being released from prison on licence must spend the rest of his life in jail, the court of appeal has ruled after finding that the original 42-year sentence was “too lenient”.
Alana Odysseos, 32, was in the early stages of pregnancy with her third child when she was killed by Shaine March last July at her home in Walthamstow, east London. She died at the scene from 23 slash and stab wounds.
Continue reading...Higher blend has been prohibited in warm weather because of concerns it could worsen smog
The US Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday that it would temporarily allow widespread sales of a higher-ethanol gas blend in a move that it hopes will tamp down consumer prices that have soared since the Iran war began.
The higher-ethanol blend has been prohibited in warm weather because of concerns it could worsen smog.
Continue reading...Here's what to know about peptides, what they can and can't do, and what's driving viral claims about possible health benefits online.
Update: downloaded Floathub, downloaded Floaty, rode my GT for the first time in 18 months!
Original post: Last night I was able to install my GTV kit, and now I’m trying get everything running with the Vesc Tool app. I’ve watched a few videos about how to set up the motor, the IMU and probably the input. There seems like only one or two videos that cover the Vesc Tool’s app calibration and startup stuff.
Does anyone in the community have a document or PDF about calibration? And using Vesc Tool to set up all of that stuff? I’ve been trying to follow along with video but a step-by-step document would be much easier if it exist.
If you have a good video on how to do the set up on Vesc Tool and then switch to Floaty or whatever, I would really appreciate your help. I do not have access to Discord currently, but I’m not against using that app.
It was really surprising that such an expensive and technical part had no instructions or instructions to find instructions! I’m super hopeful that I will be riding again with my kids!
Thank you in advance for your help
Other winners include Inter Alia’s Rosamund Pike, Ivo van Hove for All My Sons and Hayley Atwell who beat her Much Ado co-star Tom Hiddleston to best Shakespearean performance
Brendan Gleeson has been named best actor at the Critics’ Circle theatre awards for his West End debut in Conor McPherson’s pub drama The Weir. He beat fellow nominees including Bryan Cranston and Paapa Essiedu, both recognised for All My Sons, and James Hameed and Arti Shah, the duo who together portray Paddington in the new musical about Michael Bond’s bear. The Weir, directed by McPherson, was entirely omitted from the nominations for this year’s Olivier awards and is being turned into a film with Gleeson and the rest of the West End cast.
All My Sons, a critically adored production of Arthur Miller’s 1946 classic at Wyndham’s theatre, won in two categories at the Critics’ Circle awards: best revival of a play or musical and best director for Ivo van Hove. A new production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, directed by Jordan Fein at the Bridge theatre, also won two prizes – best designer (Tom Scutt) and the inaugural award for best ensemble or cast.
Continue reading...Electric buses are just 1% of the Australian fleet compared with 80% in urban China, a quarter in the Netherlands and 12% in the UK
As diesel climbs past $3 a litre amid fuel security concerns, transport advocates are calling for the rollout of electric buses across Australia to be prioritised.
In Australia, just 1% of buses are electric, compared with 80% of the urban fleet in China, a quarter in the Netherlands and 12% in the UK.
Continue reading...New rules force trucking schools to cut staff and classes, and 7,000 training providers lose accreditation
Vasyl Kushnir and Gene Moik jovially greeted some of the young men studying the parts of the hulking 18-wheel trucks parked at their driving school – but behind their smiles were the growing worries that their business is at risk of closing down nearly a decade after it opened.
Every morning, Kushnir and Moik have been running numbers, projecting that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay afloat when they’ve suffered a significant drop in student enrollments at their business, Start CDL, since the second Trump administration announced new restrictions for immigrant drivers.
Continue reading...New federal restrictions threaten licenses for noncitizen truckers, including Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion
Karina Krainova, who worked as a trucker in the US after fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where she is from, rushed to the closest motor vehicle’s office last fall, just days after the US transportation department tightened commercial driver’s license requirements for immigrant drivers like her.
She was already afraid of being deported back to Ukraine as the war rages on. She had entered the United States legally in 2024 under a Biden administration program that granted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians a safe haven.
Continue reading...The TSA's top official says the situation at U.S. airports could get even worse if the partial government shutdown that has frozen officers' paychecks continues.
 | Plugged it in this morning- no green light or charging lights on the board. I assume my only course of action is to buy a new one from FM? It's several years old & bought used. Is there anything I could have done to kill it? I've been curious about best practices- when we bought an e bike they were super particular about following the BOOB protocol (Battery-Outlet, Outlet-Battery) for plugging in/ disconnecting Thanks y'all! [link] [comments] |
Commentary: The new emoji are also fun. But I'm more into the Apple Music updates.
First lady Melania Trump shares the spotlight with a Figure 03 robot to promote the use of artificial intelligence in education.
I have a gtv with OEMGT charger it’s been dropped a couple times so I’m kind of worried about the stability of it and I’m wondering if there are any other good options aside from future motion, chargers. it still has a stock battery, but it uses a gtv bms and controller
Your chat history will be easier to transfer from iPhone to Android, and it's easier to delete large media files from your conversations.
Catch up on this year's Oscar winners and more.
BERKELEY, Calif., March 26, 2026 — Rigetti Computing, Inc., a pioneer in full-stack quantum-classical computing, has announced that it intends to invest up to $100 million in the UK to accelerate quantum computing development, which will be the Company’s first major investment outside of the US. With this investment, the Company plans to deploy a quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits in the next 3 to 4 years. This follows the UK’s recently announced program that will dedicate up to £2 billion of government investment with the aim of establishing the UK as a global leader in quantum computing.
Rigetti CEO Dr. Subodh Kulkarni said: “Our presence in the UK has been marked by fruitful collaboration across industry, government, and academia. The UK government’s unwavering dedication to advancing quantum computing technology is evident across the UK’s entire quantum ecosystem. The focus on driving end-user engagement and developing on-premises capabilities for meaningful R&D makes the UK an exemplary leader in this revolutionary field.
“We see strong alignment with the UK’s national quantum computing strategy and our own path to fault-tolerant quantum computing. By establishing critical, incremental milestones that work towards a quantum system capable of one trillion quantum operations (“TeraQuOp”) by 2035, we can rapidly learn and innovate throughout the scaling process.
“This investment in the UK’s quantum computing sector is a reflection of the success we’ve already achieved with our UK-based programs and the potential of what lies ahead through the UK’s own investments to drive the industry forward.”
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “Last week, we made a world-first commitment to procure usable large-scale quantum computers by the early 2030s, backed by a £2 billion plan of Government funding, which is already having a positive impact on jobs and investment. Rigetti shares our ambition to harness quantum to improve lives, livelihoods, and public services, and this $100 million investment is a strong and immediate vote of confidence in our approach. The steps we are taking will deliver world-class infrastructure, access to talent, and a clear pathway which turns ideas from R&D into real-world use, building an environment which will support more companies to scale up and grow on our shores.”
This commitment builds on Rigetti’s long-time presence in the UK, which includes the deployment of a 36-qubit quantum system at the National Quantum Computing Centre. The system is part of a consortium focused on advancing quantum error correction capabilities on superconducting quantum computers.
About Rigetti
Rigetti (Nasdaq: RGTI) is a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing. Rigetti quantum computers are based on superconducting qubits, which are widely believed to be the leading qubit modality given their maturity, clear path to scaling, and fast gate speeds. Current Rigetti quantum computing systems achieve gate speeds of 50-70ns, which is about 1,000 times faster than other modalities such as ion traps and neutral atoms.
Rigetti sells on-premises 9-qubit to 108-qubit quantum computing systems, supporting national laboratories and quantum computing centers. Rigetti’s Cepheus 36-qubit to 108-qubit systems are based on the Company’s proprietary chiplet-based technology and include the Company’s control electronics. Rigetti’s 9-qubit Novera QPU supports a broader R&D community with a high-performance, on-premises QPU designed to plug into a customer’s existing cryogenic and control systems.
The Company operates quantum computers over the cloud through its Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform, enabling global enterprise, government, and research clients to pursue R&D. The Company’s proprietary quantum-classical infrastructure provides high-performance integration with public and private clouds for practical quantum computing.
Rigetti developed the industry’s first multi-chip quantum processor for scalable quantum computing systems. Leveraging this proprietary technology, Rigetti deployed the industry’s largest multi-chip quantum computer in 2025 with Cepheus-1-36Q, based on four 9-qubit chiplets tiled together. The Company designs and manufactures its chips in-house at Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility. Learn more at https://www.rigetti.com.
Source: Rigetti
The post Rigetti Computing Intends to Invest $100M in UK to Accelerate Quantum Computing Development appeared first on HPCwire.
‘Misappropriation of financial resources’ from actor, 90, tracked to property, vineyards and olive groves in Tuscany
Italian authorities have seized €20m (£17.3m) of assets in Tuscany, including property, vineyards and olive groves, allegedly bought with money embezzled from the actor Ursula Andress.
Andress, 90, had filed a complaint in her native Switzerland alleging a “progressive and significant depletion of her assets” by individuals charged with managing her finances, Italy’s financial crimes police said in a statement on Thursday.
Continue reading...Population estimates released by U.S. Census Bureau show growth rates slowed sharply in metro areas in 2025, as immigration dropped and hurricanes pushed people out of some Gulf Coast counties.
The Iran war highlights the creeping use of AI in warfare Expert comment thilton.drupal
The war in Iran has added to concerns about the risks of using AI to select targets during armed conflict.
The US-Israeli war with Iran has amplified long-standing concerns over the adoption of AI-supported targeting in warfare.
These concerns came to the fore in the aftermath of the 28 February strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, which Iran says killed at least 168 people, most of whom were schoolchildren.
The Trump administration initially blamed Iran for the strike, though it did not provide any evidence. The US says it is now investigating the bombing. The Washington Post has reported that the school was on a US target list.
US Senate Democrats have written to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seeking information about the attack, including clarification on any use of AI in target selection. So far there has been no confirmation of whether or not AI was used in planning or executing the strike on the school.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the US commander leading the war in Iran, has confirmed the use of ‘a variety of advanced AI tools’ to sift through large amounts of data in the conflict, without naming any tools in particular. He said these tools allowed leaders to make ‘smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react’ and sped up processes from taking hours or days to seconds. Admiral Cooper also stated that: ‘Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot, and when to shoot.’
Iran is not the first war to incorporate AI systems, but it signals AI-supported targeting is becoming the norm in warfare. While militaries may embrace the potential for increased efficiency, significant risks remain.
AI allows for rapid processing and analysis of information from a variety of different sources and customizable data access. Its adoption across the military domain has the potential to increase situational awareness, facilitate real-time information sharing and enable more informed decision-making in military operations.
A 2024 US Department of War release outlined how the AI-enabled Maven Smart System helps frontline soldiers identify and strike military targets, and assists chain-of-command approval for strikes. NATO also acquired a version of Maven Smart System from Palantir in 2025. The US military is now reportedly using its own version of Maven to help provide targeting information for its military operations in Iran. But it is unclear exactly how and to what extent Maven and other AI tools are being used in Iran.
In the war in Ukraine, both sides are using AI for data processing and target selection. Ukraine’s deputy defence minister said last year that AI analyses more than 50,000 video streams from the front line each month, which helps to ‘quickly process this massive data, identify targets, and put them on a map.’
The New York Times has reported that Israel used AI as part of its process of identifying potential targets for air strikes targeting Hamas in Gaza. The IDF has said that ‘information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.’
Additional uses for AI technology across the military domain include the training of military personnel through virtual simulations, the automated scheduling of logistical supplies or the identification of equipment maintenance needs via image-recognition systems. These are just some of the potential uses.
Many countries will want to invest in tools that give them an advantage over adversaries, in line with the search for asymmetry, which has been a constant throughout the history of warfare. But the use of AI in complex high-stake environments such as armed conflict also comes with serious risks.
Part of the concern relates to the development of AI technology itself and how it could impact on the system’s performance. For example, an AI model could be trained with faulty data, or with material that is different to what it encounters when deployed in the real world. This could lead it to generate inaccurate information or malfunction when used outside of the training environment.
AI large language models work by predicting a sequence of words, based on statistical probability – they will likely get it right most of the time, but they won’t get it right all of the time.
In practical terms, this means basing decisions on AI-generated information contains an element of risk and inaccuracy.
AI-supported targeting decisions are a high-risk case in point. If AI tools are being employed extensively to generate targets with minimal human oversight, it’s not difficult to imagine how errors could occur.
One core issue highlighted by the use of AI in war is that there is a difference between what AI-enabled systems can do and the procedures or rules about how humans use those systems.
The Iran war suggests that AI tools are set to be increasingly used in armed conflict. While the laws of war apply to all conflicts, there is a growing debate about whether AI is introducing a new dimension that requires additional rules. For example, concerns have been raised over how AI reduces the space for human judgement required for international humanitarian law determinations.
A binding international framework is unlikely in the short-term. Nevertheless, it is in militaries’ own interest to develop rules for using AI. This would help them mitigate against the risk of over-relying on AI-supported targeting, which could reduce errors that lead to the wrong targets being hit and cause civilian deaths.
Lawyer says witnesses clear player of wrongdoing
Receiver was guilty only of ‘horseplay’, says lawyer
Star Los Angeles Rams receiver Puka Nacua has been sued by a woman who says he made an antisemitic statement and bit her on the shoulder on New Year’s Eve.
The civil lawsuit was filed this week in Los Angeles, according to TMZ. The suit also cites gender violence and negligence.
Madison Atiabi and her attorney, Joseph Kar, claim Nacua said “fuck all Jews” during a New Year’s Eve dinner in Los Angeles last year. Atiabi is Jewish and says she “immediately felt uncomfortable and emotionally distressed” when the wide receiver made the comments. She says Nacua also bit her and left teeth marks on her shoulder later in the night. The lawsuit also alleges that Nacua bit Atiabi’s friend on the thumb “with such force that her companion screamed in acute pain”.
Continue reading...Sen. Elizabeth Warren's bill would raise taxes on households worth more than $50 million and on billionaires.
A shift would highlight the growing trade-offs required for the U.S. to sustain its war with Iran as the conflict depletes the military’s critical munitions.
Commentary: From Xiaomi's incredible sensor and zoom lens to Samsung's fun photo filters, there's lots Apple could bring to its next phone.
Eline van der Velden says she developed her ‘digital twin’ to provoke discussion but backlash from some has been worse than expected
The creator of the AI actor Tilly Norwood has said she received death threats after a global backlash against the project, and said she developed it to “provoke thoughts and discussion” about the impact of AI in the entertainment world.
Eline van der Velden caused anger and panic in Hollywood and beyond last year after she said talent agents had been interested in signing her creation. Prominent actors and acting unions immediately condemned the idea.
Continue reading...In a court of law, tech titans will be judged not for who they are, but what they do. We should take comfort in that
Jury verdicts are meant to speak the truth, and today’s verdict in a California courtroom spoke the truth about the pernicious effects of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube on young people in the United States and around the world. The jury found two social media giants, Meta and YouTube, responsible for injuries incurred by a 20-year-old woman over the course of her childhood.
The plaintiff, referred to in court as KGM, claimed that her social media use had begun when she was six years old. Her suit alleged that the sites she regularly used had features designed to hold her attention and keep her coming back.
Continue reading...Aipac-backed lawmakers denounce ‘extremist’ violence in West Bank as support for Israel becomes a political liability
As Israeli settlers ramp up violent attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, often as Israeli forces stand by, denunciations are mounting in the US, even from Democratic legislators and public figures who are typically staunch defenders of Israel.
In recent days, dozens of settlers have torched homes and vehicles and attacked Palestinians in apparently coordinated attacks. Since the start of the month, Israeli settlers and police have killed at least 10 Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, including two young brothers and their parents as they returned from a Ramadan shopping trip.
Continue reading...Commentary: Super Mario Bros. Wonder's Bellabel Park DLC is here this week, but it's more about lots of chaotic multiplayer minigames than new courses.
Firm’s sales up 54% this month and Good Energy reports doubling of interest in solar after latest oil price shock
Solar panel sales have risen sharply since the start of the Iran war, according to Octopus Energy, and households are opting for bigger arrays of roof panels.
Sales were up 54% so far this month compared with the same period last month, the company said on Thursday.
Continue reading...The Teforia smart infuser was designed to brew a perfect cup of tea, but at $500 (previously, $1,500), I put it to the test to see if it lives up to its price and promise.
On Monday evening I almost pulled the trigger on an X7 long range. Although I’ve been planning to buy it for months I still decided to think about it a bit longer. On Tuesday I decided it’d order it that evening. Of course when I went online the page refreshed and it informed me that the x7 long range was removed from my cart as it’s no longer in stock. I sent a few emails back and forth with customer service and it looks like it’s going to be a couple months before they’re back in stock. Now since the long range isn’t an option I’m having a hard time deciding between the sport and the supercharged. Is it really worth the $800 extra for the supercharged? I currently have an xr and before that I had a pint.
Thanks for the help!
Iran’s foreign minister has said Tehran has ‘no intention of negotiating for now’. Plus, the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
Good morning.
Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and responded with its own negotiation plan as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.
What is the toll? The US-Israel war on Iran has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, more than 1,500 in Iran and 16 in Israel, according to each country’s authorities. More than a dozen deaths have been reported in the West Bank and Gulf Arab states. Experts warn there has been a collapse in healthcare access.
This is a developing story. Follow our live blog for the latest updates.
What did the Los Angeles plaintiff allege? The 20-year-old woman testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said harmed her wellbeing. She blamed the platforms for her experience of body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia in her adolescence.
How much will the companies pay the plaintiff? The jury awarded the plaintiff in the case damages of $6m, with Meta to pay 70% and YouTube the remainder.
Continue reading...The staff at a Florida sea turtle hospital is monitoring some animals they've rehabilitated from space -- especially amputees, such as one they named Amelie, who's back at sea.
Andy Ogles’ election victories in Tennessee are a product of an electoral system broken by gerrymandering
Andy Ogles represents more Muslims than any other Tennessee congressman. Yet he has no interest in representing them. He doesn’t even want them in the country.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” the third-term Republican wrote on Twitter/X last week. He’s proudly doubled down on his incendiary statement, which joins a long list of Islamophobic beliefs. During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign, Ogles called Zohran Mamdani “a communist who has publicly embraced a terroristic ideology”. The US naturalization system, he said, required “any alignments with communism or terrorist activities to be disclosed. I’m doubtful he disclosed them. If this is confirmed, put him on the first flight back to Uganda.”
Continue reading...Consider this your handy guide to maintaining your favorite treadmills, rowing machines and exercise bikes.
Reddit is rolling out human-verification checks for accounts that show signs of bot-like behavior, while also labeling approved automated accounts that provide useful services. The social media company stressed that these checks will only happen if something appears "fishy," and that it is "not conducting sitewide human verification." TechCrunch reports: To identify potential bots, Reddit is using specialized tooling that looks at account-level signals and other factors -- like how quickly the account is attempting to write or post content. Using AI to write posts or comments, however, is not against its policies (though community moderators may set their own rules). To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Face ID or even Sam Altman's World ID -- or, in some countries, the use of government IDs. Reddit notes this last category may be required in some countries like the U.K. and Australia and some U.S. states, because of local regulations on age verification, but it's not the company's preferred method. "If we need to verify an account is human, we'll do it in a privacy-first way," Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement Wednesday. "Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn't have to sacrifice one for the other."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Clear Secure has seen jump in new sign-ups amid the partial government shutdown as TSA workers go unpaid
As travelers continue to face sprawling security lines across the US, one company is thriving amid the ongoing chaos.
Clear Secure, a biometric firm that allows travelers to bypass Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines at more than 60 airports in the US, has reportedly seen a jump in new sign-ups this month amid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown.
Continue reading...Documents obtained by Guardian show company increased different fees to ‘offset revenue loss’ from FTC rule change
Following a wave of regulations banning the surprise fees that appear at the end of a transaction, Ticketmaster stopped charging the extra few dollars it added to each order at checkout. Typically shared with the venue, the order processing fee was a boon to a global platform that sells hundreds of millions of tickets a year.
But documents obtained by the Guardian show that while Ticketmaster eliminated this fee to comply with the rules, the company simply raised the cost of different fees in a number of its venues to ensure it didn’t lose money.
Continue reading...Oil is used to power the supply chain, from machines that manufacture a cellphone to diesel that powers a truck
Fertilizer. Phones and laptops. Flights. These are just some of the products made from or powered by crucial materials that ship through the strait of Hormuz, which still remains effectively closed due to the US-Israel war on Iran.
As the war approaches its fifth week, global oil shortages are forcing countries to take severe measures to save their reserves as Iran continues to block oil shipments.
Continue reading...Company reported loss of £125m after cyber-security attack hit sales and claims of ‘toxic’ culture
The Co-op Group has announced that its chief executive will step down this weekend after a difficult year that included a cyber-attack and recent claims of a “toxic” culture at the business.
Shirine Khoury-Haq will depart on 29 March and Kate Allum, a board member and former boss of the dairy group First Milk, will step in as interim boss while a permanent replacement is sought.
Continue reading...Twin mountain gorillas were recently born in the Virunga National Park, renowned for its biodiversity but threatened by conflict.
Market in North Darfur and truck carrying civilians in North Kordofan hit as civil war approaches fourth year
At least 28 civilians have been killed in two separate drone strikes in Sudan, according to health workers, as the country’s brutal civil war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) approaches its fourth year.
A strike hit a market in the town of Saraf Omra, in North Darfur state, on Wednesday, killing “22 people, including an infant, and injuring 17 more”, a health worker at the local clinic told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Wilmington residents and city officials have criticized the outcome of New Castle County tax reassessment completed in 2024, saying it exaggerated property values and drove up tax bills — especially for lower-income residents. In response, Mayor John Carney rolled out a new plan that could lower future bills, but it’s proving harder than expected to get the job done.
Wilmington’s plan to reassess home values in the city by looking inside some of them is proving to be more difficult than expected, as officials struggle to secure a contractor to do the work.
Amid outrage over steep jumps in tax bills last September, Mayor John Carney announced his initiative to hire a contractor to conduct interior appraisals of residential properties on a block-by-block basis for neighborhoods with assessments that were deemed to be “too high.”
Asked during a budget address last week how the plan is progressing, Carney said, “not great.”
He said no company has submitted a formal bid for the work after the city solicited proposals. Four contractors did request additional information.
“So we’ve got to go back to the four, and we’ve got to say, ‘Why didn’t you bid?’” Carney said.
The city issued the request for proposals for the contract in January, Carney’s spokeswoman, Caroline Klinger, said. She also noted that the city will be reaching out directly to vendors.
“We are actively working to stand up a program to validate the reassessment as promised,” Klinger said in a statement, referencing New Castle County’s reassessment of properties completed in 2024.
Klinger also noted that the county’s appeals program remains active.
When announced last year, Carney’s plan required a half-million-dollar budget amendment, which included $425,000 to hire the contractor, and $75,000 to establish a grant program to assist residents filing appeals with the New Castle County Board of Assessment.
The City Council approved the budget amendment in October.
Without a city program to reassess the county’s assessment, Carney noted that residents would simply have to rely on New Castle County’s one-on-one appeal process.
“That will take forever. We have whole neighborhoods that have been misvalued,” Carney said.
If the city is ultimately able to complete assessments of home interiors, officials will present the data to New Castle County in hopes it will accept the new numbers. Their goal for the process is to ultimately lower the amount of money some residents pay in property taxes.
Asked about the project, Natalie Criscenzo, a spokesperson for New Castle County, said County officials are looking forward to working with the city “to better understand the specific details and methodology of this proposal.”
“Any consideration of assessment changes would need to be reviewed carefully to ensure consistency with applicable legal standards and obligations,” she said.
Wilmington’s plan came after months of complaints from residents throughout the state, especially in northern Delaware, about sharp tax bill increases that came as a result of the first statewide property reassessment in more than four decades.
City officials have placed a particular focus on lower-income neighborhoods, such as Hilltop and Southbridge, where property taxes have doubled and tripled, according to a heat map the city released of property tax changes.
Spotlight Delaware also previously reported that Hilltop, the Eastside, Riverside and Southbridge experienced property assessment hikes between 700% and 1,000%.
Aside from the delay in finding a contractor to carry out the plan, one of the biggest hurdles may be convincing residents to allow assessors into their homes.
Local community advocates previously told Spotlight Delaware that residents may be wary of letting contractors into their homes and that it would be important for the city to educate residents so they can better understand the process.
But some residents are optimistic.
Donald Ferrell, a longtime city resident and Eastside landlord, said he would be open to interior assessments on his properties if it would help bring taxes down.
Ferrell said he hasn’t seen major increases across most of his properties. However, he said one of his vacant property, which is not yet livable, saw a significant spike.
“It’s practically a shell, but it more than doubled,” he said.
The post Wilmington’s plan to curb tax hikes stalls as city struggles to find a contractor appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Government-backed bank in talks about recompensing about 37,000 people whose money was misplaced
National Savings and Investments is preparing to repay hundreds of millions of pounds to its customers over missing savings, in what is expected to be the single biggest payout in the bank’s 160-year history.
The government-backed savings institution is in discussions with the Treasury to recompense about 37,000 people whose money has been misplaced due to historical failings.
Continue reading...I’ve commuted on XR, pint, GT-s and GT… GT wins because of range but I’d be damn tempted to ride a pint if it had 30 mile range.
Purchased the pint on lunch day during the lockdowns. I got about 5500 miles on my pint before purchasing my GT, and I commuted on it every day and upgraded the battery inside before the pint S and pint X were released.
Recently traded the board to a buddy of mine to get him into one wheeling so I figured I’d make a last ride video.
Original Pint 5,000+ Mile Review + ASMR
Anyone else love their pint?
OECD says the Middle East war will test the world’s resilience with Australia expected to suffer from higher rates and inflation
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The world economy is on the brink of a major inflationary spike as soaring fuel prices threaten growth in European and Asian nations, the OECD has warned, and local economists are slashing Australia’s growth prospects for this year and the next amid the ongoing US-Israel attack on Iran.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest interim outlook said the US-Israel war on Iran will “test the resilience of the global economy” and warned of the “significant downside risk” to their forecasts should the oil supply disruptions prove more persistent and push energy prices even higher.
Continue reading...Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says UK economy will grow by just 0.7% this year
The conflict in the Middle East will damage the UK’s economy more than any other industrialised nation, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which warned over rising inflation.
In the first major assessment by a leading international thinktank of the economic impact from the attack on Iran, the OECD said the UK economy would grow by just 0.7% this year, compared with its last forecast, made in December, of 1.2% for 2026.
Continue reading...One minute, Dennis Biesma was playing with a chatbot; the next, he was convinced his sentient friend would make him a fortune. He’s just one of many people who lost control after an AI encounter
Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”
Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.
Continue reading...The relatable, endearing authenticity of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the defending NBA champions is a wonder to behold
Winter is over, though perhaps most NBA fans feel as if it’s just beginning. After a midseason slump, the Oklahoma City Thunder have won 12 of their last 13 games They’re clinging to a slim but steady three-game lead over the San Antonio Spurs atop the otherwise chaotic Western Conference. (The Lakers are good now? The Nuggets can’t find their footing? The Rockets can’t even stand up?) The Thunder’s flirtation with vulnerability was fun, but the defending champions look as invincible now as they did during their 24-1 run to begin the season. So, now as then, with nothing to criticize in the Thunder’s basketball, we are compelled to discuss their character and vibes.
Reviews are usually poor. I myself celebrated the Spurs when they recorded a hat-trick of wins over the Thunder in December, simply for injecting intrigue into a season that already seemed decided. The Defector podcast Nothing But Respect recently featured a series of anti-Thunder guests; after discussing the idea that artists don’t like OKC with musician Will Anderson, a host announced, “next week, we will have a real, actual Thunder expert to defend his team’s values”. Most of the comments on that episode seemed unconvinced by Ringer staff writer Tyler Parker’s arguments.
Continue reading...Mauricio Pochettino will use friendlies against Belgium and Portugal to answer the final World Cup roster questions
When the US men’s national team booked Belgium and Portugal for the final pair of friendlies before the 2026 World Cup roster is named, it looked like a couple solid tests against European teams who will expect to reach this World Cup’s business end. They should be worthy tests of the US’s readiness for big matchups that could await if they advance from Group D. Oddly, they are also a pair of foes from the US’s 2014 World Cup campaign.
This will hardly resemble a 12-year reunion, though. Belgium arrives without Romelu Lukaku and Thibaut Courtois, two of the few remaining members from that round-of-16 clash that ended the United States’ tournament. Portugal arrives without the injured Cristiano Ronaldo, slightly dulling the demand for what might have been a hot ticket in Atlanta.
Continue reading...War tax resistance has a venerable tradition dating back to days before the US was even born. It’s time to revive this tradition
More than $20bn. That’s roughly the cost of our military operation in Iran to date.
Tax day is a month away. If you’re like me, it makes your stomach turn to watch the US practice regime change in the Middle East – again. If you’re like me, the reckless murder of more than 150 little girls in the name of “liberating” Iranian women fills you with rage. The worst part? You and I literally paid for this.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Last year, the state conducted its first property reassessment in decades. As a result, school districts were able to implement an up to 10% school tax increase without voter approval. Resident outrage and concern over ballooning tax bills prompted Republican lawmakers to introduce two bills aimed at limiting those automatic increases. Those bills, however, both failed to make it out of committee.
Two bills seeking to limit Delaware school districts’ ability to implement automatic tax increases following property reassessments were both tabled in committee, or not advanced to a full House vote, by their sponsors on Wednesday afternoon after nearly two hours of debate.
The Republican-led bills were spurred by school districts across the state choosing to increase their property tax revenues by 10% last summer following Delaware’s first statewide property reassessment in nearly 40 years. But those tax increases, allowed under a little-known state law, only worsened the resident outcry that had been building following reassessment.
One of the bills, Rep. Bryan Shupe’s (R-Milford) House Bill 246, would have removed school districts’ ability to automatically implement a 10% tax revenue increase following reassessment and instead allow districts to take a smaller percentage, if needed.
Shupe’s bill would have required districts to demonstrate that they would have lost revenue following a reassessment in order to instill an automatic tax rate increase. That automatic increase would then be limited to 2% a year for up to five years, or until a district makes up its revenue loss – whichever happens first.
Delaware will begin reassessing property every five years now that a new foundation has been determined.
The second bill, House Bill 245 sponsored by Rep. Mike Smith (R-Pike Creek), would have simply eliminated the 10% tax increase option altogether. That would require school districts to pass a referendum to adjust their tax rate, which was typical before the reassessment.
Following nearly two hours during Wednesday’s House Education Committee meeting, both Shupe and Smith asked for their respective legislation to be tabled. That allows the bills to potentially come back later in session rather than being denied at the committee level.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Shupe said he had spoken with school district officials in Kent and Sussex County about his bill, but not New Castle County.
He decided to table his bill, he said, in order to speak with school district leaders in Delaware’s northernmost county before introducing a new version of the legislation.
New Castle County communities were hit hard by the reassessment results, but the largest increases came in some of Wilmington’s poorest neighborhoods.
Communities like Hilltop, Eastside, Riverside and Southbridge saw increases between 700% and 1,000%. Meanwhile, chateau country communities like Centreville, Greenville and Hockessin and the booming Middletown-Odessa-Townsend corridor saw increases of 300% to 450%.
Colonial School District Chief Financial Officer Emily Falcon, who also serves as the president of the Delaware Association of School Administrators, said that although there are aspects of Shupe’s bill that districts can work with, it ultimately would be operationalized differently than how he intended.
Based on her interpretation of the bill, it could adversely affect school districts whose boundaries cross county lines and those who pass a referendum before a property reassessment takes place but are still awaiting the revenues afterward, Falcon said.
If a district falls within those categories, Falcon said, HB 246 would require it to reset its tax rate to a revenue neutral level. Districts who fall outside those categories, though, would be exempt from that rate reset unless they projected to lose revenue because of a reassessment.
During the meeting, Rep. Kim Williams (D-Stanton) also pointed out that, as the bill was written, there was no financial measure to determine which districts would be applicable to the annual 2% increase.
Instead, a district could lose as little as $1 and implement up to 2% in tax revenue increases per year for five years, she said.
“My intention is not to put something out there that I think works in writing, but is not going to work on the ground level,” Shupe said, ultimately deciding to table his bill.
Although Smith’s bill, HB 245, saw less debate than HB 246, it also did not pass through the House Education Committee to consideration within the full House of Representatives.
Smith told Spotlight Delaware that rather than districts automatically being eligible for an up to 10% tax rate increase, they should instead show the public why additional funds are needed by going through a request process.
“We’ve set the precedent for special session, and we have the budget markup process where they could come and ask the state for money, if it was necessary,” Smith said.
But multiple House Education Committee members, and members of the public, expressed concern that eliminating the tax increase would increase districts’ reliance on referendum votes.
School referendums are the only time that voters in Delaware have a direct say in their taxation rates.
But multiple referendum requests have failed across the state in recent years, making it more difficult for school districts to continue funding staff recruitment and retention efforts, bus programs, and other operational costs.
While Smith’s bill would require districts to demonstrate where money is needed, he said voters must also be accountable for referendum outcomes.
“Not enough people do vote in those referendums, but then they have an opinion after,” Smith said.
Like Shupe, Smith also decided to table his bill for further discussion.
This past summer, multiple school districts, such as the Appoquinimink, Christina, Capital, and Indian River school districts, chose to implement the full 10% tax increase during July board of education meetings.
At the time, some leaders said taking advantage of the increase would prevent their district from needing to hold, and pass, a referendum.
Others, like the Brandywine School District, announced in July that it would implement a 1.7% tax rate increase, citing concerns over the future of federal education dollars. The following month, the Brandywine school board changed course, opting to reduce rates for residential properties and increase them for business properties.
Still, post-assessment property tax bills prompted outrage from many New Castle residents over the sticker shock of the increases in their bill. For some residents, tax bills doubled after the reassessment.
By August, state lawmakers held a one-day special legislative session in response to residents’ outrage. They allowed the public school districts in New Castle County to split their property tax rates to provide additional relief to homeowners.
The school boards for the Appoquinimink, Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay Consolidated school districts then approved new rates that lowered tax burdens for homeowners and raised them for commercial property owners.
Christina, Appoquinimink, and Colonial also chose to retain the extra revenue they raised through the automatic tax increases.
The post Republican-led school tax reforms held up in committee appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The woman, 52, lay on the exam table at a clinic in Richland, Washington. Her legs were parted and propped up.
The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators.
She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland.
“Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint.
The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.”
Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.”
“Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked her, before ending their visit by saying “the playroom is open” — a comment she interpreted as Mulholland clearing her for sexual activity.
The woman said she left the room in shock. She made her way to the parking lot of the Kadlec Clinic-Associated Physicians for Women, climbed inside her car and sat, incredulous, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. What happened felt terribly wrong, she said.
Mulholland did not respond to requests for comment for this article after being sent a detailed list of findings by email and by letter. His attorney declined to comment.
What the woman didn’t know was that by the time of her exam in February 2025, the Washington Medical Commission had already received complaints from four other women since 2022 accusing Mulholland of sexual misconduct. And yet he was allowed to keep seeing patients throughout.
The accounts related by the women, whom KUOW and ProPublica are not naming to protect their privacy, included descriptions of Mulholland touching them unnecessarily, using sexually charged language, or performing painful or seemingly sexual pelvic exams that involved moving his fingers in and out.
The commission also gathered testimony a year before the woman’s February 2025 appointment from three of Mulholland’s colleagues with their own troubling accounts. These included hearing firsthand about or observing him telling patients they had “tight” and “pretty” vaginas, touching and slapping his patients’ legs, and aggressively pulling a patient’s pants down without permission.
Washington law allows the commission to take emergency action and suspend a doctor’s license while disciplinary proceedings are pending. The law says a suspension is defensible if it’s more probable than not that the physician poses an “immediate threat to the public health and safety.”
In Mulholland’s case, the commission did not choose suspension. Instead, it issued a formal statement of charges accusing Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct in April 2025 — more than a year after the commission’s investigator submitted her reports on two of the complaints for review and 11 months after Mulholland was offered an informal settlement that he apparently did not sign.
Even after the commission declared its charges against Mulholland, he was allowed to keep practicing while the case proceeded. He saw patients as late as May, before he went on leave.
At least 84 patients have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employer since the state’s investigation became public. Court filings by Mulholland’s attorney, made in response to the lawsuits, have denied wrongdoing or improper conduct toward women. He also has denied the allegations made by the medical commission and is entitled to a hearing to contest them.
Emily Volland, a spokesperson for Kadlec and its affiliate, the Providence health system, said Mulholland is no longer employed by Kadlec. Volland declined to comment on the allegations against him but said via email: “We take our patient’s safety very seriously and are fully cooperating with the state in this matter.”
The lawsuits against Mulholland, Kadlec and Providence are ongoing. Lawyers for Providence and Kadlec in court filings denied allegations of negligence and wrongdoing.
While other news coverage has described the lawsuits and the commission’s actions in 2025, none has focused on how the state dealt with complaints against Mulholland during the three years before he agreed to restrictions on his license.
Washington state has faced criticism in the past for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints. A 2021 Seattle Times investigation found that in 282 cases of alleged sexual misconduct since 2009, state regulators took more than a year to impose discipline.
Several other states in recent years have dealt with their own high-profile cases of sexual misconduct involving OB-GYNs. On March 10, for instance, Columbia University in New York released a report detailing how a culture of silence at the institution had allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients over decades.
States like Ohio and Delaware have moved aggressively to make it easier to keep doctors accused of sexual misconduct away from patients.
In Washington, the medical commission wasn’t the only organization that allowed Mulholland to keep practicing.
A Kadlec risk management employee, through an attorney, acknowledged to the commission that the clinic had received patient complaints against the doctor and said they were investigated. (The letter did not describe the complaints but said they included “communication with patients regarding obesity.”) Mulholland’s privileges were never restricted or terminated, the statement said.
When local news stories covered the commission’s charges against Mulholland in June, it unleashed a deluge of 18 new complaints in the following three months.
In September, the commission placed restrictions on his license that prevented him from seeing female patients. Mulholland agreed pending a hearing on his case.
“They just let him keep practicing.”
A former patient of Dr. Mark Mulholland’s
Yanling Yu, a former Washington medical commissioner and a patient advocate with Washington Advocates for Patient Safety, wouldn’t comment on the Mulholland case directly. But she said it’s ethically wrong to allow a doctor facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct to continue seeing any patients while an investigation is ongoing.
“In an ideal regulatory system, if there has been enough or strong evidence to support the allegation, the doctor’s practice should be temporarily suspended or at least summarily restricted to protect patients’ safety,” she wrote in an email.
Kyle Karinen, executive director of the Washington Medical Commission, said the agency wasn’t slow to act and that it must operate under the system lawmakers created.
“I acknowledge that sometimes it takes longer than people would like, but we take that process really seriously,” Karinen said. “When we file a case and go to a hearing, we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be heard on a particular topic.”
The woman who saw Mulholland in February 2025 filed a lawsuit against the clinic and a board complaint against the doctor, both in August. She said she was indignant after learning about the earlier complaints.
She said the commission should have taken those women more seriously. “They just let him keep practicing,” she said.
The first sexual misconduct allegation against Mulholland landed in the commission’s email inbox in January 2022. The author was a first-time mother who, at 41 weeks pregnant, went to have labor induced at the Kadlec Regional Medical Center.
The woman said she had hoped a female doctor would deliver the baby. But Mulholland was the on-call doctor assigned the day she arrived. When she saw that the doctor was a man, she asked if the female nurse who was there could perform her predelivery cervical check instead, according to her complaint.
Mulholland insisted, she said. (He later told a commission investigator that because the woman was having labor induced, he had to personally know her cervical dilation and consistency, whether the fetus was in breech position or if her amniotic sac was intact. He also said because she was experiencing high blood pressure, her delivery couldn’t wait to be rescheduled with a female doctor.)
“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy,” the woman said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.
In her complaint, she said Mulholland was inappropriate. When the nurse asked her if she still had her underwear on, Mulholland joked that he still had his on too, she wrote.
During the cervical check, with his fingers inside the expectant mother, he pressed in different directions, according to her complaint. The woman said Mulholland told her he doesn’t perform exams this way because it hurts. Then he showed her what he described as the correct way, she said in the complaint.
“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had,” she said in the complaint.
“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy.”
A former patient of Mulholland’s
Three OB-GYNs, when presented by KUOW and ProPublica with the woman’s description of the pelvic exam, said the maneuver sounded unnecessarily painful.
“That sounds strange,” said Alson Burke, an associate professor at the University of Washington who teaches medical students how to perform pelvic exams. “Saying ‘I don’t do something because it hurts’ and then doing it doesn’t make sense to me.”
Commission records show that Mulholland said the allegation that his cervical exam was longer than what’s typical was absurd.
“I do try to be as careful, quick, gentle, and efficient as I can be when doing a pelvic exam whether it is for gynecology or obstetrics,” he wrote in an email to a commission clinical health care investigator. “With regards to being the most painful one she ever had, for that I am surprised as well as sorry. I pride myself on trying to be as gentle as absolutely possible. I get frequent compliments on how much less uncomfortable my exams are than most other providers, male or female.”
The nurse present during the woman’s exam told the commission it seemed “no longer or any more painful than these types of exams are typically.”
Up until that day, the patient’s pregnancy had been a joyous experience, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. She was excited to meet her daughter and picked out the outfit she’d arrive home in.
The nurse was ultimately able to line up a midwife to assist with the woman’s delivery in place of Mulholland.
But her cervical exam with Mulholland made the birth experience “worse than we could have ever imagined,” the woman, now 27, said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. It brought about depression and anxiety, she said.
“My daughter’s an only child, and I’m not sure if she ever will get a sibling because of how traumatic that was,” she told the news organizations.
By the end of July 2022, the new mother’s case was closed without any disciplinary action.
At the time, it was an isolated complaint in the record of a doctor who, records show, had not faced accusations of sexual misconduct with the medical commission before.
Then, a little over a year later, came another complaint, this time filed by a woman who had worked with Mulholland for nearly a decade.
According to an investigator’s report, the woman said she had worked at Kadlec Regional Medical Center for nine years and her interactions as Mulholland’s colleague had always been professional.
The complaint she filed in October 2023 concerned events she said took place when she was Mulholland’s patient. She’d had her fallopian tubes and the tissue lining her uterus removed and developed pain that was only present when she was menstruating.
On the day of her appointment, her complaint said, she’d explained all this to Mulholland when he began a line of questioning.
“Does it hurt you to have intercourse?”
“No,” she replied.
Then, the woman wrote in her complaint to the medical commission, Mulholland stood close to her and in a lower tone asked. “Not even when he’s deep inside you?”
“No,” she said she asserted.
Mulholland told the woman he needed to do a pelvic exam, according to the complaint.
While examining her, the woman wrote, Mulholland used one hand to push down on the top of her abdomen and with the other hand began repeatedly and “powerfully” thrusting his fingers into her vagina.
Burke, the associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said repeated “thrusting” is neither a technique she uses nor something she has ever observed.
“The reason I wouldn’t recommend it is because it could be triggering and really uncomfortable for someone,” Burke said. “Is that actually helping you gather the information? And is the patient feeling safe in the way that you are examining them?”
She said that no part of the pelvic exam should be performed in such a way that its intent could be perceived as sexual.
According to the former colleague’s complaint, each time Mulholland shoved his fingers inside, he leaned in close and asked, “Is this the same as the pain you felt?”
The woman wrote that Mulholland was “effectively holding her in place” on the exam table and she was unable to move to escape the pain. A medical assistant was nearby, she said.
After the pelvic exam, she said, the assistant left. Mulholland told the woman that she had a “great looking vagina,” she wrote, and that he usually had to use three fingers, but with her, he could only use two. Before leaving, the woman said in her complaint, the doctor asked her if she worked out and said he could tell she did.
Through an attorney, Mulholland later told the commission that he conducts all of his exams “as respectfully as possible” and that he is “very cognizant of his patient’s reactions.”
The doctor was responding to a commission investigator’s December 2023 request for his version of what happened during the woman’s visit.
That same month, a complaint from a third woman arrived.
It was three weeks before the new year when the woman went to the medical commission for help.
The patient, whose primary language is Spanish, had an interpreter join her in-person appointment virtually. A physician’s assistant had referred the woman to Mulholland to discuss a possible hysterectomy to relieve pain.
The woman later told a commission investigator that during her appointment, Mulholland entered the exam room and introduced himself. Then he lifted the paper sheet that covered her naked lower half, looked at her genital area, then looked back at her, which made her uncomfortable. Without asking her to reposition herself, he grabbed her by the butt to move her down the exam table, she said.
Mulholland’s pelvic exam was aggressive, she said in her written complaint to the commission. The investigator who interviewed her wrote that the woman said he’d moved his fingers in and out and that she felt a lot of pressure.
“I yelled at some point,” she wrote in her complaint.
A nurse was present but seemed fixated on the computer screen, the woman said.
Before the appointment ended, Mulholland said he was “eager to see” the woman’s vagina again, laughed and then said he was looking forward to reuniting with her womb, the investigator quoted the woman as saying. When the Spanish-language interpreter on the computer screen went quiet and asked Mulholland to repeat what he said, the woman wrote in her complaint, the doctor told the interpreter there was no need to relay that last message.
The woman was left in pain for 12 days after her appointment with Mulholland, she told the investigator, adding that she didn’t want others to go through what she had.
In response to this complaint, Mulholland’s attorney wrote to the commission, “at no time has he ever simply moved his fingers in and out several times with this patient or any other.”
(A separate report the woman filed with the Richland Police Department, which the department classified as a potential sex offense with “forcible fondling,” was closed in 14 days. The responding officer wrote that he hadn’t found facts to indicate a crime was committed “on the basis that the alleged incident occurred during a medical examination.”)
The state medical commission pressed ahead with its investigations into the two 2023 complaints, both of which asserted Mulholland had moved his fingers in and out during a pelvic exam.
The investigator assigned to both cases turned to Mulholland’s current and former colleagues. Two said that while some patients complained about the way Mulholland communicated with them about weight issues, they personally did not have concerns. Three other current or former colleagues, meanwhile, described problems.
“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had.”
A former patient of Mulholland’s
Alexis Tuck, an OB-GYN who worked at Kadlec from 2017 to 2022, said in a statement to the commission that she noticed a pattern of Mulholland’s patients switching providers because they wanted anyone “except Dr. Mulholland,” and sometimes requested her.
She said that when she asked these patients about the reason behind their switch they replied:
“He grabbed my belly fat and shook it in front of my husband.”
“He called me fat and made fun of me.”
“He told me my vagina is tight during a pelvic exam.”
“He told me I have a pretty vagina during a pap smear.”
“He made a comment about my vagina being tight and I talked to my mom about him. Apparently she had a similar weird experience with him.”
Tuck told the commission that more than once, patients cried in her office while sharing their stories.
“These accounts were consistent in their tone and content, painting a troubling picture of a physician whose behavior repeatedly crossed the line of professional and ethical conduct,” she wrote to the commission.
Tuck told the commission that the woman who filed the October 2023 complaint was among those who described their experiences to her. Tuck said the woman was “visibly shaken and emotional” when she detailed what happened, which, based on Tuck’s retelling, was generally consistent with the woman’s complaint to the medical commission.
Another colleague told the commission that Mulholland once told her as a patient was leaving the office, “I bet you were skinny like her when you were pregnant,” and that another time he said he thought he’d seen her driving a BMW and that she looked “hot.” Another said she found Mulholland’s comments about overweight women disrespectful.
The claims against Mulholland were piling up.
In February and March 2024, Britta Fischer, commission investigator, submitted the 2023 cases for review.
What to do next was soon in the hands of commissioners.
The medical commission takes its guidance on how to handle allegations against a doctor from Washington statutes, which prohibit physicians from engaging in a range of behavior defined as sexual misconduct.
The law bans statements about a patient’s “body, appearance, sexual history, or sexual orientation” except for legitimate purposes of care. The law also bars behavior, gestures or expressions that could “reasonably be interpreted as seductive or sexual.”
A doctor can’t remove a patient’s gown or draping unless it’s with a patient’s consent, during emergency care or in a custodial setting.
A doctor can’t touch a person’s breasts, genitals, anus or other “sexualized body part” unless it’s “consistent with accepted community standards of practice for examination, diagnosis and treatment and within the health care practitioner’s scope of practice.”
Determining whether or not behavior is appropriate can be particularly difficult when it comes to OB-GYNs, said Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.
“They have access to our naked bodies as women, to our vaginas, to our breasts,” Anderson said. “They are allowed to do things that we don’t give other people permission to do, and that’s part of their job.”
There are standards for physical exams. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics wrote that exams should be explained appropriately, done only with patient consent and “performed with the minimum amount of physical contact required to obtain data for diagnosis and treatment.”
State medical boards can also look to patterns of behavior.
Two of the three complaints against Mulholland from 2022 through 2023 mentioned movement in and out during pelvic exams, while all three described painful pelvic exams and comments the women considered inappropriate. Three colleagues also had described hearing about or witnessing him making disrespectful or inappropriate remarks, including one who said they were directed at her.
OB-GYNs “have access to our naked bodies as women.”
Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine
Anderson, in a journal article, wrote that it’s common to find repeated, lesser forms of misconduct in the backgrounds of doctors who act egregiously.
“For example, sexual violations are nearly always preceded by boundary violations such as inappropriate comments or touching,” the article said.
Anderson and her colleagues recommended state regulators consider restricting a doctor’s license for multiple smaller offenses.
Stephanie Loucka, executive director of Ohio’s medical board, said that if patterns of misconduct exist, the process will find them — even when an OB-GYN’s actions occur under the guise of legitimate care. Ohio began its overhaul of sexual misconduct investigations seven years ago.
“If a complaint gets made, we’re going to work the fact pattern from the assumption that there might be something there, and we’re going to gather the evidence and see where the evidence takes us,” she said. “And it typically takes us clearly one way or the other.”
If there’s a threat of immediate harm in cases of sexual misconduct, Loucka said, Ohio moves “with a sense of urgency” to file an emergency suspension. She estimated it has taken the Ohio board from six weeks to nine months to do so.
In Washington, the medical commission reviewed the investigator’s reports on the 2023 cases and decided on what it considered an appropriate resolution.
It proposed an “informal way of settling” allegations against Mulholland.
A heavily redacted May 31, 2024, letter sent to Mulholland’s attorney by the commission does not reveal the terms of the settlement. But the letter said the settlement would not require an admission of “any unprofessional conduct or wrongdoing.” Although settlements appear in the commission’s newsletter with brief summaries, the letter told Mulholland that a settlement would avoid a hearing, typically a public process.
All Mulholland had to do was sign.
Months passed. Mulholland’s attorney asked for the information gathered about his client, and the commission sent it. A June 2024 deadline for him to accept the agreement passed, as did a subsequent one in August. Nothing in documents released by the commission indicates he signed — or that the commission took any disciplinary action.
Mulholland kept seeing patients.
Long before the commission’s investigator filed her report with her superiors, Mulholland’s employer had also heard repeated concerns, according to Kadlec Clinic records acquired by attorneys in a lawsuit against Providence and the clinic. The attorneys submitted the documents as an exhibit in court.
(In court filings, Providence and Kadlec denied that they were negligent or that they knew or should have known about the abuse the plaintiffs alleged.)
Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that the clinic conducted a 2018 human resources investigation into allegations that Mulholland had mocked a co-worker’s sexuality and religion, concluding that it was “more likely than not” the allegations were true. Afterward, the records say, Mulholland’s employer provided him “coaching.”
Kadlec’s records also say that the clinic conducted a 2019 workplace investigation into allegations that Mulholland made sex jokes and condescending remarks, displayed discrimination toward women, and challenged a co-worker who complained about him.
A labor nurse told a Providence investigator that year that Mulholland had pinched a patient’s labia while she was in labor and asked if she was hurting. A colleague told the nurse that Mulholland had done the same to another patient who was giving birth, according to the labor nurse’s account as written down by the investigator.
A different colleague reported to a Kadlec workplace investigator that a patient had disclosed that Mulholland told her to “masturbate more often,” Kadlec records say.
Separately, Tuck, the OB-GYN who worked alongside Mulholland, told a Kadlec investigator that a patient disclosed she felt Mulholland had assaulted her but that the woman didn’t report it because she felt no one would believe her.
Following the 2019 workplace investigation, Kadlec’s records say, Mulholland’s employer concluded in 2020 that he “engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate behavior” that violated the medical center’s expectations. He was placed on a “behavior agreement” and required to take harassment prevention training.
In 2022, Kadlec records show, more emails were sent to clinic leadership alleging that Mulholland was demeaning to patients and co-workers. They described a “toxic work environment” and said management failed to address employees’ concerns about the doctor.
Tuck departed the clinic sometime that same year. She later told the medical commission she left because management failed to take action against him.
Tuck raised concerns about Mulholland within an email to Chief Medical Officer Rich Meadows in July 2022, writing that patients “felt they had been insulted/assaulted” by Mulholland.
Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that Tuck had also told a Kadlec workplace investigator in 2019 that the clinic manager, Lisa Mallory, protected Mulholland. In the statement she later gave the state medical commission, Tuck said when she brought concerns about Mulholland to Mallory, she responded, “He’s always been like that.”
Mallory, in response to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica, said this statement was taken out of context. She declined to say more. Meadows, through a Providence spokesperson, declined to comment.
In June 2023, clinic records in the lawsuit say, Kadlec took a phone call from a patient who said Mulholland shoved his two fingers inside of her so hard during a pelvic exam that she felt his knuckles slam up against her vagina and anus.
“Rough, jabbing and pushing up, like he was trying to arouse me or something,” according to Kadlec’s narrative describing the woman’s complaint.
She told Kadlec that she had alerted Mulholland before the exam that her vagina was prone to tearing and that she experienced vaginal pain with as little as a sneeze or a cough.
Kadlec’s summary of the woman’s account said that after a rectal exam, Mulholland told the patient: “Well, you took that surprisingly well. It’s a good thing my fingers are small.”
The woman said her body where Mulholland touched her was inflamed for two and a half days.
When the commission eventually contacted Mallory as part of the state’s own investigation, the clinic manager acknowledged there had been complaints within Kadlec. She did not seem to give them much credence.
“Dr. Mulholland has received his fair share of complaints over the years as have all the other providers here” at the Kadlec clinic, she wrote in a statement to the state board. “From what I have observed, he cares deeply for his patients and has spent his career trying to educate women on their health. They have not always appreciated how he has done that.”
By September 2024, more than two years had elapsed since the state received its first complaint about a pelvic exam performed by Mulholland. Six months had passed since an investigator forwarded her report on two other pelvic exam complaints. That month, the commission learned of a new one.
“During examination, he said my vagina was very dry and that my husband wasn’t doing his job,” the woman wrote in her complaint.
The woman also described her interaction with Mulholland to a commission investigator. At the appointment, the woman had told a medical assistant that she was concerned about a fishy smell, she said. Upon entering the exam room, she told the investigator, Mulholland said loudly, “Hey, I heard you had a vagina that smells like fish.”
When he conducted his physical examination, the woman told the investigator, Mulholland penetrated her with his fingers and was “going in and out” and touching her clitoris.
The patient said she asked Mulholland to stop more than once. She was uncomfortable and what Mulholland was doing reminded her of her past sexual abuse, she wrote in her complaint. She said he eventually stopped.
Next, according to an investigator’s memo outlining the patient’s interview, Mulholland asked her if she masturbated and if she used sex toys or her fingers to do so. When the patient said she did not, Mulholland encouraged her to purchase some toys and to use them alone, she said. Then, according to the memo describing the woman’s account, Mulholland rubbed her shoulder and said, “You’re too young not to have good sex.”
A mandatory reporter filed a complaint supplementing the woman’s filing at around the same time.
By that time, the woman’s account brought to four the number of women asserting sexual misconduct by Mulholland since 2022. Counting a woman who reported rude behavior in a submission that was not marked as alleging sexual misconduct and that the commission closed, Mulholland had been named in six complaints.
Only 11 licensed physicians and physician assistants were the subject of six or more complaints in that time frame, the commission’s spokesperson said. As of last year, 41,256 people held this type of license in Washington.
A week after the mandatory reporter contacted the commission, Kelly Elder, a Washington Medical Commission staff attorney, sent the two pending 2023 cases back to Freda Pace, the commission’s director of investigations.
Elder asked Pace to have investigators try and reach people whose statements hadn’t been collected before.
Medical commission records show that investigator Britta Fischer also began looking into the new allegation.
Fischer’s inquiries produced statements from co-workers attesting to Mulholland’s good character and stating that they were unaware of any concerns raised by patients.
Mulholland himself, in a statement his attorney gave to the commission, said he didn’t have a “firm recollection” of the appointment the patient described in her complaint. He said he would never tell a patient anything to the effect that her husband was not doing his job. He said he addresses masturbation with patients who complain of sexual dryness or pain during sex, and he denied stroking the patient’s shoulder in a “suggestive way.”
Due to “unjustified allegations,” the statement said, Mulholland had changed the way he worked with patients. The statement said these changes included always trying to have a chaperone present instead of just during physical exams. He also started creating more physical distance from the patient during counseling and exploring “tangential issues, such as sexual health and wellbeing” only when a patient brought them up.
“Dr. Mulholland is truly sorry if his previous long-standing practice patterns have caused any patient any type of duress or anguish because of misinterpretation of what Dr. Mulholland was attempting to accomplish — excellent patient care,” the statement sent to the commission said.
Still, the commission also had the prior, adverse statements from colleagues and patients. In April 2025, the agency formally accused Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct. (The allegations would later be amended to include sexual misconduct.)
Neither the medical commission nor the Washington State Department of Health, which oversees it, posted a news release on their websites. Members of the general public could have learned of the charges — if they knew to search for Mulholland’s name on the Health Department’s “provider credential search” page. Stephanie Mason, spokesperson for the commission, said the statement of charges would also go out to anyone who subscribed to quarterly email updates from the commission.
It wasn’t until a June Tri-City Herald story that the commission’s claims seemed to become widely known.
The outpouring of new patient complaints that followed echoed what the commission had already heard.
“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done.”
Torryn Kerley, a former patient who sued Mulholland. Kerley asked to be identified by name for this article.
Their accounts included allegations that Mulholland had peeked at their pubic hair under the sheet, physically pulled them down the exam table, used sexual language and performed extremely painful vaginal exams.
Two of the women who have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employers told KUOW and ProPublica they attended appointments with him after the commission had received multiple complaints and before he agreed to restrictions on his license.
One said she was angry she hadn’t heard about allegations against Mulholland sooner. After a hysterectomy, she was directed to see him every four months for a year for pap smears.
She saw Mulholland for the last time on May 1, 2025 — two days after the commission filed its allegations against him. She learned about the commission’s case after the media coverage began.
“I don’t know if I expected the lady at the counter when you’re checking in to warn you and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna see Mulholland, and he’s had complaints,’” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. “I don’t see a company or whatever ever doing that, but it would have been nice to know. I would have picked a different doctor.”
Another woman who sued, Torryn Kerley, said she was angry at Kadlec to learn of all the women coming forward in lawsuits after she had already complained to the clinic about Mulholland.
“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done,” said Kerley, who asked to be identified by name for this article. “I reported it. I told people about it. I told doctors in the office about it.”
Karinen, the medical commission director, said it’s very unusual for the commission to file a statement of charges and then get dozens of complaints in the same vein against that same doctor, as happened with Mulholland.
“That’s unheard of,” he said.
Mason, the commission spokesperson, cast the arrival of the new complaints as a positive outcome of the action that commissioners took against Mulholland.
“That’s what opened the door to these women coming forward, because at that point, really not very many people had said anything at all, by comparison,” Mason said.
No date has been set yet for a hearing in which Mulholland can challenge the commission’s allegations against him.
The post An OB-GYN Was Repeatedly Accused of Sexual Misconduct. The State Medical Board Let Him Keep Practicing. appeared first on ProPublica.
The social media outfit TrackAIPAC’s signature anti-endorsement cards have become a fixture of the 2026 midterms. The ubiquitous graphics show a disapproved candidate’s face in grayscale over a smoky red backdrop. To the right, a number denoting their pro-Israel funding glows.
Controversially, not all of that money comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“It’s as broad as possible, and that’s by design,” TrackAIPAC co-founder Casey Kennedy told The Intercept. Instead of just AIPAC, the group tracks spending from across the pro-Israel lobby. “We want to provide the most encapsulating picture that we can of who’s giving to the lobby and where they’re giving to,” Kennedy said.
TrackAIPAC started in 2024 as a scrappy bulwark to the powerful, conservative pro-Israel lobbying group for which it is named. Amid TrackAIPAC’s rise, U.S. voters’ support for Israel plummeted to historic lows as horrified Americans watched their government support genocide in Gaza, and AIPAC, once an indispensable ally for most federal politicians, transformed into an electoral liability.
Depending on whom you ask, TrackAIPAC is a hero for pushing pro-Israel spending into the forefront of voters’ minds, a scourge peddling antisemitic tropes, or a well-intentioned activist group with an imperfect, ever-evolving model. An advocacy group called Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption launched in May 2024 and soon merged with TrackAIPAC, giving the lobby watchers the power to endorse and fund candidates. TrackAIPAC’s graphics are easily digestible and often go viral, lending the group political weight in an era when online audiences want to consume information in as little time and with as little brainpower as possible — and turning its signature red card into a political scarlet letter.
TrackAIPAC’s growing influence has set off a debate over its messaging and methodology, part of a broader conversation about outside spending in politics refracted through the lens of Israel. This was especially felt in Illinois’ recent primary elections, where AIPAC funneled its financial contributions through front PACs, or its major donors gave as individuals. AIPAC’s more elusive strategy proves the necessity of lumping several kinds of pro-Israel money together, TrackAIPAC allies say, giving the group the responsibility of acting as an analyst rather than a conduit of information.
“The work tracker accounts do is important because AIPAC and other dark money lobbies are intentionally very difficult to track,” said Morriah Kaplan, executive director of the progressive Jewish-led Palestinian solidarity organization IfNotNow. Calling AIPAC’s tactics “extremely antidemocratic,” she noted that major donors can have a range of political aims, favoring tech giants, weapons manufacturers, and fossil fuels in tandem with supporting Israel.
“Without understanding how TrackAIPAC defines ‘pro-Israel,’” Kaplan said, “it’s not as valuable a tool for transparency as it could be.”
In the 9th District of Illinois, TrackAIPAC’s broad approach drew controversy when it deployed a red graphic not just for state Sen. Laura Fine, the congressional candidate AIPAC’s funders and front groups supported, but also for Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who campaigned and won as a progressive, said he would support the Block the Bombs Act, and was a main target of AIPAC-funded attack ads.
When TrackAIPAC posted a red graphic for Biss, the group pointed to his refusal to call Israel’s actions a genocide, his opposition to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, his support for U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, and $460,357 “spent by the pro-Israel lobby groups and their donors.”
“Without understanding how TrackAIPAC defines ‘pro-Israel,’ it’s not as valuable a tool for transparency as it could be.”
That money mostly came from J Street, which bills itself as a liberal alternative for Zionist American Jews who want to counter AIPAC’s hardline influence. In recent years, the group has supported halting some weapons transfers to Israel and opposed Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. But J Street was slow to label Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide — its president Jeremy Ben-Ami came around to the term in August— and it opposed initial calls for a ceasefire.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, was frustrated by her group’s conflation with AIPAC, calling TrackAIPAC “intellectually dishonest” for the distance between its name and its methodology. TrackAIPAC does label the specific sources of pro-Israel funding that make up its sums on its website, along with a list of organizations it tracks in addition to AIPAC, but they seldom appear on the red cards that circulate on social media. Some critics have labeled this blurring of lines sloppy or confusing, while others on the left and right have accused the group of antisemitism over its generalized “pro-Israel” language.
“I think the candidates and members should be held to account for taking AIPAC support,” deGroot said, “but the way that [TrackAIPAC] is going about it is doing so much harm.”
A TrackAIPAC spokesperson said the group’s members “wholeheartedly agree” that J Street and AIPAC have significant differences, but said they would still classify J Street as part of the pro-Israel lobby.
“J Street might have some disagreements with AIPAC,” Kennedy said, “but they are both working in favor of a foreign government within our government.”
The group does appear responsive to some of the criticism. TrackAIPAC is planning to modify its anti-endorsement cards in response to recent controversies. They’ll still be red, but the graphics will now spell out how much a candidate has received from specific pro-Israel groups, or individual major pro-Israel lobby donors, as well as additional information about their policy positions on Palestine and Israel.
“Every graphic released regarding Daniel Biss stated clearly that the total of the donations reported were from the pro-Israel Lobby,” the TrackAIPAC spokesperson said. “It would be intellectually dishonest to call J Street anything but a member of that advocacy wing in the United States. That said — we will be breaking their donations out and labeling them separately for transparency purposes moving forward.”
As the founders tell it, the “AIPAC” in TrackAIPAC’s name was always meant as a synecdoche, with the lobbying giant serving as an eye-catching stand-in for the entire Israel lobby. The broad approach is intentional, said TrackAIPAC founders Kennedy and Cory Archibald, and their project is a work in progress.
“It’s as broad as possible, and that’s by design.”
The group has made several changes to its methodology since its launch. Some of them are spelled out online, but others, such as how the group tracks individual donors, are not. At the beginning, TrackAIPAC relied on Federal Election Commission data compiled by the transparency organization OpenSecrets, which also groups the pro-Israel lobby as a whole. Last year, TrackAIPAC began to analyze the FEC data for itself and started adding individual expenditures, or money spent on campaign ads, which triggered jumps in some members’ totals. That was the case for Reps. Wesley Bell, D-Mo., and George Latimer, D-N.Y., who toppled progressive incumbents last cycle with massive amounts of AIPAC support. This year, the group began including bundlers and major donors ($200 or more) who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and are donating directly to candidates, especially as AIPAC shields some of its spending.
“They’re going underground, so we’re going to have to go underground too,” said Archibald, who worked as a consultant on the campaigns of former Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who were respectively unseated by Bell and Latimer in 2024.
The approach still seems to rile candidates who find themselves on TrackAIPAC’s bad side, like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who accused the group on Instagram of being “MAGA plants who are meant to disrupt and confuse” for giving her a red card listing more than $100,000 from “Israel Lobby” donors. TrackAIPAC told The Intercept that it stands by Crockett’s rating, and that it used FEC data to identify major donors who have given to pro-Israel lobby groups and gave directly to Crockett. (It also gave a red card to Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who beat Crockett in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.)
The founders also said they have received a number of requests from members who want their red graphics taken down. TrackAIPAC is working on a new questionnaire that would give members a chance to get their cards changed if they make specific policy commitments, like committing to an arms embargo and opposing laws that would restrict BDS or promote a controversial definition of antisemitism that conflates the term with criticism of Israel.
Some politicians have already had their cards changed. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has received J Street funding, used to have a red card, but his photo now appears on TrackAIPAC’s website in its original coloring, earning neither the damning red backdrop nor the smooth green ring that indicates endorsement. Khanna, who last year exchanged kind words with TrackAIPAC on social media, is among the members of Congress who receive the label: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record on Israel-Palestine issues.”
Kennedy said those lawmakers exist in the “squishy middle,” calling it “the most ambiguous part of what we do.” He said they removed their red graphics to avoid the members “getting harangued as an AIPAC supporter,” while nudging them toward continuing to vote in favor of Palestinian rights.
One of the group’s enduring questions is “how do we still apply the pressure without kind of souring our relationship?” Kennedy said. “So it’s definitely, you know, there’s some politicking that goes on there.”
Archibald interjected with more precise terms. “But it’s still very much rooted in their record — we’re not ever picking winners or losers,” she said. “It’s all based on the scorecard … on the facts that are present.”
To round out its rating system, TrackAIPAC relies heavily on the Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker, a spreadsheet run by five volunteers who are members of Democratic Socialists of America. The spreadsheet uses a scorecard system the volunteers helped devise with the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. (It has a separate tracking system for Republicans.) For candidates who do not have a federal voting record, TrackAIPAC looks to public statements, public policy positions, or associations with pro-Israel lobby groups. If a candidate has pro-Israel positions but campaign finance data is not yet available, TrackAIPAC issues a red graphic with a “warning” label.
In some cases, J Street and TrackAIPAC have backed the same candidate. Progressive Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., for example, is J Street-supported but has TrackAIPAC’s endorsement because of her policy positions on the genocide in Gaza, BDS, and blocking weapons to Israel.
“The money alone is not enough to get you a red graphic,” Archibald said.
The question of how TrackAIPAC assesses its more subjective measures — and whether its targeting is even-handed — has spurred controversy, too.
Last week, TrackAIPAC drew criticism for deploying a red card for Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate on a platform that includes backing Block the Bombs and calling for a two-state solution. McMorrow’s graphic stood out because of her two opponents for the nomination: Rep. Haley Stevens, a hard-line Israel supporter who has taken over $9 million from the pro-Israel lobby, by TrackAIPAC’s count, and appeared in an AIPAC promotional video earlier this month; and Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights who earned the endorsement of TrackAIPAC’s campaign arm, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption.
McMorrow’s most recently issued red graphic cites $100,439 from the general “pro-Israel lobby groups & their donors.” El-Sayed’s green endorsement card, meanwhile, lists only the amount he has received from AIPAC: $0. McMorrow’s campaign argued that this reflected an uneven treatment, pointing to El-Sayed donors listed in FEC filings who have previously given to J Street.
After previously staying out of the race, a J Street spokesperson told The Intercept on Thursday that the group was endorsing McMorrow.
“It remains unclear how Track AIPAC has arrived at their number, and we invite them to share their methodology so as to not mislead voters,” a spokesperson for McMorrow’s campaign told The Intercept, adding that she had not taken any money from AIPAC and had opposed its involvement in the race.
TrackAIPAC acknowledged that some J Street donors had given to El-Sayed and said the different treatment between the two candidates was decided only by their differing policy positions on Israel and Palestine. Circulating McMorrow’s red card, TrackAIPAC cited McMorrow’s admission of having “returned policy papers to at least one Democratic pro-Israel group,” as well as reporting from Drop Site News that she had drafted an AIPAC position paper, but critics noted that the group was harsh on a relatively untested candidate running as a progressive.
DeGroot objected to a similar dynamic in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, where the campaign side supported candidate and activist Kat Abughazaleh, who finished as the runner-up to Biss. To deGroot, the group’s dual work as a data project and a political action committee allows its “masquerading support for a chosen candidate – Kat – as journalism, as fact finding.”
Candidates in TrackAIPAC’s good graces, however, may have reason to appreciate the two-part approach. Angela Gonzalez-Torres, a Los Angeles community activist and congressional candidate in California, said Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption was among her earliest supporters, giving her campaign a boost months before the more established progressive group Justice Democrats got behind her. She said that she was initially drawn to challenge incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., because of his responses to local issues like the construction of a controversial housing project atop a toxic dump site and an adjoined trucking depot that posed health risks to neighboring residents, but when she dug into his campaign, she came across TrackAIPAC’s red graphics.
“When we as a community saw those profiting off of our pain and contributing to the very issues hurting our district and other humans, I think we were immediately encouraged to find someone to challenge Jimmy Gomez,” Gonzalez-Torres said, citing his AIPAC connections.
In a statement to The Intercept, a Gomez campaign spokesperson called the congressman “a progressive champion and has delivered for working-class families on the Eastside, securing hundreds of millions in funding to address environmental injustice, expand parks and housing, improve transportation, and combat climate change. He takes local concern about cost of living and quality of life seriously.”
Gonzalez-Torres said some of her supporters told her they donated to her campaign after seeing her and Gomez in TrackAIPAC’s side-by-side graphics.
Update: March 26, 2026, 9:57 a.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Jimmy Gomez campaign, as well as the news that J Street is endorsing Mallory McMorrow.
Correction: March 26, 2026, 3:58 p.m. ET
The Congressional Democrat Palestine Tracker is operated by volunteers who are members of Democratic Socialists of America; a previous version of this story said the spreadsheet tracker was run by the New York City chapter of DSA. Cori Archibald’s role on Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman’s campaigns has also been corrected; she was a consultant, not a staffer.
The post How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC? appeared first on The Intercept.
On the day that federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, I ran out of my house with my camera in hand to document the aftermath. As a visuals editor at ProPublica, I spend most of my time at my desk. But I couldn’t ignore this massive story rapidly unfolding in Minneapolis, the city I’ve called home for the past few years.
The first thing I photographed that day was a woman trying to calm a man with a hug. “There was a young man right at the police tape, honestly inches away from some of the agents, and he was so angry,” she told me later. “I was getting really scared for him.” Not long after, the scene grew volatile, as federal, state and city police forces tear-gassed and detained protesters in a standoff that lasted for hours.
Kristin Heiberg, I learned, is a 64-year-old technical writer, a volunteer at an animal shelter and a cancer survivor. And, like many other people here, she patrols her neighborhood with a whistle, on the lookout for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
As I’ve watched the Twin Cities rally to respond to Operation Metro Surge, I’ve wanted to see the one thing I had not: What do these people look like in their day-to-day lives? I wanted to know who they are and what motivated them to patrol their streets, drive strangers to work and provide food and rent money for the families who have been in hiding since the surge began. While media coverage has moved on, and there are fewer ICE agents on the streets, they’re still here, and my neighbors are still providing mutual aid.
When I asked Heiberg who she felt was involved, she said: “Everyone in the community. Anyone with a heart.” This is how it has felt to me as well. Whether gathering with friends or ordering coffee or running into a neighbor while walking my dog, every recent conversation has led to the same place: What are you doing to meet this moment?
Each of the people I photographed scoffed at the idea that they were paid agitators, or that they were led in their efforts by state or city officials. They said they just wanted to help their neighbors.
These are my neighbors, in their city, in their own words.
We’re just watching out for our neighbors. If that’s a form of protest, so be it.
Kristin Heiberg, who writes software user guides, patrols her neighborhood every day and attends protests and vigils.
I don’t want to be one of those people that sat. I don’t want to be somebody’s history lesson.
Libby Blyth is an accountant for an environmental consulting company. She drives people to work who are afraid of being spotted by ICE and delivers food to families in hiding.
We’re retired. We have white privilege. We have to be the ones to stand up.
Kris Allen is a retired palliative nurse practitioner. She and her husband, Ben, attend weekly prayer vigils for detained people with their church. They have protested at the federal building where ICE holds detainees and participated in sit-ins at Target stores.
My parents are immigrants, and they moved here for a better life, but also to give us a better life. And we’re going to continue to support as many families as we can, especially kids.
Adan Tepozteco Gavilan owns a barbershop where he and his sister, Anai, started a food drive. They have provided food to hundreds of families.
It just seems so simple. My neighbors need help. And I would hope that if I was in a situation where I needed help, or if I was as scared as these people are, that somebody would help me.
Elizabeth Anderson works in performing arts. She arranges for drivers to take kids to school and coordinates food delivery for more than 100 families.
People are still putting themselves out there. And it’s for the sake of humanity, and our community, and showing the rest of the U.S. and the world that this is what it means to be Minnesotan.
Nasrieen Habib founded Amanah Recreational Project, an organization that promotes outdoor activities for Muslim women. She redirected her organization to provide food and rent assistance.
It was never a question. Once we knew what was happening, that people were being let out in the freezing cold, it wasn’t an option to leave that gate.
Natalie Ehret is an attorney. She and her husband, Noah, founded Haven Watch. The organization provides coats, food, phones and rides to detainees when they are released from federal custody, often with few belongings.
When they give us their worst, we are giving us our best.
Shane Stodolka is a software developer. He and his roommate, Olivia Tracy, say they deliver food to more than 100 families every week.
Legal immigration, illegal immigration? That’s not my call. That’s not my fight. By the time you’re my neighbor, you’re my neighbor.
Norman Alston is a high school wrestling coach. When he’s not coaching, he sits outside school, watching for ICE.
I need my staff to know that they’re safe. It was crazy networking … but it’s all about feeling safe and vetted.
Melissa Borgmann, a cafe owner, organized rides and grocery deliveries for her staff.
We’re all sort of getting through this together. We don’t have formal leaders in these groups.
Jen Suek is a project manager in the health care field. She patrols her neighborhood and local schools, and she vets her neighborhood Signal chat.
I think that’s the true identity of Minnesota: peaceful protesting, caring about their neighbors and stepping up to the plate. Not waiting for the government to help.
Sergio Amezcua is pastor at Dios Habla Hoy church in south Minneapolis. Since early December, the church has provided food to thousands of people.
I call [my friends] and I say: ‘Please think positive. This is going away very soon.’ And they say, ‘OK, thank you for staying positive.’ And then I turn off the phone, and I start crying.
Jianeth Riera Lazo is the chef at a Minneapolis cafe. She helped connect friends and family members in need of food and rental assistance to people who could provide it.
It’s an unspoken bond, to stick up for what’s right, knowing that something might happen to us in the meantime. … And I truly think that this will continue, this bond.
Missy Dietrich is a personal trainer. She patrols her neighborhood, regularly protests at the federal building where ICE holds detainees and volunteers at a food pantry.
The post “This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan”: Why My Neighbors Continue to Stand Up Against ICE appeared first on ProPublica.
The World Series champions have somehow become even stronger. But there are a few teams who could stop them from retaining their title
A welcome introduction. Recent years have seen a tactical flattening of the game with the introduction of the universal DH, the banning of the shift and the three-batter minimum rule, but this adds an interesting wrinkle to game management. The league table of catchers’ challenge percentages will be fascinating. AE
Continue reading...In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio. As a result, he’s quick to add, a landmark racial profiling court case dictating much of what the Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff’s department does should be dismissed.
“I believe we are in compliance with the court order. We’re not a racist organization, and we don’t racial profile,” he said on Phoenix-area talk radio in March 2025.
In May, he told the same radio host: “Is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office racially profiling or are they racially biased? We have documentation for well over 10 years that that is not the case.”
His evidence for ending oversight stemming from Melendres v. Arpaio, the federal case whose 2013 settlement imposed parameters the department has operated under ever since, was a monthly sampling of a few dozen traffic stops. The settlement requires deputies to document each stop in exacting detail. The report, analyzed by a court-appointed monitor, showed individual deputies had not used race to initiate that limited sample of traffic stops.
But annual reviews of every traffic stop or arrest of a Latino driver have repeatedly contradicted Sheridan’s claim. With the exception of one year, each of the past 10 reports showed disparities affecting Latino drivers. The latest, covering 2024, found, “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers.”
Under Sheriff Arpaio, deputies began in 2007 to use traffic stops to arrest people on immigration charges, illegally racially profiling Latinos in the process. When the constitutional violations spurred the Melendres lawsuit, a judge found they were so widespread that he included the county’s more than 1 million Latino residents as plaintiffs in the case. Fallout from it ended Arpaio’s political career.
Sheridan, a Republican, was Arpaio’s second-in-command. During his campaign for sheriff in 2024, Sheridan pledged to cooperate with the court-appointed monitor. He predicted that the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, would be pleased to see him back in the courtroom given his understanding of the settlement. He could hit the ground running and bring the case to a close, Sheridan said.
In June 2025, the latest report finding bias against Latino drivers was released. Months later, in October, Sheridan was back on the radio repeating his argument: “There has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit. The judge didn’t want MCSO to racially profile or be biased, and we have proven time and time again that the deputies are not.”
Latino activists and residents who endured the racial profiling and anti-immigrant policing of the Arpaio era tracked Sheridan’s first year as sheriff with growing alarm.
They remembered that as chief deputy, Sheridan was caught on camera telling deputies that court-mandated reforms were “ludicrous” and “crap.” (He later apologized to the judge.) They also pointed out that Sheridan staffed his administration with key figures from Arpaio’s time.
The activists and residents said their concerns were also rooted in the reality of the second Trump administration.
As Sheridan took office, President Donald Trump was initiating plans for mass deportations. Trump tasked Immigration and Customs Enforcement with expanding local law enforcement’s involvement in street and workplace operations. If the case ended now, Sheridan would be free to join forces with ICE, critics said. Without the court to keep it in check, the Sheriff’s Office could backslide.
The anxiety and anger were evident in the town of Guadalupe in February 2025, as Sheridan arrived for his first court-mandated public meeting as sheriff. Guadalupe was among the communities most affected by Arpaio’s immigration patrols and workplace raids. Residents, who were there to receive an update on the court case, greeted the new sheriff with signs saying, “Deport Jerry Sheridan,” and “We belong together not separated.”
The court-appointed monitor, Robert Warshaw, told the crowd inside an elementary school cafeteria that Sheridan had requested that the meeting be canceled, citing safety concerns related to ongoing anti-ICE protests around metro Phoenix. (The request was denied.) This angered the residents.
Their frustration grew as Warshaw noted that although the Sheriff’s Office was complying with more than 90% of the settlement, it fell short in two critical areas: continued racial disparities in traffic stops and failure to quickly investigate misconduct claims against deputies. Long delays in such investigations discouraged the public from reporting wrongdoing by deputies, attorneys and advocates said.
When it was Sheridan’s time to speak, he addressed the doubters, citing the sample of traffic stops that showed deputies didn’t use race to initiate traffic stops. He has also noted that the department is prioritizing the investigation of deputy misconduct complaints from Latino residents.
“The judge wants bias-free policing, and I want bias-free policing,” Sheridan said. “All I can ask from all of you in this room, the people that live in this community, and the 4.6 million people in Maricopa County, is to let me show you by actions the things that I have said and the fact that we all want bias-free police.”
Joel Cornejo, a community activist from south Phoenix who had protested Sheridan’s arrival, told the sheriff that he’d come of age during Arpaio’s raids. He said he was skeptical that Sheridan would fully comply with the lawsuit.
“We learned to fight your department,” Cornejo said. “We destroyed Joe Arpaio’s career. And if you target our community, we will do the same to your career.”
Sheridan repeated his pledge to show them the department had truly changed.
“I need that opportunity from you, to give me that chance,” he said.
Sheridan’s victory in the sheriff’s race capped a comeback that began after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016.
Under Arpaio, Sheridan rose through the ranks to chief of custody in 1999, running the county’s jails. In 2010, Arpaio elevated him to chief deputy, helping oversee the entire department. He held the job for six years.
During those years, Snow later ruled, the Sheriff’s Office illegally enforced federal immigration laws, violated residents’ constitutional rights and ignored the judge’s orders to end these practices.
Sheridan tried to distance himself from the controversies that led to Arpaio’s defeat, rarely speaking of his former boss. He maintained that the immigration sweeps and patrols were carried out by a separate division while he was focused on running the jails.
Sheridan stands by his work as detention chief, which included supervising 60 detention officers certified through an ICE program known as 287(g), allowing the department to process people in its jails for deportation. Maricopa County remains the only Arizona county to provide office space for ICE agents in its jails.
Arpaio’s efforts to arrest undocumented immigrants began under the same 287(g) agreement, which also allowed local officers to question individuals’ immigration status during routine policing. Sheridan says he disagreed with Arpaio’s tactics and tried to persuade him to not target day laborers or set up patrols in mostly Latino communities like Guadalupe. (Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he considered enforcing immigration laws to be part of his job.)
During a 2015 court hearing, Sheridan denied that he knew about a 2011 preliminary injunction — issued while he was Arpaio’s chief deputy — barring the Sheriff’s Office from making immigration arrests. He didn’t learn about the injunction until 2014, Sheridan said.
Evidence presented in court showed Sheridan had been notified starting in 2011. Snow accused Sheridan and Arpaio of “deliberately” violating the order, withholding evidence and failing to investigate and discipline deputy misconduct, among other things. “Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Sheridan are the authors of the manipulation and misconduct that has prevented the fair, uniform, and appropriate application of discipline on MCSO employees,” Snow wrote in a 2016 ruling. He held them in civil contempt of court.
“I don’t even remember exactly why the judge held me in contempt of the court — what exactly he used against me,” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “He didn’t think that I was truthful because I wasn’t aware of something. And I was very truthful.”
Arpaio did not endorse Sheridan’s 2024 bid for sheriff and has declined to talk about him while hinting at a falling-out. “I made a couple mistakes, which are management mistakes,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “I may have appointed a couple of wrong people. But in managing, you try to back up your people and so on. So, in any big organization, you can’t be perfect.”
Sheridan filled key leadership positions in his administration with former colleagues who worked under Arpaio and who, like Sheridan, had left the Sheriff’s Office after Arpaio lost reelection. Sheridan appointed retired Sgt. Clint Doyle to the Court Implementation Division, which is responsible for enforcing the court’s mandates. And he rehired Paul Chagolla, who ran public relations at the time of Arpaio’s raids and sweeps. Snow criticized Doyle’s appointment, calling out Sheridan for attempting to bypass a court requirement that key leadership roles dealing with the Melendres settlement be approved by the monitor.
Doyle and Chagolla didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Christine Wee, the lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it was alarming to see so many from Arpaio’s administration return. “These folks were instrumental in the abuse and the terror that so many of our clients had to experience,” she said. “And then to bring them back in again, I think it sends a dangerous message to the community.”
Sheridan acknowledges the criticism, but points to improvements like significantly reducing the misconduct complaints backlog. “From the sins of the previous administration, we’re now three different sheriffs since then, and some people just don’t want to let go.”
Since Sheridan took office last January, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica have attended seven of his public appearances, reviewed his public remarks and interviewed him on three occasions. During that time, his assertions that the department had done enough to justify ending court oversight grew bolder, and Republican allies amplified his efforts.
“It’s about time that the public gets over some of the things that happened well over a decade ago and to realize the deputy sheriffs that work in their community are really good law enforcement officers,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in a March 2025 interview.
Ending the settlement would eliminate the near-constant recordkeeping tasks deputies face while on duty, including documenting 13 details about each traffic stop. This hampers their “ability to do the job,” Sheridan said, and discourages interacting with the public. Deputies fear prolonging a traffic stop, even for a brief chat, will lead to discipline.
“If they see somebody walking down the street, they can’t just pull over and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “Every time they contact a member of the public, it is a lengthy process. And so it slows them down and it intimidates them not to want to do it.”
Last March, Sheridan began organizing meetings, in addition to the court-ordered gatherings, in rural communities policed by the Sheriff’s Office.
In Gila Bend, a town of about 1,800 southwest of Phoenix, Sheridan said he wanted to hear about locals’ needs. The town pays more than $900,000 a year to the Sheriff’s Office for public safety services.
“I’m a good leader and our deputies are responsive to your needs,” Sheridan told the group inside a community center. “And that’s really what this is all about, right? The sheriff’s main job is to keep people safe.”
A slide displayed data about traffic stops, calls for service and dispatch times. “For the population that’s here in Gila Bend, for the number of violent crimes — at least the ones that are notated here -– you guys are a very safe community,” a sheriff’s office lieutenant told the group.
The town’s vice mayor, Chris Riggs, a former deputy himself, disagreed. Crimes weren’t being reported, making the town seem safer than it is, he said.
Residents “just don’t trust MCSO anymore,” Riggs said. “They’ll deal with it themselves.” Several residents agreed.
No deputies live in Gila Bend, where response times lag and police services have suffered, they said.
“Deputies aren’t like they used to be, where they get out and they mingle with the community,” Riggs said.
Sheridan blamed the settlement for overburdening the department.
Ten days later, residents of Aguila, an unincorporated community nestled among farms where the population swells to about 1,000 during the winter growing season, told the sheriff they too felt neglected by deputies.
“We have 9,224 square miles to cover” and limited resources, Sheridan said.
Sheridan has tried to address this. When he took office, there were about 140 vacancies for patrol deputies. He raised starting pay to compete with other local law enforcement agencies in the county. By the start of 2026, vacancies declined to 65, according to his office. Sheridan called it one of his biggest successes in his first year.
But hiring was still hindered by the paperwork deputies do to comply with the settlement, he said.
The Sheriff’s Office has made significant progress on a key requirement of the court: reducing the backlog of misconduct investigations. Although it has been cut by 76% since November 2022, there are still about 475 claims that haven’t been investigated, and three recently completed investigations dated from 2017.
In June, the Sheriff’s Office released the court-mandated traffic stop report for 2024.
It tracked some improvements. But when all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.
Despite the findings, Sheridan insisted there was no racial profiling at the department.
In July, the court’s monitor team held another community meeting to review the Sheriff’s Office’s progress. It was in Maryvale, a West Phoenix neighborhood where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino.
Before it began, Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that while he remained committed to reaching full compliance with the court’s requirements, a majority of Republicans on the county’s governing board “have a different perspective because they’re the ones that fund what the sheriff does.”
Three members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were at the meeting.
Latino residents and advocates from the heavily Democratic area typically made up a majority of attendees. But this crowd was mostly white Republicans, including some from retirement communities miles away. From the front of the gym, Sheridan could see signs that read, “We support MCSO,” and, “Take the handcuffs off Jerry!”
Republican Supervisor Debbie Lesko, who represents retirement communities in western parts of the metro area, said she believed the settlement was getting in the way of public safety. “They’re spending a lot of time on paperwork instead of being able to provide public safety. And when I talked to the sheriff’s department, they said it’s hurting the morale of the deputies.”
When Latino residents asked questions and voiced concerns, they were interrupted by jeers and groans from white members of the audience.
Warshaw, the court monitor, pleaded for the crowd to allow others to speak.
Sheridan’s supporters focused on $350 million the county supervisors had approved since 2013 to implement the court-mandated reforms, including $226 million allocated to the Sheriff’s Office. The monitor later found that the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated total expenses, and the judge cautioned county leaders against citing the dollar figure because it was misleading.
“Mr. Warshaw, tell the judge to stop looting Maricopa County tax dollars to pay for that oversight,” Tom Berry, a retiree from Sun City, said to the monitor. “Advise the judge to stop the oversight.”
The case hinges on how well the Sheriff’s Office complies with 368 paragraphs outlined in four court orders aimed at rooting out racial profiling, Warshaw responded. “Is there still work to be done? Yes, there is still work to be done. Is this thing going to go on forever? No.”
“It looks like it,” a woman blurted.
Salvador Reza is a longtime organizer of Latino communities and day laborers who regularly attends meetings related to the settlement. He said it appeared Republicans were organizing to call for an immediate end to court oversight, which Sheridan would welcome.
“That’s what he’s hoping, that the federal court lets him off the hook so he can do whatever he wants,” Reza said, noting he was concerned by Sheridan’s history with Arpaio and approach to the case since taking office. “So there’s no way that we can rebuild trust in the community knowing very well who Sheridan is.”
Sheridan denied he had coordinated with the supervisors to publicly call for an end to the settlement.
Months later, debate over the settlement’s cost came to a head.
Community members asked for details about how the $226 million the sheriff’s department had attributed to enforcing the settlement was spent. The monitor’s team published a report in October that concluded the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated the cost. More than $163 million, about 72%, of the total attributed to the reforms was unrelated or lacked justification, the report found.
Sheridan attacked the audit.
“These guys are not CPAs, they don’t have the experience to do an audit of a huge government operation,” he said on the conservative talk radio show where he regularly appeared. “The sheriff’s budget is about $700 million a year, and the county’s budget is a couple of billion. They don’t have the expertise to do this, and so they come up with this report.”
He listed some expenses, including an order to create and staff new divisions. “We have three Ph.D.s that are analysts, and all of this has led to the fact that there has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit.”
Sheridan’s attorneys petitioned the court to dispute the audit but later dropped the challenge, saying the county wanted to avoid additional “unnecessary” expenses.
The audit reinforced many Latino community members’ belief that the agency couldn’t be trusted.
After the raucous gathering in Maryvale, advocates alleged there had been an effort to intimidate Latino residents, including the use of racial insults in a forum intended to gather their input and check on the Sheriff’s Office’s progress.
Judge Snow held the next public meeting at the federal courthouse. He acknowledged the increasingly vocal opposition to the settlement and its costs, but defended it as necessary.
“This is not an easy case. It is an expensive case. It is a case where everybody in Maricopa County has benefited, whether or not they appreciate it,” Snow said, before noting there was still work to do resolving the backlog of misconduct reports. “Sheriff Sheridan has done a considerable amount in reducing the backlog he was left with, but there is still a considerable backlog to be resolved.”
Sheridan conceded the settlement had made his office better, even if it sometimes caused friction. Still, attorneys for the Sheriff’s Office and the county government argued to Snow that they had done enough to end his oversight.
In December, the county filed a motion to sidestep the remaining reforms and end court supervision. Sheridan’s attorneys signed onto the motion in January.
“After 14 years, four sheriffs, and hundreds of millions spent tax dollars, it is essential to defend taxpayer money if federal oversight is no longer warranted,” Thomas Galvin, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors at the time, said in a video statement released after the motion was filed.
Attorneys representing Latino residents in the Melendres case opposed the bid to end court oversight. Snow has yet to rule on the motion.
Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated Community Advisory Board tasked with helping the Sheriff’s Office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the push to end oversight ignored a plain fact: The most comprehensive data still showed the department hadn’t eliminated bias from its policing.
“If Melendres goes away, that takes away significant protections for brown and Black people or the immigrant community in Maricopa County,” he said.
Since it joined the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, Suraj Kumar, an attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, informed Snow in January that the DOJ backed efforts to end oversight of the Sheriff’s Office.
This added to Latino community leaders’ worries that the Sheriff’s Office could once again, as it had under Arpaio, partner with ICE and allow deputies to enforce immigration laws.
Sheridan tried to put those concerns to rest, saying that if court oversight ended, he would not enter such an agreement.
But the questions grew louder as ICE surged into Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis to carry out mass deportations. Phoenix was reportedly next.
After a U.S. citizen was killed during ICE operations in Minnesota, Sheridan was asked on a conservative radio talk show what he would do if something similar happened in Arizona.
His deputies would step in if ICE agents did anything “illegal,” Sheridan said in the mid-January interview.
Four days later, Sheridan backtracked, saying he would instead side with immigration officers: “I will be here to protect them to do that and keep people from interfering with them.”
Cornejo, the community activist who attended the meeting in Guadalupe, read the reversal as a sign that Sheridan was too easily swayed and could not be trusted without court oversight. “Facing a crowd that tends to lean to the left, he’s going to give rhetoric that kind of says that he’s working on those things that he’s supposed to be,” Cornejo said. “If he’s with more conservatives, his language and rhetoric is completely different.”
Sheridan said that his position has not changed and that he “firmly believes that the Sheriff’s Office is in full compliance and that the current oversight should be concluded.”
Later that month, ICE raided 15 metro Phoenix restaurants that federal prosecutors alleged had knowingly hired undocumented laborers. Protests erupted outside some of the raided restaurants.
Sheridan sent deputies to help with crowd control, saying ICE had first asked Tempe police for assistance but the request was declined.
“We went out there, not to facilitate what ICE was doing or get involved in their business, because we don’t do that,” Sheridan told Latino faith leaders and residents at a February town hall in the suburb of Gilbert. “We were there to keep the peace.”
The Tempe Police Department told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it did not receive a request for help from ICE, nor was it notified in advance of the immigration operation. ICE did not respond to a question about local law enforcement participation in the raids.
Latino activists said the episode raised more questions about Sheridan’s willingness to collaborate with ICE and whether he would be transparent about his intentions. It would be harder for him to earn back their trust, they said.
The post This Sheriff Says His Department Eliminated Racial Bias. Data Shows Otherwise. appeared first on ProPublica.
A judge last week struck down the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists seeking “unauthorized” information, siding with the New York Times in its lawsuit against the government. In response, the Pentagon on Monday added some meaningless window dressing and essentially reissued the same restrictions. The administration pledged to “immediately” appeal the decision on the original policy, and on Tuesday, the Times filed a motion to compel the administration to comply with the judge’s order.
As alarming as the Pentagon’s antics are, the Times’ lawsuit is not the only case about whether reporters have the right to ask questions. It’s not even the only one in the news this week.
In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Patricia Villarreal under an obscure and never previously used law making it a felony to ask government employees for nonpublic information for personal benefit. Her supposed crime was asking a police officer about two local tragedies — a suicide and a deadly car wreck.
Her arrest was widely ridiculed, and a judge quickly threw out the charges. When Villarreal sued over her arrest and mistreatment by officers, the legal question wasn’t whether the charges against her were permissible but whether they were so obviously bogus that she could overcome qualified immunity, the unjust and expansive legal shield that protects government employees from liability for all but the most blatant violations. That issue went to the Supreme Court twice, but on Monday, the Court declined to review a federal appellate court’s ruling that the officers were shielded from liability.
No matter what our severely compromised Supreme Court thinks, the local cops who arrested Villarreal were embarrassingly ignorant of the Constitution. But they were also ahead of their time: The Department of Justice is making the same claims that turned the Laredo police into a First Amendment laughingstock — that reporters simply asking questions to the government is criminal — to federal district Judge Paul Friedman.
Most discussion of the Pentagon’s restrictions has focused on their conditions for reporters to receive press credentials, which the Pentagon says can be revoked if reporters publish “unauthorized” information. That policy is wildly unconstitutional on its own, and every mainstream outlet gave up their press passes rather than sign on, leaving war coverage inside the Pentagon to the likes of Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service.
But the Pentagon’s legal filings imply that reporters who don’t follow the rules risk more than their press passes. On March 12, the DOJ filed a brief to clarify its lawyers’ earlier comments in a discussion with Friedman at a hearing of “whether asking a question was a criminal act.” The government argued that although journalists may lawfully ask questions of “authorized” Pentagon personnel, “a journalist does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits … non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”
There you have it. What was once a fringe, failed legal theory concocted by some local cops in one Texas border city is now the official position of the federal government’s lawyers, which it felt compelled to put in writing in case anyone wasn’t sure where it stood after the hearing. Both the rogue cops and the DOJ’s lawyers contend that journalists merely asking questions to government officials constitutes unlawful solicitation.
“These Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story.”
As JT Morris, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (which represents Villarreal) told me in an email last week, the First Amendment “unquestionably protects our right to ask questions, whether it’s a citizen asking police about a local crime or the New York Times asking Pentagon officials about matters of national security. Officials can always respond, ‘no comment.’ But they cannot jail Americans for asking.”
The government’s argument would have turned countless Pulitzer-winning national security reporters into criminals. As Friedman put it in his ruling, the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … [A] journalist asking questions is not a crime!” (You can tell a judge is miffed when scholarly language fails and they resort to exclamation points.)
The DOJ’s “concession” in its clarification brief (and later in its revised policy) — that journalists can direct questions to authorized spokespeople — makes no difference. That the administration even felt the need to state something so obvious, presumably because they thought it would make them sound more reasonable, signals the extent to which they’ve threatened the First Amendment.
Government agencies have long routed journalists’ inquiries to PR flacks and instructed non-public-facing staffers not to answer reporters’ questions. That’s unconstitutional in its own right; earlier this month, the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida, became the latest government agency to settle a lawsuit over its employee gag rule. But until this administration, the government at least placed the burden on its own employees to comply with restrictions on talking to reporters.
Now, the government expects journalists to make themselves a party to its censorship directives, and ignore Supreme Court precedent that they can print any government information they lawfully obtain, even if it shouldn’t have been released. “A contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication,” the Court reasoned.
Journalist Kathryn Foxhall, who has for years sounded the alarm about “censorship by PIO,” including in collaboration with the Society of Professional Journalists, says the press has failed to meaningfully oppose these policies. “The media have done little to fight the ever-tightening rules at federal agencies and elsewhere banning reporters from buildings and prohibiting employees from speaking to journalists without the authorities’ oversight. With amazing negligence journalists just assume whatever reporters get is the whole story, even in the face of the many thousands of gagged staff people. Now these Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story,” she told me.
The Pentagon’s position that newsgathering is a prosecutable offense is not just theoretical. Although the DOJ’s brief didn’t explicitly reference it, just like the officers in Laredo, federal prosecutors have their own archaic and constitutionally dubious law on the books to sane-wash their nonsense arguments — the Espionage Act of 1917. Read literally, that law (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced a much-needed bill to reform it) arguably prohibits reporters and anyone else from obtaining or attempting to obtain national defense information.
But reading it that way to go after journalists would be unconstitutional and politically toxic, which is why past administrations have refrained. Had the Supreme Court denied the Laredo officers’ qualified immunity in Villarreal’s case, it would have signaled that arguments for expansive interpretations of arcane laws to criminalize routine reporting are a nonstarter.
The Court ducked the issue despite being fully aware that the present administration is looking for any excuse to punish reporters that dare to undermine its narratives. They’ve already claimed Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson — whose home they raided, seizing terabytes of data — violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information. The Trump administration is barging through the door the Biden administration left wide open, when, despite warnings from First Amendment advocates, it extracted a plea deal from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing government records, including about Iraq war crimes.
The DOJ’s adoption of the Laredo police’s discredited theory is an extension of the Assange and Natanson cases; the claim that publishing leaked documents is criminal has evolved into a theory that merely asking questions is, too. The administration lost in court this time, but it said it will appeal, and may be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s cowardice in the Laredo case.
If this administration succeeds in chipping away at constitutional protections for journalistic practices as basic as asking questions, reporters who wish to do anything more than regime stenography may risk imprisonment just by doing their jobs. In her dissent to the Villarreal ruling, Justice Sotomayor put it well: “Tolerating retaliation against journalists, or efforts to criminalize routine reporting practices, threatens to silence ‘one of the very agencies the Framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free.’”
The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.
The Saudis and Emiratis fear a deal that leaves the region less stable, and they have indicated support for an escalated campaign to force concessions from Tehran.
“I still can’t believe it,” said Shay Taylor-Allen, who landed a residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she was born and spent most of her adult life on the cleaning staff.
Henry Ford changed the face of industry forever – what kind of economic model do Musk’s methods presage?
Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest person vary in flavour, but most share something in common: they focus on Musk as an individual. In their study, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech writer, wish to reframe the conversation. The most important question, they argue, is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?”
As the title suggests, their answer is “Muskism”, the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for 20th-century capitalism built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption. If Fordism was the last century’s operating system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century’s.
Continue reading...Jena Lisa Jones says she backed Trump in 2024 election because of his campaign promises to release Epstein files
After casting her vote for Donald Trump in 2024 in hopes that he would bring transparency around the Jeffrey Epstein case, Epstein survivor Jena Lisa Jones said in an interview this week that she now fears “we’re not going to get justice in all of this”.
“I wanted my day in court,” said Jones, who has said she was abused by Epstein when she was 14, in an interview on the Shadow Sessions podcast that aired on Thursday morning. “I didn’t get that, and we were so close to it, it really got ripped from us, and then after [Epstein] passed, everything just went into a circus show.”
Continue reading...Major League Baseball's "robot umpire" made its debut in the season-opening New Yankees-San Francisco Giants game in Oracle Park.
Eddie Otchere spent 10 years photographing the New York hip-hop stars and other musicians. Here are the highlights of his thrilling new photozine
Continue reading...Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Melania and the Robot, the New York Times reports on First Lady Melania Trump's inaugural Fostering the Future Together Coalition Summit, which brought together international leaders, First Spouses from around the world, tech leaders, educators, and nonprofits to collaborate on practical solutions that expand access to educational tools while strengthening protections for children in digital environments (Day 2 WH summary). The Times begins: "On Wednesday, Mrs. Trump appeared at the White House alongside Figure 3, a humanoid, A.I.-powered robot whose uses, according to the company that makes it, include fetching towels, carrying groceries and serving champagne. But Mrs. Trump joins tech executives and some researchers in envisioning a world beyond robot butlery. She is interested in how these robots could cut it as educators. Both clad in shades of white, the first lady and the visiting robot walked into a gathering of first spouses from around the world, a group that included Sara Netanyahu of Israel, Olena Zelenska of Ukraine, and Brigitte Macron of France. The dulcet tones from a (presumably human) military orchestra played as the first lady and her guest entered the event. Both lady and robot extolled the virtues of further integrating robots into the educational and social lives of children. In the history of modern first-lady initiatives, which have included building a national book festival (Laura Bush), reshuffling the food pyramid (Michelle Obama) and advocating for free community college (Jill Biden), Mrs. Trump's involvement of a humanoid robot in education policy was a first." "Figure 3 delivered brief remarks and delivered salutations in several languages. With its sleek black-and-white appearance, Figure 3 would fit right in with the first lady's branding aesthetic, which includes a self-titled coffee table book and movie, not least because the name "MELANIA" was emblazoned on the side of its glossy plastic head. After Figure 3 teetered gingerly away, Mrs. Trump looked around the room and told them that the future looked a lot like what they had just witnessed. 'The future of A.I. is personified,' she told her audience. 'It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility.' She invited her guests to envision a future in which a robot philosopher educated children."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ukrainian president says peace deal proposed by US includes handing over land to Russia. What we know on day 1,492
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: This new war has exposed widening fractures between Israel and its allies, and the country finds itself increasingly out of step with global opinion
Good morning. Israel may be the only country in the world where there is overwhelming public support for the conflict in Iran. Despite its impact on everyday life in the country – at least 15 people have been killed and hundreds more injured by Iranian missiles since the war started in February, and school closures and missile warnings remain routine – polling puts support for the war at more than 90% among Jewish Israelis.
The contrast with the rest of the world is stark. Nearly a month into the fighting, polling shows that 60% of the US public oppose the war with Iran, and just one in four backed the initial strikes. In the Gulf, Europe and Asia, the conflict is widely unpopular, as severe economic consequences already begin to bite.
Middle East crisis | Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and countered with a negotiation plan of its own as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.
Media | Matt Brittin, Google’s former top executive in Europe, has been named the BBC’s next director general. Brittin will replace Tim Davie at a crucial time for the corporation.
UK politics | Political donations from British citizens living abroad are to be capped at £100,000 a year, in a move that is likely to limit further funding from Reform UK’s Thailand-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne.
UK news | The former justice minister Crispin Blunt has been fined £1,200 for possessing illegal drugs after he told a court he entered the world of chemsex parties to help inform government policy.
Housing | People who lost their homes when a tower block in Dagenham burned down say they are being made to pay for the building’s fire safety works after the government demanded its money back.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Watchdog issues formal guidance to trustees at top AI research institute after staff expressed concerns
The board of the UK’s leading AI research institute has been reminded of its legal duties in areas such as financial oversight and managing organisational change by the charity watchdog after a whistleblower complaint.
The Charity Commission issued formal regulatory advice and guidance to trustees at the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), the organisation’s board, after it was contacted by a group of staff with a list of concerns.
Continue reading...White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says talks with Tehran are ongoing hours after Iran's state media said the regime rejected Trump administration proposals.
Hostilities should halt and healthcare facilities must be treated as ‘safe havens’, WHO’s regional chief has said
A total stop to hostilities in the Middle East is needed to halt a “health crisis unfolding in real time”, the World Health Organization’s chief in the region has said.
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities must be treated as “safe havens”, urged Dr Hanan Balkhy, the WHO’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean.
Continue reading...Reluctance to cheerlead alleged US ceasefire efforts reflects suspicion talk of peace could be another foil for escalation
Not long after Donald Trump said the US was engaged in “strong talks” to bring the war with Iran to an end this week, Qatar took the unusual step of distancing itself from the alleged diplomatic negotiations.
Qatar was not involved in any mediation efforts, said government spokesperson Majed al-Ansari at a briefing on Tuesday night, before adding as a telling aside: “If they exist.”
Continue reading...Professionals from across Europe urge MEPs to reject plans, saying ‘climate of fear’ could stop people seeking care
More than 1,100 healthcare professionals from across Europe have urged MEPs to reject proposed measures aimed at increasing the deportation of undocumented people, warning they could threaten public health by transforming essential public services, including hospitals, into sites of immigration enforcement.
The draft plans, which are due to go to a vote on Thursday, have been in the works since last March, when the European Commission laid out its proposal to target people with no legal right to stay in the EU, including potentially sending them to offshore centres in non-EU countries.
Continue reading...The Italian PM has won plaudits for her tightrope-walking pragmatism. But have voters now had enough?
Giorgia Meloni has a long history of defying expectations. She holds the record as Italy’s youngest cabinet member, at 31, and is its first female prime minister, thus overcoming two of Italian politics’ most formidable obstacles, gerontocracy and machismo. After she took office in autumn 2022, she quickly put to rest concerns that her post-fascist background would make her a foreign policy radical. Staunch support for Ukraine and a pragmatic relationship with EU leaders won her international credibility.
Against this backdrop, the defeat she suffered in this week’s referendum – where Italians rejected the government’s proposed constitutional reform of the judiciary by 53.2% to 46.8% – appears all the more significant.
Riccardo Alcaro is head of research at IAI, Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome
Continue reading...The Federal Communications Commission bans the sale of new foreign-made routers in the US to protect national security. The ironic side effect: It could stop your current router from receiving vital security updates.
Trump’s war on Iran reveals a foreign policy without principles.
Decades of preparation are paying off.
This blog is closed. Follow our new liveblog here
Iranian nationals with valid Australian tourist visas will be blocked from entering the country for six months, Australia’s home affairs minister said, citing concern some may decide to stay longer than they’re allowed.
Tony Burke said the direction was necessary as there was a risk Iranians on tourist visas visiting Australia may be unable or unlikely to leave when their visa expires.
The order only applies to people with a valid tourist visa outside of the country.
The government said “sympathetic consideration” would be given to citizens with Iranian parents.
The government said it would closely monitor global developments and adjust settings as required.
If you’re just joining us, here’s a quick recap of the day:
An Iranian military spokesperson mocked US attempts at a ceasefire deal, insisting Americans were only negotiating with themselves. Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari’s statement came after the Trump administration reportedly sent a 15-point ceasefire plan to Iran through Pakistan.
Even as Donald Trump claimed productive negotiations to end the war were ongoing with Tehran, Iran’s relentless bombardment of the Gulf states showed no sign of relenting. Kuwait and Bahrain were both hit with damaging strikes on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, as the patience of the Gulf states after rebuffing constant attacks for almost a month began to wear thin.
The World Trade Organisation warned disruptions to international fertiliser supplies caused by the closing of the strait of Hormuz will cause food scarcity and high prices. A third of the world’s fertilisers normally transit the strait.
Oil prices fell nearly 6% and Asian shares gained, after reports Donald Trump had sent a peace plan to Iran fuelled optimism in the market. A barrel of Brent crude was down 5.92% at $98.30, while benchmark US oil contract, West Texas Intermediate, was down 5.01% at $87.72.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed nine people, state media reported. Citing the health ministry, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said strikes had killed people across towns and a Palestinian refugee camp.
News that Trump had approved the deployment of more than 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East further undermined the US president’s repeated claims of successful peace talks. Iran has previously threatened to mine the gulf surrounding the island if the US appeared to be landing troops.
Continue reading...President Trump suggested late Wednesday he's avoiding describing the military conflict with Iran as a "war" because of concerns around the fact that Congress hasn't authorized military force.
Thirty years after the alleged 1996 "ET of Varginha" encounter, debate continues to rage over the events that happened in Brazil's self-styled UFO capital. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the Guardian: The skies over this far-flung coffee-growing hub went charcoal black, the heavens opened and one of Brazil's greatest mysteries was born. "It really was something unique," recalls Marco Antonio Reis, a zoo director, who was at his ranch outside Varginha one stormy day in January 1996 when, he says, an otherworldly creature came to town. Reis and other locals claim the unusually ferocious downpour heralded a series of disturbing and seemingly paranormal events. At least six of the zoo's animals, including a spider monkey, a tapir and a raccoon, died mysteriously after a horned interloper with bulging red eyes was spotted in the vicinity by a woman who had gone out for a smoke. When a vet examined their corpses, "they were all black inside," Reis claims. On a nearby wasteland, three young women spotted a peculiar and malodorous being with a heart-shaped face and three lumps on its head cowering beside a wall. "I've seen the devil," one of those witnesses would later tell her mum. Soon afterwards, an unexplained infection was rumored to have killed a strapping police intelligence officer who was said to have grappled with the oleaginous unidentified being. Three decades later, Reis says he is convinced Varginha received a non-human visit. His only doubt was from where it came. "We don't know if it was extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial," the 71-year-old says as he climbs a staircase to the veranda where the smoker claims to have seen what, in reference to Steven Spielberg's 1982 film, became known as the "ET of Varginha". A 2ft statue of a two-toed alien now marks the spot. "It's possible it was an intraterrestrial, from inside the Earth They don't just come from space," Reis says. "It might have come from the depths of the Earth, too. We don't even know what it's like at the bottom of the sea, do we?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Since Monday, much of the wreckage had remained on the tarmac, blocking access to one of LaGuardia's two runways at one of the country's busiest airports.
Several states saw record daily temperatures set on Wednesday, as the heat wave that has been scorching the West expands into the central U.S.
Former Olympic rower to lead corporation as it hammers out future funding model with government
The BBC has turned to a former tech executive to steer it through a critical period in its history, as it attempts to navigate government talks over its future and huge changes in media consumption.
Matt Brittin, who stepped down as Google’s president in Europe, the Middle East and Africa last year, will replace Tim Davie as the corporation hammers out its crucial future funding model with the government.
Continue reading...Emad Shargi, who was released from Iran's Evin prison in 2023, said "it's important" that President Trump "hears that there are innocent Americans being held like we were as political pawns."
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 26.
Melania Trump entered a White House event in lock step with an AI-powered robot at the opening of the inaugural Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition summit. At the summit, the first lady urged nations to work together to improve access to education and technology for children around the globe. The humanoid robot, 'Figure 3', welcomed attendees ahead of the first lady’s remarks.
Continue reading...I’m looking to buy a one wheel for campus, but I’m finding it very hard to pick so I’d like to know the community’s favorite!!!
I’ve never found a good description so I just set it all the way to “less”
Is it more dynamic than that?
It doesn’t actually lessen the angle, you hit 25 and it’s the same?
I tried some testing and now I’m just more confused then ever.
Either setting it feels just as abrupt when I hit the 25mph limit
"This is the first time I've experienced something like this in my entire life," one traveler said as TSA lines snaked through George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
New hires will not be ready to work checkpoints until well after the mega event, acting head of TSA says – key US politics stories from Tuesday 24 March
Anyone planning to travel to a US city hosting World Cup matches this summer might want to leave now.
World Cup travelers could face long waits due to staffing shortages caused by the partial US government shutdown, with the head of US airport security warning of a “perfect storm”.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed.
Top officials at agencies affected by the ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown are testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The lapse in funding for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has lasted 40 days with little end in sight.
During opening remarks, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, Andrew Garbarino, said that the shutdown has caused “massive disruptions” across airports, “weakened our nation’s cybersecurity posture” and “left states unsupported with less than 100 days until the start of major events across the United States, such as FIFA World Cup”.
Continue reading...It's the first-ever surcharge from the USPS, and it's all due to rising gas costs. But it won't affect first-class stamps.
The launch of battery-powered versions of the company's powerful AI doorbells has been highly anticipated.
Bill Pulte reportedly urges examination of alleged fraud as New York attorney general’s lawyer attacks ‘vendetta’
The Trump administration’s federal housing finance director, Bill Pulte, is asking prosecutors to investigate New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, for insurance fraud, according to criminal referrals reported by MS Now and CBS News.
The referrals to prosecutors in Florida and Illinois allege that James may have committed mortgage insurance fraud. The allegations center on applications made to Universal Property Insurance, which is based in Florida, and Allstate in Illinois.
Continue reading...US president says he will host Chinese leader in a reciprocal visit later this year
Donald Trump will meet Xi Jinping in May during the US president’s first visit to China in eight years, a closely watched trip that had been postponed due to the Iran war.
Trump was initially slated to travel next week, but will now visit Beijing on 14 and 15 May, he wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Trump said he would host the Chinese leader in a reciprocal visit in Washington later this year.
Continue reading...A potential deal to end the DHS shutdown has stalled on Capitol Hill after Senate Democrats made their latest counteroffer.
How many people checked their BMS graph while riding with a split pack? I'm riding a 20s2p in a x7 LR, and my 19th cell always demonstates higher resistance. I thought it was bad batching or a bad weld but I've seen three other people show the exact same symptom on the same cell. I heard it's normal for a split pack, is that true? Is this cell not really getting hit harder and heating up more?
The first lady shared the spotlight with the robot to promote the use of artificial intelligence in education.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 26, No. 1,741.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 26 #1019.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 549 for Thursday, March 26.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 26, No. 753.
The U.S. Postal Service is raising some postage prices to help offset the federal agency's rising transportation costs as fuel prices surge.
A Trump administration official has made new criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James to federal prosecutors in Miami and Chicago for two cases of possible homeowner's insurance fraud, sources told CBS News.
In a post on X Saturday, Musk offered to pay the salaries of TSA workers during the DHS shutdown.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health and interim leader of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told staff a permanent CDC director could be nominated soon. "I know that it has been such a difficult year," he said.
The DOD’s new secondary title is a callback to the agency’s original name.
Go behind the scenes with our team as we find and make sense of the numbers.
FEMA will make $1 billion available for the BRIC program, which helps local governments harden against natural hazards like fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.
GPUs are still important for Nvidia, which held its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week in San Jose. But the importance of GPUs appears to be waning as the AI boom is creating a surge in demand for general purpose CPUs and other processor types that offer advantages for AI inference. Nvidia wants to control this emerging market too, as CEO Jensen Huang, AKA the “Inference King,” made clear in his keynote.
Forget about Nvidia as the GPU company. “Most people forget that Nvidia’s business is much, much more diversified than a chip company,” Huang said during a Q&A with the press at GPC last week. “And the reason for that is because we’re full stack and we can help people build AI factories anywhere.”
If a company spends $30 billion to build an AI factory to generate tokens, they will want to equip it with chips that can generate tokens at efficiently as possible. That is Nvidia’s goal: to help customers build systems to generate a huge amount of tokens as affordably as they can.
“Inference is your workload and tokens is your new commodity,” Huang said in his keynote. “That compute is your revenues, [and] you want to make sure that the architecture is as optimized as you can in the future. Every single CSP, every single computer company, every single cloud company, every single AI company, every single company period, is going to be thinking about their token factory effectiveness.”
Nvidia is already leading the AI inference ballgame. Dylan Patel of the benchmarking company SemiAnalysis has run the numbers, and he found GB300 delivered not a 35x increase in performance per watt versus Hopper, but 50x. That led SemiAnalysis to name Nvidia the Inference King, a name that Huang instantly latched onto.
SemiAnalysis named Nvidia NVL72 the Inference King thanks to its leadership in token generation efficiency
As part of that full stack, Nvidia is focusing on lowering the cost of delivering AI inference at massive scale. That is in line with a new prediction from Gartner, which today forecast that the cost of an AI inference token will drop by 90% by 2030. Judging by what Nvidia presented at GTC, it is planning to match this figure.
GPUs still play a critical role in Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, but it’s not the big player that it was when the generative AI revolution really started to get going back in 2023. As part of the Vera Rubin architecture, Nvidia is offering five specialized systems, all based on its liquid-cooled MGX rack architecture, which it fills with these chips.
There is, of course, the NVL72, which features 36 Vera Rubin superchips connected with an NVLink switch. But in addition to that longstanding system, Nvidia is offering several more, which it dubs the MGX ETL line. The MGX ETL line includes:
“The new Vera Rubin platform: seven chips, five rack-scale computers, one revolutionary AI supercomputer for agentic AI,” Haung said during his keynote address at GTC 2026 last week. “Forty million times more compute in just 10 years.”
GPUs are instrumental for AI model training, and they’re also needed in the first stage of AI inference, called prefill, when the prompt is received and input into the AI model. But GPUs are not as efficient at running the second stage of AI inference, the decode stage, which is where the AI model generates responses to the prompt.
During the decode stage, the AI model generates tokens one at a time based on the current prompt and other previous prompts, which are stored in the KV cache, a critical element in the modern AI inference workflow. The bottleneck during the decode stage is the speed at which data can be moved from memory to the processor, not the speed of the processor, which is the GPU’s biggest advantage. While GPUs have large amounts of high-bandwidth memory and can be used for decode, it’s not an efficient use of the GPU, and that inefficiency spells trouble in a $30 billion gigawatt AI factory.
Six months ago, Nvidia introduced a version of the Rubin GPU that was better at AI inference, dubbed the CPX. But Groq seems to have replaced it, and the CPX will not be delivered in 2026, as previously planned, the company said.
Nvidia wants its AI factory customers to use other chip types to accelerate various parts of AI acceleration. CPUs, like the new Vera ARM chip, will be used to run a variety of different workloads during AI inference, while LPUs like Groq 3 are specialized to handle specific parts of the decode phase, including pulling data from the KV cache. Other chips, like the BlueField-4 DPUs and Spectrum-X SuperNICs, will be instrumental in getting data to and from storage in the quickest amount of time, and potentially avoiding the dreaded GPU memory wall.
The AI boom has moved processing demand back over the CPU sweet spot, which led executives at AMD and Intel to declare that CPUs are “cool again.” You could say that Nvidia got the message, too.
Nvidia rolled out its new Vera CPU at GTC 2026. The 88-core ARM chip boasts some impressive stats against its X86 rivals, including 1.5x the “sandbox performance” (or running compilers, runtime engines, and data analytics tasks), 3x the memory bandwidth (it offers 1.2 TB per second for its LPDDR5x memory), and 2x the efficiency, the company said.
An agentic AI workload that involves generating and running code will need to create a sandbox environment. That, along with other various other tasks, is best suited for a general-purpose CPU with very high single-threaded performance, such as Vera, according to Nvidia.
For example, Vera will be tasked with spinning up Linux instances, running interpreters to execute and compile Python code. The effectiveness of that generated code needs to be monitored to determine whether changes are needed, which is another workload where general purpose CPUs will shine. SQL queries may also need to be executed to grab structured data out of a database.
It’s all about matching the software workloads to the appropriate hardware to keep everything running as quickly and as efficiently as possible, said Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager of hyperscale and HPC.
“This might be a $30-billion, gigawatt data center [full] of GPUs. I’m not going to skimp on the CPU side and have this [GPU] sit idle or have the potential of that model come up short because I couldn’t run the compilation too long and I had to cut it off and drop that data on the floor,” he said.
“The world…needs a lot of CPUs,” Buck continued. “For training these models, they need fast CPUs in order to make sure that they get the best possible data back to the GPU and never let the GPU stall out. And then finally AI, when you actually deploy it after you’re done training, it’s not just the AI model…They call tools all over the place.”
The Rubin GPU is a powerhouse of a machine, with each chip providing 50 petaflops of NVFP4 compute for AI inference. Combining Rubin with the Vera CPU in the NVL72 system creates an even better system that is tough to beat, Huang said during his keynote.
“However, if you extend it way out here…if you wanted to have services that deliver not 400 tokens per second, but a thousand tokens per second, all of a sudden NVLink72 runs out of steam and you simply can’t get there,” Huang said. “We just don’t have enough bandwidth. And so this is where Groq comes in.”
Accelerating the decode phase is why Nvidia paid $20 billion to license the Groq intellectual property and hire the Groq engineers in December 2025. Each Groq 3 LPU has only 500 MB of SRAM, which is much less memory than the Rubin GPU. But Groq LPUs feature 150TB per second of memory bandwidth, which is much more than Rubin’s 22TBps. With 256 Groq LPUs in an LPX rack, the total memory bandwidth jumps to an eye-watering 40 PBps of SRAM memory bandwidth, which is enough to power AI inference workloads with large context windows.
As Nvidia shared last week, the combination of a Groq 3 LPX rack with a Rubin NVL72 system will allow customers to generate a million tokens for $45 on a 1 trillion GPT model with a 400k context window, which is 35x more tokens than Rubin NVL72 could generate by itself.
According to Buck, about one quarter of the computing demand in AI inference is the prefill stage, which can be handled effectively and efficiently with Vera Rubin (VR) superchips, while about three quarters is the decode stage, which works best with a combination of VR and LPX.
“Prefill is just step one, how quickly can you get to your first token,” Buck said in the press briefing at GTC. “After you’ve done that, those prefill. GPUs or CPXs or whatever you’re using to prefill, it doesn’t matter. Your token rate is all about the number of processors you’re using to generate every token after that. So it’s not a CPX thing. If you just did LPX, you would need a lot of chips because of all of that state, all that memory, all that context.
“By combining the LPX rack with VR rack, we cannot need all that,” he continued. “[LPX] is 7x faster memory bandwidth than HBM. That lets the little experts, the FFMs [feed forward networks]…we can run them here. The whole rest of the model, we can run all the … attention math, all the rest of the model can operate here [on the VR rack] so that we don’t need a dozen racks of LPX. We can deliver all that kind of performance with just two racks of LPX and one rack of VR.”
The result of that architecture is an AI factory that can deliver tokens at the rate of 1,000 per second, which we referenced earlier. This is the future that Nvidia is building
“Everything that we’ve optimized here in order to serve models can do that with high throughput, low-cost inference king economics,” Buck said. “We can bring down the cost of that of that volume of what the AI that market is today.”
Related Items:
Nvidia Boasts 7 Chips in Production for Vera Rubin Platform, Including Groq 3 LPU
AI Boom Comes for CPUs, Which Are ‘Cool Again’
What Nvidia’s $20B Purchase of Groq’s Assets Means for AI Accelerators
The post Nvidia’s Shift from GPUs and AI ‘Inference King’ Economics appeared first on HPCwire.
During a demonstration, cybersecurity experts showed how readily available apps can transform a person's appearance in real time to create a deep fake.
During a demonstration, cybersecurity experts showed how readily available apps can transform a person's appearance in real time to create a deepfake.
 | Safety floating around. This is behind McDonald’s [link] [comments] |
The U.S. Postal Service plans to impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages (source paywalled; alternative source), adding an 8% fee starting in April as it struggles with rising fuel costs and ongoing financial pressure. The surcharge will not apply to letter mail and is currently expected to remain in place until January 2027. The Wall Street Journal reports: Other parcel carriers, including FedEx and United Parcel Service, have imposed fuel surcharges, as well as a basket of other surcharges and fees, for years. Both FedEx and UPS have dramatically raised their fuel surcharges in recent weeks as the price of oil has increased amid the turmoil in the Middle East. [...] The post office has been trying to increase the volume of packages it delivers. It previously differentiated itself from commercial carriers by saying that it doesn't apply residential, Saturday delivery or fuel or remote-delivery surcharges.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Latest strike brings number of deaths to at least 163 since attacks on alleged ‘narco-terrorists’ began in September
The US has launched another strike on a vessel in the Caribbean, killing four people, the US Southern Command said.
The command, which oversees combatant operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced on X that it had conducted a “lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations”.
Continue reading...Check out the top trending gadgets that you can snag on sale now during the Amazon Big Spring Sale.
The Derpy McFlurry mixes popping boba pearls and berry sauce into a soft-serve dessert.
A survey of Minneapolis and St. Paul residents found the deployment of thousands of federal agents to their cities caused significant upheaval to their lives.
Gaming is about to become even more expensive.
As Iraq claimed “heinous aggression,” the U.S. denied it targeted a clinic. The incident threatens to sour relations between the countries amid the Iran war.
The U.S. military said it carried out a strike on a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, killing four people.
Manus’s CEO and chief scientist are facing scrutiny from Beijing over the company’s $2 billion sale to Meta.
We have family in a India and trying to send or bring my old xr+ for them, if I disassemble it completely and ship the battery before can I put a rail in each check in bag and the boxes in a 3rd bag and carry on the wheel and tire? What rules could they accuse me of breaking? I’m talking 1 piece per bag under the whole traveling family to there from USA, battery would already be delivered in family hands before we would go. Leaving it there…. Do they tariff or duty charge for just parts and pieces? We go regularly enough to split it up over 2-3 trips if absolutely necessary or is it a heck no don’t do it situation since the wheel and tire are such a security look at me thing?
Right now, you need a Plus plan or better to access the library feature.
Surcharge, spurred by oil price spikes due to the Iran war, is set to take effect on 26 April and run until January 2027
The US Postal Service (USPS) plans to introduce its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages to offset rising energy costs, according to a statement.
The surcharge, set at 8%, is expected to take effect on 26 April and remain in place until 17 January 2027, under the current plan.
Continue reading...NotebookLM's latest features turn your notes into videos, podcasts and more.
Reversal by London police comes as Shabana Mahmood prepares an appeal against high court overturning ban on the group
The Metropolitan police has said it will resume arresting people who show support for Palestine Action just weeks after it said it would no longer do so following a high court ruling that the ban on the direct action group was unlawful.
After last month’s judgment, the Met police said it would immediately stop arresting people for such offences under the Terrorism Act but would gather evidence for potential future prosecutions.
Continue reading...New submitter haroldbasset writes: Canada's Immigration Department rejected an applicant because the duties of her current job did not match the Canadian work experience she had claimed, but the Department's AI assistant had invented that work experience. She has been working in Canada as a health scientist -- she has a Ph.D. in the immunology of aging -- but the AI genius instead described her as "wiring and assembling control circuits, building control and robot panels, programming and troubleshooting." "It's believed to be the first time that the department explicitly referred to the use of generative AI to support application processing in immigration refusals," reports the Toronto Star. "The disclaimer also noted that all generated content was verified by an officer and that generative AI was not used to make or recommend a decision." The applicant's lawyer was shocked "how any human being could make this decision." "Somehow, it hallucinated my client's job description," he said. "I would love to see what the officer saw. Something seriously went wrong here." The applicant's refusal came just as Canada's Immigration Department released its first AI strategy, which frames artificial intelligence as a way to improve efficiency, service delivery, and program integrity. The department says it has long used digital tools like analytics and automation to flag fraud risks and triage applications, and is now also experimenting with generative AI for tasks such as research, summarizing, and analysis. In this case, however, the department insisted the decision was made by a human officer and that generative AI was not involved in the final decision.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Guatemalan nationals Angelina Lopez Jimenez and Wendy Godinez Lopez, nine, apprehended en route to Miami, report says
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers targeted a mother and her child at San Francisco international airport for arrest after TSA agents tipped them off, according to a report from the New York Times.
The report, which cites federal documents, adds a new dimension to the arrest by ICE officers that went viral this week, casting new scrutiny on the Trump administration’s information-sharing agreements that critics say are leading to more indiscriminate immigration arrests.
Continue reading...Dell is bringing back the Precision Pro alongside a lineup of new Dell Pro laptops, the tiny Pro 5 Micro PC and a "conferencing monitor."
Rybakina completes 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 comeback win
American slumps to fifth straight defeat to Kazakhstani
Jessica Pegula had her chances. Midway through the second set of yet another showdown with Elena Rybakina, the American had engineered a flawless start. After bulldozing through the opening set, Pegula’s level at the beginning of set two put her in with a fair shot of snatching a win against her Kazakhstani opponent, who has dominated their recent meetings.
Instead, Pegula departed Miami with another tough lesson to parse through after being shown once again that the best players in the world pounce on even the smallest drops in intensity. Despite her mediocre start, Rybakina produced a brilliant comeback to reach the Miami Open semi-finals with a 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 win.
Continue reading...A panel of appeals court judges handed the Trump administration a major legal victory in its quest to detain large swaths of immigrants living in the country illegally without bond.
Writer looked to topics such as computer engineering and life in a nursing home to produce richly researched books
Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.
Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House confirmed his death in a statement on Wednesday: “Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.”
Continue reading...
President Donald Trump wants Congress to approve the SAVE America Act to add certain requirements for voting, and he also wants to ban most cases of voting by mail, even though he voted that way recently in Florida.
"Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all," Trump said at a March 23 event in Memphis. He also said that the U.S. is the only country that "does mail-in voting," which is False.
Does voting by mail equate to cheating? No, more than a decade of studies, reviews and investigations of voting by mail show that fraud happens occasionally, but it is not widespread.
The House passed the SAVE America Act in February and debate in the Senate continues. The bill would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register and a government-issued photo ID to vote. Trump wants lawmakers to add to the legislation a ban on voting by mail except for travel, illness, disability or military.
Trump voted by mail in the March 24 special election for a state house seat in the Florida district that includes his Mar-a-Lago home. Democrat Emily Gregory won the election, with a majority of votes received via mail-in ballots, according to unofficial results, flipping the district from red to blue. It was not the first time Trump voted by mail — he did so in some past New York and Florida elections.
Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told PolitiFact that it was a "non-story" that Trump voted by mail because he primarily lives in Washington, D.C.
Trump was in Florida during some days of early voting.
Wales pointed to some examples of mail-in voting fraud, including a former Atlantic City, New Jersey, councilman and political operative who in 2025 pleaded guilty in a vote by mail scheme. Some of the examples Wales cited stretched back a decade or more. Wales also pointed to a 2005 report by a commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter that said "absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud." The report also said mail voting worked in some places, and Carter later embraced mail-in voting.
Voter fraud, including by mail, happens sporadically, but not enough to change the outcome of a statewide or nationwide election. There are anecdotal examples of people voting on ballots of dead relatives, for example.
A North Carolina congressional election was overturned in 2018 after evidence surfaced that the Republican candidate benefited from an effort to collect voters’ mail-in ballots.
Mail voting fraud is extremely rare, occurring approximately four times per 10 million votes cast each election cycle, according to a 2025 analysis by Brookings Institution, a think tank. The analysis used voter fraud cases documented by the conservative Heritage Foundation for general elections from 2016 to 2022.
In 2022, The Associated Press asked top election officials in each state whether mail-in ballot drop boxes were tied to fraud. None that allowed the boxes in 2020 said they were tied to fraud or stolen ballots. Another AP investigation into fraud in 2020 battleground states found too few cases to affect the outcome of the election that Trump lost.
Republican lawmakers have not gone along with Trump’s proposed ban on most voting by mail. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said during a SAVE America Act debate that her state had taken steps to ensure the security of mail-in voting.
"We have got an ability to track your ballot once you have cast it," Murkowski said. "So we have worked this long and hard and well to accommodate the many, many tens of thousands of Alaskans who will vote by mail."
The Heritage Foundation database showed five fraud cases in Alaska since 1982 and none were related to voting by mail.
States take several steps to ensure the security of voting by mail. It starts with determining whether someone is eligible to vote. Election offices also periodically update their registration lists, including removing inactive voters or those who have died. Election officials track mail ballots to prevent double voting.
Trump has made false and ridiculous voter fraud allegations for a decade, such as grossly inflating instances of noncitizen voting.
The day before the Florida election, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case about whether to ban counting mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive after the election, a practice allowed in more than a dozen states. A ruling is expected by July 4.
Trump said "mail-in voting means mail-in cheating."
Each election year, tens of millions of Americans, including Trump, vote by mail, and evidence from court records and studies shows only a tiny speck of votes are fraudulent. By saying that mail-in voting means cheating, Trump is wrongly lumping all such voting as a criminal act.
Our definition of Pants on Fire is a statement that is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. That fits here.
We rate it Pants on Fire.
RELATED: President Trump wants to slash voting by mail. About 1 in 4 Republicans voted that way in 2024
RELATED: Trump wrongly says Jimmy Carter said ‘don’t ever use’ mail ballots
Picture number two is a painful lesson, the scrape on the forearm not so much
Had ordered padded shorts but saw this at goodwill and couldn’t pass it up.
Now I feel much safer to deal with anything that comes my way. Even nosedives
It’s hockey gear I think?
Idk but I for the whole set for a song and couldn’t resist
I’m 53 and falling hurts.
I don’t plan on stopping so I gotta be safe
Please don’t laugh too hard. I know it doesn’t look cool but I know I am deep down inside like below that giant bruise. lol
Be safe guysh
Hit 18.5 on the normal pint right before.
March 25, 2026 — Ericsson and Forschungszentrum Jülich aim to push the boundaries of network performance and efficiency, ensuring future solutions use as little energy as possible, while delivering exceptional intelligence and performance.
Signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (from left to right): Prof. Paul Strachan, Prof. Thomas Lippert, Prof. Laurens Kuipers, Jan-Peter Meyer-Kahlen, Nicole Dinion, Bernd Mellinghaus. Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich / Kurt Steinhausen.
The new collaboration brings together Ericsson’s global leadership in telecommunications with Jülich’s world-renowned expertise in high performance computing and next-generation computing technologies, including its work on JUPITER, Europe’s most powerful supercomputer, by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). The partners signed a Memorandum of Understanding yesterday, March 24, 2026.
A key focus of the collaboration is on neuromorphic computing, aiming to open up new possibilities for processing complex network tasks and advancing the underlying technologies that enable next-generation infrastructure.
The partners will explore advanced AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions that will underpin the continued evolution of 5G and form the foundation of future 6G networks. The first commercial 6G services are expected around the year 2030.
Prof. Laurens Kuipers, member of the Executive Board of Forschungszentrum Jülich, said: “This collaboration has the potential to make a significant contribution to a more sustainable digital future. By combining our excellence in high-performance computing and our research into novel, neuro-inspired computing approaches with Ericsson’s expertise in telecommunications, we aim to develop more energy-efficient network solutions and strengthen a sovereign European digital infrastructure.”
Nicole Dinion, Head of Architecture and Technology, Cloud Software and Services, Ericsson, commented: “The future of mobile networks is deeply intertwined with AI and the need for unparalleled energy efficiency. Our collaboration with Forschungszentrum Jülich, for years a global leader in supercomputing and applied physics, combines their research and computing power with our expertise in all domains of telecoms technology. We will explore architectures that define the next generation of telecommunication.”
The new partnership will explore AI models and methods to enhance Ericsson’s core network, network management, and Radio Access Network (RAN).
The collaboration covers several areas of research:
The collaboration will provide insights into the feasibility of cloud strategies based on concepts from the EuroHPC ecosystem, which is establishing a world-class supercomputing infrastructure with leading European centres such as the JSC.
About Forschungszentrum Jülich
Shaping change: This is what drives us at Forschungszentrum Jülich. As a member of the Helmholtz Association with more than 7,000 employees, we conduct research into the possibilities of a digitized society, a climate-friendly energy system, and a resource-efficient economy. We combine natural, life, and engineering sciences in the fields of information, energy, and the bioeconomy with specialist expertise in simulation and data science.
About Ericsson
Ericsson’s high-performing, programmable networks provide connectivity for billions of people every day. For 150 years, we’ve been pioneers in creating technology for communication. We offer mobile communication and connectivity solutions for service providers and enterprises. Together with our customers and partners, we make the digital world of tomorrow a reality.
Source: Ericsson
The post Ericsson and Jülich Explore Neuromorphic, HPC Approaches for Next-Gen Telecom Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
NEW YORK, March 25, 2026 — Salute has announced a new collaboration with Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions and services, enabling customers to protect their AI investments by reducing complexity and mitigating risks in direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid cooling.
Credit: Salute and Ecolab
Though this collaboration, Ecolab’s Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) program will become integral to Salute’s DTC Liquid Cooling Operations Service. Ecolab’s CaaS solves one of the most complex challenges for liquid cooling in data centers by simplifying the management of the technology loop, which is the centerpiece of DTC cooling systems.
“To achieve operational excellence in AI environments, companies need to ensure the performance and reliability of the tech loop. It is the beating heart and circulatory system of your cooling systems, and it must be managed properly to prevent downtime and ensure performance. Ecolab’s CaaS program does exactly that,” said John Shultz, Chief Product Officer, AI and Learning Officer for Salute. “Ecolab is a globally trusted name in cooling management in dozens of industries; their solution for these cooling systems delivers tremendous value and peace of mind to data center operators. Together, we are further mitigating the risks of liquid cooling and protecting the investments that companies are making in AI computing.”
Enabled by Ecolab’s CaaS program, Salute’s DTC Liquid Cooling Operations service is a comprehensive solution that mitigates the risks that liquid cooling introduces into data centers, particularly as AI operations rapidly scale. It represents a state-of-the-art advancement for world-class AI and HPC operations, and has been adopted by a rapidly growing list of data center operators.
Ecolab’s CaaS program brings together a full suite of cooling management solutions that help unlock peak cooling performance all the way from the data center facility environment to the high-performance data computing servers. The program incorporates high-performance water management technology, smart coolant distribution units, connected coolants, and 3D TRASAR monitoring technology, all delivered through Ecolab’s global service team.
“Ecolab’s CaaS program simplifies one of the most complex aspects of AI operations: maintaining the performance of the technical loop that protects critical equipment in AI and HPC data centers,” said Mukul Girotra, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ecolab’s Global High Tech division. “This service addresses complex operations challenges for companies investing in high-performance computing and supports companies to tap into the unmatched experience and global resources that Ecolab provides. Ultimately, CaaS enables operators to drive performance while navigating the pressure of reliably doing more with less. We are proud to be working closely with Salute to help AI implementations be successful.”
Salute’s partner ecosystem for world-class DTC Liquid Cooling Operations delivers integrated technology solutions, expertise and support that enable companies to achieve operational excellence for AI/HPC data centers.
About Salute
Founded in 2013, Salute is a leading provider of integrated lifecycle services for data centers, operating in over 102 markets with 12 global offices and a workforce of more than 2,200 employees. The company delivers comprehensive solutions for hyperscale, cloud, colocation, and edge facilities, with a strong focus on sustainability and talent development. Salute is a member of the NVIDIA Partner program and offers the first and only comprehensive Direct-to-Chip (DTC) Liquid Cooling Operations Service for AI/HPC data centers To learn more about Salute, visit www.salute.com. And to learn more about how Salute protects your AI Investments with industry best practices for high density, liquid based operations, visit our AI Hub here: https://salute.com/ai-hub.
Source: Salute
The post Salute and Ecolab Target DTC Liquid Cooling Complexity in AI Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.
This 16-inch gaming powerhouse has an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor and up to RTX 5090 graphics but doesn't come cheap.
Republicans’ proposal would restart almost all of DHS operations but excluded key reforms that Democrats want
The Senate remained deadlocked on Wednesday over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), after Republicans proposed legislation that would restart all of its operations with the exception of those involved in deportations, but exclude reforms that Democrats want.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, quickly shot down the offer, and said Democrats had countered with a measure that coupled DHS funding with a host of new guardrails on immigration enforcement operations – something the party has insisted on for months.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 25, 2026 — Altera, the world’s largest pure play FPGA solutions provider and a leader in FPGA-based data center infrastructure, has announced an expansion of its longstanding collaboration with Arm. This expanded effort moves beyond traditional embedded systems, combining Altera’s robust, data center-optimized programmable solutions with the Arm AGI CPU, built on Arm Neoverse CSS V3, enabling system architects to build low-latency, highly flexible, highly scalable compute platforms targeting AI data centers.
Credit: Shutterstock
For more than two decades, Altera and Arm have worked together to jointly deliver multiple generations of SoC FPGAs across embedded, industrial, and communications markets, where real-time performance, adaptability and long lifecycle support are essential. The expanded integration now connects Altera FPGAs with the Arm AGI CPU, extending programmable acceleration into next-generation Arm-based AI data center architectures.
“The next generation of data center infrastructure will be shaped by increasingly intelligent AI workloads and the need for purpose-built compute,” said Mohamed Awad, Executive Vice President, Cloud AI Business Unit, Arm. “The Arm AGI CPU provides the efficient compute foundations required for these systems, and collaborating with partners like Altera helps expand that capability across the broader ecosystem.”
Today, Altera FPGAs are widely deployed in data centers alongside CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators to handle tasks such as data pre-processing, networking and AI inference orchestration. FPGA-based deployment models, including PCIe accelerator cards, SmartNICs and DPUs, place programmable acceleration where it delivers the lowest latency, security and fastest time to market. The combination of Altera FPGAs and the Arm AGI CPU opens new opportunities across high-growth AI data centers, where real-time performance, deterministic processing, and adaptability are essential.
“Altera and Arm have a long‑standing track record of delivering SoC FPGA solutions targeting embedded markets,” said Raghib Hussain, president and CEO of Altera. “At the same time, Altera has established a strong footprint in data center infrastructure with a significant install base of FPGA‑based SmartNICs and DPUs. This expanded collaboration with Arm enables a new class of heterogeneous computing designed to meet the growing performance and flexibility requirements of AI data centers.”
More from HPCwire: Arm Introduces AGI CPU, Expands Compute Platform into Data Center Silicon
About Altera
Altera is a leading supplier of programmable hardware, software, and development tools that empower designers of electronic systems to innovate, differentiate, and succeed in their markets. With a broad portfolio of industry-leading FPGAs, SoCs, and design solutions, Altera enables customers to achieve faster time-to-market and unmatched performance in applications spanning industrial automation, audio/video, robotics, aerospace, defense, data centers, telecommunications, edge AI and more. For more information, visit www.altera.com.
Source: Altera
The post Altera and Arm Collaborate to Deliver Efficient, Programmable Solutions for AI Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.
This new feature is one of the best yet.
STAMFORD, Conn., March 25, 2026 — By 2030, performing inference on a large language model (LLM) with one trillion parameters will cost GenAI providers over 90% less than it did in 2025, according to Gartner, Inc. a business and technology insights company.
AI tokens are the units of data that GenAI models process. For the purposes of this analysis a token is 3.5 bytes of data, or approximately 4 characters.
“These cost improvements will be driven by a combination of semiconductor and infrastructure efficiency improvements, model design innovations, higher chip utilization, increased use of inference-specialized silicon, and application of edge devices for specific use cases,” said Will Sommer, Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner.
As a result of these trends, Gartner forecasts LLMs in 2030 will be up to 100 times more cost-efficient than the earliest models of similar size developed in 2022.
The forecasted model results are split between two sets of semiconductor scenarios:
Modeled costs in the “blend” forecast scenarios are considerably higher than in the “frontier” scenarios, given lower computational power (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Gartner GenAI Inference Cost Scenario Forecasts
Source: Gartner (March 2026)
Falling Token Costs will not Democratize Frontier Intelligence
However, falling GenAI provider token costs will not be fully passed on to enterprise customers. Moreover, frontier intelligence will demand significantly more tokens than current mainstream applications. Agentic models, for example, require between 5-30 times more tokens per task than a standard GenAI chatbot, and can perform many more tasks than a human using GenAI.
While lower token unit costs will enable more advanced GenAI capabilities, these advancements will drive disproportionately higher token demand. As token consumption rises faster than token costs fall, overall inference costs are expected to increase.
“Chief Product Officers (CPOs) should not confuse the deflation of commodity tokens with the democratization of frontier reasoning,” said Sommer. “As commoditized intelligence trends toward near-zero cost, the compute and systems needed to support advanced reasoning remain scarce. CPOs who mask architectural inefficiencies with cheap tokens today will find agentic scale elusive tomorrow.”
Value will accrue to platforms that can orchestrate workloads across a diverse portfolio of models. Routine, high-frequency tasks must be routed to more efficient small and domain-specific language models, which perform better than generic solutions at a fraction of the cost when aligned to specialized workflows. Expensive inference of frontier-level models must be heavily gated and reserved exclusively for high-margin, complex reasoning tasks.
Falling Token Costs will not Democratize Frontier Intelligence
However, falling GenAI provider token costs will not be fully passed on to enterprise customers. Moreover, frontier intelligence will demand significantly more tokens than current mainstream applications. Agentic models, for example, require between 5-30 times more tokens per task than a standard GenAI chatbot, and can perform many more tasks than a human using GenAI.
While lower token unit costs will enable more advanced GenAI capabilities, these advancements will drive disproportionately higher token demand. As token consumption rises faster than token costs fall, overall inference costs are expected to increase.
“Chief Product Officers (CPOs) should not confuse the deflation of commodity tokens with the democratization of frontier reasoning,” said Sommer. “As commoditized intelligence trends toward near-zero cost, the compute and systems needed to support advanced reasoning remain scarce. CPOs who mask architectural inefficiencies with cheap tokens today will find agentic scale elusive tomorrow.”
Value will accrue to platforms that can orchestrate workloads across a diverse portfolio of models. Routine, high-frequency tasks must be routed to more efficient small and domain-specific language models, which perform better than generic solutions at a fraction of the cost when aligned to specialized workflows. Expensive inference of frontier-level models must be heavily gated and reserved exclusively for high-margin, complex reasoning tasks.
Gartner clients can read more in Navigating the Commoditization Trap as Token Costs Fall by Over 90% Through 2030 and Frontier Scale Models Threaten Software Margins and Solvency.
About Gartner
Gartner (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective business and technology insights that drive smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.
Source: Gartner
The post Gartner Forecasts 90% Drop in LLM Inference Costs by 2030 appeared first on HPCwire.
Several US states, the country of Brazil, and I’m sure other places in the world have enacted or are planning to enact laws that would place the burden of age verification of users on the shoulders of operating system makers. The legal landscape is quite fragmented at this point, and there’s no way to tell which way these laws will go, with tons of uncertainties around to whom these laws would apply, if it targets accounts for application store access or the operating system as a whole, what constitutes an operating system in the first place, and many more. Still, these laws are already forcing major players like Apple to implement sharing self-reported age brackets with application developers (at least in iOS), so there’s definitely something happening here.
In recent weeks, the open source world has also been confronted with the first consequences of these laws, as both systemd and xdg-desktop-portal have responded to operating system-level age verification laws in, among other places, California and Colorado, by adding birthDate to userdb (on systemd’s side) and developing an age verification portal (on xdg-desktop-portal’s side) for use by Flatpaks. The age verification portal would then use the value set in usrdb’s birthDate as its data source. The value in birthDate would only be modifiable by an administrator, but can be read by users, applications, and so on.
Crucially, this field is entirely optional, and distributions, desktop environments, and users are under zero obligation to use it or to enter a truthful value. In fact, contrary to countless news items and comments about these additions, nothing about this even remotely constitutes as “age verification”, as nothing – not the government, not the distribution or desktop environments, not the user – has to or even can verify anything. If these changes make it to your distribution, you don’t have to suddenly show your government ID, scan your face, or link your computer to some government-run verification service, or even enter anything anywhere in the first place.
Furthermore, while the xdg-desktop-portal’s proposals are still fluid and subject to change, consensus seems to be to only share age brackets with applications, instead of full birth dates or specific ages – assuming anything has even been entered in the birthDate field in the first place. Even if your Linux distribution and/or desktop environment implements everything needed to support these changes and expose them to you in a nice user interface, everything about it is optional and under your full control. The field is of the same type as the existing fields emailAddress, realName, and location, which are similarly entirely optional and can be left empty if desired.
Taken in isolation, then, as it currently stands, there’s really not much meat to these changes at all. The primary reason to implement these changes is to minimally comply with the new laws in California, Colorado, Brazil, and other places, and it’s understandable why the people involved would want to do so. If they do not, they could face lawsuits, fines, or worse, and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the western world’s most incompetent justice system. Aside from that, these changes make it possible to build robust parental controls, which isn’t mentioned in the original commits to systemd, but is clearly the main focal point of xdg-desktop-portal’s proposal.
This all seems well and good, but given today’s political climate in the United States, as well as the course of history, that “as it currently stands” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Rightfully so, a lot of people are worried about where this could lead. Sure, today these are just inconsequential, optional changes in response to what seems to be misguided legislation, but what happens once these laws are tightened, become more demanding, and start requiring a lot more than just a self-reported age bracket?
In Texas, for instance, H.B. 1131 requires any commercial entity, including websites, that contains more than one-third “sexual material harmful to minors” to implement age verification tools using things like government-issued IDs or bank transaction data to verify visitors’ ages before allowing them in. The UK has a similar law on the books, too. It’s not difficult to imagine how some other law will eventually shift this much stricter, actual age verification from websites and applications into operating systems instead. What will systemd’s and xdg-desktop-portal’s developers do, then? Will they comply as readily then as they do now?
This is a genuine worry, especially if you already belong to a group targeted by the current US administration, or were face-scanned by ICE at a protest. Large groups of especially religious extremists consider anything that’s LGBTQ+ to be “sexual material harmful to minors”, even if it’s just something normal like a gay character in a TV show. It’s not hard to imagine how age verification laws, especially if they force age verification at the operating system level, can become weaponised to target the LGBTQ+ community, other minorities, and people protesting the Trump regime.
You may think this won’t affect you, since you’re using an open source operating system like desktop Linux or one of the BSDs, and surely they are principled enough to ignore such dangerous laws and simply not comply at all, right? Sadly, here’s where the idealism and principles of the open source world are going to meet the harsh boot of reality; while open source software has a picturesque image of talented youngsters hacking away in their bedrooms, the reality is that most of the popular open source operating systems are actually hugely complex operations that require a ton of funding, and that funding is often managed by foundations. And guess where most popular Linux distributions’ and BSD variants’ foundations are located?
Developers from all over the world may contribute to Debian, but all of its financials and trademarks are managed by Software in the Public Interest, domiciled in New York State. Fedora is part of Red Hat, owned by IBM, and we all know IBM. Arch Linux’ donations are also managed by Software in the Public Interest. The Gentoo Foundation is domiciled in New Mexico. The FreeBSD Foundation is domiciled in Boulder, Colorado. The NetBSD Foundation is domiciled in Delaware. Ubuntu is a Canonical product, a company headquartered in London, UK, a country with strict age verification laws for websites and applications. Hell, even Haiku, Inc. is domiciled in New York State. I could go on, but you get the gist: all of these projects manage their donations, financials, trademarks, and related issues in the United States (or the UK for Ubuntu).
It’s relatively easy for these projects to take a principled stance against the relatively limited age verification laws that exist today, but what about if and when these laws are expanded to infiltrate the very operating systems we use? It’s easy to resist the boot when it’s pressing down on some porn website or a sex worker’s OnlyFans page, but once that same boot is pressing down on your own throat? That’s a whole different story. Will Debian, FreeBSD, or Fedora still stand their ground when the organisations managing their donations, finances, and trademarks become the target of lawsuits or the US justice system, because they refuse to implement age verification?
I sincerely doubt it.
And this is why I am of two minds about this issue. On the one hand, I fully understand that the various developers involved with these efforts want to make sure they follow the law and avoid getting fined – or worse – especially since compliance requires so little at this time. On top of that, these changes make it possible to implement a fairly robust set of parental controls in a centralised way, keeping the data involved where it makes sense, so it also brings a number of benefits for users. There really isn’t anything to worry about when looking at these changes in isolation.
On the other hand, though, I also understand the fears and worries from people who see these changes as the first capitulation to age verification, nicely making the bed for much stricter age verification laws I’m sure certain parts of the political compass are already dreaming about. With so many Linux distributions, BSD variants, and even alternative operating systems having their legal domiciles in the United States, it’s not unreasonable to assume they’re going to fold under any possible legal pressure that comes with such laws.
I’m not rushing to replace my Fedora KDE installations with something else at this point, but I’m definitely going to explore my options on at least one of my machines and go from there, so I at least won’t be caught with my pants down in the future. The world isn’t ending, age verification hasn’t come to Linux, but we’d all do well to remain skeptical and prepare for when it does make its way into our open source operating systems.
Apple reportedly has full access to customize Google's Gemini model, allowing it to distill smaller on-device AI models for Siri and other features that can run locally without an internet connection. MacRumors reports: The Information explains that Apple can ask the main Gemini model to perform a series of tasks that provide high-quality results, with a rundown of the reasoning process. Apple can feed the answers and reasoning information that it gets from Gemini to train smaller, cheaper models. With this process, the smaller models are able to learn the internal computations used by Gemini, producing efficient models that have Gemini-like performance but require less computing power. Apple is also able to edit Gemini as needed to make sure that it responds to queries in a way that Apple wants, but Apple has been running into some issues because Gemini has been tuned for chatbot and coding applications, which doesn't always meet Apple's needs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Lawmakers say moratorium on construction would buy time to create strong, federal guardrails for AI
Amid an unprecedented energy crisis and the rapid buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure, progressive lawmakers have unveiled a new policy to place a moratorium on the construction of AI datacenters.
“Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and its impact on every man, woman and child in this country, AI has received far too little serious discussion here in our nation’s capital,” Sanders told reporters on Wednesday. “I fear that Congress is totally unprepared for the magnitude of the changes that are already taking place.”
Continue reading...Removal of Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez after arrest during green-card appointment decried as ‘flagrant violation’ of legal rights
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) to the US, ruling that her deportation to Mexico last month was a “flagrant violation” of the legal protections afforded to immigrants who arrived in the country as children.
Judge Dena Coggins said in her Monday ruling the administration must return Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, a Daca recipient, to the US within seven days. She was arrested on 18 February in Sacramento during her green-card appointment, and was deported to Mexico the next day.
Continue reading...Father of Grace O’Malley-Kumar calls decision to take sample from his daughter after her death ‘disgusting’
The father of a university student killed while trying to protect her friend from Valdo Calocane in Nottingham told an inquiry it is “disgusting” the stabbing victims were tested for drugs and alcohol but their killer was not.
Sanjoy Kumar, Grace O’Malley-Kumar’s father, said he could not understand why the diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic had not been tested for drugs while in custody after the attacks.
Continue reading...Jury in Los Angeles awards plaintiff damages of $6m, with Meta to pay 70% and YouTube the remainder
Meta and YouTube have been found liable for deliberately designing addictive products that hooked a young user and led to her being harmed, a jury ruled on Wednesday. Jurors found the tech companies to be both negligent and having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their products.
The jury awarded the plaintiff in the case damages of $6m, with Meta to pay 70% and YouTube the remainder. It took nearly nine days of deliberations for the Los Angeles jury to reach its verdict. This lawsuit, over social media’s alleged harm to young people, was the first of its kind to go to trial.
Continue reading...Automated Ball-Strike System will start this season
Players will be able to challenge calls under system
Former major league umpire Richie Garcia is worried about the impact that robot officials will have on their human counterparts.
Major League Baseball has introduced the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System for regular-season play in 2026, starting with the New York Yankees’ opener at San Francisco on Wednesday night. Teams will have a chance to appeal strike zone decisions to a system based on 12 Hawk-Eye cameras.
Continue reading...The verdict, which caps a weeks-long trial in Los Angeles, could set a legal precedent for similar allegations brought against social media companies.
With Social Security's trust fund sliding toward insolvency, one group wants to cap benefits for the wealthiest U.S. couples.
Former Trump national security official and right-wing activist Michael Flynn sued the Justice Department for $50 million, alleging wrongful prosecution during the first Trump administration.
The proposal offered sanctions relief to Iran in return for the removal of all its enriched uranium and other U.S. demands, officials said.
Longtime Slashdot reader JackSpratts writes: The Supreme Court unanimously said on Wednesday that a major internet provider could not be held liable for the piracy of thousands of songs online in a closely watched copyright clash. Music labels and publishers sued Cox Communications in 2018, saying the company had failed to cut off the internet connections of subscribers who had been repeatedly flagged for illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music. At issue for the justices was whether providers like Cox could be held legally responsible and required to pay steep damages -- a billion dollars or more in Cox's case -- if they knew that customers were pirating music but did not take sufficient steps to terminate their internet access. In its opinion released (PDF) on Wednesday, the court said a company was not liable for "merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights." Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said a provider like Cox was liable "only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement" and if it, for instance, "actively encourages infringement." Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separately to say that she agreed with the outcome but for different reasons. [...] Cox called the court's unanimous decision a "decisive victory" for the industry and for Americans who "depend on reliable internet service." "This opinion affirms that internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers," the company said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
They asked nicely at first.
After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who’d recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they’d done in past shootings involving federal agents.
When the Trump administration refused to cooperate, Minnesota prosecutors ratcheted up their efforts. They sent a series of strongly worded legal letters demanding evidence in the Good shooting as well as the shootings of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was wounded a week after Good was shot, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Jan. 24.
Still, the administration rebuffed the requests.
This week, prosecutors from Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota took the next step to force the Trump administration’s hand. They filed a federal lawsuit against the departments of Homeland Security and Justice over the evidence in the shootings, an action that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose jurisdiction covers Minneapolis, characterized as “unprecedented in American history.”
The Trump administration has declined to release the names of the agents involved in the shootings, even after the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica identified the officers involved in the Good and Pretti incidents.
“The federal government has refused to cooperate with state law enforcement, which is unique, rare and simply cannot be tolerated,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told reporters. “[We] can’t sit around and let them do it.”
In the standoff over evidence, the case has already become a game of constitutional chicken over states’ rights versus federal immunity, a battle that will have implications for others who wish to hold agents in the president’s immigration surge criminally accountable.
So far, neither side is showing signs of backing down, foreshadowing a fight that could take years. If prosecutors do eventually file charges against federal agents involved in the shootings, legal experts said the path to trial, much less winning convictions, will be filled with legal and procedural challenges.
“State prosecutors across the country are going to be watching what happens in Minnesota really closely,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.
The first test for prosecutors, if they file charges, would be to prove the agents don’t qualify for immunity through the Constitution’s supremacy clause, a rarely invoked legal doctrine that protects federal officers from state prosecutions if they’re acting lawfully and within the scope of their duties.
Failing to pass that test would likely end the case.
The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t taken up a case involving supremacy clause immunity in over 100 years, Bannon said, and judges have come down differently on legal issues related to its application.
There’s no easy answer as to whether Minnesota will be able to get past a supremacy clause defense, said Jill Hasday, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota.
“That depends on the facts, but probably the odds are stacked against it,” she said.
Even if they survive such a fight, the cases could be dogged by a series of logistical challenges. Moriarty, who has been leading the investigations, has decided not to seek reelection and will leave office at the end of the year. That means whoever wins the election for her seat in November could inherit the prosecutions.
In addition to not having the names of the agents, prosecutors don’t know where those agents are now. Minnesota may need to extradite them, potentially from a MAGA-leaning state that may balk at sending them to Hennepin County to stand trial.
“Will the federal government or other states cooperate with that? I think the answer to that is sort of iffy,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia. (Indeed, in a case involving a doctor charged with illegally mailing abortion medication to a Louisiana woman, the state of California has rejected an extradition request, citing its own laws protecting doctors from prosecution elsewhere.)
The fight is focused on three shootings. But Moriarty’s office has opened criminal investigations into 14 additional cases of potentially unlawful behavior by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, which started in early December and has wound down over the past few weeks.
The other cases Moriarty is examining involve allegations of excessive force or other misconduct by federal agents, such as an incident in early January in which agents allegedly used force on staff and students on the grounds of a high school.
Prosecutors are also investigating Gregory Bovino, the outgoing Border Patrol commander who helped to lead immigration surges into several American cities and who was seen on video lobbing green-smoke canisters into crowds at a park in Minneapolis. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said at the time that Bovino and other agents were responding to a “hostile crowd.”
The tension has played out in a series of demand letters sent by Moriarty to the Justice and Homeland Security departments. “Public transparency is vitally important in these cases — not just for the people of Hennepin County and Minnesota, but for the public nationwide,” Moriarty wrote in one of the letters. “The only way to achieve transparency is through investigation conducted at a local level.”
In January, after the shooting of Good, federal officials had agreed to participate in a joint investigation with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension — Minnesota’s state police agency tasked with examining use of deadly force cases — according to the letters signed by Moriarty.
State officials presumed they’d be able to examine evidence, such as the car Good was driving and the guns used to shoot her and the other victims. But the investigators later learned through public statements by high-ranking Trump administration officials that federal agents were no longer planning to share evidence, the letter states.
Local and state prosecutors don’t have the authority to subpoena them for evidence like in a typical criminal investigation. The demand letters, called Touhy letters, are formal written requests, used as an alternative to a subpoena, asking a federal agency to provide evidence or testimony in a case in which the government is not a party. Moriarty sought an extensive list of evidence in the shootings, from the guns fired by the agents in all three cases to official reports, agent GPS devices and witness statements. The Touhy letters asked for a response by Feb. 17.
Normally, the federal government complies with Touhy letters as a matter of protocol, as long as releasing the information doesn’t violate an internal policy, said Timothy Johnson, a political science and law professor at the University of Minnesota.
But on Feb. 13, the FBI told BCA investigators that it won’t share investigative materials in the Pretti case, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement. Evans said the police agency had reiterated its requests for evidence in the Good and Sosa-Celis cases.
More than a month after the deadline set by prosecutors, the Trump administration still hasn’t turned over the materials.
“There has been no cooperation from federal authorities,” BCA spokesperson Michael Ernster said.
The agents involved in the shootings have not spoken publicly, but a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security defended Good’s shooting, saying the agent acted in self-defense. They said the Pretti shooting was under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, with the Border Patrol conducting its own investigation. Those investigations could result in discipline or charges, including for civil rights violations.
The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal officials found that, after Sosa-Celis’ shooting, officers made false statements. But the agency did not say whether it would cooperate with the local authorities or follow a court ruling requiring it to do so.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment or to questions. Neither agency has responded to the lawsuit.
Moriarty called the lawsuit “critically important” to investigating the shooting cases but also said she had not made any decisions on whether her office will file charges.
“There has to be an investigation anytime a federal agent or a state agent takes the life of a person in our community,” she said. “And ultimately the decision may be it was lawful. You don’t know, but that’s why you do the investigation. You are transparent with the results of that investigation, and you are public with your transparency about the decision and how you got there.”
But a lawsuit does not guarantee that prosecutors will get all they want. “The question then becomes, even if Hennepin County or Minneapolis wins the suit, will they comply then?” Johnson asked. “And the answer is probably no.”
If the Trump administration did eventually defy a judge’s order, he said, prosecutors could try to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court. As far as what could happen next: “It’s anyone’s guess.”
The post Minnesota Kicks Off Legal Battle With Trump Administration to Hold ICE Shooters Accountable appeared first on ProPublica.
Summer gasoline regulations will be waived for 20 days, and possibly longer to try to ease gas prices.
Trump says Iran's navy is "gone," so how does it still have a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz? Part of the answer may lie off Ukraine's Black Sea coast.
Legislation subject to MPs’ approval but will be backdated due to urgency of threat to UK democracy, says minister
Keir Starmer is set to embark on a fundamental overhaul of the political finance system, starting with an emergency ban on cryptocurrency donations and £100,000 cap on donations from Britons living abroad in a blow to Reform UK.
In a hugely significant move, the government said it would bring in the annual cap as well as a moratorium on crypto donations from Wednesday as part of its new elections legislation.
Requiring third-party campaigners to declare donations all year round, not just election periods, and allowing funding only from permissible donors.
More stringent checks on the source of funds from political donors, bringing it more into line with know-your-customer checks in the financial services industry.
Preventing donations from shell companies by ensuring funding is from post-tax profits rather than revenue.
Requiring foreign consultant lobbyists to join the official register, from which they are currently exempt because they do not charge VAT.
Banning foreign-funded political adverts.
Continue reading...CBS News reviewed dozens of reports dating back three decades about New York's LaGuardia Airport.
British Medical Association blame government for longest proposed walkout so far, with NHS leaders warning it could cost £300m
Resident doctors in England will strike for six days after Easter after rejecting what they said was the final offer by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to end the long-running pay and jobs dispute.
The British Medical Association blamed the government for its decision to undertake its longest stoppage so far, from 7am on Tuesday 7 April to 6.59 on Monday 13 April.
Continue reading...March 25, 2026 — Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Artificial Intelligence Security Research (CAISER) is shining a light on AI vulnerabilities. While AI models offer tremendous economic, humanitarian and national security potential, they are also increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Identifying and characterizing these vulnerabilities has required considerable intellectual effort and specialized expertise.
Photon leverages Frontier’s exascale speed to run multiple AI vulnerability scenarios simultaneously. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
To bring both efficiency and effectiveness to AI vulnerability detection, CAISER researchers developed Photon, a groundbreaking framework designed to rapidly detect vulnerabilities in AI models at exascale. The technology can help ensure AI-based systems remain secure and robust against attacks, a key protection as models are deployed across critical domains — from energy and healthcare to finance and national security.
ORNL researchers designed Photon by reimagining their existing technology, DeepHyper, originally developed for training large neural networks to find optimal network parameters. By inverting its purpose, now trained to detect nefarious activity, Photon can detect the most efficient attack parameters against AI models and help model developers understand how to prevent these attacks.
“It might sound devious, but it’s worked very well,” said ORNL’s Edmon Begoli, director of CAISER. “Photon accelerates the design and development process and reuses the most effective methods for exploring and exploiting vulnerabilities.”
“Exploration and exploitation” is a fundamental AI concept that describes the balance between discovering new possibilities (exploration) and making use of existing knowledge (exploitation).
Photon begins by applying publicly known attacks from a catalog of published scientific literature against a target model. It then refines these attacks by exploiting vulnerabilities discovered in the model. While this exploitation happens, Photon is also exploring the model further to uncover new weaknesses, which are subsequently exploited. The cycle continues until no further degradations of the model’s performance are observed.
Through the DeepHyper framework, Photon’s automated testing efficiently explores large hyperparameter spaces through asynchronous, decentralized execution. In other words, Photon can quickly try many different settings at once, even when the tests run on separate computers. This model differs from traditional centralized schemes where a single manager “agent” coordinates the entire optimization process.
Instead, each of Photon’s attack agents coordinate their findings with the others so if one attack seems to be most effective, other attack agents learn in real time and improve their own attacks, allowing them to exploit weaknesses to the maximum.
Frontier Enables Large-Scale AI Vulnerability Testing
This kind of attack testing speed and efficiency is made possible through ORNL’s Frontier exascale supercomputer. Photon’s ability to run in parallel – such as running several different attacks at the same time on different nodes – sets it apart from any other known AI vulnerability testing approach. For example, running on Frontier nodes, Photon can execute 60,000 “jailbreak” prompts, inputs designed to unlock restricted behaviors in an AI system, each hour. Comparably, it could take human “red teams”, groups mimicking adversaries, years to accomplish similar results, especially knowing that Photon not only executes jailbreaks in parallel, but it also coordinates these attack campaigns to constantly pursue the most effective paths.
By adapting and evolving its tactics in real-time, Photon mimics nature’s most efficient search strategies — much like ants exploiting high-yield niches in their environment — ensuring that every exploration is efficiently converted into actionable intelligence.
This approach significantly reduces auxiliary tasks and bottlenecks associated with conventional red team jailbreaking campaigns, scales effectively without loss of computational efficiency, and maintains above 95 percent resource utilization across 1,920 GPUs on Frontier.
“When we’re talking about running something at this scale, it becomes difficult to use as much of the available compute power as possible. Since you are running at such a large scale, eliminating resource downtime is not trivial,” Jack Hutchins, ORNL robust AI engineer, said. “There is still downtime when resources are waiting for what to do next but maintaining 95 percent utilization is very high.”
DeepHyper’s exploration strategy prioritizes potentially impactful parameters while ensuring coverage across the entire parameter space. As a result, Photon can detect both obvious and subtle vulnerabilities, offering a comprehensive understanding of model performance under adversarial conditions.
“Since our goal is to find highly effective jailbreaks, finding the parameters that have the most effect quickly speeds up our search for effective jailbreaks,” Hutchins said.
In a market where AI integrations drive critical operations at a global scale, ensuring the reliability, robustness and safety of these systems has never been more vital. Photon not only provides a window into the vulnerabilities that may lie within our AI models, but it also offers a pathway to rapid remediation, thus safeguarding the integrity and performance of mission-critical systems.
“Photon represents a paradigm shift in how we approach AI security. By running coordinated, high-scale experiments, we can uncover hidden vulnerabilities far more efficiently than ever before,” Begoli said. “This technology ensures our AI advancements can continue bringing much-needed innovation to a wide variety of industries without also introducing safety or security risks.”
Frontier is housed in ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Source: ORNL
The post ORNL Introduces ‘Photon’ Framework for Accelerating AI Vulnerability Discovery on Frontier appeared first on HPCwire.
Now that more major brands are competing in the foldable market, a growing number of people are making the switch.
Tehran puts forward five-point counter-proposal and says war will end when it decides and on its terms
Iran dismissed a US ceasefire proposal on Wednesday and countered with a negotiation plan of its own as intermediaries sought to keep diplomatic channels between the warring countries open.
Iranian state TV quoted an anonymous official as saying Tehran had rejected the plan it had received via Pakistan, saying it would “end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met”, and until then would continue fighting across the region.
Continue reading...March 25, 2026 — The High Performance Software Foundation community gathered in Chicago for HPSFCon 2026, bringing together developers, researchers, and industry leaders focused on advancing high performance software through open collaboration.
Credit: HPSF
Over the course of the event, attendees explored a packed schedule of technical sessions, project updates, and community discussions that reflected the depth and growing momentum of the HPSF ecosystem.
A Week of Technical Insight and Collaboration
This year’s program highlighted the importance of open, community-driven approaches to high performance computing and software infrastructure. Sessions spanned topics including performance optimization, scalability, interoperability, and real-world deployment challenges. Videos from the sessions will be available on YouTube soon (stay tuned!)
Project communities across HPSF came together for dedicated meetings, creating space for contributors and users to align on roadmaps, share progress, and collaborate on next steps. These project meetings continue to be a value-added part of HPSFCon, turning conversation into action.
Project Communities at the Center
HPSFCon 2026 placed a strong emphasis on project-level collaboration. Maintainers, contributors, and adopters gathered to exchange ideas, address challenges, and strengthen the foundations of the ecosystem.
These sessions reinforced what makes HPSF unique: a focus on practical, production-ready software built through open governance and shared ownership.
HPSF would like to thank the following for sharing updates: AMReX, Apptainer, Chapel, Charliecloud, E4S, Flux, HPCToolkit, HPX, Kokkos, Modules, OpenCHAMI, Spack, Trilinos, WarpX and Viskores.
Continuing the Conversation
The momentum from HPSFCon does not stop when the event ends. Attendees can revisit key moments and continue learning through a range of post-event resources:
Thank You to the Community
HPSFCon 2026 was made possible by the contributors, speakers, and attendees who continue to invest their time and expertise into the ecosystem. Community participation is what drives progress across HPSF projects and helps shape the future of high performance software.
Source: HPSF
The post HPSFCon 2026: Bringing the Community Together in Chicago appeared first on HPCwire.
The prime minister says the condolence video after the fatal LaGuardia crash revived anger over linguistic rights
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has said a decision by Air Canada’s top executive to post an English-only message of condolence after a deadly crash in New York showed a “lack of judgment, a lack of compassion”.
Amid growing calls for his resignation, the airline chief’s misstep has once again revived frustrations and fears over linguistic rights protections in the province of Quebec, where French is the only official language.
Continue reading...Tehran skeptical of president’s offer – and troop deployments for potential ground operations – suggest claim of imminent end to war not credible
Somewhere between the strait of Hormuz and the screens of Bloomberg terminals around the world, the standard laws of cause and effect appear to have been suspended for Donald Trump’s war in Iran.
Trump this week soft-launched his latest Iran peace talks – which he has said must be accepted or “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out” – with few details or proof that anyone in the Iranian regime was willing to listen to him. The ultimatum was described as “maximalist” by Iran and quickly derided as a non-starter by analysts and former government officials.
Continue reading...A $60,000 deposit into a CD account could produce a lucrative return for savers right now. Here's what to know.
Two EV models that Sony was developing with Honda, the Afeels 1 sedan and an Afeela SUV, are now discontinued.
Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’
The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”
Continue reading...The show will now debut before 2027.
I am currently having a persistent error 23 on my Onewheel pint and have been trying to find out how to fix it for a while now. I wanted to try to reflash my pint and found this YouTube video https://youtu.be/NoBA5\_3k5YQ?is=5BVPJsETZ-veorUn where they used this flashing website: https://autumn-bar-0505.on.fleek.co which as you can see, is currently down. Is there any way to get around this or any other way to flash my pint?
Reform’s ability to fundraise is hobbled in a move that draws attention to donations from an overseas billionaire
Reform UK are no doubt the biggest losers from the government’s emergency measures to overhaul political donations.
Labour MPs are absolutely delighted that No 10 is at last bringing in changes that will hobble Reform’s ability to raise money from its Thailand-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne, at the same time as making the electoral system fairer in the eyes of the public.
Continue reading...Nvidia's NemoClaw adds some significant advancements to OpenClaw, but experts believe more work needs to be done.
Ha Nguyen McNeill testified before House committee about airport wait times amid DHS funding shutdown
The acting head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said on Wednesday that airports across the country are experiencing the “highest wait times in TSA history”, as the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enters its sixth week.
At a House homeland security committee hearing, Ha Nguyen McNeill said her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far – a stretch that includes last year’s record-breaking 43‑day lapse in federal funding. She told lawmakers that by Friday, TSA employees will have missed $1bn in paychecks as a result of the closures.
Continue reading...Cuts to family planning aid are linked to an 11% increase in deaths during pregnancy and childbirth in some countries
When Republican presidents win power in the US there is a stark consequence for many pregnant woman around the world – a significant rise in maternal mortality as aid is withdrawn, a new study has found.
Global family planning aid typically drops under Republican presidents and then rises again by 48% once Democratic presidents are elected, the research, published in BMJ Global Health, finds.
Continue reading...State department to expand program on 2 April
Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Tunisia, Cape Verde affected
No apparent exceptions for athletes or officials
A newly expanded policy from the Trump administration could require travelers from five World Cup-qualified countries to front a bond of up to $15,000 in order to enter the United States for the tournament.
Visa bonds operate like security deposits: a one-time payment meant to be refunded after a traveler exits the US under the terms of their visa. The amounts generally run between $5,000 and $15,000, and are required for passport holders from certain countries to enter the US legally under B-1 or B-2 visas, the types required for business travelers or tourists.
Continue reading...My favorite carpet cleaners do more than just tackle tough stains and pet messes -- they also remove pollen, dust and pet dander to help keep your seasonal allergies at bay.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Stephen Colbert already has a new job lined up for when he ends his 11-year run as host of "The Late Show" in May -- the comedian and well-known J.R.R. Tolkien superfan announced he will co-write and develop a new film in the blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" franchise. Colbert joined "LOTR" director Peter Jackson to reveal the news in a video announcement. "I'm pretty happy about it. You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me," the late-night host told Jackson, who led the Oscar-winning team behind the nearly $6 billion original "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies. [...] Colbert said the next installment will be based on parts of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring" book that didn't make it into the original movies. "The thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in (The Fellowship of the Ring) that y'all never developed into the first movie back in the day ... and I thought, 'Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story.'" he said. Colbert said he discussed the idea with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, to work out the framing of the story. "It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile and give you a call, but about two years ago, I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it," Colbert told Jackson. Colbert said he, McGee and Jackson have been working alongside screenwriter Philippa Boyens on the development of the story. "I could not be happier to say that they loved it, and so that's what we're going to be working on," Colbert said. Colbert's LOTR movie, tentatively titled "Shadow of the Past," will be the second of two new upcoming films in the franchise from Warner Bros. Discovery. The first of which is called "The Hunt for Gollum" due to be released in 2027.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cabinet Office thought to have a number of exchanges between the friends, which are expected to be released within weeks
The Cabinet Office is understood to hold a number of text and email exchanges between Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney, despite the theft of the former chief of staff’s phone in October last year.
The whereabouts of McSweeney’s messages with Mandelson has been under intense scrutiny since it was reported his work device was stolen last year shortly after Mandelson was sacked as US ambassador.
Continue reading...Senate nominee in Texas James Talarico says ‘Christian nationalism kills’ in response to Brooks Potteiger remark
James Talarico, the Texas Democratic state representative and Presbyterian seminarian, has said he forgives Pete Hegseth’s pastor for praying for his death. On Tuesday, Texas’s popular Democratic nominee for a US Senate seat pushed back against comments from Brooks Potteiger, the defense secretary’s closest spiritual adviser, who said: “We want him crucified with Christ.”
Talarico said on X: “Jesus loves. Christian Nationalism kills. You may pray for my death, Pastor, but I still love you. I love you more than you could ever hate me.”
Continue reading...Quick question my lords : I have a onewheel original. The tire has suffered lately and its losing air . I want to change it . But unfortunately its very very difficult to find a 11,5x6,5-6 tire in europe . I asked a friend who owns a go kart business. He only manged to get me 11x7,10-5 tire . Will it fit ? PLEAS HEEEEELP :'(
PS : im also thinking of putting a tube inside and call it a day . Is it possible ?
Thanks in advance
The spacecraft will deliver NASA's Skyfall payload, which is a group of helicopters designed to find subsurface water on Mars.
New unitary councils will replace 43 county and district councils, in latest round of local government overhaul
Fifteen new councils will be created in the south and east of England under the latest round of a major local government overhaul, aimed at boosting economic growth and accelerating mass housebuilding plans.
The new unitary councils will replace 43 counties and districts across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hampshire, with hundreds of councillors’ roles axed. A decision on future arrangements for East Sussex and West Sussex has been delayed.
Continue reading...  | Pint-S ~2300 miles. [link] [comments] |
Custom hardware enables real-time error correction on 64-qubit Kaveri quantum processor, achieving a ‘significant milestone’ for India’s National Quantum Mission (NQM).
BENGALURU, India, March 25, 2026 — QpiAI, a leading global provider of integrated AI and quantum solutions, today announced a major advancement in the development of utility-scale quantum systems. The company has successfully demonstrated high-speed quantum error correction (QEC) on its superconducting quantum processors using a newly developed, high-performance decoder platform.
Credit: QpiAI
A scalable quantum error correction system has been developed by QpiAI to enable fast, scalable error correction using a rotated surface code architecture. The decoder, based on a union-find algorithm, is designed to operate in real time alongside superconducting qubits and represents a key step toward practical fault-tolerant quantum computing.
“The design of QpiAI QEC for 64 qubit Kaveri QPU is a promising development towards large scale Quantum computing deployment,” said Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja, Founder and CEO, QpiAI. “With this setup we would like to prove Error correction and reduction in errors possible and eventually lead to fault tolerant Quantum computing.”
The system implements a distance-5 rotated surface code using 49 physical qubits. While current state-of-the-art QEC decoders for distance 5 surface codes run at 60 microsecond latency on CPUs and GPUs, QpiAI has achieved an end-to-end latency of just 1.5 microseconds and decoder-only latency of less than 1 microsecond.
Significant Milestone for Indian National Quantum Mission
Indian NQM invested in QpiAI to design the 64-qubit Kaveri QPU. Dr. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), commented: “Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential for scalable quantum computing. By implementing distance 5 surface code QEC in custom hardware rather than traditional CPUs, QpiAI is accelerating the deployment of its 64-qubit Kaveri QPU in India, marking a major step toward practical, large-scale quantum utility.”
Technical Specifications
More from HPCwire
About QpiAI
QpiAI is a deep-tech company pioneering the convergence of AI and quantum computing. With a vertically integrated stack spanning hardware, software, and applications, QpiAI is dedicated to delivering powerful quantum solutions for enterprises and research institutions worldwide.
Source: QpiAI
The post QpiAI Achieves High-Speed Quantum Error Correction on Superconducting Systems with New Decoder Platform appeared first on HPCwire.
Events in Denmark and Italy show geopolitical instability is creating opportunities for a centre-left response to the far right
In the lead-up to Denmark’s snap election on Tuesday, it was revealed that blood supplies were flown into Greenland in January in order to treat Danish military casualties in the event of a US invasion. Against that surreal backdrop, the country’s Social Democrat prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, did not need to work too hard to justify a “stick to what you know” message in uncertain times.
Ms Frederiksen’s surprise gamble in calling an early poll duly paid off, but only just. Donald Trump’s threats to annex territory belonging to a Nato ally handed her party a patriotic lifeline, after it had endured a historic humiliation in local contests last November. But in a campaign dominated by domestic issues, the hoped-for Trump bump was modest, meaning that any Frederiksen-led coalition will depend on centrist support. The Social Democratic party remains comfortably the biggest political force, but its vote share dropped markedly compared to the last general election, while rivals to the left and on the far right made notable gains.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...Giorgia Meloni made public request for Daniela Santanchè to quit in effort to restore credibility after voters rejected judicial reform
Italy’s embattled tourism minister has resigned, heeding a call to step down as the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, strives to restore credibility after a bruising defeat in a referendum that has thrown her far-right government into turmoil.
The resignation on Wednesday of Daniela Santanchè, a prominent and brash member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, came after the prime minister took the unusual step of calling in a public statement for her to go.
Continue reading...Woman pleads not guilty to firing shots at Rihanna’s home while the singer and her family were there
A woman from Florida pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to the attempted murder of Rihanna.
Ivanna Lisette Ortiz, of Orlando, also pleaded not guilty through her attorney to more than a dozen other felony counts in Los Angeles superior court.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Parental consents in Greater Manchester up 40% as demand surges in various parts of the country
School immunisation services and pharmacies are reporting surging demand for routine vaccinations after the Kent meningitis outbreak in which two teenagers died.
Thousands of teenagers across England have booked or received jabs in the past fortnight against the A, C, W and Y strains of meningitis (MenACWY), and diphtheria, polio and tetanus (Td/IPV).
Continue reading...See if you qualify for one of these student-focused discounts.
El Paso, Texas, and Los Angeles, California, had some of the worst air pollution in the U.S. last year, according to a new report.
Tax relief companies promise to assist with IRS debt, but that help isn't always necessary — or worth the cost.
Markets in Asia, Europe and US move higher after Iran says it will permit ‘non-hostile’ ships through strait of Hormuz
The price of oil has dipped and stock markets around the world have moved higher on reports that the US has sent a 15-point framework for peace to Iran, amid hopes of a ceasefire in the Middle East.
Positive sentiment may also have been bolstered by reports that Iran had announced it was permitting “non-hostile” ships to pass safely through the strait of Hormuz, a move that could help to reopen the vital shipping lane.
Continue reading...The best VPNs for Google Chrome enhance privacy so you can browse the web, stream videos and download files away from prying eyes.
A jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media addiction case, ruling that addictive design features such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations harmed a young user and contributed to her mental health distress. The verdict awards $3 million in compensatory damages so far and could pave the way for more lawsuits seeking financial penalties and product changes across the social media industry. "Meta is responsible for 70 percent of that cost and YouTube for the remainder," notes The New York Times. "TikTok and Snap both settled with the plaintiff for undisclosed terms before the trial started." From the report: The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google's YouTube over features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations that she claimed led to anxiety and depression. The jury of seven women and five men will deliberate further to decide what further punitive damages the companies should pay for malice or fraud. The verdict in K.G.M.'s case -- one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat -- was a major win for the plaintiffs. The finding validates a novel legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury. It is likely to factor into similar cases expected to go to trial this year, which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products. The verdict also comes on the heels of a New Mexico jury ruling that found Meta liable for violating state law by failing to protect users of its apps from child predators.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First lady Melania Trump argued that humanoids can help children develop critical thinking skills — and robots never get impatient.
A California woman sued the tech giants, alleging Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive to children.
Role for Social Democrats’ leader confirmed after meeting with king
Speaking at the debate, Frederiksen confirms she has submitted her government’s resignation as it is clear the outgoing three-party government will not have enough mandates to continue.
But she stresses the urgency of the task to form the new government, as “the world is not waiting for us out there and it has only become more unsettled since the election was called.”
Continue reading...An internal watchdog report in the Department of Homeland Security identified serious vulnerabilities in TSA's screenings at airports nationwide.
Ukraine said eight people were killed as Russia launched a bombardment that included its largest single-day drone assault of the war.
Same engine, new fuel? China's economic model and the AI bet 9 April 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Experts assess whether the investment-and-export-led model that has driven China’s growth has run its course, and whether the ‘AI Plus’ Initiative represents political rhetoric or a genuine new model.
Experts assess whether the investment-and-export-led model that has driven China’s growth has run its course, and whether the ‘AI Plus’ Initiative represents political rhetoric or a genuine new model.
China’s investment-and-export-led model of economic growth has been central to its rise in economic and political prominence. Investment of high levels of domestic savings into a financial system with highly subsidised infrastructure has enabled China to achieve higher economic growth than most countries at similar levels of development.
However, strong systemic challenges are adding pressure to this approach. Diminishing rates of return make it more difficult to generate growth on an additional unit of investment than even ten years ago. Prolonged disruption to the domestic property market has undermined local finances, household sentiment and domestic demand, resulting in a deflationary spiral. Without a strong consumption-driven economy, international demand for China’s goods and services has kept it afloat.
To deliver its growth agenda, China’s 15th five -year plan outlines its innovative ‘AI Plus’ Initiative, which envisions integration of artificial intelligence economy-wide as the route to being a “modernised socialist state” by 2035. But with an ageing population, low productivity growth and high youth unemployment, questions remain about the sustainability of its superstar model, and whether artificial intelligence can deliver on the state’s political promises.
Join us for a timely conversation chaired by Ben Bland, Director of Chatham House’s Asia-Pacific Programme, with Dr Yu Jie, Senior Research Fellow on China; James Kynge, Senior Research Fellow for China and the World; and David Lubin, Michael Klein Senior Research Fellow in Chatham House’s Global Economy and Finance Programme, as they assess the challenges and opportunities in the Chinese economy.
The mayor of Hammond, Indiana, says train company Norfolk Southern is reneging on a promise to partly finance the construction of a pedestrian overpass at a dangerous rail crossing that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation. And without the funding, he added, the project is dead.
Officials began pursuing the overpass in 2023, after the news organization and its reporting partner, InvestigateTV, documented dozens of children crawling through, over and under trains that blocked them from getting to and from school in the city.
Hammond is a nearby suburb of Chicago, the busiest train hub in the nation. At the time, the area served as a kind of parking lot for Norfolk Southern’s trains as they idled between two busy intersections — a growing problem in Hammond and railroad communities like it across the country as trains get longer.
After publication, Norfolk Southern’s CEO at the time, Alan Shaw, called Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott to discuss solutions, including a pedestrian overpass. The mayor said Shaw committed to paying the full cost of the project. A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern told ProPublica the company never made any such commitment.
The company would later make operational changes, such as stopping the trains in a different location to reduce the impact to Hammond and the schoolchildren. Still, one child was captured on video jumping from a moving train after Norfolk Southern said it made those changes.
For a while, the overpass effort seemed to have some momentum. The company paid for engineering and design plans, and in June 2023 the city received a $7.7 million federal grant for the project. While it required a local match of $2.6 million, McDermott said Shaw agreed to pay it.
The mayor said the company made no written commitment, and Shaw was fired by the railroad in 2024. Now, McDermott is accusing Norfolk Southern, under its current CEO, Mark George, of backing out of the handshake deal. “The new guy got amnesia,” the mayor told ProPublica.
Shaw did not respond to messages seeking comment.
A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern, which reported $2.9 billion in profit in 2025 according to its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, disputed McDermott’s claims that the company agreed to provide the matching funds but said it did provide the city with $450,000 and “assisted officials in successfully applying for a federal grant to make the city’s plan for a pedestrian bridge possible.”
The spokesperson also said that the changes the company made in 2023 to reduce the impact on schools are working.
“More than two years later, these changes continue to yield results, including a nearly 50% drop in blocked crossing calls into our communications center at this location,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
But local and state officials say Hammond is still seeing blocked crossings near schools. Carlotta Blake-King, the local school board president, told ProPublica that district employees saw children at a different location traversing a stopped train as they left school as recently as last week.
A Norfolk Southern spokesperson acknowledged the blockage but said it was “not typical for that location.” The company said its trains normally have clear passage through that area without stopping. “We never want to inconvenience our communities with a stopped train, and we encourage everyone to always stay off railroad tracks and never attempt to cross between rail cars,” the spokesperson wrote.
McDermott said he’s also noticed Norfolk Southern’s trains beginning to block the roadways again and worries that “it will slowly but surely resume to where it was.”
“I’ve already been lied to once by Norfolk Southern,” the mayor said, “so I have no reason to believe that they’re going to keep on trying to reduce the impacts upon our city.”
McDermott said the community will ultimately see some relief in the form of a vehicle overpass in the area where the children routinely encounter the train. The project, however, won’t be completed until at least 2029. And while it will include a path for pedestrians, it won’t help many students, as they would need to walk at least a mile out of their way to reach it.
Indiana state Rep. Carolyn Jackson, a Democrat who represents the Hammond area and has in the past introduced legislation to address blocked crossings, said she doesn’t want the community’s children to grow “up thinking that crawling under or over the train is a way of life.” Her fear is that without the bridge, “a child will be severely injured or killed in Hammond.”
McDermott said he has the same fear: “I hope to God, and I pray it never happens.”
The post Walkway Over Dangerous Train Crossing Is Dead After Norfolk Southern Backtracks on Funds, Mayor Says appeared first on ProPublica.
Meta lost a child safety trial in New Mexico after a court found that its platforms failed to adequately protect children from exploitation and misled parents about app safety. According to Ars Technica, the jury on Tuesday "deliberated for only one day before agreeing that Meta should pay $375 million in civil damages..." While the jury declined to impose the maximum penalty New Mexico sought, which could have cost the company $2.2 billion, Meta may still face additional financial penalties and could be forced to make changes to its apps. From the report: The trial followed a 2023 lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez after The Guardian published a two-year investigation exposing child sex trafficking markets on Facebook and Instagram. Torrez's office then conducted an undercover investigation codenamed "Operation MetaPhile," in which officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The jury heard that these fake profiles were "simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations" from child abusers, Torrez told CNBC in 2024. Ultimately, three men were arrested amid the sting for attempting to use Meta's social networks to prey on children. At trial, Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified that "harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company's platforms due to their vast user bases," The Guardian reported. Internal messages and documents, as well as testimony from child safety experts within and outside the company, showed that Meta repeatedly ignored warnings and failed to fix platforms to protect kids, New Mexico's AG successfully argued. Perhaps most troubling to the jury, law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also testified that Meta's reporting of crimes to children on its apps -- including child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) -- was "deficient," The Guardian reported. Rather than make it easy to trace harms on its platforms, the jury learned from frustrated cops that Meta "generated high volumes of 'junk' reports by overly relying on AI to moderate its platforms." This made its reporting "useless" and "meant crimes could not be investigated," The Guardian reported. Celebrating the win as a "historic victory," Torrez told CNBC that families had previously paid the price for "Meta's choice to put profits over kids' safety." "Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew," Torrez said. "Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough." Meta said the company plans to appeal the verdict. "We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal," Meta's spokesperson said. "We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's what to know about the biggest iPhone update since iOS 26 dropped six months ago.
Explosions lit up Tehran skyline as Israel launched new airstrikes but by morning joggers were in the park
The days after Nowruz, the Persian New Year, are usually a bustling time in Tehran, with spring arriving, trees blossoming, businesses reopening after the holidays, and people returning to work and school.
This year, however, Iranians are trying to maintain a semblance of ordinary life against the constant backdrop of explosions, airstrikes – and a conflict many fear may drag on for weeks or months.
Continue reading...Julius Pursaill, Andy Roberts and Jane Oberman respond to Polly Hudson’s article that decried Josh Wardle for creating a new game
Josh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, a game that gave huge pleasure to so many people during lockdown, reportedly sold it for a seven-figure sum. According to Polly Hudson (The Wordle guy’s latest move tells us a lot about modern-day ambition, 22 March), he now has the temerity to create another word game, Parseword, rather than kicking back on his yacht. Imagine if everyone who has a creative impulse kicked back after their first recognised achievement – if Michelangelo had kicked back after creating the Pietà, or Picasso had kicked back after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Well done to Wardle, keep creating.
Julius Pursaill
London
• It seems a little unfair to characterise Josh Wardle’s new game as trying his luck again, equating it with naked ambition. It certainly seems out of kilter to be drawing parallels with that and the rampant egotism displayed recently by Timothée Chalamet. Wardle just strikes me as a bit of a word nerd and coder who likes making games. His new one seems to be a love letter to cryptic crosswords – it certainly isn’t a tilt at creating another viral sensation.
Andy Roberts
Witney, Oxfordshire
Ofcom says decision is ‘real win for children and families’ but some users raise concerns over privacy
Millions of Apple iPhone customers in the UK will now have to confirm they are 18 or older to use all available services, including by showing a credit card or by scanning an ID.
The move, believed to be a first for a European market, comes amid pressure on tech companies from the government to do more to protect children online.
Continue reading...If you have them please message me. I am willing to pay shipping. I don’t care how scratched up they are just message me with an offer as long as they aren’t bent and screws aren’t stripped.
MONTRÉAL, March 25, 2026 — Bell Canada today announced the continued growth of Bell AI Fabric through an expanded partnership with BUZZ High Performance Computing (HPC), a wholly owned subsidiary of HIVE Digital Technologies LTD., to deliver advanced, sovereign AI infrastructure in Merritt, B.C.
BUZZ HPC has secured an immediate 6.5 MW of gross capacity at the Bell AI Fabric Merritt facility with an option for potential additional power that may become available over time. At this site, BUZZ HPC will continue scaling its next-generation GPU clusters for commercial use. Expected to come online in the coming weeks, the facility represents the next step in Bell AI Fabric’s data centre supercluster, providing Canadian organizations with the high-performance computing capacity needed to drive the next generation of AI innovation.
The Merritt data centre is specifically engineered to handle AI’s most intense computational demands. Powered by BUZZ HPC’s specialized high-density, liquid-cooled infrastructure and accelerated GPU compute, the facility provides the design, implementation and scaling expertise required for complex AI workloads, including inference and training.
“We are excited to deliver cutting-edge AI infrastructure and deployment expertise to our customers through our partnership with BUZZ HPC at our Merritt facility,” said John Watson, Group President, Business Markets, AI and Ateko, Bell. “This partnership provides another important layer to the Bell AI Fabric ecosystem, delivering the advanced workloads our customers need in a sovereign, private and secure Canadian facility. Partnerships like these are instrumental to BCE Inc. delivering on our ambition to grow our revenue from AI-powered solutions to $2 billion by 2028.”
This partnership brings together BUZZ HPC’s expertise in GPU-accelerated computing with Bell AI Fabric, a full-stack AI offering anchored by the company’s nationwide fibre network, data centre infrastructure, software, cloud capabilities, advanced professional integration services and partner ecosystem – allowing Canadian innovators to access massive compute power while adhering to strict data residency standards with a comprehensive, made-in-Canada AI solution.
“BUZZ HPC is expanding its AI infrastructure with Bell AI Fabric across two Canadian provinces, including new capacity in British Columbia to scale near-term deployments,” said Craig Tavares, President and COO, BUZZ HPC. “This marks a major step in BUZZ’s journey to become a leading national sovereign AI platform, scaling our reach to serve both Canadian innovators and international customers. Together, Bell and BUZZ are delivering the secure, high-performance accelerated compute Canada needs to compete globally in AI.”
“Purpose-built AI infrastructure – sometimes described as AI factories – is essential to transforming compute power into intelligence at scale and accelerating the potential of AI technology,” said Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman, BUZZ HPC. “Through our partnership with Bell AI Fabric, we are providing Canadian companies with sovereign compute to help them deploy AI securely and at scale to support advanced use cases across sectors ranging from healthcare to defence and beyond.”
Today’s announcement expands upon Bell and BUZZ HPC’s previously announced partnership to deploy high-performance GPU clusters in Bell AI Fabric’s sovereign facilities.
More from HPCwire
About Bell
Bell is Canada’s largest communications company, leading the way in advanced fibre and wireless networks, enterprise services and digital media. By delivering next-generation technology that leverages cloud-based and AI-driven solutions, we’re keeping customers connected, informed and entertained while enabling businesses to compete on the world stage. To learn more, please visit Bell.ca or BCE.ca.
Source: Bell Canada
The post Bell Canada Expands Sovereign AI Fabric with BUZZ HPC GPU Capacity appeared first on HPCwire.
Susie Wiles was on plane and witnessed event, according to files shown to House judiciary committee
Federal prosecutors examined whether Donald Trump showed a classified map to people on his plane after his first term, including to his now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to justice department materials produced to the House judiciary committee.
The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Continue reading...Savannah Guthrie said her family is in agony as she made a tearful plea for someone "to do the right thing" nearly two months after Nancy Guthrie disappeared.
The Supreme Court ruled that internet service provider Cox Communications cannot be held liable for copyright infringement by its subscribers.
Commentary: We need to have a serious conversation about what AI tools we need and the ones we really don't.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vanity Fair: Focus Features is releasing The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters on March 27. If you're even slightly interested in what's going on with AI, it's required viewing: The film touches on all aspects of the technology, from how it's currently being used to how it will be used in the near future, when we potentially reach the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is a theoretical form of AI that supposedly would be able to perform complex tasks without each step being prompted by a human user -- the point at which machines become autonomous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise. [...] [Director Daniel Roher] interviews nearly all the major players in the AI space: Sam Altman of OpenAI; the Amodei siblings of Anthropic; Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (Google's AI arm); theorists and reporters covering the subject. Notably absent are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. "Have you seen that guy speak? He's like a lizard man," Roher says regarding Zuckerberg. "Musk said yes initially, but it was right when he was doing all the stuff with Trump, and we just got ghosted after a while," adds [codirector Charlie Tyrell]. Altman, arguably AI's greatest mascot, is prominently featured in the documentary. But Roher wasn't buying it. "That guy doesn't know what genuine means," he says. "Every single thing he says and does is calculated. He is a machine. He's like AI, and it's in the service of growth, growth, growth. You can be disingenuous and media savvy." [...] How, exactly, is Roher an apocaloptimist? "We are preaching a worldview," he says, "in a world that's asking you to either see this as the apocalypse or embrace it with this unbridled optimism." He and his film are taking a stance that rests between those two poles. "It's both at the same time. We have to try and embrace a middle ground so this technology doesn't consume us, so we can stay in the driver's seat," says Roher -- meaning, it's up to all of us to chart the course. "You have to speak up," says Tyrell. "Things like AI should disclose themselves. If your doctor's office is using an AI bot, you have to say, I don't like that." The driving message behind the film is that resistance starts with the people. That position is shared by The AI Doc producer Daniel Kwan, who won an Oscar for directing Everything Everywhere All at Once and has been at the forefront of discussions about AI in the entertainment industry. [...] Roher and Tyrell both use AI in their everyday lives and openly admit to it being a helpful tool. They also agree that this technology can make daily tasks easier for the average consumer. But at the end of our conversation, we get into the economics of AI and how Wall Street is propping up the industry through huge evaluations of these companies -- and Roher gets going yet again. "This is all smoke and mirrors. The entire economy of AI is being propped up by a Ponzi scheme. The hype of this technology is unlike any hype we've seen," he says. "I feel like I could announce in a press release that Academy Award winner Daniel Roher is starting an AI film company, and I could sell it the next day for $20 million. It's fucking crazy." [...] "These people are prospectors, and they are going up to the Yukon because it's the gold rush."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The company has unleashed a slew of new soundbars, subwoofers and Bravia TVs.
Getting the cold shoulder from candidates? The problem might not be the market. It could be the job post itself.
Today show co-host appeared in pretaped interview as her mother, Nancy Guthrie, has been missing for seven weeks
Savannah Guthrie, the co-host of NBC’s Today show, has described her family’s ordeal as “agony” in her first interview since her mother’s disappearance more than seven weeks ago.
“Someone needs to do the right thing. We are in agony. We are in agony. It is unbearable,” Guthrie said through tears in a preview of the pretaped interview with her co-host, Hoda Kotb, which previewed on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Archaeologists believe remains found in Maastricht, Netherlands, may be of soldier who inspired novel character
More than three-and-a-half centuries after a musket ball to the throat put an end to decades of exemplary swashbuckling, the French soldier who inspired Alexandre Dumas and went on to be immortalised on the stage and screen – not to mention as a plucky cartoon dog – may rise again.
Workers repairing a church in the Dutch city of Maastricht have discovered a skeleton that could belong to the 17th-century Gascon nobleman Charles de Batz-Castelmore – better known as d’Artagnan – whose exploits led Dumas to make him the hero of the Three Musketeers.
Continue reading...Steve Reed makes statement to MPs following the Rycroft review into political funding
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question at PMQs.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has urged people to reject “conspiracy” theories about the loss of Morgan McSweeney’s phone.
Continue reading...The NBA’s board of governors voted to move forward with the cities as targets for its first expansion since 2004. Here’s what it means for the future of the league
The NBA has moved a step closer to adding teams in Seattle and Las Vegas.
The league’s board of governors met this week and voted to explore bids and applicants for teams exclusively in those two cities, beginning the process for its first expansion in more than two decades. Bids are expected to be in the $7bn to $10bn range per franchise.
Continue reading...Some Iranians who'd hoped for regime change say the realities of the U.S. and Israel's war have been a "rude awakening," and they just want it to stop.
Danish palace says it has asked Mette Frederiksen to try to form new majority with her Social Democrats and leftwing parties
Denmark’s outgoing prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has been given the first shot at forming another coalition government after an election which saw her leftwing bloc and the opposing rightwing parties fail to win a parliamentary majority.
A statement released by the Danish palace on Wednesday said Frederiksen had been asked to see if she could pull together a new majority involving her Social Democrats, who had their worst general election since 1903 but remain the biggest force in parliament.
Continue reading...France’s National Rally missed key targets in local elections ahead of next year’s seismic presidential vote – and the mainstream is doing OK elsewhere, too
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The Rassemblement National is not invincible. A year out from a make-or-break presidential vote, that might be the main lesson (though there are others, which may prove more significant) from last weekend’s local elections in France. What’s more, news elsewhere – Giorgia Meloni’s referendum defeat in Italy, Janez Janša beaten in Slovenia, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in trouble, the left bloc largest in Denmark – might suggest the rest of Europe’s far right are not having it all their own way, either.
But let’s focus first on France – if only because while local elections are rarely a wholly accurate guide to future national outcomes, these ones seem to provide some pointers – and the stakes in the country’s next major election are vertiginously high.
Continue reading...Industry fears strait of Hormuz closure could disrupt shipping of crucial parts for UK and German North Sea projects
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A string of large offshore wind projects in Europe are facing potential delays as the Iran war threatens to disrupt shipping of crucial parts manufactured in the Gulf.
Continue reading...Temporary ban on crypto donations is being introduced after review into countering foreign interference in politics
Ministers are introducing a temporary ban in cryptocurrency donations following an official review.
Philip Rycroft, a former senior civil servant, made the recommendation as part of a review into countering foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics.
Continue reading...Man credited with cooling Greenland tensions with Donald Trump is poised to play central role in any coalition deal
At the end of a long, gruelling night for the biggest parties on the right and left, there was one veteran of Danish politics who came out of Tuesday’s general election with a smile on his face – and a pipe in his mouth.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the two-time prime minister whose Moderates party is not aligned with the country’s left or right-leaning political blocs, is poised to play a central role in any coalition deal reached in the coming weeks.
Continue reading...Debt consolidation can slash interest charges, but how much you actually save depends on your balance and rate.
Greater London Authority seeks £6m refund for uncompleted fire safety work on destroyed Spectrum Building
People who lost their homes when a tower block in Dagenham burned down say they are being made to pay for the building’s fire safety works after the government demanded its money back.
Former leaseholders of the Spectrum Building, a seven-storey block of flats which was demolished after a major fire in August 2024, said it was “absolutely outrageous” the Greater London Authority (GLA) was seeking to reclaim £6m for the safety works because the blaze meant they were never completed.
Continue reading...Contributing to the early application of quantum computers in drug discovery and new material development
TOKYO, March 25, 2026 — Fujitsu Limited and the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology at The University of Osaka today announced the development of a new technology designed to accelerate the industrial application of quantum computers in the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing (early-FTQC).
Credit: Sergiy Palamarchuk/Shutterstock
By combining ver. 3 of the STAR architecture, a unique highly efficient phase rotation gate quantum computing architecture, with a novel molecular model optimization technique, researchers have significantly reduced computational resource requirements. This breakthrough will enable the energy calculations for chemical material design such as catalyst molecules, within a realistic timeframe using early-FTQC quantum computers.
These kinds of calculations are currently not possible using current computers, and would take millennia even using previous versions of the STAR architecture. The technologies are expected to contribute to solving various societal challenges, including accelerating drug discovery, improving the efficiency of ammonia synthesis processes, and advancing carbon recycling technologies.
Background
Quantum computing holds significant promise across a wide range of industries, including drug discovery, cryptography, and finance. However, current quantum systems are highly error-prone, and practical applications are generally believed to require quantum computers with millions of qubits.
In addition, the accurate calculation of complex molecular chemical energies for practical applications has required excessive computational resources, with prior methods limited by insufficient computational power or impractical timeframes.
Future plans
Fujitsu and The University of Osaka will continue to advance the STAR architecture and molecular model optimization technology, expanding the practical application range of quantum computers in the early-FTQC era. The partners aim to contribute to solving societal challenges by applying these technologies across various industrial fields, including drug discovery, new material development, and finance.
More information can be found here.
About Fujitsu
Fujitsu’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. As the digital transformation partner of choice for customers around the globe, our 113,000 employees work to resolve some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Our range of services and solutions draw on five key technologies: AI, Computing, Networks, Data & Security, and Converging Technologies, which we bring together to deliver sustainability transformation. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.6 trillion yen (US$23 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 and remains the top digital services company in Japan by market share.
Source: Fujitsu
The post Fujitsu and University of Osaka Develop New Tech for Chemical Material Energy Calculations on Early-FTQC Quantum Computers appeared first on HPCwire.
NATO members Estonia and Latvia say Russian drones hit their territory amid one of Moscow's biggest assaults on Ukraine.
Longtime Slashdot reader cusco writes: A private company in China has developed hypersonic missiles that cost the same as a Tesla Model X. This missile, the YKJ-1000, is being marketed for sale at a reported price of $99,000, and it's in mass production now after successful tests. That is far below what countries will spend to target and shoot down the missile if it's heading their way. Besides the low cost, they can be launched from anywhere. The launcher looks like any one of the tens of millions of shipping containers floating around on the ocean, or sitting at ports, or riding along on trucks, or sitting on industrial lots. The launchers for these missiles are hiding in plain sight, in other words. Whatever tactical advantages great-power countries have in ballistics is going away, fast; 1,300 kilometers is 800 miles, and so the range is anything within 800 miles of wherever someone can send a shipping container. To keep the price down, the missile is reportedly using civilian-grade materials and widely available commercial parts, along with simpler manufacturing methods like die-casting. There are also broader savings from tapping mature supply chains and using China's large-scale civilian industrial base.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BOULDER, Colo., March 25, 2026 — Atom Computing today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Cisco to explore how neutral-atom quantum computers can be linked together through quantum networks to enable distributed quantum computing architectures.
Under the terms of the MOU, Atom Computing and Cisco will collaborate to address critical challenges in distributed quantum computing, including physically linking neutral-atom quantum computers via quantum networks. By combining Cisco’s quantum networking hardware, software, and expertise in networking protocols with Atom Computing’s cutting-edge neutral-atom quantum hardware, the collaboration aims to accelerate the development of scalable, distributed quantum systems.
“Neutral‑atom quantum computers are uniquely suited for modularity and scaling,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder of Atom Computing. “By integrating them into advanced quantum networks, we can begin to realize architectures capable of supporting the next era of quantum applications.”
As part of the collaboration, Atom Computing and Cisco will evaluate opportunities to integrate Atom Computing’s hardware into Cisco’s quantum networking infrastructure and network-aware distributed quantum computing compiler, enabling more a tightly coupled full-stack distributed quantum platform.
Areas of collaboration under the MOU include:
“Scaling quantum computing to its full potential is a challenge the entire industry must tackle together,” said Ramana Kompella, VP & Head of Cisco Research. “At Cisco, we believe the future of quantum lies in distributed systems that connect many smaller processors, instead of relying solely on a single massive machine. This collaboration with Atom Computing allows us to explore how advanced networking technologies can help turn that vision into reality.”
The MOU reflects the shared commitment of Cisco and Atom to advancing the global quantum ecosystem and driving progress toward utility‑scale quantum computing. Additional details about the collaboration will be announced as the partnership evolves.
About Atom Computing
Atom Computing is developing large-scale quantum computers to enable companies and researchers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Utilizing highly scalable arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms, the company has developed systems with over 1,000 qubits, featuring advanced capabilities towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Atom Computing’s on-premises systems provide customers with new computational tools and logical qubit capabilities to address increasingly complex applications and to grow their quantum ecosystem.
Source: Atom Computing
The post Atom Computing Partners with Cisco to Advance Scalable, Networked, and Distributed Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
Former prisons minister pleads guilty to four drugs charges stemming from raid on his Surrey home
The former justice minister Crispin Blunt has been fined £1,200 for possessing illegal drugs after he told a court he entered the world of chemsex parties to help inform government policy.
Blunt, 65, a former Conservative MP for Reigate, pleaded guilty at Westminster magistrates court to four charges of possessing methamphetamine – commonly known as crystal meth – cannabis and the chemical sedative GBL.
Continue reading...D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.
 | Built this over high voltage as I rarely go over 15 mph and still wanted some range. HS motor. The 5” hub is indeed 5 lbs lighter than the 6”, but you’ll certainly need a second set of hands to mount the tire. Froze the hub, tire in hot sun, liberal windex. We got the first bead on, but not past the main hub body, then got the second bead on and blasted it with the air gun with the valve core out and she popped on. Getting it off is going to suck even more. Everything came to my door in 10 days in three deliveries. Hub shipped from Cali, everything else China. Foot pads bubbled in hot sun at 7500’ elevation, assuming they were slapped on at sea level; easy fix with poke of pocket knife. Quality, fit and finish are great on all the machined and extruded parts. Customer support got back to me within 1 business day. Very happy with this board, my first VESC board, setting up with float hub was super easy, Agro tuned in floaty. It rips, brakes SUPER hard and slams back into (regular for me) seamlessly with full power, no glitchy nonsense, no haptic buzz when your stomping on it trying to get over a rock or root. It also feels so much safer being able to watch your duty cycle, monitor charging and cell balancing, voltage, motor temp and check for any faults etc. 10/10. $2600 plus the tire. Don’t overlook the LR or High Voltage boards. Cheers and stay floaty. [link] [comments] |
The Minnesota mom of two and U.S. soldier was days from returning home from her tour in Kuwait when she was killed in an Iranian strike.
Lead runners were led off course by guide vehicle
World Athletics gives runners special entry
Three runners who were led off course in a race that served as a qualifier for the World Road Running Championships have been given entry into the upcoming competition.
Jessica McClain, Emma Grace Hurley and Ednah Kurgat were leading the USA Track & Field Half Marathon Championships in Atlanta earlier this month when the guide vehicle took the trio off course. Molly Born, who had been more than a minute behind the leaders, came through to win the race, with Carrie Ellwood and Annie Rodenfels in second and third. McClain, Hurley and Kurgat finished in ninth, 12th and 13th respectively, around two minutes behind Born.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch and others say they have documented use of weapon in civilian areas during war on Gaza
When the M825-series 155mm artillery projectile bursts, expelling its felt wedges containing white phosphorus, it leaves a distinctive knuckle-shaped plume. That is how Human Rights Watch (HRW) researchers said they were able to verify that Israel was again using the notorious weapon over south Lebanon, reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war.
The New York-based rights group said it had verified and geolocated eight images showing airburst white phosphorus munitions exploding over residential areas in the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor in the opening days of Israel’s assault during the war on Gaza.
Continue reading...Rising inflation and unemployment mean effects of Iran war could be even worse than the post-Covid cost-of-living crisis
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As diesel prices make history by passing $3 a litre in nearly every capital city around the country, the stresses of high fuel costs are beginning to show.
Truckies are warning they will go out of business if they can’t renegotiate their contracts with customers; farmers are warning the same, telling families that food in our supermarkets could soon cost more.
Continue reading...The orphaned bear cubs will receive intensive care even as their exposure to humans is limited, the San Diego Humane Society said.
Mortgage interest rates have changed considerably this month. Here's where they stand as of March 25, 2026.
UK urged to tackle transnational repression, as dissidents say Beijing has targeted them with tax bills and other threats
“I didn’t feel safe, even though I’m not based in Hong Kong any more,” said Christopher Mung Siu-tat after getting tax bills from Hong Kong authorities. “The regime can reach me by their long arms wherever I am.”
Siu-tat, the executive director at the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor, a UK-based NGO, fled Beijing’s sweeping national security laws years ago. The letters are the latest example of a series of transnational repression (TNR) tactics the 54-year-old has faced in recent years.
Continue reading...Change raises age limit from 35 and removes barrier for entry for recruits who have a legal conviction for cannabis
The US army has raised the maximum enlistment age to 42 years old and scrapped a barrier for potential recruits who have a legal conviction for marijuana or drug paraphernalia possession.
People aged up to 42 can now enlist in the army, the army national guard and the army reserves, according to the new US army regulation, lifting the previous ceiling of 35 years old.
Continue reading...Move comes after judge voided Kennedy’s ACIP picks, leaving key flu, Covid and RSV vaccines in limbo
Amid upheaval to the US vaccine advisory committee Robert Malone, the former co-chair and controversial figure who has opposed vaccines, says he has been pushed out and will not be involved in any future decisions. The move comes after a federal judge stayed the appointment of 13 members of the advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), essentially invalidating their roles on the committee and the decisions they have made.
Those new advisers were all hand-picked by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, after he fired the previous 17 members of the ACIP in June – but the judge ruled they were unqualified and not selected properly.
Continue reading...Legislation initiated by far-right Otzma Yehudit party drew mounting criticism from opponents and rights groups as it moved through the Knesset
Israel’s parliament has advanced a contentious bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of terrorism to its final vote, after the Knesset’s national security committee approved the measure on Tuesday.
The legislation, initiated by the far-right Otzma Yehudit party led by the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has drawn sharp criticism from opponents who warn it would mark a significant escalation in Israel’s penal policy. Members of Otzma Yehudit have worn noose-shaped pins in support of the bill.
Continue reading...HELSINKI, March 25, 2026 — atNorth today announced that its heat reuse partnership with Kesko Corporation went live in November 2025 and is delivering waste heat generated at atNorth’s FIN02 data center in Espoo to a neighboring branch of the Finnish retail giant.
The project marks a significant milestone in atNorth’s ongoing commitment to integrating circular economy principles into its operations. By repurposing excess heat generated by the data center’s infrastructure, the collaboration will supply almost all of the heating required by the adjacent Kesko store, reducing reliance on district heating and lowering emissions for both organizations.
For Kesko, the project supports its target of achieving a 58.8 percent reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, a large portion of which results from heating its buildings. The recycled heat from FIN02 is expected to reduce Kesko’s emissions from district heating use by approximately 200 tons of CO₂ equivalent per year, representing around 0.9 percent of Kesko’s district heating emissions.
“Reducing emissions from the heating of our properties is a key priority within our sustainability strategy,” said Antti Kokkonen, Director of Energy at Kesko. “Through this collaboration with atNorth, we are able to significantly cut emissions at one of our stores while demonstrating how innovative partnerships can accelerate the transition to lower-carbon operations.”
The initiative also highlights the broader role data centers can play in supporting local energy ecosystems. By capturing and repurposing surplus heat, the project enhances the energy efficiency of the FIN02 facility while contributing to Finland’s wider circular economy ambitions.
“As demand for AI-ready digital infrastructure continues to grow, it is essential that data centers scale responsibly,” said Erling Gudmundsson, COO of atNorth. “This project demonstrates how data centers can become active contributors to local energy systems. By recycling excess heat, we can reduce our client’s environmental footprint while supporting our partners’ sustainability goals and delivering tangible benefits to the surrounding community.”
The FIN02 facility is part of atNorth’s expanding presence across the Nordics and forms a key element of the company’s strategy to develop sustainable digital infrastructure across the region. The business continues to explore innovative partnerships that reuse excess heat and support circular energy solutions.
The launch of the Kesko initiative follows several other heat reuse collaborations across atNorth’s portfolio, including a new community greenhouse in Akureyri, Iceland and also partnerships with waste-to-energy company Vestforbrænding in Denmark and Stockholm Exergi in Sweden to provide heat for the local district heating networks. These initiatives reinforce the company’s commitment to responsible and community-focused data center development.
About atNorth
atNorth is the leading Nordic data center company that offers cost-effective, scalable high-density colocation and built-to-suit services trusted by industry-leading organizations. With sustainability at its core, atNorth’s data centers run on renewable energy resources and support circular economy principles. All atNorth sites leverage innovative design, power efficiency, and intelligent operations to provide long-term infrastructure and flexible colocation deployments. atNorth is headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland and operates eight data centers in strategic locations across the Nordics, as well as a ninth under construction in Kouvola, Finland, a tenth site in Ølgod, Denmark and an eleventh campus in Stockholm, Sweden. The business has also announced a new mega-site development in the Sollefteå Municipality in Sweden.
Source: atNorth
The post atNorth Brings Data Center Heat Reuse Online with Kesko in Finland appeared first on HPCwire.
About 111 million Americans are carrying credit card balances, a 17% increase in five years, new research shows.
Most of Shark's cordless vacuum models are on sale during Amazon's Big Spring Sale, and I've tested quite a few. These two deals stand out.
Shiffrin holds off challenge from Germany’s Emma Aicher
US star ties record set by Annemarie Moser-Pröll in 1970s
Mikaela Shiffrin secured a record-tying sixth women’s overall World Cup skiing title by holding off a challenge from Germany’s Emma Aicher in the final race of the season.
Shiffrin needed only to finish in the top 15 of Wednesday’s giant slalom in Lillehammer, and the American secured that before Aicher had even began her second run. Shiffrin finished 11th and Aicher – who needed to win the race and hope that Shiffrin finished 16th or worse to clinch her first title – finished 12th.
“It’s quite emotional,” Shiffrin said. “This thing sums up a whole season of work and fighting with the whole team and I have to say to Emma that her skiing has been just outstanding and today it was just so cool to watch her, especially on the first run.
“I think the outcome of this day is that she can do this. And I think that’s the coolest thing about ski racing – that anything is possible,” Shiffrin added.
Starmer’s handling of Trump and Iran reflects public opinion, but shows the limits of UK power Expert comment jon.wallace
The war threatens the UK prime minister’s hopes for economic recovery and heaps pressure on US relations he has worked hard to maintain. A long war will see his problems mount.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has navigated the early weeks of the Iran war relatively well. 47 per cent of all UK voters believe he has managed the response to the war badly, according to recent polls. But a majority of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters believe he is doing well.
And with 59 per cent of all UK voters opposing the Iran conflict, Starmer’s decision to deny the US military access to British bases for their initial attacks seems to have reflected wider public opinion. Starmer also had the satisfaction of seeing domestic political rivals like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage having to rapidly U-turn on their initial enthusiasm after seeing the war’s unpopularity.
Internationally, the picture has been more mixed. The prime minister’s position aligned with European and other Western allies. But it prompted anger and repeated insults from US President Donald Trump.
Beyond the US, the war has frayed the UK’s relations with Cyprus, whose president has called for a ‘frank discussion’, about the future of British bases on the island after it was targeted by Iranian drones. The slow deployment of a Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Dragon, to help protect Cyprus has raised further concerns about Britain’s military credibility.
Similarly, while UK forces have helped defend allies from Iranian attacks, some Gulf officials have expressed frustration at their limited nature. The UK’s decision to remove its only mine-hunting ship from Bahrain for maintenance in the weeks before the war, despite the US’s obvious build up, fed into these criticisms.
The longer the war drags on, the more challenges emerge. President Trump’s capriciousness means it would be equally unsurprising if he declared the war over tomorrow or dramatically escalated it, through an action like occupying Kharg Island or attacking Iran’s power infrastructure. But the Iranian regime has also proven itself unpredictable and may expand and/or prolong the conflict whatever actions the US and Israel take. Yemen’s Houthis may also decide to intervene, threatening trade routes in the Red Sea.
None of this is good for Starmer, as the continuing conflict threatens to undermine two of his core goals. The first is economic recovery. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have bet their political fortunes on achieving sufficient growth to repair public finances and reduce the cost of living.
The war may have already shattered those hopes for 2026. The Bank of England did not cut interests rates in March, as it had been expected to do, citing the effects of the conflict. Energy bills, mortgage costs, petrol prices and food bills are all rising. The fear for Starmer and the chancellor is that things will get even worse as the war continues – a situation beyond their control dealing a significant blow to their electoral hopes.
A second goal for Starmer – and one of his few achievements in office so far – has been to maintain strong ties with Trump. Cracks were appearing before the war, as London stood by Denmark over the White House’s public threats to seize Greenland.
But Iran has worsened relations. Starmer has tried to tread carefully, seeking to fulfil Britain’s alliance obligations as much as possible without being sucked into the conflict. This has meant gradual concessions: initially denying the US access to British bases but then later permitting their use to defend allies against Iran’s retaliations.
Similarly, the UK belatedly allowed Washington to use the joint airbase on Diego Garcia in ‘limited and defensive’ Iran operations, having initially refused. But London has been slow to commit to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as Trump has publicly demanded, creating a significant row.
Starmer may hope that, just as the ‘special relationship’ survived Harold Wilson’s unwillingness to send forces to Vietnam, it can also endure his refusal to engage in Iran – if he simply ignores Trump’s insults. Donald Trump though, is not Lyndon B. Johnson. He may forgive Starmer and other allies should the war end well for him. But if things go wrong, Britain may have to deal with a humiliated, vengeful and unpredictable president.
These are not Starmer’s only concerns. Another is to support key Gulf allies like Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE, and to ensure the safety of the UK citizens living there. The UK has done a good job of getting its people out of harm’s way rapidly, with over 100,000 evacuated within days.
But the UK armed forces have not projected reassuring power in the region as they once could. Small numbers of RAF Typhoon and F35 aircraft are intercepting Iranian attacks in the region. And the UK is reportedly considering deploying assets to help secure the Strait of Hormuz once the war is de-escalated. But the absence of minesweeping assets at the outbreak of war highlighted significant reductions to Royal Navy capability, according to some Gulf observers.
Beyond this, the war could affect the UK in ways currently unforeseen. Regime collapse or civil war in Iran could lead to migration crises or increased international terrorism, as did the Syria conflict a decade earlier.
But even the foreseeable challenges pose difficult questions. Might the need to limit the economic impact of the war force Britain into a more active role? And might this result in more British assets being targeted by Iran, as Cyprus and Diego Garcia have already been?
The war also raises bigger, long term strategic questions for British foreign policy. When the US begins a war that the prime minister judges not to be in the national interest, is it better to remain distant and try to manage the fallout or stay close in the hope of shaping decisions?
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair reportedly argued that Starmer should have ‘backed America from the very beginning’ and supported the use of UK bases for attacks on Iran. Though this criticism, from a figure whose legacy in the region is the source of significant unpopularity, may lead Starmer to conclude he is pursuing the right course.
Calls for the UK to make serious plans for greater strategic autonomy, as recently argued by the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, may look increasingly convincing.
Britain’s future in the Gulf and wider Middle East also looks uncertain. Will the economic shockwaves of the war mean Britain tries to insulate itself better from future shocks, by decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels? Or should it reverse its recent distance from the region and play a fuller role securing price and supply?
The woman was arrested at routine ICE check-in and separated from two children, aged 18 months and four
A Venezuelan mother of two who was allegedly trafficked to the US has been unlawfully detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and could soon be deported, according to her lawyers.
The woman has applications in process for asylum and a visa designed for victims of trafficking.
Continue reading...Yes, you should absolutely marathon them.
In House depositions, disgraced financier’s associates say they were not contacted after his 2008 plea deal
Jeffrey Epstein’s accountant and his attorney have both said that federal government investigators never interviewed them about the late financier’s crimes and their work with him, according to deposition videos released by the House of Representatives’ oversight committee.
Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, and Darren Indyke, Epstein’s lawyer, said in hours of closed-door interviews with the committee that they did not witness, nor were involved in, any wrongdoing relating to Epstein, who died in 2019 after being charged with child sex trafficking.
Continue reading...This Eureka outperformed the competition during our tests, and it currently has a meaty discount during Amazon's Big Spring Sale.
As physical media makes an unlikely comeback among younger gamers, the humble VHS emerges as an unexpected archive of gaming’s messy, magical evolution that I saw first time around
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As I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.
The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of Street Fighter: The Movie and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, naturally, as well as early games-inspired hits such as The Last Starfighter, The Wizard and WarGames. I rented most of these from my local video shop in the 80s – which, like many others, also sold computer games by the budget publisher Mastertronic, another interesting (at least to me) crossover between these two entertainment formats.
Continue reading...Huge cuts announced this week show that truly no developer working in games is safe from corporate whims
The video game industry is currently experiencing a seemingly endless bout of ruinous deja vu. Every month, another publisher posts an all too familiar statement about job losses in its development studios. There will be airy expressions of regret and platitudes praising the skill and contribution of the imminently jobless; it is all filtered through layers of corporate doublespeak intended to disguise the human cost of downsizing.
On Tuesday, it was the turn of Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, one of the most successful titles on the planet. In a note posted online, CEO Tim Sweeney announced that more than 1,000 jobs would be lost – this followed the cutting of 830 staff in September 2023.
Continue reading...Wael Sawan warns of pressure on diesel and petrol if strait of Hormuz does not reopen to oil and gas shipping
Europe could face a shortage of energy and fuel as soon as next month without a reopening of the strait of Hormuz, Shell’s chief executive has said.
The boss of Europe’s biggest oil company said it was working with governments to help them address the oil and gas supply crisis, which has already led to energy rationing in Asian countries.
Continue reading...With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deployed to more than a dozen airports across the U.S. and border device searches growing increasingly common, it’s more important than ever to consider your digital security before you travel.
The risks are real. Customs and Border Protection agents have the authority to examine travelers’ devices. Inl June, for instance, federal agents denied a Norwegian tourist entry to the U.S. after looking through his phone. (Authorities claim they turned him away for admitted drug use; he says it was over a meme depicting Vice President JD Vance as a bald baby.)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement have already started targeting travelers, with agents in plain clothes forcefully detaining a mother in front of her young daughter at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday after a tip from the Transportation Security Administration.
If you’re flying, take these steps to reduce the likelihood that your sensitive information is compromised at the airport.
The only surefire way to keep your devices from being searched and seized is to simply not bring them with you on your trip. If you can’t leave them at home, consider mailing them to and from your destination.
Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap. Then buy a temporary SIM card or eSIM so that you’re not using your usual number. Remember to let contacts know that for the duration of your trip you’ll be reachable at a different number.
Create a travel account for these devices. You can do so by starting a fresh account in the App Store or Google Play. This should ensure that if you’re forced to log into your device by authorities at the airport, the only information they’ll find is data you’ve put on this specific piece of hardware. CBP agents are supposed to only be able to look at data that’s local on the phone.
If you have anything sensitive in your accounts (say, emails from confidential sources) or anything you believe federal agents could consider damning (such as party pics or memes), be sure not to sync your apps, files, and settings onto your travel devices.
Regardless of whether you opt to bring your usual devices or specialized travel burners, take these steps to lock down your devices.
First and foremost, disable any biometrics, like using your face or fingerprint, to unlock your phone. Instead, set up a unique and random alphanumeric passcode; eight characters consisting of random digits and numbers is a good start. Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras. Use one hand to shield your screen and the thumb of your other hand to put in your passcode. Consider using privacy screens on your devices to further diminish the chance of wandering eyes noticing things that are none of their business.
Be cautious of entering your passcode in open view of surveillance cameras.
When going through security checkpoints, turn your devices completely off. Don’t just put them to sleep — fully shut them down. Though having a locked device is better than having it be unlocked, turning it off is best, as this makes it much harder for data to be forensically recovered from your devices.
That means you’ll need to obtain paper copies of boarding passes, rather than rely on digital versions stored in a device wallet or via your airline’s app.
If you’re asked to unlock your devices, you can say “no.” But doing so may result in being delayed and hassled, and your device could be confiscated. You should receive paperwork attesting to the confiscation and establishing chain of custody (this is called CBP Form 6051D, or a custody receipt for detained property). As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, it may be months before your devices are returned — or even for an indefinite period of time if agents believe there is evidence of a crime.
To practice what’s known in security circles as “defense in depth,” it’s best to think of your digital security as an onion: If an outer layer is peeled off, you want there to be a good second layer to minimize the damage to the core. To that end, assume that even if you have a strong passphrase and have powered off your device, someone may still be able to find a way in. Your travel devices should, therefore, minimize the amount of sensitive information they store. In that case, even if someone manages to break through the outer layer, the information exposed would be trivial.
If you use a password manager — a specialized app that securely stores your passwords — put it into a “travel mode,” limiting the passwords it will reveal for the duration of your trip. Remove access to sensitive accounts that you very likely won’t have a reason to need to access during your travels; for example, removing your work email if you’re going on vacation, or leaving and deleting sensitive Signal chats, like local ICE watch groups.
Log out of or delete apps you won’t need while traveling. You can reinstall and log back in when you are safely away from the airport. Remember to remove them once again when you’re on your way back — and keep in mind that this may lead to some apps deleting your history.
Finally, be sure to prune your contacts to remove any that are sensitive, such as sources, if you’re a journalist. If you have sensitive materials on your devices that you’ll need to access during your travels, use a tool like Cryptomator to encrypt them and upload them to a cloud drive, then delete the files from your devices. You can download them when you reach your destination.
These extra steps are undoubtedly a bit of a pain, but any inconvenience would pale in comparison to the potential damage if sensitive information is disclosed during your time in the airport.
The post How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport appeared first on The Intercept.
Any Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon will work to Hezbollah’s advantage Expert comment jon.wallace
The Lebanese government has failed to effectively confront Hezbollah. But a prolonged Israeli incursion will only reenergize the group.
As many focus on the US/Israeli war on Iran, another related conflict is intensifying in Lebanon. On 2 March Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into Israel in retaliation for the attacks on Iran. Since then, the Israeli military has attacked Beirut, the Beqaa Valley, the Baalbek-Hermel governorate, and the south.
More than 1,000 people have been killed and 2,500 injured and over one million (almost a fifth of the population) have been displaced. On 22 March, Lebanon’s leadership warned of the threat of invasion. On 24 March, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that Israel intends to seize control of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River to create a ‘defensive buffer’.
The war on Iran may yet see the US declare victory relatively early, perhaps in a matter of weeks, and disengage. But the conflict unfolding in Lebanon is unlikely to see Israel walk away any time soon.
Instead, it reflects Israel’s shift towards a longer-term struggle for regional primacy after Hamas’s cross border attacks of 7 October – one that Lebanon’s fragile state may not endure.
For decades since its formation, Hezbollah operated a parallel state in Lebanon, with significant logistical and financial support from Iran. The group wielded a veto over the country’s politics and maintained a military force far stronger than the Lebanese army.
The situation changed after 7 October 2023. Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel the very next day in support of Hamas, and conflict between the group and Israel quickly intensified.
That culminated in a sequence of attacks in September 2024 which saw Israel decapitate Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including long-time secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah. In November, a fragile ceasefire was agreed, though in practice it remained tenuous, with Israeli operations continuing and the terms only partially observed.
For a time afterwards, Hezbollah seemed to be in decline, with public perception shifting, as Hezbollah was seen by many Lebanese as having unnecessarily exposed the country to conflict.
The technocratic Lebanese government that took office fifteen months ago appeared to offer something different. Led by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam alongside President Joseph Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese Armed Forces, it moved quickly to assert that it alone should hold the monopoly on arms in the country. That push was strongly encouraged by the US and Israel as part of a broader plan to dismantle Hezbollah.
The new government deployed the army south of the Litani River for the first time in decades, reasserted control over Beirut’s airport, and signalled a harder political line, including efforts to curb the language and symbols of ‘resistance’ that had long normalized Hezbollah’s armed presence in the state.
These early moves suggested a government that was attempting to reclaim control of territory and establish legitimacy.
Yet the limits of that push were clear. Hezbollah has refused to disarm north of the Litani River and continues to wield political influence. US Special Envoy for Syrian Affairs Tom Barrack recently called it a ‘legitimate political party in Lebanon’ (though the US has designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997).
Reportedly, Hezbollah has been reconstituting and adapting, returning to a more dispersed, guerrilla-style organization rooted in asymmetric warfare and a mission of long-term resistance. Crucially, it still commands loyalty across much of Lebanon’s Shia community.
These realities point to the Lebanese state’s continuing structural fragility. The country’s sect-based political system fragments authority and, combined with decades of political corruption and mismanagement, undermines coherent governance.
Hezbollah has filled gaps left by the government within Shia communities, providing social services, education, healthcare and local support. As a result, in these areas, citizens still tend to turn to Hezbollah rather than the government to meet their everyday needs.
Disarming Hezbollah illustrates the government’s dilemma. It can insist that arms belong in the hands of the state and declare Hezbollah’s military arm illegal. But any attempt to use force to disarm the group would likely lead to civil war. There is little political or public appetite for that, in a country still marked by the memory of fifteen-years of civil war in the 1970s and 80s.
Others will believe that disarming Hezbollah leaves the country even more exposed to Israeli attacks, given the weakness of Lebanon’s army.
The Lebanese people have not yet had the chance to recover from a series of devastating events. An economic collapse in 2019 was followed by rampant inflation, the port explosion of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Israeli bombing and ground incursions of 2024.
Populations that had only recently returned to their homes now once again find themselves displaced or forced to live exposed to Israeli attacks. Communities remaining in the south of the country are now at risk of being cut-off, with Israel destroying bridges across the Litani River and intent on creating the ‘defensive buffer’ announced by Katz.
Those who have been displaced are now homeless or sheltering in cramped or unfit facilities. The Lebanese government is making efforts to track displaced people and provide shelter and relief items. Its response is a marked improvement compared to previous crises. However, with no end to the fighting in sight the state is having to rely on civil society and international actors to provide support to communities in need.
Israel’s strategy risks undermining what little possibility remains of a coherent Lebanese state operating in place of Hezbollah.
Parliamentary elections, due in May 2026, were postponed for two years due to the violence, with some parties already using developments to stoke sectarian divisions and further party interests. The gains made by independent parliamentarians and the fragile new government hang in the balance.
A prolonged Israeli military presence will likely deepen instability and further weaken Lebanese state institutions. It will also create the conditions for Hezbollah to reconstitute its military capabilities and rebuild popular support.
The first step should be a ceasefire by both sides and an end to Israeli incursions into Lebanon. But this now looks highly unlikely in the near term.
That means the only viable path to keep Hezbollah weakened and potentially one day disarm it is to build the Lebanese government’s capacity to provide reliable public services and to protect the entire population, including Shia communities, both of which the government has historically struggled to do. US and international engagement should therefore be concentrated on this objective.
A first step would be tying international reconstruction assistance to visible state delivery, ensuring that aid reaches all affected communities through government channels. Diplomatic efforts toward a broader regional settlement should also address the external flows of support, namely from Iran, to Hezbollah that have long undermined the Lebanese government’s authority over its own territory.
In the meantime, in the event of Israel seizing territory in the south, Lebanon’s government will have limited options. It can transmit messages of national solidarity. And it can deploy the army to Beirut to signal stability there and deter civil tensions.
But the damage being done will make the government’s job even harder: it was already unclear how it would pay to rebuild infrastructure destroyed in 2024. Dealing with the destruction and displacement caused by this new fighting will need more time and money, something which the government does not have, and which will be hard to raise.
The Lebanese government will also need to carefully assess the risk of if and how to confront Hezbollah. The government banned Hezbollah’s military activities on 2 March and expelled the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon on 24 March. But challenging Hezbollah while the group is fighting Israel could inflame internal tensions and increase the risk of civil war.
Meanwhile the displaced will be vulnerable to exploitation, creating possible public health risks, forcing children to stay out of school and adults out of work, creating possible tensions with local residents, and compounding decades of trauma.
Regardless of when the fighting stops, Lebanon and its citizens will be left picking up the pieces for years to come.
Government’s pilot ban for under-16s accompanies consultation as peers vote on Australia-style restrictions
Hundreds of UK teenagers will trial social media bans, digital curfews and time limits on apps under a government pilot, which will run alongside a consultation to decide whether the UK should ban access to social media for the under-16s.
During the test, led by the UK government, a proportion of 300 teens across all four nations of the UK will have their social apps disabled, “mimicking the enforcement of a social media ban at home”.
Continue reading...FedEx said it will give customers the option of two-hour or end-of-day delivery, including for large and oversized packages.
Democrat Emily Gregory won a special election for a Florida state House seat on Tuesday, flipping a district that is home to President Trump's estate, Mar-a-Lago.
A California sheriff running for governor has seized more than half a million ballots cast in a November special election from county election officials, saying he's investigating a ballot count discrepancy.
A handful of moments at SXSW had me wondering: How much of AI is me playing a game and how much is it a game playing me?
Apple's iPhone 17E is closer than ever to its $799 sibling. But can you save $200 when upgrading from an older base iPhone?
As US raids spread, a grassroots pantry delivers food, medicine and basics to immigrant families too afraid to leave home
Last summer, months before Memphis became overrun with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, local activists and Latino leaders came together to figure out how to best meet their community’s needs. The Trump administration’s expansion of ICE was still nascent; the agency had conducted raids in Los Angeles, but hadn’t yet begun its operations in Chicago or Minneapolis.
Amber Hampton and another member of Indivisible Memphis, a volunteer-run chapter of the nationwide civil rights organization, attended the meeting. Though neither of them spoke much Spanish, and many of those gathered from the Latino community spoke little English, they understood each other, Hampton told the Guardian.
Continue reading...From Nokia and BlackBerry to LG and Russia's YotaPhone, these phones tried some questionable things.
While market conditions are raising the cost of these Galaxy A phones, Samsung hopes fast charging speeds, improved water resistance and camera features will provide value for price-conscious buyers.
Iran has targeted Israel and Gulf states while denying Trump’s claims that any negotiations are taking place. Plus, Democrats flip seat in district that includes Mar-a-Lago
Good morning.
The US appeared poised to deploy airborne troops to the Middle East, according to reports, as strikes intensified across the region.
What is the 15-point framework? Diplomats with knowledge of the talks believe it is likely to be a rehashed version of a proposal put forward by Trump’s negotiating team during nuclear talks in May 2025.
What is happening with the strait of Hormuz? Iran has announced it is permitting “non-hostile” ships to pass safely through the strait.
This is a developing story. Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.
Continue reading...Looking to track your heart rate? These are the most reliable monitors you'll want in your arsenal.
Why Should Delaware Care?
As New Castle County faces another difficult budget year, officials are proposing a significant property tax increase to close a projected shortfall while prioritizing funding for public safety initiatives.
In his annual budget address Tuesday, New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry proposed a 17% property tax hike on residents – a major increase that officials say will only partially close a $42 million budget deficit facing the county in the coming fiscal year.
Henry’s remarks follow a year in which county officials repeatedly had to pull money from reserves to cover expenses amid a drop off in federal funding and fallout from the county’s recent property tax reassessment.
If the New Castle County Council approves Henry’s proposed budget, the next fiscal year would become the first since 2019 to feature a tax rate increase for the county’s share of property taxes.
“It’s time, unfortunately,” Henry told reporters during a budget briefing on Monday.
Asked then about budget conversations he had with the outgoing county executive — now-Gov. Matt Meyer — Henry took a deep breath and laughed. Then he said he didn’t know in late 2024 that the deficit was going to be as large as it is today.
“I was presented information that showed us in a deficit, but it ended up being much, much larger than what I was shown,” Henry said.
Tuesday marked Henry’s second budget address, after entering office in 2024.
Henry also said the county kept “revenue neutrality” following a 2024 property reassessment, meaning it did not take in additional tax dollars. The county’s share of property tax bills is a little under 20% of the total, Henry said. The rest goes to school districts.
If approved, the tax hike will bring in about $23 million for the county to cover the $42 million gap between expected costs and revenues for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
The county will also split tax rates for commercial and residential properties for another year, according to Henry’s budget.
The proposed operational budget totals just over $387 million — a 4.4% increase over the 2026 fiscal year.
Henry said the county had been in a budget deficit for several years, but costs were previously covered by one-time federal appropriations that the county received as a result of the COVID pandemic.
To restore fiscal balance over the long-term, county officials have described a “multiyear approach,” which includes some plans to increase spending, such as on workforce training and in public safety and public works.
Henry also said the county is going to work with state legislators in Dover to diversify its sources of revenue. County officials also said they want to convince the General Assembly to allow them to shift the responsibility of school tax billing and collections back to the school districts.
“This structural deficit was built over several years, and that’s what we’re trying to cure,” Henry said.
After relying on reserves for the past year, officials also say those backup funds are under strain.
If approved, Henry’s budget would reduce the general fund tax stabilization reserve to roughly $25 million and the real estate transfer tax reserve to about $22.5 million, according to County Chief Financial Officer David Del Grande.
And in order to make ends meet, county officials are also raising fees.
The county will begin charging credit card fees for sewer bills and land use permits. Sewer consumption rates would also be increased by 5%.
Additionally, a total of 56 positions of the county’s full-time workforce, which Del Grande called “back office” positions, will also go unfunded for 2027, saving the county nearly $6 million in expenses.
The county currently has a hiring freeze on all “non-essential” employees.
“It’s also health care that we don’t need to provide for 56 people, which is actually the burden.” Del Grande said.
Henry asserted that there will be no layoffs or salary reductions for existing employees as part of the new budget proposal.
County officials have also decided to cut $2.5 million for open space and Agricultural Preservation. DelGrande and Henry noted that both projects currently have funds in them, so they are not being eliminated.
The county is also cutting $2.8 million from the Community Services Department, with a portion of that from a reduction for part-time employees.
Almost $1 million has also been cut from some of the county’s special events, some of which, like New Castle’s annual Sleep Under the Stars event, will be paused for a year.
Finally, libraries also will be impacted. Under Henry’s budget, the county will close libraries to the public one day a week, though no two locations will close on the same day, allowing residents to still access services. The closures will contribute to almost $900,000 in avoided costs.
Separately, in its capital budget, the Glasgow Library project will be pushed back for a year. The proposed capital budget has also been reduced by 10% to more than $75 million.
This year, Henry wants to focus on public safety.
For fiscal year 2027, the county will propose an allocation of almost $4 million for union-negotiated wages, reflecting contracts covering about 84% of the workforce. It also added a little over $5 million to public safety to maintain service levels and support filling vacancies, such police, paramedics, and 911 operators.
“Keeping people safe is our priority,” Henry said.
The county will also allocate $1 million toward its property assessment office to add 10 more positions.The additions, if approved, would bring the office total to 39 positions. The County Council recently approved adding the first five positions to the office.
Rounding out the increases in spending is a $1 million increase for wastewater treatment, and $4 million for county employee healthcare premiums.
The County Council is set to vote on the budget on May 26.
The post New Castle County proposes 17% tax hike to partially close deficit appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Israel and Gulf states targeted by Iran while Tehran denies any negotiations with US to end war
The US is poised to deploy airborne troops to the Middle East as strikes intensified on Tuesday, signalling that it may consider boots on the ground despite Donald Trump’s claims of “very good” talks with Iran, as it was reported that the US president had delivered a 15-point negotiation plan to Iran via Pakistan.
Early on Wednesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had launched a new wave of attacks against locations in Israel including Tel Aviv and Kiryat Shmona, as well as US bases in Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain. Drones hit a fuel tank and sparked a fire at Kuwait international airport, the Gulf state’s civil aviation authority said.
Continue reading...Ruling linked to takeover of Autonomy in 2011 comes two years after tech tycoon died in superyacht disaster
The estate of the late British tech tycoon Mike Lynch has been ordered to pay £920m to the technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) two years after he died in a superyacht disaster.
The ruling by London’s high court said the estate was liable to pay the sum as compensation, costs and interest for the acquisition of Lynch’s firm Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard (HP), after a UK legal ruling in 2022 that he duped the US company into paying £8.2bn for the software firm.
Continue reading...Paul Kovacich's defense team contends that long-suppressed evidence debunks claims that he killed his dog weeks before his wife disappeared.
The US is recklessly spreading economic havoc among global friends and foes while suffering little harm itself
To shield ordinary Indians from the war in Iran, the government in Delhi redirected supplies of liquefied gas to Indian families, for which it is the main cooking fuel, limiting supplies to the plastics industry. The Nepalese government rationed gas and the Philippines trimmed the government workweek to four days. Bangladesh closed universities and rationed fuel.
They have been hardest hit by Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. Economies in Asia import over a third of the energy they consume, on average. Korea imports four-fifths; Japan nine-tenths; Thailand 55%. Most of this comes from the Gulf. About 80% of oil and oil products transiting through the strait in 2025 was destined for Asia, according to the International Energy Agency. But traffic through its waters has collapsed by 90%.
Continue reading...The world of soccer throws up no shortage of questions. Today, Graham Ruthven endeavors to answer three of them.
Twenty-six minutes. That’s all the game time Gio Reyna has played in 2026. He hasn’t played at all for Borussia Mönchengladbach in the last two months. For any other player, this surely would’ve kept them off the US roster for the upcoming friendlies against Belgium and Portugal. US manager Pochettino has consistently repeated the point that club form matters when building these squads. Reyna, however, isn’t any other player.
Continue reading...The president promised to spill the beans about little green men. Is that why the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency registered the domains alien.gov and aliens.gov?
There are some very important files sitting in a US government building right now, full of shocking details that certain entities would prefer to keep hidden. For far too long the public has been kept in the dark but, thanks to the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in history”, the truth could be about to be revealed.
Obviously I’m not talking about the Epstein files. I’ve got a funny feeling we’re never going to see the rest of those. FBI agents have been paid nearly $1m in overtime to work on the “Epstein Transparency Project”, also referred to as the “Special Redaction Project”, but even with all that special redacting, more than 2m documents have reportedly not been released. No, I’m talking about proof of alien life – which is far less fanciful than the idea that powerful people might actually face accountability.
Continue reading...Mildred Danis-Taylor dropped everything to advocate for the release of her husband, Rodney Taylor. A brutal year of legal and health challenges led her to Capitol Hill
Shortly after 1pm on 4 March, in a crowded hearing room on Capitol Hill, Mildred Danis-Taylor and two of her daughters stood up from their seats so that Kristi Noem could see them.
As they looked across the chamber at the homeland security secretary, the Georgia representative Lucy McBath took the mic to describe the neglectful and dangerous conditions Danis-Taylor’s husband said he had experienced during 14 months of being locked up at ICE’s Stewart detention center in south Georgia.
Continue reading...Idris Robinson says Texas State violated his constitutional rights over off-campus talk seized on by pro-Israel activists
Philosophy professor Idris Robinson has sued Texas State University officials, asserting that the school violated his constitutional rights by ending his contract after he gave a talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off-campus in another state where a fight broke out, the Guardian has learned.
Perhaps in part because Robinson did not introduce himself as connected to Texas State at the event, it took several pro-Israel social media accounts a year to identify him and launch a campaign to get Robinson fired, targeting the school’s leadership and accusing him of being a terrorist and inciting violence.
Continue reading...alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. [...] The team ran tests of the three main possible scenarios currently being considered for the slowdown of black hole growth. These options were: could the decline in black hole growth be caused by less efficient rates of consumption, or by smaller typical black hole masses, or by fewer actively growing black holes? Their analysis of the data, extending over billions of years of cosmic history, led them to the conclusion that black holes are indeed consuming material less rapidly the later they are found after the Big Bang. The researchers expect this trend of slower-growing black holes to continue into the future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Should Delaware Care?
School referendums are the only time that Delawareans can have a direct say in their taxation rate, but they also make it harder for school districts to meet rising costs. One year after the Smyrna School District’s referendum attempt failed, and eight months after staff members began picketing board meetings, the district and Smyrna Education Association have come to an agreement regarding staff pay increases.
A yearlong standoff between the Smyrna School District and its union of teachers and other school staff has ended with a small pay raise for employees.
Following the agreement last week, the two sides released a joint statement saying the deal “serves both parties fairly.”
The statement also noted that the district will likely ask voters to increase school taxes in the near future. If successful, the referendum would fund staff retention and recruitment, as well as other items, according to the statement.
“The parties look forward to a successful operating revenue referendum in the near future and will work collaboratively toward this goal,” the district and union said in the statement.
The statement comes in sharp contrast from what was months of turmoil in the district that sits along the Kent and New Castle county line. Sometimes it was obvious to the public with protests outside of school board meetings. Other times, a quieter tension existed as the two sides engaged in months in mediation or other formal negotiations.
Now, with a deal secured, employee raises will be based on their years of experience. The newest workers will receive a $150 raise per year, while the most senior employees will get $420 increases, according to a memorandum obtained by Spotlight Delaware.
The increases take effect immediately, and carry forward into the 2027 fiscal year beginning in July, but there will be no additional increases.
Those raises cannot exceed 4% for any employee, according to the memorandum.
Smyrna Board of Education President Jonathan Snow told Spotlight Delaware that the board has not planned when the district will hold its next referendum vote, but conversations about future referendum plans will start this summer.
“Given our financial situation and the escalating cost associated with running schools in the state of Delaware at the moment, another referendum will have to happen,” Snow said.
The deal resolves what has been an ongoing fight between the district and its employees’ union since a referendum request failed last year, leaving schools struggling to pay their bills.
More than half of the $5.4 million that could have been raised by the 2025 referendum in its first year would have paid for staff salaries, with teachers receiving raises during the subsequent two years.
It also would have funded extracurricular activities, technology upgrades, utilities costs, and the hiring of additional school constables.
Still, nearly 60% of district voters rejected the referendum last year. In their joint statement last week, school officials did not say how they will try to convince voters to approve a referendum next time.
In the wake of the vote last year, school staff claimed the district backtracked on promised pay increases, while district officials said they needed to ensure their schools remained financially stable.
While the Smyrna Education Association is not legally allowed to strike, union members picketed district board meetings last fall, with dozens of teachers wearing black shirts, and some holding signs that said “Worth More Than 0%.”
The signs referenced the district’s decision to not increase the educators’ pay scale.
In October, the Smyrna Board of Education released a statement in response to the ongoing protests, stating it would be “fiscally irresponsible” to provide raises with “non-sustainable funding.”
The board also cited recent inflation in its statement, saying Smyrna schools will have to spend $750,000 more this year just to maintain the level of services they previously provided.
In Delaware, educators’ salaries are funded by a combination of state and local tax revenue, with the state paying approximately 70% of an individual’s total salary.
The post Smyrna School District, teachers union reach deal on pay raises appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
As the number of people with cameras on their dashboards and doorbells has grown, so have reports of such sightings.
If you’re looking for the best hair dryer for your specific hair type and budget, we tested popular models from Shark, Dyson and more.
Federal health officials posted a warning about misleading statements by biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong about his company's bladder cancer drug Anktiva.
Apple has the cutting-edge sci-fi you're looking for.
The 37-year-old may come across as corny and gauche. But he’s already won one NBA championship and it probably won’t be his last
The Boston Celtics’ head coach, Joe Mazzulla, is a very odd man. He is also a very good coach.
Take, for example, a story Celtics guard Derrick White told in an interview last November. According to White, the first sound at one Celtics practice wasn’t a whistle.
Continue reading...Trump’s oil blockade is starving the island of vital resources. His brute force isn’t making America great again – it’s breeding resentment across the globe
The US has become a power that knows only how to destroy. In the Ramón González Coro maternity hospital in Havana, Cuba, I saw what that looks like in human terms.
Maria lies on a hospital bed, wrapped in a dark blue blanket, two friends at her side. She is 50, with terminal cervical cancer, and nothing but praise for her doctors. But she is also a victim of a decades-long US siege, drastically intensified by Donald Trump’s decision earlier this year to threaten tariffs against countries that deliver fuel to Cuba. The result has been no fuel imports for three months, meaning the island is running out of diesel and fuel reserves. The electricity grid is collapsing and life is grinding to a halt.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Tony Burke says decisions about permanent stays should be ‘deliberate decisions of the government, not a random consequence of who booked a holiday’
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Iranian tourists will be banned from entering Australia for the next six months after the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, triggered tough new immigration laws over concerns visitors may not be able to return to Iran.
The ban could apply to up to 7,200 Iranians with valid tourist visas – though some may still be given the chance to enter the country under special consideration.
Continue reading...Report by Verdant says rooting out waste, fraud and tax avoidance would save money that could help improve public services
A “Doge of the left,” could save up to £30bn a year for taxpayers by rooting out waste, fraud and tax avoidance, according to the first report from a new green thinktank.
Launched amid growing interest in the future manifesto of Zack Polanksi’s Green party, the Verdant thinktank will be co-chaired by James Meadway, a former adviser to Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and civil society campaigner Deborah Doane.
Continue reading...Dayton Webber’s former playing partner says: ‘Dayton has a great family, and I care about that family. Yet obviously, there is somebody [who] died’
The former doubles partner of a professional, championship-winning cornhole player who had his four limbs amputated in his infancy and is now accused of a deadly shooting says he was shocked to learn about the case, calling it an instance of at least two families being torn apart in one fell swoop.
“I’ve been mad, sad – it sucks,” Mike Hoffman said of his past cornhole teammate Dayton Webber during a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is on the verge of giving the Portland Trail Blazers a major gift: hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to overhaul the team’s arena in an effort to keep the Blazers’ incoming owner, billionaire Tom Dundon, from moving the NBA franchise to a new city.
The deal came together with little public discussion of how Oregon and other states in 2020 landed a $550 million settlement with the car loan company where Dundon built his wealth. The settlement followed an investigation into lending practices that Oregon’s then-attorney general, in a news release, described as “predatory and harmful.”
Now, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica have obtained documents that reveal the role Dundon played in pushing some of the key company practices that regulators later presented as problematic.
Specifically, the documents show that Dundon, as the company’s CEO, was behind what regulators called an “aggressive push” at Santander Consumer USA in 2013 to waive requirements that car dealers prove borrowers had enough income to afford loans. The company would then charge more for those loans to ensure profit even in cases where borrowers ultimately failed to keep up with payments, according to internal emails and a slide deck that described findings in the multistate investigation.
Oregon officials wrote in their 2020 court complaint against Santander Consumer that many customers took out loans under the “false pretense” that they were acquiring a car they’d eventually own, when in fact the terms of the loans were so onerous that they would “almost certainly” result in the loan defaulting and the car getting repossessed.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, when asked about Dundon’s call for waiving proof of income on car loans when he was at Santander Consumer, said in a statement: “Proof of income requirements exist for a reason — they protect borrowers from being sold loans they cannot afford. When those guardrails get waived, dealerships win in the short term, and consumers lose.”
Rayfield, who was elected in 2024, is working with other state attorneys general in a continuing investigation into another auto loan company, Exeter Finance, where Dundon’s website lists him as an investor and where he has served as chairman of its board. Dundon left Santander Consumer in 2015.
“Working families put a lot on the line when they take out a loan,” Rayfield said, “and they deserve lenders who treat them fairly and follow the law.”
Dundon, whose deal to buy the Trail Blazers is expected to close on March 31, did not answer emails sent to his investment firm from OPB and ProPublica that included a copy of the newly obtained records and a list of questions. When provided separately with an overview of the story via text to his phone, he responded simply: “Can talk after 3/31.”
Exeter has said in regulatory filings that it is cooperating with the current multistate investigation. A spokesperson for Exeter declined to comment.
Asked for comment by OPB and ProPublica, Santander Consumer referred back to the statement it gave the newsrooms for an October story: “Operating in a highly regulated industry, we have robust processes in place that are designed to protect customers and adhere to all regulatory requirements and industry best practices.”
Lawmakers recently approved $365 million in public funding to renovate Portland’s 30-year-old Moda Center, home to the Blazers, one of Oregon’s most prominent businesses. The bill awaits Kotek’s signature. Combined with city and county money, the total proposed public backing has reached $870 million, far exceeding what the team originally asked for.
Kotek’s office did not respond when asked when she became aware of the investigations into businesses connected to Dundon and whether it affected her position on giving public money to the team. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to public remarks Kotek made in support of public funding for the Blazers arena as the Legislature adjourned.
“This is a great first step,” Kotek told reporters at the time. “We’re going to get the best deal possible for Oregon, and the economic impact of keeping not only the Blazers but all the activity at Moda is really important for the state.”
The chief sponsor of the bill, Senate President Rob Wagner, a Democrat representing the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego, also declined to answer when asked if he was aware of Oregon’s investigations into Dundon’s businesses.
“The Oregon Legislature does not have a role in who owns the Trail Blazers,” Wagner said in a statement. “Our goal all along has been to support the renovation of Oregon’s Arena so it can remain an economic and entertainment hub for the region.”
But a prominent critic of the deal with the Blazers said Dundon’s history with regulators is troubling.
State Sen. Khanh Pham, a Portland Democrat who cast one of just six no votes in the 30-person chamber, wrote at the time that she supported a public investment in the arena but worried the Legislature wasn’t including enough protections for taxpayers. She tried unsuccessfully to win amendments that would require the state to negotiate a private investment and revenue sharing with the Blazers.
Pham said she wasn’t aware of Dundon’s history in Oregon until OPB and ProPublica asked her about the newly obtained emails.
“This new information affirms that guardrails on public-private partnerships are important in all instances and especially this one,” Pham said in a statement.
Dundon was known as a key player in the rise of subprime lending to car buyers, a niche that supporters say makes car ownership possible for people with poor credit. He sold the subprime company he founded to a Spanish firm in 2006, retaining a 10% stake and becoming CEO of the newly formed company.
In January 2013, he took a step that would keep the company’s lending from being slowed down by people having to prove they could afford the cars they were buying. He set a plan in motion that would let the company advertise to car dealers that Santander Consumer wasn’t going to ask anymore for proof of income, or “POI,” in order to issue a loan.
“Lets do a test,” Dundon wrote to two of his senior employees, Karthik Chandrasekhar and Steve Zemaitis. “I want to waive poi more often.”
As the plan moved forward, Santander Consumer’s chief risk and compliance officer, Michele Rodgers, sent an email on Jan. 21, 2013, to Zemaitis and various senior executives expressing worry the company’s plan could violate federal law.
Rodgers identified potential concerns surrounding anti-money laundering and identity theft laws. She also noted that federal regulators were less than a year from implementing a new rule for another type of loan — home mortgages — requiring those lenders to “determine the consumer’s ability to repay both the principal and the interest over the long term.”
But the records collected by the attorneys general indicate the plan proceeded.
Two weeks after Dundon’s email, Santander’s marketing and sales teams got involved, records show.
Matt Fitzgerald, Santander Consumer’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, described a conversation with Dundon about “stips,” or statements stipulating the borrower’s income, address and phone number have been verified.
“I just rode up the elevator with TD and he wants us to market (fax, e-mails, sale handout) the waiving of stips to all dealers,” Fitzgerald wrote on Jan. 30, 2013. “And he wants to see these communications by the end of the day.”
He added: “We can serve it up to dealers that due to their good performance of the loans, we have decided to waive these certain stips to make it easier for you to close deals.”
Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve regulator who teaches finance at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, reviewed the state’s summary of the company’s correspondence and said it was troubling that internal concerns seemed to go unheeded.
Williams described proof of income as one of the pillars of bank lending.
“To say, ‘Sure, I’ll give you a loan and we don’t even care whether you make income or not,’ or, ‘You don’t even have to state your income,’ that’s counter to just sound banking practices,” he said.
By early February of that year, the company was days away from announcing its new plan to car dealers, including a fax-based marketing plan and promotional flyer, ready for final approval.
“Flyer looks good,” Robert O’Brien, senior vice president at Santander, wrote on Tuesday, Feb. 5, “however the POI change will not be in the system until Thursday.”
He suggested holding off a couple of days. Then Rodgers, the company’s chief risk and compliance officer, chimed in again with a question.
“What is the POI Change?” she asked.
“Tom wants to waive POI as much as possible and build in pricing to cover the incremental risk,” O’Brien wrote back. O’Brien said that their tests showed the stated income was correct on most loans, and that they would continue to require proof of income for dealers with a history of problems. He said they found that requiring proof of income “reduces capture especially in the nearprime segment.”
In other words, the company felt it was limiting its business opportunities by forcing potential customers to prove they could afford to pay back a car loan. Any increase in risk created by the new approach would be made up through fees and interest rates.
“I am just trying to ensure we aren’t disparately treating any of our customer base,” Rodgers wrote to O’Brien on Feb. 5, 2013. Under fair lending laws, companies are not allowed to enact policies that would have disparate impacts on certain groups of customers, such as people of a particular race or gender.
Dundon is not listed as a recipient on the emails that Rodgers sent, and the degree to which her concerns may have been shared with him is unclear from the company emails obtained by OPB and ProPublica.
However, in the slide presentation regulators gave to Santander Consumer, they said the remarks O’Brien and Fitzgerald described Dundon making showed he continued to push for waiving proof of income even after Rodgers raised red flags on Jan. 21. The slides characterized Dundon as “ignoring this internal concern” from his company’s risk and compliance officer.
Oregon’s subsequent 2020 legal complaint against the company alleged Santander Consumer did not, as O’Brien’s email suggested it would, continue requiring proof of income from dealers with a history of fudging borrowers’ incomes as it launched its new approach.
“When Santander rolled out this change to its funding requirements, Santander did not bar those dealers identified as ‘problematic’ by Santander from using stated income on loan applications,” Oregon’s attorney general wrote in the 2020 complaint. “Santander’s decision to broadly market its new stated-income policy, even to dealers with a history of misstating income, led to a significant spike in the number of early payment defaults.”
Dundon’s 2015 departure from Santander Consumer came with a separation agreement of more than $700 million, including cash for stock he owned, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Rodgers, Zemaitis and Chandrasekhar all left Santander Consumer and are currently listed as senior executives at Exeter Finance, a subprime car lender where a number of top Santander Consumer employees have landed.
They did not respond when OPB and ProPublica sent copies of the Santander Consumer correspondence in which they are named and requested comment. O’Brien and Fitzgerald are no longer alive.
Santander Consumer did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement it paid to 33 states — including Oregon — and the District of Columbia.
Six years after the settlement, Dundon and his associates are playing hardball in negotiations with state and city leaders to secure public money to revamp Portland’s Moda Center.
Although sports arena renovations in some cities have been 100% taxpayer-financed, at least 10 — including in Atlanta; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Florida; and Cleveland — have been funded wholly or partially with private money during the past decade. Just north of Portland, Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena opened in 2021 after $1.15 billion in renovations that were entirely privately financed.
That same precedent exists in Portland: When the Moda Center opened in 1995 — back then it was Portland’s Rose Garden — Blazers owner Paul Allen got $34.5 million from the city of Portland but financed the rest of the $262 million construction himself.
Dundon, too, has offered private dollars as part of arena renovations in the past. In 2023, he agreed to a new arena lease in Raleigh, North Carolina, for his professional hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. Raleigh put $300 million toward the arena while Dundon committed to investing $800 million over 20 years toward developing an entertainment district in the surrounding area.
Portland was a different story.
According to a January chat group message from a city employee whose job is to manage sports venues, a consultant for the team and Dundon’s billionaire ownership group was asking for the public to cover 100% of the cost to renovate the Moda Center.
A phalanx of lobbyists hired by the Blazers, meanwhile, were telling state lawmakers they’d need a total of $600 million, starting this year.
“The assumption that the incoming ownership group can finance an additional $600 million for Moda Center — which is now a publicly-owned community asset is not possible,” lobbying materials from the Blazers stated.
After state and local leaders concluded that the team’s initial ask wasn’t nearly enough to cover rising construction costs, they bumped up the investment to $870 million.
Team representatives wrote in the lobbying material that the Blazers’ future in Portland was at stake — and that a departure would threaten the city’s turnaround from pandemic-era headlines about downtown retail vacancies and crime.
“If the Portland Trail Blazers leave Rip City,” team officials stated, “we are losing far more than the tax revenue the Blazers generate for the General Fund. It would have a devastating impact on the City’s national and international reputation and would feed the ‘doom loop’ narrative we have all been working to refute.”
The Blazers did not respond to emailed questions. When asked about the lobbying effort in a March 17 interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud,” the Blazers’ President of Business Operations Dewayne Hankins said Dundon’s ownership group never explicitly told the team it would move without a public investment. But he noted that other cities are pushing hard to get an NBA team and said the Blazers had “heard rumblings” of interest.
“You have a team that has very few years left on their lease,” Hankins said of the Blazers. “You have a team that could potentially be portable.”
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson declined to say whether Dundon’s business history would affect the city’s ongoing negotiations with the Blazers after the late Paul Allen’s sister agreed to sell the team. The council plans to take up the issue of arena funding no later than this summer.
“Jody Allen chose to sell the team to the ownership group led by Tom Dundon,” Wilson said in a statement, echoing a point made by Oregon’s Senate president. “The City is not a decision maker in the process of approving franchise ownership changes; that authority lies exclusively with current team ownership and the NBA. The City will work in good faith with whoever owns the Trail Blazers.”
John Van Alst, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said state and local officials should use caution in negotiating with someone whose business the state previously accused of violating consumer protection laws.
“If they’re willing to violate those rules, I’d be concerned about doing business with them,” Van Alst said.
Van Alst said leaders in Portland, far more so than people buying a car through a subprime lender like Santander Consumer or Exeter, have options at their disposal as they negotiate for the Blazers’ future.
“They have more resources to make good choices, hopefully, than a lot of folks do who get themselves tangled up in really bad subprime auto financing,” Van Alst said.
The post New Portland Trail Blazers Owner Played Key Role at Company Oregon Accused of Predatory Lending appeared first on ProPublica.
Concern that Iran was amassing missiles to overwhelm defenses was a key factor in the push for war, officials said, and recent strikes laid bare Israel’s vulnerability.
The group was created a year ago to investigate Hamas terrorists and antisemitic attacks. Now many of its members have been fired or reassigned.
Triple J signed off with the hip-hop anthem Express Yourself while other radio and TV networks filled the air with BBC broadcasts, re-runs and soothing music
Broadcasters had warned their audiences that the ABC would look “a bit different” on Wednesday – and as the clock struck 11am, they weren’t wrong.
As more than 2,000 ABC staff walked off the job for the first time in two decades in protest of their working conditions, the public broadcaster’s news channel switched over to the BBC.
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Continue reading...The fragility of the global food system fills me with dread – and the war with Iran has exposed just how close to collapse it is
The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.
Drawing on years of scientific data, I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists – and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security, with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more. The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this."
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President urges people to reduce consumption after power line passing through Ukraine damaged by drones; Moscow spring offensive steps up. What we know on day 1,491
Moldova declared a state of emergency in the energy sector after a key power line with Europe was disconnected following Russian strikes in Ukraine. The declaration comes into effect on Wednesday and lasts for 60 days. The prime minister, Alexandru Munteanu, appealed to people to “avoid unnecessary consumption, especially during peak hours” and “stay united”, according to a statement from parliament. The former Soviet republic imports electricity from neighbouring EU member Romania, mostly via a power cable that passes through southern Ukraine. Moldovan authorities said crashed drones had been identified in Ukraine near the line and that “demining operations” were needed before repairs could be done. Restoring the power line itself was expected to take up to seven days, the energy minister, Dorin Junghietu was quoted by the Moldovan media outlet Ziarul de Gardă as saying. “Russia alone bears responsibility,” the Moldovan president, Maia Sandu, wrote on X, while the foreign ministry also condemned the Russian attacks. Russia has frequently targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since it invaded its neighbour in 2022.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has accused Russia of “absolute depravity” after Moscow fired an unprecedented daytime barrage across Ukraine, including on the historical centre of the western city of Lviv. “Iranian ‘shaheds’ [attack drones], modernised by Russia, are striking a church in Lviv – this is absolute depravity, and only someone like [Vladimir] Putin could find this appealing,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address. “The scale of this attack makes it abundantly clear that Russia has no intention of actually ending this war,” Zelenskyy added, vowing that Ukraine “will certainly respond to any attacks”.
Russia’s military said on Wednesday it had shot down 389 Ukrainian drones overnight in one of the largest attacks to date. Russian regions bordering Ukraine, as well as Moscow and northwestern Leningrad were the main areas targeted, according to the military.
Moscow appears to be stepping up a spring offensive intended to break Ukrainian resistance, writes Pjotr Sauer. Ukrainian officials said Moscow fired nearly 400 long-range drones and 23 cruise missiles overnight, followed by another 556 drones in an unusual daytime assault on Tuesday, hitting cities across the west of the country and killing at least seven people. Taken together, the barrage marks one of the largest aerial bombardments of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion more than four years ago. One Russian drone struck the Bernardine monastery, a 16th-century church in Lviv’s Unesco-listed medieval centre, causing damage, local authorities said.
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said his country would always support Russia in a thank-you letter to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Ties between the two have grown closer since Putin began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Pyongyang sending ground troops and weapons systems to aid Russia’s war effort. “I express my sincere thanks to you for sending warm and sincere congratulations first on my reassumption of the heavy duty as president of the state affairs,” Kim said in the message on Tuesday, the official Korean central news agency said. “Today the DPRK and Russia are closely cooperating to defend the sovereignty of the two countries,” Kim said, using the initials of the North’s official name. “Pyongyang will always be with Moscow. This is our choice and unshakable will,” he added. South Korean and western intelligence agencies have estimated that the North has sent thousands of soldiers to Russia, primarily to the Kursk region, along with artillery shells, missiles and long-range rocket systems. Analysts say the assistance has been provided in exchange for Russia’s provision of food and weapons technologies.
Continue reading...President’s declaration allows officials to tackle fuel hoarding or profiteering, while energy secretary says country will lean more heavily on coal
The Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos, has declared a state of “national energy emergency” as a result of the Middle East war, which his administration said posed “an imminent danger of a critically low energy supply”.
The state of emergency, which will initially last for a year, was declared just hours after the country’s energy secretary said the Philippines planned to boost the output of its coal-fired power plants to keep electricity costs down as the war wreaks havoc with gas shipments.
Continue reading...American No 4 seed beats Belinda Bencic 6-3, 1-6, 6-3 in quarter-final
Gauff next faces 13th seed Karolína Muchová for a place in final
Coco Gauff may be struggling with an unfamiliar arm injury, indifferent form and the pressure of attempting to transform her serve with the entire tennis world watching, but the one quality that will never evade her is her fighting spirit.
Under far from ideal circumstances, Gauff’s mental toughness continues to guide her through the Miami Open draw and to her best ever result at her home town tournament. She navigated a path into the semi-finals for the first time in her career with an arduous 6-3, 1-6, 6-3 win over Bencic.
Continue reading...Dozens of former Israeli military, police and spy chiefs describe situation as ‘organised Jewish terrorism’
Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, a Guardian analysis of legal data and public records show, creating impunity for a campaign of violence.
Attacks have spurred former prime minister Ehud Olmert to call for an intervention by the international criminal court (ICC), to “save the Palestinians and us [Israelis]” from state-backed settler violence, carried out with the complicity and sometimes participation of the police and military.
Continue reading...I had to deal with the energy shock in Germany after Putin invaded Ukraine. The solution now is the same: buy ourselves out of the fossil fuels trap
Yes, there are big differences between the war of aggression that Russia has now been waging against Ukraine for four years and the war the US and Israel launched against Iran. The biggest difference: the US is still a democracy. Even a president who considers himself all-powerful is not. From scathing press coverage to anger over high oil prices, fear of the midterm elections and – the capitalist form of democracy – falling stock prices, what people think makes a difference. That is why the US president is occasionally forced to change his mind. That is not the case in Russia.
Vladimir Putin had a clear plan: Russia wanted to occupy the whole of Ukraine and turn it into a satellite state or annex its territory. Putin was preparing for this war for years, in my view; this included a cheap energy trap into which he successfully lured Germany through the construction of Nord Stream 2 and the purchase of gas storage facilities and refineries by Gazprom and Rosneft.
Continue reading...I've had my pint since 2021 and used it almost every day until December of 2022 where it was left in storage for about 7 months. When I took it out of storage the battery turned on but if I tried to accelerate beyond 1 mph the nose would tip over and essentially turn off the board.
I'm pretty sure it's a battery issue but sending it to future motion now about 4 years after purchase, it's not covered by warranty and I am a broke high school student. If I try to repair it myself and if I do what batteries are cheap but have the same range? Or should I pay the $300 to send it back?https://www.reddit.com/submit/?source_id=t3_1s30w57&composer_entry=crosspost_nudge
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In Australia, the number of petrol stations running out of fuel continues to climb as the Middle East war drags on, with at least 184 dry across the country’s three most populous states.
On Tuesday, 51 service stations in the state of New South Wales were out of fuel and 164 out of diesel, compared with 38 and 131 respectively the previous day, premier Chris Minns said.
Continue reading...How America and China can avoid the blunders that led to World War I.
Moscow’s missteps offer a warning—and an opening—for Washington.
A pliant autocracy in Iran won’t solve America’s problems in the region.
The Justice Department's investigation of a $2.5 billion renovation project at the Federal Reserve found no evidence of a crime, a federal prosecutor privately conceded under questioning by a judge.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 25.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL). Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $12,700, and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail. It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday. The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability -- but critics say they are tools to quash dissent. The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention." Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organizations are adequately protected," Hong Kong authorities said on Monday. Changes to the bylaw was announced by the city's leader, John Lee, bypassing the city's legislative council. The NSL also allows for some trials to be heard behind closed doors.
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Grammy winner seeks more than $20m in damages over mistranslation of The Lion King chant
A Grammy-winning South African composer who wrote and performed the opening chant in Circle of Life for Disney’s The Lion King is suing a comedian for allegedly damaging his reputation by intentionally misrepresenting the song’s meaning on a podcast and in his standup routine.
Lebohang Morake’s lawsuit accuses the Zimbabwean comedian Learnmore Mwanyenyeka, known as Learnmore Jonasi, of intentionally mistranslating the chant, which launches the 1994 movie and is central to staged versions as well as Disney’s 2019 remake.
Continue reading...Lawmakers and President Trump appear to be edging closer to a framework to wrap up the Department of Homeland Security shutdown — but a breakthrough has remained out of reach. CBS News contacted every House and Senate office to ask what they're doing to end the shutdown.
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Gregory Bovino, the customs and border protection (CBP) commander who led the agency’s aggressive anti-immigration push in Minneapolis before being sidelined by the White House, has decided to go out with a bang it would seem.
Having announced his forthcoming retirement from the CBP, the publicity-hungry Bovino – known for his florid statements – has given an interview to the New York Times that stresses defiance over contrition.
Continue reading...The report also recommends government do more to make tech companies liable for ‘psychosocial harms’
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Australia’s climate change and energy “information ecosystem” is fuelling conflict in communities, with misinformation and disinformation confusing the public, slowing renewable energy projects and undermining policy responses to the climate crisis, a cross-party Senate inquiry has concluded.
The inquiry’s final report, released on Tuesday evening, recommended the government do more to make tech companies liable for “psychosocial harms” spread on their platforms.
Continue reading...Panel denies attorney general’s bid after Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 special-election ballots
A three-judge panel has denied a filing by California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, seeking a court order to stop the Riverside county sheriff’s department from continuing its recount of ballots from the November 2025 special election.
The LA Times reported that Bonta filed a petition with the fourth appellate district on Monday, writing that “the sheriff’s misguided investigation threatens to sow distrust and jeopardize public confidence” in upcoming elections.
Continue reading...March 24, 2026 — The Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors has selected Dan Reed — Emeritus Presidential Professor in Computational Science at the University of Utah — as the recipient of the 2026 CRA Distinguished Service Award, recognizing his sustained and transformative contributions to the computing research community through technical innovation, national policy leadership, and extensive professional service.
Dan Reed
Across more than four decades, Reed has helped shape the evolution of high-performance computing, national cyberinfrastructure, and U.S. science and technology policy, with leadership roles spanning academia, industry, and government.
“Professor Reed’s contributions to the computer research community, coupled with his innovative individual research, extensive policy service, and his collaborative spirit have had significant positive impact for our community, sustained over four decades,” said Charlie Catlett, Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.
Reed’s influence on the field has been widely recognized.
“Dr. Reed has been a global thought leader in advanced scientific computing for forty years,” said Jack Dongarra, Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee.
Through his technical achievements and policy leadership, Reed has played a pivotal role in advancing high-performance computing from a specialized capability into foundational infrastructure for science, commerce, and society.
A Career of Transformative Service
Reed’s career reflects a rare combination of deep technical impact and national leadership in computing research.
His contributions include:
Supporters also emphasized the breadth of Reed’s impact across research, policy, and community leadership.
“Professor Reed (Dan) is an outstanding scientist, a community leader, and a mentor. His many foundational and translational research contributions, coupled with his policy leadership and national and community service, have helped transform the field of high-performance scientific computing over the years and helped shape national policy,” said Manish Parashar, Presidential Professor and Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah.
About the Award
The CRA Distinguished Service Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding service contributions to the computing research community in government affairs, professional societies, publications, conferences, and leadership.
The CRA Committee on Awards – Selection reviews nominations and recommends recipients to the CRA Board of Directors, which votes on the awardees at its February Board meeting.
Recognizing a Computing Research Leader
Please join CRA in celebrating Daniel A. Reed’s exceptional contributions to the computing research community. If you have worked with him or benefited from his leadership, consider sharing this announcement and reflecting on how his work has helped shape the field.
More from HPCwire: 35 HPC Legends Daniel Reed
Source: Matt Hazenbush, CRA
The post Dan Reed Wins 2026 CRA Distinguished Service Award appeared first on HPCwire.
The orders follow weeks of speculation about whether the 82nd Airborne Division would join the war, after its headquarters unit abruptly pulled out of a training exercise this month.
President continues to tout ‘very good’ talks with Iran, which Iranian officials continue to deny – key US politics stories from 24 March 2026 at a glance
Donald Trump declared victory in his war on Iran on Tuesday amid reports that the US is in the process of deploying about 1,000 more soldiers to the region as the president touts “very good” talks with Iran are ongoing. Iranian officials continue to deny that.
Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to carry out strikes across Tehran and on other targets in the Islamic Republic. Israel indicated that it planned to occupy control over swaths of southern Lebanon in what one Hezbollah official told Reuters was an “existential threat” to the Lebanese state.
Continue reading...Sophomore season brings new characters, more energy and more blood, making for a can't-miss watch.
Growing numbers of young voters are signing up to the Māori electoral roll as debate flares over the need for dedicated seats ahead of November’s election
More young people have signed up to vote in Māori electorates, new figures from the electoral commission show, as New Zealand prepares for an election this year.
The rise comes after years of tense relations between Indigenous New Zealanders and the centre-right coalition government. The latest figures show 58% of eligible 18- to 24-year-olds have registered for the Māori roll, up from 50% in 2023.
Continue reading...The pilots killed in a collision between a jetliner and a fire truck on a New York runway have been identified as Capt. Antoine Forest and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther.
Thinking about getting a new tire for my Pint X to get ready for the summer season. I have put about 700 miles on the stock tire and I want something with tread since I live in a mountain town and regularly ride a mix of shitty pavement and gravel/trails. Im leaning towards the thundercat from TFL. Anyone have one on their pint x? Is it really that much different than the stock tire? If so, what changes should I expect?
Im also open to tire recommendations so have at it!
Arielle Konig took the stand to testify against her husband, anesthesiologist Gerhardt Konig, exactly one year after he allegedly tried to kill her by pushing her off a cliff during a hike in Hawaii.
This Android smartphone with a tactile QWERTY keyboard has already raised over $2.1 million.
 | I was looking at my XRC I’ve had for about 15 miles and I noticed the charger port looks like it’s bent inwards and I can see the inside of the rails. Any thoughts? [link] [comments] |
 | I was street riding my GT Rally Xl when the tire lost all pressure instantly. 205-pound rider; 18 psi checked that morning. I'm posting this so others are aware of this Future Motion wouldn't be covered under warranty, surprise! New tire in my future for sure. [link] [comments] |
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 25 #1018.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 25, No. 752.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 25 No. 548.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 25, No. 1,740.
President Trump said several members of his administration were involved in talks with Iran about the ongoing war.
A judge sharply questioned a lawyer for the federal government on Tuesday over the Pentagon's efforts to cut Anthropic's AI out of its classified systems.
Centre-left coalition appears likely as Social Democrats and other left-leaning parties win 84 seats, while right-leaning bloc wins 77 seats
Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats and Denmark’s other left-leaning parties appear to have failed to win enough votes to gain a clear mandate to form a government in an election fought amid geopolitical tensions with the US over Greenland.
With 100% of the vote counted in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the prime minister’s party won the most votes but performed worse than expected, with nearly 22% of the vote, leaving the Social Democrats and the other left-leaning parties that form the “red bloc” with 84 seats short of a majority in the 179-seat parliament.
Continue reading...Apple is testing a standalone Siri app, a new interface and deeper AI features for this year's software update, Bloomberg reports.
Democrats have vowed to keep forcing votes on the issue as they seek public testimony from administration officials.
Mette Frederiksen’s red bloc wins 84 seats, blue bloc wins 77 seats and Moderates win 14 seats
in Copenhagen
The far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) is attempting to win over voters by paying for their petrol.
“We would like to contribute to the debate about fuel prices, but we do not really have a desire to be party political.”
Continue reading...The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial. Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta prioritized profits over safety.
Democrats are pushing for reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Senate appeared to be closing in on a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
New Mexico hails ‘historic’ win after jury finds firm misled consumers over safety and enabled harm against users
A New Mexico jury on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties after it found the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users.
The lawsuit – the first jury trial to find Meta liable for acts committed on its platform – was brought by the state’s attorney general office in December 2023.
Continue reading...Nathan Newby set to receive George Medal for stopping a potential atrocity with an act of kindness
A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down.
Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal for bravery.
Continue reading...Nearly a thousand pounds of steak went into the meaty effort, and TSA agents, unpaid for weeks, ate the results
Philadelphia has set a world record for the “Longest Line of Cheesesteaks”, with 1,200ft of the city’s iconic sandwich stretching across the B/C connectors at the Philadelphia international airport (PHL).
The airport achieved the record on Tuesday with help from more than 100 employees and volunteers, who assembled foot-long rolls using 990lbs of Philly’s Best Steak and 225lbs of cheese sauce. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the full line took about an hour to complete.
Continue reading...DoD announces ‘interim’ policy for journalists decried by newspaper as ‘end-run around the court’s ruling’
The New York Times on Tuesday accused the Pentagon of disobeying a judge’s ruling that undid much of the restrictive agreement journalists were forced to sign or lose access to the building.
The judge, Paul Friedman, granted an injunction on Friday that overturned much of the language in the “media in-brief” document that had so concerned many news organizations that cover the Pentagon that almost all journalists chose instead to give back their press badges. He also ordered that seven journalists from the Times be returned their badges.
Continue reading...Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.
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After breaking heat records in 14 states, the heat wave pummeling the Southwest is moving eastward.
A command element and some ground forces are expected to be part of the Middle East deployment, according to a source familiar with the planning.
Tech firm ‘says goodbye’ to Sora, made publicly available in 2024, just six months after its launch of a stand-alone app
In an abrupt announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI said it was “saying goodbye” to its AI video generator Sora. The move comes just six months after the company’s splashy launch of a stand-alone app with which people could make and share hyper-realistic AI videos in a scrolling social feed.
“To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the company wrote in a post on X. “What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”
Continue reading...The New Mexico ruling comes as a Los Angeles jury is still debating whether Meta's social media platforms are addictive to children.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said the SAVE America Act “could disenfranchise over 20 million American citizens,” while Republicans dispute that the voter registration and ID bill would block any legitimate voters. Election experts say the bill, which isn’t expected to pass, would make it difficult for some unknown number of voters to register and cast a vote.
At times, Schumer has used more definitive language about the bill’s impact, saying that “more than 20 million legitimate people … will not be able to vote under this law” or that it “would disenfranchise tens of millions of people.”
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us the legislation wouldn’t meet the dictionary definition of “disenfranchise,” which is to “deprive a person of the right to vote.” But it would, as described by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, “‘make it harder and more expensive for [many people] to [register and] vote,'” Olson said in an email. “That extra hassle and expense would mean that some citizens eligible to register and vote will in practice not complete the needed process even though the bill does not take away their legal right to register or to vote.
“How many eligible people will fail to complete the process? Any estimate is guesswork at this stage in part because it depends on factors that the bill itself leaves unspecified,” he said.
Schumer’s 20 million figure comes from an estimate of the number of voting age Americans who don’t have easy access to citizenship documents that the bill would require to register to vote. According to a 2023 survey by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and other groups, more than 9% of Americans of voting age, or 21.3 million people, wouldn’t be able to “quickly find” documents such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers if they “had to show it tomorrow.” More than 3.8 million of those people don’t have those documents, the survey found.
That doesn’t mean that at least some of those Americans couldn’t obtain or find proof of citizenship in order to register to vote under the legislation. But some could find the process too onerous to complete, experts say. Under the bill, citizenship documents also would need to be presented in person to an election official if registering to vote for the first time or reregistering after moving, changing one’s name or making other changes to voter registration.
Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told us that “it’s definitely safe to say that millions of Americans would be blocked from voting” by the bill’s registration requirements, among other provisions. She noted that tens of millions of Americans register or update their registrations in the two years before elections. More than 103 million did so in the two years before the 2024 election, according to survey reports by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
“As many as 21 million could be stopped from voting” under the SAVE America Act, she said, because they lack ready access to a passport, birth certificate or naturalization document required under the bill for voter registration.
Schumer has repeatedly used the 20 million estimate, adding that these voters could be purged from the voter rolls and not know about it until they showed up to vote, at times linking this to a requirement under the bill for states to use a Department of Homeland Security database to remove noncitizens. “Our objection is it’s a voter suppression bill. Twenty million, maybe more people, when they show up to vote … will be told, you’re off the rolls. That’s the problem with the bill,” Schumer said in a March 17 press conference.
On the Senate floor the same day, the Democratic leader said, “It could purge millions of American citizens from the voter rolls through a screening algorithm designed by Elon Musk’s DOGE squad. It could disenfranchise over 20 million American citizens.”
The DHS database is known to have wrongly flagged as noncitizens some Americans who are, in fact, citizens. But the extent of those flaws is unclear — as is how voters might be notified and purged from voter rolls under the legislation.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn objected to Schumer’s remarks. On the Senate floor on March 19, Cornyn said that Schumer’s “general argument that American citizens would be denied the opportunity to vote is patently false. Thirty-eight states, including states like Georgia and Rhode Island, currently represented by Democrats, require voter ID. Are those states suppressing the vote? Is the minority leader suggesting that 38 out of our 50 states are actively engaged in voter suppression? Well, that is preposterous on its face.”
“So the idea that the SAVE America Act will disenfranchise legitimate voters is a bald-faced—well, let me try to be generous. It is not true, and he knows it,” Cornyn said, adding that Schumer was telling “people who may not be informed about the details of this that we are trying to take away their right to vote.”
Cornyn is nearly correct on the number: 36 states have some form of voter ID laws. But the requirements in the bill before the Senate are “stricter” than most of those state laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
We’ll explain what the bill would require for registering and casting votes, and how this could affect voters. (For more, see our article “Q&A on the SAVE America Act.”)
The SAVE America Act passed the House in February, and the Senate began debate on the bill on March 17. Similar legislation in recent years has failed to pass the Senate. A proposed Senate amendment would impose more restrictions on voting by mail, eliminating universal mail-in voting and only allowing mail ballots in certain cases, such as illness or disability, travel, or military service. Here, we describe the bill as it passed the House.
Republicans say the bill is needed to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections, though election experts say, and state audits have shown, this is rare.
Current federal law requires those registering to vote to attest that they are citizens under penalty of perjury. The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof, presented in person to election officials, for those registering or reregistering to vote.
This would happen “any time you conduct what we call a registration transaction, which usually comes from a life event, a move or a change of name,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works with election officials throughout the country, said in a March 18 media briefing.
For most people, this would likely mean showing a U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate along with a driver’s license or government-issued photo ID. As we’ve explained, the bill stipulates elements the birth certificate must have, such as a government seal.
Some voters could prove citizenship with other documents. A REAL ID driver’s license doesn’t typically show citizenship, but five states issue REAL IDs that do. Also acceptable under the bill: a military ID and service record that says the person was born in the U.S., or a government-issued photo ID that shows a U.S. birthplace. Those with government-issued photo IDs that don’t indicate citizenship would also need either the certified birth certificate or a hospital birth record, adoption decree, a consular birth report, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian card with the classification “KIC,” which designates U.S. citizenship for Mexican-born members of the Kickapoo tribes of Texas and Oklahoma.
As we said, surveys show millions of Americans could have trouble producing the proper citizenship documents. In addition to the 2023 survey Schumer has cited, the Bipartisan Policy Center, in analyzing the 2024 Survey on the Performance of American Elections, found that 12% of registered voters, the equivalent of 28.4 million citizens of voting age, lacked either a valid passport or a birth certificate they could easily find along with a valid government-issued photo ID.
For those who do have the proper documents, the requirement to show them “in person” could dissuade others from registering to vote. The bill says that people registering by mail won’t be registered unless they present “documentary proof of United States citizenship in person to the office of the appropriate election official.”
Sweren-Becker said that this in-person requirement would be “especially hard” for “working parents, people with disabilities, elderly voters, voters who live in rural areas.”
The bill calls for states to make unspecified “reasonable accommodations” for people with disabilities.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee said on the Senate floor on March 19 that claims about the legislation disenfranchising voters were wrong. “Ideally” Americans have the proper documents, he said, but “even if you do not have a single shred of documentation as to your citizenship — you can’t find it, it burned down, whatever it is — all you have to do is swear an affidavit.”
“The state is in a very good position to track down the details of the affidavit and easily confirm or refute what the person says,” Lee said.
The bill does provide a process for those who don’t have the required documents. It says: “Subject to any relevant guidance adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, each State shall establish a process under which an applicant who cannot provide documentary proof of United States citizenship … may, if the applicant signs an attestation under penalty of perjury that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and eligible to vote in elections for Federal office, submit such other evidence to the appropriate State or local official demonstrating that the applicant is a citizen of the United States and such official shall make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote in elections for Federal office in the State.”
The election official making that determination also would need to sign an affidavit “swearing or affirming the applicant sufficiently established United States citizenship for purposes of registering to vote.”
There’s a similar process for people whose names differ from their documents, such as married women who changed their names. They can provide “additional documentation” on the name discrepancy or sign an affidavit.
Olson said there’s uncertainty about these alternative methods of citizenship verification. Will they “be relatively easy and generous, accepting common sorts of documents and an uncomplicated sworn statement that most eligible persons will feel comfortable signing?” he asked.
States’ procedures will be governed by guidance from the Election Assistance Commission, the bill says, an independent agency that has two commissioners appointed by Trump and two appointed by former President Barack Obama.
“In short, we aren’t going to find out what the bill does on many key questions until after we pass it into law and the EAC begins issuing guidance,” Olson said. “One of the reasons I am critical of the bill is that I don’t believe we should be asked to take it on faith that the EAC will issue practical guidance in good faith. If the EAC is going to issue guidance that causes an uproar because it sets requirements many legitimate voters cannot meet, we should know that now, not later.”
Sweren-Becker said that the affidavit method “is only available if a state or local election official deems that the registered has sufficiently established U.S. citizenship … so it leaves an enormous amount of discretion in local and state election officials’ hands.” The bill also would impose criminal penalties and civil liability on election officials who register someone “who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship,” the legislation says. “So in practice,” she said, election officials “will face a lot of pressure to construe it [the affidavit method] very, very, very narrowly out of rightful concern about their own liability,” Sweren-Becker said.
Becker, in the March 18 briefing, said the legislation “would incredibly negatively impact voters across the political spectrum. … I don’t think there’s anyone who can say definitively, if this were to pass, which party would be hurt more by it,” he said. “I think it’s highly likely that Republicans would likely be more hurt” than Democratic voters, “because a lot of the voters who have difficulty digging up their documentary proof of citizenship are Republicans.”
In pushing back on Schumer’s comments about disenfranchisement, Cornyn spoke about the bill’s photo ID requirements for casting a vote. “Thirty-eight states, including states like Georgia and Rhode Island, currently represented by Democrats, require voter ID,” he said.
As we said, 36 states do have some form of voter ID laws, but the SAVE America Act is “stricter” than most of them, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The Republican bill would require “a valid physical photo identification” in order to cast a ballot in person. Those voting by mail would need to submit a copy of a photo ID, or the last four numbers of their Social Security number and an affidavit saying that they couldn’t obtain a copy of their ID.
A valid photo ID under the bill includes: a state-issued driver’s license or ID card issued by the motor vehicle agency that includes a photo and expiration date, a U.S. passport, a military ID, or a photo ID issued by a tribal government that includes an expiration date. There are exceptions for overseas uniformed services members and those who have the right to vote absentee via the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act.
The NCSL said most states’ laws are less strict. “Currently, each state determines the types of ID acceptable to vote, and that often includes student IDs, hunting and fishing licenses or other state-specific identification cards,” it said in a post on its website updated in March.
Thirteen states also accept non-photo identification, such as a bank statement. NCSL classified 10 of the voter ID states as having “strict photo ID” laws.
Georgia is one of them, but it still accepts a broader range of documents than the SAVE America Act would. Georgia accepts a student ID from a public college in the state, an expired state driver’s license, an employee photo ID from a government entity, or a free voter ID card issued by the state, among other documents, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office explains. To get an absentee ballot, a voter submits the number on a driver’s license or state-issued ID card, or a photo or copy of another listed ID, or a document that shows a name and address, such as a utility bill, bank statement or paycheck.
NCSL puts Rhode Island in its “non-strict photo ID” category, along with 13 other states. Rhode Island also issues free voter ID cards and accepts “ID issued by a U.S. educational institution,” the state Board of Elections says. No ID is required to cast a ballot by mail.
When we asked Cornyn’s office about his comments, a spokesperson pointed to some of his other remarks, including a March 19 post on X, which said: “These tactics are nothing more than fearmongering by Dems who are objecting to this because they want to make it easier for people to cheat. In a country with citizens bright enough to put a man on the moon and to build the strongest, most powerful military & the greatest economy the world has ever known, Americans are smart enough and capable enough to be able to locate their driver’s license when they cast a ballot and to establish their citizenship in order to qualify to vote. Any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous.”
Schumer also objected to the bill’s provision requiring states to submit their voter rolls to DHS’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program and remove noncitizens from their rolls. The legislation “could purge millions of American citizens from the voter rolls,” Schumer said in the March 17 press conference. He later added: “Our objection is it’s a voter suppression bill. Twenty million, maybe more people, when they show up to vote … will be told, you’re off the rolls.”
On the Senate floor that same day, he repeated the idea that people could be removed from voter rolls and not know about it until they try to cast a vote. “The way this works, you don’t have to be notified if you’re kicked off the rolls. You show up on Election Day and they say, ‘We’re sorry Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones, you’re not on the rolls anymore.’ And then they make it impossible to re-register. Certainly, on that day you lose your right to vote,” the senator said.
In March 15 remarks, he said the bill’s requirements for states to use the DHS system “will purge tens of millions of people from the voter rolls. Once purged, you don’t even know it.”
There are a couple of provisions regarding purging voters. The first requires states to use the DHS system “for the purposes of identifying individuals who are not citizens of the United States and taking the necessary steps to remove such individuals who are not citizens from the official list, after notice is given to such individuals and such individuals are given the opportunity to provide documentary proof of United States citizenship.” As we’ve explained, the DHS system has been shown to have flaws and has wrongly identified people as being noncitizens.
When we asked Schumer’s office about the language in the bill, a spokesperson said the bill included “a requirement that they [voters] be told they have been flagged,” but no requirements about what form the notice would take or the “length of time” people would be given to respond. And there’s “no language in the bill about notice to the voter that they have been purged,” the spokesperson said.
The bill doesn’t provide more details on how states should give “notice” and an opportunity to dispute incorrect information before removing people from the rolls; nor does it say people should be notified again before being purged.
There’s another provision in the bill that says states could remove someone “at any time.” It says: “A State shall remove an individual who is not a citizen of the United States from the official list of eligible voters for elections for Federal office held in the State at any time upon receipt of documentation or verified information that a registrant is not a United States citizen.” That provision doesn’t say anything about a notice given before removing someone.
Election experts told us there’s ambiguity in the bill regarding these provisions. We reached out to the offices of Sen. Lee and Rep. Chip Roy, the authors of the legislation, about this issue, but we haven’t yet received a response.
“[I]t’s not obvious that all of the ways people will be removed from the rolls will be subject by the SAVE Act to notice and an opportunity to respond,” Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, told us in an email. “I’d think there are constitutional protections that would kick in, but they’re not explicit in the statute, and that’d take someone litigating.” Levitt, who briefly was a White House senior policy adviser on voting rights during the Biden administration, said the bill “seems to contemplate at least some people being kicked off the rolls without being told,” though this could be a mistake in the drafting of the bill.
“As for how many, it’s a question I can’t answer,” he said, explaining that it depends on the accuracy of the SAVE database and how the process of comparing voter rolls works.
Olson told us that the provision on using the DHS SAVE system “appears to establish protections (notification and a chance to contest removal by supplying documents)” for voters flagged for removal under that system. But “some other persons removed from the voter rolls may not have rights to notification and challenge unless their states have separately legislated to provide such rights,” he said, pointing to the provision on states removing noncitizens “at any time.”
“So far as I can tell, this means that anyone, including the federal government or some private person or group, can send ‘documentation or verified information’ to a state that a certain person, or a list of persons, on its voter rolls are not U.S. citizens. The state then ‘shall’ remove them,” Olson said. “So long as this is not being done by the method carved out for the SAVE database and its intersection with state voter rolls in federal possession, I don’t see where the bill provides any assurance of notification.”
Sweren-Becker had the same reading of the bill. “Absolutely, I think that the second provision … indicates that people could be removed, but on the basis that something has flagged them as a noncitizen, without notice to the voter or an opportunity to provide evidence of their citizenship,” she told us. “And it is also important to note that it is very unclear what ‘documentation or verified information’ means” and from what sources. “I think there’s a risk that election officials may receive, essentially, purge lists generated by activist groups who are not doing careful list matching.”
As for how many legitimate voters could be removed from voter rolls through this process, “I don’t know how to hazard a guess there,” Sweren-Becker said, noting that “shoddy” purge lists by activist groups have listed thousands of people.
Schumer, however, has gone as far as saying that, under the bill, 20 million could be wrongly purged without knowing they were removed from the voter rolls. But that figure comes from the estimate of those lacking easy access to a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers. It’s not an estimate of voters who could be purged without their knowledge.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
The post Competing Claims on SAVE America Act Disenfranchising Voters appeared first on FactCheck.org.
OpenAI said Tuesday that it will discontinue the company's Sora app, which let users create AI-generated videos.
Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles. For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LaGuardia’s air traffic control tower failed to recognize it had granted permission for a plane and an emergency vehicle to use the same runway, officials said.
Nearly 100,000 claims have been filed by authors as the deadline looms.
State officials allege the federal government is trying to evade responsibility for shootings by officers amid an immigration crackdown that killed two citizens and wounded an undocumented immigrant.
The new initiative includes a base on the moon, a nuclear-powered flight to Mars and a replacement for the ISS.
March 24, 2026 — There’s a pattern in how complex technology matures. Early on, teams make their own choices: different tools, different abstractions, different ways of reasoning about failure. It looks like flexibility but at scale it reveals itself as fragmentation. The fix is never just more capability; it’s shared operational philosophy. Kubernetes proved this. It didn’t just answer “how do we run containers?” It answered “how do we change running systems safely?” The community built those patterns, hardened them, and made them the baseline.
Credit: Shutterstock
AI infrastructure is still in the chaotic phase. The shift from “working versus broken” to “good answers versus bad answers” is a fundamentally different operational problem, and it won’t get solved with more tooling. It gets solved the way cloud-native did: open source creating the shared interfaces and community pressure that replace individual judgment with documented, reproducible practice.
That’s what Microsoft is building toward. Since the last update at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Microsoft has continued investing across open-source AI infrastructure, multi-cluster operations, networking, observability, storage, and cluster lifecycle. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, the company is sharing several announcements that reflect that same goal: bring the operational maturity of Kubernetes to the workloads and demands of today.
Building the Open Source Foundation for AI on Kubernetes
The convergence of AI and Kubernetes infrastructure means that gaps in AI infrastructure and gaps in Kubernetes infrastructure are increasingly the same gaps. A significant part of the upstream work this cycle has been building the primitives that make GPU-backed workloads first-class citizens in the cloud-native ecosystem.
On the scheduling side, Microsoft has been collaborating with industry partners to advance open standards for hardware resource management. Key milestones include:
Beyond scheduling, Microsoft has continued investing in the tooling needed to deploy, operate, and secure AI workloads on Kubernetes:
What’s New in Azure Kubernetes Service
In addition to Microsoft’s upstream contributions, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has new capabilities across networking and security, observability, multi-cluster operations, storage, and cluster lifecycle management.
From IP-based controls to identity-aware networking
As Kubernetes deployments grow more distributed, IP-based networking becomes harder to reason about: visibility degrades, security policies grow difficult to audit, and encrypting workload communication has historically required either a full-service mesh or a significant amount of custom work. Microsoft’s networking updates this cycle close that gap by moving security and traffic intelligence to the application layer, where it’s both more meaningful and easier to operate.
Azure Kubernetes Application Network gives teams mutual TLS, application-aware authorization, and detailed traffic telemetry across ingress and in-cluster communication, with built-in multi-region connectivity. The result is identity-aware security and real traffic insight without the overhead of running a full-service mesh. For teams managing the deprecation of ingress-nginx, Application Routing with Meshless Istio provides a standards-based path forward: Kubernetes Gateway API support without sidecars, continued support for existing ingress-nginx configurations, and contributions to ingress2gateway for teams moving incrementally.
At the data plane level, WireGuard encryption with the Cilium data plane secures node-to-node traffic efficiently and without application changes. Cilium mTLS in Advanced Container Networking Services extends that to pod-to-pod communication using X.509 certificates and SPIRE for identity management: authenticated, encrypted workload traffic without sidecars. Rounding this out, Pod CIDR expansion removes a long-standing operational constraint by allowing clusters to grow their pod IP ranges in place rather than requiring a rebuild, and administrators can now disable HTTP proxy variables for nodes and pods without touching control plane configuration.
Visibility that matches the complexity of modern clusters
Operating Kubernetes at scale is only manageable with clear, consistent visibility into infrastructure, networking, and workloads. Two persistent gaps Microsoft has been closing are GPU telemetry and network traffic observability, both of which become more critical as AI workloads move into production.
Teams running GPU workloads have often had a significant monitoring blind spot: GPU utilization simply wasn’t visible alongside standard Kubernetes metrics without manual exporter configuration. AKS now surfaces GPU performance and utilization directly into managed Prometheus and Grafana, putting GPU telemetry into the same stack teams are already using for capacity planning and alerting. On the network side, per-flow L3/L4 and supported L7 visibility across HTTP, gRPC, and Kafka traffic is now available, including IPs, ports, workloads, flow direction, and policy decisions, with a new Azure Monitor experience that brings built-in dashboards and one-click onboarding. For teams dealing with the inverse problem (metric volume rather than metric gaps) operators can now dynamically control which container-level metrics are collected using Kubernetes custom resources, keeping dashboards focused on actionable signals. Agentic container networking adds a web-based interface that translates natural-language queries into read-only diagnostics using live telemetry, shortening the path from “something’s wrong” to “here’s what to do about it.”
Simpler operations across clusters and workloads
For organizations running workloads across multiple clusters, cross-cluster networking has historically meant custom plumbing, inconsistent service discovery, and limited visibility across cluster boundaries. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager now addresses this with cross-cluster networking through a managed Cilium cluster mesh, providing unified connectivity across AKS clusters, a global service registry for cross-cluster service discovery, and intelligent routing with configuration managed centrally rather than repeated per cluster.
On the storage side, clusters can now consume storage from a shared Elastic SAN pool rather than provisioning and managing individual disks per workload. This simplifies capacity planning for stateful workloads with variable demands and reduces provisioning overhead at scale.
For teams that need a more accessible entry point to Kubernetes itself, AKS desktop is now generally available. It brings a full AKS experience to the desktop, making it straightforward for developers to run, test, and iterate on Kubernetes workloads locally with the same configuration they’ll use in production.
Safer upgrades and faster recovery
The cost of a bad upgrade compounds quickly in production, and recovery from one has historically been time-consuming and stressful. Several updates this cycle focus specifically on making cluster changes safer, more observable, and more reversible.
Blue-green agent pool upgrades create a parallel pool with the new configuration rather than applying changes in place, so teams can validate behavior before shifting traffic and maintain a clear rollback path if something looks wrong. Agent pool rollback complements this by allowing teams to revert a node pool to its previous Kubernetes version and node image when problems surface after an upgrade (without a full rebuild). Together, these give operators meaningful control over the upgrade lifecycle rather than a choice between “upgrade and hope” or “stay behind.” For faster provisioning during scale-out events, prepared image specification lets teams define custom node images with preloaded containers, operating system settings, and initialization scripts, reducing startup time and improving consistency for environments that need rapid, repeatable provisioning.
Connect with the Microsoft Azure Team in Amsterdam
The Azure team is excited to be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026. Here are a few highlights of where to connect with the Azure team on the ground:
Source: Brendan Burns, Microsoft
The post Microsoft Advances Open-Source AI Infrastructure on Kubernetes at KubeCon Europe 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
Lens Plus subscribers can put themselves into a wide variety of AI situations.
Force previously said it was ‘too busy’ to investigate theft despite it potentially holding sensitive information
Police are revisiting a closed investigation into the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s phone after admitting they recorded the wrong address when he reported the crime.
Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff told the Metropolitan police that his phone was stolen in central London when he was returning home from a restaurant on 20 October last year, the Times reported.
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Two suspects have been arrested after a U.S. Park Police officer was wounded Monday evening in a shooting in Washington, D.C.
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President Donald Trump said that peace negotiations with representatives from Iran were ongoing: “They want to make a deal so badly.”
After Anthropic refused to let its AI to be used in autonomous weapons systems, Trump ordered US agencies to quit using it
Anthropic faced off against the Department of Defense in a federal court on Tuesday afternoon, as the artificial intelligence company seeks a temporary pause on the government’s decision to bar the US military and any contractors from using its technology. The two sides have been locked in an escalating feud over Anthropic’s refusal to allow its Claude AI chatbot to be used for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Donald Trump has ordered all US government agencies to stop using Anthropic’s tools, which the company is also contesting.
Representatives for the AI firm and the government appeared in a northern California district court, where Judge Rita Lin presided over the hearing for a temporary injunction. The hearing is one of the first steps in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the defense department, which it filed earlier this month after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, declared the company a supply chain risk – a designation that Anthropic alleges will cause irreparable harm and cost hundreds of millions or more in revenue.
Continue reading...Survey puts Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco ahead with Democratic vote split between large field of candidates
Republicans continue to lead the California governor’s race amid a crowded field of Democrats, a new poll commissioned by the state’s Democratic party found, fueling concerns of a conservative win in the famously liberal state.
The party on Tuesday published the results of a large-scale poll of 2,000 likely voters conducted by Evitarus Research that revealed that 16% of participants would back the conservative political commentator Steve Hilton in the upcoming primary, while 14% would support Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff.
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OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its generative-AI video creation platform it launched in December 2024. "The move is one of a number of steps OpenAI is taking to refocus on business and coding functions ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year," reports the Wall Street Journal. CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday. "We're saying goodbye to Sora," the Sora Team said in a post on X. "To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We'll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work." Last week, OpenAI announced plans to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts," said CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo. "That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want." This could behind the decision to kill Sora as the company redirects its resources and top talent towards productivity tools that benefit both enterprises and individual users.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The crackdown on foreign-made routers labeled a "national security risk" affects most major router brands.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Georgetown Mayor Bill West has been the subject of substantial criticism in recent months from a group of residents who have questioned his approach to housing and homelessness policy. His impending retirement will open the top seat in Sussex County’s seat, just as it seeks to address those concerns.
Longtime Georgetown Mayor Bill West, who has been the target of criticism amid a heated town debate over homelessness services, announced Monday night that he will retire at the end of his current term in May.
West’s announcement comes after several tumultuous months for elected officials in the Sussex County seat, which have devolved into shouting matches at town council meetings and frequent social media attacks.
Since last fall, West and other members of the town council have often found themselves at odds with a growing group of vocal residents who have criticized the town’s approach to homelessness. That group has repeatedly said it would seek candidates to run against West and other council members up for re-election later this spring.
Much of the tension in town has centered on the effectiveness of two homelessness service providers — the Shepherd’s Office and Springboard Delaware’s Pallet Village — and the town government’s consideration of a proposal by the nonprofit Little Living to build cottage homes in town.
West’s support for the homelessness service providers and the Little Living tiny homes drew a strong reaction from residents in opposition to those initiatives.
West, however, who has been mayor since 2014, said his decision to not seek re-election is not related to the pressure he has faced. Rather, he said it is time for him to lean into retirement and focus on his health and spending time with his family.
“You get to the point where your kids want to see more of you, your grandkids want to see more of you,” West told Spotlight Delaware before he made his official announcement at the March 23 town council meeting. “And somebody will continue that job after I’m gone.”
Town council members and residents supportive of West’s tenure as mayor say he worked tirelessly to bring more development to Georgetown.
“It’s going to be hard shoes to fill, as far as the amount of time that Bill has put in and the things that he’s accomplished in town,” resident Dennis Winzenreid said. “He’s a tough act to follow.”
West’s opponents, however, say they are relieved to see their pressure campaign pay off, and that there will be a new town leader for the first time in 12 years.
Members of the ballooning Facebook group in opposition to West’s government, Make Georgetown Great Again, which has grown to more than 5,000 members since early October, have coined the phrase “May is on the way” to rally support for new candidates in the upcoming May election.
Only one candidate, Geoffrey Walker, had filed for the mayoral election as of March 24, Town Manager Gene Dvornick told Spotlight Delaware. No candidates had filed for the two open council seats, currently held by Penuel Barrett and Eric Evans. But Dvornick said that is unsurprising, as candidates often wait until “five minutes before the filing deadline” to declare their candidacy.
The deadline to file for the May 9 town election is 5 p.m. Friday, April 17.
Tyler Scott, who created the Make Georgetown Great Again Facebook group and has been a prominent West critic, declined to say who, if anyone, his group plans to put up for election.
Scott said he is not worried about finding candidates, though, because his group still has “some time to see what’s going to happen” before the April filing deadline. Scott said he hopes to keep Barrett in office, but would like to find candidates for both West’s and Evans’ seats.
A number of members of the Make Georgetown Great Again Facebook group responded to West’s announcement with posts on the page Monday night, some praising West for his service to the town, and others expressing relief at his decision to step away.
West told Spotlight Delaware that he has asked five people in town whether they would be interested in running to take his place, but each person declined.
“Nobody wants any part of it,” West said.
In the 2024 mayoral election, West defeated Angie Townsend, who was a town council member at the time, by a narrow margin of 34 votes.
Councilwoman Christina Diaz-Malone, who is currently serving as West’s vice mayor, praised the “one-on-one care for the people in town” that West has provided during his tenure.
But Diaz-Malone said she has no interest in running for mayor herself. She plans to step away from her position on the town council when her term is up in May 2027, she added.
Evans said he has still not decided whether he will run again, and it depends on whether any other candidates toss their hat in the ring.
“If nobody runs, then yeah, I’ve got to step up to continue on,” Evans said. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
Council members Penuel Barrett, who is up for re-election this spring, and Tony Neal, whose term runs through May 2027, did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
Reflecting on his time as the leader of Georgetown’s government, West said he is proud of the work he has done to encourage cohesion between the diverse communities in town, and bring more commercial and residential development within town limits. He brushed off the criticism he has faced in recent months as something he has experienced at various points during his time in office.
“Every town is going through the same thing right now,” West said. “I’ve not let it worry me because I stay focused on things that I need to do to improve this town of Georgetown.”
West took office as mayor in May 2014, following a two-year term as a member of the town council. Before serving in municipal government, West worked for 25 years as a state trooper.
He highlighted some of the organizations that have come to town during his tenure, such as PAM Health Rehabilitation Hospital, the new Sussex County Family Court House building and some restaurants near the Delaware Technical Community College Owens campus, which he said have incentivized people to stay in town, instead of moving elsewhere.
Diaz-Malone, West’s vice mayor, said she has seen how the relationships West has cultivated with state lawmakers and Delaware’s federal delegation have been key to bringing more funding and opportunities to the town.
“He knows a lot of people,” she said. “Bill likes to experiment with solutions.”
West has also served as the president of the Sussex County Association of Towns for the past six years and the vice president of the Delaware League of Local Governments since 2022.
After his term as mayor ends, West wants to continue to be involved with a couple projects that began when he was in office, including the building of a new ChristianaCare campus in Georgetown and helping to advise the town police department.
While the mayorship is considered to be a part-time position, West said he would encourage the next mayor to approach it as a full-time endeavor, as he has, to really be successful in bringing change to the community.
“You can’t just sit in the town hall,” West added. “You have got to be out. You have got to be talking to people.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Geoffrey Walker’s name. A previous version incorrectly referred to the Georgetown mayoral candidate as Jeffrey Walker.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
The post Georgetown Mayor West will retire, opening May election appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
March 24, 2026 — Two of the world’s leading quantum technology conferences will join forces in Chicago this year as the Q2B26 x Chicago Quantum Summit, hosted by QC Ware and the Chicago Quantum Exchange.
Event will be held December 8 – 10 at Marriott Marquis Chicago and McCormick Place
The event, to be held December 8–10 at the Marriott Marquis Chicago and McCormick Place, combines Q2B’s quantum business, practical application, and investor strength with the Chicago Quantum Summit’s integrated focus on research, scale-up, and economic development, offering opportunities for participants to engage with thought leaders, explore partnerships, and build skills across the full discovery-to-deployment spectrum.
“After building Q2B into the pre-eminent quantum conference in Silicon Valley, we wanted to explore a new partnership and location for the US edition of Q2B. Chicago was obvious choice,” said Matt Johnson, the co-founder and CEO of QC Ware, a leading software and development firm that launched Q2B in Mountain View, California, in 2017. “The region’s local stakeholders are deeply committed to building a Midwest quantum hub and bringing together global leaders in the sector. All of that is supported by the unparalleled research and innovation ecosystem.”
The partnership reflects both the growing strength of the Quantum Prairie, a globally recognized quantum hub that spans Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, and the evolution of the fast-growing quantum sector, which is on the cusp of commercial utility.
“At this pivotal time in our sector’s development, it is more important than ever to foster the collaboration that will drive our sector toward real-world impact,” said David Awschalom, the University of Chicago’s Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics and the founding director of the CQE, an intellectual hub that advances the science and engineering of quantum information, prepares the quantum workforce, and drives the quantum economy in collaboration with leading universities, national labs, and industry partners. “This partnership is an opportunity to further integrate the full spectrum of elements that will shape the sector’s growth, from cutting-edge breakthroughs, startup support, and supply chain security to workforce development, investment strategies, and policymaking. By thinking and working comprehensively, we create an efficient path to a revolutionary quantum future.”
Q2B x Chicago Quantum Summit will feature three days of intense networking, cutting-edge discussions, exclusive announcements about products and initiatives, and hands-on demonstrations from the forefront of the quantum industry and academic research. Attendees will hear from thought leaders across government, academia, and Fortune 500 corporations who are shaping the quantum future and building the roadmap to quantum value.
The event also will feature the Boeing Quantum Creators Prize competition and presentations, a trainee poster session, and other key Summit offerings. The CQE will also host the 2026 Chicago Quantum Recruiting Forum on Monday, December 7, the day before the Summit opens.
The CQE, which launched the Summit in 2018, is based at the University of Chicago and anchored by the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Northwestern University, and Purdue University and includes nearly 70 corporate, nonprofit, international, and regional partners.
Learn more on the CQE event page and on the Q2B website.
For media inquiries, contact Tyler Prich or q2b@qcware.com.
Source: CQE
The post QC Ware and CQE to Co-Host Q2B x Chicago Quantum Summit appeared first on HPCwire.
The commercial-free service is now available as an add-on subscription.
“Take a picture of a bus, if you see one, because it’s the last one you’ll see here in Cuba,” my taxi driver said. We were headed into Havana in his Chinese electric car during a trip I made to the island earlier this month.
The car is a novelty on Cuba’s crumbling streets, which are crowded with bikes and electric motorcycles and flanked by new solar parks and in-demand diesel generators. It’s also a lifesaver now more than ever amid a near-total oil blockade that has plunged the island’s residents into a profound state of uncertainty, fear, and hopelessness.
As the Trump administration starves Cuba of fuel in an attempt to force political and economic change on the island, conditions on the ground have grown more dire than I’ve ever witnessed in the 11 years I’ve been traveling there — including several years working as a journalist during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country’s tourism-dependent economy was brought to a standstill.
Signs of the oil blockade are everywhere you look. Street corners are turning into trash dumps, transportation is prohibitively expensive, inflation is climbing, food is rotting in ports and refrigerators, and access to running water is intermittent, at best.
A friend will not get to see his child be born, as his wife — one of many Cubans with dual Spanish citizenship — has flown across the Atlantic to give birth in Spain due to the dire state of Cuba’s state-run hospitals, once among the region’s best.
Another friend with severe cataracts, who had undergone months of tests and lab work ahead of a surgery finally scheduled for February, learned the week before that it had been postponed indefinitely. Now, she can no longer see out of her left eye.
A third friend saw the cost of the wedding for which he’d been saving up for years double from one day to the next, as prices soared when the small reserves of fuel his vendors had got down to the last drops.
The Trump administration’s wager that depriving Cuba of oil would either provoke a mass uprising, browbeat the island’s authorities into subservience and a change in leadership, beget a free-market paradise — or some ill-defined combination of the three — is just the most recent in a series of “maximum-pressure” actions Secretary of State Marco Rubio has devised in an attempt to dislodge Cuba’s rulers from power, a longtime goal for him and for many Cuban Americans.
This campaign has been ongoing since Trump’s first term, when Rubio, the president’s de facto secretary of state for Latin America, helped restrict Americans’ ability to travel and send money to the island; cut off Cuba’s access to international finance; shutter the U.S. Embassy in Havana; and deploy dozens more sanctions over everything from hotel contracts and cruise lines to banking and investment, most of which were kept in place under the Biden administration.
Now, in Trump’s second term, the maximum-pressure strategy for which Rubio has taken full credit has accelerated into full gear. Not only has the administration coerced Venezuela and Mexico, until recently Cuba’s two largest fuel suppliers, into halting oil shipments to the island, it has also pressured Central American and Caribbean countries to drop their medical services contracts with Cuba, privately encouraged regional neighbors to sever diplomatic ties with the country, and stopped issuing most visas for Cuban nationals, including for family reunification, scientific and business exchanges, humanitarian parole, and other purposes.
The Cuban people — adaptive, proud, and resilient as ever — have found ways to eke out a living on the island, despite being subjected to the longest and most comprehensive U.S. sanctions regime.
In part due to these sanctions, the island’s economy is projected to shrink by more than 7 percent in 2026, while over the past several years, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has nearly doubled, and some 20 percent of its population has left.
And yet, the Cuban people — adaptive, proud, and resilient as ever — have found ways to eke out a living on the island, despite being subjected to the longest and most comprehensive U.S. sanctions regime anywhere on Earth and stymied by insufficient Cuban government efforts to kickstart an outdated economy.
Thousands of private businesses, which have also been hamstrung by Trump’s oil siege, continue to sell imported, even American, goods, albeit at prices that are exorbitant for the majority of the population. Community projects, churches, and civil society organizations organize ad-hoc soup kitchens to feed the most vulnerable. Foreign governments, even those that have buckled under U.S. pressure like Mexico, continue to send vital aid to the island, as do U.S.-based activists, religious groups, and Cuban Americans.
Despite limited access to the most basic supplies, engineers are rolling out new solar infrastructure faster than any other country in the world, electrical technicians are restoring the country’s collapsed power grid even quicker than before, doctors are saving lives against all odds, and Cubans are inventing workarounds to conditions that seem totally unworkable.
Trump’s gambit is to once again make the island dependent on the United States by simultaneously engineering state collapse while controlling the resources entering the country’s nascent private sector. This strategy will only exacerbate rising inequality on the island by drawing clear lines around who gets to live and who is condemned to die.
As the president floats “taking over” Cuba by means “friendly” or not — amid secret negotiations rife with speculation, misinformation, and trial balloons — it’s those who depend the most on public services to survive, rather than well-connected, middle-class entrepreneurs, who will have no other choice but to seek refuge on U.S. shores or perish before making it that far, if the state collapses.
Despite these dire circumstances, Cubans are increasingly optimistic that a negotiated solution with the U.S. that avoids military action and tangibly improves quality of life on the island — not entirely dissimilar from the one President Barack Obama pursued a decade ago — might be possible.
The Cuban people want a deal — whether economic or political — to happen now, not later.
While Rubio has disputed recent reports that the U.S. only seeks to remove Cuba’s president and keep the rest of its power structure intact, he also indicated he may be open to gradual, economic reforms on the island, as opposed to the maximalist, unconditional political changes he has long demanded — a red line for Cuban authorities. To prevent outright humanitarian collapse, the administration has authorized fuel sales, including from Venezuela, to Cuba’s private sector — some of which are already arriving — and sent humanitarian aid to hurricane-stricken eastern Cuba through the Catholic Church.
Cuban authorities — with their backs up against the wall and no assurances that a Russian crude oil tanker barreling toward the Caribbean won’t be intercepted by U.S. Coast Guard cutters off the island’s northeast coast — have responded to U.S. pressure by releasing political prisoners, loosening restrictions on private enterprise, and making important, if long-overdue, overtures to Cuba’s diaspora to reconcile with their homeland. Rubio has responded that these changes aren’t “dramatic” enough and the island needs “new leaders,” while other administration officials prepare indictments against Cuban leaders and threaten that the switch from negotiation to military action could be imminent.
No matter what agreement, if any, ultimately emerges between the two governments, what’s clear is that the Cuban people want a deal — whether economic or political — to happen now, not later. As the situation on the ground becomes increasingly unsustainable for the Cuban people, that may mean leaving in place for the time being the regime that Trump has promised to topple and allowing fuel to flow once again in exchange for a few meaningful concessions, even if further-reaching reforms get pushed down the road.
As prominent Republicans grow concerned about the potential for humanitarian catastrophe and a migration crisis brewing just off U.S. shores, nothing is stopping Trump from achieving the deal with Cuba he has always wanted — one that’s hammered out, as Rubio has said, by “mature and realistic” negotiators on both sides who understand the country “doesn’t have to change all at once.”
With tensions continuing to mount, military preparations underway on both sides, and Trump assuring he’ll be turning to Cuba “very soon,” it’s more urgent than ever that an agreement — the contours of which are still not publicly known — be reached as soon as possible. Countless Cuban lives may very well depend on it.
The post U.S. Oil Blockade Could Condemn Cubans to Die Without a Deal appeared first on The Intercept.
OpenAI is pushing to build more business- and coding-centric tools, the kind Anthropic excels at.
The new Pokemon game will provide the standard battle format for the 2026 Pokemon World Championships.
Tania Warner says she has documents showing she is in the US legally, but immigration agents were not swayed
A Canadian woman who has been imprisoned with her seven-year-old daughter by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has cautioned other immigrants that they are at risk of detention, even if they follow the correct legal process – and warned them to keep out of sight for as long as Donald Trump is president.
“Don’t go anywhere near a checkpoint, and if your papers are in processing, just lay low. Trump meant what he said – he is trying to get rid of everyone, whether they are good or bad,” said Tania Warner, 47, who is currently held with her autistic daughter, Ayla, at the Dilley immigration processing center in south Texas.
Continue reading...Senate leader proposes compromise to fund homeland security shutdown amid chaotic scenes at airports
Donald Trump on Tuesday swore in Markwayne Mullin as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while Senate Republicans unveiled a compromise that would restart funding to most of the agency but appears to exclude reforms to immigration enforcement Democrats have demanded.
The two parties have been at an impasse over DHS funding since mid-February, after Democrats insisted any legislation include new guardrails on immigration enforcement after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis.
Continue reading...Board and players unanimously approve new CBA deal
Seven-year agreement runs through end of 2032 season
Free agency, expansion draft now come in quick rush
The WNBA’s board of governors unanimously ratified the terms of a new collective bargaining agreement on Tuesday.
Their vote came a day after the players also unanimously approved the seven-year CBA, which will begin this season and run through 2032. It represents a landmark labor deal for the WNBA and its players. Under the terms of the new deal, the minimum salary for the league will be $270,000 – last season the maximum salary was about $250,000. There will be hefty rewards for the best players, with the supermax salary coming in at $1.4m. The salary cap for each team this coming season will be $7m, up from $1.5m in 2025.
Continue reading...  | As the title suggests, I'm installing some Ice Blocks on my GTV to try to reduce the annoying overheating I get during my rides. However, if my main concern is heat dissipation, should I remove the stainless steel axle rods while I install the new blocks? For those that don't know, the axle rods were a fix for the design flaw of the GT axle that had some folks shearing (snapping) their axles with heavy load. Essentially they are just solid stainless steel rods that take up the air space in the axle while adding shear strength. Since the cold blocks add some stiffness to the axle (or at least change the orientation of the axle to the stronger load path) I'm thinking that the axle rods might be redundant? But mostly, I'm wondering if removing the axle rods will help with heat dissipation or hinder it? ChatGPT says the steel rods act kind of like a "heat sponge" but I'm unclear whether that's a good or bad thing. Would love to hear from the community regarding my best option. [link] [comments] |
In an on-going overhaul of NASA's Artemis program, agency officials say it will take seven years to build a sophisticated base on the moon.
Trading in crude oil futures spiked only minutes before President Trump postponed an ultimatum on Iran, causing oil prices to drop and stocks to surge.
A Venezuelan man who was deported from the U.S. and detained at CECOT prison in El Salvador has become the first known ex-prisoner to sue the U.S. for damages.
Some airlines are issuing waivers for travelers eager to avoid hours-long waits for TSA security screening. Here's what to know.
Former congressman David Rivera, accused of secretly lobbying for Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela, climbed Miami politics alongside Marco Rubio.
Because putting down the controller is not an option.
Arm unveiled its first self-developed data center chip, the AGI CPU, designed for handling agentic AI workloads. The new chip was built in partnership with Meta and manufactured by TSMC. Other customers for the new chip include OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, and SK Telecom. Reuters reports: The new chip, called the AGI CPU, will address data-crunching needed for a specific type of AI that is able to act on behalf of users with minimal oversight, instead of responding to queries as part of a chatbot. For years, Arm, majority-owned by Japan's SoftBank Group has relied only on intellectual property for revenue, licensing its designs to companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia and then collecting a royalty payment based on the number of units sold. "It's a very pivotal moment for the company," CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters. The new chip will be overseen by Mohamed Awad, head of the company's cloud AI business, and Arm has additional designs in the works that it plans to release at 12- to 18-month intervals. TSMC is fabricating the device on its 3-nanometer technology and is made from two distinct pieces of silicon that operate as a single chip. Arm plans to put it into volume production in the second half of this year but has received test chips that function as expected. In addition to the chip itself, Arm is working with server makers such as Lenovo and Quanta Computer to offer complete systems.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Argonne’s chip compresses and processes detector data instantly, letting scientists analyze results and steer experiments as they happen
March 24, 2026 — Every second, scientific experiments produce a flood of data — so much that transmitting and analyzing it can slow down even the most advanced research. To help scientists better manage this data deluge, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new computer chip that rapidly compresses and processes the huge amounts of data generated by advanced X-ray detectors, like those at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne. By compressing data right at the source, like shrinking a movie or song to make it easier to send, this technology makes experiments faster, more efficient and more insightful than ever.
Silicon chip that integrates both imaging sensors and data compression, shown next to a U.S. penny and resting on grains of sand. This chip was co-designed by Argonne and SLAC. Image credit: Antonino Miceli/Argonne National Laboratory.
When X-rays or electrons hit a sample, detectors capture the resulting signals — much like a digital camera captures light to produce photos. These signals are converted into electrical pulses and then digitized into numbers that computers can process. But with modern detectors, the amount of data generated is enormous. Every frame, even those with little useful information, is sent out for storage and analysis. This can overwhelm computer systems and slow down research, making it harder for scientists to find what matters most.
“Our goal is to bring more computing right where the data is generated,” said physicist Antonino Miceli of Argonne and the University of Chicago. “In our earlier work, we showed how advanced mathematical techniques could shrink data while keeping the important parts for analysis. Now, using new chip technology and improvements in microelectronics, we’ve built a chip that puts the math right inside the detector. Using data collected at the APS 8-ID beamline, the detector can compress the data instantly as it’s acquired.”
This means scientists can do key calculations directly on the compressed data, without needing to decompress it first. Consequently, they can analyze results and get feedback much faster, even while the experiment is still running.
Guided by data: Chips That Learn from Experiments
Building on their work, the team has now implemented a fast, compact matrix-math processor into the detector chip itself. Instead of sending every pixel off the instrument, the chip distills each image into a compact set of numbers that preserves the most important features for scientists. The output is always the same size and streams in real time, making it easier to manage and send.
To make the chip even more useful and flexible, it can be customized for each experiment. Before or during an experiment, scientists can upload preset “weights” — settings that tell the chip what features to keep. This process is similar to training an artificial intelligence (AI) model. Using sample data, the chip can be programmed to focus on what is most relevant for each experiment.
“In essence, the chips can be trained on what’s most important for the experiment, so it can compress and reduce data on the fly,” explained Tao Zhou, an Argonne scientist who works on the beamline shared by the APS and the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM). “The hardware is flexible and can be adapted for different types of compression or data reduction such as radial integration.” CNM is a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.
Tests and design studies show this on-chip approach can reduce data by about 100 to 200 times, while running at speeds of up to a million frames per second. That means less data to move, lower power use and fewer cables, making experiments cheaper, more efficient and easier to scale up.
By combining smart data compression with fast hardware, scientists can get answers in real time and adjust their experiments right away. This helps speed up the cycle of discovery and makes the most of every minute at the beamline. The Argonne team is now working to move this chip from the design stage to large-scale fabrication and use in real experiments.
“Experiments at the APS will benefit significantly from this technology,” Miceli said. “Often, the detector, not the X-ray source, is the limiting factor. To fully use the capabilities of the source, we need technology like this. This work also shows how collaborations between detector developers and domain scientists can be very impactful.”
The results of this research were published in the Journal of Instrumentation.
Other contributors to this work include Rami Rasheedi, Mohamed Adel Gharib and Salma Abdelzaher (Argonne, University of Illinois Chicago); Nicholas Contini (Argonne, Ohio State University); Mike Hammer and Henry Shi (Argonne, University of Chicago); Senthil Gnanasekaran, Sebastian Strempfer, Tejas Guruswamy, Kazutomo Yoshii and Angelo Dragone (Argonne); Yu-Sheng Chen (University of Chicago); Lorenzo Rota, Dionisio Doering and Angelo Dragone (DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory).
This study was funded by the DOE Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Basic Energy Sciences (BES). This work was primarily supported by the AUREIS project, part of Microelectronics Energy Efficiency Research Center for Advanced Technologies, and the Morpheus project, supported by DOE BES/Scientific User Facilities Division’s Accelerator and Detector R&D program.
Source: Amber Rose, Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne: New Chip Tech Enables Real-Time Insights from Scientific Data appeared first on HPCwire.
PM’s most costly quarter for travel was in last quarter of 2025, with the most expensive trip to Cop30 in Brazil
Keir Starmer’s government is spending an increasing amount on foreign trips, with almost 40 visits abroad adding up to more than £4m since he took office, the latest transparency figures have showed.
The prime minister had his most costly quarter for foreign travel in the last three months of 2025, with eight trips adding up to £1.2m.
Continue reading...COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 24, 2026 — Vertiv, a global leader in critical digital infrastructure, today announced four new or expanding manufacturing facilities in the Americas, growing the company’s production capacity for infrastructure solutions, power management, and integrated cabinets. As data center operators focus on scaling quickly and time to first token speed, Vertiv is uniquely positioned to help meet the rapidly evolving infrastructure and services requirements for AI factories, through its focus on innovation and manufacturing footprint.
“Vertiv sees AI as a long-term, secular trend, and we are accelerating our capacity expansions to anticipate the continued growth in demand,” said Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi. “Today’s announcement represents the most recent steps in our continuous capacity planning and deployment approach, as we further increase our regional and global footprint. We remain committed to our strategy of delivering future-ready, high-density solutions that enable our customers to plan confidently for multiple generations of compute ahead.”
Vertiv’s innovation and portfolio strategy reflects the demands of the AI revolution, which requires infrastructure that works as one integrated system. From grid to chip and chip to heat reuse, Vertiv delivers end-to-end infrastructure where power, cooling, IT, and services operate in unison and are built for multiple compute generations ahead. Backed by the recent regional manufacturing capacity and an industry-leading end-to-end portfolio, Vertiv is enabling customers to deploy efficiently and scale seamlessly.
For more information on Vertiv’s end-to-end power and cooling systems and services, innovative infrastructure solutions, and validated AI reference designs, visit Vertiv.com.
About Vertiv
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extends from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv does business in more than 130 countries. For more information, and for the latest news and content from Vertiv, visit Vertiv.com.
Source: Vertiv
The post Vertiv Expands Americas Manufacturing Capacity with 4 Facilities for AI Data Center Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
CAMBRIDGE, England, March 24, 2026 — Arm Holdings plc today announced the next evolution of the Arm compute platform, extending into production silicon products for the first time in the company’s history. This begins with the launch of the Arm AGI CPU, an Arm-designed CPU for AI data centers, built to address a rising class of agentic AI workloads.
Credit: Shutterstock
For more than three decades, the industry has innovated on the Arm compute platform to deliver scalable, power-efficient computing across hundreds of billions of devices. As AI transforms global computing infrastructure, partners across the ecosystem are asking for ways to deploy Arm technology at scale. In response, Arm is expanding its platform strategy beyond IP and Compute Subsystems (CSS) to include Arm-designed silicon products – giving partners the broadest set of options to build on Arm and enabling faster innovation across the AI ecosystem.
“AI has fundamentally redefined how computing is built and deployed. Agentic computing is accelerating that change,” said Rene Haas, CEO, Arm. “Today marks the next phase of the Arm compute platform and a defining moment for our company. With the expansion into delivering production silicon with our Arm AGI CPU, we are giving partners more choices all built on Arm’s foundation of high-performance, power-efficient computing, to support agentic AI infrastructure at global scale.”
Agentic AI is Reshaping AI Infrastructure, Driving More Demand for CPUs
The rise of AI agents is driving a major inflection point in global computing. As AI shifts from training models to deploying continuously running agents that reason, plan and act, the volume of tokens generated across AI systems is rapidly increasing and requires significantly more CPUs to handle reasoning, coordination and data movement.
As organizations scale agent-driven applications, data centers are expected to require more than 4x the current CPU capacity per GW* — driving the need for significantly more compute within the same power envelope. This is driving demand for a new class of CPUs designed for AI-scale infrastructure — delivering the performance needed to sustain high token throughput, the efficiency required to operate within real-world power constraints and a simplified architecture built without the overhead and complexity of x86 processors.
Extending the Arm Platform into Production Silicon
To help partners move faster in this new environment, Arm is introducing the Arm AGI CPU, which is expected to be the foundation for agentic data centers. The expansion into silicon products provides the ecosystem with greater flexibility in how they build and deploy Arm-based infrastructure — whether licensing Arm IP, adopting Arm CSS, or deploying Arm-designed silicon.
The Arm AGI CPU delivers:
These capabilities translate into greater workload density, improved accelerator utilization and more usable compute within existing power envelopes — critical advantages as AI infrastructure scales. The Arm AGI CPU delivers more than 2x performance per rack versus x86 CPUs, enabling up to $10B in CAPEX savings per GW of AI data center capacity*.
Broad Ecosystem Support for Arm AGI CPU
Meta serves as the lead partner and co-developer, leveraging Arm AGI CPU to optimize infrastructure for its family of apps and working alongside Meta’s own custom silicon, called Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), enabling more efficient orchestration in large-scale AI systems. Arm and Meta are committed to collaborating across multiple generations of the Arm AGI CPU roadmap.
“Delivering AI experiences at global scale demands a robust and adaptable portfolio of custom silicon solutions, purpose-built to accelerate AI workloads and optimize performance across Meta’s platforms,” said Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure, Meta. “We worked alongside Arm to develop the Arm AGI CPU to deploy an efficient compute platform that significantly improves our data center performance density and supports a multi-generation roadmap for our evolving AI systems.”
Alongside Meta, Arm has confirmed additional commercial momentum with partners including Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom. These customers will deploy the Arm AGI CPU for key agentic CPU use-cases including accelerator management, control plane processing, and cloud and enterprise-based API, task and application hosting.
To accelerate this ramp, Arm is partnering with lead OEMs and ODMs including ASRock Rack, Lenovo, Quanta Computer, and Supermicro, with early systems available now and broader availability expected in the second half of the year.
More than 50 leading companies across hyperscale, cloud, silicon, memory, networking, software, system design and manufacturing are supporting the expansion of the Arm compute platform into silicon. That momentum includes industry leaders such as AWS, Broadcom, Google, Marvell, Micron, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung, SK hynix and TSMC, alongside many others.
A New Era for the Arm Compute Platform
For decades, the industry has built on the Arm compute platform through its industry-leading IP and, more recently, Arm CSS, grounded in a foundation of high-performance, power-efficient computing. The expansion into production silicon with the Arm AGI CPU marks the next phase of that evolution, extending Arm into data center silicon and bringing its power-efficient architecture to AI infrastructure at scale.
“Our partnership began nearly two decades ago and since then, Arm’s adaptability has made it possible for us to integrate Arm across all of our platforms and for all different phases of AI,” said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together we’re creating one seamless platform, from cloud to edge to AI factories. We look forward to building the future with Arm.”
“Datacenter AI workloads are evolving, and we are seeing more demand than ever for efficient, scalable compute, driving deeper collaboration across every layer of the ecosystem—from silicon design to manufacturing innovation,” said Dr. Kevin Zhang, SVP and Deputy Co-COO at TSMC. “As the Arm AGI CPU manufacturer, we are excited to support this breakthrough platform. By leveraging our advanced 3nm process technology, the new Arm AGI CPU delivers significant performance and energy efficiency and is expected to play an important role in enabling the next generation of AI infrastructure across the datacenter ecosystem.”
*Based on estimates.
About Arm
Arm (NASDAQ: ARM) is the industry’s highest-performing and most power-efficient compute platform with unmatched scale that touches 100 percent of the connected global population. To meet the insatiable demand for compute, Arm is delivering advanced solutions that allow the world’s leading technology companies to unleash the unprecedented experiences and capabilities of AI. Together with the world’s largest computing ecosystem and 22 million software developers, we are building the future of AI on Arm.
Source: Arm
The post Arm Introduces AGI CPU, Expands Compute Platform into Data Center Silicon appeared first on HPCwire.
Diplomats say US president’s latest claimed plan probably based on now dated framework put forward in May 2025
The 15-point framework plan for peace with Iran that Donald Trump has said is being discussed is based on a proposal put forward by his negotiating team during nuclear talks almost a year ago, diplomats knowledgable about the talks believe.
That original 15-point plan was the basis for negotiations in late May 2025, shortly before the talks collapsed due to Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Continue reading...SPARKS, Nev., March 24, 2026 — Crusoe and Redwood Materials today announced a significant expansion of their partnership to scale renewable-powered AI computers.
Following the successful deployment of a Redwood Energy 12 megawatts / 63 megawatt-hour (MWh) microgrid in June 2025, the companies are expanding the campus deployment from 4 to 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centers, bringing total compute capacity to nearly 7x the original deployment.
The project originally debuted as the largest second-life battery system in the world, combining solar and repurposed electric vehicle (EV) batteries to power four Crusoe Spark modular data centers on Redwood Materials’ campus in Sparks, Nevada. Since commissioning, the system has delivered 99.2% operational availability over seven months of continuous operation with minimal unplanned downtime, exceeding reliability expectations and demonstrating consistent, around-the-clock performance.
That performance also validates a core premise behind the partnership: that repurposed EV batteries can be orchestrated through Redwood Energy’s Pack Manager technology to deliver reliable, 24/7 power for high-performance compute workloads like Crusoe Spark modular AI factories for Crusoe Cloud.
“Since launch, the Redwood Energy and Crusoe system has demonstrated that repurposed EV batteries can reliably power high-performance compute workloads at scale,” said JB Straubel, Founder and CEO of Redwood Materials. “Achieving 99.2% uptime validated our approach and gave us the confidence to expand compute capacity nearly sevenfold on the same energy infrastructure. Together with Crusoe, we’re demonstrating a faster, more flexible, and lower-cost way to build and power AI infrastructure.”
“By expanding our work with Redwood Energy to 20 megawatts, we are proving that the ‘AI factory’ of the future can be quickly scaled through the convergence of innovative energy solutions and modular infrastructure deployment,” said Cully Cavness, Co-Founder, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Crusoe. “This expansion allows us to quickly and predictably deliver high-performance Crusoe Cloud compute capacity to our customers through Crusoe Spark modular data centers.”
Key highlights of the expanded partnership:
About Crusoe
As the AI factory company, Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. The company provides a reliable, scalable, cost-effective, energy-first solution for AI infrastructure. By harnessing large-scale energy sources, building AI-optimized data centers, and delivering a powerful AI cloud platform, Crusoe empowers its customers and partners to build the future faster.
About Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials, founded by JB Straubel, is creating a circular supply chain to make batteries sustainable and affordable. Redwood Energy, its newest division, repurposes used EV battery packs into low-cost, large-scale energy storage systems, helping to power the energy transition and the age of AI.
Source: Crusoe
The post Crusoe and Redwood Materials Expand AI Data Center Deployment to 24 Modular Units in Nevada appeared first on HPCwire.
The much-teased feature is rolling out now to Premium users on Android and iOS.
Minnesota officials allege they're being blocked from probing the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis by federal agents.
Suella Braverman presses the FA to scrap diversity and inclusion policies, which she claims are ‘racist’
Reform UK has been accused of seeking to insert “toxic politics” into football after the party pressed the Football Association in England to scrap diversity and inclusion policies.
Suella Braverman wrote to the FA on Tuesday to ask for a meeting to discuss the governing body’s diversity policies, which Reform’s equalities spokesperson described as “utter woke nonsense”.
Continue reading...Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, the chief of the 82nd Airborne Division, and his headquarters staff have been ordered to the Middle East as the War Department awaits a White House decision about the deployment of the unit to the Middle East for possible ground operations in Iran, two government sources tell The Intercept.
The deployment includes the division’s “headquarters element,” support staff, and some personnel who manage logistics, planning, and command operations, the sources said.
The order comes as the Pentagon is weighing the broader deployment of the 82nd Airborne’s “Immediate Response Force,” a 3,000-soldier brigade capable of deploying anywhere in the world within a day, which was first reported by the New York Times on Monday. It also comes as thousands of Marines are headed to the region along with at least three more ships, including the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship with F-35 attack jets with vertical takeoff and landing capability, as well as attack and transport helicopters.
Open source reporting suggests dozens of transport aircraft used to ferry troops and cargo have been flying out of airfields used by America’s most elite commandos, including the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.
U.S. ground troops could be employed to carry out a number of varied missions from more conventional combat operations to specialized commando missions. These could include seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub, or securing that country’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
“We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”
“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Fox News Sunday over the weekend. “I don’t know if you take the island or you blockade the island. But I know this: the day we control that island, this regime, this terrorist regime, has been weakened. It will die on a vine.”
“People are going to have to go and get it,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month when asked about Iran’s uranium.
The potential expansion of Operation Epic Fury into a ground campaign would be another major escalation of President Donald Trump’s expanding world war.
One of the U.S. officials, who has been briefed on Operation Epic Fury, speculated that Trump’s fixation on and fascination with the supposed success of Operation Absolute Resolve — in which the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro — might prompt something similar in Iran.
Orders for the deployment of thousands more members of the division may come within hours, said one of the officials on Tuesday afternoon.
The Office of the Secretary of War referred questions about the deployment of ground forces in Iran to the White House, which did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last week, Special Operations Command chief Adm. Frank M. Bradley said that he has long viewed Iran and its proxies threatening the freedom of navigation in and around the Middle East as “the most dangerous crisis” facing the United States. “I would anticipate that along those same lines, the ability to project force into increasingly contested environments where U.S. national interests are threatened is the characterization of the next most dangerous crisis,” he told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. “That is why that we have made our ability to do that our top modernization priority. If you look at the operation conducted under Absolute Resolve into Venezuela, I would argue it’s the most sophisticated integrated inter-agency joint force raid ever conducted.”
The U.S. forces being sped to the Middle East will augment more than 40,000 troops already stationed in the region and forces brought in before the Trump administration began its latest war with Iran on February 28. This included dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft, as well as two carrier strike groups. (The USS Gerald R. Ford had to since abandon the fight and travel to port, following a fire on the ship.)
The Pentagon has already requested $200 billion in supplemental funds to pay for its war on Iran. The ultimate cost of the war is expected to run into the trillions of dollars.
The post Leaders of Elite Paratrooper Unit Ordered to Middle East as Trump Weighs Iran Ground War appeared first on The Intercept.
HELOC interest rates are continuing to decline. Here's how much an $80,000 line of credit costs monthly now.
Defence chiefs have been discussing how to unblock the conduit for about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies
The UK has offered to host an international security summit to draw up a “viable, collective plan” to reopen the strait of Hormuz as economic fallout from the Iran conflict continues.
Defence chiefs have been discussing how they could unblock the vital shipping lane, through which about 20% of global oil supplies usually pass, amid the Middle East crisis unleashed by the US and Israel.
Continue reading...Medicare Advantage open enrollment is ending soon, and there are a few things to know before that window closes.
High performance computing is a potent tool that allows researchers to peer beneath the surface to understand fundamental scientific phenomenon. But getting access to an HPC system remains out of reach for many who could benefit from it. That’s the premise behind a new program at the University of California, San Diego, which is providing undergraduate students with access to a campus supercomputer to help elevate their studies, and familiarize them with cutting-edge HPC techniques along the way.
The program involves UC San Diego’s School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), who are working together to enable access to Expanse, a supercomputer that’s supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations.
One class that’s getting access to Expanse is a course titled “Modeling of Nanoscale Systems.” According to a “UC San Diego Today” story by Kimberly Mann Bruck and Scott Paton, students use Expanse to understand how model how atoms and molecules interact, and how tiny shifts in molecular structure “might change whether a material conducts electricity, repels water, traps heat, breaks down pollution or binds to a target in the human body.”
UCSD grad student Gaurav Guru uses SDSC’s Expanse to teach undergraduate students (Image courtesy SDSC)
“This course is about giving students a realistic view of how modern engineering discoveries happen,” said Wan-Lu Li, who leads the class and is assistant professor in chemical and nano engineering department. “Not just on paper, but through hands-on modeling where you can test ideas, make predictions and learn from the data the system gives you.”
The course gives undergrad engineering students the opportunity to get hands-on HPC access to learn critical engineering concepts, including molecular mechanics, energy minimization, statistical mechanics, molecular dynamics simulations, and Monte Carlo simulations.
“The future of nanoengineering won’t be built only by people who can use instruments,” said course instructor Gaurav Guru, who is a graduate student at the school’s mechanical and aerospace engineering department. “It also will be built by people who can model and simulate nanoscale systems, interpret the data and use those insights to engineer new materials.”
The course is funded through an NSF allocation for Expanse, which is often used as a teaching platform to bridge classroom theory with real-world practice. Expanse is a 5-petaflop supercomputer that features more than 93,000 CPU cores, 208 Nvidia V100 GPUs, 220 TB of DRAM, and 810 TB of NVMe storage. The GPUs are connected via NVLink while the entire system is connected with a 100 GB/s HDR InfiniBand interconnect.
According to SDSC Director Frank Würthwein, providing undergrad access to Expanse not only enriches the students’ experience while in school, but also prepares them to use the computational tools in use by academia, government, and industry.
SDSC’s Expanse system (Image courtesy SDSC)
“Through courses that run large-scale simulations and data-intensive workflows on SDSC’s HPC systems, UC San Diego aims to graduate students who are not only comfortable working at research scale, but who can carry these skills directly into AI- and data-driven careers in graduate school, national labs and industry,” Würthwein said. “At SDSC, we are weaving AI into undergraduate experiences by giving students access to the same GPU-accelerated and data-centric infrastructure that powers cutting-edge research, and by partnering with educators across the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems, we are democratizing access to HPC and AI so that students see these capabilities as part of their everyday toolbox, not a rare privilege reserved for a few specialists.”
The post UCSD Aims to Make HPC an ‘Everyday Toolbox’ for Undergrads, Not a ‘Rare Privilege’ appeared first on HPCwire.
British investigators are circumspect but experts and security officials say incident has hallmarks of Iranian intelligence
From Golders Green, where four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set alight in the early hours of Monday, a tangled trail probably leads across two continents to Tehran.
British investigators are circumspect. Speaking at an event on Monday evening, Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan police, described a “very relevant and rolling threat” from Iran to the UK, and specifically to Jewish targets, but warned it was still too early to attribute the attack in north London to Tehran.
Continue reading...  | hi guy's, my son's onewheel pint is having some minor issues. I have no clue I am a layman when it comes to electronics. I checked al the connectors, and that's as far as my knowledge goes. can someone help us?? [link] [comments] |
Former Brazil president, serving 27 years over attempted coup, given initial 90-day period that could be extended
Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been granted permission to serve his 27-year sentence for a coup attempt at home instead of in prison because of his failing health.
The decision by supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes followed Bolsonaro’s hospitalization since 13 March for pneumonia, one of several health problems the former leader has faced since he was stabbed by a man in 2018 before he was elected president.
Continue reading...Anthropic is testing a new Claude feature that lets users send a request from their phone and have the AI carry it out directly on their computer, such as opening apps, using a browser, or editing files. The move follows the viral spread of OpenClaw earlier this year, which has gained cult popularity among devs for the ability to run local, 24/7 personal workflows. CNBC reports: Users can now message Claude a task from a phone, and the AI agent will then complete that task, Anthropic announced Monday. After being prompted, Claude can open apps on your computer, navigate a web browser and fill in spreadsheets, Anthropic said. One prompt Anthropic demonstrated in a video posted Monday is a user running late for a meeting. The user asks Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF file and attach it to a meeting invite. The video shows Claude carrying out the task. [...] Anthropic cautioned that computer use "is still early compared to Claude's ability to code or interact with text." "Claude can make mistakes, and while we continue to improve our safeguards, threats are constantly evolving," Anthropic warned. The company added that it has built the computer use capability "with safeguards that minimize risk," and that Claude will always request permission before accessing new apps. Users can use Dispatch, a feature it released last week in Claude Cowork. That lets users have a continuous conversation with Claude from a phone or desktop and assign the agent tasks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Delta is temporarily halting specialty services for members of Congress, citing strain on its resources during the partial government shutdown.
Lawsuit argues XAI failed to disclose risks, limitations and exposure to harm that come with using chatbot
The mayor and city council of Baltimore, Maryland, filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI company on Tuesday, alleging that its Grok chatbot violated consumer protections by generating nonconsensual sexualized images.
Baltimore’s lawsuit argues that xAI deceptively marketed Grok as a general-purpose AI assistant and X as a mainstream social media site, failing to disclose the risks, limitations and exposure to harm that come with using the platform and chatbot. The suit, filed in the circuit court for Baltimore city, argues that the court has jurisdiction over xAI given that the company advertises and operates in Baltimore.
Continue reading...Yellow 4x blinking light. 986 km board. Switched self on. Hadn’t used in over a week. I can’t turn it off. Only alert on app is needs to be switched on upright (when powered itself on was on its side.). Anyone else had this issue? Battery and hub temperature are fine. Based in UK so sending back to FM is not straight forward.
For much of last year, Trump administration officials insisted that no Americans were caught up in the government’s immigration dragnet.
ProPublica and many others repeatedly documented that is not true: Americans have even been kicked, dragged and detained for days by immigration agents.
On Tuesday, House and Senate Democrats are spotlighting a particularly troubling part of the crackdown: the American children who have been collateral damage in the deportation campaign.
The forum the lawmakers are holding is part of an ongoing congressional investigation prompted by ProPublica’s report last fall that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents for some amount of time. That included Americans who have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or simply prevented from leaving their location.
As of last October, more than 20 of those citizens were children, ranging from toddlers to teens. A toddler, a preschooler and a 7-year-old — all citizens — were deported despite their documented parents claiming they wanted to keep the children in the U.S.
In response to questions, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “does NOT deport United States citizens or separate families,”
American children held along with their families will be sharing their stories at Tuesday’s forum. That includes two families whose accounts were featured in ProPublica investigations.
Eighteen-year-old Fernando Hernández García, who is using a pseudonym to protect the safety of his family in Mexico, is speaking on behalf of his 11-year-old sister. Both siblings are citizens.
Last year, the family was driving to Houston to get emergency treatment for the girl, who was recovering from brain cancer. Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used previously to go through checkpoints. This time, agents held the family until they were deported the next day to Mexico. With few other options, the American children went with their parents — except for Hernández García, who had not been detained and stayed to earn money and send medicine home.
The family’s lawyers say they have not been able to access the care they need for their daughter in Mexico, and they have applied for humanitarian parole to return. Customs and Border Protection previously told ProPublica the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.
Also speaking is 16-year-old Arnoldo Bazan. As ProPublica detailed earlier this year, Bazan was tackled and choked by immigration agents who were chasing his undocumented father in Houston.
Bystanders filmed the teen screaming that he was a minor and a U.S. citizen. After agents knelt on his neck and put him in a choke hold, then they handcuffed him.
Bazan told ProPublica that when he was in a choke hold, “I felt like I was seeing the light.” He said he’s now speaking up — including on Capitol Hill — to help keep others from going through the same. “I don’t think nobody’s safe anymore.”
DHS said in its statement that Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. The agency’s spokesperson added that any allegations that agents assaulted Bazan “are FALSE.”
It’s unclear exactly how many American kids have been held. The government doesn’t disclose how many Americans are detained, even briefly, during immigration enforcement.
Former immigration officials told ProPublica that it used to be rare to encounter, let alone hold, American children for any amount of time. While the officials couldn’t recall a specific policy prohibiting it, they said past administrations just didn’t prioritize arresting families during immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. (A ProPublica investigation published Monday found that in his second term, President Donald Trump has deported mothers of U.S. children at four times the rate Biden did.)
In a report shared with ProPublica, the minority staff from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform compiled 128 cases of children — a mix of citizens and noncitizens — who were injured, left unattended or otherwise put at risk by enforcement operations conducted by Department of Homeland Security agents.
The review found that citizen children caught up in immigration operations were also exposed to chemical agents, were placed in restraints or required medical attention, and some were held at gunpoint, were left unattended when agents detained their parents, or were present when agents smashed car windows or rammed their vehicles.
“The impact of all of these practices on children — the physical injuries but also the trauma — is really horrific,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told ProPublica.
Several other citizen teens and mothers of U.S. citizens who were detained by immigration agents will be delivering testimony at the forum.
Anabel Romero, an Idaho mother, recalled how she was detained with three of her children during a multiagency raid at an Idaho racetrack. The stated target of the raid was illegal gambling, but it ended with more than 100 people in ICE custody.
Officers pointed guns at Romero’s 14-year-old, SueHey Tello, and at her 8-year-old and 6-year-old. Tello said they dragged her from the truck and eventually zip-tied her, leaving bruises and marks.
Asked about the raid and agents’ conduct, DHS said, “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children.” (Romero and Tello do not know which agency’s officers zip-tied them.)
Tello told ProPublica she was petrified and particularly worried for her younger siblings. “My little sister’s crying, my little brother’s scared,” Tello recalled. “I don’t know what to do. [I was] looking for any familiar face.”
Romero noted that the Trump administration has often said its immigration dragnet is keeping kids safe by going after predators and criminals. “They say they’re doing this to protect children,” recalled Romero. “But they hurt my children.”
The post How American Kids Have Been Collateral Damage in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.
Markets and the Treasury are pricing a quick exit. Without a credible political endgame, Donald Trump cannot deliver one
Whatever else Donald Trump’s “pause” is, it is not a ceasefire. Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes struck across Iran. What Mr Trump’s statement did was to narrow US targets to exclude power plants and energy infrastructure to calm jittery markets. But the fighting continues. With reports that the US is considering boots on the ground, Washington is waging war while searching for an exit – without a credible or unified negotiating position, as Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu pursues his own agenda.
Mr Trump’s strategy, if he has one, might be to soothe markets now – and launch a massive escalatory strike over the weekend when trading desks are closed, in the hope of forcing the Iranian regime to fracture or capitulate. This rests on the idea that Tehran is brittle and will crack under American “shock and awe”. Sir Keir Starmer’s implicit judgment is that Iran will not cave. That disagreement may have been enough to send him to Mr Trump’s doghouse. Britain must stay out of US-Israeli adventurism. The war’s constraint is not capability – Washington has plenty of air power and Iran offers plenty of targets. But nothing can be resolved without a politically achievable objective.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...The Supreme Court weighed a policy that would allow agents at U.S. borders to block migrants from entering the country to seek asylum.
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Marco Rubio welcomes release of Dennis Coyle, who was detained in January last year for violating unspecified laws
Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities have released the American academic Dennis Coyle after holding him for over a year, with the foreign ministry saying the release came on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
A statement from the ministry said the academic researcher had been released in Kabul on Tuesday, following an appeal from his family and after Afghanistan’s supreme court “considered his previous imprisonment sufficient”.
Continue reading...Former Rep. David Rivera of Florida is accused of secretly lobbying for the Venezuelan government during the first Trump administration.
Markwayne Mullin was sworn in as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, taking the oath of office at the White House one day after winning confirmation in the Senate.
At least seven killed as Moscow appears to step up spring offensive amid concerns focus on Iran war leaves Kyiv more vulnerable
Russia has launched a huge wave of nearly 1,000 drones at Ukraine, killing at least seven people, as Moscow appears to be stepping up a spring offensive intended to break Ukrainian resistance along the front.
Ukrainian officials said Moscow fired nearly 400 long-range drones and 23 cruise missiles overnight, followed by another 556 drones in an unusual daytime assault on Tuesday, hitting cities across the west of the country.
Continue reading...Hiring your first employees doesn't have to take long. Here's how to move quickly without making costly mistakes.
I Swear’s Kirk Jones set to direct film based on the 1970s cult animation about a ‘very ordinary man’ who accessed different worlds via a magical fancy dress shop
A live-action film based on the cult British kids’ cartoon Mr Benn is to go into production with I Swear director Kirk Jones at the helm.
Mr Benn first appeared on TV on the BBC in 1971, in a series created by David McKee, who died in 2022. The series followed the adventures of “a very ordinary man who could do extraordinary things” when he visited a magical fancy dress shop, which acted as a portal to different worlds. Only 13 episodes were made before the series ended in March 1972, though a one-off episode was broadcast in 2005 on the kids’ channel Nick Jr.
Continue reading...Apple is adding advertising to its Maps, Mail, Wallet and Siri services this summer.
Hopes of de-escalation dim as Israeli PM also vows to keep striking Iran, even as Trump talks up deal hopes
Israel said on Tuesday it would seize parts of southern Lebanon to create what it called a “defensive buffer”, while Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue striking Iran, dimming hopes of de-escalation even as Donald Trump talked up the prospects of a deal to end the conflict.
During a meeting with the military chief of staff, Israel defence minister Israel Katz said Israeli forces would “control the remaining bridges and the security zone up to the Litani”, a river in Lebanon that meets the Mediterranean about 30km (20 miles) north of Israel’s border.
Continue reading...March 24, 2026 — The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre has opened a new call for PULSE Collaborations (formerly Pawsey Uptake Projects), inviting Australian researchers to partner with Pawsey experts to accelerate the impact of their computational research.
The program supports projects that improve performance, scale, and efficiency using Pawsey’s infrastructure. Successful teams will receive up to 0.20 FTE of dedicated Pawsey staff support over six months to collaboratively improve research capability. Depending on the project’s needs, this support may draw on expertise from multiple Pawsey team members.
PULSE projects are intended to facilitate:
PULSE projects can span a wide range of activities, from benchmarking and code optimization to GPU acceleration, workflow improvements, advanced visualization, and hybrid quantum-classical approaches. Competitive applications clearly define their goals, outline team contributions, and effectively leverage systems such as Setonix, Australia’s largest and most energy-efficient supercomputer.
The call is open to researchers based at Australian universities, government agencies, and research institutions. Projects may also receive preparatory access to Setonix for development where needed.
Applications close: April 10, 2026 (End of Day, Anywhere on Earth)
For full details, eligibility criteria, and scope, visit the program page.
Apply here.
Source: Karina Nunez, Pawsey
The post Pawsey Opens Call for PULSE Collaborations to Accelerate Research Impact in Australia appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor -- and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visibility in December, when researchers from security firm Flare observed it unleashing a worm that targeted cloud-hosted platforms that weren't properly secured. The objective was to build a distributed proxy and scanning infrastructure and then use it to compromise servers for exfiltrating data, deploying ransomware, conducting extortion, and mining cryptocurrency. The group is notable for its skill in large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques. More recently, TeamPCP has waged a relentless campaign that uses continuously evolving malware to bring ever more systems under its control. Late last week, it compromised virtually all versions of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in a supply-chain attack after gaining privileged access to the GitHub account of Aqua Security, the Trivy creator. Over the weekend, researchers said they observed TeamPCP spreading potent malware that was also worm-enabled, meaning it had the potential to spread to new machines automatically, with no interaction required of victims behind the keyboard. [...] As the weekend progressed, CanisterWorm [as Aikido has named the malware] was updated to add an additional payload: a wiper that targets machines exclusively in Iran. When the updated worm infects machines, it checks if the machine is in the Iranian timezone or is configured for use in that country. When either condition was met, the malware no longer activated the credential stealer and instead triggered a novel wiper that TeamPCP developers named Kamikaze. Eriksen said in an email that there's no indication yet that the worm caused actual damage to Iranian machines, but that there was "clear potential for large-scale impact if it achieves active spread." It's unclear what the motive is for TeamPCP. Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote: "While there may be an ideological component, it could just as easily be a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the group. Historically, TeamPCP has appeared to be financially motivated, but there are signs that visibility is becoming a goal in itself. By going after security tools and open-source projects, including Checkmarx as of today, they are sending a clear and deliberate signal."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Australian-born Maga influencer Nick Adams appointed to role for tourism, exceptionalism and American values
Donald Trump’s appointment of Nick Adams, the “alpha male” Australian turned American internet provocateur as a new special presidential envoy on Tuesday, could give fuel to theories that the White House is deliberately trolling the world.
The president nominated the Sydney-born Maga influencer, who has a history of theatrically inflammatory and Islamophobic comments, as ambassador to Malaysia in July, but the Senate returned the appointment without a confirmation vote in January and Trump did not re-submit him.
Continue reading...New Nasa chief outlines changes to moon programme Artemis including repurposing Lunar Gateway
Nasa is cancelling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use its components to construct a $20bn base on the moon’s surface over the next seven years, its new chief, Jared Isaacman, said on Tuesday.
Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency in December, made the announcement at the opening of a daylong event at Nasa’s Washington headquarters at which he outlinedchanges he is making to the agency’s flagship moon programme Artemis.
Continue reading...California governor backtracks and says he meant to apply term to Israel’s future if it continues on present trajectory
The California governor, Gavin Newsom, backtracked on earlier remarks likening Israel to an “apartheid state” in a new interview with Politico published on Tuesday.
In the interview, the Democrat, who is widely expected to launch a presidential bid in 2028, said that when he used the term three weeks ago, he meant it to apply to Israel’s future should it continue on its present trajectory.
Continue reading...The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, in collaboration with the HPC-AI Advisory Council, will host the 17th annual Swiss Conference in Locarno, Switzerland, April 20-23, 2026.
March 24, 2026 — Hosted by the HPC-AI Advisory Council and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the 17th annual Swiss Conference will bring together the global HPC, AI, and emerging-technology community in Locarno, Switzerland. The event serves as a forum for industry leaders, startups, and researchers to examine how advances in compute and storage are shaping science and industry.
Credit: CSCS
This year’s program expands its focus on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and digital twins as interconnected areas of high-performance innovation. Technical sessions, workshops, and case studies will explore their convergence, from AI-accelerated HPC workflows and early hybrid quantum-classical models to large-scale digital twins used to design, validate, and optimize complex systems.
The conference opens with a dedicated tutorial day, followed by three days of keynotes, invited talks, panels, and interactive activities. Attendees will gain practical insights across HPC, AI, quantum computing, digital twin engineering, cloud architectures, containerized workflows, and more.
The full agenda of the meeting is available on the HPC-AI Advisory Council website.
Registration is required for all participants and includes a nominal attendee fee charged in advance. Registration also covers daily breaks and lunch, as well as a group outing, which requires confirmation during the registration process.
Source: CSCS
The post HPC-AI Advisory Council, CSCS to Host 17th Swiss Conference in Locarno appeared first on HPCwire.
You can download and 3D print the little spaceman from Project Hail Mary, and it's inspiring, like the movie itself.
White House is defending US authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem the border too overburdened
US supreme court justices indicated sympathy on Tuesday toward Donald Trump’s administration in its defense of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
The legal dispute centers on a policy called “metering” that the Republican president’s administration may seek to revive after it was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden in 2021. The policy allowed US immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.
Continue reading...French superstar played 10 years for Atlético
Forward will join Orlando in July on a deal through 2029
Atlético plays Barcelona in Copa del Rey final in April
Orlando City SC completed the long-anticipated signing of Atlético Madrid superstar Antoine Griezmann on Tuesday.
The 35-year-old French attacker is signed from July 2026 through the 2027-28 season with an option for 2028-29. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Continue reading...Labour and Liberal Democrats welcome suspension of Chris Parry, the party’s Hampshire mayoral candidate, after derogatory remarks about Jewish group
The live feed from the Lib Dem local elections campaign launch did not last long, and it did not include footage of Ed Davey taking questions from reporters. But this is what the Lib Dems are saying about their five key campaign issues.
-Cut the cost of living: A plan to halve energy bills within a decade, saving households an average of £870 a year
-Fix the NHS and care: Guarantee the right to see a GP within seven days (or 24 hours for urgent cases) and ending 12-hour A&E waits.
-Rescue high streets: Give an emergency cut to VAT for hospitality businesses, to bring prices down and boost struggling high streets.
-Clean up rivers: Ban water companies from dumping raw sewage into local rivers and coastal areas.
-Restore community policing: Ensure visible, effective local policing to reduce crime.
Stitch puts UI design tools into the hands of anyone who can chat.
The seed reveals that people in France have been cultivating the popular variety of grape since at least the 1400s, scientists say.
Greg Bovino says Trump’s immigration crackdown hasn’t gone far enough in exit interview with the New York Times
As his retirement looms, Gregory Bovino, the US border patrol’s former commander-at-large, has contended that efforts to curb illegal immigration by Donald Trump’s administration have not gone far enough – showing no remorse over federal agents’ killings of two US citizens in Minneapolis in January.
“I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens,” he told the New York Times on Tuesday in an exit interview, during which he also referred to the Republican president as “the Trumpster” and acknowledged his retirement at the end of March was not entirely voluntary.
Continue reading...US pressure on Zambia shows that Western aid has become nakedly transactional Expert comment LToremark
The US insisting on preferential access to minerals as part of health deal – and Zambia pushing back – highlights how aid is changing.
Western aid for health and development is undergoing two major changes. First, it is shrinking drastically. G7 countries are reducing aid by 28 per cent in 2026 compared to 2024, the biggest drop in aid since the G7 was formed in 1975. In percentage terms, the UK has slashed its aid more than any G7 country – even the US. Although US aid cuts have drawn the most media attention, US Congress has stepped in to reduce some of the proposed cuts. Second, aid is becoming more explicitly conditional on national interests, such as supporting economic growth, tackling immigration or reducing the influence of geopolitical rivals like China.
The most blatant deal-making has come from the US. A current and striking example is Zambia, where the US is reportedly considering withdrawing funding for life-saving malaria, tuberculosis and HIV programmes, from as early as May 2026, to pressure the Zambian government to sign the Zambia–US Health Deal.
Zambia has pushed back on the deal over concerns about US health funding being tied to preferential access to its mineral resources, mining sector and pathogen data. The proposed deal makes it clear that the US will use foreign aid to incentivize other nations to support US interests and will punish those that do not comply. But this shift to overtly transactional aid predates the policies of the second Trump administration. For example, in 2023, Italy’s Mattei Plan explicitly tied engagement with African countries to migration management, energy security and strategic influence.
Why has aid from Western countries become so transactional, and what does this mean for health in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)? In short, the previous framing of aid as an altruistic or charitable endeavour – which was never the full picture – has become unpopular in both donor and recipient countries.
In LMICs, there has been a growing realization of – and frustration with – aid’s links to implicit political and economic agendas of donor countries, often undermining recipient countries’ abilities to set their own health priorities.
At the same time, many Western countries that were previously major aid donors have experienced widening inequalities. These inequalities have fuelled a wave of right-wing populism – amplified by social and traditional media – that prioritizes problems at home over sending money to other countries, and presents this as a zero-sum trade-off. As illustrated by UK polls showing that public support for overseas development assistance is ’genuine but conditional’, spending on global health and development by Western countries is now politically viable primarily when it is conditional on serving national interests.
The immediate impacts on recipient countries facing the biggest cuts will be huge, with estimates of excess deaths from severe funding cuts as high as 23 million by 2030. Other consequences of aid cuts are expected to include staggering reductions in access to modern family planning methods, disruptions to school feeding programmes, and a surge in vaccine-preventable diseases.
In the long term, however, making national interests more explicit introduces a level of transparency that was often absent in the past. This allows for more honest negotiations between donors and recipient countries, and explicit alignment of mutual goals. We can already see that aid-recipient countries are in a better position to assess the full terms of engagement and reject deals that do not align with their interests. Like Zambia, Zimbabwe halted negotiations with the US because the health funding deal asked Zimbabwe to provide biological samples and access to information on new or emerging pathogens for up to 25 years without assurance of access to life-saving innovations.
A further long-term benefit for countries that walk away from one-sided aid deals and rely on more domestic financing for health is increased accountability and responsiveness of health programmes to their populations.
Looking ahead, how should stakeholders adapt to the new transactional model of aid?
NGOs, activists and policy advocates making the case for foreign aid should reframe how they present its purpose. Rather than relying primarily on altruistic arguments – which are proving less politically persuasive in an era of fiscal constraint and more inward-looking populations – they could emphasize how interconnected health is globally and challenge the notion that diverting health funding towards defence makes Western countries safer. Although highlighting national interest to justify foreign aid may feel uncomfortable or even distasteful to those who have championed aid as a moral imperative, it more accurately reflects how aid has always functioned. Global health scholar Hani Kim has argued that investments in global health have always had explicit and implicit purposes – with the implicit being to maintain existing power structures.
For countries that continue to rely on foreign aid for health programmes, it is critical to introduce stronger safeguards in their agreements with donors, particularly in relation to withdrawal conditions. They should take advantage of the transactional nature of discussions to embed longer timeframes for ending financial support and impact mitigation strategies to protect essential health programmes during transitions.
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said that if the SAVE America Act becomes law, it will present a major hurdle for everyone already on the voter rolls.
"The SAVE America Act doesn’t ‘Save’ America,’ Kelly said in a March 17 X post. "And this isn’t about voter ID. This bill requires everyone to re-register to vote in person and your driver’s license, REAL ID, or military ID aren’t even good enough."
After Kelly repeated the statement on MS Now’s "Morning Joe," Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, one of the bill’s authors, said Kelly was wrong.
"Nothing in the SAVE America Act requires currently registered voters to re-register," Lee wrote in an X post.
Millions of American voters newly register or update their registration each election and would face the new registration rules; but Kelly’s statement exaggerates the breadth of the bill’s effect. Lee’s comment, meanwhile, downplayed the measure’s potential impact on voters.
The House passed the proposal in February and the Senate is now debating it. The bill appears to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to proceed to a final vote.
President Donald Trump said lawmakers should not approve a deal to end the Homeland Security partial government shutdown until Democrats agree to pass the SAVE America Act — a priority of his during the midterm election year.
The legislation does not say that everyone currently registered must reregister to vote. It says someone seeking to register to vote in federal elections shall present "documentary proof of United States citizenship in person to the office of the appropriate election official."
Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director for the voting rights and election program at the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, previously told PolitiFact that the documentary proof of citizenship requirements would apply not only to new registrants and those who moved to a different state, but also potentially to a lot of people who wouldn’t consider themselves new registrants.
For instance, depending on how a state interpreted the bill’s language, moving to another county within the same state or to a new voting precinct could count as a new voter registration and trigger the citizenship proof requirement.
States’ decisions on how to classify residential moves will affect whether the documents are needed, Sweren-Becker said.
In 2024, about 26 million people relocated within the U.S., which is almost 8% of the total population, according to North American Moving Services, a moving company. That data is likely an undercount because it might not include people who made short-distance moves without hiring a moving company.
In the more than half of states where people register by party, people who want to change their party affiliation would have to update their registration. So would people who change their names after they get married.
Experts told us when major voting changes happen, there are bound to be errors that affect people’s registration. Such errors could force some voters to reregister.
Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, a group that works with election officials, told PolitiFact in an email that "it would not be correct to say that every voter would be required to re-register under the bill, but any registration update would require the voter to comply with the bill's proof of citizenship requirement."
Jacob Peters, a Kelly spokesperson, cited an article by the liberal Center for American Progress about the legislation. It said that "for a federal election cycle, approximately 80 million to 100 million Americans register to vote for the first time or for updates." The article said that means that every two years, 80 to 100 million Americans would be affected by the legislation. The center cited state voter registration data compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
In the 2024 election, there were about 211 million active registered voters.
University of California-Los Angeles election law professor Rick Hasen said some of the questions about who would need to reregister would be hashed out in the courts if the legislation becomes law. But, he said, "I think it’s unlikely to be read to require everyone to re-register."
Kelly also said "your driver’s license, REAL ID, or military ID aren’t even good enough" to register to vote. This is more accurate.
The legislation says people need government documentation showing U.S. citizenship to register, such as a passport or birth certificate. It allows a U.S. military identification card but only if it is accompanied by a U.S. military record of service document showing that the applicant was born in the U.S.
Military service members and veterans can obtain their service records. But a spokesperson for VoteVets, a liberal advocacy group, said that not every military service record lists a place of birth.
The legislation also accepts a form of identification consistent with the requirements of the REAL ID Act that shows U.S. citizenship. However, most states do not show such citizenship information on driver’s licenses or REAL ID.
A handful of northern border states offer an optional enhanced ID that is only available for U.S. citizens. For example, about 16% of Minnesota drivers have that ID.
Separately, a few states have passed laws since 2023 requiring that drivers licenses show citizenship, but not all drivers have them. For example, in Montana, all U.S. citizens will have a citizenship marker — a black eagle in flight — displayed on new or renewed driver’s licenses and ID cards starting in 2026. In South Dakota since July 1, 2025, all driver’s licenses and ID cards show the REAL ID designation and U.S. citizenship status. Florida drivers licenses will include whether someone is a U.S. citizen in 2027 if Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a bill as expected.
Kelly said the SAVE America Act "requires everyone to re-register to vote in person and your driver’s license, REAL ID, or military ID aren’t even good enough."
Many details about voter registration would depend on how states implement the legislation if it becomes law, which means many details remain unknown.
Based on the legislation, though, Kelly exaggerated the need for everyone to reregister. The legislation does not say that all registered voters need to reregister. However, every election cycle, tens of millions of Americans newly register or update their registrations when they move. This means they would be subject to the requirements of the proposed legislation.
Kelly was more accurate about driver’s licenses. REAL IDs do not automatically confirm U.S. citizenship; only a minority of states offer licenses that show citizenship. And military IDs must be accompanied by a military service record.
We rate this statement Half True.
Chief correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this fact-check.
RELATED: Fact-checking Chuck Schumer about SAVE America Act, how many Americans register to vote in person
RELATED: Voter suppression or little step? How the SAVE America Act affects married women who change names
RELATED: President Trump wants to slash voting by mail. About 1 in 4 Republicans voted that way in 2024
Security lines are stretching up to 6 hours at some airports amid TSA staffing shortages. Here's how to check wait times before you leave.
Where traditional religion once gathered people together, digital spirituality is now consumed in isolation, mediated by tech gods with opaque agendas
Jim Pu’u didn’t set out to find God. His soul-searching began with a modest idea: to leave a record of his life in case something happened to him. His own father had died young, leaving behind only scraps of his memory, and he didn’t want his daughter to face the same void.
In December of 2024, Pu’u, who is 36 and runs a warehouse for a commercial flooring company in Las Vegas, turned to AI.
Continue reading...Epic Games is cutting more than 1,000 jobs as usage of its flagship title, Fortnite, falls. "The layoffs aren't related to AI," CEO Tim Sweeney noted. Reuters reports: The cuts, along with more than $500 million in savings from lower contracting and marketing spending and unfilled roles would put the company in "a more stable place," Sweeney said in a note to employees. [...] "We've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic," Sweeney said, adding "market conditions today are the most extreme" since the early days of the company founded in 1991. The move marks Epic's second major round of layoffs in three years. In September 2023, the company cut about 830 jobs, or roughly 16% of its workforce. It was not immediately clear what percentage of staff would be impacted by Tuesday's announcement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
At the start of the school year I bought a Onewheel off of marketplace to get around campus, overall it’s been working great but some things are beginning to frustrate me. Since I didn’t buy it new nor have read an owners manual I don’t know if this is normal, but the battery seems to fail to update its percentage well charging unless it is connected to the app well on the charger, if I fully charge it and then connect the app it will show what the percentage was before charging not a full battery, likewise the board itself indicates low battery much before its battery is depleted and will turn off much before the battery is depleted.
I never saw this as a big deal but it has always been difficult to connect the app well charging.
It seems to me the Onewheel prevents itself from being on and connectable well charging and I’ve always had to finagle with it to make it connectable well on the charger, which has never made since to me as it needs to be connected to a phone and charging to receive software updates.
I know the previous owner put a lot of aftermarket into it, my main concern is that he “waterproofed” the internals and I just don’t know what that entails and if it could have messed something up.
My main questions are:
Is it normal for the batteries to not update the percentage without a connection to the app?
Is it normal for it to be a bitch to connect well plugged in, and if so is there a simple way to make it connect that I’m missing?
Edit: I’ve used the fast charger everytime, don’t know if that changes anything
Exclusive: Group says measures to curb harmful content will also help to tackle violence against women and girls
Men and boys need as much protection as women and girls from harmful influencers and “the worst parts of the internet”, a group of MPs have told Ofcom as they called for the regulator to give specific guidance to online platforms.
More than 60 Labour MPs have written to the Ofcom chief executive, Melanie Dawes, urging her to protect men and boys from “manosphere” influencers who may expose them to gambling, sextortion and violent pornography.
Continue reading...The video game maker is cutting 1,000 workers as it struggles to keep players engaged with Fortnite.
Airline CEOs have urged Congress to restore funding to the TSA as lengthy security lines plague US airports
Delta Air Lines is partly suspending its speciality service desk for members of Congress until funding for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is restored, the airline confirmed on Tuesday, as security lines stretch for hours at airports across the country due to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown.
The service desk is used to help members of Congress book flights at special government rates, secure airport escorts and make last-minute changes to flights.
Continue reading...If you're looking for a less-chunky phone to carry all day, Apple and Samsung have new slim options. Here's how they compare.
A controversial multimillion-dollar deal between New York City’s public hospital system and military contractor Palantir, first reported by The Intercept, is coming to an end, according to recent testimony before the city council.
The Intercept reported in February that the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which operates a network of public health care facilities across the city, had paid Palantir almost $4 million since 2023 for data analysis services. NYCHH says it used Palantir’s software to boost its efficiency in billing Medicaid and other public benefits, which included the automated scanning of patient health notes.
The contract prompted protests from activists and local organizers who objected to the hospital system’s use of software from a company whose technology has facilitated lethal airstrike targeting, wide-reaching surveillance of American citizens, and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government.”
At a March 16 meeting of the New York City Council, NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz disclosed that Palantir’s contract will not be renewed come October. Katz defended the health care network’s collaboration with Palantir on the grounds that there was an “absolute firewall” between patient data and the company’s government customers, such as ICE, that would prevent information sharing. “We haven’t had any problems,” Katz said, “And we’re going to end the contract anyway because we always intended it to be a short-term solution.”
According to Katz, data analysis previously conducted with Palantir’s help will be brought in-house following the contract’s expiration.
“Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government,” said Kenny Morris, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, which shared the contract documents with The Intercept.
“Our campaign against Palantir doesn’t stop in NYC,” Morris said. “We will continue to isolate this company and limit its destructive influence on our lives. In this city and around the world, communities are organizing to push more and more corporate clients, institutions, and politicians to cut ties with Palantir.”
The post Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data appeared first on The Intercept.
Advocates say Lee Zeldin’s EPA has rolled back protections and cut staff and funding, putting health at risk
More than 160 environmental and public health organizations on Tuesday called for Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, to resign or be fired.
“No [EPA] administrator in history – Democratic or Republican – has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission,” the groups wrote in an open letter. “EPA’s foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address.”
Continue reading...Young people generate ideas for AI adoption in ‘policy hackathon’ News release thilton.drupal
Members of Chatham House’s Common Futures Conversations community used a fictional scenario to come up with innovative ways in which governments can adopt AI.
Chatham House has completed a ‘policy hackathon’ in which young people produced transferable policy proposals for how governments could benefit from adopting AI.
Twenty-two members of Chatham House’s Common Futures Conversations (CFC) community took part in the online event ‘Intelligent Government: Reimagining Civic Infrastructure’ from 10-19 March.
They were asked to come up with creative proposals for realizing the benefits of AI adoption in government for the fictional country of Valdoria. The winning team presented their idea for an AI-assisted system, ‘Guardian Angel’, which analyses ministry employee access patterns to detect potential security risks.
The team was comprised of CFC members Daria Bogolyubova, Yunus El-Asri, Sufyan Hatia and Eugenia Obeng-Akrofi.
Other ideas included an AI-enabled care intelligence platform that connects fragmented health and social care systems into a unified structure; an AI platform that detects tariff and trade-risk shocks early; and a predictive analytical model that eliminates the inefficiencies of manual resource allocation within a healthcare system.
‘Valdoria was fictional, but the challenges participants dealt with are very real,’ said Rowan Wilkinson, Research Associate, Digital Society Programme.
‘This policy hackathon demonstrated the complexity of emerging tech adoption in government, and participants really had to wrestle with how to scale these technologies in a transparent, democratic and open way, whilst maintaining secure, sovereign and cost-effective solutions – a difficult and ongoing problem for governments globally,’ she added.
The competition judges were Alex Krasodomski, the director of Chatham House’s Digital Society Programme, Felix Reilly, Senior AI Product Manager at the UK government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, and Dr Stephanie Diepeveen, Senior Lecturer in Global Digital Politics at King’s College London.
Supported by the Ford Foundation, the policy hackathon was hosted by Chatham House’s QEII Academy, Digital Society Programme, and Global Economy and Finance Programme.
One of T-Mobile's most popular perks started again Tuesday, and you have a week to redeem the offer.
Apple's higher-tier models dominate among owned iPhone 17 models, while the thin iPhone Air is more popular than last year's Plus model.
Bright Line Watch researchers see stabilization in democratic health but at lower levels after sharp decline
The health of American democracy, as measured by those who study it most closely, has settled into a diminished state – stabilizing after a sharp decline last year, but still well below the levels recorded before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, according to a new survey released on Tuesday.
The findings, by the non-partisan democracy-tracking project Bright Line Watch, which has surveyed hundreds of US scholars at American colleges and universities since 2017, suggest that the erosion of norms detected after Trump’s return to the White House last year has hardened into a new baseline. The public also holds a dim view of American democracy, the most recent survey found, but are sharply divided along partisan lines over how well the system is functioning.
Continue reading...GB Energy’s Jürgen Maier says production could bring economic benefits and give supply chains ‘time to transition’ to renewables
The head of the UK’s national green energy champion has joined other high-profile renewable energy leaders in making the case for more North Sea oil and gas production as the government braces for an energy cost crisis.
The GB Energy boss, Jürgen Maier, used a social media post on LinkedIn to reject the claim that more North Sea oil and gas could help to bring down energy costs, which have soared as the war in Iran has escalated.
Continue reading...Struggling to find the right buzzwords to adorn your CV, or to put a gloss on a series of professional setbacks? There’s a translation app for that
Name: LinkedIn Speak.
Age: One month old.
Continue reading...German rescue teams have been trying to ease the humpback’s path back into deeper waters without success
A 10-metre-long humpback whale stranded on a sandbar in the Baltic Sea is in danger of dying if rescue workers do not manage to help it move into deeper waters soon, experts have said.
Believed to be a young male, the mammal was spotted by guests of a hotel in Niendorf in Lübeck Bay, northern Germany, on Monday after they heard its deep moans and alerted police.
Continue reading...The alleged cyberattack has drawn attention from across the internet.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 24, 2026 — COMPUTEX organizer Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) today announced that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan will deliver a keynote address at COMPUTEX 2026, one of the world’s leading technology exhibitions.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Tan’s keynote will take place on June 2 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Hall 2, 7F, where he will share Intel’s vision for the next era of computing in the age of artificial intelligence.
As AI reshapes every industry, Tan will discuss how breakthroughs across silicon, systems, and software—combined with deep ecosystem partnerships—are enabling new levels of performance, efficiency, and scale. He will also highlight how Intel is working with customers and partners across the industry to define the future of heterogeneous computing and build the infrastructure required for the AI era.
COMPUTEX brings together global technology leaders, innovators, and partners to showcase the breakthroughs shaping the future of computing. Tan’s keynote will offer attendees insight into how collaboration across the technology ecosystem is accelerating innovation and unlocking new opportunities for businesses and developers worldwide.
Registration for COMPUTEX Keynote will open in the middle of April.
COMPUTEX 2026 with the theme “AI Together,” is set to take place from June 2-5, 2026, at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1 & 2, TWTC and TICC. This event will host 1,500 exhibitors across up to 6,000 booths, showcasing three major themes: AI & Computing, Robotics & Mobility, and Next-Gen Tech.
For more exhibition information:
More from HPCwire
About COMPUTEX
COMPUTEX was founded in 1981. It has grown with the global ICT industry and become stronger over the last four decades. Bearing witness to historical moments in the development of and changes in the industry, COMPUTEX attracts more than 40,000 buyers to visit Taiwan every year. It is also the preferred platform chosen by top international companies for launching epoch-making products.
Taiwan has a comprehensive global ICT industry chain. Gaining a foothold in Taiwan, COMPUTEX is jointly held by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, aiming to build a global tech ecosystem. COMPUTEX has become a global benchmark exhibition for AI and startups, connecting global pioneers and enabling new sparks of breakthrough technology.
Source: COMPUTEX
The post Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to Deliver Keynote at COMPUTEX 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
Workers are ‘in the middle of chaos from political games’ as Senate Republicans try to negotiate with Democrats to reopen DHS
Workers with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are reeling from the White House’s deployment of immigration law enforcement into airports as TSA workers enter their sixth week without pay as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown continues.
More than 400 TSA workers have quit since the shutdown began in February, with major US airports reporting high call-out rates among workers, leading to longer security wait times. On Sunday, more than, 3,450 TSA officers called out of work, with as many as 40% of officers at some airports calling out that day, according to DHS data.
Continue reading...In addition, NVIDIA announced at KubeCon Europe a confidential containers solution for GPU-accelerated workloads, updates to the NVIDIA KAI Scheduler and new open source projects to enable large-scale AI workloads.
March 24, 2026 — Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as one of the most critical workloads in modern computing. For the vast majority of enterprises, this workload runs on Kubernetes, an open source platform that automates the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.
Credit: Shutterstock
To help the global developer community manage high-performance AI infrastructure with greater transparency and efficiency, NVIDIA is donating a critical piece of software — the NVIDIA Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) Driver for GPUs — to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a vendor-neutral organization dedicated to fostering and sustaining the cloud-native ecosystem.
Announced today at KubeCon Europe, CNCF’s flagship conference running this week in Amsterdam, the donation moves the driver from being vendor-governed to offering full community ownership under the Kubernetes project. This open environment encourages a wider circle of experts to contribute ideas, accelerate innovation and help ensure the technology stays aligned with the modern cloud landscape.
“NVIDIA’s deep collaboration with the Kubernetes and CNCF community to upstream the NVIDIA DRA Driver for GPUs marks a major milestone for open source Kubernetes and AI infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of CNCF. “By aligning its hardware innovations with upstream Kubernetes and AI conformance efforts, NVIDIA is making high-performance GPU orchestration seamless and accessible to all.”
In addition, in collaboration with the CNCF’s Confidential Containers community, NVIDIA has introduced GPU support for Kata Containers, lightweight virtual machines that act like containers. This extends hardware acceleration into a stronger isolation, separating workloads for increased security and enabling AI workloads to run with enhanced protection so organizations can easily implement confidential computing to safeguard data.
Simplifying AI Infrastructure
Historically, managing the powerful GPUs that fuel AI within data centers required significant effort. This contribution is designed to make high-performance computing more accessible.
Key benefits for developers include:
A Collaborative, Industry-Wide Effort
NVIDIA is collaborating with industry leaders — including Amazon Web Services, Broadcom, Canonical, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Nutanix, Red Hat and SUSE — to drive these features forward for the benefit of the entire cloud-native ecosystem.
“Open source will be at the core of every successful enterprise AI strategy, bringing standardization to the high-performance infrastructure components that fuel production AI workloads,” said Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president of global engineering at Red Hat. “NVIDIA’s donation of the NVIDIA DRA Driver for GPUs helps to cement the role of open source in AI’s evolution, and we look forward to collaborating with NVIDIA and the broader community within the Kubernetes ecosystem.”
“Open source software and the communities that sustain it are a cornerstone of the infrastructure used for scientific computing and research,” said Ricardo Rocha, lead of platforms infrastructure at CERN. “For organizations like CERN, where efficiently analyzing petabytes of data is essential to discovery, community-driven innovation helps accelerate the pace of science. NVIDIA’s donation of the DRA Driver strengthens the ecosystem researchers rely on to process data across both traditional scientific computing and emerging machine learning workloads.”
Expanding the Open Source Horizon
This donation is just part of NVIDIA’s broader initiatives to support the open source community. For example, NVSentinel — a system for GPU fault remediation — and AI Cluster Runtime, an agentic AI framework, were announced at GTC last week.
In addition, NVIDIA announced at GTC new open source projects including the NVIDIA NemoClaw reference stack and NVIDIA OpenShell runtime for securely running autonomous agents. OpenShell provides fine-grained programmable policy security and privacy controls, and natively integrates with Linux, eBPF and Kubernetes.
NVIDIA also today announced that its high-performance AI workload scheduler, the KAI Scheduler, has been onboarded as a CNCF Sandbox project — a key step toward fostering broader collaboration and ensuring the technology evolves alongside the needs of the wider cloud-native ecosystem. Developers and organizations can use and contribute to the KAI Scheduler today.
NVIDIA remains committed to actively maintaining and contributing to Kubernetes and CNCF projects to help meet the rigorous demands of enterprise AI customers.
In addition, following the release of NVIDIA Dynamo 1.0, NVIDIA is expanding the Dynamo ecosystem with Grove, an open source Kubernetes application programming interface for orchestrating AI workloads on GPU clusters. Grove, which enables developers to express complex inference systems in a single declarative resource, is being integrated with the llm-d inference stack for wider adoption in the Kubernetes community.
Developers and organizations can begin using and contributing to the NVIDIA DRA Driver today.
Source: Justin Boitano, NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Donates Dynamic Resource Allocation Driver for GPUs to Kubernetes Community appeared first on HPCwire.
Top prediction market sites usher in new guardrails after senators introduced bill that could limit booming industry
Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest prediction market sites, rushed to institute new industry guardrails and add new surveillance tools on Monday after two key senators announced legislation that could severely curtail the industry’s prospects.
Kalshi said it would ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns, and it would pre-emptively block anyone involved in college or professional sports from trading contracts related to the sports they play or are employed by.
Continue reading...Diplomatic sources say negotiations may begin in Islamabad next week, though no formal agreement is in place
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, says his country is ready to “facilitate meaningful and conclusive talks” to end the war in the Middle East amid attempts to push Islamabad as a possible venue for negotiations between the US and Iran.
Pakistani sources said the US vice-president, JD Vance, was being put forward as a probable chief negotiator from the US side if talks went ahead. Iranian sources have said they would refuse to sit down with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, or Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who led the nuclear negotiations with Iran before the war.
Continue reading...Big tech believes the future is AI while everyday Americans remain wary; and the dangers of riding in a Tesla Cybertruck
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. This week in tech, we discuss a moment of divergence between Silicon Valley and everyday people; deep cuts at Meta to maximize spending on AI; writers caught using AI; and the frightening, fiery crashes of the Tesla Cybertruck.
How the FBI can conduct mass surveillance – even without AI
Kash Patel admits under oath FBI is buying location data on Americans
Why is the FBI buying people’s location data and how is it using the information?
Continue reading...Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash that killed two pilots and injured 41 others
Pilot safety concerns about New York’s LaGuardia airport were filed to aviation officials months before Sunday’s collision between an airplane and a fire truck left two pilots dead and 41 other people hospitalized.
According to the aviation safety reporting system administered by the US space agency Nasa, a pilot using the airport in the summer wrote, “Please do something,” after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft.
Continue reading...RENO, Nev., March 24, 2026 — CIQ today announced a collaboration with AMD to deliver optimized enterprise infrastructure solutions for AI and HPC workloads running on AMD datacenter solutions including AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD ROCm software platform and more. The collaboration begins with AMD-optimized Rocky Linux from CIQ builds featuring validated AMD drivers, ROCm support, and day-zero deployment capability, with plans to integrate AMD optimizations throughout CIQ’s infrastructure stack.
As enterprise AI moves from experimentation to production, the partnership establishes a foundation for delivering complete infrastructure solutions. CIQ’s portfolio spans operating system, automation, cluster management and AI-optimized distributions, complementing AMD datacenter solutions to deliver increasingly integrated, AMD-optimized solutions across the stack.
As adoption of AMD Instinct GPUs grows across AI training, inference and HPC, enterprises increasingly seek validated software foundations that match the performance and scalability of the hardware. Deploying AI and HPC software stacks at scale requires careful alignment of GPU drivers, libraries and dependencies across Linux distributions. This collaboration standardizes a validated foundation for AMD ROCm software to simplify deployment and lifecycle management. At cluster scale, image management and version alignment can slow deployments. Validated, reproducible OS builds reduce these operational bottlenecks.
The collaboration offers an alternative to proprietary Linux solutions and addresses a gap in the market for freely accessible, enterprise-grade Linux optimized specifically for AMD-powered deployments.
The collaboration aims to deliver an AMD-optimized Rocky Linux build that enterprises can deploy at scale with day-zero capability, while reducing technical complexity and procurement barriers. Free enterprise access also enables AMD to deliver optimizations to the broadest possible user base. For customers deploying AMD datacenter solutions for large language model training, scientific simulation and data-intensive analytics, this provides a reproducible, enterprise-grade Linux foundation designed to unlock peak accelerator performance without custom integration work.
Rocky Linux has become one of the most widely deployed Enterprise Linux distributions in the world. Fedora EPEL telemetry shows millions of Rocky Linux systems in use globally, figures that understate the true deployment scale in air-gapped and enterprise environments. Rocky Linux’s dominance in performance-intensive computing, combined with CIQ’s enterprise capabilities, made the AMD datacenter solutions choice clear.
“Enterprise customers expect to move from infrastructure deployment to workload execution quickly,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux. “This collaboration gives AMD a single, reproducible Linux foundation to optimize against, and it gives enterprises a path to deploy AMD datacenter solutions from day-zero, without procurement hurdles. Rocky Linux is already the OS of choice for performance-intensive computing. Adding AMD-specific optimization and keeping it freely accessible makes that combination even stronger for AI and HPC workloads.”
“AMD Instinct GPUs along with our other datacenter solutions are designed to deliver leadership performance for AI and HPC workloads,” said Chuck Gilbert, senior director system design engineering at AMD. “To fully realize that performance in production environments, customers need a validated, scalable software foundation. By collaborating with CIQ to optimize Rocky Linux for AMD datacenter solutions, we are reducing time-to-deployment, simplifying operations at scale, and strengthening the enterprise ecosystem around our AI platform.”
The AMD-optimized Rocky Linux image will be available with enterprise support and lifecycle management from CIQ, providing organizations with a production-ready foundation for AMD-powered AI and HPC environments. Additional enhancements focused on cluster-scale deployments are expected in future releases.
Following general availability of the AMD-optimized image, CIQ plans to incorporate ongoing AMD performance enhancements and extend support for AMD Instinct GPUs and the AMD ROCm software platform across its infrastructure portfolio, including Warewulf Pro for cluster management, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Apptainer for containerization, and Fuzzball for workload orchestration. The companies expect to continue advancing joint ecosystem initiatives throughout 2026 and beyond in response to customer demand.
CIQ and AMD are delivering a scalable, open alternative for organizations seeking high-performance AI and HPC solutions without proprietary lock-in.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.
Source: CIQ
The post CIQ and AMD Collaborate to Deliver Optimized Enterprise AI and HPC Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware’s governor and his allies in the legislature unveiled a proposal to adopt a new set of banking reforms. The legislation places Delaware in a race with other states to attract a burgeoning, and potentially fast-growing, industry. Still unclear is whether it could thrust Delaware and its regulators – who pride themselves on a business-friendly ethos – into a debate between financial titans.
With two bills introduced Monday, Delaware could be among the first states to regulate a part of the disruptive cryptocurrency industry that is pushing to become a mainstream provider of card payments and savings accounts.
And, unlike in Congress where a bitter fight is raging over rules to govern the industry, Delaware’s proposal may avoid a lobbying clash between cryptocurrency firms and traditional banks.
The state’s proposal would create regulations allowing Delaware’s banking commissioner to issue licenses to cryptocurrency companies that take deposits and hold them in the form of stablecoins – which are digital currencies pegged to the dollar.
The proposed rules build on efforts by lawmakers nationally, and in a handful of other states to formalize the cryptocurrency industry within the American financial system. Supporters say that could unlock massive flows of money to the industry and therefore democratize financial tools for everyday people.
But critics argue it could boost a shadowy industry that too often facilitates money laundering and tax evasion.
For Delaware, proponents hope the legislation will bolster the state’s reputation as a financial technology center.
In a press conference at the University of Delaware on Monday, Gov. Matt Meyer said the regulations, if passed, could become as consequential to the state as its 1980s-era financial reforms that convinced credit card company executives to move thousands of jobs to the Wilmington area.
Meyer said changes in technology since then have required the state to reform banking laws to make room for cryptocurrencies. In a reference to a rise in virtual payments, Meyer said that few people will “carry a piece of plastic in their wallet” in the future.
“While that creates a tremendous opportunity for many in the market, it also creates a threat to our state, to a bedrock industry in our state,” Meyer said.
Also speaking at the press conference — held at UD’s FinTech Innovation Hub — was Karyn Polak, president of the Delaware Bankers Association, who said she was proud to stand alongside Delaware officials pushing for the “critically important” reforms.
“The financial landscape of today … looks very different from the environment that shaped our current statutes decades ago,” Polak said.
Her comments were noteworthy because banks have ferociously opposed other draft legislation in front of Congress that they say would allow cryptocurrency companies to encroach on their business.
The key issue in those federal fights has centered around the question of whether stablecoin issuers should be able to pay their depositors a form of interest-like “rewards.”
Pushing to make those legal – and in opposition to the banks – is Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms in the world. The company also is a primary investor in the stablecoin issuer, Circle.
Unlike other forms of cryptocurrencies with volatile valuations, stablecoins are designed to be safer forms of everyday payments because their values are tied to traditional currencies, largely the United States dollar. Crypto companies maintain those dollar pegs by investing customer deposits into safe securities, such as U.S. Treasury bills.
Last summer, Congress prohibited stablecoin companies from offering interest to customers through legislation, called the GENIUS Act. President Donald Trump promptly signed the act into law.
But that legislation didn’t end the fight. Earlier this month, Trump joined the crypto industry to criticize banks for lobbying against new legislation, known as the CLARITY Act, that could allow stablecoin companies to pay yields to people who use their accounts.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that “Americans should earn more money on their money.”
“The Banks are hitting record profits, and we are not going to allow them to undermine our powerful Crypto Agenda that will end up going to China,” Trump said in the post.
Following guidelines under the GENIUS Act, Delaware’s legislation states that “a permitted payment stablecoin issuer may not pay interest or yield on payment stablecoins to holders.”
It further says that if the federal government allows those interest-like payments in the future, then the state law would follow the new rules.
Asked who has lobbied for the proposed legislation, Meyer said the idea for the reforms originated within his office.
He also noted that a sponsor of the bills, State Sen. Spiros Mantzavinos (D-Elsmere), brought “similar but not identical thoughts of updating our financial regulation.”
Pressed specifically about lobbying from Coinbase, the governor said he spoke with a company official a few months ago, but that conversation was about Coinbase’s decision at the time to move its legal headquarters out of Delaware.
“I made it very clear that I thought they were taking actions that were not in Delaware’s interests,” Meyer said.
When asked about potential pushback from Delaware banks, Meyer asserted that his goal is to protect families, grow jobs, and democratize finance.
“Those are my three guiding principles. Who lobbies or calls or happens to sneak through a door and get a word into me edgewise doesn’t really matter,” Meyer said.
As of Tuesday, Delaware’s database of lobbying activity lists no registered lobbyists as working on the stablecoin legislation.
Mantzavinos said in an interview with Spotlight Delaware that he began thinking about the legislation in 2024 while watching Discover – the last of the independent credit card companies that came to Delaware in the 1980s – be purchased by Capital One.
Mantzavinos said ideas about the legislation formed more fully last year after Congress passed the GENIUS Act.
At the time, he said he watched as other states make “moves in this space,” which prompted his work on what he described as a more measured set of rules for the industry. Notably, Wyoming, a state that has aimed to compete with Delaware in the financial space in the past, became the first to issue a stablecoin earlier this year.
“We started to get a sense of seeing where some states were getting out over their skis a little bit, and being like, ‘That’s not us, that’s not Delaware,’” he said.
The post Delaware proposes regulations on crypto, with licensing for stablecoins appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: It’s Orwellian…appropriate, under the circumstances.
Coined Message: Probably not what was ever meant by “Stay gold.”
Video Break: Here’s why it’s called March Madness
Enormous Stakes: The economic risks of a long war.
Too Young to Die: A teen wrestler and two others executed in a public square.
What I’m Watching: One Battle After Another
Jukebox Playlist: The Byrds “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
— Attributed to George Orwell
It’s starting to feel like my mission in life these days is to take very good quotes that are widely attributed to someone or other, and say “No, so-and-so never actually said this.” Which is the case here again with George Orwell. Orwell scholars have searched his novels (like 1984 and Animal Farm), along with essays, letters, and journalism, and the line doesn’t appear in any verified source. But it does capture Orwell’s themes of dissent and truth vs propaganda. Which makes the quote sound Orwellian.
What Orwell actually said was, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” But by now you’re probably thinking, Kareem, this is your newsletter, you could have written it any way you chose; so why didn’t you just use the correct quote in the first place?
Because in a sense, a misattributed quote is like a society drifting off course. It’s almost that…but it’s not. It’s good enough to pass, and it fits the bill, so why quibble? How big a deal is it anyway that George Orwell never said what we say he said? Facts become optional. Authors’ words are fabricated…not all of them, maybe, but just enough to muddy the waters. And anyone who insists on saying what’s real suddenly looks like a big fat troublemaker.
So let’s break down the real quote. “In a time of deceit.” Surely we’re living in such a time. As for “telling the truth is a revolutionary act”—it seems like such a stretch, but let’s look at our present circumstances. Anyone who dares go against the status quo is called a radical, a communist, or worse, and is threatened with fines and jail time. And if you don’t think we’re “there” yet, let’s not forget that a beloved director and his wife were accused of sowing the seeds of their own murder via “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It doesn’t get any weirder or more degenerate than that.
This Orwellian pattern shows up every time a country decides that party matters more than reality. It’s the harmless “white” lie; it’s a good story that smooths over an uncomfortable fact; it’s a leader who discovers that withholding the truth get easier by the hour. But when the rich and powerful build lies upon lies in order to continue to gain fame and wealth and remain in power, the truth becomes not only inconvenient but dangerous.
It threatens to topple the power structure. It becomes a revolutionary act.
And once a society reaches that point, the people who insist on telling the truth stop being seen as honest or principled. They’re painted as disloyal, negative, or disruptive. They “aren’t patriotic.” They “don’t see the bigger picture.” It becomes easier to attack the person pointing out the problem than to confront the problem itself. Truth‑tellers become the enemy not because they’re wrong, but because they’re right in a way that exposes the stories people are invested in believing.
The irony is that most truth‑tellers aren’t trying to tear anything down. They’re trying to keep something standing—usually the idea that a society should be anchored in reality, not fantasy. But admitting the truth would mean admitting that the drift happened in the first place. And truth becomes something people fear instead of something they rely on. At that point, all we can hope for is that while most of us are watching the parade, a few will point to the Emperor and call out that he’s totally naked.
Enslaved by debt, victims often feel compelled to sell an organ to repay loans – but can find themselves even worse off after the procedure
Shafeeq Masih* faced an impossible choice: remain trapped for ever by the debt he owed to the owner of the brick kiln where he worked, just outside the Pakistani city of Lahore, or try to pay it off by selling the only thing he had of any value: one of his kidneys.
The brick kiln owner was harassing him to repay the debt, which he claimed stood at 900,000 rupees (£2,420), but however hard he worked, it just kept growing. Masih knew the owner was fiddling the books but says, “whatever they put in writing, we can’t question that. They see us as slaves. We just have to obey.”
There are an estimated 20,000 brick kilns in Pakistan, employing as many as five million workers, the vast majority of whom are believed to be in debt bondage
Continue reading...Since 1956, the majority of water and infrastructure spending has been by state and local governments.
A CBS News analysis of Los Angeles County hospice records found indications of fraud are growing. The House Oversight Committee is now investigating.
How is the US-Israel war on Iran impacting energy and the global economy? 1 April 2026 — 13:00 TO 14:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Online
Speakers discuss the evolving energy and economic implications of the US-Israel war on Iran and its impact on regional and global markets.
Speakers discuss the evolving energy and economic implications of the US-Israel war on Iran and its impact on regional and global markets.
The US-Israel war on Iran has already led to high jumps in global energy and gas prices. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the escalation of strikes on energy sites, threaten long-term damage to the region’s energy sector and economy.
In this webinar, experts discuss the evolving energy and economic implications of the US-Israel war on Iran and its impact on global markets. Speakers will also assess risks to energy supply, trade flows, and inflation, as well as the broader shift toward economic fragmentation and heightened geopolitical uncertainty.
The session will also examine how Gulf economies are navigating these pressures, including their resilience, policy responses, and pathways to recovery in a more volatile global environment.
AI and National Security: Who's Really in Control? 20 April 2026 — 18:00 TO 19:15 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
Experts discuss who controls AI, and on whose terms.
The International Security Programme brings together a panel of experts to discuss who controls AI, and on whose terms?
When the US government designated Anthropic a national security threat earlier this year — a label previously reserved for foreign adversaries — it exposed a fault line that had been building for years: who controls AI, and on whose terms?
This panel brings together voices from research, journalism, military and industry to examine who really controls AI when national security is at stake — and what the answer means for democracy, global order and world security.
Key questions include:
This event is part of the AI Collaborative, a program of the Howard Baker Forum implemented in partnership with Chatham House.
The baby needed somewhere to go. So in the frantic hours before officers took her parents away to immigration detention, her mom turned to their pastor and his wife. As squad cars waited outside the family’s Lakeland, Florida, trailer home, she gave them a crash course in how to care for the 4-month-old.
Briany, with her plump cheeks and full head of dark hair, wasn’t normally this fussy. But it was late that January night — around midnight — and she was still hungry. Her mom, Doris Flores, had tried nursing her to calm her down. It didn’t work. When she brought Briany to her breast, the milk wouldn’t come. Flores thought it had to do with the panic that set in after the officers arrested the baby’s father and told her she was next.
The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who’d never had children of their own, should take her bottles and the yellow cans of formula, too, and follow the instructions on the label. They should use distilled water, never from the tap. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to two-and-a-half hours.
She was almost due for her next round of vaccinations. She was getting big enough for Size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was to be held in someone’s arms.
The Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, soft-spoken with close-cropped hair, had held Briany before, when he formally presented the baby to God in a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn’t take the girls in, they would have to go into foster care. “What else could we do?” he said.
The baby’s half-sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of. Eight-year-old Briana was quiet and humble. She preferred speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color was blue.
Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office helped load a baby stroller and bouncy swing into the couple’s car. Then the officers, employed by one of the hundreds of Florida agencies carrying out immigration enforcement for the Trump administration, handcuffed a sobbing Flores.
Incidents like this, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with American citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement dataset shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention.
The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights as part of an ongoing public records lawsuit. It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration until mid-August 2025.
ICE arrests of parents doubled in the first seven months of Trump’s second term compared with the Biden administration.
The differences between the fates of detained immigrant parents under the two presidents are stark, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did.
Immigration authorities are arresting more of these moms in the first place, but that doesn’t account for all of the surge in deportations. If arrested, they are seldom allowed to return home to their families anymore. About 30% of such arrests under Biden resulted in a deportation. Under Trump, almost 60% resulted in a deportation.
Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all. Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses.
ProPublica compared what happened to U.S. citizen children’s mothers arrested during the same seven-month period — Jan. 20 through Aug. 20 — in 2024 (under Biden) and 2025 (under Trump), looking at over 1,000 cases. About a third of the arrests made during the Biden administration led to a deportation. Under Trump, that rate doubled.
While thousands of children who aren’t U.S. citizens are also caught up in the administration’s crackdown — some of them detained with their parents, others by themselves — families with mixed citizenship can be uniquely difficult to keep together. American-born kids like Briany can’t legally join their parents in immigrant detention. So some end up in the care of friends or strangers.
Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security said such separations are not necessarily a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on the way officers should exercise discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive. And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word.
John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the original directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, “Back then, we were operating from a lens that family unity is everything.” Tom Homan, then a top ICE official and now Trump’s border czar, introduced the directive to field offices around the country. If agents encountered parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without “unnecessarily undermining their parental rights,” according to his August 2013 talking points, which were obtained by ProPublica.
Now, Sandweg and the other former officials said, the second Trump administration has put aggressive enforcement goals like arresting 3,000 immigrants a day above concerns about the harms of hastily separating children from their parents.
ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency “cannot verify the veracity of the data” that ProPublica analyzed. (We validated the data, which the agency provided via Freedom of Information Act requests, and our approach with outside experts.) Bis also said in the statement, “ICE does not separate families.”
Immigrant parents can choose to leave the country with their children or to designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which “is consistent with past administration’s policies.” The revised directive “simply standardizes the required forms.” She added that “under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.”
A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally “who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.”
The unraveling of Flores’ family began with another kid’s alleged threat against 8-year-old Briana.
According to a Jan. 15 police report, the girl’s school bus driver had contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after Briana claimed a student at her elementary school, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, had threatened to kill her.
The sheriff’s office dispatched a deputy to the family’s mobile home, where she introduced herself to Flores and her fiance, Egdulio Velasquez, and asked to speak with Briana. The 8-year-old was “timid,” according to the police report, and initially denied any trouble with fellow students. The family said that the deputy questioned Briana alone outside the trailer. Eventually, the girl let on that her classmate had indeed been bothering her, poking her in the back and face with his fingers — but did not say the boy had threatened to kill her, according to the police report.
The deputy went to the classmate’s house, and the boy told her it was Briana who had made the threats. He said she had pointed a broken pencil at him. The deputy filled out two threat assessment forms, one for the boy, one for the girl, noting that she hadn’t checked the boy’s home for firearms because his “father was uncooperative” but had searched Briana’s trailer.
“I was unable to determine probable cause,” the deputy wrote in her report. She would have to drop the case. But her investigation had turned up something else: Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras.
A second sheriff’s deputy arrived at the trailer not long after and took their passports. According to police records, he then called an ICE hotline, a requirement stemming from Florida’s close cooperation with the agency. An operator told him that both parents had deportation orders: Velasquez from a DUI conviction and Flores from a missed asylum hearing.
Flores said she had missed the hearing because of computer issues and was trying to appeal the ruling. She’d crossed the border into the United States and applied for asylum in 2023, after a man in Honduras had threatened to kill her. DHS’ Bis confirmed that Flores entered the country in 2023 and had a deportation order issued in May 2025.
Flores had met Velasquez, who is from the same rural Honduran province of Olancho, in the United States. Briana, his daughter from a previous relationship, was born in Honduras. The family built a life together in Lakeland, where he worked in a factory that built shipping pallets, and they became members of Vázquez’s church.
A third squad car appeared outside the trailer. The officers arrested Velasquez first, keeping him handcuffed in the back of one of the cars for hours. But before they could arrest Flores, they needed to figure out what to do with the kids.
“Don’t be like this,” Flores recalled saying to the officers as she held baby Briany. “My girl needs me.” She said they told her they were just doing their jobs. She said she prayed to God: “Lord, I’m putting everything in your hands.”
According to Flores and Velasquez, one of the deputies took a liking to a family kitten and offered to take it home with him. Velasquez said he later saw the kitten clinging to the officer’s pants.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to specific questions about the incident, instead sending an emailed statement that outlined its state-mandated cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
It was close to 11 p.m. when an investigator from Florida’s child protective services finally arrived, the family said. She informed Flores that if she couldn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. So Flores called her pastor.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd recently began calling for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes and have strong community ties. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office wrote in the statement to ProPublica that deputies do not make any decisions on who to detain — they report suspects to ICE, and ICE makes the decision.
But she noted they now make an effort to determine citizenship status.
“Nothing has changed in how we deliver day-to-day law enforcement services in our community,” she wrote, “other than asking everyone with whom we interact their place of birth.”
Federal policy still says ICE officers should ask people they arrest if they are the parents or legal guardians of minors — and if they are, they should be allowed to make arrangements for the children’s care. The Trump administration’s July revision to this directive, the one that removed the word “humane” from the preamble, also added a new line. It specifies that the directive “in no way limits the ability of ICE personnel to make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis.”
In practice, instances when parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who oversaw implementation of the directive at ICE during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It may happen on a case-by-case basis because an officer in and of himself has humanity,” he said.
ProPublica followed multiple families through their sudden separations — examining the moment itself and its aftermath — and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children.
Fernanda, a Florida restaurant worker, made an agonizing decision after the father of her children was arrested and deported: She would send their toddler son and 4-year-old daughter to Guatemala to live with him. She feared it was only a matter of time until immigration agents came knocking on her door. She didn’t want the children, both U.S. citizens, to be stranded.
Fernanda asked to be identified by only her middle name because of her immigration status. The Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit, helped her take the kids to the Fort Lauderdale airport in early February, the little boy dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, the little girl in a CoComelon sweatshirt and pink hat, and put them on a plane.
Griselda, a single mom originally from Honduras, had to leave her young daughters with their babysitter for four months. She said she was getting a ride to a housepainting job in Melbourne, Florida, when the car’s brakes failed and it crashed into a stop sign. Police officers showed up, she said, then called ICE.
A domestic abuse survivor who asked to be identified by only her first name, Griselda said she told the officers, then ICE, about her children, but she was sent out of state to be detained in Dilley, Texas, without them. Griselda was desperate to reunite with her 4-year-old, who was born in Mexico during her journey to the southwest border, and her 1-year-old, who is a U.S. citizen. She said she decided not to file an appeal after a judge denied her asylum claim and that an ICE agent and a social worker were dispatched to Florida to retrieve the girls. Then, she said, she and her daughters were escorted to the border to cross on foot into Mexico — where they knew no one and had no money.
A DHS spokesperson confirmed that the family was sent to Mexico together.
Mauricio Ayala, a 24-year-old engineer working at a firm in downtown Seattle, called 911 after immigration agents arrested his dad last April. “My father has been illegally detained,” he told the dispatcher nervously, stumbling over his words. “A bunch of masked men in unmarked vehicles pulled up and detained him.” (A DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement that “our officers verbally identify themselves” and wear badges and vests that display their agency name.)
His dad, a roofer, had been swept up in one of the first large-scale workplace raids of the new Trump administration. It was the beginning of a role reversal for Ayala, his college-age sister and his brother, a high school senior. All citizens, they would be the ones supporting their parents. Their mom had been forced to leave the country after an immigration arrest over a decade ago, Ayala said, but officers didn’t arrest his dad at the time because there were young children in the home. His dad was found guilty of reckless driving in 2015 but had no other criminal convictions that we could find in the United States. But now, as the siblings entered adulthood, their dad would be deported, too.
To cut costs and send money to his parents in Mexico, Ayala moved from his Seattle apartment back into the trailer his dad owned in a smaller city 90 minutes away. His sister did the same. Their little brother picked up part-time jobs.
Maria Magdalena Callejas, her boyfriend and her 14-year-old son were detained in Texas while on a road trip last spring. She called a friend back home in California who she’d asked to watch her two younger children — both U.S. citizens — until her return. She begged the friend to take care of them for even longer.
Callejas’ boyfriend was deported. She and her older son, Edwin, were held in family detention, where he said he was stressed because it felt like a prison. He said he lost 10 pounds in a week after he got sick. He was so despondent, his mother said, that she felt her only option was to allow them to be sent back to El Salvador, a country Edwin left when he was 5. (ICE has said conditions in its facilities are safe for families and that everyone is provided proper medical care.)
Callejas said she agreed to return to El Salvador only because she understood that her 6-year-old and 4-year-old would be allowed to join her and their older brother.
The kids’ father had previously pleaded no contest to domestic battery and had a restraining order placed against him, which allowed brief supervised visitation. (Attorneys for both parents said Callejas allowed him to spend time with the kids despite the order.) When he found out their mom had been deported, he opposed the children leaving the country and decided to fight for custody. Since Callejas’ deportation, the children have been with a caretaker, and a judge has allowed their father more time with them, according to lawyers for both parents. The result: a monthslong battle in a Los Angeles court — with Callejas attending hearings virtually from El Salvador.
Back in Lakeland, Israel Vázquez takes no credit for feeding the baby that first night or the ones after. “That girl can drink milk!” he said. His wife, the Rev. Raysa Vázquez, woke up every couple of hours and tended to Briany, sitting with her in the brown recliner in the living room, rocking her back to sleep.
They did not know how long the girls would be with them. They decided 8-year-old Briana should stay at the same elementary school, to keep her with her friends and teacher. They drove around 45 minutes round trip to the school every day.
Meanwhile, the girls’ parents bounced among hold rooms, jails and detention centers. In detention, Flores said, she began to suffer a painful swelling, which she believed could have been mastitis brought on by her inability to nurse her baby. Her chest became hot to the touch, her whole body feverish. The fever lasted a week.
The couple wanted to do whatever they could to make the girls feel at home. But they also wanted to make sure the girls could be reunited with their parents. If Flores and Velasquez were going to be deported, the pastors wanted the girls to go with them. And to go with them, Briany would need a passport. The pastors would have to get both parents’ signatures while they were in detention.
Briany was sitting on Raysa’s lap as they watched TV in the living room, babbling along as she listened to the couple talk, when Israel’s phone rang. It was an ICE deportation officer. He said Flores would be removed from the country soon and the window for getting her daughters on a plane with her was closing. He offered to help the Vázquezes get the parents’ signatures and said ICE would bring Flores to Tampa.
The next day, they drove to a government office in Tampa to get Flores’ signature, where the girls were allowed to see and hug her. She let out a loud scream and started weeping at the sight of the children. In Mississippi, volunteers rushed to the detention center where Velasquez was being held and got his signature, too.
The couple drove Briany to Miami a few days later and picked up her passport. Then they brought the girls to the Tampa airport.
They met Flores at the terminal. She was clad in a sweatshirt and bleary from the early hour. Israel handed over the diaper bag he’d been carrying around and the baby’s bottles. Flores’ fiance would be deported a few weeks later on a separate flight to Honduras. Her eldest child, a son from a previous relationship who had to go live with his father after she was arrested, would remain in the U.S. So for now it was just Flores and the two girls. They posed for a photo, then said goodbye.
The family now lives at Velasquez’s father’s house in the town of San José, deep in rural Honduras. The baby no longer breastfeeds. She hasn’t since the night deputies separated her from her mother. “I brought her to my breast,” Flores said, “but she doesn’t want it anymore.”
Briany’s preferred formula costs too much for the family to afford. To keep the baby fed, they rely again on their church. A box of it recently arrived, enough to last several weeks, sent by the Vázquezes and their Lakeland congregation.
Ours is the most detailed accounting to date of the U.S. citizen children whose immigrant parents have been arrested, detained and in many cases deported. Underlying the analysis is a database of ICE I-213 records obtained by the University of Washington. Immigration agents fill out Form I-213 when they arrest someone alleging they are in the country without permission. Among other pieces of information, it records the citizenship and number of minor children of each arrestee.
The data appears to contain arrests only by ICE and does not cover arrests by Customs and Border Protection. It covers late 2021 to mid-August 2025. We used this data to calculate the number of parents of U.S. citizen children arrested each day.
To learn what happened to parents after they were arrested by ICE, including detention, final release from ICE custody in the United States or removal from the country, we combined the I-213 data with records from the Deportation Data Project, which covers late 2023 to mid-October 2025. The I-213 dataset contains about 17% fewer arrests by ICE in any given month than the Deportation Data Project’s arrest dataset.
We were able to combine these two datasets using fields common to both of them, including date of arrest, gender, age, nationality, location and method of arrest. We matched about 85% of the arrests in the I-213 data to a unique record in the ICE arrest and detention data. (An additional 7% had multiple possible matches, so we did not include them, and about 7% had no possible match. These rates were similar across presidential administrations.)
We used the overlapping 85% to make statements about the number of U.S. citizen children who had a parent arrested and detained by ICE since Trump returned to office and about the criminal status of their parents. We also used these combined records to compare how their mothers were treated differently by the Trump and Biden administrations.
To calculate that more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children had a parent arrested and detained by ICE, we counted only children of fathers. We did this to avoid double-counting children in cases where both parents were detained, and fathers made up a large majority of the parents detained. We were limited to the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the time period covered in the I-213 data. If a father was arrested and detained more than once under Trump, we counted that father’s children only once. All other calculations were performed at the arrest level, meaning that in a very small number of instances, the same parent could be included more than once for each time they were arrested, detained, released or removed.
The government cannot legally detain U.S. citizen children with their parents or deport them. According to immigration experts and current and former officials, the arrest and detention of parents of U.S. citizens often leads to a family separation, even if it’s brief.
We counted a parent as having been detained by ICE if they were booked into a facility for any length of time according to the Deportation Data Project’s detention records. In a very small minority of cases during the Trump administration, parents were released from ICE custody in less than a few days. This was more common under Biden. When we calculated the criminal history of parents arrested and detained by ICE, we relied on the criminal charges in these detention records.
To calculate that Trump has deported mothers of U.S. citizen children at four times the rate that Biden did, we calculated the total number of mothers removed under each administration in the period covered by our data and divided by the number of days each president was in office during that period. We used the period from November 2023 through mid-August 2025 to minimize undercounting at the start and end of our detention dataset. We also compared equivalent seven-month periods in 2024 and 2025, which produced a similar result. For the purposes of our analysis, we counted a small number of detained mothers who agreed to leave the country voluntarily as having been deported.
We verified our matches between the two data sources in several ways. First, there were three fields in the I-213 data that were in other parts of the Deportation Data Project data but not used as part of the linkage process: marital status, processing disposition and date of entry. For records we linked that contained values in those fields (some were empty in one or both datasets), we found that those data points matched more than 98% of the time.
Next, we checked to make sure that there were no systematic differences in which ICE arrests appeared in the I-213 dataset compared to those contained in the Deportation Data Project records. We checked to make sure that women and men were equally represented, the different ICE field offices were equally represented, nationalities were equally represented, etc. We found no appreciable difference between the two datasets.
We also compared records for which we found a match between the two datasets to records that had no match and found no strong patterns suggesting systematic differences between the two.
ICE publishes the number of parents of U.S. citizens arrested on its detention management website and in reports to Congress. We compared our analysis against these numbers and found that for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, our data showed about 15% fewer such parents arrested by ICE than the official statistics noted. We do not know exactly why this is, although it is in line with how many fewer I-213 records we have than there are arrest records in the Deportation Data Project.
We ran our findings and methodology by Phil Neff, a researcher at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and Joseph Gunther, a mathematician who researches immigration-related datasets and former ICE officials.
We also were able to link some of the data to leaked ICE flight manifests, which allowed us in some cases to find the full names — redacted in most of the other data — of some of the deported parents. In a handful of those cases, we found their phone numbers or those of family members, and we reached out to hear their stories.
We conducted interviews in Spanish and English with close to two dozen detained or deported parents or their relatives or lawyers. We also spoke with nonprofits like the American Friends Service Committee and Each Step Home, which assist immigrant families — including Flores’ family — after they are separated.
The parents we followed through the arrest process were originally from a range of mostly Latin American countries: Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Ecuador. They and their children had made lives in all corners of the United States, including California, Washington state, New York, Massachusetts and Florida. Most of the parents we interviewed were moms.
The post Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids appeared first on ProPublica.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: The importance of truth in small matters
Where’s Vlad?: The Kremlin’s Toughest Man is suddenly hard to find
Video Break: Dancing with Zorba the Greek
Congress Turns Up the Heat: Pam Bondi to testify in Epstein case
Chief Justice Roberts: He wants growing hostility to judges to stop
What I’m Watching: Young Sherlock
Jukebox Playlist: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” — Albert Einstein
This is an actual quote from Albert Einstein. The wording may differ slightly, but that’s due to translation choices, not because some spurious or random statement was attributed to a famous person who never said any such thing. And though I don’t speak German, the tone of the original, from what I gather, is more ethical and deliberate than it appears in English. It’s less about accidental carelessness with the truth and more about a person’s attitude toward it.
In basketball, you find out quickly that greatness isn’t built on highlight plays, but on the quiet habits nobody cheers for: the extra pass, the box-out, the discipline to run the play even when the crowd wants a show. Winning matters, of course, but the game itself also matters—how it’s played. In other words, the best players are those who have an ethical and deliberate attitude. They do it for the love of the game, even when nobody’s watching.
The same is true in public life. Some people in power quietly protect the Constitution. Others perform for the cameras. They tend to “exaggerate” the errors of their adversaries while sweeping their own mistakes under the rug. We’ve seen this so often that we’ve come to take it for granted—the fact that Truth with a capital T takes a back seat to partisan politics. We tune in to government hearings hoping to hear thoughtful, well-calibrated questions grounded in research. Instead, we often see members of one party defending their own interests, with truth as an afterthought. This isn’t accidental carelessness or even, as it sometimes appears, outright stupidity. More often, it reflects an attitude toward truth that has become so malleable it can be pushed aside in favor of a paycheck or continued power.
Unfortunately, the more truth is handled this way, the less weight it carries. Over time, the system teaches itself to survive by obscuring the truth from its own people. An overt case at the moment continues to be Epstein and his infamous files. They’ve ceased to be simply about bringing criminals to justice and have become an indication of whether of not truth itself still matters—not only to elected officials, but to us all.
Societies drift away not with a bang, but with a shrug, not through dramatic collapse, but through a slow erosion of standards. A little secrecy here. A little intimidation there. A little bending of the rules “just this once.” A little sweeping of truth under the nearest rug. Our elected officials strain at a gnat and swallow a camel while expecting us to do the same…or at the very least, to turn away politely while they wash it down with a nice Chianti.
And when we finally decide to look again, we notice that the guardrails are not just no longer where we left them, they’re nowhere to be found.
Film screening: ‘Facing War’ 23 April 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House
Join us at Chatham House for this screening documenting the final year in office of former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg – who headed the organisation from 2014 to 2024 – as he dealt with Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine.
Join us at Chatham House for this screening documenting the final year in office of former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg – who headed the organisation from 2014 to 2024 – as he dealt with Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Facing War offers an unprecedented, inside look at the fraught closing months of the Norwegian diplomat’s tenure, at a time when the crisis had pushed the alliance to its most serious test since the Second World War. Filmed with rare access to NATO’s inner decision‑making spaces, the documentary immerses viewers in the high‑stakes diplomacy shaping Europe’s security as the alliance sought to balance promises of support to Ukraine with concerns about triggering an escalation of the conflict.
It shows tense negotiations with world leaders including US President Joe Biden, who had persuaded Stoltenberg to stay on for one more year to deal with the crisis; President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán. The film captures urgent discussions over how to support Ukraine and a year defined by fragile unity and geopolitical friction at a time when the crisis had pushed the alliance to its most serious test since the Second World War.
Filmed with rare access to NATO’s inner decision‑making spaces, the documentary immerses viewers in the high‑stakes diplomacy shaping Europe’s security as the alliance sought to balance promises of support to Ukraine with concerns about triggering an escalation of the conflict.
It shows tense negotiations with world leaders including US President Joe Biden, who had persuaded Stoltenberg to stay on for one more year to deal with the crisis; President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán. The film captures urgent discussions over how to support Ukraine and a year defined by fragile unity and geopolitical friction.
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