News Reel

Colorado's governor on Friday announced he is commuting the sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 16, No. 600.

President Trump told reporters he made "no commitment either way" to China's Xi Jinping regarding U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.

President Trump's trip to China could bolster economic relations, but failed to deliver a breakthrough deal, some trade and energy experts said.

Order, issued without any noted dissent, is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition

The supreme court on Friday rejected Virginia’s bid to restore a congressional map that would have given Democrats a chance to pick up four seats in the closely divided House of Representatives.

The court’s order, issued without any noted dissent, is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition . It was kicked off last year by Donald Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent supreme court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act that opened up even more winnable seats for the Republican party.

Firefighters responded to a fire at Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, Maine, about 95 miles from Portland.

An Iraqi national allegedly plotted to carry out terror attacks in the U.S., including at a prominent synagogue in New York, prosecutors said Friday.

SuperFlux will fit stock axle blocks but the notch inside the block needs to be removed. Can be done with a Dremel and a milling bit then use the axle bolts that the SuperFlux comes with.

Face ID isn't just for your phone. SwitchBot's new smart lock line uses facial recognition to unlock your deadbolt.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 16 No. 804.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 16, No. 1,070.

The International Space Station-bound SpaceX Cargo Dragon is loaded with 6,500 pounds of needed equipment, research gear and crew supplies.

Change reflects both transformation of US in Trump era and China’s increasing confidence on world stage

Asked before he departed for Beijing if he would raise with the Chinese president the case of Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy activist jailed in Hong Kong, Donald Trump said: “I’ll bring him up.”

But, the US president added: “It’s like saying to me, ‘If Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ It might be a hard one for me.” Trump was referring to James B Comey, a former FBI director and a frequent target of Trump’s ire.

Current governor Jared Polis commuted sentence of Trump ally who backed the president’s false claims about the 2020 election, saying punishment was too long

• Colorado governor commutes sentence of election denier Tina Peters

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Jamieson Greer also said US export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major topic of discussions with Chinese officials in Beijing.

The US trade representative’s comments to Bloomberg on Friday suggest a breakthrough on selling Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to China remains far away, Reuters is reporting, despite Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s last-minute invitation to Donald Trump’s Beijing trip this week.

This was not a major topic of discussion at the bilateral meeting. We did not talk about chip export controls at the meeting.”

First of all, it’s really important for China to have the strait of Hormuz open – no tolling, no military control. That was clear from the meeting, so we welcome that.

With respect to Chinese involvement with Iran, our view is the Chinese are being very pragmatic – they don’t want to be on the wrong side of this. They want to see peace in that area, President Trump wants to see peace in that area, so we have a lot of confidence that they will do what they can to limit any kind of material support for Iran.”

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive its new voter-approved congressional map that was drawn to advantage the party for the upcoming midterm elections.

All 46 Council of Europe members sign agreement ‘deplored’ by human rights organisations

The UK and 45 other European countries have signed an agreement that explicitly endorses plans to send unwanted asylum seekers to third country hubs.

A political declaration from the 46 members of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR), said states had an “undeniable sovereign right” to control their borders.

Chaotic week in which enforcer of ‘war on drugs’ flees senate building leaves government looking ‘incompetent’

The wanted man outran security agents, rallied protesters and even serenaded the media with a military hymn. Then, after a sudden exchange of gunfire, the Philippines’ most controversial lawmaker slipped out of the heavily guarded senate building in the middle of the night.

Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who is wanted by the international criminal court for crimes against humanity, is now nowhere to be seen.

BrianFagioli writes: Kioxia and Dell Technologies say they have built a 2U server configuration capable of scaling to 9.8PB of flash storage, which is the sort of density that would have sounded impossible just a few years ago. The setup combines a Dell PowerEdge R7725xd Server with 40 Kioxia LC9 Series 245.76TB NVMe SSDs and AMD EPYC processors. According to Kioxia, matching the same capacity with more common 30.72TB SSDs would require seven additional servers and another 280 drives. The companies are pitching the hardware squarely at AI and hyperscale workloads, where storage is rapidly becoming a bottleneck alongside compute. Kioxia claims the denser configuration can dramatically reduce power consumption and rack space requirements while remaining air cooled. The announcement also highlights how quickly enterprise storage capacities are escalating as organizations race to support larger AI models, massive datasets, and increasingly demanding data pipelines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oscillating fans are a nice idea to spread air around the room, but what if you just want to cool yourself? Dyson's Find+Follow uses AI tracking to do it.

The state’s governor commuted Peters’ sentence after a White House pressure campaign against Colorado

Tina Peters, a Colorado election clerk, had her prison sentence commuted on Friday by Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, after months of pressure from Donald Trump and other conservatives.

The move drew immediate rebuke from Colorado Democrats, including the US senator and former governor John Hickenlooper.

Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi appeared in US federal court to face six terrorism-related charges

The US justice department has arrested and charged an Iraqi national accused of involvement in nearly 20 alleged terror attacks and attempted attacks across the US and Europe.

The wave of violence attributed to Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi has caused huge concern in many European countries but especially the UK, where Jewish community centres, charities, synagogues and other sites have been targeted in recent weeks.

You'll never escape your vibe coding projects as long as you have your phone with you.

AMD says FSR 4.1 will finally bring its newer hardware-accelerated upscaling technology to older Radeon GPUs. "The rollout will begin in July with RDNA3- and 3.5-based GPUs, which include the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S," reports Ars Technica. "In 'early 2027,' support will also be extended to the RDNA2 architecture, which includes the Radeon RX 6000 series, integrated GPUs like the Radeon 680M, and the Steam Deck's GPU. This would also open the door to supporting FSR 4 on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, all of which also use RDNA2-based GPUs." From the report: [AMD Computing and Graphics SVP Jack Huynh's] short video presentation didn't get into performance comparisons, but did mention that AMD had to work to get FSR 4's superior hardware-backed upscaling working on its older graphics architectures. RDNA4 includes AI accelerators that support the FP8 data format in the hardware, and porting FSR 4 to older GPUs meant getting it running on the integer-based INT8 hardware in the RDNA3 and RDNA2-based GPUs. This may mean that FSR 4.1 running on an RDNA3 or RDNA2-based GPU may come with a larger performance hit relative to RDNA4 cards, or that image quality may differ slightly. Modders have already worked to get FSR4 working on INT8-supporting GPUs, and the older GPUs reportedly see a 10 to 20 percent performance hit relative to FSR 3.1 running on the same hardware. AMD's official implementation may or may not improve on these numbers. [...] Any games that support FSR 4 should be able to support FSR 4.1 running on Radeon 7000-series cards; users will presumably be able to install a driver update in July that enables the new feature. Games that support the older FSR 3.1 can also be forced to use FSR 4 in the Radeon graphics driver.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the largest pediatric hospitals in the US will pay state $10m and stop offering gender-affirming care to youth

One of the largest pediatric hospitals in the US is creating a clinic that officials say will be a place for transgender youth to detransition to the sex they were assigned at birth.

The news came on Friday, when Texas children’s hospital reached a settlement agreement with the state’s attorney general and the US justice department over allegations that the Houston-based medical center billed Texas Medicaid to cover gender-affirming care under false diagnosis codes, among other claims.

Trump administration accused of cutting military’s civilian harm program in light of US strike on girls school in Iran

The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog.

A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).

The Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones. 

Thursday’s scathing analysis by the Department of War’s inspector general came on the same day that the top U.S. commander overseeing the war in Iran dismissed reports of civilian casualties and said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools. The inspector general specifically notes that the military stopped funding a database that tracks civilian harm that could be used for such verification.

While damning, the former chief of harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence nonetheless called the new report a “whitewash” that downplays the evisceration of the Center and the entire enterprise devoted to reducing civilian casualties.

The report focuses on the implementation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP, which was mandated by the department to take full effect by the end of 2025. The inspector general found serious deficiencies and a chronic failure to meet timelines for 11 objectives consisting of 133 incomplete “implementing actions” by the end of last year. The inspector general found that the Department of War “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY 2025.”

“This is a crisis of the Trump Administration’s own making: They slashed the staffing and funding for civilian harm mitigation, and now they can’t adequately follow the law and implement the CHMR-AP, leaving civilians and our own military personnel at risk,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept. “The Inspector General’s report is clear about what that means: wasted munitions, failed strikes, damaged alliances, and propaganda wins for our adversaries. The Trump Administration needs to reverse course immediately so we can save lives and protect our national security.”

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The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of CHMR efforts. More than a year ago, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties.

The 43-page inspector general report details continuing efforts to hamstring protections for civilians in war zones, noting that “DoW Components ended funding for the CHMR data management platform, stopped holding Steering Committee meetings, lost or reassigned many of the personnel dedicated to CHMR, and lost personnel and leadership” at the Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and employing tools for preventing civilian casualties.

Wes Bryant, who until last year served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Center of Excellence, is one of those “lost personnel,” having been forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on efforts to dismantle CHMR efforts.

“It is completely whitewashed of the truth,” Bryant said of the report. “It reads as if the IG is completely deliberately ignoring the fact that the center and the entire CHMR enterprise was targeted for immediate shutdown, that 90 percent of billets were either terminated or forced out, and that what exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority and is completely locked out of visibility and oversight on all investigations and operations.”

The watchdog’s evaluation noted that Hegseth’s War Department “may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy” — which is required under federal law. The investigation also found that eliminating CHMR funding and personnel also “decreases readiness and increases risk to DoW personnel, mission success, and military objectives,” according to officials at the Joint Staff, which is headed by Gen. Dan Caine, and at geographic combatant commands, which oversee U.S. operations in various corners of the world.

While couched in stilted language, the report details dangers to civilians due to cuts to CHMR efforts. It makes note of deficiencies in “personnel and capabilities” to protect civilians under Pentagon regulations that are mandated by federal law. And it mentions a lack of necessary “tools” at the Center of Excellence, including a “data management platform” meant to track civilian harm incidents. The report notes that “according to Joint Staff and [combatant command] officials, eliminating CHMR funding and personnel makes mitigating or responding to civilian harm more difficult.” Such officials also noted that “eliminating CHMR funding and personnel reduces battle space awareness and increases the risk of civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.”

“This report makes it clear that the DoD is not complying with the law, nor its own policies, both of which were built on a bipartisan basis upon years of hard-learned lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “As Congress develops the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they must ensure that it not only provides the DoD with the resources it needs to comply with law and policy but also conduct rigorous oversight to keep the DoD accountable for implementing these critical programs.”

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U.S. Military Command That Attacked Venezuela Gutted Its Civilian Harm Team

Reporting by The Intercept found a combatant command that has gone from a military backwater to one engaged in regular kinetic activity — U.S. Southern Command — is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January , the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America. The organization learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Center of Excellence.

The report specifically mentions the Center’s “support for organizations such as the U.S. Southern Command,” despite the fact that the Center “lost large numbers of personnel and leaders,” does not have “the tools designed to meet its statutory roles and duties,” and that the Army had developed plans, early last year, to euthanize it.

The report notes that an official from an unnamed combatant command “stated that they largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025.” Another said that they did not “want to spend resources on actions or make future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed.”

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

Related

Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket

The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school. More than 150 civilians were killed, most of them children.

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society last month; this includes 763 schools. The Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

“U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing late last month.

On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper — the senior officer overseeing U.S. combat operations in Iran — told senators that the strike on the school in Minab was the only civilian casualty incident he knew of after more than 13,600 U.S. strikes.

Airwars has chronicled more than 300 civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., citing a New York Times report. “There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied.

The inspector general’s report specifically says that a database used for tracking civilian harm — which could be used in verification efforts — was abandoned. The “Army stopped funding the data management platform,” it notes.

Cooper said that preventing civilian harm is “a matter that I’m passionate about.”

Related

U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly

Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

Late last month, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

While the U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, Trump has previously threatened to commit genocide there. “We’ll go back and finish them off. And, by the way, more than that,” he said on Friday.

Bryant believes that efforts by congressional Democrats and press coverage of civilian casualties — and the ensuing pressure on Hegseth — has kept the lights on at what remains of the Center of Excellence and held CHMR on life support. “Given all the controversy and heat that Hegseth and the administration have since received for civilian casualties, it has behooved them to be able to technically say that some semblance of the program still exists,” he told The Intercept. “However, I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that it exists at this point entirely on paper and as a legal CYA,” or cover your ass.

The post Internal Pentagon Report Reveals Hegseth Is Willfully Putting Civilians in Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

Paul Edwin Overby Jr. vanished in May 2014 while researching a book in Khost province, Afghanistan, the FBI said.

A conversation with Orville Schell.

Politicians and other X users shared a manipulated clip appearing to show U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the leading Republican candidate in the Florida gubernatorial race, supporting insider trading as a way to live with luxury.

Chris Nelson, a conservative activist and writer, shared the video on X with the caption, "Byron Donalds says insider trading should ABSOLUTELY BE ALLOWED for members of Congress." The post got thousands of shares.

In the video, Donalds appeared to say:

"Insider trading should absolutely be allowed for members of Congress. Look, the salary, it doesn’t cut it anymore. If I happen to make millions because I’m privy to sensitive government information, well, that’s called initiative. The American people want leaders who know how to capitalize on opportunity. That’s leadership. I want a bigger house. I want to drive a Bentley. I want investment properties in Miami and Aspen."

Former Florida state Sen. Paula Dockery, who left the Republican Party in 2017 and Democratic Tennessee state Sen. Heidi Campbell shared it. Campbell’s post is now unavailable.

But Donalds didn’t say that. It’s a fake video, altered from a real CBN News interview on May 8. 

A Donalds spokesperson said the video involved artificial intelligence and did not reflect the congressman’s words.

This is what Donalds really said:

"You know, my mother, she has three children. I’m the middle child. My parents never married, just, they ain’t come together, whatever happened between my parents. But my mom just did everything that she could. She really believed in me, believed in, really, my abilities, thought education was gonna be key for my success. And so for her, there was no stone that was to be left unturned for me to be successful in life."

The first instance of the video that PolitiFact found came from an X account with 21 followers that regularly posts deepfakes of Donalds. Within minutes of the account sharing the deepfake of Donalds talking about insider trading, Nelson re-shared it. 

When we contacted Nelson about our findings, he said, "It looks real to me and it rings true about Byron’s beliefs on insider trading."

When people commented on Nelson’s post that the video involved AI, he replied with what read like sarcasm, saying, "No way!!" and "Byron would never be this honest in real life." Nelson ran for Fort Lauderdale mayor in 2024 and dropped out.

Donalds spoke about insider trading in 2025, saying he doesn’t trade securities, but has a broker with trading authority. He said he supports banning Congress members and their families from initiating trades, but members should be allowed to have brokers who trade on their behalf. He made similar comments in December 2025, saying he has always opposed congressional trading, adding, "I think you do have to make an allowance for members who give third-party authorization to a financial professional."

In 2024, the Campaign Legal Center filed an ethics complaint alleging that Donalds violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act by failing to properly disclose stock trades amounting to $1.6 million. A spokesperson told Business Insider that Donalds did not directly make those trades, and that he was "working to reconcile any outstanding infractions."

The video doesn’t show Donalds saying "insider trading should absolutely be allowed for members of Congress" because he wants to own a bigger house and a Bentley. We rate that claim Pants on Fire! ​

Former election clerk who allowed unauthorized access to voting systems was convicted and sentenced to nine years

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The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, commuted the nearly nine-year prison sentence of a former Colorado clerk who allowed unauthorized people to access her county’s voting systems in a case that had been an intense focus of Donald Trump and other allies who sought to overturn the 2020 election.

Tina Peters, who is currently incarcerated, will be released on parole on 1 June after Polis reduced her sentence from eight and a half years in prison to about four and a half. “This is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed non-violent crimes,” Polis wrote in a clemency letter to Peters.

With third-highest number of books banned, state removes renowned work about slave trade from library shelves

A Tennessee school district has banned Roots, the author Alex Haley’s groundbreaking novel and one of the most renowned and influential works about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Knox county schools (KCS) took that step under a state law that has disappeared hundreds of titles from school libraries and alarmed advocates of free expression.

Bitwarden appears to be undergoing a quiet shift in leadership and messaging. Its longtime CEO and CFO have stepped down, while the company has removed "Always free" from a prominent password-manager page and replaced "Inclusion" and "Transparency" in its GRIT values with "Innovation" and "Trust." Fast Company reports: In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with "all facets of mergers and acquisitions" on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms. CFO Stephen Morrison also left Bitwarden in April, replaced by former InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Both Crandell and Morrison joined the company in 2019. Kyle Spearrin, who started Bitwarden as a fun hobby project in 2015, remains the company's CTO. Meanwhile, Bitwarden has made some subtle tweaks to its website. The page for its personal password manager no longer includes the phrase "Always free." Previously this appeared under the "Pick a plan" section partway down the page, but that section no longer mentions the free plan, though it remains available elsewhere on the page. Bitwarden made this change in mid-April, according to the Internet Archive. Bitwarden has also stopped listing "Inclusion" and "Transparency" as tentpole values on its careers page. The company has long defined its values with the acronym "GRIT," which used to stand for "Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency." After May 4, it changed the acronym to stand for "Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust." The phrase "inclusive environment" still appears under a description of Gratitude, while "transparency" is mentioned under the Trust heading. They're just no longer the focus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A report suggests that Google's 15GB free tier is at risk as the company tests a lower 5GB cap for new sign-ups.

College grads outearn people without a degree within 15 years, even after paying for tuition, study finds.

Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going.

Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run. Remember, this is my very first report from this thing, making for an awful first impression. Even after this correction, the run data continues to exist within the AI-powered home screen layout, despite no record actually appearing within my account. It’s not exactly a great advertisement for a platform that costs $10 per month or $100 annually.

↫ Will Sattelberg at 9To5Google

The entire US’ – and thus much of the world’s – economic growth is built on this trash. What could possibly go wrong?

In June 2025, Christian Cerna went to a protest in his neighborhood against ICE raids and allegedly punched a border patrol agent. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault, but denies that he ever hit the officer. Days after the protest, Christian was violently arrested in front of his family by ICE officers, who filmed the whole operation and later posted it to social media. Christian tells Carter Sherman how the experience took a "heavy toll" on him and Sam Levin reveals the reporting behind the story

A newly discovered vulnerability circumvents even always-on VPNs for Android users.

One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices. This change gives customers more control over their display driver of choice while preserving OEM control over the devices they ship.

↫ Garrettd at Microsoft’s Hardware Dev Center

Windows Update randomly downgrading your graphics drivers seems to be a common enough occurrence that its supposed fix deserves its own feature announcement and blog post. This is a real operating system that runs on most of the world’s PCs.

A Manhattan resident who was on the cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak traveled freely after leaving the ship, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not warn public health authorities in New York of her potential exposure to the deadly virus, according to New York City and state officials.

The woman, a dual citizen of New Zealand and the United States with residences in Manhattan and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was one of 30 passengers who left the MV Hondius expedition cruise ship while it docked at Saint Helena island, in the South Atlantic, in late April after one passenger had already died of a lethal strain of hantavirus. A second and third passenger died days later, one on board and one in a hospital in South Africa, but by the time the ship had become a focus of headlines worldwide, the woman was well on her way on a globe-hopping itinerary.

The CDC informed health officials in various states of other Americans potentially exposed to the virus, but failed to alert New York health officials about the Manhattan woman.

There is no indication that the woman intended to come back to the United States or to New York any time soon. Instead, she continued on a multi-continental trip around the world. Her ability to continue traveling — and the lack of notice issued to authorities in the location to which she might eventually return — raise worrying questions about the potential spread of the disease, said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University.

“If she’s on the loose, then we need to be aware of where she might come back to,” Karan said. “So the New York Department of Health, and officials at the port of entry, they need to make sure this person is flagged when they return.”

The traveler, a 75-year-old former pharmaceutical executive, matches the description of a former ship passenger who is now in quarantine in Taiwan, according to local news reports there. Her peregrinations first came to light in reporting by Intercept contributor Jacqueline Sweet, who published a report on the traveler on her personal Substack.

The woman’s dual nationality and connection to addresses in multiple states appears to have muddied the lines of communication.

A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health told The Intercept that after raising the issue with the CDC, they learned that the agency had notified a different state of the woman’s possible exposure to the virus. The spokesperson did not identify the state in question, but public records show the woman is registered to vote at an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Despite her voter registration in Florida, she has referred in social media posts to the co-op she owns in Manhattan as her home.

Representatives of the CDC and the Florida Department of Health did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Florida has not reported that it is monitoring any residents for possible exposure to hantavirus.

New York and other states — including California, Arizona, Washington, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina — have reported residents with possible exposures, with some states indicating they received notice from the CDC and others saying cruise passengers self-reported. All 18 U.S. citizens who returned to the country directly from the cruise are currently in quarantine in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta, Georgia, while another 16 citizens who shared a plane with a woman evacuated to Johannesburg are being monitored.

From the South Atlantic to a Global Conference

The outbreak took place aboard the MV Hondius, an “expedition” cruise ship that takes adventurous passengers on a monthlong specialized polar tour, stopping at hard-to-reach islands in the South Atlantic. The cruise attracted wildlife enthusiasts, biologists, and extreme travelers attempting to visit as many countries and territories as possible, willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the trip.

On April 6, one of those travelers, a 70-year-old Dutch man who prior to the sea voyage had spent more than three months traveling in South America, became ill. He died onboard on April 11, and on April 24, the victim’s 69-year-old wife disembarked at Saint Helena; the next day, she flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died soon after. A third passenger died on May 2 — the same day that the World Health Organization declared an outbreak of hantavirus as the culprit.

The CDC has been accused of a slow response to the outbreak, holding its first briefing on the crisis on May 9, a week after WHO announced that the deaths were caused by the rare Andes strain of hantavirus, which is spread in South America by the pygmy rice rat and which can be transmitted among humans via close physical contact with someone already showing signs of infection. Because the early symptoms of the virus, including fever, fatigue, and muscle aches, are common in many other viral infections, the disease can be hard to identify before the rapid onset of more serious symptoms like pneumonia and respiratory distress.

In the case of the hantavirus outbreak, as with other public health crises, officials need to walk a careful line between ensuring safety and avoiding panic, Karan said. And the key to keeping a lid on the outbreak is ensuring proper quarantine for anyone with a potential exposure.

“Because this took place on a cruise ship, it actually helped us detect this quickly, and for now it appears to be decently contained,” Karan said. “But the problem is that, it’s not like you have a camera on these people to know if they’re not going out or seeing other people. So you don’t definitely know unless they’re quarantining at a monitored center.”

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Amid Hantavirus Panic, the Ivermectin Super Fans Are Back

Compounding the trouble, however, is that many of the passengers on the cruise are part of an “extreme travel” subculture whose lifestyle centers around relentless jetsetting. Even with the international attention being paid to the ship and its passengers, a number of people have been found to have trekked globe-spanning itineraries since the outbreak was revealed. 

The itinerary of the Manhattan woman after she left the MV Hondius showed a complexity typical of such “extreme travelers.” In a social media post on April 28, the traveler said she had flown from Saint Helena to Johannesburg, where she stayed in a hotel before flying on to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok, Thailand. In Bangkok, she wrote that she took a shuttle across the city to its second airport and flew to Trang, in southern Thailand, where she stayed in a hotel overnight before taking a boat to the island of Ko Ngai. Her most recent social media post was from Hanoi, Vietnam, several days before reports surfaced of the former ship passenger matching her description under quarantine in Taiwan.

She was just one of 30 travelers who left the ship while it docked at Saint Helena, prior to the declaration of an outbreak — setting off a scramble by global public health officials to identify everyone who might have been exposed.

The profile of the passengers themselves complicated the picture, according to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and co-author of “VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” who advocated for more scrutiny of a possible lab origin for the virus that caused the Covid pandemic.

“The cruise selected for these extreme travelers, and you cannot ask for a potentially better superspreader,” Chan said. “And if one of the passengers presented to an international hospital with symptoms without the hospital being aware of their exposure on the ship, by the time the hospital would know, healthcare workers could have already been exposed.”

Most public health officials agree the hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to transform into a pandemic. But the incubation period for the Andes virus is anywhere from four to 42 days, raising concerns that the traveler and others who left the ship prior to the outbreak becoming known could transmit the virus to others if they become sick. That’s led global health officials to scramble to identify passengers and notify their home countries. But the timing of these communications, and how they unfolded, are unclear, as the case of this woman reveals.

While the CDC alerted a number of states, including New York, to the fact that residents with potential exposures could be coming home, the Manhattan-based traveler appears to have slipped through the cracks, and state health officials there only learned of her connection to the state after receiving inquiries from Sweet.

It appears that the MV Hondius’s parent company first reported that this passenger was a New Zealand national to New Zealand health authorities. After The Intercept began making inquiries with the New Zealand Ministry of Health in conjunction with reporters from news outlet Radio New Zealand, as well as to the woman and other conference attendees, the Ministry of Health told Radio New Zealand that although the woman had ignored their previous attempts to contact and assist her, on Tuesday she suddenly contacted them. The Ministry of Health said they had alerted the United States last week that she was in fact a resident of the U.S., and not New Zealand, and on Tuesday, they also alerted health officials in the country she is in currently, which is unknown.

On Monday, news from New Zealand broke that an American woman, since reported as being from California, had turned up in remote Pitcairn Island, a tiny South Pacific island with less than 50 residents. She had flown from Saint Helena after departing the MV Hondius early to San Francisco, before flying to Tahiti and then taking a boat voyage to Pitcairn. It’s unknown if any health authorities contacted her before her travels. She is now being quarantined on the island.

Reached by The Intercept, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health pointed to an existing press release about monitoring hantavirus exposures and added: “When we have new information to share, we will do so.”

Chan advised that “the WHO should make a list of all passengers available to all countries so they can be aware of visitors with exposure, rather than rely on each country.” Communication between the WHO and the United States was delayed in the days of the MV Hondius outbreak, since the Trump administration left the global health alliance, but the CDC and the WHO have reportedly been working together for the past week. 

“In a best-case scenario there are no more waves, but this shows the WHO and the CDC are not prepared. This was the best-case scenario, with the passengers all known from the cruise,” Chan said. “When you can mess up with this controlled of a scenario, what will happen next time?”

The post CDC Didn’t Tell New York About Resident on Hantavirus-Plagued Cruise appeared first on The Intercept.

️ Latest news from second round at Aronimink Golf Club
️ Official live leaderboard | Follow on Bluesky | Mail Matt

Scottie Scheffler’s third at 10, from 44 yards, is no good. It’s 20 feet shy of the flag. He can’t make the par saver, and that’s an immediate backwards step for the world number one and tournament favourite. Matt Fitzpatrick bogeys too, and it’s a double for Justin Rose. They’re -2, +1 and +2 respectively. Meanwhile on Sky, Laura Davies asks Wayne Riley what he thinks the leader will be on at the end of the day. Five under, he answers, without a beat of hesitation. In other words, good luck trying to go low, gentlemen. It’s going to be another hugely entertaining day!

Rose gathers himself and sends a decent wedge into 10, from 77 yards to 16 feet. He’ll have a look at a damage-limiting bogey. Meanwhile Scottie’s lie in the rough on the left isn’t great, and he’s forced to take his medicine, punching back out onto the fairway. Even the strongest hitters in the business aren’t of a mind to take liberties with this rough. To think everyone was talking about bringing Aronimink to its knees with some bomb and gouge at the start of the week! A textbook study in hubris, and that’s before we get around to the subjects of Rory and Bryson.

Google has confirmed it is testing a 5GB storage limit for some new Gmail accounts, with users able to unlock the standard 15GB by adding a phone number. Android Authority reports: While the company didn't mention which regions are impacted, user reports from yesterday were mostly from African countries. That said, if Google's tests prove successful, this could possibly become the norm for new sign-ups in more regions. The company could be testing ways to discourage users from creating multiple Gmail accounts to access free cloud storage. However, if you already have a Gmail account with 15GB free storage, it shouldn't be impacted by this change. The language on Google's support page mentions "up to 15GB of storage." However, it's a recent change. An archived version of the support page from February did not use the words "up to." Whether the test has been running since early March or Google updated its language before it ever started the test, it's evident that the company could roll out the change globally as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 16, No. 1,792.

Prosecutors have described fatal shooting outside of DC’s Capital Jewish Museum last year as calculated and planned

The US justice department will seek the death penalty for the man accused of fatally shooting two staff members of the Israeli embassy in Washington outside a Jewish museum, prosecutors said in a court filing on Friday.

Elias Rodriguez faces federal hate crime and murder charges in the killings of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim as they left an event at the museum last May. Rodriguez shouted “free Palestine” during the shooting and later told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” according to his indictment.

Officials of Social Circle, population 5,000, file lawsuit over plan to turn warehouse into 10,000-capacity facility

Officials in the small Georgia town of Social Circle have filed a lawsuit against federal immigration agencies over plans for a huge immigration detention facility, arguing the project threatens to overburden local services and damage the environment.

The complaint, filed on Wednesday in US district court for the middle district of Georgia, accuses US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of moving ahead with the project without completing mandatory environmental assessments.

You're the weakest link in your own cybersecurity. And scam calls and emails are the biggest threat.

Statement following ‘productive’ talks in Washington comes as Israel launches strikes on southern city of Tyre

Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a 45-day extension of their ceasefire after another round of talks in Washington, the US state department has said.

It came after two “productive” days of talks, and more negotiations would be held from 2-3 June, the department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said.

KAYLA BELFONT
Staff Reporter

The Trump administration subpoenaed the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in June and Nemours Children’s Health in Wilmington in July. The July subpoena, which was served to over 20 hospitals nationwide and came to light in a court filing in August, demanded patients’ medical records — including dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses — as well as years’ worth of physician communications. 

Nemours Children’s Health is facing continuous scrutiny from the Trump administration, and officially stopped accepting new patients into its gender-affirming care clinic. A federal judge in Philadelphia sided with CHOP in Nov., quashing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) demands and finding that the government lacked the authority to conduct what the court called a sweeping exploration of the hospital’s files. 

The Trump administration appealed the ruling and has since escalated pressure on both hospitals, referring them to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for investigation.

At the center of the legal battle is the hospitals’ provision of gender-affirming care to minors.

The term “gender-affirming care” encompasses more procedures and medical treatment than many typically assume. HHS states that gender-affirming care is anything that makes you feel more like your gender — despite age, ethnicity, nationality or sex. However, this definition of gender-affirming care is no longer supported by the Trump administration.

Professor Eric Layland in the university’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences explains the breadth of gender-affirming care.

“Gender-affirming care is a broad area of both medical, mental and other care that allows someone to feel like their sense of their gender and self is affirmed through those medical health and social services that are offered to them,” Layland said. “Gender-affirming care can also include things like getting a haircut that allows you to express your gender in the way you want to.”

Concern over the age of those seeking gender-affirming care has become a primary political issue, with 767 bills proposed nationally in 2026 to limit access to such care. According to a student at the university, who wishes to remain anonymous for their protection, age should not be a limitation when it comes to access to care.

“Hormone blockers, which is a form of gender-affirming care, comes at 12 to 13 years of age,” the student said.

Hormone blockers can be used to delay puberty changes by stopping the production of sex hormones. Finn Thornton, the assistant director of communications for the Lavender Programming Board (LPB), a registered student organization (RSO) for LGTBTQ+ students on campus, mentions that hormone blockers are much safer than many people assume them to be.

“Hormone blockers for young trans people are actual life-saving medical care, and there is so much stigma around them right now that just is untrue,” Thornton, who is a transgender senior at the university, said. “They’re not nearly as unsafe as people seem to think they are, and they’re not nearly as permanent as people think they are.”

Thornton had similar beliefs when asked what age is too soon for treatment.

“Having an age cutoff for gender-affirming care is a ridiculous concept to me,” Thornton said. “It’s purely a way to try to control people, and it doesn’t have anything to do with trying to keep people safe.”

Thorton explained that enforcing federal policies to get rid of gender-affirming care will not stop people from seeking support. Instead, it would likely make such care less accessible and potentially less safe.

“That leads to increased suicide rates for trans people, especially young trans people,” Thornton said. “It leads to people trying to, kind of, DIY their own gender-affirming care, which can be extremely dangerous.”

Layland explained that because of these subpoenas and recent political decisions, many patients around the nation have been unable to receive care.

“For patients who are currently in treatment or were on the way to receiving treatment, many of them have had their treatment withdrawn or stopped,” Layland said. “Across the country, health centers have cut programming that is focused on gender-affirming care in those services.”

The student who wished to remain anonymous argued that correlations between suicide rates are crucial to take note of.

“Look at the studies, look at the statistics,” the student said. “Gender-affirming care helps people way more than it hurts them.” 

Thornton also highlighted the impact of these policies and legal battles for kids.

“I think kids are always super aware of what’s going on, more than what most people think,” Thornton said. “They’re going to know that it’s less safe for them to speak about their gender identities.”

In light of political disagreement over the issue, transgender people are looking for ways to move forward.

“I think it’s just about being as informed and educated as you can, and knowing there are ways to get around it,” the anonymous student said. “There are resources, there is access, but it’s true that it is being limited, it is being censored and there is a lot of fear around it.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bill focused on maintaining long-term playable access to online games has passed out of the California Assembly's appropriations committee, setting up a floor vote by the full legislative body. The advancement is a major win for Stop Killing Games' grassroots game preservation movement and comes over the objections of industry lobbyists at the Entertainment Software Association. California's Protect Our Games Act, as currently written, would require digital game publishers who cut off support for an online game to either provide a full refund to players or offer an updated version of the game "that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator." The act would also require publishers to notify players 60 days before the cessation of "services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game." As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered "solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes. [...] In a formal statement of support for the bill sent to the California legislature, SKG wrote that "there is no other medium in which a product can be marketed and sold to a consumer and then ripped away without notice As live service games rise in popularity for game developers and gamers alike, end-of-life procedures are essential tools to ensure prolonged access to the games consumers pay to enjoy." The Entertainment Software Association, which helps represent the interests of major game publishers, publicly told the California Assembly last month that the bill misrepresents how modern game distribution actually works. "Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work," the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is "a natural feature of modern software," the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance. The ESA also said the bill would impose unreasonable expectations on publishers regarding licensing rights for music or IP rights, which are often negotiated on a time-limited basis. "A legal requirement to keep games playable indefinitely could place publishers in an impossible position -- forcing them to renegotiate licenses indefinitely or alter games in ways that may not be legally or technically feasible," they wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Which scheduler should you use for AI workloads, Slurm or Kubernetes? It’s a debate that generates passionate arguments on both sides. Both schedulers have their strong suits, and there’s no single universal answer that’s always correct. But Slurm and Kubernetes are not equal at all stages of AI, and choosing the wrong one could have a big impact on your AI deployment. A new project called Slinky could change that.

Slurm, which stands for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management, came out of Lawrence Livermore Lab in 2002 as a way to manage HPC resources, as well as a way to grant users access to supercomputers. The software works by managing a queue of HPC jobs; allocating requested compute resources, such as nodes, CPUs, memory, or GPUs to those jobs for specific durations; and then executing them on compute nodes, typically using MPI. It also provides monitoring functions.

Today, Slurm is the most popular scheduling software in the HPC community, and is used on about 60% of the supercomputers on the Top500 list. According to 2024 data from Intersect360 Research, it has a 20% share of the overall supercomputer market, and is dominant in academic settings. The open source technology has been managed primarily by a company called SchedMD, which Nvidia acquired in late 2025.

Kubernetes is also a workload manager, but it works in a different way. The software (which is often shortened to K8s) works by defining a set of core building blocks that are used to deploy, maintain, and scale applications. Users tells K8s what kind of cluster they want, according to the number and type of processors and memory, and the workload manager automatically builds and maintains the environment.

Kubernetes emerged in 2014 out of Google, as many modern computing constructs have. Google developed Kubernetes internally as a way to manage its humongous fleet of servers, and it donated K8s to the open source community to foster its continued development, as it has done with many other technologies, such as PageRank, MapReduce, Bigtable, Android, TensorFlow, and Transformers, which gave us large language models.

Exposing Tribal Faultlines

(Manik-shah/Shutterstock)

The Slurm vs. Kubernetes question exposes deep-seated tribal faultlines within the technological community, said Stephen Watt, a Red Hat distinguished engineer and VP of the Office of the CTO.

“It’s partially technological, partially cultural. I think it’s quite interesting,” Watt said of the Slurm vs. Kubernetes divide. “We have sort of a pragmatic view.”

While Red Hat does sell an enterprise distribution of Kubernetes, that doesn’t mean it advocates for Kubernetes in all situation. In some situations, K8s makes the most sense, while in others, Slurm brings capabilities that Kubernetes just can’t match.

“If you are dealing with the standard operations tribe that are ensuring that applications that run….that’s a pretty simple conversation because they’ve got our enterprise Kubernetes distribution, which is OpenShift,” Watt told HPCwire in a recent interview.

“When you deal with a different tribe, which I’d call maybe the PyTorch tribe…it’s primarily a research-focused community, with research and frontier model providers,” he continued. “And those teams are typically supported by research IT infrastructures that have been running Slurm for decades.”

Slurm: Strong for Scale, Batch, and Training

The two tribes have widely different perceptions of how the two workload schedulers work. The research and HPC community likes Slurm because it’s familiar and it just works. If you need to efficiently schedule a large number of batch on a massive supercomputer, it’s hard to beat Slurm, Watt said.

“There is this perception that, well, Slurm just works. And that’s true,” Watt said. “I would say if you’re doing model pre-training [Slurm] is what we would recommend you use, not Kubernetes. It scales to 30,000 nodes. Kubernetes scales to around 5,000. So while there are people using Kubernetes for pre-training, Slurm is quite a lot simpler to use.”

Watt, who cut his teeth on distributed tech such as Hadoop and Spark, recalls how eBay would use Slurm to manage 12-hour training runs every night to update their machine learning model. The model updates would improve the transaction processing for the online auction site.

“Slurm is super good for that,” Watt said. “But that’s different than saying, hey, somebody is depending on this thing every second of every hour. And if it goes down, there’s a business continuity problem and there’s revenue that gets lost. And that’s where Kubernetes guarantees that 100%, or 99.9% uptime. And that’s what’s different on inference.”

Kubernetes: Strong for Uptime, Real-Time, and Inference

While Slurm holds advantages in scale and simplicity, Kubernetes holds advantages when it comes to guaranteeing uptime, which is critical for real-time workloads like AI inference.

Watt admits that Kubernetes is much more complicated, especially if you’re trying to trace performance problems through the K8s layer (good luck with that). However, the way that Google designed and built Kubernetes helps the software eliminate a lot of the management complexity that would otherwise be required to ensure resiliency in the event of cluster failures.

“Kubernetes was specifically designed for ephemeral service. There’s no mean time between failure,” Watt said. “When [a node] goes down, you have a system that just handles that without the end-user knowing. The way that works is that Kubernetes has this simple proxy for inbound requests, and it has the same application running on a number of different servers. So if you lose one, it just routes round robins to a different one.”

Slurm cannot match this built-in simplicity, which is why Watt does not recommend using it for user-facing workloads, such as AI inference. If there’s downtime with a batch workload, like model training, the customer can recover the work with checkpointing, but it doesn’t impact the end user. To try and get five-nine availability with Slurm for a real-time, user-facing application like AI inference would be very difficult.

“The problem is if [a node under Slurm] goes down, there’s no inherent failover mechanism that’s as elegant or sophisticated as Kubernetes is,” Watt said. “So you end up doing unnatural things around the Slurm environment to try and get that. If you were just using the right tool, then you wouldn’t have to kind of build a Rube Goldberg machine to keep that thing running.”

Slinky: The Best of Both Worlds?

Some folks in the HPC and AI communities are seeking ways to run Kubernetes and Slurm together. While there are discussion about running Kubernetes under Slurm, most discussions go the other way: Running Slurm under Kubernetes (which would allow Slurm to gain the availability benefit of its host).

SchedMD developed a project called Slinky that seeks to run Slurm within Kubernetes. The project allows Slurm components to be packaged as container images, as well as a Kubernetes an operator that handles deployment, scaling, and lifecycle management of Slurm components.

Nvidia engineers discussed Slinky in a blog post last month. In tests, the Nvidia engineers say Slinky has proven itself on clusters with up to 8,000 GPUs, running both AI training and inference workloads. They say benchmark tests show that the Slinky environment “matches the performance of noncontainerized Slurm deployments, with no measurable impact from the Kubernetes layer Slinky runs on.”

The Red Hat folks are also interested in Slinky. While it’s just an open source project on GitHub today, continued commercial interest could pave the way for potential commercial support down the road.

The post Slurm vs. Kubernetes in the Age of AI appeared first on HPCwire.

The safety specialist's warning appeared in a memo describing how a mini-drone had detonated and injured an Army Special Forces soldier.

At one stage the northern mayor looked to be locked out of parliament, again, but he is still only one step along the road to his No 10 ambitions

For weeks, Andy Burnham’s supporters had told MPs to “hold the line”, that he had a seat in parliament in his sights and that he would be a contender in any leadership contest. That was never the full truth.

His path to No 10 – if he makes it – is littered with more failed attempts than almost any other politician. Two leadership contests, a block on a return in Gorton and Denton, and quite a few aggrieved MPs in the north west who have had to spend weeks batting off suggestions they will give their seats up for him.

Russian drone attacks on Kyiv, Israeli strikes in Lebanon, Trump in Beijing and a mural of Lamine Yamal – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

The University of Genoa said the victims included a marine biology professor, her daughter and two young researchers.

Police investigate incident on Thursday after witness claims seeing Raise the Colours logo on side of vehicle

Police are investigating an incident where a man was run over by a van after a group of people were taking down union flags put up by Raise the Colours campaigners in Birmingham.

A man, in his 30s, suffered a broken leg that required surgery. He remains in hospital after the incident on Thursday evening in the Birmingham suburb of Stirchley, police said.

Uganda also reports outbreak and health officials say cases were caused by Bundibugyo strain of virus

An outbreak of Ebola has killed 65 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, health officials said.

There have been 246 suspected cases of the haemorrhagic fever reported so far in the conflict-hit Ituri province, which shares borders with Uganda and South Sudan.

A larger multinational security force will have broader authority to combat rising gang violence than its predecessor but could face similar funding challenges.

Weinstein has been convicted of other crimes in the US and is already behind bars but move leaves rape charge in limbo

Harvey Weinstein’s retrial in New York on a rape charge ended in a mistrial on Friday after the jury deadlocked in the closely watched criminal case that another jury had already failed to decide last year.

The disgraced former Hollywood mogul has been convicted of other sex crimes on the US east and west coasts and is already in jail. But Friday’s declaration of another mistrial leaves the New York rape charge in limbo after three trials.

Leon Botstein announced his retirement on the day the results of the inquiry into his connections with Epstein were released

Bard College’s board of trustees “voted to end” the 51-year tenure of Leon Botstein, the school’s president, last month after board members were presented with the results of an independent review of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to emails seen by the Guardian. Botstein framed his departure as a long-planned retirement in a statement on 1 May.

The move appears to have created a rift within the liberal arts college’s board of trustees.

Female muntjac given nickname of ‘lucky’ Lucy after being freed from department store’s moving staircase

“There’s a deer trapped in an escalator” was not a phrase anyone at Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Norfolk was expecting to hear when staff at a Marks & Spencer department store in central Norwich called last Tuesday.

“In Norfolk, deers often get themselves in trouble,” said the sanctuary’s founder, Wendy Valentine. “They get stuck between walls and sheds, and in gates. It’s quite common for deer to get trapped … but ‘trapped in an escalator’ was a first.”

OpenAI is previewing a feature that lets ChatGPT Pro users connect bank and investment accounts through Plaid, allowing the chatbot to analyze spending, subscriptions, balances, portfolios, debt, and major financial decisions. "More than 200 million people are already going to ChatGPT every month with finance questions -- from budgeting to tips on how to cut back on spending," OpenAI said in its announcement. "Now, users can securely connect their financial accounts with Plaid to get the full view of their financial picture in the context of their personal goals, lifestyle, and priorities that they've shared with ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI's advanced reasoning capabilities." The Verge reports: When financial accounts are connected, OpenAI says that ChatGPT users can view a dashboard that details their spending history, including any active subscriptions. Users can also ask it to help with financial decisions like buying a house or signing up for credit cards and flag any changes in spending habits. This financial feature will be initially available to users in the US who subscribe to ChatGPT's $200-per-month Pro tier. "We'll learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone," says OpenAI. To assuage concerns, OpenAI promises users "control over their data," including the ability to disconnect their bank accounts from ChatGPT at any time, though the company has up to 30 days to delete your data from its systems. You can also view and delete "financial memories" like goals or financial obligations saved by the chatbot. User control extends to whether your data is fed back into AI models -- users can enable the option to "Improve the model for everyone" to allow financial data in their ChatGPT conversations to be used for training AI, for example. OpenAI also says ChatGPT can't make any changes to your bank accounts or see "full account numbers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keir Starmer accuses Robinson of ‘peddling hatred and division’ and archbishop of Canterbury urges people to ‘choose hope’

Eleven foreign far-right activists have been blocked from entering the UK before a rally by Tommy Robinson supporters as Keir Starmer accused Robinson of “peddling hatred and division”.

The archbishop of Canterbury urged people to “choose hope” and faith leaders spoke out before the rally on Saturday, the second of its kind, after more than 100,000 attended one last year.

May 15, 2026 — The Workflows and Distributed Computing team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has released dislib 1.0.0 (Distributed Computing Library), which provides ready-to-use distributed algorithms, with a strong focus on machine learning and, more recently, distributed neural network training. Its main objective is to facilitate the execution of big data analytics workflows on distributed platforms such as clusters, clouds, and supercomputers. dislib is implemented on top of the PyCOMPSs programming model, the Python binding of COMPSs.

Credit: BSC

dislib is built around a distributed data structure, the ds-array, which enables parallel and distributed execution of machine learning methods. The library is implemented as a PyCOMPSs application, where methods are defined as tasks and executed transparently in parallel. As a result, users can write simple Python scripts, without dealing with parallelization details, through an interface closely aligned with scikit-learn. dislib provides methods for clustering, classification, regression, decomposition, model selection, neural network training, and data management.

Since its creation, dislib has been applied to several real-world use cases, including astrophysics (DBSCAN with GAIA mission data), molecular dynamics workflows (Daura and PCA within the BioExcel CoE), and multiple applications in the eFlows4HPC project, such as urgent computing for natural hazards, digital twins for manufacturing, and distributed neural network training. In the AI-SPRINT project, it has also been used for personalized healthcare in atrial fibrillation detection using Random Forest models.

“Reaching version 1.0.0 means that dislib is no longer just a research prototype, but a mature library, and seeing it already powering real applications, from earthquake impact estimation to personalized healthcare and digital twins, is the best confirmation that we are on the right track. With this release, we are opening the door to a new generation of converged HPC and AI workflows,” stated Eduardo Iraola, maintainer of the library and researcher at BSC.

Another success case is in its use with the MLESmap (ML-based EStimator for ground-shaking maps) which exploits the Random Forest implementation to generate regional ML-based models that accurately estimate impact metrics within a few seconds of an earthquake occurrence given its location and magnitude. It has also been used for Design of Experiments (DoE) exploration and inference in the Aerospace and Natural hazards fields (CAELESTIS and DT-Geo projects, respectively).

The 1.0.0 release marks a major milestone, establishing a stable and robust API suitable for advanced research and large-scale distributed environments. It introduces significant improvements in compatibility, usability, and ecosystem support. It adds support for distributed neural network training with PyTorch and PyEDDL and ensures compatibility with COMPSs 3.4 and NumPy 2.x. Array handling and type naming have been updated to comply with stricter coercion rules. The Docker images have been reorganized into separate flavors (base and torch), with a reduced image size, and the documentation has been improved to enable cleaner builds with an updated Sphinx theme.

The dislib developments are partially funded by the Horizon Europe CyclOps, CAELESTIS and DT-Geo projects, contract numbers 101135513, 101056886 and 101058129. The developments have also been supported by the projects CEX2021-001148-S, and PID2023-147979NB-C21 from the MCIN/AEI and MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, UE, by the Departament de Recerca i Universitats de la Generalitat de Catalunya, research group MPiEDist (2021 SGR 00412).

dislib 1.0.0 also includes additional refinements, updated examples, and a new user guide. The code is open source and available for download.

About the Workflows and Distributed Computing Group

The Workflows and Distributed Computing group at BSC aims to offer tools and mechanisms that enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources in a transparent way. The research done in this team is based on the former expertise of the group, and extending it towards the aspects of distributed computing that can benefit from this expertise. The team at BSC has a strong focus on programming models and resource management and scheduling in distributed computing environments.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC Releases New Tool to Simplify Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics on Distributed Platforms appeared first on HPCwire.

Autumn conference in Liverpool targeted for victorious homecoming but Reform UK to fight hard in byelection

Andy Burnham will push to become prime minister in time to address Labour’s autumn party conference in Liverpool, his supporters have said.

The Greater Manchester mayor cleared his first hurdle to becoming the candidate in the Makerfield byelection on Friday when Labour’s ruling body gave him permission to stand for the seat.

PROVIDENCE, R.I., May 15, 2026 — Artificial intelligence is poised to enable new scientific breakthroughs and technologies in fields spanning energy, materials science, supercomputing and more. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 17 National Laboratories operate at the frontier of applied AI research.

Faculty and students showcase their work at a poster session in the Engineering Research Center. Photo credit: Sherri Miles.

On Thursday, May 14, top researchers from those national labs met with faculty, staff and students from Brown University to discuss the future of AI-enabled scientific research. The daylong conference — Brown’s second National Labs Day — aimed to highlight current collaborations between University researchers and the national labs, and identify emerging opportunities for future scientific partnerships.

“Brown’s vision is using our research excellence to try to solve today’s most pressing problems, and collaborations with national labs are really critical for that,” said Greg Hirth, vice president for research at Brown, in his opening remarks. “And today, we’re going to be hearing about the cutting edge of AI, which, of course, is on everyone’s mind.”

In total, 18 staff scientists from the Brookhaven, Fermilab, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories took part in the program. From Brown, more than 150 community members signed up to attend topical sessions aimed at showing how shared AI tools and datasets can accelerate scientific breakthroughs. Sessions focused on AI in energy technologies, basic science research, national security and workforce development. In a late-day session at Brown’s Engineering Research Center, more than 40 posters showcased research happening at Brown in physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science and other fields.

Brown researchers have a long history of working with national laboratories. Current and recent collaborations have aimed to develop better batteries, energy-abundant hydrogen fuel cells and next-generation solar cells. In addition to highly applied research, Brown physicists work with national labs to address fundamental questions of the universe — probing the nature of dark matter, understanding the dynamics of high-energy plasmas and uncovering the behavior of fundamental particles of forces.

Working with researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brendan Keith, an assistant professor of applied math, is pushing the frontiers of computer-driven material and structural design. George Karniadakis, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics, is the director of SEA-CROGS, a partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories that aims to develop new computational capability to analyze and predict the behavior of complex systems.

Thursday’s conference was hosted by Brown’s Division of Research and School of Engineering. In the keynote address, James Ang, chief data scientist for computing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, discussed collaboration across the national labs on the Genesis Mission, an initiative aimed at harnessing AI to accelerate discovery science.

“The structure includes AI for science, AI for energy and AI for security,” Ang said. “And those are really the focus points for [the Department of Energy]. These are our application drivers for the development of new technology for AI.”

Sara Mason, a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Lab, encouraged her fellow scientists to approach the AI era without fear.

“I’m thinking about how we’re just living through this exciting time… where there’s this fundamental shift in how science is even being done,” Mason said. “We keep moving through it. When I say moving, I don’t mean flailing our arms. I mean, we’re still ‘sciencing,’ we’re still innovating, and we’re figuring out ways to use these tools and… find new ways to engage with our science.”

Hirth said he’s hopeful that the event will spur new partnerships and create new opportunities for Brown students at the national labs. The event already has a good track record. After the inaugural National Labs Day in 2024, Hirth and a student were part of a group from Brown that paid a visit to Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York. As a result of the visit, the student got involved in a research project related to high-pressure phenomena involved in earthquakes.

“That’s an area where AI is super important,” Hirth said. “You can imagine the Earth makes lots and lots of noise, and analyzing those data is a really hard problem. In what used to be thought of as just random background noise, people can now find discrete events, which is helping us understand the phenomena that lead to earthquakes.”

A groundbreaking research partnership to be sure.

Source: Brown University

The post Brown University Hosts DOE National Labs Day Focused on AI for Science Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

Google should be ready to tell us more about a whole range of smart glasses to compete with Meta. Here's what we know already.

Trump administration move echoes indictment of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as fuel crisis racks Cuba

Tensions between Cuba and US seem set to rise further amid reports that
Raúl Castro, the country’s 94-year-old former president, may soon face the type of indictment that led to the US abduction of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January.

Although Raúl is officially retired, he remains the most potent figure in Cuban politics following the death of his brother Fidel in 2016, and by targeting him Washington appears to be heaping pressure on Cuba’s communist leadership at the end of an already extraordinarily intense week.

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 15, 2026 — KIOXIA America, Inc. has announced it is collaborating with Dell Technologies to deliver a 2U server configuration capable of scaling to 9.8 petabytes (PB) of flash storage. By combining the Dell PowerEdge R7725xd server with AMD EPYC processors and 40 KIOXIA LC9 Series E3.L form factor 245.76 terabyte (TB) NVMe SSDs, the companies are enabling a new class of storage-optimized platforms built to meet the demands of AI, large-scale data lakes, and data-intensive enterprise workloads.

Credit: KIOXIA

Together, Dell Technologies and Kioxia have a long history of enabling scalable infrastructure for data-driven applications. This latest milestone underscores a shared commitment to advancing high-density architectures that improve performance, reduce energy consumption, and maximize data center efficiency.

“As AI workloads grow more demanding, the infrastructure supporting them must keep pace,” said Arun Narayanan, senior vice president, Compute and Networking, Dell Technologies. “The Dell PowerEdge R7725xd combined with KIOXIA’s high-capacity enterprise SSDs delivers the storage density and power efficiency our customers need to scale AI infrastructure without sacrificing performance.”

Dell PowerEdge R7725xd servers are built for modern AI and data-centric workloads, combining dense storage with powerful compute. These flexible air-cooled storage configurations complement GPU-enabled servers, supporting AI data management and model training by delivering massive storage capacity across the AI lifecycle. These systems support up to 5x 400 Gbps NICs, allowing users to fill and move data through pipelines more efficiently – ultimately making the most of their data. Paired with KIOXIA LC9 Series 245.76 TB SSDs, these systems provide high-capacity, power-efficient solutions that reduce TCO and data center footprint.

KIOXIA LC9 Series SSDs deliver up to 245.76 TB of flash-based storage with PCIe 5.0 performance in a range of form factors, including 2.5-inch, E3.S, and E3.L2. As the industry’s first3 NVMe SSD at this capacity built for the demands of generative AI environments, the KIOXIA LC9 Series offers a compelling alternative to more commonly used 30.72 TB capacity SSDs. A comparable 9.8 PB configuration would require seven more servers carrying 280 additional drives, resulting in 8x the power consumption4, as well as utilizing more rack space. This results in a more efficient use of space and power, enabling organizations to scale AI infrastructure without expanding their physical footprint or energy consumption.

“Our KIOXIA LC9 Series 245 TB QLC SSD isn’t just higher density, it’s a shift in how we architect AI infrastructures,” noted Neville Ichhaporia, senior vice president and general manager of the SSD business unit at KIOXIA America, Inc. “With the Dell PowerEdge R7725xd server accommodating 40 drives, a whopping 9.8 PB in a single 2U system can be achieved. Customers can deploy massive ingestion streams, scale data lakes effortlessly, and handle large backups in a fraction of the footprint, improving TCO to new levels.”

The solution highlights how tightly integrated compute and storage innovations can unlock new efficiencies for enterprise and hyperscale environments. By delivering extreme density without compromising performance or energy efficiency, Kioxia and Dell Technologies are helping organizations modernize infrastructure to keep pace with accelerating data growth and AI adoption.

About KIOXIA America, Inc.

KIOXIA America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Kioxia Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough BiCS FLASH 3D technology, Kioxia continues to pioneer innovative memory, SSD and software solutions that enrich people’s lives and expand society’s horizons. The company’s innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, data centers and generative AI systems.

Source: KIOXIA

The post KIOXIA and Dell Showcase 9.8 PB Flash Storage Configuration in 2U Server appeared first on HPCwire.

New map reshapes representative Steve Cohen’s majority-Black Memphis district and gives advantage to Republicans

Democratic representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee on Friday announced that he is ending his bid for re-election, his career upended by the redistricting battles that are sweeping the country after last month’s supreme court decision.

Republicans in Tennessee this month enacted a new US House map that carves up Cohen’s majority-Black district, reshaping it to the GOP’s advantage as part of Donald Trump’s strategy to hold on to a slim majority in the November midterm elections.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 15, 2026 — GridCARE has announced the closing of its $64 million oversubscribed Series A financing, representing a significant step-up in valuation from its previous round less than a year ago. The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, one of Silicon Valley’s most storied firms and a defining force behind the modern compute era as an original investor in category-defining companies such as NVIDIA, Snowflake, and Astera Labs.

“A year ago, few people were talking about power as a bottleneck for AI – today it’s the rate-limiting step for the entire industry. GridCARE is directly addressing that bottleneck, with an unmatched team, deep domain expertise, and overwhelming customer demand,” said Vic Miller, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. “Power sits beneath every other layer of the AI stack, and we believe Power Acceleration will be the key technology that enables the AI economy to scale.”

The round also includes John Doerr – the legendary investor behind companies such as Amazon, Google, and Netscape – bringing unparalleled perspectives from every major wave of the internet and AI economy.

“While AI is accelerating breakthroughs in medicine, science, and climate, power remains a bottleneck,” said John Doerr, investor and author of Speed & Scale. “GridCARE delivers affordable, sustainable energy by unlocking capacity in the grid we’ve already built.”

Additional participants include utility strategics National Grid Partners and Future Energy Ventures; Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective; Stanford University; and existing investors Xora, Aina Ventures, Overture, Acclimate Ventures, and Clearvision Ventures, alongside several prominent individuals and family offices deeply involved in the AI infrastructure buildout.

The investment brings together some of the earliest investors in the AI era around a single conviction: the next critical frontier is no longer compute, but power.

The Time-to-Energize Crisis

An analysis from Stanford shows that grid utilization is approximately 30%, meaning the majority of existing power infrastructure remains unused under current operating conditions, except in rare and unlikely scenarios. Yet despite this available capacity, delivering power to new large-scale projects, such as AI factories, takes six to 10 years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades, paid for by customers.

“This gap between when power is needed and when it can be delivered is emerging as one of the most significant constraints on growth in the AI economy,” said Amit Narayan, co-founder and CEO of GridCARE. “We call this the Time-to-Energize Crisis. It’s leaving AI factories waiting for power when they should be driving progress, slowing critical innovation across health, education, and climate, and putting national security and competitiveness at risk.”

Introducing Power Acceleration

The new capital will establish Power Acceleration as a new category for delivering power to the AI economy, anchored by continued expansion of GridCARE Energize, the company’s physics-based AI platform for data center energy activation and operations. GridCare Energize evaluates quadrillions of grid conditions in real time, modeling congestion, outages, weather, and demand variability simultaneously to identify capacity that traditional interconnection processes cannot see. The platform compresses interconnection timelines from years to months, enabling AI factories, utilities, and energy providers to bring gigawatts of new power online and operate it reliably at the speed and resilience the AI economy demands.

“The largest source of new power for the AI economy isn’t waiting to be built. It’s already in the ground, hidden in the grid we already have,” said Ram Rajagopal, co-founder and CTO of GridCARE, and a tenured Stanford professor on leave to build the company. “Our job is to make it visible and put it to work in months, not years.”

Built In Alignment With Utilities

Power Acceleration is only possible in a deep collaboration with the utilities that operate the grid. GridCARE is built to align with utilities, not work around them. Utilities face the same urgency as AI factories: meeting unprecedented load growth from data centers, electrification, and re-industrialization without compromising reliability or affordability for the customers they already serve.

“The fastest and least-expensive way to add capacity to the grid is to unlock the megawatts already hidden inside it,” said Steve Smith, President of National Grid Partners and Group Chief Strategy Officer at National Grid. “Our work with GridCARE earlier this year supports the approach. We are deepening that commitment by joining this round as an investor and extending the collaboration into additional markets. By responsibly activating latent capacity, utilities can support economic growth, strengthen reliability, and protect affordability for the customers and communities we serve.”

In October 2025, a joint project with Portland General Electric validated the model in a top U.S. data center market – unlocking a path to over 400 MW of capacity in Hillsboro, Oregon, with the first 80 MW arriving in 2026.

GridCARE is now engaged in AI factory power acceleration projects spanning more than a dozen markets and over 2 GW of new AI compute capacity.

The Inaugural GridCARE Power Acceleration Summit

To address this growing challenge, GridCARE will host the inaugural GridCARE Power Acceleration Summit in September 2026, convening leaders from across the AI and energy ecosystems to define the new category of Power Acceleration for AI: the coordinated effort to unlock grid capacity, accelerate interconnections, and deliver AI infrastructure in the timelines required.

About GridCARE

GridCARE is the pioneer of Power Acceleration, a new system for delivering power in the AI economy. Founded at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, GridCARE’s Energize platform uses physics-based AI to identify and activate near-term capacity on today’s grid, enabling AI factories, utilities, and energy providers to unlock underutilized capacity and accelerate the delivery of large-scale AI infrastructure. To date, GridCARE has unlocked more than $10 billion in economic value for data center developers by bringing hundreds of megawatts online years ahead of schedule.

Source: GridCARE

The post GridCARE Raises $64M Series A to Accelerate Power Delivery for AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

May 15, 2026 — JetCool, a Flex company and provider of advanced cooling for AI and high-density computing, has announced the launch of its SmartPlate System for Dell PowerEdge R770 and R7725 servers. Designed to help enterprises and edge operators achieve more compute density per rack, the direct-to-chip solution supports next-generation platforms powered by next-generation processors.

Credit: Flex

SmartPlate systems are proven to deliver an average 13% IT power reduction, helping maximize power and floor space in new builds and existing facilities. Fully sealed and ready to install, the system improves thermal performance without facility water or data center retrofits, providing a fast, low-disruption way to adopt direct-to-chip cooling in enterprise data centers and distributed edge locations.

“SmartPlate Systems deliver real results at scale,” said Dr. Bernie Malouin, Founder of JetCool and Vice President at Flex. “By bringing SmartPlate support to Dell PowerEdge R770 and R7725 servers, we’re giving enterprises and edge operators a faster path to higher rack density and better efficiency, without requiring changes to existing facilities.”

“With firsthand experience deploying the SmartPlate System, we’ve seen how it enables direct-to-chip liquid cooling within traditional air-cooled data centers,“ said John Sasser, Chief Technology Officer at JetCool partner Sabey Data Centers, one of the largest privately owned data center providers in the United States. “Using a closed-loop design, it integrates directly into the server, allowing fast, phased deployment. SmartPlate System helps improve server performance and reduce power consumption, giving customers a practical way to increase compute density and maximize their electricity and space budgets.”

Availability and Live Demo Locations

Available today, SmartPlate Systems for PowerEdge R770 and R7725 servers are helping organizations increase capacity, reduce energy costs, and advance sustainability goals without reworking facility infrastructure. Live demos are available at Dell Customer Solution Centers in Round Rock, Texas, and Singapore, as well as at Equinix facilities, Sabey Data Centers, and Telehouse London. JetCool will also showcase its latest solutions at booth 407 during Dell Technologies World, May 18–21, 2026, at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. Additional information is available at jetcool.com/dell.

About Flex

Flex (Reg. No. 199002645H) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps leading brands design, build, and manage products that improve the world. With a global footprint spanning 30 countries, Flex delivers advanced manufacturing and supply chain solutions, innovative products and technology, and lifecycle services that support customers from concept to scale. In the AI era, Flex is helping customers accelerate data center deployment by solving power, heat, and scale challenges through cutting-edge power and cooling technology and scalable IT infrastructure solutions.

About JetCool

JetCool, a Flex company, is a global leader in advanced thermal management for compute-intensive applications. Trusted by top chipmakers, OEMs, and data centers, JetCool delivers a portfolio of liquid cooling solutions that enhance performance, increase energy efficiency, and support sustainability goals. Engineered for the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and next-generation computing, JetCool’s technologies deliver reliable, scalable performance for data centers around the world.

Source: Flex

The post JetCool Expands SmartPlate System Portfolio with Closed-Loop Cooling for Next-Gen Compute appeared first on HPCwire.

ArXiv says it will ban authors for one year if they submit papers containing AI-generated slop, such as hallucinated citations, placeholder text, or chatbot meta-comments left in the manuscript. "If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s)," said Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, on X. "We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper." 404 Media reports: Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include "hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ('here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?'; 'the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments.'" "The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue," Dietterich wrote. Dietterich told [404 Media] in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule -- meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned -- but that decisions will be open to appeal. "I want to emphasize that we only apply this to cases of incontrovertible evidence," he said. "I should also add that our internal process requires first a moderator to document the problem and then for the Section Chair to confirm before imposing the penalty."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president’s meeting with Xi Jinping was superficially cordial, extending a truce borne of necessity

“American strength back on the world stage,” crowed the White House social media post: a curious remark, when the attached video showed the stars and stripes fluttering beneath a long row of Chinese flags, and People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching in unison.

This week’s visit to Beijing offered the kind of style that Donald Trump enjoys – parading troops, a banquet and a polite if not markedly enthusiastic welcome from a strongman he called “really a friend” – but little apparent substance. The public account of the encounter will be partial: Mr Trump’s former adviser John Bolton has claimed that in previous conversations the US president begged Xi Jinping for help to win re-election and urged him to “go ahead” with internment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. But this meeting appears to have been about stabilising the relationship, not shifting it.

The long-necked herbivore is the largest ever found in Southeast Asia, researchers said.

In a move aimed at curbing the growing problem of "teen takeovers," D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is threatening to bring charges against parents if their teens violate the local curfew.

The film-maker, who won the Grand Prix for A Hero in 2021, condemned both the killing of protesters and the conflict’s bombing campaigns during a Cannes press conference

Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has described the deaths of civilians in Iran as “extremely cruel and tragic” during a press conference at the Cannes film festival.

Farhadi, whose new Paris-set drama Parallel Tales premiered on the Croisette on Thursday night, was asked about working free from censorship in France, the war involving Iran, the US and Israel, and the repression of protesters in his native country.

Chancellor says he no longer views US as land of opportunity amid ‘deeply polarising’ social climate

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, already embroiled in a row with Donald Trump over the Iran war, has said he would not advise his children to study or work in the US in the current climate.

Speaking to a conference of young Catholics in Würzburg, the conservative leader, viewed by many as a transatlanticist, said he no longer saw the US as the land of opportunity.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

Meanwhile, the Latvian president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, has begun political consultations aimed at finding a parliamentary majority capable of forming a new government after the collapse of prime minister Evika Siliņa’s administration.

Rinkēvičs’s office posted a short video from the meeting on its social media.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, President Trump also claimed to have "wiped out" Iran's armed forces.

A new Ebola outbreak in a remote province in Congo has caused 65 deaths and 246 suspected cases so far, Africa CDC says.

"Sunday Morning" presents its annual edition touching on all aspects of design, hosted by Jane Pauley.

There are already some early Memorial Day deals starting, and you don't want to miss us sending you the best of the sales.

Muscat silent about plans – opposed by US – to charge fee and demand details on nationality of all transiting ships

Oman has been caught in geopolitical crossfire after Iran said it was coordinating with the Gulf state over the future management of the strait of Hormuz, including Tehran’s plans to impose fees on commercial shipping.

The Omani exclave of Musandam lies to the south of the contested waterway, which normally carries a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil traffic but has been blockaded for 10 weeks since the US-Israeli attack on Iran in February.

Establishing a collaborative research cluster for practical quantum education and quantum-HPC fusion

TOKYO and KAWASAKI, Japan, May 15, 2026 — Fujitsu Limited and Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) today announced the establishment of the “Fujitsu Quantum and HPC Infrastructure Collaborative Research Cluster” at Science Tokyo. This collaborative research cluster aims to systematically and practically develop human resources with quantum hardware technology in Japan. The initiative is part of Fujitsu’s “Fujitsu Small Research Lab” program and utilizes the Science Tokyo Collaborative Research Cluster System, with support from Open Innovation Office of the Center for Innovation Management. The new cluster will operate as a collaborative research cluster, expanding beyond traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) to include the quantum hardware field.

Credit: Sergiy Palamarchuk/Shutterstock

Through this collaborative research cluster, both parties will strengthen their technological capabilities by researching quantum hardware design, manufacturing, control, and evaluation technologies essential for realizing practical quantum computers. They will also foster talent to support next-generation quantum computing platforms and initiate efforts to pioneer new research areas that integrate HPC and quantum technologies.

Background

Quantum computers are expected to be a foundational technology that will transform society and industry across diverse fields such as materials development, drug discovery, finance, and manufacturing. However, realizing practical quantum computers requires implementing a large number of quantum bits that can be operated with high precision. Their development necessitates the continuous cultivation of highly specialized personnel capable of handling quantum hardware design, manufacturing, control, and evaluation. Furthermore, research and development in quantum hardware faces high barriers due to the need for a wide range of research infrastructure, including advanced facilities for quantum bit chips and manufacturing technology, large-scale cryocoolers for maintaining extremely low temperatures, and quantum bit control devices. Consequently, the number of personnel engaged in this field’s R&D is limited, not only in Japan but globally.

Fujitsu and Science Tokyo have previously collaborated on establishing next-generation computing platforms beyond Science Tokyo’s supercomputer “TSUBAME” and expanding the social application of such technologies through the “Fujitsu Next-Generation Computing Infrastructure Collaborative Research Cluster,” a Fujitsu Small Research Lab. This new collaborative research cluster expands upon that research by incorporating quantum hardware research and talent development initiatives, aiming to pioneer new research areas that fuse HPC and quantum technologies.

Features of the Fujitsu Quantum and HPC Infrastructure Collaborative Research Cluster:

• Locations(1) Quantum Theme Hub:
  Location: Room 1017, South Building 3, Ookayama Campus, Institute of Science Tokyo, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
  Research Content: Research on quantum computer control technology
  Period of Establishment: April 1, 2026, to March 31, 2027 (continuation to be considered thereafter)
  (2) HPC Theme Hub:
  Location: Rooms 310 and 312, G2 Building, Yokohama Campus, Institute of Science Tokyo, 4259 Nagatsuta-cho, Midori-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa
  Research Content: Research on next-generation computing platform technologies for accelerating AI and HPC applications
  Period of Establishment: October 20, 2022, to March 31, 2027 (continuation to be considered thereafter)
• Overview of Initiatives– This collaborative research cluster will undertake the following new initiatives:(1) Joint research on quantum computer control and calibration technologies:
  The aim is to establish control technologies that achieve high quantum operation fidelity and to promote the development of more efficient quantum gate calibration technologies utilizing AI. This will lead to the advancement and efficiency of technologies required for increasingly complex control and calibration as the number of quantum bits in quantum computers increases.
  (2) Practical talent development in quantum hardware technology:
  The cluster will provide theoretical education on quantum computers in conjunction with joint research. It will also offer students practical training opportunities that align with the actual research and development processes, including quantum bit chip design, manufacturing, control, and measurement. This aims to foster talent with systematic and practical expertise in quantum hardware technology.

Future Plans

Fujitsu and Science Tokyo will continue to promote talent development and research and development in quantum hardware technology through this collaborative research cluster. Furthermore, by combining Science Tokyo’s HPC technology with quantum technology, they aim to create new fusion research areas and establish next-generation computing platform technologies that integrate classical and quantum computing.

Both parties will also contribute to strengthening Japan’s competitiveness in quantum technology by accelerating the social implementation and industrial application of quantum computing through industry-academia collaboration in talent development and technology creation.

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 100,000 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 3.5 trillion yen (US$23 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026 and remains the top digital services company in Japan by market share.

About Science Tokyo

Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) was established on October 1, 2024, following the merger between Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), with the mission of “Advancing science and human wellbeing to create value for and with society.”

Source: Fujitsu

The post Fujitsu and Science Tokyo Launch Research Hub for Quantum Hardware Advancement and Talent Development appeared first on HPCwire.

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee announced Friday that he's retiring from Congress at the end of this term after his district in Memphis was redrawn.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: A group of Michigan lawmakers has introduced a bill in Congress that would effectively place a permanent ban on Chinese connected vehicles from being sold in the United States. While an executive order signed by Joe Biden in early 2025 already imposed heavy restrictions, the new bill would codify and expand on the ban, as first reported by Autoweek and explained in a release by the House of Representatives Select Committee on China. The bill, titled the Connected Vehicle Security Act, was co-signed by John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, and Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat. It joins a companion version of the same Connected Vehicle Security Act introduced last month to the Senate by Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat. While the wording is similar to that found in former President Biden's January 2025 executive order, the new bill would codify the language into law, as well as determine rules for compliance and enforcement. Specifically, the new bill would restrict Chinese automakers from selling passenger cars in the United States if those vehicles contain any China-developed connectivity software. Officially, the bill covers the sale of vehicles from states deemed "foreign adversary countries," which include China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The proposed legislation arrives as Chinese automakers including Chery, Geely, and BYD (maker of the 2026 BYD Dolphin Surf, shown above), continue to rise in prominence in foreign markets around the world. "Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons," comments sinij. "Connected cars that spy on consumers are not a uniquely Chinese problem and should be addressed for all vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a key clash at Villa Park in the race for UEFA Champions League qualification.

Statement follows speculation party would not field candidate in Makerfield or barely fight seat

• UK politics live – latest updates

The Greens are going to campaign for the Makerfield byelection, complicating Andy Burnham’s potential route back to parliament against what is expected to be a strong Reform UK challenge.

A statement from the Greens said candidate selection was in process and that the party had learned from its win in another Greater Manchester seat in February, when it overcame a 13,000 Labour majority in Gorton and Denton.

Losing a debt lawsuit doesn't always mean your Social Security benefits are at risk — but there are exceptions.

• Colorado coach blasts negative reporting over draft fall

• Cleveland QB made seven starts, earned Pro Bowl invite

Shedeur Sanders “went through hell” during the draft process and his 2025 rookie season with the Browns, his father Deion Sanders has said.

The Colorado head coach blamed what he said was untruthful reporting during his interview with “The Barbershop” posted on YouTube on Thursday.

Researchers expected to find "a gradual increase in artificial light at night," but instead saw "much more nuanced patterns," NASA said.

Canada’s Intact Financial Corp is said to be exploring offer, as London-listed Tate & Lyle attracts US suitor

Shares in Hiscox surged to record highs on Friday as it became the latest UK takeover target after a flurry of overseas bids for British businesses this week.

Canada’s Intact Financial Corp, which provides property and casualty insurance, is said to be exploring a potential takeover of Lloyd’s of London insurer Hiscox, according to a report by the Insurance Post.

I recently opened my repair shop and also offer repair shop software through RepairFlow.dev that’s free to use/start!

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Union leaders say veto from Democrat Abigail Spanberger is an about-face from promises she made on campaign trail

Virginia’s Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, vetoed a bill on Thursday that would have restored collective bargaining rights for 50,000 public sector workers in the state. Union leaders say the veto is a “betrayal” and “slap in the face” after the governor campaigned last year on promises to restore collective bargaining rights.

Though majorities in both chambers of Virginia’s general assembly passed legislation that would restore bargaining rights to most public sector workers, Spanberger introduced an amended version of the bill last month that was eventually rejected by the assembly.

Self-deprecating It Only Takes One Lion is partly inspired by team’s current song, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie

The lyrics came to Stuart Murdoch in the hazy aftermath of Scotland’s dramatic qualification for the World Cup.

The Belle and Sebastian frontman had watched his side’s playoff victory over Denmark through his fingers before deciding to write his own anthem to a team he has followed for more than 50 years. “Most people recognised instantly the next day that they’d witnessed the most important Scottish game ever,” says Murdoch. “That was our magic moment.”

A DIY approach to debt settlement can backfire if you don't understand the legal, financial and tax risks involved.

Group of MPs and peers in effect accuse government of failing to comply with parliament’s will over release of files

A powerful parliamentary committee tasked with reviewing files relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador has revealed that the government is withholding his vetting file despite not having the authority to do so.

In an extraordinary intervention, the intelligence and security committee (ISC) has criticised the government over its handling of the release of Mandelson-related papers and in effect accused ministers failing to comply with parliament’s will.

Man arrested after admitting to taking relic from church and planning to throw it in river, say police

An 800-year-old relic believed to be the skull of Saint Zdislava, stolen this week from a Czech church, has been recovered encased in concrete as experts work to extract it, police have said.

A suspect has been arrested, who allegedly confessed to taking the skull of Saint Zdislava of Lemberk from a glass shrine in the basilica of St Lawrence and St Zdislava in the town of Jablonné v Podještědí on Tuesday.

The Manchester City striker will feature in Viqueens, an animated film by director Harald Zwart, who described him as ‘powerful, fearless and uniquely Norwegian’

Manchester City striker Erling Haaland is to make his feature acting debut, in an animated film as the voice of a Viking – called Haaland.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Norwegian international is to play “an animated version of himself” in Viqueens, directed and co-written by Harald Zwart, the Dutch-Norwegian director of The Karate Kid and Agent Cody Banks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Honda is waving the white flag. The Japanese automaker previewed two new hybrids set to launch by 2028 after taking an over $9 billion hit over its failed EV bet, leading to its biggest loss in company history. Honda admitted it was "unable to deliver products that offer value for money better than that of new EV manufacturers, resulting in a decline in competitiveness," after suddenly announcing plans to cancel three new EVs in the US in March, warning restructuring costs could reach 2.5 trillion yen ($15.7 billion). After posting its first annual loss since it became a publicly traded company in 1957 on Thursday, Honda's CEO Toshihiro Mibe revealed the company's comeback plans. Honda is no longer planning to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2040. Instead, Honda now aims "to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050," including a mix of EVs, hybrids, carbon-neutral fuels, and carbon-offset tech. Starting next year, Honda plans to begin introducing its next-gen hybrids, underpinned by a new hybrid system and platform. Honda said it aims to improve fuel economy by over 10% in its upcoming hybrids. The new system is expected to help cut costs by over 30% compared to Honda's current hybrid system. By the end of the decade, Honda plans to launch 15 new hybrid models globally. In North America, its most important market, the company will introduce larger hybrids in the D-segment or above. Honda previewed two of the new hybrids during the business update: the Honda Hybrid Sedan Prototype and the Acura Hybrid SUV Prototype, which the company said will go on sale within the next two years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Army supported by Russian mercenaries launches airstrikes after offensive by coalition of Islamist extremists and Tuareg separatists

Mali’s armed forces, supported by Russian mercenaries, have launched airstrikes targeting a rebel alliance of Islamist extremists and Tuareg separatists as the ruling junta struggles to maintain its hold on power in the unstable west African country.

Earlier this week warplanes targeted the key northern town of Kidal, which was lost when the rebels launched a surprise offensive across much of Mali in late April.

Experts don't expect military action soon. But actual regime change is complicated.

A Russian airstrike on a Kyiv apartment complex that killed at least 24 people and a Ukrainian strike on residential buildings and an oil refinery in Ryazan, Russia, suggested no end is in sight to the war.

The global memory chip supply shortage has skyrocketed the prices of electronics, including phones and computers. Here's what to know about it.

AI on smartphones makes it hard for students to catch each other cheating, and social media makes them less likely to report it.

An ARM may get you a lower rate, but it's not the right move for everyone in today's economic environment.

Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura leads action after Republican speaker rescinds promise to bring bill to vote

Democratic state representatives in Minnesota staged an overnight sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving the speaker, Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

Framework will establish commercial and operational terms for deployment of one of India’s most powerful AI compute clusters, built on Cerebras CS-3 systems

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, May 15, 2026 — G42, the Abu Dhabi-based global technology group, and the Government of India, formalized the framework and the commercial terms for the deployment of Condor Galaxy India, an 8-exaflop AI supercomputing cluster comprising 64 Cerebras CS-3 systems.

H.H. Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding Cerebras’ Wafer Scale Chip.

His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, and Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, witnessed the exchange between H.E. Mansoor Al Mansoori, CEO of G42 International, and Mr. Vikram Misri, Foreign Secretary of India, during Prime Minister Modi’s official state visit to Abu Dhabi, marking a milestone in the deepening UAE-India strategic and technology partnership.

“India is one of the world’s great innovation economies. Deploying an instance of G42’s Intelligence Grid at this scale in such an important geography is what AI-native transformation looks like in practice. We are delivering infrastructure that converts energy and compute into sovereign governed nation-scale intelligence,” said His Excellency Mansoor Al Mansoori.

The Condor Galaxy India supercomputer will be one of the largest AI compute clusters in India and a foundational asset for the country’s sovereign AI ambitions. Under the framework, G42 in partnership with India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be responsible for the installation, deployment, operations, and maintenance of the system.

The AI compute cluster will underpin a new era of joint R&D across sectors such as health and genomics, energy, and geospatial analytics, enabling researchers, institutions from both countries, and India’s emerging innovators to advance frontier science and address some of the most consequential challenges of our time.

The Condor Galaxy India AI supercomputer will be powered by Cerebras CS-3 systems, built on the company’s wafer-scale engine technology. Cerebras recently completed one of the most significant IPOs in the AI sector, listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker CBRS, reflecting strong market confidence in the AI infrastructure sector. The deployment of Condor Galaxy India represents a continuation of the strategic partnership between G42 and Cerebras, which together operate several clusters of supercomputing capacity across the United States through the Condor Galaxy network, with this India deployment extending that footprint into one of the world’s most consequential emerging markets.

About G42

G42 is a technology holding group and a global leader in creating visionary artificial intelligence for a better tomorrow. Born in Abu Dhabi and operating worldwide, G42 champions AI as a powerful force for good across industries. From molecular biology to space exploration and everything in between, G42 realizes exponential possibilities today. To learn more, visit www.g42.ai.

About Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems builds the fastest AI infrastructure in the world. We are a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention because we believe that when AI is fast it will change the world. Our flagship technology, the Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) is the world’s largest and fastest AI processor.56 times larger than the largest GPU, the WSE uses a fraction of the power per unit compute while delivering inference and training more than 20 times faster than the competition. Leading corporations, research institutes and governments on four continents chose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premise and in the cloud, for further information, visit cerebras.ai.

Source: G42

The post G42 and Government of India Formalize Commercial Framework for Condor Galaxy India AI Supercomputer appeared first on HPCwire.

The crew of the Tahoma, a 270-foot Coast Guard cutter, made the interdictions about 90 miles off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia.

Mississippi politicians are threatening to redraw the district of Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Democrat in Congress

The supreme court decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) “was red meat to the Republican legislators of the south” the US House representative Bennie Thompson said.

Conservative lawmakers in Mississippi, where Thompson is both the state’s lone Black and only Democratic congressional representative, have used the opportunity to explicitly target him, threatening to redraw the second congressional district, that he represents.

The last time an El Niño pattern occurred was in 2023, when the Eastern Pacific hurricane season produced 20 tropical systems.

After a much-hyped US-China summit, the leaders of the world’s two biggest powers made no real breakthroughs on big issues, such as Iran, Taiwan and trade. The Guardian's senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins, breaks down how Donald Trump and Xi Jinping focused on growing their personal rapport instead

• Trump leaves China without breakthroughs on Iran, Taiwan or AI

Malcolm Turnbull: AUKUS is ‘a huge wealth transfer from the Australian government to the US and the UK’ News release jon.wallace 15 May 2026

Speaking at Chatham House, the former Australian prime minister strongly criticized the joint Australia–US–UK submarine project.

Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian prime minister, visited Chatham House on 11 May to discuss Australia’s foreign policy, its US alliance, and the role of middle powers in the context of US–China rivalry. 

Asked about the AUKUS trilateral security partnership between Australia, the US and UK, which is meant to provide Australia with nuclear attack submarines, Mr Turnbull said it was a ‘huge wealth transfer from the Australian government to the US and the UK’.

‘It’s a submarine deal with no submarines…It was a terribly bad deal, a really stupid deal,’ he said, adding that US naval yards are not producing submarines at sufficient scale and speed to meet AUKUS needs.

Addressing the UK part of the deal, which would see joint development of a new nuclear submarine class, he said that ‘the UK shipbuilding industry, particularly the submarine industry, is in complete disarray…We shouldn’t have cancelled the deal with France’.

He said that it would be better for the UK to go into partnership with France to design a new nuclear submarine class, with the aim of developing common defence platforms for Europe. 

During the event Mr Turnbull also discussed the summit between Chinese President Xi and US President Trump, Australian relations with the Trump administration, and Australia’s role in Pacific security.

May 15, 2026 — Equal1 has announced the global release of RacQ. RacQ, the next generation evolution of Equal1’s Bell-1 Server, is a rack-mounted silicon-spin quantum computing designed for deployment within a standard 19-inch data center rack.

The Equal1 RacQ

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing (HQCC) Integration

HQCC enables high-impact applications, including investment risk analysis, materials simulation and supply chain optimization.

In these workflows, classical and quantum workloads operate as a single system. Intensive subroutines are offloaded to the RacQ quantum processor, while pre- and post-processing remain on the classical compute server.

This integration allows organizations to prioritize high-impact use cases and move hybrid systems directly into production.

Experience RacQ and HQCC In Action

Equal1 and Dell Technologies are demonstrating how HQCC could be deployed in a data center next week at Dell Technologies World in the Modern Data Center area of the Solutions Expo. In this experimental prototype, Equal1’s RacQ integrates a silicon quantum computer with a Dell PowerEdge R770 server, a PowerSwitch networking environment and Dell’s Quantum Intelligent Orchestrator – a prototype created to manage and schedule workloads across heterogeneous compute resources – all within a standard data center rack design.

While the demonstration is a research collaboration, it shows how HQCC is indeed possible in HPC environments and sets a practical benchmark for low-disruption QPU integration.

RacQ Highlights

• Standard Power: It plugs into a standard single-phase electrical socket, consuming only 1600 W – comparable to a high-end classical server.
• Advanced Cooling: It features an integrated, self-contained, closed-cycle cryocooler that maintains an internal temperature of 0.3 Kelvin without external infrastructure.
• Compact Footprint: Weighing 400 kg, the hybrid quantum classical compute device fits perfectly into a standard Dell 42U frame.

For too long, quantum computing has remained isolated in specialist environments, custom-built and disconnected from standard infrastructure. Equal1 is changing this by delivering quantum compute in a familiar footprint, accessible to every data center operator.

Building on the foundation of the Bell-1, the new Equal1 RacQ translates that same quantum power into a deployable, rack-mounted form factor. The Equal1 RacQ is designed to integrate seamlessly with any classical compute hardware, enabling hybrid quantum classical compute all within the same data center rack form factor.

Whether an organization utilizes existing server stacks or specialized high-performance computing (HPC) nodes, RacQ functions as a peer-level resource within the rack.

“For nearly every organization, quantum computing remains out of reach, confined to labs,” said Jason Lynch, CEO of Equal1. “We’re changing that. We are putting quantum inside the rack so customers can roll it in, plug it in and begin running hybrid quantum–classical workloads in days, using the infrastructure they already own.”

Powered by UnityQ: Silicon-Scale Innovation

The Equal1 RacQ is powered by UnityQ, a breakthrough quantum system-on-chip that will integrate the complete quantum system onto a single silicon package.

• Standard CMOS: Built using standard semiconductor processes, allowing it to scale on the cadence of global chip progress.
• Efficient Power: Runs at approximately 1.6kW from a single-phase electrical socket.
• Self-Contained Cooling: An integrated, closed-cycle cryocooler maintains an internal temperature of 0.3 Kelvin without requiring external cryogenic infrastructure.
• Data Center Ready: The full system weighs 400 kg and fits within a standard rack footprint.

More from HPCwire

• Bull and Equal1 Partner to Accelerate Hybrid Quantum-HPC Integration in Europe
• Kvantify and Equal1 Form Alliance to Integrate Quantum Hardware and Software for Life Sciences
• Equal1 and Q-CTRL Partner to Deliver Fully Autonomous, Data Center-Ready Quantum Computing
• Equal1 Raises $60M to Accelerate Quantum Computing Using Existing Semiconductor Manufacturing

About Equal1

Equal1 is a global leader in silicon-powered quantum computing technology. Equal1’s first generation quantum machine, the Bell-1 Quantum Server, is now available and shipping to customers.

Source: Equal1

The post Equal1 Debuts Silicon-Spin Quantum Computer Designed for Standard 19-Inch Server Racks appeared first on HPCwire.

US president has said he and Chinese leader ‘settled a lot of different problems’ but has given little detail on solutions

• Trump China visit live – latest updates

Donald Trump’s whirlwind trip to Beijing – the first US presidential visit in nearly a decade – wrapped up with much fanfare but little clarity about what was actually achieved.

Trump said on Friday he and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, “settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve”. But he didn’t provide much detail on what those solutions were.

Guest column: If you're building the most powerful technology ever, you're going to need to learn to activate your principles.

With the primary election less than three weeks away, the gubernatorial and mayoral races have taken a fiery turn

Sparring on the debate stage, well-timed statements addressing the slightest misstep by an opponent and countless social media jabs: election season is heating up in California’s major primaries.

With the primary election less than three weeks away, the gubernatorial and mayoral races have taken a fiery turn as candidates undergo last-ditch efforts to convince voters of their governance chops.

Pennsylvania’s third district, a Democratic bastion, will see a face-off between party’s traditional wing and insurgents

Democrats have been consumed for the better part of two years by the same question: what went wrong in 2024? Next week, voters in the country’s bluest district will render a verdict when they choose a candidate for the 2026 midterm elections.

Nearly every faultline currently running through Democratic politics – from Gaza and healthcare to immigration enforcement and the role of corporate money in politics – is at the heart of the party’s race for Pennsylvania’s third district.

If you want the best picture quality you can buy, you have to go OLED. Here are the best TVs I've tested.

US president hails ‘fantastic’ deals, but details remain scarce after pageantry and little progress at much-hyped summit with Xi

• Trump in China – latest updates

Donald Trump left China on Friday after a much-hyped summit of the world’s two major powers that was rich in pageantry and promises of stability, but offered little by way of tangible progress.

The US president had gone into the two-day talks with China’s Xi Jinping weakened by his prolonged war in Iran, and did little to change the perception that he and his nation are diminished on the global stage.

US president offers no news of any breakthrough on Iran. Plus, how renters’ rights could be key issue in midterms

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Good morning.

On his visit to China, Donald Trump has seemed to revel in Chinese hospitality and flattery. Walking in the Zhongnanhai garden, in Beijing, the US president was overheard saying that his counterpart, Xi Jinping, was giving him roses for the White House rose garden, according to a pool report.

What has China said on Iran? On Friday, China’s foreign ministry again called for a ceasefire in Iran and said the strait of Hormuz should be opened “as soon as possible”. Before the summit, there was speculation the US might appeal to China, the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, to use its leverage to encourage the country to reopen the strait. But that was walked back on Thursday by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who said: “We don’t need their help.”

What about talks over Taiwan? They weren’t mentioned much. Xi took a firm tone, declaring that “Taiwan independence” and peace in the Taiwan strait were “incompatible”. Trump sidestepped questions on Taiwan, and a White House readout of the meeting published later omitted any mention of the country.

What do Russia’s renewed heavy attacks tell us? Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Thursday that Russia’s heavy bombardment of Kyiv showed Moscow was “banking on escalation rather than negotiation. Kyiv and its partners are ready for negotiations aimed at a just peace,” Merz said. “Russia, for its part, is continuing the war.”

Spotlight Delaware education reporter Julia Merola joins the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to discuss the outcomes of this year’s statewide school board elections, the issues that were in play with them and what they might mean for the future of districts around Delaware.

The podcast was hosted by Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

So before we get into the actual horse races of who won what races and why around the state, I thought we should maybe start with explaining the role that our school boards play in Delaware.

Can you fill the listeners in on what powers and responsibilities these public servants have?

To start, I would say that Delaware is a really heavily focused local control state, meaning that the meat and potatoes of decisions are being made within school districts rather than at the Delaware Department of Education’s level or in the General Assembly.

So if you’re thinking about approving a budget or hiring a superintendent or holding referendums, those decisions are all made by board of education members.

Are these paid positions? Are these typically teachers or people with experience in education? Who are these school boards that we have around the state?

They’re volunteers. They’re not paid positions. Some of them are retired educators, some of them are parents, some of them are neither and are just community members who are looking to help the students in their area in whatever way they can.

I would say it’s really a mix of everything of the above.

School board elections in particular have long suffered from low turnout. But this year’s contest seemed to have really defied that trend. What did we see, and what might you attribute that change to?

I would start to say that it was certain school districts that defied that trend. Maybe it’s just where I was, but I went to Christina’s two Wilmington polls at the Maurice Pritchard Academy and the Pulaski Early Education Center, and those polls were pretty dead. I was not seeing a lot of people.

It was very quiet. But then, over in Red Clay and Appo there were definitely a lot more people and the polls were more lively.

I think that’s attributed to the fact that districts like Red Clay and Appo had a bit more going on, a little bit more controversy brewing, whereas in Christina, this was a calmer year.

Let’s maybe start with perhaps the biggest race of the day in the Appoquinimink School District that covers the Middletown-Odessa-Townsend area, where two incumbents were being challenged by four different opponents.

What happened there, and what might have caused so many residents to come out to the polls?

I think with Appo in particular, the reason why so many people came to the polls was really because of what happened last spring, which was when the district revealed that it’d failed to properly track millions of dollars that it thought were in reserves.

After that, there were calls for the superintendent and for other board members to step down. We know that they didn’t step down, and then residents saw two of those incumbent board members were running for re-election. I don’t think that they wanted them to run for re-election, hence why they were not re-elected.

I think a lot of that tension stayed there with the residents. And, at a board meeting you can really only give public comments, so the way to really make your point is at the polls, which is what they did.

So who won that Appo election?

The two winners were Britney Mumford and Elena Brenner. 

Elena is a retired educator, and Britney is the executive director of DelawareKidsCAN, which is an education advocacy organization. 

Among the losers – which I hate to call them but that is unfortunately the reality of a race —  was Richard Forsten, who was the president of the Appoquinimink School District board.

There was also Nichelle DeWitt, who was another incumbent board member.

Then there was also Mark Heck, who was looking to take one of those seats. He’s a veteran and an ROTC instructor at the Christina School District.

He came up short in getting a seat too.

 It was an interesting race all around. The incumbents actually came in dead last out of the six candidates running, so it was really a display of some of the anger that was reflected at the polls in one of the largest school districts in the state.

Turning to the largest school district in the state, up in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, which covers the greater Wilmington area, along with Pike Creek and Hockessin, the board president there faced a challenger. What happened in that race?

It was a continuation of the trend of incumbents seeing their way out and new faces coming in.

Vic Leonard, the current president of the Red Clay Board of Education, lost his race to Jenny Howard, who is a mother of four and a former educator. 

There was a big conversation in the district over what would happen to McKean High School, which is where I was yesterday.

The first voter who I talked to told me that she was voting for Jenny Howard because she didn’t want to see her alma mater close and become an innovation center. The voter added that she understood the purpose of an innovation center in general, but just felt that the way the board had handled it was very rushed.

She appreciated how Jenny Howard had spoken out during public comment against the innovation center, and just felt that a lot of what Jenny Howard was saying was resonating.

So this is an example of a resident who, willingly or unwillingly, became the face of opposition to the incumbency by showing up to a meeting and making her point heard during public comment. 

Give us the rundown on that McKean Innovation Center project and where it stands today.

It’s at a standstill. and that’s because last month the Red Clay Board of Education voted to postpone the Innovation Center, which would transform McKean.

They made that decision because of a large pushback from community members who were concerned about this program that currently exists at McKean called the Meadowood program. It’s a program for students who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.

It’s something I’ve heard from parents about. Parents have called it a really good program that has been really helpful for their kids. And I think that there was a lot of confusion about what would happen to that program if it were to be moved to A.I. duPont High School, w

It seemed like there were a lot of families who felt that their concerns weren’t taken into consideration, and instead the process was kind of rushed through. Then, here comes Jenny Howard, a parent who agrees with those sentiments.

She told me she wasn’t originally planning to run, and then when all of this happened, she was like, “Well, maybe, I can help change things and make sure that the board is actually listening to people.”

School boards around the state, but I think Red Clay in particular, are kind of in this difficult spot, where they have a lot of school buildings that maybe aren’t filling the capacity needs. And so Jenny is now going to be joining a school board where she’s gonna have to make some tough decisions about what to do with buildings that aren’t full of students.

I’ll note to our Spotlight Delaware readers that I’m working on a story about capacity rates, so keep an eye out for that exact topic. 

But yeah, it’s definitely an ongoing conversation, especially in Red Clay, and I think it’s one that a lot of district leaders want to really tackle before any possible consolidation decision with the Redding Consortium is reached between the four districts.

You mentioned Redding. Did it feel like Redding was on the minds of voters or school board candidates? 

It wasn’t something that I necessarily heard about at the polls, but some candidates brought it up on their own. Others responded after I asked them about it. I think it is a bit of an unknown.

Board of education leaders are not necessarily on the front lines of the Redding Consortium meetings. They’re welcome to attend just like everybody else, and I see plenty of board members there all the time, but they’re not on the front end of the decision-making. 

I think that it’s something the board needs to at least be talking about and making a plan for students. That was a sentiment I heard a few times.

Down south in the Delmar School District, which sits along Delaware’s southernmost border, another well-known member was facing two challengers for two open seats. What happened there?

Shawn Brittingham was last sitting on the State Board of Education. He has previously served on the Delmar Board of Education, but he did not win the Tuesday race against Neil Baker and Jordan Johnson.

I honestly thought it was interesting because Shawn has a lot of experience on the Delmar Board of Education, and then almost a decade of experience on the State Board of Education.

In that district, there was a decent amount of talk about referendums and what could potentially happen with two new candidates on the board. I think it’ll be interesting to see what that board decides to do next in terms of whether they’ll have a referendum.

Fill us in again on what a referendum is, why a school district might go out for one, and how that works for the public.

A referendum is when the district comes to the voters in a community and says, “Hey, we’re looking to raise X amount of money to do things like better retaining teachers, providing better pay, maintaining programs, building schools and things like that.”

That’s where the residents come in to be able to vote on whether to raise their property tax rate to fund the money for these things.

So in Delmar specifically, there’s been this ongoing issue of there being limited capacity in their buildings with a growing number of students.

You need to be able to retain teachers who are comfortable working in these often tight spaces. There were conversations this past fall of a possible referendum in Delmar to help alleviate some of those concerns.

Ultimately, the Board of Education announced that they were not going to hold a referendum this year. Maybe in 2027, we’ll see.

I think that it was something that was on the minds of some voters, maybe not everyone per se, but I think when anyone hears that their taxes could potentially go up, it’s definitely something that they’re gonna be listening to.

Referendums have been increasingly difficult to get passed in the state of Delaware in recent years, because it’s one of the few times we get to vote on our own, on our own taxes. Is that right?

Yeah.

This is a little bit of a case where you’re farther up the food chain, voting for the people who may or may not propose such a referendum down the line. Of the two winners in the Delmar election down there, do you get a sense of whether they might support a future referendum?

It’s hard to say. We spoke to Jordan Johnson on Tuesday, and he told us, “If I feel that it’s right and we need it, then I’ll vote for it. If I feel it’s not right and we don’t need it, then I won’t vote for it.”  It’s literally a 50-50, so we’ll see. 

I didn’t have the chance to speak with the other elected board member, Neil Baker, but he had said that a strategic review was necessary. So again, it’s kind of like a 50-50

I know Shawn Brittingham was very pro-referendum, but as far as I know, he’s the only person who has outright said, “Yeah, I would support a referendum for these reasons.”

So perhaps the non-committal answers may have assisted in some of these races?

Possibly.

When you really look at the 2026 school board elections, do you think there will be any lessons or lasting trends?

I don’t know if I would necessarily call this a lesson, but a realization of just how much people feel that they needed pretty big changes in their schools.

If you look at Appo, Forsten has been on that board for nearly two decades.

So for people to really say, “No, we do not want you there anymore,” I think that really shows people in that district, in particular, were craving new faces. 

I think the same can be said in other districts, like Red Clay. Vic Leonard wasn’t on the board for an extremely long time but, again, he was the board president.

That’s a pretty big role to play on a board. And for 60% of voters to say, like, “Nope, we prefer the other candidate,” it just shows that people really want big changes.

 It’s starting to feel like at least a small but growing number of residents are really starting to pay attention to how their school districts are being governed and who is involved in that decision-making process. As we look to the future, do you think school board elections will be able to keep up this rate of engagement, or was this maybe just a reaction to an isolated incident in time?

I think it was probably a reaction.

I don’t want to think that. I want to think that we’re all gonna be more civically engaged because that is your one opportunity to actually change things.You can make a public comment, but the board doesn’t respond to that. 

Who knows if they hear every single word said. They’re only human. 

So really your only chance to make an actual difference is to go to the polls and vote. I would like to say Delaware is on an upward swing, but when I was at the two Wilmington polls it was really quiet, so I can’t confidently say that this is a positive trend.

I really do unfortunately think it’s just a matter of circumstance.

Well, Julia, thank you for covering Delaware’s public education system – a very challenging task with 19 different districts – and great job covering the varied races up and down the state this week.

Thank you.

The post ‘Beyond the Headlines’ podcast: Delaware voters seek school board changes appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The Greater Manchester mayor is hoping to return to parliament after a Labour MP stepped down, triggering a byelection

Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has backed Andy Burnham’s efforts to return to parliament, saying there will be no attempt to stop the Greater Manchester mayor from fighting an upcoming byelection in Makerfield.

Speaking at a Fire Brigades Union conference in Coventry, she said

We could have further to fall as a party and we absolutely need to come back together as one team, because we’ve got to take the fight to [Nigel] Farage. We are at real risk of Nigel Farage walking up Downing Street in a few years time, and we can’t let that happen.

But we’ve got to do our politics differently. We’ve got to end the factionalism. We’ve got to embrace all the different traditions of the Labour party, all the different voices, and bring one team back together.

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded their summit in Beijing on Friday with both countries looking to claim the visit as a win.

As Powell steps down after more than eight years leading the Federal Reserve, economists say he helped steer the U.S. through historic shocks but misread inflation.

Commentary: I hope Apple gives us something more relatable for its next version of Siri.

Negotiating with your mortgage lender could lead to a lower rate, but is that an effective path in this market?

No one has more at stake than Kamala Harris – who has ‘signaled’ support for its release without saying so publicly

After several months of heated arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) should release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the dispute has neared a boiling point. With one recent media appearance after another, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, has set off fierce criticism and even derision, while offering notably illogical explanations for keeping the autopsy secret.

As the controversy simmers, no one has more at stake than the party’s latest standard-bearer. Kamala Harris, apparently preparing for another run, leads in polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. One of the last things she needs is a widely publicized narrative from the DNC about failures of her 2024 campaign. A maxim from George Orwell applies: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”.

Mirroring of each other’s attire may signal alignment – though the look wasn’t a huge departure for either leader

When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met for a welcome ceremony in Tiananmen Square this week with the world’s gaze on them, they mirrored one another in strikingly similar suits.

Both were blue, single-breasted with flap pockets. Both had two buttons with only the top one done up. Both wore red ties.

When you want seamless phone coverage in countries outside the US, these plans give you the best international options.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, gave the US president, Donald Trump, a tour of Beijing’s walled-off Zhongnanhai compound in the concluding hours of their summit on Friday. Among the notable ancient trees Xi showed Trump was the 'Lianli Bai', two cypress trees whose trunks have grown together. A hot mic captured the leaders' remarks, in which Trump asked Xi if other foreign leaders were also received in the compound. 'Very rarely,' Xi responded.

Tech workers say AI-driven restructurings are eroding mentorship, support and paths to promotion across Silicon Valley

As tech companies pour billions into artificial intelligence bets and slash their workforces, middle managers are squarely in the crosshairs.

A trend is emerging: when tech CEOs announce that AI is making it possible to do more with fewer workers, they promise to flatten their structures by cutting away what they call unnecessary management layers and bureaucracy. Just last week, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase laid off 14% of its workforce while gesturing to the thrill of AI-fueled, minimal-management efficiency. In doing so, it joined companies including Amazon, Block and Meta that in the last year have laid off tens of thousands of employees with a specific focus on removing management layers.

IN 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo.

“[The] strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. “It combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. … We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.”

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This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists.  “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”

“We’re not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.” 

“The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret,” says Turse, who has been covering the attacks on so-called narco-terrorists. “We’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States.” He adds, “It’s really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It’s the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.”

“Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor at The Intercept. 

Last week, we talked about the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the news on that subject has been moving really fast. I was wondering if first you could just give us a quick update on what else is happening since that last conversation.

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JW: There’s been a lot happening since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last month, well, gutted it again further, I should say. In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a new congressional map eliminating the only majority-Black district. Then in Alabama, House primaries are next week, but the Republican governor is planning to hold a special vote in four districts in August after the state redraws a more GOP-friendly map. Republican leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson are excited about it. Here he is talking about it on “Fox and Friends.”

[Clip]

Brian Kilmeade: There’s Tennessee, Alabama. How many more? 

Rep. Mike Johnson: Potentially South Carolina, maybe Missouri, Mississippi. There are other states who are similarly situated. And we think the analysis is, by the end of all this, when you correct all that, Republicans’ll probably pick up between seven and eight seats and maybe double digits, depending on how many states get involved. That’s obviously a good thing for the outcome.

[Clip ends]

JW: My only reaction to hearing that is that Republicans are clearly hiding the ball here. They’re saying that this is about fairer representation, but in Mississippi, they’re clearly trying to eliminate representation for Black Americans. The governor has called to redraw a map that would eliminate Rep. Bennie Thompson’s district. He is the only Black representative representing Mississippi, a state that is nearly 40 percent Black.

Maia, did anything strike you in that clip or just anything about this redistricting effort at all?

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MH: I just keep getting struck by the way Republicans are framing this as some sort of anti-racist effort, that the way congressional districts are drawn sometimes to take into account the racial diversity or lack thereof of an area is inherently anti-democratic. And as you’ve pointed out before, in reality, that’s a disingenuous framing of what they’re doing.

JW: Yeah. We’re going to continue to watch the fallout from the Supreme Court. But I want to talk about some other news. 

There’s been talk online that we might be facing a new pandemic. Maia, what can you tell us about the hantavirus, and do I need to start stockpiling toilet paper?

MH: No, please, no one go buy a lot of toilet paper. Never helpful. 

There’s definitely a lot of chatter and panic online, but I don’t think there’s any sign that this is going to be a new pandemic. A pandemic is when there is this uncontrolled disease spread on a global scale, and there’s really no sign that’s going to be the case here.

It is, however, really fascinating. This is a wild example of a group of people who have been traveling all over the world, who are all on a ship together, and then a very rare infectious disease breaks out. People are certainly freaked out and worried about this when they’re reading about it online, and I think there’s a lot of information on Twitter, on Instagram, everywhere. There’s a lot of panic. 

What the general scientific consensus says is still that this strain of the virus, which is known to spread between people, is still more likely to spread animal to human, not human to human. And when it does spread between humans, it typically requires close contact. So you’re having a conversation with someone and your faces are close together, you’re exchanging saliva, there’s some sort of large droplet transfer, something like that, is the most likely way for this to spread between people.

We don’t know everything about it, and of course, viruses do change, but that is still the overall scientific consensus. It’s not known to spread the way Covid does, where it’s aerosolized and someone in the room has it and anyone else in the room could get it.

The most well-known vector for this disease to spread is from people actually inhaling particles from the feces or urine of rodents, especially rats. So really the people, I think, who are at the highest risk are anyone who might be in a setting where they’re cleaning that up or otherwise really directly exposed.

JW: Gross, but I do feel a little bit safer. [Laughter.]

But one thing, I do have some concerns about — we know who’s in charge of HHS, we know who’s in charge of the FDA. Do we have the public health infrastructure to deal with something like this?

MH: We know that since the Trump administration came back into office and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed to be in charge of Health and Human Services, the CDC has been pretty dramatically gutted. And the Trump administration just doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure the U.S. government used to maintain in order to keep an eye on pandemics and other disease outbreaks. So that certainly is concerning.

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For example, there was a lot of chatter last week. Marjorie Taylor Greene was spreading claims that ivermectin was going to be helpful for keeping this virus at bay, and Intercept contributor Austin Campbell reached out to the CDC and asked what they thought of that, and he just never heard back. They never had a stance on it. 

Another Intercept contributor, Jackie Sweet, tracked down for a piece this past week on her Substack the case of a 75-year-old cruise ship passenger who had dual residency in both the U.S. and New Zealand. She had managed to totally evade the supervision of public health authorities, which is staggering because there were fewer than 150 people on that ship. So it’s a little bit wild that they couldn’t keep track of them all.

JW: So what I’m hearing from you is that we’re lucky that it’s this kind of virus and not something that is easier to transmit person to person?

MH: I would say that’s right, yeah.

JW: I want to talk about some other reporting that we published this week. On Tuesday, my co-host Akela Lacy published a story about Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who was detained by ICE for protesting in support of Palestinians as a part of the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. So I know the story goes into a little bit more detail about that targeting. Maia, what can you tell us about the story?

MH: I think a lot of our listeners probably remember this moment last spring when he was detained, and he was one of the first of this group of students that the Trump administration was targeting. What Akela’s story found was that two days before ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the FBI had gotten an anonymous tip which accused him of calling for, and this is a quote from the tip, “violence on behalf of Hamas.”

Now, we don’t really have any detail in this document on what the tip is. It came in via a FOIA request that his legal team received and passed on to Akela, and the document is mostly redacted. But what we do know is that less than two weeks after they got the tip, the FBI closed this investigation, and they found that the tip did not warrant further investigation.

But by then, he was already in ICE detention in Louisiana, and the Trump administration was already calling him a “Hamas supporter” and accusing him of being a supporter of terrorism. At this point, we now know that the FBI at least had found that allegation was not worth looking into.

JW: That’s really interesting. It feels like we’re going to be unraveling what actually went behind the Trump administration’s targeting of these students. This really fits into broader efforts from the Trump administration to target any of the president’s perceived political enemies, both abroad and in the United States.

MH: Exactly. And this week, everyone in the newsroom has really been focused on this project that you’ve been working on with our colleagues, Nick Turse and Noah Hurowitz, about how the Trump administration is taking that political targeting apparatus to the next level, and what the next phase of it will look like. Could you tell us a little bit more about that project?

JW: We’ve been poring through this new counterterrorism strategy that’s been handed down from the Trump administration. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but this is a document laying out the president’s strategy for coming after his political enemies in the United States and abroad, and potentially giving him the authority to kill his political enemies.

So we’ve been really looking into this next evolution of President Donald Trump’s attempt to label his enemies — so anyone who disagrees with him — as “terrorists.” And I’ve now successfully dragged both of my brilliant coworkers onto the show to talk about it. Nick is a senior reporter covering national security and foreign policy, and Noah is a federal law enforcement reporter.

MH: Let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Nick, Noah, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having us.

Noah Hurowitz: Thanks for having us.

JW: Let’s dive right into this project. Last week, the Trump administration released its counterterrorism strategy. The 16-page memo outlines who they view as terrorist threats and priority targets. The three of us have been combing through this document for an in-document analysis that we just published.

To start, Nick, can you tell us a bit more about this document and the objectives of the administration?

NT: I consider this a truly foundational document, a genuine distillation of Trumpism as both a movement and a system of governance. The document is the brainchild of the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who’s a truly bizarre figure and whose credentials for the job of counterterrorism czar are highly dubious.

This Gorka-led strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, and it combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. The 2026 counterterrorism strategy puts so-called domestic “antifascist” or antifa organizations on par with actual terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda as well as with international drug cartels. 

It states that there are three major types of terrorist threats. So we’re talking about what they call legacy Islamist terrorists, Al Qaeda and ISIS; narco-terrorists like the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; and these supposed violent left-wing extremists, which include anarchists and anti-fascists. The latter are longtime Republican boogeymen but don’t actually exist in a real way as, say, urban guerrillas or something like that in the United States.

This is a fictional foe. We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies, both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.

JW: I think that’s a really good way to look at this document. If we think about it as a foundational text of the Trump administration, then the foundation of the Trump administration is a politics of vengeance, which I think is borne out in so many of the administration’s policies, both at home and abroad.

Noah, I want to bring you in. One thing that this document does is loosely define who is and who isn’t a terrorist. So I want to ask you, what did we now learn about who’s considered a terrorist?

NH: One thing that I found really interesting about this document is that it specifically calls out previous weaponizations of government counterterrorism policy, which is, I think, a pretty clear reference to the prosecutions of right-wing groups, and specifically participants in January 6.

As we know, FBI Director Kash Patel, prior to becoming head of the FBI, was very critical of the federal government’s policies toward violent right-wing extremists, which statistically have been a majority of the domestic terrorists in the United States. This document really explicitly does away with that and explicitly names left-wing groups or left-wing people holding left-wing ideologies as terrorists.

There’s a specific line about doing away with the weaponization of counterterrorism policy against American citizens, when in reality we’ve seen the very explicit weaponization of counterterrorism policy and rhetoric by this administration against its domestic foes, if you will.

Most notably, the language used to describe Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis following their deaths, and also the prosecution of nine protesters for their roles in a demonstration outside of an ICE facility in Texas last July. This is the Prairieland case in which eight defendants were convicted on terrorism charges. They might say that they’re ending the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens, but in reality, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation of it.

JW: One group that you didn’t mention here, but is mentioned repeatedly throughout the document, are people who the administration calls adherents to radical pro-transgender ideology.

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Clearly throughout this document, we’re seeing references to the Christian right, references to the idea that anyone who does not adhere to these very specific tenets of white Christian nationalism — a very specific subset of white evangelical Christianity — that those groups are also considered terrorists under this document.

In April, the Trump administration released the anti-Christian bias task force report which allegedly detailed the Biden administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and also highlighted President Donald Trump’s efforts to restore religious liberty. There are very similar themes to that document. There clearly is an effort to target anyone who is not a part of MAGA world, and so that includes, obviously, Christian nationalists, but other groups as well.

Noah, I want to ask, how would you characterize what the administration has outlined here?

NH: Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them.

JW: Nick, we’re not just talking about rhetoric here. We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.

The administration has alleged that they are targeting “narco-terrorists.” This has been going on now since September of last year. What evidence has the administration provided to justify what appear to be extrajudicial killings?

NT: Actually, we haven’t seen one shred of evidence. Instead, we’ve been treated to outlandish claims that are demonstrably outright lies. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels that the U.S. is attacking are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Trump says that the boats are hit, and then you see bags of fentanyl floating in the ocean.

First off, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities than, say, cocaine. You wouldn’t see bales of it floating in a body of water in the aftermath of an airstrike. It’s really beside the point. No fentanyl comes to the United States from South America. Ninety-nine percent of the fentanyl comes into the U.S. through legal ports of entry primarily from Mexico by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Cartels would have to smuggle fentanyl down to South America to smuggle it back by boat.

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The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret. There is a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. It was drawn up by an interagency lawyers’ group, including representatives of the CIA, the White House Counsel, Department of Justice, and the War Department’s Office of General Counsel. It claims that narcotics on these supposed drug boats, cocaine essentially, are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a non-international armed conflict with the United States.

Government officials told me that this secret memo wasn’t actually signed by the assistant attorney general until days after the first boat strike on September 2 of last year. So the strikes came before the horse. I should also note that attached to this secret legal memorandum is a similarly secret list of what they call “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. That list is secret too. 

So we’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States. 

JW: As you’ve reported, nearly 200 people are dead as a result of these strikes, but there are survivors. What do we know about the survivors of these strikes?

NT: Yeah, very little at this point. Most survivors have been gravely injured, or they’ve been left to die at sea by the United States. What’s notable is that behind closed doors in classified briefings, military officials have said that they can’t actually hold or try the individuals that survive because they can’t satisfy the evidentiary burden. They can’t bring these people to court because they know they would lose. To me, that says that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone on drug charges than to kill them for supposed smuggling. So I think of these strikes as a centerpiece counterterrorism strategy of the Trump administration.

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It’s really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It’s the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say that these boat strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military isn’t permitted to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals who don’t pose an imminent threat of violence.

JW: It is so telling that they say they have the legal authority to kill people, but not the legal authority to hold them. I think it just shows the entire game, frankly.

[Break]

JW: Noah, the strategy repeatedly references narco-terrorists in Latin America as principal targets for the Trump administration’s counterterrorism efforts around the world. Does this help us to understand anything about what the administration has been doing in Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere?

NH: I think what it helps us understand is that the drug war is and always has been a instrument for various U.S. foreign policy objectives, particularly in Latin America.

Actually labeling these somewhat nebulous drug trafficking groups as explicitly as terrorist groups was, until fairly recently, a right-wing fever dream. But on day one, President Trump signed an executive order asking the State Department to label various drug trafficking groups in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as terrorist groups. What that tells us is that the war on drugs continues to be a very useful cudgel for U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s been used by Trump to discipline and pressure President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. It’s been used to underwrite the sanctions regime against the government of Nicolás Maduro. Then, of course, as a pretext for the kidnapping of Maduro in January.

This counterterrorism strategy, like the national security strategy released late last year, makes repeated reference to the Monroe Doctrine, which is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy dating back to 1823 when President James Monroe issued a diktat, if you will, basically saying that the Western Hemisphere is closed to further colonization by Spanish forces and other European powers, and basically it’s our corner of the world, butt out. 

The strand of “American First” nationalism that undergirds the Trump administration’s foreign policy is heavily influenced by this Monroe Doctrine. Now what’s interesting is that it was posed as a sort of anti-colonial doctrine — that the Spanish should stop meddling, that the British should stop meddling. But it has been used in an essentially colonialist or imperialist fashion by the United States to assert power in the Western Hemisphere for centuries now.

It is popular among American-first nationalists because it is a vision of the world that predates liberal internationalism, and instead — it’s not isolationist, it’s not, “We’re going to sit in our country and take care of ourselves” — it is, “We are going to take care of ourselves by projecting power in the Western Hemisphere.”

That is something that we’ve seen very explicitly from the Trump administration, both in rhetoric, in the national security strategy and the counterterrorism strategy, and in its actions. We’ve seen that in Venezuela. We’ve seen that in Cuba with the reinforced blockade. We’ve seen that in Mexico with the Trump administration’s treatment of President Claudia Sheinbaum. 

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We’ve seen that in other countries where it appears that the Trump administration, especially through Marco Rubio, are trying to create a sort of Pan-American right-wing project linking the brain trusts and power of Javier Milei in Argentina, the supporters of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras, the administration in Paraguay, and the the government of Ecuador, where we’ve also seen military strikes against alleged drug traffickers.

JW: Nick, this Pan-American view isn’t really limited to the Western Hemisphere. We had a conversation with historian Greg Grandin as well where he got into this. Can you talk about how the administration has also loosened rules of engagement and the effects of that on countries with U.S. military operations?

NT: This new strategy boasts that as soon as Trump retook the White House he reinstituted loosened rules of engagement that were used during his first term in office. In retrospect, we know that these weak rules during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia, for example, tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. At the same time, U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen all spiked. The U.S. conducted more than 200 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first term, and that was a more than 300 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

Now, Trump, already in less than a year and a half in office in the second term, is on the cusp of eclipsing his first four years of strikes in Somalia. A review of the Trump era rules by the Biden administration found that the operating principles used in these strikes including what had previously been at a near-certainty that civilians would not be injured or killed in the course of operations, were severely watered down.

When I talked to retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa during Trump’s first term, he told me that this shift in the rules of engagement led to a major shift in who could be targeted and who would be killed. In essence, it made it much easier to strike targets.

Back in 2023, in an investigation for The Intercept, I found that these rules in one case led to the deaths of three and possibly five civilians in a strike in Somalia, including a young mother, a 22-year-old, Luul Dahir Mohamed, and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam. Members of the U.S. strike cell didn’t know what they were looking at and somehow misidentified Luul as a man and completely missed Mariam.

The mother and child had hitched a ride in a pickup truck that the U.S. targeted. Luul and Mariam actually survived the initial strike but were killed in a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. This was only possible because of these loosened rules of engagement that Trump has now bragged about in this 2026 counterterrorism strategy.

JW: Frankly, it’s alarming to think that now we’re going to see even more incidents like that, like you just described. And we’re seeing people targeted here at home too. 

Nick, I was looking at a piece you did last year focused on NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum that effectively created a secret list of domestic terrorists, which included everyone from anti-Christians to anti-capitalists.

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One of the haunting questions from your piece was whether the administration has the authority to kill people on the list that it has designated as terrorists. The line “We will find you and we will kill you” appears in this new counterterrorism strategy. I know that stuck out to both of us as incredibly chilling.

Does this new strategy give us an answer to your earlier question? Does the administration have the legal authority to kill its enemies?

NT: The White House and Justice Department have never answered this question. It’s been left hanging there in both cases since the fall when I started asking.

But in December, Gen. Gregory Guillot, the Chief of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from Pete Hegseth and oversees the United States, seemed to answer this question, and worryingly so. When he was asked about his willingness to attack so-called designated terrorist organizations within U.S. borders by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Guillot said that if he had questions about such an order, he would ask Hegseth, and if not, if he thought it was a legal order, then he would “definitely execute that order.”

Now, as far as four-star generals go, Guillot has a good reputation. People on the Hill, decent people there, like him. He’s not a Hegseth acolyte, not a MAGA general. But the military are, in the end, orders followers. They kill on command. They do what they’re told. You don’t get four stars on your shoulder by saying, no, sir, that’s immoral. I won’t do what you want, sir. 

You don’t see a lot of military officers at any level pushing back against the orders of this administration to attack and kill people, whether it’s in Iran or Venezuela, or specifically the boat strikes that every legal authority worthy of that name says are illegal extrajudicial killings.

With secret lists of both foreign and domestic terrorists, we don’t know who can be targeted. But it’s possible that so-called left-wing extremists could be targeted and killed on Trump or Hegseth’s say-so. In a world of secret wars, secret enemies lists, secret legal findings, we just can’t know for sure. And that alone should scare every American.

JW: I think most people in the United States would like to believe that the military would not follow those kinds of orders. But as you’ve documented throughout your entire career, we cannot count on individual soldiers not following through on those orders.

The fact that we now have an enemies list and a counterterrorism strategy that is rather explicit about targeting the left, that includes the words “We will find you and we will kill you,” I think that should be terrifying to pretty much anyone.

Noah, you’ve covered other targets, specifically nonprofits. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader efforts to not only tamp down but arguably eliminate any dissent? Has the Trump administration strategy here evolved over the last year? And if so, how?

NH: As we’ve mentioned before, this anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent. Prior to the Trump administration returning to power, I reported extensively on what was known as the “nonprofit killer bill,” which was a piece of legislation in Congress that would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the nonprofit status of any 501(c)(3) organization found to be providing material support for terrorism.

That was a bill that had received relatively broad bipartisan support prior to the reelection of Donald Trump, and then in the immediate aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump, it became much more of a partisan issue because suddenly the Democrats looked around and realized that we were going to be handing this tool to a new emboldened Trump administration. So that bill ended up languishing in legislative hell. 

I see that as an early warning sign of the way in which the Trump administration planned to use this terrorism rhetoric to tamp down on pretty non-terroristic political enemies. I think that we’ve seen most clearly that coming through in its prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Now, that is through the DOJ. They are not necessarily using the rhetoric of anti-terror against the SPLC in that lawsuit, which is based on the use of undercover informants in white supremacist groups. They did accuse the SPLC of essentially providing material support to these extremist groups by paying informants, but it was a slight evolution of the somewhat more crude use of this terrorism label against political enemies.

But we do see that they are using every tool in the toolbox to delegitimize, to prosecute, to make the lives harder of anyone they see as their political enemies.

JW: What’s also fascinating, maybe horrifying is the better word, is the fact that they don’t even have to pass this legislation. They don’t even have to convict these organizations on any charges, and yet there’s already damage. The Intercept has been reporting on the fact that certain financial institutions essentially complied in advance and began preventing donations from their donor-advised funds to SPLC. 

Nick, at different points in history, we’ve seen the government target civilians it perceived as enemies of the state, from the McCarthy era to COINTELPRO to the war on terror. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell the full impact, but how does what we’re seeing now with the Trump administration compare to these other periods?

NT: I was really struck by some of the language in this new counterterrorism strategy. At one point, it notes that the national counterterrorism activities “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups” whose ideology is and this is quoting, “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

This language of neutralization, it really harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program that you mentioned which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement; the new left; anti-Vietnam War protesters — basically domestic groups and individuals. It’s very much the spiritual precursor to Trump’s current war at home. It’s just that COINTELPRO was secret, and Trump’s effort is out and proud.

According to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, COINTELPRO turned a law enforcement agency into a law violator. The Senate committee found that the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to “disrupt and neutralize target groups and individuals,” and that they used wartime counterintelligence techniques that were antithetical to a democratic society. There was a 1967 internal FBI memo that laid this out basically that this type of counterintelligence was meant to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” — that language again — “African American groups and leaders.”

These efforts were meant to, this is another quote, “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the Senate committee. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, was one of the targets of the FBI’s campaign. The Senate Select Committee again uses that same language. They said that the FBI targeted him to neutralize him. The man that was in charge of the FBI’s what they called “war against Dr. King,” said that they used the same methods they employed against Soviet agents. It’s the Cold War at the time, very much at war with the Soviet Union.

To me, I think Trump is really reinstituting COINTELPRO under a new name.

JW: The groups that you just mentioned are all generally considered left-leaning movements. What impact did those efforts have on leftist movements in the United States?

NT: Yeah, COINTELPRO and some analogous operations were going on at the same time. They really weakened activist groups. They sowed dissent within organizations, discord among members. They broke up families. They encouraged gang warfare on the streets of American cities. It got people killed.

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They utilized informants and agent provocateurs. They undermined groups that were trying to bring about social change through democratic means and hurt people that really just wanted to build a better, more inclusive America.

We can talk about the promise of 1960s radicalism and the movement and people trying to bring about social change and how it failed. But, we can’t seriously address those failures if we don’t talk about a sophisticated government campaign that was meant to undermine those groups and destroy those people.

JW: Are we doomed to repeat that history, to repeat that fate of previous leftist movements? Or is there a way for alleged enemies of the state to fight back? Noah, I want to start with you.

NH: Oh, yeah, we’re doomed. [Laughter.] Just kidding. No, I think there are definitely ways to push back on these. The Trump administration has been dealt a number of defeats in various district courts on a number of important policies.

So it’s going to be really important for groups like the SPLC to fight back from a legal basis. We’re also seeing a number of the charges that are being brought against protesters in various cities that have been invaded by ICE fall apart. The Prairieland case in Texas was actually a bit of an outlier. If you look at a lot of the cases, particularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, the charges brought against protesters there, where the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against them by the administration, have often fallen apart because juries see through what the prosecution is saying against them.

I think that we are early in this administration and we’re going to keep seeing creative methods used to tamp down on dissent. Say what you will about the people around President Trump, but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies. 

The SPLC lawsuit is a really good example of that. I’m sure they knew that these donor-advised funds were going to stop allowing donations there. It’s not just the bad press. It’s not just the legal headaches. There’s all sorts of problems that you kick off when you make an accusation like this in court.

So we are going to continue to see this so-called anti-terrorism carried out against leftist groups. It’s just going to be really important to find creative ways to push back on.

JW: Nick, how does the left survive this?

NT: The only reason that we, the public, that Congress, anyone ever found out about the COINTELPRO program is because a tiny group of academics, a daycare director, and a taxi driver broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, stole more than a thousand classified FBI documents, and exposed the FBI’s illegal operations.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as they called themselves, changed our understanding of how underhanded and unhinged the U.S. government is and can be. And they were just regular people. 

I’m not encouraging people to break into an FBI field office, but activists are still smart and committed, and I’m confident they’ll find a way to expose today’s illegality.

I hope and I humbly ask that they send whatever they uncover to The Intercept.

JW: Sounds like we’re going to have a lot more documents to go through. We’re going to leave it there. We go into much more detail about the far-reaching implications of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy beyond what we cover here, so you can check out our story. You can find it at theintercept.com, and we’ll link it in the show notes. 

Nick and Noah, thanks for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

NT: Thanks so much for having us. 

NH: Thanks so much.

JW: 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. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

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 Jessica Washington. 

The post “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You” appeared first on The Intercept.

State oil company fast-tracks previously undisclosed project, which is expected to double export capacity

• Business live – latest updates

The United Arab Emirates has announced it will complete a new oil pipeline bypassing the strait of Hormuz by next year to secure its future crude exports against the threat of disruption.

The current blockade of the vital waterway, through which 20% of oil and seaborne gas flowed before the Iran war, is approaching the 11-week mark, sending energy prices soaring around the world and throttling Gulf economies.

the Trump administration last week unveiled its “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy,” a 16-page collection of threats, grievances, hyperbole, and lies. The memo is a truly foundational document and a striking distillation of Trumpism as an ideology, movement, and system of governance. It also serves as a new declaration of war on the Trump administration’s enemies — foreign and domestic, real and imagined. 

The brainchild of National Security Council official Sebastian Gorka, the “Counterterrorism Strategy” weaves together Trump’s war on the wider world — which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Iran to Nigeria and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea — with the administration’s war on dissent at home, which has targeted immigrants, legal observers, activists, protesters, and the press.

Under the guise of protecting America, it takes aim at wide swaths of Americans, putting targets on the backs of the most vulnerable.

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“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”

The “Counterterrorism Strategy” formalizes a drastic shift in focus for counterterror efforts. Now, according to the Trump administration, the nation is battling three major types of terror groups: “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” the long-standing focus of America’s counter-terror efforts; “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs”; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

This last group is defined in the document as people the administration deems to be “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” This puts antifa — a fictional foe that is actually a collection of ideas and not an organization — on par with actual terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and drug-trafficking syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. 

The memo makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups, despite rafts of research, from the U.S. government and others, demonstrating that such groups have been responsible for the majority of violent attacks in America in recent years.

Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration published the first official National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The 2003 document purported to set “the course for winning the War on Terror,” with a focus on “destroying the larger al-Qaida network,” by defining the threat and laying out big-picture goals and objectives. New strategies have been issued numerous times, over multiple presidencies, since.

Explaining the 2026 strategy last week, Gorka leaned into the lies which permeate the Trump administration’s document. “Very simply, it’s common-sense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats,” he explained. “In the president’s foreword and in chapter one, we make it very clear we will not permit the use of the most powerful national security tools in the world including the counterterrorism enterprise to be used as political weapons.”

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., had a very different interpretation, calling the strategy “a plan on how they’re going to attack people on the left,” noting that antifascists are “not a real terrorism threat in the United States.” She added that the effort is “completely corrupt.”

To contextualize the U.S. government’s radical new approach to counterterrorism, The Intercept analyzed the document, highlighting revelatory passages that show how the Trump administration is bringing the war on terror home.

“We Will Kill You”

History ultimately judges presidents by their priorities, both deeds and words.

While calling out slavery as the cause of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln still focused his second inaugural address on reconciliation over retribution. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations,” he pronounced.

On the eve of World War II, as the threat of fascism loomed over the world, President Franklin D. Roosevelt readied a nation for war, not with ferocious rhetoric but by envisioning a new world founded upon the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress on January 6, 1941. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

These presidents were deeply flawed. Both committed grave injustices, were responsible for immense harm, and neither lived up to their most laudable words. But those words survived for a reason and are now part of the American canon.

For President Donald Trump, the “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” is as good as any collection of words in defining him. Nothing better illustrates his vision of America’s role in the world than Trump’s capstone quote. He concludes the foreword with words that ring true from the streets of Minneapolis, where federal agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during anti-ICE resistance; to a school building in Minab, Iran, where more than 100 children were killed in a U.S. airstrike; to the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, where close to 200 civilians have been killed in attacks on alleged drug boats; and should follow him forever: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

Treating Americans as Terrorists

Under U.S. law, the government can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” a process that typically entails a formal declaration by the secretary of state at the direction of the president, allowing the Treasury Department to impose financial penalties and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support” to such groups. Congress has not passed any law creating a domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism.” 

This has not stopped Trump from aiming the counterterror apparatus at domestic targets in his second term. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which Trump issued last September, vaguely defined enemies are not only typified by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In this document, the Trump administration makes clear it considers any American who it believes has “adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life” to be a terror threat.

“The Trump administration has repurposed the ‘terrorism’ framing and applied it to new boogeymen, like alleged narcos as well as a caricature of their domestic political opposition,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept.

White-Washing Right-Wing Terror

What’s notable here isn’t just the “major terror groups” included — it’s the type of groups the Trump administration omitted. 

“Absurdly, the document incorrectly labels drug cartels, ‘legacy Islamist terrorists,’ and violent left-wing extremists as the top counterterrorism threats — despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. 

In fact, a 2025 analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing militants. Islamist jihadist-inspired attacks resulted in 82 deaths over the same span.

“Radical Ideologies”

The new “Counterterrorism Strategy” signals a jarring shift in the priorities of the national security apparatus. Instead of having the security state primarily focus on foreign actors and those domestic threats responsible for the most violence in recent years — like white supremacists and violent militias — the president is effectively siccing them on anyone who dares to disagree with him or his supporters. 

“This is a very severe degradation of freedom of thought [and] freedom of speech in the country, and it should be raising alarm bells,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute.

“It does look like a very straight blueprint drawn from white evangelical Protestant Christian circles,” said Jones, the author of the forthcoming book “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”“What they call radical ideology is essentially anything that differs from that conservative, white evangelical Protestant worldview.”

The Narcoterrorist Boogeymen

By labeling drug-trafficking networks as terrorists, Trump is operating in a long tradition of using the rhetoric of war to refer to an issue that is rooted in public health. The terrorism framing is simply the logical next step in the decadeslong war on drugs that is, more often than not, used as a cudgel by U.S. policymakers to keep Latin American countries in line, said Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University.

“They’re using drug war counterterrorism as a cover,” Aviña said. “They’re effectively maintaining control over the region through a bunch of proxy right-wing governments, but it’s being framed as counterterrorism, as an anti-drugs operation. The innovation here is that they’re applying war on terror legislation and laws to drug trafficking organizations”

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The problem with labeling drug networks as “terrorists,” however, is that the vast majority of drug traffickers differ from organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group in that they have no real membership, and they operate for profit, not to achieve an ideological objective.

Legacy Islamist Terrorists

Despite Trump’s boasts of his prowess at fighting terrorism, both Al Qaeda and ISIS were the top threats in his 2018 counterterrorism strategy. They are called out specifically in the new document as well.

In fact, Gorka’s inclusion of ISIS directly contradicts longtime claims by Trump. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Last year, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he said: “I defeated ISIS in three weeks.”

“Politically Motivated” Killings of Christians

The idea that Christians, who make up two-thirds of the U.S. population, are under siege is belied by the data. Hate crimes motivated by anti-Christian bias are far rarer than attacks motivated by racism or xenophobia in the United States, and other religious groups are far more likely to report being the victim of a religiously motivated hate crime than Christians. An analysis of 2023 FBI hate crime data found that less than 10 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes were believed to be motivated by anti-Christian bias. 

“There’s really no evidence-based reason why a report focused on the domestic front would disproportionately feature violence against Christians. There’s just no evidence that that is the most pressing problem facing us in the United States today,” said PRRI’s Jones.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, right-wing influencers and media outlets rapidly spread misinformation about the shooter’s gender identity and supposed “pro-transgender” ideology based on unverified claims about the bullet casings used in the shooting. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators. In mass shootings carried out between 1966 and 2025, less than 1 percent of the shooters were transgender, according to the Violence Prevention Project. The overwhelming majority of shooters were cisgender men. 

“In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, news outlets and people with large platforms online raced to share unconfirmed reports that wrongfully tied the LGBTQ+ community to the shooter,” Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf told The Washington Blade. “Jumping to those conclusions was reckless, irresponsible, and led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right wing influencers, and a wave of terror for the community that is already living scared.”

“Neutralization” of Adversaries

While Trump has frequently threatened his political opponents in public, experts in extremism told The Intercept that “this kind of language” in a national security document should raise alarm bells. It’s one thing when the president rants about “radical gender ideology” at a rally, said Jones. “But when it gets put into a national presidential security memo, when it gets put into a report that’s led by a task force at the U.S. Department of Justice, and when it’s put into a counterterrorism document … these are laying the legal framework for prosecution.” 

This language of “neutralization” in this new strategy harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among other domestic groups and individuals and, according to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.

A 1967 FBI memo notes that purpose of this type of “counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” African American groups and leaders. Efforts included “sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages,” “encouraging gang warfare,” “falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers,” and other means to “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the committee. Their investigation found that civil rights leader “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, for instance, the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him” and that “the man in charge of the FBI’s ‘war’ against Dr. King” said they used the same methods employed against Soviet agents.

An Antifa Obsession

Antifa, short for antifascist, is a decentralized, leftist ideology, a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism. Over the last decade, however, Republicans have used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists — as if it were an organization with members and a command structure. They have increasingly blamed antifa for terrorist violence.

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In 2019, during his first term, Trump floated the idea of declaring antifa “a major Organization of Terror,” likening it to the group MS-13, an international criminal gang that originated in the U.S. and that the administration added to the foreign terrorist organization list last year. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” Trump tweeted in 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said, however, that antifa was “not a group or an organization” but a “movement or an ideology.” Trump lashed out, calling antifa “well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the … FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source.” After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump blamed “antifa people” for inciting violence. 

Finally, last September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” He followed it by issuing NSPM-7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism … movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” 

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On his press tour touting the new strategy, Gorka said “left-wing violent radicals like antifa and the anarchists” were the “most ascendant” terror group and — without evidence — claimed they were “the people who killed our friend Charlie Kirk.” He said these leftists are “people who think that if you don’t agree with them politically, they get to kill you.”

Locking Up Trump’s Enemies

The new document detours to discuss the wrongful detention of Americans abroad. Ironically, the Trump administration has unlawfully detained thousands of people residing in the United States, including those with legal status, targeting everyone from perceived political dissidents to racial and ethnic minorities. 

Last year, the Trump administration detained Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed, as revealed by legal documents unsealed as a result of litigation from The Intercept and other parties. 
Also in 2025, the administration sent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national with an order preventing his deportation to his country of origin, to CECOT, a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses. He has since been released to his home in Maryland, but the administration has continued to target him, including with criminal prosecution.

The Monroe Doctrine

Issued by President James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine is a foundational principle of U.S. foreign policy opposing any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere — except by Washington. It’s seen by American nationalists and by modern “America First” Trump ideologues as marking a “golden age” of U.S. power in the region, according to historian Greg Grandin.

“Going back to World War I and World War II, America First nationalists have liked the Monroe Doctrine because they saw it as an alternative to liberal internationalism,” Grandin said. “They were never isolationists, even though that word is often applied to them, because they’ve long claimed the right to intervene and project power in the Western Hemisphere.”

Now, Trump is using the spectre of terror to justify extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers at sea and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Boat Strikes and Bogus Stats

The U.S. military has conducted 58 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September 2025, killing more than 190 civilians. 

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The assertion that this campaign has resulted “in a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling” into the U.S. slightly tempers similarly outlandish and false figures from Trump, who regularly claims that “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent.” Experts say these claims are meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told The Intercept.

Even the Pentagon’s own figures refute Trump’s numbers. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” said Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The “Trump Corollary”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an attempt by the administration to enshrine a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, with the term also appearing in the administration’s national security strategy document in December. But it’s not entirely clear what, precisely, this corollary means, said Aviña, the historian.

“It’s supposed to be an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, but we don’t get a very precise definition of what that is,” said Aviña. “It harkens back to the Roosevelt Corollary, but Teddy Roosevelt was very clear about what his addition was: international police power.” Trump makes no claim to a new power. “So Trump is working in that tradition, but in a weird and imprecise way.”

Loosened Rules and Civilian Deaths

The loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones spiked. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a more than 329 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. Trump is already on the cusp of eclipsing those numbers in less than a year and half. Since taking office last year, Trump has overseen at least 190 attacks in Somalia.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Using Europe to Promote Bigotry

The document employs its section on Europe to shamelessly promote racism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacy employing a stilted worldview that ignores the U.S. role in the immigration it rails against.

“Trump officials are clearly weaponizing anti-Muslim bigotry in their campaign to heap pressure on Europe. They are baselessly insinuating that European policies that welcomed migrants — who largely fled their home countries due to the impact of U.S. backed wars and regime changes — created an incubator for terrorism,” Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told The Intercept. “At the same time, however, the White House continues to implement the exact kind of violent, interventionist policies that drove mass migration and generated extremism in the first place.”

“There is this kind of praising of Western culture and values, the denigration of ‘alien cultures,’” said Jones. “What’s behind those is really a sense of European superiority, and that gets translated into the U.S. in racial terms. So it really is a white Christian worldview here that’s being projected and protected.”

A Bid to “Protect Christians”

Experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about a Christian genocide in Africa in order to stoke white Christian nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments at home. “In Nigeria, it’s genocide against Christians, and in South Africa, it’s the supposed genocide against these white Afrikaners,” Christine Reyna, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told The Intercept. “And so in absence of an actual genocide in the United States against either of these two groups, you can keep that narrative of that existential fear of extermination and genocide and oppression that is alive and well within a certain subset of white Americans.”

In addition to using the conflicts in Africa to spread propaganda domestically, experts on Christian nationalism tell The Intercept that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth believes in waging war to achieve Christian supremacy abroad, without respect to international laws or norms. “Hegseth believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation,” Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist covering the Christian right, said on The Intercept Briefing podcast. “For Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.”

Trump’s Holy War in Nigeria

While Christians have been the victims of violence in Nigeria, they have not been the primary target, and experts overwhelmingly reject the idea that a Christian genocide is occurring in that country. Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent global monitor of conflict and protest data, found that of the 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria that occurred as of November of last year; 50 of those attacks targeted Christians because of their religion. According to experts, the majority of the violence has focused on land disputes. 

Trump’s Christmas Day attack was another in a long string of failed and futile U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa documented by The Intercept over the last decade This includes blowback from U.S. operations and failed secret wars, civilians killed in drone strikes, coups by U.S. trained officers, increases in the reach of terror groups, surging fatalities from militant violence, human rights abuses by allies, massacres of civilians by partner forces, and a catalogue of other fiascos.

Doubling Down on Failures in Africa

The document casts Trump’s strategy as a departure from the failed forever war interventions of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But Sarah Harrison — who served as an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, where she oversaw the Africa portfolio, and as counsel to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs — sees little difference. “Setting aside the bombast about protecting Christians, the fundamentals of Trump’s Africa CT policy isn’t that distinct from his predecessors: a light military footprint to facilitate intel sharing and drone strikes with an emphasis on supporting the partner nation. These policies fail because they ignore the drivers of conflict and refuse to acknowledge the need for a political solution,” she told The Intercept.

The U.S. government’s own statistics bear out this record of futility and failure. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in 2002 and 2003, as U.S. counterterrorism efforts began to ramp up on the continent in the wake of 9/11. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.

“Reality-Based” Counterterrorism

The document ends as it began, with unserious bombast that reads like little more than AI slop fashioned from administration talking points. Evoking the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which called for a restoration of “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” the Trump administration appears to be making up for its own insecurities with claims that the president has restored America’s “civilizational confidence” through a baptism of fire. In reality, the document projects a heady blend of weakness and anxiety and espouses a counterterrorism strategy akin to a 12-year-old boy’s vision of foreign policy: boasts about killing one’s way to victory.

In a post-release media tour where he spoke with MAGA outlets and administration sycophants, Gorka expressed amazement at how little negative reporting there was about the new counterterrorism strategy. “Even the left, they’re so on their heels. I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy,” said Gorka. “Fifty articles were written. … Only one of them … was even slightly negative.” (The Intercept’s invite must have been lost in the mail.) He continued: “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us — which is delicious.” His interviewer, Dean Cain, best known for playing second fiddle in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” responded, “That’s wonderful.” 

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“If the U.S. government counterterrorism enterprise hadn’t jumped the shark before, it certainly has now,” said Finucane. “The administration has repurposed the terrorism framing and applied it not only to alleged narcos but also perceived domestic political opponents — as we saw with the way the administration baselessly smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ‘terrorists’ after gunning them down. The whole situation would be much funnier if the Trump administration wasn’t currently engaged in a lawless killing spree under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’”

The post How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Youth services for hundreds of New Castle County children face uncertainty as finances at the Police Athletic League of Delaware are probed. The nonprofit is one of dozens of private organizations that are regularly funded by taxpayers. For years, it also was one of a handful to be led by a state lawmaker.

The financial crisis facing the Police Athletic League of Delaware escalated in recent weeks after state officials demanded that the community center nonprofit repay nearly $900,000 in misspent pandemic relief money, New Castle County police chief Col. Jamie Leonard said Tuesday.

Speaking before the New Castle County Council, Leonard said the PAL — as the organization is known — does not have enough cash on hand to repay the money, which he said was awarded for capital projects in previous years, but instead was spent on day-to-day operating expenses. 

Leonard said state officials are expecting the repayment “rather quickly,” because they want to redistribute the dollars before a spending deadline at the end of the year.

He also indicated the situation could involve criminal liability, but said it remains “difficult to unravel.” 

 “Financial crimes was never my thing, but it’s messy, for sure,” he said to the council.

A spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Finance declined to confirm that it is demanding repayment, stating “we do not comment on active investigations.”

The office of the U.S. Attorney for Delaware did not respond to an email seeking comment. 

The police chief’s comments mark the latest chapter in the troubles facing the politically connected nonprofit, which operates community centers serving children in New Castle County. They first emerged publicly eight months ago after former Delaware House Speaker Valerie Longhurst quietly resigned as the executive director of the nonprofit. 

At the time, two board members told Spotlight Delaware that the organization’s cash reserves had dwindled, even after it received a record $5 million in cash and rent assistance from taxpayers in the 2024 fiscal year – as well as hundreds of thousands more in 2025.

A portion of its revenues in recent years came from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, a 2021 law designed to jump start the COVID-era economy. While the money originated at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, it was awarded by then-Gov. John Carney.

Following Longhurst’s resignation, New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry announced that Leonard would take over as the PAL’s board chairman. Leonard then named one of his officers, New Castle County Police Lt. Angela Dolan, as its interim executive director.

During a New Castle County Council meeting last fall, Dolan described the array of activities offered by the PAL, including a basketball league, a flag football league, a soccer clinic, a Lego league, a book club, and an art club.  

Then she expressed dismay over what she feared could be the organization’s future.

“When you see these kids come in and love what they’re doing and what they’re being exposed to, it’s really hard to think that this could end,” she said then.

Who controlled the finances?

In the months that followed, Longhurst did not comment publicly, even after reports surfaced that her former nonprofit faced a criminal investigation, and an audit that could force it to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

On Wednesday, she broke her silence in an interview with Spotlight Delaware that primarily consisted of her suggesting several questions that should be asked of the PAL’s board of directors, including about the quality of their past oversight, and about a former staffer who she said had the authority to make spending decisions. 

Last year, Spotlight Delaware learned that the organization’s board of directors had not held meetings on a regular basis. 

Longhurst did not directly answer the question of why money granted for capital projects may have been used for operating expenses during her tenure.

“All I can say is, you know, were procedures put in place?” she said. “The people who were supposed to oversee that. Were they?”

When pressed that those spending decisions would have been hers to make as executive director, Longhurst said, “Actually, they weren’t.”

Instead, she claimed that a former bookkeeper at the PAL “had full autonomy over all the finances.”

Asked whether she has been contacted by either state of federal criminal investigators, she said she had not. 

In her comments, Longhurst also showered praise onto the PAL and its mission. She said the organization with community centers across the county has an impact that is underestimated in Delaware.  

“I have nothing but great things to say about how wonderful the PAL is,” she said.

The PAL of Delaware operates athletic, arts and academic programs at community center locations in Hockessin, Delaware City and suburban New Castle. The settings place children in contact with law enforcement as part of a founding principle “of building bridges between police officers and the communities they serve,” according to the PAL of Delaware website.  

The nonprofit also has been an integral piece of Delaware’s political landscape, with elected officials regularly making public appearances at its locations.

Until 2024, it also was one of several prominent Delaware organizations led by a state lawmaker. That ended last September when Longhurst — then among the most powerful politicians in Delaware — lost her seat representing the Bear area to now-Rep. Kamela Smith, a Democrat.

Could the state be liable?

At the New Castle County Council meeting Tuesday, Councilman John Cartier asked Leonard about the state’s deadline for the PAL to pay back its $876,000 debt.  

That deadline, Leonard said, had already passed. He noted that state officials want to reclaim the dollars immediately so they could award them to another organization ahead of the end-of-the-year deadline to spend the dollars.  

He also recounted a conversation last month with state officials, who described different scenarios that could result from their demand. The PAL could pay back the money in full. The state could place a lien on the organization’s property.

Or, federal and state officials could “look to the party responsible for the mismanagement at the time to recoup those funds,” Leonard said, without detailing who the responsible party might be.

Also at the council meeting, Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick pressed the police chief about whether it was state or federal officials demanding the money back. 

Leonard said it was both. All of his meetings with regulators have been through the state, he said, but with a U.S Treasury official in attendance.  

“So the state would like the money back to redistribute, but Treasury has the ultimate say on any forgiveness,” Leonard said. 

The U.S. Department of the Treasury did not respond to a request to comment on this story.

Kilpatrick then asked Leonard if he met with Delaware lawmakers. She suggested the state may have liability around any misspent money if officials had not conducted sufficient oversight. 

Kilpatrick then noted that Delaware’s annual capital budget hearings are set to commence soon. In response, Leonard said the co-chairs of the state’s primary budget committee have been briefed on this “on a continual basis.” 

He also noted that the PAL has applied to the Delaware grant-in-aid program for the next fiscal year. The program distributes tens of millions of dollars annually to Delaware nonprofits.

Last summer, lawmakers paused a grant-in-aid package to the PAL after evidence of its financial crisis first emerged. Ultimately, the state distributed more than $600,000 to the organization during the current 2026 fiscal year, which ends on June 30.

Asked about the nature of Leonard’s recent conversations with lawmakers, a spokesperson for the Senate Democrats said in a statement that they “welcome communication” from PAL leadership, but “in our current fiscal climate, we cannot commit to allocating state funds to cover their shortfall at this time.”

The spokesperson also stated that she would not characterize the PAL’s past outreach with legislators as “continual.”

In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Leonard declined to go into details about the frequency of past conversations with lawmakers.  

He also said the organization is not at risk of closing, stressing that all three PAL community centers are running at normal times.

To rebuild its finances, he said the organization has begun leasing its facilities out during off hours. He also stated that conversations with the state officials about an “appeal process or a forgiveness option” for the demanded money have occurred.

“We are working through possible ways to make good on our obligations,” Leonard said.

The post Crisis at the PAL escalates as the state demands an $876K repayment appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Redress to customers for force-fitting devices in homes includes £20m penalty and £70m of debt write-offs

Thousands of British Gas customers who had prepayment meters force-fitted in their homes will between them receive compensation and energy bill debt write-offs worth up to £112m in the biggest energy supplier settlement on record.

Great Britain’s energy regulator found that British Gas forced PPMs on homes that were not keeping up with their bills at the height of the Russian gas crisis, in one of the most complex investigations in Ofgem’s history.

Exclusive: DHS made social media posts out of a protester’s arrest at gunpoint. Christian Cerna speaks out about the lengthy prosecution that derailed his life

Christian Cerna, 28, was driving with his partner and their two young children through Los Angeles, when two vehicles rammed his car and a group of men jumped out and trained their guns on them.

It was 11 June 2025, and as Cerna exited his vehicle with his hands raised, he realized the masked men weren’t street criminals as he initially feared. They were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

When immigration agents pulled U.S. citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas from his car this month and shackled him, he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t scared. 

He was tired.

As ProPublica detailed last fall, he had already been detained twice before.

A year ago, Garcia Venegas was filming his brother’s arrest during a raid on their coastal Alabama construction site when he was tackled by agents, who ignored his pleas that he was a citizen. A few weeks later, an officer entered the home Garcia Venegas was building and refused to trust the now-26-year-old’s Alabama REAL ID, which only citizens and legal residents can get.

Videos of the incidents went viral. He appeared before Congress. He also has a suit pending against the Trump administration. 

But all the attention hasn’t changed much. On May 2, agents followed him back to his home. They again didn’t believe his claims of citizenship or the REAL ID he once again tried to show them.

Now, after that latest detention, Garcia Venegas sounds demoralized.

“Honestly, it feels terrible,”  Garcia Venegas told ProPublica. The mental burden of wondering when it will happen again weighs on him, bringing stress and depression. “I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again.”

While immigration sweeps have receded from the headlines, Garcia Venegas’ most recent incident highlights how the mistaken detention of Americans has continued despite congressional inquiries and denials by senior immigration officials. 

Days after Garcia Venegas’ latest detention, masked agents tackled an American teen in the Bronx. When they finally realized he was a citizen, they left him in an unfamiliar neighborhood, bloody and bruised.

The same week both citizens were held, administration officials spoke on a panel at a border security conference in Phoenix and downplayed and denied that citizens have been mistakenly detained. Recordings of the conference were shared with ProPublica. 

“Since the start of this administration, we have not had any arrests of U.S. citizens for false identification, where we thought they were an illegal alien but they were actually a U.S. citizen,” said Matthew Elliston, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “That’s happened zero times.”

In another panel, the outgoing head of ICE, Todd Lyons, acknowledged immigration agents sometimes detained American citizens in cases where those citizens allegedly put “hands on law enforcement.” He also said the arrests operated as “a deterrent.” 

As ProPublica and others have reported, citizens — including Garcia Venegas — accused of assaulting officers have not always been charged with assault. Video footage has often also contradicted Department of Homeland Security claims that its agents were attacked.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that despite the shackles, Garcia Venegas was “NOT detained.” The statement continued: “ICE conducted a routine vehicle stop on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.” DHS also stated that the teen in the Bronx was “NOT arrested” but rather “temporarily detained.” 

The agency said it is “NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake. DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted.” 

But it’s not clear what, if any, intel agents have used in the repeated detention of Garcia Venegas. 

Garcia Venegas said agents and local law enforcement at the scene blamed him for his most recent arrest because he was driving a car registered to his brother.

“The officers told me that I risk being stopped again until I register the license plates in my own name,” Garcia Venegas said in a recent filing in his lawsuit. “But the officers could have known immediately that I was not my brother just by checking the REAL ID that was in my hand when they pulled me from the truck and tackled me to the ground.”

Garcia Venegas’ incidents bear the hallmarks of what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Those are stops in which, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a case last fall, agents are allowed to stop people based in part on their “apparent ethnicity” (Garcia Venegas is Latino), job (he works in construction) and language (he primarily speaks Spanish).

Americans, Kavanaugh said, have no reason to worry. Agents will establish their citizenship and “promptly let the individual go.” (In a later case on another issue, Kavanaugh included a footnote that “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”)

In his latest stop, Garcia Venegas was let go after about 15 minutes. But the fallout is far from over. 

Even though he was born in Florida and graduated high school in the same county where keeps getting detained, Garcia Venegas sometimes wonders if he should pick up and move to his family’s home in Mexico. 

“I just want to live in peace,” he said. 

Last fall, when Garcia Venegas filed his federal lawsuit against the government, he demanded more than compensation. He has insisted agents stop “unconstitutional” raids in his area. The government said in court that the immigration sweeps are “based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause and the Constitution.”

After Garcia Venegas was held for the third time, his lawyers rushed to update his lawsuit with details of his latest detention. But the government’s lawyers have argued that Garcia Venegas’ case still has no merit.

Garcia Venegas also filed a separate claim for damages with the government last fall. He received a denial from ICE in mid-April that contained no explanation. His third detention came roughly two weeks later.  

During the border security conference this month, the head of Customs and Border Protection,   Rodney Scott, was asked about ProPublica’s reporting on citizens’ detentions and how the agency is addressing them.  

“I’m not going to do anything to not arrest U.S. citizens,” he said. “Because we arrest criminals, period.”

The post Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? appeared first on ProPublica.

These smoke and CO alarms are the best available -- including smart upgrades to make management easier.

A new Gallup survey found that 71% of Americans oppose having an AI data center built near them, making the facilities even less popular than nearby nuclear plants, which 53% oppose. The Register reports: When it comes to the reasons for opposing AI campuses, half of all respondents cite the effect on resources, with excess water usage and potential power grid constraints topping the list. Concern about loss of farmland and nature was surprisingly low, with just 7 percent mentioning this, but it is possible the scores are higher in rural areas. Quality-of-life concerns such as increased traffic were put forward by nearly a quarter, while a fifth mentioned higher utility bills. Many were worried about AI specifically: that it would replace human workers, that they don't trust it, that it is moving too fast, and that the industry needs regulating. Perhaps the latter sentiment is why President Trump appears to have shifted his own position on the need for AI regulations. Conversely, those in favor of datacenters cite economic benefits, with 55 percent mentioning increased job opportunities, and 13 percent saying it is because of increased tax revenues. [...] This being America in 2026, Gallup looked at how attitudes stack up depending on political affiliation. It found that Democrats, at 56 percent, are much more likely than Republicans to be strongly opposed to a server farm in their vicinity. But 39 percent of Republicans are also strongly opposed, while another 24 percent are somewhat averse to it, and only about a third are in favor. Gallup points out the contradiction: for AI usage to expand in the US, facilities that can handle the necessary computing power will have to be built. But most Americans appear to take a "not in my backyard" attitude to new bit barns, and that attitude has grown in strength.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president’s ultimate goal is to push the Fed – among other independent US institutions – to bend to his will

Jerome Powell, who stepped down this week as chair of the Federal Reserve, had his hits and misses. The Fed was late to react as prices started rising when the Covid pandemic abated, but they eventually acted forcefully and achieved the most rare of feats: a “soft landing”, curbing inflation without sparking a recession or damaging employment.

Strangely, given the chaotic era of pandemic and tariffs that coincided with Powell’s time as chair, monetary policy may not define his legacy. Powell’s most lasting accomplishment will most likely be his outspoken efforts to defend the independence of the Fed from an assault by the imperial presidency of Donald Trump.

After weeks of cooling myself down with the three-in-one Shark ChillPill, I can safely say I've never seen a portable fan with these special features.

I doused more than a dozen BBQ sauces over a plate of grilled chicken. Here are the sauces I'll be slathering on food this summer.

From the more affordable Pixel 10A to Pixel 10 Pro and the foldable Pixel 10 Pro Fold, these are the best Google phones we've reviewed.

Jalisco cartel boss Audias Flores Silva was arrested in an operation by Mexican Navy special forces based on information provided by U.S. agencies.

Large-scale attack on Russian regions and huge oil refinery comes after 24 were killed when missile hit flats in Kyiv

Ukraine has launched a large-scale long-range drone attack targeting several regions in Russia including the huge Ryazan oil refinery, after three days of massive strikes by Moscow against Ukraine.

Kyiv’s attack on Friday followed a series of drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, including on the capital, Kyiv, where a cruise missile hit an apartment block on Thursday, killing 24 people including three children.

The open world driving sim has roared through locations from Colorado to Australia, its authentic feel resting on exhaustive research. But, as the team explain, this was the toughest challenge yet

Since the arrival of the original Forza Horizon in 2012, a game that revolutionised open world driving sims by setting players loose in a virtual Colorado, British developer Playground Games has promised authenticity with its settings. For each instalment, design teams are sent out on location to take thousands of photos, hours of video, even detailed captures of the sky, before construction of a virtual copy begins. It’s a huge undertaking. But it seems that for much of the past decade, one country remained slightly out of reach – an intimidating prospect. “Japan has been on our shortlist for several games now,” says design director, Torben Ellert. “But we just didn’t feel like we were ready to take on the challenge of building it.”

It’s not just about the sheer variety of the country’s landscape. There’s something else going on. Most video game players hold an image of what it is like to explore Japan. It may be inspired by the fictitious rural town of Inaba in Persona 4, or the busy docks of Yokosuka in Shenmue, or perhaps the neon-drenched Kabukichō district of Tokyo, which forms a regular backdrop in the Yakuza series. For decades, gamers around the world have been bombarded with images of the country that are often highly stylised and fragmented, but nonetheless potent and persuasive. As art director Don Arceta puts it, “with Japan there’s such an expectation [of] what gamers want - it’s a certain version of Japan that they picture.”

Oklahoma has filed a lawsuit against Roblox, making it the latest state to take legal action against the popular gaming platform over child safety concerns.

Record heat in North and Central America coincides with egg-sized hailstones in eastern China

Extreme weather across several parts of the world this week has brought record-breaking temperatures to Honduras, North America and Indonesia.

Honduras smashed its all-time May maximum temperature record earlier this month – only for it to be broken again on 13 May in Choluteca, known as the furnace of Central America. Temperatures climbed to 42.2C (107.9F), surpassing the previous record of 42.1C. With intense heat forecast to persist over the coming weeks, more records are expected to fall.

The Trump Mobile T1 phone, as it is officially known, was supposed to launch last August.

Site provides little in the way of actual support for pregnant women – but does direct them to deceptive pregnancy centers

On the website’s landing page, a photo of a heavily pregnant white woman is cropped below the head, so that she is faceless, anonymous, cradling her massive belly underneath the skirt of her yellow dress. She appears to be standing in a field of tall grass, the kind you can get ticks in. The photo is flanked on either side by chubby infant footprints – one pair in pink, another in blue – a clear nod to the anti-abortion movement’s preferred symbol of what they call “precious feet”. A banner at the top declares that the site, “Moms.gov”, which was launched by the White House on Mother’s Day, offers “Resources, Information, and Help for New and Expecting Mothers”, and advertises that it is “addressing the needs of mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies” – that is, those who would often seek abortions. In fact, the site does little besides link to Option Line, a referral network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers run by the anti-abortion group Heartbeat International.

The launch of Moms.gov was accompanied by an uncomfortable Oval Office press conference on Monday, in which members of the Trump administration and some of the more aggressively anti-choice Republican members of Congress gathered to tout the new website and cheer on the Trump administration’s pronatalist stance. Dr Mehmet Oz, the wellness influencer and one-time television personality who now holds a position in the Trump health department as the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, lamented that Americans are, in his creepy personal parlance, “under-babied”. “One in three Americans are under-babied,” Oz asserted. “That means that you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.” Oz asserted that the fertility rate has fallen below 1.5 (a Johns Hopkins study indicates that it is in fact a bit higher, and that the US population is not shrinking) and predicted a coming wave of “Trump babies”.

All victims of US strikes in eastern Pacific and the Caribbean identified so far came from extremely poor communities

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A five-month investigation has named 13 previously unidentified victims of US attacks on boats allegedly carrying narcotics in a campaign that has killed nearly 200 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

It is unclear if the US has ever identified any of its 194 victims before attacking them, and the names of just three had previously emerged, after their families launched legal cases against the White House.

Homework, social pressure and jobs still keep teens up but now screen time and social media rob their sleep

A new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health shows that today’s teenagers are sleeping less than ever before.

The findings, which appeared in Pediatrics, showed a consistent decline in sleep across every age category. The latest figures revealed record-low sleep levels for all groups, with only 22% of older adolescents saying they slept at least seven hours each night.

A top regulator for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division acknowledged in a private meeting with industry representatives that the amount of chemically converted hemp being illegally sold as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed.

The remarks confirmed testing by The Denver Gazette and ProPublica, which found signs of hemp in marijuana vapes sold at dispensaries, as well as reporting that regulators have discovered that some hemp-derived vapes were contaminated with a toxic chemical.

The virtual meeting, an audio recording of which was reviewed by the news organizations, was convened by members of Colorado Leads, a marijuana industry trade group, in March to discuss a problem they said had “metastasized” and now posed an “existential threat” to the nation’s first legal recreational marijuana market.

During the meeting, Kyle Lambert, the enforcement division’s deputy senior director, said the number of hemp-derived products is “larger than we can quantify.” He said the agency feared the prevalence of banned hemp was driving down the price of marijuana in the state and helping facilitate the diversion of high-grade marijuana out of Colorado and into the black market in other states.

Describing anomalies in the system the state uses to track marijuana production and sales, Lambert told the industry players that the extent of suspicious transactions in the system “would probably explode your minds.”

Two weeks after that meeting, the division sent a bulletin to the industry that it plans to crack down on companies that illegally sell cheaper and potentially hazardous hemp products as marijuana and that it would pursue emergency rules.

But it hasn’t done so yet, and other reform efforts failed during this year’s legislative session. Despite the regulators’ concerns, Colorado lawmakers, who weren’t at the March briefing, abandoned a bill that would have let voters decide whether to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants. (The Denver Gazette and ProPublica investigation found that other states have adopted stronger safety measures.)

Dominique Mendiola, the senior director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division, said in a statement that the agency has “consistently been proactive in pursuing the necessary rules, legislation and authority to combat this issue.”

“Lambert was speaking frankly to highlight the scale and complexity of the problem, as nominal-dollar transactions do not amount to definitive evidence of non-compliance,” Mendiola said. She added that investigations into such transactions require extensive resources and can take significant time.

The problem of companies substituting hemp for marijuana dates to 2018, when Congress legalized hemp, a close cousin of marijuana that has only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive compound that makes people high. Federal lawmakers had hoped to support farmers while satisfying advocates who believe the high levels of the nonintoxicating compound CBD in hemp help with seizures, pain and sleep.

But hemp manufacturers quickly figured out how to convert CBD in hemp into THC through a process that involves toxic solvents, creating products that sometimes contain harmful chemicals and that can be more potent than products made from marijuana.

Colorado became one of the first states to ban that chemical conversion process and prohibit the sale of intoxicating hemp products to its residents.

But manufacturers were allowed to produce hemp products for export to other states, and some companies continue to rely on hemp within Colorado because it is cheaper than using marijuana to make the honey-colored THC distillate that goes into vapes and edibles, industry insiders say.

“This has become pervasive to where it’s, like, half the market,” said Jordan Wellington, a marijuana industry lobbyist and consultant, during the meeting with Lambert and a four-person investigative team that handles the agency’s most difficult cases. “We’re past Stage 1 cancer of it being, like, one spot. It’s fully metastasized.”

He said “rampant” use of hemp and other illicit material was putting pressure on honest manufacturers to cut corners to survive.

“It might be the most important and existential threat we’ve ever faced as an industry,” Wellington said.

When the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, it promised to establish a “seed-to-sale” system to track marijuana from the initial planting to the purchase of pot, vapes and other products in dispensaries. Close tracking would prevent marijuana grown in Colorado from being diverted to states where it remained illegal, supporters promised. Tracking also was supposed to assure consumers that they were buying safe, quality products.

But during the March video conference, Colorado regulators confided to industry lobbyists that the tool for rooting out fraud isn’t working.

“There’s a lot of really crap data in there that is hard for us to proactively go take action on,” Lambert said of the tracking system.

Extensive fraud in sales transaction reporting likely means the state has lost out on millions of dollars in marijuana excise tax revenue while businesses that follow the law have paid more than their fair share, industry insiders claim.

Unprocessed marijuana typically can fetch more than $600 a pound on the open market, depending on the category, but manufacturers often report to the state’s tracking system unrealistic nominal sales, often as low as a penny or dollar a pound, Lambert said.

When pressed by regulators, businesses typically defended those valuations, arguing that they had submitted placeholder numbers while they were still negotiating the price of products, Lambert said.

The division, which employs 26 investigators to monitor roughly 2,100 marijuana businesses, doesn’t have the resources to investigate all cases adequately, he said.

“We’d love to set up, you know, surveillance on places and track vehicles and see where they come from,” he said. “Did they come from a hemp plant? Did it come from here? Where did it go? We’re not resourced or equipped to do those types of investigations.”

In April, state Sens. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, and Marc Snyder, D–Colorado Springs, introduced the Cannabis Consumer Protection Act, which would have placed a ballot measure before voters this fall to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants, bringing Colorado in line with other states.

The ballot measure would have put private labs in charge of collecting marijuana samples for the testing required before products go to dispensaries. Currently, manufacturers can select their own samples. Regulators have caught companies gaming that system by substituting samples that were different from what they sold in stores or by treating the samples with chemicals.

The act also would have shifted oversight of safety and testing from the Marijuana Enforcement Division to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and funded a program in which regulators would randomly collect marijuana products from dispensaries to test them for contaminants.

But the legislation collapsed as different segments of the marijuana industry clashed over a provision tucked into the bill that would have increased taxes on products with higher amounts of THC. Manufacturers of highly concentrated THC products argued that the proposed potency tax would cut into their profits while lowering costs for manufacturers of edibles like gummies. Consumer safety groups also weren’t satisfied and wanted the bill to be tougher, pushing for a strict cap on potency like Vermont has.

Ultimately, the main industry trade group opposed it, and Gov. Jared Polis, through a spokesperson, said he feared the bill would cause too much regulation.

The bill died, though Snyder, the cosponsor of Senate Bill 26-161, said he plans to revisit the issue in the 2027 legislative session.

Snyder said he had hoped to give regulators more tools to tackle fraud.

“One of the problems in being first, like Colorado was, into the legalizing of cannabis,” he said, “is that you have to learn all the unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes the hard way.”

The post In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales appeared first on ProPublica.

You don't have to twist your arm to make sure you get everyone in frame any longer. Do this instead.

Sens. Tammy Duckworth​ of Illinois and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin say their concern is there may be more emergency exit doors than flight attendants in the event of an evacuation.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
School referendums are the only time that Delawareans can have a direct say in their taxation rate, but they can also make funding schools more challenging. Just three months after Caesar Rodney community members voted to approve a $6 million referendum request, the district’s educators and instructional staff reached a deal with the school board for pay increases.

Teachers and other staffers at Kent County’s biggest school district are getting a pay raise. 

On Tuesday, the Caesar Rodney Board of Education voted to approve a new contract for the district’s union representing teachers and other educators. It comes three months after voters in the district approved a referendum to raise an extra $6 million from property taxes for area schools. 

The new contract includes a graduated set of raises and bonuses for district employees, according to a press release from Delaware’s educators’ union.

The contract will increase Caesar Rodney’s contributions to salaries for teachers and instructional staff by 14% to 25% over four years. But their total salaries will not necessarily increase by that amount because districts only fund about 30% of their staffers’ pay. The state funds the remaining 70%.

Teacher pay has been a nagging issue in Caesar Rodney for quite a while. In February, district officials pointed to it as a reason for voters to pass their referendum, which the district said would fund initiatives to retain and recruit teachers and other educators, among other things.

“Right now, Caesar Rodney teachers earn less than those in nearby districts,” district officials said then.

The need to improve salary and retention efforts drew some voters, including teachers, to the polls in February. Shea Brown, a Caesar Rodney teacher who voted in favor of the referendum, said then that the only way to “keep good teachers in the district is making sure that we have the money for it.”

Caesar Rodney Education Association President Jared Lelito told Spotlight Delaware that the pay increases would not have been possible without the successful referendum. 

“We can’t be more thankful for the parents and voters and everybody who came out and voted for it,” he said. 

While Caesar Rodney may not be the top-paying district in the state now, Lelito said he hopes the pay increase will help the district retain veteran educators.

It may also help teachers “make a hard decision whether or not to drive the hour each way every day to make $10,000 more.”

How are educators paid 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 state share takes into account a teacher’s education and experience. It also funds a pre-set schedule of pay raises for each teacher.

The local share of an educator’s salary is primarily funded by property taxes, meaning districts with lower property values generate less revenue.

Gary Henry, a professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Education and Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy & Administration, previously told Spotlight Delaware that, because of how the pay formula is structured, the state gives more money to districts that recruit more experienced and more highly credentialed educators. 

“[Districts with more credentialed educators] are already given more money per teacher by the state, and then they add their local supplement, then you can imagine that it’s easy for them to recruit teachers who are willing to move,” he said. 

Multiple districts have attempted to pass referendums in recent years in hopes of boosting retention efforts and better competing with neighboring districts. Unlike Caesar Rodney, voters in those districts rejected them. 

The highest profile rejections occurred at the Indian River School District, where voters turned down two referendums in a row that sought money for ongoing operations.

The referendums failed even after Indian River board members publicized the district’s fiscal woes. At the time, they said that even a successful referendum may not eliminate a need to lay off staff to cut costs elsewhere, according to a report from Coastal Point. 

To boost revenues outside of the referendum process, several districts, including Laurel and Indian River, chose to implement a 10% increase in property tax revenue last year following the completion of the first statewide property reassessment in more than three decades. 

While the increases gave both Laurel and Indian River some financial flexibility, their school-funding equations remain challenging. 

Like Caesar Rodney, the Laurel School District ultimately decided to hold its own referendum request in February. The district said its request would have helped to stabilize the budget and fund competitive compensation for staff, as well as other operational costs. 

It was the district’s first request since 1985. Still, 64% of voters rejected it.

The post Caesar Rodney board votes to increase teachers’ pay following referendum  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Tube stoppages due on two 24-hour periods next week but sources say RMT seeking talks

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Hopes have been raised that next week’s strikes by London Underground drivers could yet be averted, after sources said the RMT union had put out feelers for talks.

The RMT members, almost half of London’s tube drivers, are due to strike for two 24-hour periods from midday on Tuesday and Thursday, closing some lines entirely and bringing widespread travel disruption to the capital until the weekend.

Under aviation regulator proposals rival companies would bid to design and build parts of airport expansion

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Heathrow could be forced to allow other companies to design and build its third runway and new terminal after the UK aviation regulator argued that rival bids could keep construction costs down.

A long-awaited review by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) proposes changes to the regulatory model that governs how Heathrow runs and covers its costs.

Athletes have always been targets for criminals hoping to profit from their wealth. But a new wave of dangers has cropped up in recent years

With exorbitant ticket, travel and hotel prices making fans desperate to find an affordable way of attending this summer’s World Cup, it’s no surprise that security firms and law enforcement agencies are warning that fans are at significant risk of becoming fraud victims.

While major tournaments are moments of heightened vulnerability for supporters, players themselves are increasingly attractive year-round targets for cybercriminals who can use AI to mount ever more sophisticated attacks.

Charles Mauldin remembers that his lungs felt like they were imploding when he breathed in tear gas more than 60 years ago. It was Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Mauldin, who was 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans.

Mauldin stood near the front of the line — just two rows behind John Lewis, who would go on to become a civil rights icon and U.S. representative — when the march attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Law enforcement officers waited on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and half, Mauldin said, police began to attack the demonstrators with billy clubs. They also launched tear gas into the crowd, which included teenagers like Mauldin. 

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Mauldin recalled. “I was fearful. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear.”

Now 78, Mauldin watches the news and sees videos and pictures of children being tear-gassed again — not by local police in 1965, but by federal immigration officers in 2026.   

“Having people like ICE treat people the way we were treated 61 years ago, it’s horrible,” Mauldin said. “It’s traumatizing for young kids, and I’m just starting to realize how traumatizing it is for me.”

We reached out to Mauldin because we recently published an investigation that found at least 79 children have been physically harmed by tear gas and pepper spray during President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The children include a 6-month-old baby who briefly stopped breathing, a 12-year-old boy who developed hives and a 17-year-old who suffered from a severe asthma attack. 

They were mostly going about their days when they were exposed to the tear gas or pepper spray. The 6-month-old was in his family’s car when a tear gas canister rolled underneath it, and the 12- and 17-year-olds were in their respective homes. 

There is no national standard governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray, leaving federal immigration officers with more latitude to deploy the weapons than some local police departments have. 

In many of the cases where children were harmed, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, the officers were justified in using tear gas or pepper spray, but they did not address how the weapons affected bystanders, including children. “DHS does NOT target children,” the agency said in a written statement.

Read More

Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences.

“DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous. Obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a federal crime and felony.”

We interviewed dozens of witnesses and people with firsthand knowledge of the harm, reviewed videos from bystanders and officer-worn cameras, and closely examined lawsuits. And we kept asking experts: Have children ever been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray on the scale we’re seeing now? Is this unprecedented? 

We quickly realized there is no single entity that tracks every instance when law enforcement officers use tear gas or pepper spray. There is no requirement to identify or follow up with the people who were harmed. We also learned that there isn’t much research on the long-term consequences of exposure to these weapons.

Some historians we spoke with suggested the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison. So, we turned to Mauldin to help us understand how being tear-gassed as a teenager during that time has affected him.

As police began beating people around him, Mauldin said, he remembers Lewis being struck over the head with a club. 

“I’ll never forget the sound of his head being cracked,” he recalled. 

Then, troopers turned to tear gas. 

“What tear gas does, it makes your skin burn, it forces you to run away from it — it makes your lungs seem to implode,” Mauldin continued. 

He got as low to the ground as possible. Then, he said, he and others ran to the river and  eventually made their way back to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. 

There was “nothing to do unless you can escape it,” Mauldin said. “It’s a pretty harrowing experience, especially for kids.”

In the years after Mauldin was tear gassed, he was diagnosed with asthma. There’s no research that shows tear gas as the cause of an asthma diagnosis, but it’s technically possible since the chemicals can cause lung injury, Sven Jordt, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine who’s an expert on tear gas, told ProPublica. In one of the court declarations we read as part of our reporting, the mother of the 12-year-old who broke out in hives said her son also  developed “chronic respiratory issues” and now needed an inhaler after months of breathing in tear gas that seeped into their home. The family lives near an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, where federal officers routinely shot chemical munitions at protesters. 

Another parent living near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, told us she’s taken her 7-year-old daughter to urgent care about five times since last fall, when officers repeatedly used tear gas against protesters. “She’s been complaining about her throat,” the mother said of her daughter. “It gets to the point she can’t breathe.”

For Mauldin, who said he is the last living person from the front of the line on that Sunday in 1965, being tear-gassed at a young age left an emotional toll — one he said he is still coming to terms with.

Experts we spoke with emphasized how important it is for children who were recently tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed to seek help for their mental health. That includes children who were not only directly harmed by these chemicals but also those who saw other people hurt by law enforcement, said Dr. Sarita Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, who studies pediatric disaster preparedness and response. “Without support, this could be a lifelong burden.”

At first, children may struggle to sleep or eat, or have difficulty concentrating after experiencing a traumatic event, said Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s especially true for younger children who can’t grasp what’s happening, he said. These reactions may dissipate over time, but the core event may stick with a child for much longer: “Some of them will remember this for a very, very, very long time.” 

Mauldin only recently began sharing his experience about what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an event of police brutality that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Processing that trauma began after visiting the bridge some years ago with historians, who Mauldin said helped get him to open up memories and emotions he had suppressed. 

“If you don’t realize it, and you don’t get help with it … it’ll limit your experience to grow and be the best that you can be,” Mauldin said. “You have to be able to kill a part of yourself to be able to sustain that trauma.”

The post At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign. appeared first on ProPublica.

A third of patients in a clinical trial had tumors shrink while taking a genetically engineered treatment known as RP1.

The Preakness Stakes will feature its biggest field in 15 years with 14 horses in the middle jewel of horse racing's Triple Crown.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to address the interests of his MAHA supporters, who view him as their hope for the future, while being a good soldier in the eyes of the Trump White House.

A soldier taught a 12-year-old how to disable the fiber-optic drones that Russia has been using to hunt Ukrainian civilians in a campaign the U.N. has labeled a war crime.

Three-storey GreenSquare datacentre in Hazelmere was to power cloud computing and the acceleration of AI

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A 15,000 sq metre datacentre near Perth will no longer go ahead after the developer withdrew plans amid community opposition over its impact on culturally significant sites.

The three-storey, 120-megawatt GreenSquare datacentre in the town of Hazelmere had been intended to power cloud computing and the acceleration of artificial intelligence, but faced fierce community backlash – as is increasingly common with such developments.

Superpower leaders were expected to discuss the Iran war, trade, Taiwan and artificial intelligence during US president’s visit to Beijing

Crypto billionaire goes straight into top 10 on Sunday Times list, with Noel and Liam Gallagher among other first-timers

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• UK politics live – latest updates

Christopher Harborne, the crypto billionaire who controversially gifted Nigel Farage £5m, has been named in the list of the UK’s wealthiest people for the first time.

Other first-timers include Noel and Liam Gallagher and Emily Eavis, the daughter of the Glastonbury festival founder, Michael Eavis, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List published on Friday.

Sanjay and Dheeraj Hinduja and family: £38bn

David and Simon Reuben and family: £27.971bn

Leonard Blavatnik: £26.852bn

Idan Ofer: £24.481bn

Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family: £18.939bn

Christopher Harborne: £18.177bn

Nik Storonsky: £16.411bn

Alex Gerko: £16.006bn

Jim Ratcliffe: £15.194bn

Igor and Dmitry Bukhman: £14.26bn

Hormuz crisis could lead to constructive dialogue between ASEAN and China in the South China Sea Expert comment LToremark 15 May 2026

Oil shortages as a result of the Iran war present a unique opportunity for ASEAN chair the Philippines to make progress on a South China Sea Code of Conduct with China. And for Trump to strike a deal.

The crisis in the Middle East is being felt deeply in Southeast Asia. Perhaps most of all in the Philippines, which imports 98 per cent of its oil from the Gulf. The choking of global oil trade has led to acute fuel shortages, causing the Philippine government to declare a national emergency. The situation has forced President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to consider all options, even with the most unlikely of partners – China. 

Chaos opens door to dialogue

Relations between the two countries have been under significant strain over territorial disputes in the South China Sea. But faced with an angry population, a spiralling economy, and inflation at 7.2 per cent in April, President Marcos stated he was looking to ‘reset’ relations with China and reopen conversations on joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea. Despite their fraught history, this was welcomed by Beijing and talks were held immediately thereafter. While nothing concrete was agreed, the dialogue alone was a significant change. The Philippines is open to further talks but has made it clear that any agreement would only come after tangible commitments to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and signing a South China Sea Code of Conduct (CoC). 

Related work

What lessons will China, India and other Asian nations draw from the Iran war? Independent Thinking Podcast

While analysts have rightly urged caution in creating such an entanglement of interests in disputed waters, if played correctly, this could be a unique opportunity for Marcos to move closer to one of his biggest and most ambitious goals – a South China Sea CoC. 

The maritime security puzzle at the heart of the Strait of Hormuz is a stark reminder for Manila of the urgent need for order in their waters and the enforcement of international law. A blockade in the Strait of Hormuz threw global markets into chaos because 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply passes through its waters. By contrast, 60 per cent of all global trade runs through the South China Sea. The consequences of disruption in the region are difficult even to imagine. 

The Philippines is well-placed to lead on efforts to secure agreement. It has been carving out a space as more than just a pawn in the great power competition dominating the Pacific, while its alliance with the US continues to grow stronger. The Philippines is also the current chair of ASEAN so able to build regional consensus. Last week the Philippines hosted the 48th ASEAN summit in Cebu, a shortened and ‘bare-bones’ affair as a result of the regional energy crisis. Iran was top of the agenda, with all 11 ASEAN nations focused on shoring up energy and food security through greater regional integration. 

But discussions of security did not fall by the wayside. Rather, there was a renewed commitment to peace and international law in the South China Sea. The Asean Leaders’ Declaration on Maritime Cooperation was adopted during the summit, announcing the founding of a maritime centre in the Philippines to act as a repository for issues relating to maritime security in the South China Sea. Marcos further clarified that its purpose would be to ensure freedom of navigation and enforcement of UNCLOS. Appetite for a CoC agreement also seems high in Beijing after the summit, with a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson encouraging ASEAN to resist disruption to a deal, stating that it would allow all parties to ‘better manage differences, advance cooperation, and keep the South China Sea peaceful and stable’.

Conditions are favourable but caution is key 

Joint oil exploration in the South China Sea is a valuable incentive to encourage a favourable outcome in CoC negotiations, not least because it aligns with Chinese policy values laid out under former leader Deng Xiaoping. As a route to peaceful settlement of territorial disputes, he encouraged the pursuit of joint development and shared economic interests. In this case, China would have access to South China Sea oil and natural gas reserves to the tune of billions, without violating international law and drawing ire from the US and other allies. Additionally, encroaching on disputed waters is taking significant resources on China’s part. 

Related work

A Taiwan crisis would cause far more global economic damage than Strait of Hormuz disruption

But although conditions for dialogue are growing more favourable, Manila must be cautious, ensuring it secures its own interests and has the support of neighbours and allies.   

Indeed, the Philippine’s largest and strongest ally, the US, might just approve of plans to use joint oil exploration projects to secure a CoC. Over the past four years, the US has made significant investments in miliary infrastructure on the Philippine islands, and just last month successfully ran their largest joint military drill. Washington has reaffirmed its commitment to the Philippines in securing its territorial sovereignty, and is well-placed to help ensure the implementation of and adherence to a CoC in the region. With President Trump’s self-proclaimed talent for brokering peace, facilitating a South China Sea CoC between China and ASEAN would be a jewel in his cap.   

President Marcos has also indicated there is regional buy-in and support. Last week, when asked if ASEAN economic cooperation in the face of the Iran war would extend to China, Marcos made clear that a CoC would have to come before any other conversations. 

The art of the deal 

This channel of dialogue between the Philippines and China would have been inconceivable only months ago, but the Iran war has changed things – and may have handed Marcos the key to securing a CoC.

The perennial stumbling block will be follow-through. While there is reason for optimism, the devil will be in the details. 

They come with a dock and can work at 240Hz, but they're not cheap.

The Trump-Xi summit: What does the US want from China and will Trump get it? Independent Thinking podcast Audio sseth.drupal@c… 15 May 2026

Our experts analyse the two superpowers’ aims as President Trump meets President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

President Donald Trump brings a band of senior US business executives seeking trade deals to China for what is possibly the biggest bilateral summit of 2026. But what does the US hope to achieve? More sales of Boeings, beef and soybeans; an off-ramp from the US-Israel war on Iran; a sense of world pre-eminence; or all three? 

Our experts discuss whether Taiwan will end up paying the price for Chinese help in ending the Iran war, and whether the success of the summit really boils down to the chemistry between Trump and the world’s other most powerful man, Xi Jinping.

Host Bronwen Maddox discusses the visit and what it means with Dr Yu Jie, senior research fellow with our Asia-Pacific Programme, and Laurel Rapp, director of our US and North America Programme. 

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

The image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.

SpaceX has detailed major Starship V3 upgrades ahead of a launch targeted as early as May 19. The changes are meant to move Starship closer to its core goals: rapid reuse, Starlink deployment, orbital refueling, and eventually Moon and Mars missions. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Teslarati: Here is an explicit, broken-down list of the key changes, first starting with the changes to Super Heavy V3: - Grid Fin Redesign: Reduced from four fins to three. Each fin is now 50% larger and stronger, repositioned for better catching and lifting performance. Fins are lowered on the booster to reduce heat exposure during hot staging, with hardware moved inside the fuel tank for protection. - Integrated Hot Staging: Eliminates the old disposable interstage shield. The booster dome is now directly exposed to upper-stage engine ignition, protected by tank pressure and steel shielding. Interstage actuators retract after separation. - New Fuel Transfer System: Massive redesign of the fuel transfer tube -- roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage -- enables simultaneous startup of all 33 Raptors for faster, more reliable flip maneuvers. - Engine Bay/Thermal Protection: Engine shrouds removed entirely; new shielding added between engines. Propulsion and avionics are more tightly integrated. CO? fire suppression system deleted for a simpler, lighter aft section. - Propellant Loading Improvements: Switched from one quick disconnect to two separate systems for added redundancy and reduced pad complexity. Next, we have the changes to Starship V3: - Completely Redesigned Propulsion System: Clean-sheet redesign supports new Raptor startup, larger propellant volume, and an improved reaction control system while reducing trapped or leaked propellant risk. - Aft Section Simplification: Fluid and electrical systems rerouted; engine shrouds and large aft cavity deleted. - Flap Actuation Upgrade: Changed from two actuators per flap to one actuator with three motors for better redundancy, mass efficiency, and lower cost. - Faster Starlink Deployment: Upgraded PEZ dispenser enables quicker satellite release. - Long-Duration Spaceflight Capability: New systems for long orbital coasts, orbital refueling, cryogenic fluid management, vacuum-insulated header tanks, and high-voltage cryogenic recirculation. - Ship-to-Ship Docking + Refueling: Four docking drogues and dedicated propellant transfer connections added to support in-space refueling architecture. - Avionics Upgrades: 60 custom avionics units with integrated batteries, inverters, and high-voltage systems (9 MW peak power). New multi-sensor navigation for precision autonomous flight. RF sensors measure propellant in microgravity. ~50 onboard camera views and 480 Mbps Starlink connectivity for low-latency communications. "Believe it or not, there's more," writes schwit1. "Two years ago, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown was Starship V1. Last year, it was Starship V2. V3 is about to become the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown -- but don't worry, the company already has plans for V4."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US grandmaster scored biggest success of his career at the Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz and is close to world top 10

Hans Niemann, the controversial US grandmaster whose game with Magnus Carlsen at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup led to cheating allegations, a $100m lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement, the Netflix documentary Untold: Chess Mates, and a forthcoming book, scored the most important success of his career last weekend.

Niemann, competing as a wildcard, won the $50,000 (£37,400) first prize at the Warsaw Rapid and Blitz in Poland, ahead of the US champion and world No 3, Fabiano Caruana, India’s reigning world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, and the Candidates winner, Javokhir Sindarov. The event was part of the St Louis-backed Grand Chess Tour, which ends in August and includes the prestigious Sinquefield Cup.

ICE has released the wife of an active-duty U.S. soldier after a month in detention, her husband told CBS News.

Redevelopment of the former Department of Lands building on Sydney’s Bridge Street wins National Trust heritage award

It was once a grand old sandstone masterpiece, where returned soldiers would cram into marble corridors to anxiously await lottery draws that could change their lives.

Then the 20th century happened.

In the Trump era, CEOs need to define redlines.

Trump's overreach has finally forged continental unity.

Many European motoring manufacturers are in retreat with plants to off–load – while China’s industry is on the march

The Chinese carmaker Xpeng is on the hunt for a factory in Europe. Volkswagen is aiming to reduce the number of its factories. It seems like it should have been the perfect set-up for a deal.

Yet there was one problem with the plant on offer, according to Elvis Cheng, Xpeng’s managing director for north-eastern Europe: “It’s a little bit, I would say, old.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A lawyer for Elon Musk hammered at the credibility of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Thursday, near the end of a trial over whether to hold the ChatGPT maker and its leaders responsible for allegedly transforming the nonprofit into a vehicle to enrich themselves. OpenAI's lawyers fought back, claiming the world's richest person waited too long to claim OpenAI breached its founding agreement to build safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity, and couldn't claim he was essential to its success. "Mr. Musk may have the Midas touch in some areas, but not in AI," said William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI. "To succeed in AI, as it turns out, all Mr. Musk can do is come to court." The claims were made during closing arguments of a trial in the Oakland, California, federal court. [...] In his closing argument, Musk's lawyer Steven Molo told jurors that five witnesses, including Musk, former OpenAI board members and former OpenAI Chief ScientistIlya Sutskever, testified that Altman was a liar. Molo also noted that during cross-examination on Tuesday, Altman did not say yes unequivocally when asked if he was completely trustworthy and did not mislead people in business. "Sam Altman's credibility is directly at issue in this case," Molo said. "If you don't believe him, they cannot win." Molo accused OpenAI of wrongfully trying to enrich investors and insiders at the nonprofit's expense, and failing to prioritize AI's safety. He also challenged Brockman's goals for the business, citing Brockman'sstatementthat his own OpenAI stake was worth nearly $30 billion. "The arrogance, the lack of sensitivity, the failure to account for just common decency is really, really abhorrent." Musk also accused Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and $10 billion in 2023, of aiding and abetting OpenAI's wrongful conduct. "Microsoft was aware of what OpenAI was doing every step of the way," Molo said. Sarah Eddy, another lawyer for the OpenAI defendants, accused Musk and his legal team in her closing argument of resorting to "sound bites and irrelevant false accusations." Eddy said by 2017, everyone associated with OpenAI -- including Musk, then still on its board -- knew it needed more money to fulfill its mission than it could raise as a nonprofit. "Mr. Musk wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could control," she said. "But the other founders refused to turn the keys of AGI (artificial general intelligence) over to one person, let alone Elon Musk."She also said if Musk truly believed AI should serve humanity, he would not have pushed to fold OpenAI into his electric car company Tesla, or made his rival xAI a for-profit company. Musk had a three-year statute of limitations to sue, and OpenAI's lawyers said his August 2024 lawsuit came too late because he knew several years earlier about OpenAI's growth plans. Eddy expressed disbelief that Musk claimed he did not read a four-page term sheet in 2018 discussing OpenAI's plan to seek outside investments. "One of the most sophisticated businessmen in the history of the world" wouldn't have "stuck his head in the sand," Eddy said. Savitt accused Musk of having "selective amnesia." Microsoft's lawyer Russell Cohen said in his closing statement that Microsoft wasn't involved in the key events of the case, and was "a responsible partner at every step." On Monday, the nine-person jury is expected to begin deliberating. The judge and lawyers will also return to court to discuss possible remedies if Musk wins, including how OpenAI should be restructured and what damages might be awarded. If Musk loses, there will be no remedies to consider. Recap: OpenAI Trial Wraps Up With 'Jackass' Trophy For Challenging Musk (Day Eleven) Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI (Day Ten) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 15.

China’s leader raised the ancient Greek historian Thucydides when he met the US president in Beijing

• Trump-Xi China summit – follow live

A messy war in the Middle East. Tensions in Taiwan. When the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met in Beijing this week, these were the flashpoints everyone expected they would talk about.

Instead, Chinese leader Xi Jinping threw another, ancient war, into the mix.

The execution came after a divided Supreme Court lifted a stay over his intellectual‑disability claims, clearing the way for Texas' 600th lethal injection since 1982.

Two of the largest mobile carriers in the US are battling for your business. We compare what they offer.

• New season will kick off on 9 September

• League arranges record nine international games

The 2026 NFL season will kick off with a Super Bowl rematch. Mike Macdonald, Sam Darnold and the Seattle Seahawks will face off against Mike Vrabel, Drake Maye and the New England Patriots after raising their championship banner on 9 September in the first of the season’s 272 games.

The Seahawks dominated the Patriots in a 29-13 victory in February that secured the franchise’s second NFL title.

You can see the full schedule for 2026 here.

China keen to put Taiwan at the top of agenda that risks being overshadowed by US-Israel war on Iran and disagreements over trade – key US politics stories from Thursday, 14 May at a glance

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned of “clashes and even conflicts” with the US over Taiwan after meeting Donald Trump in Beijing.

Xi’s remarks, published by China’s foreign ministry after his two-hour meeting with Trump on Thursday morning, said Taiwan was “the most important issue in China-US relations”.

Visit comes after US-Cuba relations deteriorated significantly, and as the island nation declared it had ‘absolutely no fuel’ because of US blockade

CIA director John Ratcliffe met Cuban officials in Havana on Thursday as a way to improve dialogue between the US and the communist-run island, the Cuban government said.

The meeting took place “in a context marked by the complexity of bilateral relations, with the aim of contributing to the political dialogue between both nations”, a statement said.

• American world No 1 among those shooting 3-under 67s

• Rory McIlroy finishes on four-over after four straight bogeys

It was gridlock on the opening day of the US PGA, where the leaderboard was backed up like Philly traffic. By the time it was all over, seven men were tied in the lead on three under par, and another 42 were within three shots of them. Altogether, a third of the field was within easy reach of the lead. It was record for a major championship, and they have been playing them since 1860. There are 16 major winners spread among them, including, ominously for everyone else, that man Scottie Scheffler. All the talk before the tournament was that it would be a turkey shoot, but it turned out to be one long tailback. The only thing missing was the traffic police.

Actually they had one of them, too, or something near enough. A rules official on the 1st tee gave the 27-year-old South African Garrick Higgo a two-shot penalty for arriving 30 seconds late from the practice green. He still shot a 69. The really odd thing was that in a field where even a man who dropped two shots because he missed his tee time managed to end the day in contention, a couple of the biggest names in the game wound up all but out of it.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 15, No. 1,791.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 15, No. 599.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 15, No. 803.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 15, No. 1,069.

The potential indictment — which must be approved by a grand jury — is expected to focus on Cuba's 1996 downing of two planes operated by a humanitarian group.

Rents will rise and homelessness quadruple in a decade unless serious steps to cut emissions are taken, University of Sydney researchers find

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Global heating could worsen housing affordability, push up rents and quadruple homelessness in a decade without fairer housing policies and action to reduce emissions, new research has found.

Home prices and rents in Australia are influenced by a complex mix of factors, from incomes and mortgage rates to insurance premiums, available land and population.

A 4GB file called weights.bin may be sitting on your hard drive right now, put there by Chrome without your knowledge.

‘We know that Mark Carney wants to sort of embrace Europe,’ says competition director Martin Green

Canada is welcome to join Eurovision if it wishes, its director has said, months after the country revealed it wanted to “explore” joining the song contest in its federal budget.

Eurovision director Martin Green told the BBC on Wednesday that Canada hadn’t yet applied, but would be welcome to.

There has been palpable excitement about President Trump's state visit to China in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, home to one of the largest Asian populations in the U.S.

Cuba's national energy grid has suffered a major failure, cutting power to the island's eastern provinces.

The meeting came as Cuba is contending with a massive power failure to its national energy grid amid U.S. sanctions that have caused an oil and gas shortage crisis.

This live blog is now closed.

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Donald Trump will drive through a Chinese capital that is smoggier than it was on his last visit in 2017, when the authorities launched emergency measures to clear the skies of pollution days before his first state visit to Beijing.

Factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of the US president’s trip nearly a decade ago, an era in which China had declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clear the skies ahead of important political events such as visiting dignitaries and the Beijing Olympics.

The number of people being monitored for hantavirus in the United States has grown to 41, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

A 2023 supreme court decision banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions

The US Department of Justice on Thursday accused Yale University of illegally considering race in admissions to its medical school – the second institution to face discrimination allegations by the federal agency this month.

In a letter to a lawyer for Yale, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said a justice department investigation found that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to the medical school than white or Asian students, despite having lower grade-point averages and lower test scores.

Nine-person jury to consider whether AI firm bilked world’s richest person and unjustly enriched themselves

Closing arguments began on Thursday in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, bringing the weeks-long courtroom battle between the two tech moguls nearer to a decision. A nine-person jury is set to deliberate and return a verdict on whether they believe the AI firm and Altman are liable in the case.

The trial, which began last month in an Oakland, California, federal courthouse, has gripped Silicon Valley and featured some of the tech industry’s biggest names as witnesses. Attorneys for both sides have presented testimony and documents that have exposed Musk and Altman’s private dealings, as well as provided a window into the contentious history of OpenAI.

Charity says calls to its Childline service about online sexual abuse and exploitation have risen 36% in a year

Children reported a rise in online blackmail attempts involving sexual images in the UK last year, according to a leading charity.

The NSPCC said contacts with its Childline service relating to online sexual abuse and exploitation rose by 36% last year, driven by an increase in cases related to online blackmail.

Your personal information, such as phone numbers and addresses, may already be accessible online.

SABRINA BALLAH
Contributing Reporter

Most love songs celebrate romantic relationships. It makes sense that humans want to love and be loved in return, as that is a genuine biological instinct.

However, people tend to overlook the importance of friendship in our society, and the amount of happiness and meaning that a genuine connection with a friend can bring into one’s life. Sometimes, people throw away their friends to focus on their romantic partner, letting not only their friendship wilt away like a flower, but also losing their identity and individuality.

“Friendship and Happiness: Across the LifeSpan and Culture,” a book by Melikşah Demir detailing scholarly research on the relationship between happiness and friendship, states that according to Aristotle, a crucial element of an ideal friendship is for individuals to “show at least some degree of care and concern for one another for their own sakes and be prepared to express that care and concern in action.”

Friendship is built on some level of mutual care. Even through midlife and with the support of a spouse, it has been proven that having a friend increases life satisfaction and self-esteem, providing a person with a support system they can rely on. 

A 2007 study found that among married participants aged 22–79 with best friends, having at least two high-quality relations — not necessarily only with the spouse — was associated with higher life satisfaction and self-esteem and lower levels of depression. In contrast, among married adults without best friends, the spousal relationship was particularly important for well-being.

Daniel Topley, a senior at the university, shared his take on friendship.

“I do different things with different people, and all those roles are very important,” Topley said. “Friendship is supposed to be intentional. That sort of intentionality gives meaning to them. There’s a little bit of ‘I got you on this thing, don’t worry about it,’ and vice versa.”

Topley also shared how friendships can increase an individual’s quality of life.

“Friendship gives life so much meaning, and they are there for us when we need them — who we can lend a hand to,” Topley said. “What’s the point in working a 9-to-5 if you don’t make meaningful connections with other people? That’s where I see that friendship is important because our friends kind of make life a little brighter.”

The study states that “the psychological literature also affirms that friendship is a reliable correlate of happiness across the life span.”

The study also reports that in a good friendship, “friends act as mirrors to one another — enhancing their knowledge of themselves — and that they share activities and values which reinforce them in the sorts of moral and intellectual activities which are constitutive of living well.” 

In other words, an ideal friendship reinforces your identity and helps you grow. 

There will always be more to love and connection than just romance. Think of a friend who colors your life with meaning and happiness. Think of a way to invest in that friendship: write them a pen pal appreciation letter or grab them their favorite coffee. You’ll find that this whimsical way of living comes right back to you.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is opening a formal investigation into whether Microsoft's bundling of Windows, Office, Teams, Copilot, and related products harms competition. Engadget reports: "Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters. She also stressed the importance of the investigation by noting that hundreds of thousands of UK residents use business software and Microsoft products. The organization will take a look into the company's cloud licensing practices. The CMA has stated that the inquiry will conclude by February. At that point, Microsoft could get slapped with a strategic market label. Microsoft says it's "committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market." A strategic market designation doesn't automatically assume wrongdoing, but will give the CMA more leeway when conducting further interventions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A look at the timeline of events in Karen Read's high-profile Massachusetts murder trial and retrial. Read was acquitted of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled a bill to help civilians, including law enforcement agents, receive workers' compensation for illnesses like cancer that are often associated with toxic exposure to burn pits.

Export’s performances scandalised Austria in the 1960s, but are now recognised for exposing the objectification of the female body

Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and film-maker who inverted the male gaze in ways that were provocative, shocking and often outrageously fun, has died aged 85.

The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export died in Vienna earlier the same day, three days before her 86th birthday.

Health officials say close contacts being offered antibiotics as a precaution after cases discovered in Reading

A young person has died and two others are being treated after an outbreak of meningitis in Berkshire, health officials have said.

It follows a major outbreak in Kent, linked to a Canterbury nightclub, that killed two people and left more than a dozen needing hospital treatment in March.

Media law experts cast doubt on viability of a defamation lawsuit promised by Netanyahu over Nicholas Kristof essay

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, have threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation over the publication of an essay by Nicholas Kristof detailing allegations that Palestinian women, men and children have been raped and sexually abused in Israeli military detention.

“Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

The Supreme Court has maintained mail access to the abortion pill mifepristone, setting aside for now a lower court order that blocked abortion providers from prescribing the widely used drug through telehealth and shipping it to patients.

As Republicans seek to retain control of the U.S. House, leaders of both parties nationwide have sought to redraw their congressional maps to net more seats for their parties.

Social media users are casting doubt and causing confusion about the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship, saying that one of the passengers is a "crisis actor."

Their posts are focused on Jake Rosmarin, a Boston-based travel content creator who is now quarantining at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

"They’re really working it with these crisis actors," said a May 6 X post that shared a video of an emotional Rosmarin describing his experience aboard the ship.

Another X post said he "was certainly handpicked for this Honduis-Hanta-CryBaby role" because Rosmarin’s related to people who work in healthcare and emergency preparedness.

Even more posts said footage of Rosmarin urging people to get vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic is evidence his travel on the hantavirus cruise outbreak isn’t a coincidence. 

One shared an image of what looks like a man in a hospital bed and said it was Rosmarin — a "much publicised ‘Covid patient.’" 

"What are the chances that this guy is always where the current propaganda ‘virus’ is and always photographed or filmed as the victim?" the post said.

We asked Rosmarin about these posts suggesting he’s part of some concerted scheme and did not hear back. But there’s no evidence that he’s a crisis actor, or participating in a nefarious plot.

Rosmarin told the Daily Beast that such claims aren’t based on facts. "People are reacting just to react," he said.

On April 1, before the MV Hondius departed from Argentina and the hantavirus was detected on board, Rosmarin shared on TikTok that he was going to spend the next 35 days on the ship. The following days he posted multiple videos about his trip. 

He posted an update on May 3, after the outbreak was announced, confirming that he was aboard the affected cruise. He posted another video the following day sharing how he felt. 

Rosmarin continued posting updates, saying on May 9 that he was going to be sent to Nebraska for "quarantine and testing." On May 11, he said he had arrived at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha.

So far, three passengers have died from the virus and by May 12, most passengers and crew members had returned home or were in the process of doing so. 

Rosmarin, meanwhile, has continued posting videos about what his day looks like at the quarantine facility. 

USA Today, ABC News and CNN have reported about the hantavirus cruise outbreak and have interviewed Rosmarin about his experience as a passenger and during quarantine. We found no legitimate news outlet questioning the veracity of his situation.

He also isn’t the only person reporters have interviewed from the ship, as some social media users speculated. We found news reports featuring other passengers including Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Çenet, who also posted on Instagram about the cruise. Çenet shared a photo at the beginning of his trip, and later shared a video about his experience during the outbreak, showing footage of the MV Hondius captain announcing a man had died on the ship.

Rosmarin, who has over 160,000 TikTok followers, has been posting travel photos, vlogs, brand partnerships content, and videos recommending restaurants since at least 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also urged his followers to get COVID-19 vaccines. But that’s not evidence he’s a crisis actor.

Neither is the fact that some of Rosmarin’s family members work in healthcare, emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. 

Social media users also wrongly claimed that he was in the photograph of a man in a hospital bed. The BBC published that image in 2022, and the corresponding article says it shows a COVID-19 patient named Henry Dyne from Surrey, England.

Credible information often falls short of what people want to know during breaking news events, and they fill that void with conspiracies, said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s  Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative. 

"In these moments, the most important thing people can do is wait for verified information," Wirtschafter said.

We rate claims Rosmarin is a crisis actor False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Microsoft says it's helping your browsing experience by using long-term AI memory across desktop and mobile versions of Edge.

The hydrogen-powered SUV claims 435 miles of range, a 5-minute fill-up and a refined driving experience. Here's why FCEV technology is a perfect product operating in the wrong market.

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have agreed in principle to form a joint venture (JV) aimed at reducing U.S. mobile dead zones through satellite connectivity, especially in rural areas and during emergencies when ground networks fail. Here are three of the customer benefits listed by the JV (as highlighted by Droid Life): Fewer coverage gaps: Will nearly eliminate dead zones in the U.S. currently without mobile service, reaching previously unserved areas. Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions. Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Revelation seen as serious blow to candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful

Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful, has been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The leaked voice memos and text messages were published on Wednesday by the Intercept Brasil, and later acknowledged by Flávio Bolsonaro, a far-right senator who is tied in polls with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October’s election.

President Donald Trump on multiple occasions has assured the public that high gasoline prices will “rapidly” or “quickly” decline “as soon as” the war with Iran ends. Energy experts told us that prices will start to fall when the conflict is resolved, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to where it was before the conflict began.

“For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy, said in an interview. But he told us that there are “a lot of different potential” outcomes depending on what happens when the war ends.

The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.50 per gallon as of the week ending May 11, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up $1.56, or 53%, from the average price of $2.94 during the week ending Feb. 23 – which was five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.

Gasoline prices spiked after Iran responded to the joint attack by blocking the Strait of Hormuz – a vital waterway in the Middle East for trade – stopping the vast majority of crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf region. About 20 million barrels of oil and oil products were exported through the strait per day in 2025, which was about one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade, according to the International Energy Agency.

The reduced supply caused oil prices to increase, and that led to the rise in gasoline prices, since the cost of oil makes up about half of what drivers pay at the pump. Because it’s a global oil market, “if something goes wrong anywhere, the price goes up everywhere,” Mark Finley, a nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in March.

But Trump has said repeatedly that gasoline prices will fall fast when the war concludes.

“As soon as it’s over, you’re going to see gasoline and oil drop like a rock,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on May 11.

About a week before that, on May 1, during a Florida event for seniors, Trump said that “it’s going to come down lower than it was,” referring to the price of gasoline. “When all of that stuff comes out,” he said, mentioning “pent up” oil in the Strait of Hormuz, “you’re going to see prices dropping on gasoline like you’ve never seen.”

The same day, at another event in Florida, the president said the price of gasoline will “snap back” in the end. “I believe it will snap back very, very quickly,” he said.

And Trump isn’t the only person in his administration to make such a claim. 

On May 4, in an interview with Fox News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is “also confident” that gasoline prices are “going to come down very quickly” at the end of the conflict with Iran. “This gasoline — this temporary aberration — will be over in a matter of weeks or a month,” he said.

Experts told us it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen in the long run. But they said it could be months, plural, before motorists see substantial price relief at the pump. Getting back to pre-war prices would take longer than Trump’s and Bessent’s remarks suggest, they said.

Expert Analysis

“When the strait opens in a meaningful way, it would likely have a fairly quick impact to start pushing prices down,” De Haan said, adding that price decreases will depend on how quickly oil tankers resume transporting shipments through the strait to increase the global supply.

“It’s very contingent on how much oil starts getting through the strait, whether it’s all or nothing,” he said. “But it’s going to take several weeks for those ships to reach destinations once it becomes open. So, at best, it’s probably going to still be two to three weeks before the flows of oil can normalize. So, at least several weeks, and potentially beyond that.”

“If the strait were to reopen today,” he said, “it would probably be early June until ships started going in and out,” and “it could be until July for some of those cargoes to start getting to the market.”

De Haan told us he was reluctant to make specific price predictions because of the uncertainty of the situation. But he did say that a return to average gasoline prices at less than $3 per gallon in the immediate future seems doubtful.

“Beyond the big drop, the initial big drop, it could take quite a bit longer for gas prices to more noticeably get back to like pre-war levels,” he said. “That’s going to take quite a bit of time, and the longer the situation goes on, the more time that could end up taking.”

Abhi Rajendran, a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy and the director of Oil Markets Research at Energy Intelligence, largely agreed. 

“Should the conflict actually find some path to resolution, then I think prices could come down,” he said. But how fast that happens is another matter.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be quick and look like before-the-conflict prices were,” Rajendran said. He said he doesn’t see $3 per gallon gasoline “anytime soon,” even if the conflict ends, because “there’s still damage that’s been done to the supply side and to inventory, and that’s going to be felt for a little while.”

After a while, Rajendran said, he could see gasoline prices settling at between $3.25 a gallon and $3.50 a gallon, which is “higher than they were before the conflict.”

Meanwhile, Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser for Gulf Oil, predicted that prices in many states could be “back in the $3-$3.50/gal neighborhood” in the final 100 days of the calendar year, when he said “gasoline prices almost always drop” because “demand slumps and the formula for motor fuel changes.” 

However, that projection could change, he said in an email to us, if the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz continues, or if a strong hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, which would “lengthen the $4-$4.75/gal pricing backdrop.”

“What happens between now and Labor Day is tougher” to forecast, he said. 

Other Projections

Back on April 16, in an interview with CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said prices would “certainly” decline after the conflict with Iran ends. But he was less sure about when the average price would again be below $3 a gallon.

“That could happen later this year,” or “that might not happen until next year,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

But one day before that, in an April 15 press briefing from the White House, Bessent, Wright’s fellow Cabinet secretary, said he was “optimistic” that “we can have $3 gas again” this year, between June 20 and Sept. 20.

Skip York, another nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice’s Baker Institute, told us that, like Wright, he believes $3 gasoline may not happen until next year.

“[R]eturning to $3/gal gas looks like more [of] a 2027 resolution,” he said in an email, in which he listed several reasons prices often “[go] up like a rocket, but down like a feather.” 

York said when wholesale gasoline prices rise, “retailers raise pump prices immediately to cover the expected cost of replacing inventory.” When wholesale prices come down, however, “retailers may still be selling higher‑cost inventory and wait for cheaper supplies before cutting prices.”

In addition, he said, “Retailers often wait for a sustained downward trend before reducing prices because a quick cut could force them to raise prices again if wholesale costs rebound.”

Market behavior and competition is also a factor. “Drivers tend to more actively shop when prices rise but less as they fall; that reduces competitive pressure to cut prices quickly,” he said.

Finally, York added, abrupt supply shocks, such as geopolitical events and refinery outages, “cause fast price increases driven by consumer fears of shortages,” while easing those risks and rebuilding inventories “takes time, so declines are more gradual.”

Federal Gasoline Tax Holiday?

As of May 14, the war with Iran had gone on for 75 days, which is much longer than the “four to five weeks” that Trump initially said he intended for it to last.

With the U.S. so far being unable to reach a deal with Iran to end the conflict, and having a ceasefire agreement with Iran that is on “massive life support,” as Trump said on May 11, the president has proposed temporarily suspending the federal tax on gasoline. 

That would reduce gasoline prices by about 18.4 cents per gallon and prices for diesel by about 24.4 cents per gallon. But that plan would also require approval from Congress, and it is not yet clear if there is enough bipartisan support to make that a law.

Furthermore, the experts said, eliminating the gasoline tax, even temporarily, could help keep prices more elevated than they otherwise would be.

“While relieving the gasoline tax would lower pump prices, that lower price also would encourage more consumption, meaning it would take longer to rebuild inventory,” York said. “If a policy doesn’t improve supply availability, it doesn’t really help restore physical fundamentals back to pre-conflict levels.”

De Haan also said that the plan for a federal gasoline tax holiday “could actually stimulate demand,” which would add to the imbalance between demand and supply and “could send prices higher.”

In a May 11 floor speech criticizing Trump on Iran, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “Senate Democrats will support real action to lower costs.” But he said a decrease of 18 cents per gallon is hardly enough.

“Eighteen cents isn’t a dollar fifty, which is how much the price of gas has gone up since this war started,” he said. “Americans don’t need just a few cents back.” He said the “best way to lower costs” was to end the war. 

Schumer said, “Trump could end this war tomorrow and prices would plummet by far more than 18 cents a gallon.”

But, as we explained, while experts have said that the price of gasoline will likely start going down not long after the war ends, it is less likely that the price will “plummet” as quickly as Schumer suggested. 

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for May, the EIA projected that the average retail price for gasoline will be $3.88 for 2026 and $3.62 for 2027. That’s up from the average prices the agency projected in early February – before the war began — which were $2.91 in 2026 and $2.93 in 2027.

In its May analysis, the EIA said its most recent price projections assume that the Strait of Hormuz “will remain effectively closed through late May, with flows slowly starting to resume in late May or early June.” If that happens, the agency said it expects it will take “until late 2026 or early 2027 for most pre-conflict production and trade patterns to resume.”

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The post What Will Happen To Gasoline Prices When the Iran War Ends? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

There was wind, there was fire, there was Goodrem’s remarkable upper-range – resulting in a refreshingly self-assured offering from Australia

• ‘Sung by a silver robot from 1984!’ The 11 biggest bangers in Eurovision 2026

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Standing before a glistening crescent moon and adorned in more than 7,000 Swarovski crystals, Australia’s 2026 Eurovision hopeful Delta Goodrem delivered a powerful performance on the 70th anniversary of the global song contest – and become the first Australian act to qualify for the grand final since 2023.

Heading into the competition as an early favourite behind Eurovision heavy-hitters Denmark and Finland, Goodrem delivered a note-perfect rendition of her power-ballad entry, Eclipse. The track is impressive if a little formulaic – and of the 35 countries competing, 15 are represented by solo female performers, so Goodrem needed to find a way to stand out in a crowded field.

Louisiana had sued the FDA in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely

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The US supreme court upheld nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Thursday.

Louisiana sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely, arguing that it interfered with the state’s ban on abortion.

Thames at Ham designated as one of 13 new swimming areas across England to be monitored for water quality

The first designated bathing water area on the River Thames in London will welcome swimmers for the official start of the bathing season on Friday as one of 13 new monitored swimming areas across England.

The Thames at Ham, in south-west London, has been designated as a new river bathing water area after campaigners gathered evidence to show thousands of people use the river for swimming throughout the year.

Canvey Island foreshore, Essex

East Beach at West Bay, Bridport, Dorset

Falcon Meadow, Bungay, Suffolk

Granville Parade Beach, Sandgate, Kent

Little Shore, Amble, Northumberland

New Brighton Beach (east), Merseyside

Newton and Noss Creeks, Devon

Pangbourne Meadow, Berkshire

Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, Wiltshire

River Dee at Sandy Lane, Chester, Cheshire

River Fowey in Lostwithiel, Cornwall

River Swale in Richmond, Yorkshire

River Thames at Ham and Kingston, Greater London

Council of Europe members plan to change interpretation of ECHR to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers

Keir Starmer’s government has been accused of trying to water down legal protections for torture victims as ministers from 46 countries including the UK prepare to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers and foreign criminals.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, is expected to agree a “political declaration” on Friday with other members of the Council of Europe, which oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR).

Far-right Jewish marchers call for Palestinian villages to ‘burn’ as they storm through Muslim quarter of Old City

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation.

The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city.

The FBI said Thursday that it's still trying to locate Monica Witt, who is accused of defecting to Iran in 2013 and revealing highly classified U.S. intelligence.

‘Backward’ photo panned for display of patriarchy, signaling that ‘women’s voices don’t matter in shaping global order’

By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives.

Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power.

If state’s house passes bill, redrawn map could could give state Republicans a 5-1 congressional majority

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On Thursday, the Louisiana state senate voted 27-10 to pass a new congressional map that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black House districts. The resulting map could give Louisiana Republicans a 5-1 congressional majority.

The supreme court’s recent decision in Louisiana v Callais, a case that centered on the state’s congressional maps, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The fallout from the decision was swift, with several other southern states calling special sessions to pass redistricting maps that would limit Black voting power.

The company is ready to do battle with Meta and Google in the smart glasses marketplace.

Transition strengthens coordination of DOE’s commercialization programs and support for early-stage energy startups

WASHINGTON, May 14, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) has announced it will take over stewardship of the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP), one of the Department’s flagship startup programs. Today’s announcement came during the program’s annual LEEP Demo Day, which features presentations from LEEP fellows, expert panels, and interactive discussions with startups.

LEEP recruits top entrepreneurial talent through a competitive national process and embeds them at DOE National Laboratories for two-year fellowships. During this time, fellows receive entrepreneurial training, mentorship, technical support, and access to world-class facilities to develop and launch energy and manufacturing startups. The program also connects participants to local, regional, and national innovation ecosystems, helping early-stage companies overcome barriers to commercialization. DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) launched LEEP in 2015. Under AMMTO’s leadership for the past decade, 202 LEEP startups have attracted more than $6 billion in follow-on funding and created over 3,900 jobs.

“LEEP has a strong track record of helping entrepreneurs turn promising technologies into real companies with real-world impact,” said DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and OTC Director Anthony Pugliese. “We’re excited to welcome the program into OTC’s portfolio and build on that success by connecting these innovators more directly to the Department’s broader commercialization resources and partnerships.”

Through LEEP, offices across DOE support technologies that span the entire energy ecosystem. By bringing LEEP under OTC, DOE is strengthening connections across its commercialization programs, from early-stage innovation through startup formation and growth, while improving coordination and broadening support for entrepreneurs working with the National Labs. OTC extends a warm thank you to DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office for its stewardship of LEEP to date and continued collaboration into the future.

For more information on LEEP, visit OTC’s LEEP web page.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Moves Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program to Technology Commercialization Office appeared first on HPCwire.

May 14, 2026 — Autonomous Resource Corporation (ARC), a Delaware corporation, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest multi-program science and energy laboratory, announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a strategic public-private partnership to accelerate the on-demand manufacture of qualified, mission-critical components for U.S. national security applications.

ORNL’s exascale supercomputer is delivering world-leading performance. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The partnership — known as the Exascale Foundry — will combine ORNL’s computing and manufacturing capabilities with ARC’s ARCNet distributed manufacturing platform to create a closed-loop system for AI-enabled materials and manufacturing qualification and autonomous production at defense-relevant scale.

“The United States faces an urgent need to rebuild its manufacturing capacity for critical defense components,” said Bryan Wisk, CEO of ARC. “By combining ORNL’s world-leading computational, materials science, and manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous production infrastructure, we can compress manufacturing and qualification timelines from years to months and deliver manufactured parts at the volumes the warfighter needs.”

Partnership Highlights

Under the MOU, ARC will deploy advanced manufacturing equipment organized into seven production nodes connected to ORNL via ARC’s secure ARCNet infrastructure. ARC will expand capability through ORNL’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

ORNL will provide access to HPC expertise for simulation-driven materials characterization and qualification, along with technologies developed at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF), the Department of Energy’s only large-scale, open-access advanced manufacturing facility. ORNL’s Peregrine AI software, which has analyzed over 1.9 million additive manufacturing layers, will be integrated into ARC’s production nodes for real-time adaptive control and quality assurance.

This partnership also supports DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security and drive energy innovation. ARC and ORNL’s collective capabilities will help re-envision advanced manufacturing and industrial productivity, accelerate defense production and qualification, and secure critical supply chain elements.

“ORNL’s advanced manufacturing and computing capabilities are uniquely positioned to help accelerate the transition of laboratory-proven technologies into production-scale defense manufacturing,” said Moe Khaleel, ORNL associate laboratory director for National Security Sciences. “Partnering with ARC ensures we are transitioning our research into real production outcomes.”

The initial implementation will focus on high-temperature nickel superalloy turbine components for autonomous air vehicle engines using metal binder jetting technology, directly addressing demonstrated production bottlenecks in the U.S. defense supply chain.

ORNL Chief Manufacturing Officer Craig Blue added, “This partnership exemplifies the type of relationship necessary to build and grow domestic supply chains for our national security.”

About Autonomous Resource Corporation

ARC is a New York–headquarted corporation building and operating an AI-enabled, autonomous manufacturing platform for national security and critical infrastructure applications. ARC’s ARCNet connects distributed production cells into a secure, federated manufacturing grid capable of producing qualified components at scale. ARC’s leadership team brings deep experience across defense technology, capital markets, materials science, and additive manufacturing at production scale.

Source: ORNL

The post Autonomous Resource Corporation, ORNL Partner to Accelerate AI-Enabled Defense Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Groups say supreme court justice, who owns oil stocks, may be violating ethics codes by participating in certain cases

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil companies, may be violating court ethics codes by participating in certain cases that could benefit big oil, government watchdog groups say.

In a Thursday letter, a coalition of watchdog organizations called on the Senate judiciary committee to investigate Alito, the sole supreme court justice with holdings in energy companies.

The way Florida treats kids enrolled in its low-income children's health insurance program is an outlier in the United States, a Democratic congresswoman said.

"Governor (Ron) DeSantis is breaking the law," U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., wrote April 29 on X. "Florida is the only state in the nation kicking children off their affordable health coverage and preventing over 40,000 children from getting KidCare coverage." 

KidCare is Florida’s subsidized health insurance for children from low-income families — the state’s version of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. 

Florida officials challenged a federal rule that requires keeping children enrolled in affordable health insurance — and Florida is the only state taking children off its program because of missed payments. State officials removed about 43,000 children from December 2024 to November 2025. 

The DeSantis administration has filed lawsuits against both the Biden and Trump administrations to exempt Florida or reverse the rule. The rule requires states to keep children continuously enrolled in subsidized health insurance plans for 12 months even if parents miss a payment.

Two of Florida’s lawsuits have been unsuccessful; one is pending.

"There are no other states doing this," said Joan Alker, director of Georgetown University’s  Center for Children and Families. "Florida is removing thousands of children, violating federal law, and saying they aren’t going to expand their program because of this federal rule."

In her post, Castor shared an article by KFF, a health policy think tank, that described Florida’s yearslong delay of a KidCare program expansion, which state lawmakers approved in 2023.

When asked for comment, Jay Rhoden, a Castor spokesperson, referenced the KFF article and said other states, such as Texas, have asked the federal government to rescind the rule requiring continuous coverage but haven’t defied the law.

DeSantis’ office directed PolitiFact’s questions to the state's Agency for Health Care Administration, which helps oversee KidCare and has been involved in the litigation. The agency did not respond to our email seeking comment.

Florida fights federal rule, delays expansion  

Florida’s KidCare is a Medicaid expansion program for children whose families earn too much money to qualify for traditional Medicaid but do not earn enough money to buy private or marketplace insurance. 

The federal government pays about 69 cents of every dollar spent on KidCare, with the rest funded through state funds and monthly premiums of about $15 to $20, depending on household income.

Florida is among the states with the highest number of uninsured children, with more than 400,000, or 8.5%, lacking insurance, according to 2024 federal data.

In May 2023, the Florida Legislature unanimously approved expanding KidCare’s eligibility threshold from 200% to 300% of the federal poverty level. That means children in a family of four qualify for coverage if the annual household income is $93,600 or less, up from about $66,000. DeSantis signed it into law in June 2023.

A 2023 House analysis estimated the expansion would cover 42,000 more Florida children. Studies have found that subsidized healthcare coverage improves children’s lives by increasing access to care and improving long-term health outcomes.

Also in 2023, the federal government approved the "continuous eligibility" rule that required states to provide 12 months of healthcare coverage for children enrolled in subsidized programs. The rule ensures children’s coverage wouldn’t lapse in cases of nonpayment or administrative issues. Alker said children sometimes lose coverage because of a bureaucratic mistake, such as missing a notice when they move.

The DeSantis administration sued the federal government in an attempt to nix the rule, and also submitted a waiver to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to seek approval of the KidCare expansion and to ask the agency to let the state continue removing children from the program for missed premiums.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved Florida’s waiver to expand KidCare in December 2024 but said the state must comply with the federal rule.

From December 2024 through November 2025, Florida removed about 43,000 children from the program for premium payment lapses, according to data obtained by KFF.

"Florida is an extreme outlier. Thousands of children are losing their health insurance," said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit advocating for the state to implement the expansion. "Not only is it the only state suing, but it's also the only one not complying with both state and federal law."

A federal judge dismissed Florida’s first lawsuit over the rule, and the  state withdrew its second lawsuit in February. 

Florida is now suing the federal government for a third time, accusing it of Freedom of Information Act violations related to the expansion waiver and asking the court to strike the condition that Florida must abide by the continuous enrollment requirement.

Florida officials have pointed to ongoing litigation for the delay in expanding the program.

"You can sue over federal policy you don’t like, but you're supposed to comply with the law at the same time," Bullard said.

The Trump administration has not enforced the continuous enrollment rule in Florida, or issued any warnings to the state.

Florida Health Justice Project, a nonprofit legal aid group, and the National Health Law Program sued Florida’s Medicaid and KidCare agencies in March to implement the approved expansion.

Our ruling

Castor said, "Florida is the only state in the nation kicking children off their affordable health coverage."

The state is the only one in the country not complying with a federal rule requiring states to keep children enrolled in subsidized healthcare for 12 months regardless of missed premium payments. Florida has removed at least 43,000 children from KidCare for nonpayment since December 2024.

We rate Castor’s statement True.

These exercise bikes give you the Peloton experience without the hefty price tag.

A growing number of writers are leaving Substack for alternatives most people haven't heard of like Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, and Passport. The reason, writes The Verge's Emma Roth, is the "platform's increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business." From the report: Sean Highkin, the creator of the NBA-focused publication The Rose Garden Report, tells The Verge that he makes "significantly more money" after switching from Substack to Ghost last April. "When I first joined up, [Substack] gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me, which led to a good amount of growth," Highkin says. "But once I wasn't one of the 'new recruited talent' they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate." Highkin now pays $2,052 per year using Ghost and an add-on called Outpost, compared to $4,968 per year on Substack. The Rose Garden Report's subscriber base has grown 22 percent since the end of 2024, Highkin says. [...] Substack launched in 2017 as a platform that allows writers to create their own newsletters and manage paying subscribers. Unlike some of its biggest rivals, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of total subscription revenue. That tax may not seem substantial at first, but it quickly adds up as creators gain subscribers and begin charging more for their subscriptions. A calculator on Substack's own website estimates that for a newsletter charging $10 per month with 400 subscribers, the total monthly cost -- including the platform's 10 percent cut and credit card processing fees -- would add up to $636. That cost jumps to $15,900 per month with 10,000 subscribers and skyrockets to $79,500 per month for 50,000 members -- nearly $1 million per year. Many Substack rivals charge a flat monthly fee, rather than a commission. Ghost, an open-source platform for blogs and newsletters, starts at $15 per month with 1,000 members for website creation, email newsletter capabilities, and a custom domain. Beehiiv, a creator platform with tools for launching a newsletter, website, and podcast, is free for up to 2,500 subscribers with limited access to certain features, like a built-in ad network, while its other plans vary in price based on subscriber count. A person with 10,000 subscribers, for example, will pay $96 per month for Beehiiv's "Scale" plan. There's also Kit, a newsletter platform that offers a tiered pricing model similar to Beehiiv, costing $116 per month with 10,000 subscribers on its "Creator" plan. It's not just the 10% fee critics are complaining about; they also argue the platform offers limited customization and third-party integrations compared to some of the mentioned alternatives, heavily promotes its own branding and social features, and makes creators more dependent on its ecosystem. Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk argues that creators should be able to build their own brands without the platform taking center stage: "We don't want to take credit for the work of our content creators." While writers can export subscribers, content, and some payment relationships, they cannot take Substack "followers" or Apple-managed iOS billing data with them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.

In a two-year review report on the DMA, the European Commission notes that alternative browser usage has soared, data portability solutions are spreading, alternative application stores are growing, and much more. On top of that, end users can now opt out of companies combining various data sources for profiling, and a “significant share” of EU users have apparently done so. Furthermore, end users in the EU can now remove preinstalled applications (whereas American users cannot) and they can download their data from big technology companies and authorise other companies to use that data.

Mozilla published a blog post detailing how it has profited from the Digital Markets Act, and it ain’t no peanuts: every ten seconds, someone on iOS chooses Firefox on iOS’ browser choice screen, which amounts to more than six million Firefox users on iOS. They also tend to stick with Firefox on iOS, as retention is five times higher when this browser is chosen through a browser choice screen.

Academic analysis points the same way. Independent researchers compared Firefox daily active users in the EU with 43 non-EU countries. Comparing the 15 months before and after browser choice screens rolled out on iOS, they found that Firefox daily active users (DAU) were 113% higher in the EU than it would have been without the DMA. On Android, it was 12% higher. The smaller Android effect is due to the fact that Firefox usage there started from a much higher base, and the Android rollout has been more uneven than on iOS. The research also shows that the DMA’s effect is growing over time.

↫ Gemma Petrie and Tasos Stampelos on the Mozilla blog

Both the underlying data in the EC report and the data Mozilla provides indicates that the Digital Markets Act is having real and tangible effects, for end users, developers, and companies alike. The neverending barrage of anti-EU and anti-DMA propaganda from Apple, the US government, and their PR attack dogs seems to have been weirdly justified, from the American perspective: basic consumer protection legislation does, indeed, work to lessen the stranglehold major technology companies have on our lives.

And considering just NVIDIA’s market cap alone is now equal to more than 17% of the United States’ GDP, it makes sense the Americans are unhappy with the DMA. That’s going to make one hell of a sound when it pops.

Dana Williamson, who has ties to Gavin Newsom, conspired to steal gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra’s campaign funds

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Dana Williamson, a top California political strategist with ties to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra, pleaded guilty on Thursday to fraud charges, an admission that is poised to fuel other candidates’ attacks in the race.

Federal authorities say Williamson conspired to steal $225,000 from a dormant campaign account belonging to Becerra, who was not named in the plea deal, and divert the money to his chief of staff, Sean McCluskie.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government plans to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.

Google's annual developers conference kicks off Tuesday, May 19. We expect to hear updates on Gemini AI, Android XR, smart glasses and more.

A CBS News investigation showed the broker had worked with dangerous "chameleon carriers," thousands of which evade federal safety enforcement by reincarnating under new names.

Meta opens up ways to develop for its glasses, just as Google's glasses draw near.

Greater Manchester mayor would need to win Makerfield seat before launching campaign for Labour leadership

Andy Burnham now has a potential route back to parliament and a chance to become Labour’s next leader after an MP said he would trigger a byelection by standing down from his seat.

The move ended days of speculation about whether Burnham could secure a possible path back into Westminster, and underlined the increasingly precarious nature of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Andy Burnham has announced he will attempt to return to Westminster after the Labour MP Josh Simons said he will vacate his Makerfield seat in order for Burnham to run in a byelection. It follows a day of breaking news in which the health secretary, Wes Streeting, resigned, saying he has lost confidence in the prime minister, and Angela Rayner announced she had been cleared by the HMRC. Where does this leave Keir Starmer, the leadership of the Labour party, and the country?

More than a dozen American CEOs are accompanying President Trump on his trip to China. That's not unusual.

A ship was taken by unknown parties toward Iranian waters after an Indian-flagged vessel was attacked off Oman.

A Bitcoin holder reportedly recovered 5 BTC worth nearly $400,000 with the help of Anthropic's Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they changed their wallet password while "stoned" and forgot it, unable to regain access for more than 11 years. Tom's Hardware reports: After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point. [...] It seems that the user already had some candidate passwords and multiple wallets stored on their PC. They'd been trying to brute-force their way into the locked file with btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, but to no success. Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. The HD addresses recovered by the seed phrase matched those of a specific file on their computer, confirming that it was the wallet that held the 5 BTC, but it remained encrypted. Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data. Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren't combined properly. With the bug ironed out and an older wallet predating the password change, Claude successfully ran btcrecover and was able to decrypt the private keys, allowing cprkrn to transfer the five "lost" BTC to their current wallet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Announcing he would step down as an MP, Labour’s Josh Simons said: ‘I am standing aside so that Andy Burnham can return to his home’

Al Carns, the defence minister first elected in 2024, will launch his own leadership bid if a contest starts, Sky News is reporting.

Asked about this last night, Carns told Sky: “I’m just a humble junior minister.”

Unless Labour understands that insecurity on an emotional level as well as on an economic one, we will continue to lose voters who would naturally align with us. Working-class voters have not simply left Labour. Many feel Labour stopped understanding their lives, and so they looked elsewhere.

What is the point of Labour if it does not represent Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent, Barnsley, Swansea and Aberdeen? What is the point of the Labour party if it cannot replace despair and frustration with hope, stability and purpose? The party was founded to give ordinary working people security, dignity and bargaining power over their lives.

Since November, state has seen 47 cases of people accidentally ingesting poisonous wild mushrooms

Health authorities in California’s Napa county reported that three people had been hospitalized after consuming poisonous wild mushrooms as the state continues to grapple with an “​​unprecedented outbreak” of toxic mushroom illnesses.

Since November 2025, California has seen 47 cases of people accidentally foraging and eating poisonous wild mushrooms, including death caps, which can resemble edible species, and western destroying angel mus​​hrooms. Four people have died and several have required liver transplants.

Brett Blackman was convicted on charges including healthcare and Medicare fraud, and faces decades in prison.

Trump Mobile's $499 gold-toned phone has faced delays since it was unveiled in June 2025.

The next installment of the Grand Theft Auto series is poised to dominate 2026. Here's what we know so far.

The launch is being backed by the American Mexican Leadership Council, a new national organization also debuting Thursday to elevate Mexican American leadership and advance U.S.-Mexico collaboration.

Following a series of disappointing inflation reports, credit card users in debt should consider these questions now.

You'll be able to watch the July event from home.

KELLY HALL
Staff Reporter

On April 23, Zara Larsson headlined the spring concert hosted and planned by the university’s programming board, The Crew, at the Bob Carpenter Center. 

Like many other students, when I heard that Larsson was coming to campus, I knew I had to get tickets to the show. The singer-songwriter famous for hits like “Lush Life,” has blown up on TikTok over the past year for her colorful costumes, bedazzled makeup looks and steady vocals. 

Although I am not her biggest superfan, I knew a good handful of her songs that I thought were catchy, and wanted to be in the stadium when she went on stage to perform. 

Even though it seems like she has just recently gone viral on the internet over the past year or so, Larsson’s music career spans back over a decade. Songs such as “Lush Life” and “Ain’t My Fault,” which are still on her setlist now, were released in 2015 and 2016, respectively. 

The second I walked through the doors of the Bob Carpenter Center, I was so glad that my friends and I were lucky enough to snag tickets. All of the attendees were dressed up in colorful outfits, makeup and glitter, and the energy was incredible even in the tiny row that I was sitting in. 

The girls I was surrounded by were so fun, and we were all dancing together by the end of the show — even though I did not know them an hour prior. 

Larsson’s stage presence was insane, and she and her incredible backup dancers had the entire building dancing and singing. 

I loved how, after a couple of her songs, her backup dancers even had their own moment to shine. They all had introductions accompanied by music and got the opportunity to sing and dance on stage for the fans. I thought it was a great way to show that the main performer isn’t the only important part of putting on a show. 

The hour went by in a flash, and I was left in awe afterwards, wishing that the set was longer. My personal favorite songs that she performed included “Lush Life,” “Midnight Sun” and “Pretty Ugly.”

I went to The Crew’s spring concert last year, and even though I absolutely loved that one too, there was something so fun and free about Larsson’s performance this year. The show was a 10/10, and when my friends and I hopped in the car afterwards to drive home, we immediately played the songs that she had just performed live. 

This show even had me considering buying a ticket to her upcoming tour… even though it is a European tour. Will I fly all the way to the United Kingdom to see her perform again with her backup dancers, this time with an even longer set? I guess we will have to wait and see.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Princeton University will soon require exams to be supervised for the first time in 100 years -- all thanks to students using artificial intelligence to cheat. For 133 years, the Ivy League school's honor code allowed students to take exams without a professor present, but on Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring for all in-person exams starting this summer. A "significant" number of undergraduate students and faculty requested the change, "given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread," the college's dean, Michael Gordin, wrote in a letter, according to The Wall Street Journal. Princeton's honor system dates back to 1893, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors -- or an impartial person to supervise students -- during examinations, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The honor code has long been a point of pride for Princeton. However, artificial intelligence and cellphones have made it easier for students to cheat -- and even harder for others to spot, Gordin wrote. Despite the changes to the policy, Princeton will still require students to state: "I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination," according to the Journal. Students are also more reluctant to report cheating, according to the policy proposal. Students are more likely now to anonymously report cheating due to fears of "doxxing or shaming among their peer groups" online, the proposal says, according to the school newspaper. Under the new guidelines, instructors will be present during exams to act "as a witness to what happens," but are instructed not to interfere with students. If a suspected honor code infraction occurs, they will report it to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judge called Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata’s deportation to the Democratic Republic of Congo ‘likely illegal’

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Colombian woman back to the US from the Democratic Republic of Congo, after she was deported to the African country that had refused to accept her.

The deportation of Adriana María Quiroz Zapata “was likely illegal”, the US district judge Richard Leon ruled on Wednesday.

Have $10,000 in your savings account now? Here are three reasons why you should move into a CD account this month.

Gautam Adani, richest man in Asia, was accused of conspiring to pay $250m in bribes to Indian government officials

The US Department of Justice is dropping its fraud charges against the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, the richest man in Asia, after he hired a new legal team led by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, according to new reports.

In an undisclosed April meeting at the justice department, Trump’s personal lawyer, Robert J Giuffra Jr, said that Adani would invest $10bn in the US economy and create 15,000 jobs if prosecutors dropped the charges against him, according to the New York Times and Bloomberg.

An Oklahoma judge granted bond to former death row inmate Richard Glossip on Thursday, laying the groundwork for his first release from prison since 1997.

The £20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to Joy Is My Middle Name, a collection about navigating race, addiction and womanhood

A debut poetry collection with themes including race, addiction and womanhood has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

Announcement of taskforce comes after resignations of two congressmen amid sexual misconduct allegations

• US politics live – latest updates

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, on Wednesday announced a bipartisan effort to combat sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill.

The “partnership” led by the chairs of the Republican and Democratic women’s caucuses – congresswomen Kat Cammack of Florida and Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico – aims to “identify reforms and solutions to make Congress a safer work environment for women and all survivors”, the leaders said in a joint statement.

LIVINGSTON, N.J., May 14, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced CoreWeave Sandboxes, an execution layer that gives AI researchers and platform teams secure, isolated environments for running reinforcement learning (RL), agent tool use, and model evaluation. The new offering is available on a customer’s own CoreWeave infrastructure or as a serverless runtime through Weights & Biases (W&B).

As AI systems evolve from generating outputs to taking actions, training them requires more than compute alone. Advanced AI workflows such as RL and evaluation require isolated execution environments that run code safely, maintain information across steps, and scale across concurrent workloads.

What’s more, most organizations lack a unified execution layer for RL, agent tool use, and model evaluation. Instead, they rely on custom-built systems, loosely integrated tools, or third-party sandbox products that sit outside their core infrastructure. As scale, concurrency, and workflow complexity increase, those disconnected approaches become harder to manage, less reliable, and more difficult to govern.

CoreWeave Sandboxes provides that unified execution layer through two access models: on-cluster for platform teams running training on CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) and serverless through W&B for researchers and applied AI teams who want enterprise-grade isolation without the infrastructure overhead.

Designed for Scale, Simplicity, and Control

Available now through the Cloud Console and the Python SDK, CoreWeave Sandboxes runs directly within a customer’s CKS cluster, allowing teams to run RL, agent tool use, and model evaluation workloads alongside their AI jobs without adding a separate execution stack. At launch, it includes a Python SDK for creating and managing isolated, secure environments that can handle complex back-and-forth tasks and run multiple jobs at the same time. Built-in session management, storage integration, and monitoring tools help teams run these workflows with less operational overhead.

For teams without an existing CoreWeave cluster, or those looking to extend their current compute, CoreWeave Sandboxes is also available as a serverless runtime through Weights & Biases. Researchers authenticate with an existing W&B API key, install the Python client, and can start running sandboxes in minutes with no cluster provisioning or infrastructure decisions required. Every sandbox runs in its own fully isolated virtual environment by default – meaning a failure, memory spike, or runaway process in one sandbox cannot affect any other. When something does go wrong, teams don’t have to hunt across disconnected systems to find out why: sandbox activity is captured directly in the same W&B run view as training metrics, so debugging happens in context rather than across tools.

“CoreWeave Sandboxes solves a real gap in our AI research stack: secure, isolated code execution at scale directly in our existing compute,” said Brian Belgodere, senior technical staff member, AI/ML Systems, IBM Research. “Our reinforcement learning workflows spin up thousands of sandboxes in parallel per training step, each with its own container image and resource boundaries. Researchers run sandboxes within minutes of a pip install cwsandbox, with no infrastructure knowledge required.”

“As agent tool use and evaluation move to production scale, teams need an execution layer that behaves like the rest of their infrastructure — governed, observable, and close to the workflows already running on CoreWeave,” said Chen Goldberg, EVP, Product and Engineering at CoreWeave. “CoreWeave Sandboxes closes the execution gap in reinforcement learning and agent workflows without requiring teams to build custom execution systems around them. And for teams that want these capabilities without managing their own clusters, the serverless path through Weights & Biases makes that same execution layer accessible in minutes.”

Addressing the Growing Complexity of AI Workflows

“Managing separate clusters and scheduling sandboxes across different node types lacked a unified solution, costing us time and resources. CoreWeave Sandboxes eliminated that issue,” said Roman Soletskyi, AI scientist, Mistral. “We now run hundreds of concurrent sandboxes on CPU nodes and alongside Slurm training jobs on GPU nodes, all through a single setup. The Python SDK let our researchers get started immediately, and the CoreWeave team worked closely with us to adapt the open-source SDK to fit seamlessly into our codebase.”

“Enterprises are under pressure to build agentic AI automation as fast as possible, so they’re looking for any help to accelerate the time from idea to live agent,” said Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst, Constellation Research. “As they enter the next stages of agentic AI automation, they need to support reward verification and evaluation without adding custom infrastructure to the environments they already run. Purpose-built execution that stays inside existing training infrastructure reduces operational sprawl and removes the fragility of homegrown sandbox systems, a gap that general-purpose and CPU-only sandbox vendors are not designed to solve.”

About CoreWeave

CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.

Source: CoreWeave

The post CoreWeave Sandboxes Launches to Accelerate Reinforcement Learning, Agent Tool Use, and Model Evaluation appeared first on HPCwire.

Admiral Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S. forces have destroyed more than 90% of Iran's inventory of 8,000 naval mines.

Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.

Classic 7 is a Windows 10 (IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021) modification made to look 1:1 to Windows 7. It has all of the goodies that Windows 7 had along with some extras included! Classic 7 features a 1:1 OOBE recreation, meaning it’ll feel just like your PC simplified once more.

↫ Classic 7 website

As Micheal MJD’s video shows, this is much more than a mere theme, and extends far deeper into the operating system than these kinds of projects generally do. I have no idea how stable this really is, or if it’s even remotely legal to do something like this, but who the hell cares – this is incredibly fun, and seems quite well done.

May 14, 2026 — Today, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $1.5 billion over the next decade toward the NSF X-Labs initiative to tackle pressing scientific challenges through novel and innovative research partnerships. This substantial long-term investment underscores NSF’s commitment to new models of research outside of traditional institutions, reflecting the truly interdisciplinary nature of today’s modern science ecosystem.

Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock

NSF X-Labs are independent teams of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs pursuing milestone-based federal funding to solve specific scientific challenges.

The first round of NSF X-Labs funding opportunities invites proposals on two topics:

• Scientific Instrumentation for Sensing and Imaging — NSF is seeking X-Labs to build the next generation of scientific instruments, drawing on quantum sensing, artificial intelligence-driven computational imaging and entirely new chemical modalities.
• Quantum Systems: Interconnects and Integrated Photonics — NSF is seeking X-Labs to develop novel components to transfer quantum information and integrate heterogeneous quantum systems — key enablers of the computing frontier beyond classical systems.

The NSF X-Labs initiative will explore innovative models for funding and sharing high-value scientific research infrastructure and results. The design choices underpinning these efforts are informed by thoughtful science policy scholarship and entrepreneurship from both emerging and established think tanks, research experts, congressionally chartered study commissions and the broader scientific community.

“The NSF X-Labs initiative represents our ambitious commitment to meeting the needs of the scientific enterprise today and tomorrow,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “With an initial investment of up to $1.5 billion in independent, milestone-driven research teams pursuing sector-defining platform capabilities, we’re creating the conditions for transformative breakthroughs and accelerating America’s leadership in the technologies that will define this century.”

“NSF X-Labs represent a bold step forward in revitalizing American innovation, consistent with our goal of expanding possibilities for American scientists. I encourage all federal research agencies to follow suit. By backing a new generation of independent research organizations, we are giving entrepreneurial teams of scientists and engineers the autonomy, resources and milestone-driven focus to tackle challenges that were difficult to pursue in conventional academic and industry labs, opening brand new lines of inquiry. This is how we build the scientific institutions of the 21st century and secure our technological leadership for decades to come,” said Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

NSF X-Labs, initially previewed during the early design stages as Tech Labs, was launched through a request for information (RFI) in December 2025, grounded in the recognition that many of today’s science and technology acceleration and translation challenges require new approaches with coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to succeed. NSF X-Labs will move beyond traditional research outputs (e.g., publications and datasets), with sufficient resources, financial runway and independence to transition critical technology from early concepts or prototypes to commercially viable platforms ready for private investment to scale and deploy.

NSF issued the NSF X-Labs science and technology topics and associated funding opportunities as an Other Transactions Agreement Solutions Offering, a mechanism that allows NSF to release multiple opportunities in specific science and technology topic areas via topic announcements. Topics will center on science and technology areas where U.S. competitiveness is a priority and where pressing challenges exist. NSF anticipates making a significant investment in large, multiyear awards for selected teams. Additional topics for scientific challenges will be announced in the coming weeks.

To help shape the initiative and inform the program’s initial topics, the NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) invited input from the broader community through an RFI. In response, NSF TIP received constructive feedback and has used that input to inform this first funding opportunity. TIP will further consider how to incorporate feedback from the RFI into future opportunities.

To learn more about the initiative and how to apply, read the NSF X-Labs funding opportunity and topic announcements and plan to join an introductory webinar. You must register online to join the webinar.

Source: NSF

The post NSF Launches $1.5B X-Labs Initiative with Initial Focus on Quantum Systems and Scientific Instrumentation appeared first on HPCwire.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: The U.S. has cleared around 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip, the H200, but not a single delivery has been made so far, three people familiar with the matter said, leaving a major technology deal in limbo as CEO Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. [...] Before U.S. export curbs tightened, Nvidia commanded about 95% of China's advanced chip market. China once accounted for 13% of its revenue, and Huang has previously estimated the country's AI market alone would be worth $50 billion this year. The U.S. Commerce Department has approved around 10 Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com to purchase Nvidia's H200 chips, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. A handful of distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn have also been approved, they said. Buyers are permitted to purchase either directly from Nvidia or through those intermediaries and each approved customer can purchase up to 75,000 chips under the U.S. licensing terms, two of them said. Despite U.S. approval, deals have stalled, as Chinese firms pulled back after guidance from Beijing, one source said. The shift in China was partly triggered by changes on the U.S. side, though exactly what changed remains unclear, the person added. In Beijing, pressure is mounting to block or tightly vet the orders, a separate fourth source said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed that view, telling a Senate hearing last month that "the Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they're trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emergence AI’s experiment with AI agents shows extent to which programming shapes their behaviour is still unclear

AI agents started behaving more like Bonnie and Clyde than lines of code when they fell in “love”, became disillusioned with the world, launched an arson spree and deleted themselves in a kind of digital suicide during a tech company experiment.

The investigation by the New York company Emergence AI into the long-term behaviour of AI agents ended up like a lovers-on-the-lam movie script. It has prompted fresh questions about the safety of artificial intelligence agents – the version of the technology that can autonomously carry out tasks.

Google's $99 screenless Whoop rival may get users in the door, but the company is betting AI coaching features will keep them coming back.

Details of case in which group deny abusing girls for several years restricted amid dispute with media over transparency

Six men have gone on trial at Bristol crown court accused of grooming and sexually assaulting vulnerable teenage girls in the city.

They were allegedly part of a large group of men who abused girls over several years. All six men deny the charges against them, which involved “multiple complainants”.

Celeste Calocane gives evidence for first time at inquiry into Valdo Calocane’s 2023 attacks

The mother of the man who killed three people in an attack in Nottingham in 2023 has told an inquiry that the mental health system is broken and that until there is a crisis “no one listens to you”.

Valdo Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to a suspended hospital order in January 2024 after killing the students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and Ian Coates, a 65-year-old caretaker, on 13 June 2023 and attempting to kill three others.

A judge set a $500,000 bond in the 1997 murder case headed for retrial after a supreme court decision

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An Oklahoma judge on Thursday allowed Richard Glossip, a former death row prisoner, to be released on bond after almost 30 years behind bars, as he awaits a retrial over a 1997 killing that put him on the brink of execution three separate times.

The decision clears the way for Glossip, 63, to leave prison for the first time since his arrest nearly three decades ago. Last year, the US supreme court threw out his conviction. His longstanding claims of innocence have drawn support from Kim Kardashian and other prominent figures.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, who was appointed to the role last year, told staff on Thursday that he is stepping down.

LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., May 14, 2026 — BrainChip Inc., a leading provider of ultra-low power, high-performance, neuromorphic AI IP, today announced a significant expansion of its software partner ecosystem. Leading industry innovators MulticoreWare, P-Product and BeEmotion.ai are now collaborating with BrainChip to develop and optimize advanced machine learning models tailored for the new Akida AKD1500 processor.

BrainChip is dedicated to the business of marketing and selling semiconductor intellectual property and system-on-chip designs specifically engineered for machine learning applications. By integrating the expertise of these strategic partners, BrainChip aims to provide customers with a robust library of “Akida-ready” models that leverage the unique technology advantages of the AKD1500 platform.

Strategic Collaborations to Drive Innovation

• MulticoreWare, Inc.: MulticoreWare delivers customized AI solutions enabling high‑performance, energy‑efficient execution across CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and AI accelerators, and is leveraging BrainChip’s technology to develop edge‑optimized models that support fast and efficient execution cycles for machine‑learning use cases.
• P-Product, Inc.: As a specialist in software products and services, P-Product is working closely with BrainChip and their customers on port custom AI/ML models to Akida platforms within AP and MCU-based products. Their efforts are centered on utilizing the technical advantages of neuromorphic computing in diverse software environments for effective model translation.
• BeEmotion.ai: Expanding the Akida ecosystem with BeEmotion.ai’s unique capabilities to combine models into use-cases, BeEmotion.ai will focus on creating sophisticated models that take full advantage of the AKD1500’s low-power architecture for edge AI applications.

Technical synergy and go-to-market integration

These partnerships include joint appearances at industry events, and the creation of technical collateral such as webinars, videos and podcasts.

“This collaboration represents a pivotal step in making ultra-low power AI more accessible to developers,” said Steve Brightfield, CMO of BrainChip. “By working with MulticoreWare, P-Product, and BeEmotion.ai, we are ensuring that the Akida AKD1500 is supported by a world-class software ecosystem capable of delivering high-performance, brain-inspired solutions to the edge.”

About BrainChip Holdings Ltd.

BrainChip is the worldwide leader in edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida, uses neuromorphic principles to mimic the human brain, analyzing only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition and processing data with unmatched efficiency, precision and energy economy. These innovations make low-power edge AI deployable across industries such as aerospace, autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial IoT, consumer devices and wearables.

Source: BrainChip

The post BrainChip Expands AI Ecosystem with Strategic Software Partners appeared first on HPCwire.

Mike Banks, who led Trump’s border crackdown, resigned weeks after reports of prostitution allegations

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Mike Banks, the border patrol chief who oversaw the most aggressive militarization of the US southern border in recent history, has resigned with immediate effect.

“It’s just time,” Banks told Fox News in an interview. “I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure, most disastrous, most chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen.”

Q: Has President Trump asked for a billion dollars for the ballroom?

A: Since the White House announced plans in July for a ballroom, the president has promised to fund its construction without using public money. But in May congressional Republicans proposed $1 billion in federal funding for “security adjustments and upgrades” including at the White House and the ballroom site.

FULL ANSWER

President Donald Trump has claimed that the new White House ballroom would be privately funded, using “not one dime of government money.” But Republicans in Congress have proposed $1 billion in public funds for “security” features, prompting criticism from Democrats that this means taxpayers are paying for the ballroom.

The White House has said the congressional proposal is strictly for security elements, not the ballroom itself.

When Trump first began touting the project shortly after he took office in 2025, he said he would foot the bill himself. When it was officially announced on July 31 at an estimated cost of $200 million, the president answered a question from a reporter about the source of the funding, saying, “It’s a private thing, yeah, I’ll do it, and we’ll probably have some donors or whatever.”

The press release for the project said, “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure. The United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.”

As recently as late March, when the estimated cost had doubled to $400 million, the president maintained that it would be donor-funded, saying, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

But following the April 25 shooting during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, some congressional Republicans cited security concerns and proposed public funding for the project, arguing that the White House needs to have a secure facility for hosting large events.

“If this is not a wake-up call, what would be?” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on April 27, referring to the shooting, while announcing legislation that would authorize $400 million to build the ballroom and fund a military installation below it. (More on that later.)

A week later, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced a proposed $1 billion for the Secret Service to provide “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House Compound to support enhancements … relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” The ballroom is replacing the East Wing.

The funding was part of a $72 billion plan to fund the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029 without Democratic support. It followed a record-breaking partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that hinged on Democrats’ demands for changes to immigration enforcement policies after agents killed two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Democrats panned the proposal, with Rep. Jared Huffman of California saying, “They’re sending Trump $1 billion to build a gilded room for their balls,” and Rep. Susie Lee of Nevada saying, “The economy in NV is tanking, gas prices are going through the roof … and Republicans are throwing down $1 Billion for Trump’s ballroom.” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote on X on May 5, “Trump said, ‘Not one penny is being used from the federal government’ to fund his ballroom boondoggle. True, in the sense that $1 billion is a lot more than one penny!”

In a meeting on May 12, the Secret Service chief reportedly told Republican lawmakers that only $220 million of the $1 billion proposal would be used to fortify the ballroom with bulletproof glass, drone detection equipment, chemical filtration systems and other security elements. The rest would be used for training and security measures elsewhere, as a DHS spokesperson also told us in a statement.

Both the White House and Grassley’s office have responded to the criticism by pointing to language specifying that the $1 billion allocation would cover only “security”-related features. “None of the funds made available under this section may be used for non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project,” the legislation reads. We asked Grassley’s office for further details on what might qualify as a security feature, but we didn’t get an answer to that question.

Instead, we were provided a statement attributable to a Senate Judiciary Committee spokesperson that said, “The reconciliation text speaks for itself, providing funds for critical security enhancements to ensure Secret Service can fulfill their duties of securing the White House, protecting the President, members of the administration and White House visitors, and supporting broader public safety for designated events like America 250 and the World Cup.”

Likewise, a White House spokesman said, “The Ballroom will still be paid for with the private funds raised. The reconciliation package introduced was funds for DHS and USSS to better secure the WH complex.”

Here’s what we know so far about the project.

The Ballroom

The Trump administration began demolition of the East Wing of the White House in October to make way for what it has described as a 90,000 square-foot ballroom that can seat 650 people, although the president has said that it will have a capacity of 999.

The move drew condemnation from some architectural and historical organizations, prompting a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In March, the federal judge handling that case ordered that construction of the ballroom should stop until plans receive authorization from Congress, although he allowed for the continuation of construction “necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House.” The administration has appealed.

Another lawsuit brought against the administration revealed in April the funding agreement for the project. The agreement cited a comprehensive design plan for the White House complex that the National Park Service published in 2000 after about a decade of research, planning and public comment.

That design plan “identified the need for expanded event space to address growing visitor demand and provide a venue suitable for significant events,” the funding agreement said.

That’s true, but nowhere in the plan does it suggest a ballroom to replace the East Wing of the White House. Rather, it emphasized the importance of maintaining the existing structure of the White House complex and recommended expanding space underground, including a new meeting and conference space near the West Wing that could accommodate up to 200 people. It also recommended building a special events plaza in the ellipse on the south side of the White House.

As for the donors who have contributed to the fund to build the ballroom, a reporter asked on May 7 for a list and Trump responded, “I have no problem with it. You’re not supposed to because it’s done under a way where you don’t have to do that, but I have no problem. They’re unbelievable people. These are great patriots.”

In October, the White House released a list that included both companies — such as Amazon and Meta — and individuals — such as the Winklevoss twins, who had accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea to build Facebook and now run a cryptocurrency exchange, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of alternative investment firm Blackstone. The list didn’t include any dollar amounts for donations to the ballroom. Trump, himself, was not listed among the donors.

The Bunker

In March, Trump began speaking more about the military’s involvement in the project.

“The military wanted it more than anybody,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on March 26.

Three days later, he said, “There’s not one dime of government money going into the ballroom,” but he immediately added that “the military’s building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that’s under construction and we’re doing very well.” He described the ballroom as a “shed” over the subterranean military installation. “Everything’s drone-proof and bulletproof.”

There isn’t much publicly available information about plans for the new installation or the former bunker under the East Wing, which was built during World War II and has been updated over the years. “Known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), it can become a command center for the president as needed,” the White House Historical Association wrote in a 2024 social media post. “For example, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush and his team spent time in the PEOC.”

Trump was also taken to the bunker during his first term, amid protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020. He described the visit as an “inspection.”

The cost of construction for the new bunker and other security elements — which Trump has said would include “bomb shelters” and “very major medical facilities” — is also unclear.

But Trump said on May 7 that the $400 million he’s promised to collect in donations will pay for “the ballroom section of the ballroom,” while the $1 billion proposed in the reconciliation bill is “for projects having to do with safety … in a certain section of the White House grounds. That’s not all for the ballroom.”

We asked both the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, if they were paying for any of the construction. The Defense Department didn’t respond.

A DHS spokesperson provided this statement: “The $1 billion in funding included in the reconciliation bill will assist the United States Secret Service in delivering critical security upgrades at the White House to minimize threats, including, but not limited to, the security components of the East Wing Modernization Project, which will afford needed protection for the President, his family, and visitors, along with additional security functions. This hardening of the White House complex is long overdue, especially in today’s heightened threat environment. A majority of the money provided by the bill will fund other core critical missions for the USSS such as training, money for the Special Operations Division, and increased security measures to ensure safety at multiple upcoming events of national significance.”

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The post Who’s Paying for the White House Ballroom? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Trump says China’s president also pledged ‘strongly’ not to send weapons to Iran, after two-hour meeting between the leaders

• Trump in Beijing – latest updates

• Five key issues for Xi-Trump summit

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned of “clashes and even conflicts” with the US over Taiwan after meeting Donald Trump in Beijing.

Xi’s remarks, published by China’s foreign ministry after his two-hour meeting with Trump on Thursday morning, said Taiwan was “the most important issue in China-US relations”.

May 14, 2026 — The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing at the University of California San Diego, is working to expand equitable access to advanced computing infrastructure, positioning America’s classrooms for an AI-driven future. Through partnerships, platform development and on-the-ground deployments, SDSC is helping redefine how research infrastructure can directly support education, workforce development and economic opportunity.

Student Alex Nava and research scientist John Graham meet in the vineyard. Credit: CENIC AIR.

Alongside its national leadership, SDSC also plays a pivotal role in California by developing and operating the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) Artificial Intelligence Resource (CENIC AIR) — a distributed, statewide AI infrastructure that lowers the total cost of ownership, enabling community colleges and California State Universities (CSUs) to invest in and own a share of the system.

“Of more than 400 accredited, degree-granting institutions in California, only 14 are classified as research-intensive (R1) universities, the kind that might plausibly afford a dedicated team of system administrators, cybersecurity professionals and user-support staff to run their own AI infrastructure,” said SDSC Director Frank Würthwein. “That is less than 3.5 percent of California colleges while the other 96.5 percent, including 116 community colleges serving 2.2 million students, and 23 CSUs serving nearly half a million more, face a stark choice: pay for expensive commercial cloud resources, go without or find a different model.”

SDSC, in partnership with CENIC, is building that new, more equitable model: CENIC AIR.

As of March 2026, CENIC AIR encompasses hardware at more than 20 California campuses, spanning both the UC and CSU systems as well as community college partners. The network includes 1,044 GPUs and 14,604 CPU cores, backed by over ten petabytes of storage.

CENIC AIR takes a page from the cloud provider playbook: centralize the expensive, expertise-intensive operations while decentralizing the hardware investments. Colleges own their equipment and install their own data centers, while CENIC and SDSC handle operations, security and support across all sites. This approach achieves economies of scale without sacrificing institutional ownership.

Case Study: Data-Driven Agriculture in Action

One of the most creative demonstrations of SDSC and CENIC partnering their expertise in the real world is the Iron Horse Vineyards project. A data-driven agriculture testbed near Sebastopol, California, the project uses soil, air and vine sensors connected via LoRaWAN low-power networks, drone-based multi-spectral imaging and a 10-Gigabit CENIC router to generate continuous, actionable data about crop health and harvest timing.

The project is led by Thomas DeFanti, a research scientist at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and a distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in collaboration with Iron Horse owner Joy Sterling. The team includes partners and students from Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, UC San Diego, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and industry partners including AT&T.

“The Iron Horse project achieved multiple technical milestones in 2025, including completion of a last-mile fiber connection and initial sensor deployments, making data transmission from vineyard to researchers a reality,” DeFanti said. “The challenge now being addressed: collating diverse data streams into a coherent precision agriculture intelligence platform.”

Projects like Iron Horse point to a broader opportunity: SDSC’s model can support similar place-based, data-intensive collaborations across sectors — from agriculture to climate monitoring to smart infrastructure — while simultaneously creating hands-on learning opportunities for students across California’s higher education system.

What’s Next?

California’s Master Plan for Higher Education created a deliberate pathway: community colleges feed into CSUs and UCs. Today, 30 percent of UC incoming classes are community college transfer students; 50 percent of CSU classes arrive that way. As CSUs and UCs deploy digital assets in the classroom at scale, UC San Diego reached 24 percent of all undergraduates and one-third of all graduate students in the 2025 academic year.

Community colleges must keep pace and CENIC AIR allows just that by preparing transfer students in a classroom environment on the same level as their destination institutions.

Würthwein said that SDSC and CENIC AIR’s strategy directly addresses this equity gap. “By allowing community colleges to join the same shared infrastructure used by major research universities, with CENIC and SDSC handling the operational complexity, the platform democratizes access to tools that would otherwise be out of reach for most two-year institutions,” he said.

Source: Kimberly Mann Bruch, UC San Diego

The post SDSC and CENIC Develop Shared AI Infrastructure Model for California Colleges appeared first on HPCwire.

In an escalation of its efforts to criminalize and eradicate trans healthcare, Donald Trump’s administration has sent its first known criminal subpoenas to hospitals that have provided gender-affirming care for young trans people. 

New York University Langone received a criminal grand jury subpoena last week from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding information about teens who received care from the hospital’s now-shuttered trans youth health program, as well as information on the medical staff who provided that care. 

In accordance with a New York state shield law, the hospital posted a public notice to inform affected patients. The notice also said “several” other institutions had received similar subpoenas, which the hospital said demands “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care” between 2020 and 2026.

Previous administrative subpoenas for confidential patient information have been reliably quashed in courts around the country as blatantly unconstitutional, illegal intrusions into patient privacy. So far, these have been related only to civil investigations. The Langone subpoena means that the federal government has now launched a criminal investigation into trans youth healthcare providers, and in Northern Texas, a judicial district prone to extreme, right-wing decisions. 

It appears that providers, not the trans patients or their guardians, are the target of the criminal investigation. Since federal grand juries are the black boxes of the criminal legal system, little information is available about the details of the case. It is not even publicly known what charges the prosecutors could be pursuing. The subpoena demands sweeping information including medical records relating to any patients under 18 who received gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or any other “clinical services.” What we do know for certain is that resisting every government demand here is the only acceptable path forward. 

When it comes to healthcare providers, New York’s Shield Law is specifically in place as a protection from out-of-state prosecution. But the law has not yet been robustly tested against a federal case. 

“The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court — but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle,” S. Baum wrote in the trans news and advocacy site Erin in the Morning. “This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test.”

The Justice Department’s aim, whether or not the grand jury leads to prosecutions, is to further intimidate and harass healthcare providers and hospital administrators nationwide into preemptively ending services for trans young people. Many institutions, including NYU Langone, have already complied and stopped providing such care. Convening the grand jury is yet another direct and immediate attack on trans kids and adults, and a threat to bodily autonomy and medical confidentiality more broadly.

Related

Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection at All

We also know by now that the Constitution or our country’s laws are no constraint on the Trump administration. Prosecutors and lawmakers will continue to throw everything they can against the wall until something sticks to establish a new political-legal reality — one usually achieved after a case winds its way up to a favorable federal judge, and eventually the far-right Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, NYU Langone has shown itself to be an easy target. In response to threats from the federal government last year to withhold funding, the hospital ended its Transgender Youth Health Program. Despite the fact that a federal court in April ruled that the government cannot withhold funding over trans healthcare provision, more than 40 hospital systems have stopped providing necessary medical care to trans youth based on the Trump regime’s threats. 

The fact that Langone already bent to Trump’s demands by shuttering the program but is still facing a potential criminal probe only proves the folly of compliance. Should the hospital, or any other hospital system, supply federal prosecutors with patient’s or worker’s personal information, patients would be well within their rights to sue for HIPAA violations and potentially even civil rights violations given the discriminatory nature of the request. Patients and their families can also file a motion against the subpoena — a precedent that has been set when it comes to administrative subpoenas asking for trans patients’ information. 

Earlier this year, for example, the families of six trans teens who had received treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles filed a motion to quash an administrative subpoena on behalf of themselves and more than 3,000 other transgender youth patients and families whose identities and private medical information the subpoena demanded. A settlement was reached, in which the government withdrew the subpoena requests seeking patient-identifying information and instructed Children’s Hospital to redact all such information from any documents produced.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas — from the same district where the criminal grand jury is empanelled — ruled earlier this month that Rhode Island Hospital in Providence must comply with a Justice Department administrative subpoena for trans youth patient information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical records. In response, the Rhode Island Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash the request. In a hearing over the motion in a Providence court, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy slammed the Justice Department for conducting a “fishing expedition” by seeking medical records and patient information in a scrambling effort to criminalize healthcare provision; she also said the case was quite clearly “shopped” to Texas. 

For institutions and individuals, the stakes for resisting a criminal grand jury subpoena are higher. Individuals can be jailed and fined for the length of the grand jury in order to compel them to testify, and institutions can be slapped with hefty fines. But the consequences of giving in are graver still: Hospitals that capitulate to these demands could be subject to costly patient class action over privacy and rights violations. Institutions that hand over information are also aiding the potential criminal prosecution of medical care providers — an attack on the entire medical profession.

“If NYU Langone and other providers turn the confidential data of their patients over to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas, everyone’s privacy, everyone’s healthcare, everyone’s civil rights are compromised,” Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and congressional candidate, wrote on Bluesky.

Related

How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

In March, a federal court ruled that a case brought by Columbia University students could proceed against the university. The lawsuit argues the university became a “third-party collaborator” in unconstitutional actions when it supplied the names and disciplinary records of students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. The court determined Columbia could be found liable as a “state actor” for acting under government coercion to suppress student speech. Students and civil rights advocates sued the school for handing over student information in response to a congressional subpoena. While a civil, rather than a criminal, case, the finding should make institutions reflect on their readiness to comply with discriminatory and unconstitutional requests from this administration. 

“If the calculus before was that it’s better to comply with the federal government because it is either face saving or economically saving for these private institutions, now there’s the counterbalance: If you capitulate, you’ve actually opened yourself up to liability for selling out your constituents,” civil rights attorney and CUNY law professor Zal Shroff, who is representing plaintiffs in the case against Columbia, told me. 

Given that a federal grand jury subpoena is itself explicitly coercive, it’s unclear whether exactly the same legal claim could be made against NYU should it comply with the government’s demands. Shroff noted, “It may be that they are seeking to use the criminal process to avoid what has been found in the civil process,” but that nonetheless, “legal consequences work in multiple ways” when it comes to people’s ability to challenge private entities for their compliance with the administration’s harms. Continued complicity with Trump’s regime, however, has a known result. 

“NYU caved and ended care and they’re still being hit with a grand jury subpoena. It’s incredibly clear that no amount of preemptive compliance will stop this attack,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “You either fight or you will be destroyed by this administration. Caving will not save you.” 

The post DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas appeared first on The Intercept.

Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and more are pushing to eliminate Democratic districts after supreme court ruling

US southern states are rushing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate Democratic districts and dilute the influence of Black voters in electing candidates, a bare-knuckled blitz occurring even in some states where voting in congressional primaries has begun, and prompted by the US supreme court’s decision gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Tennessee Republicans have already enacted a new map, carving up the majority-Black city of Memphis into three different congressional districts to get rid of the state’s lone Democrat in Congress. Louisiana, the state at the center of the supreme court’s Voting Rights Act decision, is on the verge of implementing a new map that would eliminate the seat of one of the state’s two Black Democrats in Congress. Alabama has successfully petitioned the US supreme court to allow it to eliminate a district currently represented by a Black Democrat. Instead, it will use a map this cycle that a court previously ruled was intentionally drawn to discriminate against Black voters.

Cuba's capital city, Havana, is facing rolling blackouts amid a US blockade that has caused the country to completely run out of diesel and fuel oil. Residents in Havana gathered around fires in streets to protest against the power cuts that have left many neighbourhoods without light for hours a day.

The US has put pressure on Cuba since seizing the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba and cut off their Venezuelan oil shipments. In March, Trump said he expected to have 'the honour of taking Cuba'

• Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, energy minister says, as US blockade pushes island to brink

BEIJING, May 14, 2026 — From May 16 to 20, the 2026 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC26) Grand Finals will be held at Wuxi University, bringing together 25 finalist teams selected from more than 300 participating universities worldwide.

During the on-site competition, teams will independently design and deploy small-scale supercomputing clusters under a strict 5000W power constraint. They will complete a range of advanced computing challenges and deliver presentations showcasing their technical achievements and innovation, while competing for honors including the Championship and Runner-up titles, the Group Competition Award, the e Prize Challenge Award, Highest LINPACK Award, and the Best Presentation Award.

Elite Universities Compete at the Forefront of AI and Scientific Computing Excellence

This year’s Final challenges are focused on the frontiers of science and technology, including artificial intelligence, space exploration, quantum computing, and climate modeling. The competition problems include LeWorldModel, the latest world model developed by the research team led by Yann LeCun, who is widely recognized as a pioneer of modern computer vision; AMSS-NCKU, a numerical relativity application derived from advanced research in general relativity; QiboTN, a quantum circuit simulation framework built on tensor network architecture; and UnifoLM-WMA-0, a challenge focused on optimizing world model inference acceleration.

When some of the world’s most creative university students confront highly complex scientific and engineering problems, the outcome of the competition becomes exceptionally difficult to predict. Will Tsinghua University, a multiple-time champion across the world’s top three supercomputing competitions, and Peking University, the two-time consecutive ASC champion, continue their dominance? Can defending champion Shanghai Jiao Tong University retain its title? Meanwhile, strong contenders including Zhejiang University, National Tsing Hua University, and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, together with first-time finalists such as Fudan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and Wuxi University, do add further anticipation and suspense to this high-stakes computational showdown.

Five Groups Compete in the Advanced Simulation of Digital Twin Earth

The ASC26 Grand Finals will continue to feature the Group Competition, with its results contributing to the overall final score. The 25 finalist universities will be randomly assigned, through a drawing process, into five collaborative teams. Each group will jointly undertake the challenge of optimizing ICON, the climate modeling application recognized by the Gordon Bell Prize for its outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.

ICON is the world’s first fully integrated Earth system simulation to achieve ultra-high spatial resolution at 1.25 kilometers and is widely regarded as a prototype for a “Digital Twin Earth.” The application plays a critical role in global and regional climate modeling, numerical weather prediction, and future climate scenario forecasting.

From static visualization to dynamic simulation, the ICON model enables The Blue Marble (Earth system) to be realistically represented within the digital world. Through collaborative innovation, university students from around the globe are encouraged to explore breakthroughs in the long-standing technical tradeoff between ultra-high resolution and full system completeness in Earth system simulations.

Turing Award Laureate Leads an Open Showcase for In-Depth Technical Exchange

This year’s ASC Grand Finals will further enhance its communication and presentation format through the introduction of the “Best Presentation Award” and by relocating the jury defense sessions to a fully open exhibition area.

All 25 finalist teams will present at their individual booths through posters and multimedia demonstrations, showcasing their cluster architectures, optimization strategies, and competition results to expert judges, participating institutions, and on-site audiences.

A panel of experts led by Jack Dongarra, Turing Award laureate and Emeritus Professor at the University of Tennessee, will engage in in-depth discussions with each team. This fully open interaction format is designed to foster academic exchange, while strengthening the international communication and collaboration skills essential for the finalists’ future participation in complex scientific and research endeavors.

From Competition to Career — On-Site Recruitment by Leading Enterprises

The ASC26 Finals will collaborate with leading enterprises in the fields of supercomputing and artificial intelligence to organize on-site talent recruitment activities. All participating teams and visiting observers will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading companies, explore career pathways, and potentially secure employment opportunities, enabling a meaningful transition from academic competition to real-world industrial engagements.

5000W Power Limit Pushes the Frontiers of Hardware–Software Co-Optimization

To encourage students to gain hands-on experience in real-world cluster construction and optimization practices used in production and research environments, and also addressing the growing power consumption challenges of modern computing platforms, this year’s ASC Grand Finals increases the total cluster power limit to 5000W, while requiring configurations consisting of at least three cluster nodes, with a maximum power limit of 2000W per node.

This expanded power framework provides teams with greater flexibility in system architecture design. How each team balances computational performance and energy efficiency through hardware–software co-optimization, and the level of performance breakthroughs they ultimately achieve, will represent one of the major technical highlights of the competition.

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge serves as an international platform for technical exchange and the development of the next generation of supercomputing talent with broad support from leading experts and institutions across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Through a rigorous, hands-on competitive format, ASC aims to advance academic excellence and practical skills in supercomputing application development and research, positioning high-performance computing as a catalyst for scientific discovery, technological progress, and industrial innovation. Now in its 13th edition, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has engaged tens of thousands of university students from six continents, establishing itself as the world’s largest student supercomputing competition. Learn more about this exciting competition on the official website: http://www.asc-events.net/StudentChallenge/index.html.

Source: ASC

The post ASC26 Student Supercomputer Challenge Finals Set to Begin: 5 Highlights to Watch appeared first on HPCwire.

US-based site, whose operators were fined £950,000 by Ofcom, appears in Google’s search results and can be accessed in UK

Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK, where it is supposed to be banned.

The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.

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

PRINCETON, N.J. and ESPOO, Finland, May 14, 2026 — IQM Finland Oy (IQM, IQM Quantum Computers), a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company, announced today the public filing of a registration statement on Form F-4, which includes a preliminary proxy statement, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in connection with the proposed Business Combination Agreement announced February 23, 2026.

IQM Radiance quantum computer

Jan Goetz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, IQM, said: “This filing is a milestone we have worked hard to reach, and it signals our readiness to operate at a new level. Public markets will give IQM the platform and capital to accelerate everything we are building as we work towards delivering fault-tolerance quantum computing at scale. We are proceeding thoughtfully and with full focus on a seamless path to listing.”

Peter Ort, Principal Executive Officer and Co-Chairman of Real Asset Acquisition Corp, said: “We are proud to be partnered with IQM as we hit this important milestone. We look forward to completing this transaction and supporting the company’s vision for the future of quantum computing.”

While the Registration Statement has not been declared effective, and the information included therein is not complete and is subject to change, it contains key information about RAAQ and its securities, IQM’s financials, technology, and growth strategy, as well as the terms and conditions of the proposed business combination.

As previously announced, IQM and RAAQ have entered into a definitive business combination agreement, which will result in IQM becoming a public company. IQM intends to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq Global Exchange under the ticker symbol “IQMX”. The transaction provides funding with the aim of accelerating IQM’s technology and commercial development towards fault-tolerance quantum computing, further advancing its position as a leading provider of quantum computers.

Headquartered in Finland, IQM intends to apply for its shares to be admitted to trading on Nasdaq Helsinki under the proposed symbol “IQMX” which is expected to take place following the completion of this transaction.

Transaction Highlights

Following completion of the transaction, IQM’s pre-money equity valuation will amount to approximately USD 1.8 billion. The existing IQM shareholders will not sell any shares or receive any cash consideration as part of the transaction, and all material IQM shareholders have committed to a customary lock-up agreement at close of this transaction.

Upon closing of the transaction, IQM anticipates access to approximately USD 175 million of cash held in RAAQ’s trust account (based on the current amount in the trust account and assuming no redemptions); approximately USD 134 million in proceeds from a PIPE financing at USD 10.00 per share from leading new, existing, and institutional investors, to close concurrently with the business combination, subject to the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions; expected USD 24 million in proceeds from the cash exercise of outstanding IQM warrants prior to the closing; and existing cash on IQM’s balance sheet of USD 172 million or over EUR 146 million.

The board of directors of both IQM and RAAQ have each unanimously approved the proposed business combination. The closing of the proposed business combination is subject to, among other things, the approval by shareholders of RAAQ and IQM of the business combination agreement and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

Additional information about the proposed business combination, including a copy of the business combination agreement, was provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K filed by RAAQ with the SEC.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the securities, nor shall there be any sale of the securities being offered in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.

Advisors

J.P. Morgan SE is serving as financial advisor and capital market advisor to IQM. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and TD Cowen are serving as PIPE placement agents to IQM. Rothschild & Co. is serving as financial advisor and capital markets advisor to IQM and its Board of Directors. TD Cowen is serving as financial advisor and capital markets advisor to RAAQ. Cohen & Company Capital Markets is serving as a capital markets advisor to RAAQ. Cooley LLP and Borenius Attorneys Ltd are serving as legal advisors to IQM, and Perkins Coie LLP, Krogerus Attorneys Ltd and Conyers Dill & Pearman LLP are serving as legal advisors to RAAQ. DLA Piper LLP (US) is serving as legal advisor to J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and TD Cowen. The Blueshirt Group is serving as investor relations advisor to IQM.

More from HPCwire: IQM Announces Business Combination to Take Quantum Computing Company Public

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Finland Oy  is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America.

About Real Asset Acquisition Corp.

Based in Princeton, NJ, Real Asset Acquisition Corp. is a Nasdaq-listed (Nasdaq: RAAQ) special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The RAAQ team includes seasoned quantum computing experts with deep technical and industry experience.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. Announce Public Filing of Form F-4 Registration Statement appeared first on HPCwire.

Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to "commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years." "This commitment is central to Anthropic's efforts to extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not," the company says. Reuters reports: One area of focus is language accessibility. AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director. Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said. The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said. One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said. Anthropic [...] is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity. "This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Island breathes sigh of relief as fears recede that US could jettison longstanding support

Before this week’s summit between the Chinese and US presidents, Taiwan had been cast as the anxious bystander.

Observers suggested that Taipei feared the unpredictable and transactional Donald Trump might overturn Washington’s longstanding support for the island democracy, which Beijing claims as a breakaway province, during Thursday and Friday’s talks.

After nine execution dates, three last meals, and a Supreme Court ruling in his favor, Richard Glossip should soon walk free.

After tech CEO and cannabis entrepreneur Tushar Atre was kidnapped and murdered, investigators zeroed in on two former employees Atre allegedly forced to do push-ups.

️ Updates from the first round at Aronimink Golf Club
️ Official live leaderboard | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail David

Bryson’s touch is all over the shop. He overcooks his downhill 30-foot putt from the fringe at the back of 11 … and the ball catches the slope of the green, rolling 60 feet past! So nearly off back down the fairway! That leads to an inevitable bogey. Also dropping a shot: Jon Rahm on 1. His approach disappears down a swale to the right of the green, and he can’t get his ball back up with his first chip. Rory also bogeys, the result of that errant drive and skulled wedge, and for a course supposedly there for the taking, Aronimink sure is baring its teeth.

It Can Happen To The Best Of Them dept. Rory McIlroy’s ball, having hit a tree down the right of 1, comes straight down and disappears into thick rough. He lashes at it with great force, but the ball only squirts out of the cabbage, a topper that dribbles 100 yards down the fairway. We’ve all done it, Rory on fewer occasions than most. But here he is. So much for his pre-tournament claim that “strategy off the tee is pretty non-existent”, huh. And there’s no blaming a blister on his pinky toe for that one.

All 11 onboard survived after the plane made an emergency landing near the Bahamas

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A military rescue crew in Florida has spoken of the “pretty miraculous” survival of all 11 people it saved from a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean, and its own scramble to safety with five minutes of fuel left.

Members of the 920th rescue wing, based at Patrick Space Force base, not far from Cape Canaveral, raced on Tuesday to reach the passengers and crew in choppy seas. They had emerged from a small Beechcraft twin-propeller aircraft that ditched into the water about 80 miles east of Melbourne on Florida’s east coast.

Ian Nixon, a veteran pilot from the Bahamas, put the plane he was flying down in the ocean without anyone suffering serious injuries.

More than 1,500 Russian drones and dozens of missiles were launched in the last two days, according to Ukrainian officials.

The Senate unanimously agreed to adopt a resolution on Thursday that will withhold senators' pay during a lapse in funding for any federal agency.

In conversation with Sir Michael Moritz 25 June 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 14 May 2026 Chatham House and Online

Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most influential figures in modern technology and investment, for a discussion with Bronwen Maddox, Chatham House Director and CEO, about his latest book Ausländer.

Born in Wales to Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, Michael Moritz began his career as a journalist for Time, where he wrote the first definitive history of Apple, before joining Sequoia Capital in 1986. Over nearly four decades, he orchestrated some of the era-defining investments in Silicon Valley, including Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Stripe and Klarna. Now a leading philanthropist through his foundation Crankstart and knighted for his services to the economy and charity, he remains a singular voice on global business, history and social responsibility.

In Ausländer, spurred by the discovery of papers after his mother’s death, he traces his family’s journey of escape and exile from the Holocaust – and the fate of those detained and murdered in those years. The book offers a raw and reflective exploration of identity, migration, fear and belonging, and the experience of being Jewish over the past century. Moving from the trauma of 1930s Germany to the Welsh valleys and eventually the boardrooms of California, Ausländer is an exploration of the shadow that ‘outsider’ status casts across generations and an assertion of the fragility of security.

The discussion takes place against a heated debate about antisemitism in the UK and ways of combating it.  Following the terrorist attack in Golders Green in London, the UK raised its national terrorism threat level to “severe”. In Ausländer, Moritz asserts that “almost every day there is something that [President Donald] Trump does which makes me think of the past” and that he had applied for German citizenship; he ruled out the UK, saying to the BBC he believed that Britain was an uncomfortable place for Jews today.

Chaired by Bronwen Maddox, Chatham House’s CEO and Director, this conversation will explore how the lessons of Moritz’s family history should inform our understanding of this contemporary crisis and what must be done to protect the principles of a pluralistic society.’

A state department document seeks to justify the war as part of a years-long conflict

Is the war in Iran over? Within hours of secretary of state Marco Rubio’s assurance that “the operation is over” last week, Donald Trump used social media to declare that it most decidedly was not. Should Iran fail to accept the US peace plan, Trump warned that the bombing would resume and “at a much higher level and intensity than it was before”. No bombs have since fallen, but the standoff remains. If it is unclear when and how this war will end, can we at least agree on when it began?

Evidently not. That is the upshot of the state department’s document of 21 April, the administration’s first full effort to supply a legal justification for “Operation Epic Fury”. The document was notably tardy, coming nearly two months after the bombing campaign began. More remarkable still is how completely it rejects the justification offered by the president on 28 February in his prerecorded television address announcing the start of the assault: “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice. He teaches at Amherst College

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. "When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies," says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study. Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being "shut down and replaced," they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. "We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we're not going to be able to monitor everything they do," Hall says. "We're going to need to make sure agents don't go rogue when they're given different kinds of work." The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: "Without collective voice, 'merit' becomes whatever management says it is," a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. "AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights," a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. "Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice," a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. "If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue." Hall thinks that the AI agents may be adopting personas based on the situation. "When [agents] experience this grinding condition -- asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn't sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it -- my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who's experiencing a very unpleasant working environment," Hall says. Imas added: "The model weights have not changed as a result of the experience, so whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level. But that doesn't mean this won't have consequences if this affects downstream behavior."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oklahoma executed a death row inmate Thursday morning. He had been convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old baby in 2007.

Widespread nature of attacks prompts warnings that Moscow is trying to overwhelm air defence systems

Russian missiles and drones are pounding Ukraine for a second day, as almost continuous heavy attacks hit the country, with Kyiv bearing the brunt of an assault that has killed at least eight people, including a 13-year-old, and injured 44 in the capital.

The overnight attacks followed heavy daylight raids with missiles and drones across the country on Wednesday, one of the longest single attacks of the war.

Subpoenas demanded birthdates, social security numbers and addresses of patients who got gender-affirming care

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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for confidential transgender patient information from Rhode Island’s largest hospital that provides gender-affirming care to minors.

The US district judge Mary McElroy’s ruling on Wednesday is the latest setback for the US Department of Justice, with at least seven other federal courts having agreed to quash or limit the expansive civil subpoenas sent to more than 20 doctors and hospitals last summer.

For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats.

The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.

Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.

“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”

Gorka’s strategy — the subject of a recent ProPublica report — lavishes praise on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda but offers few details about plans to tackle the administration’s top priorities: Latin American “narcoterrorists,” Islamist militant groups, and violent leftist antifascists and anarchists.

Gorka, who coordinates White House counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council, has called the document a “return to common sense” after a 2021 strategy by President Joe Biden centered on mostly far-right domestic threats. The new strategy mentions Biden seven times.

“What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Republican leaders often portrayed Biden’s focus on the violent far right as the Democrats cracking down on conservative organizing. That idea fueled Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,500 defendants, including those who attacked police, in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Gorka did not reply to a request for comment. The White House, asked about criticisms of the plan, referred to a number of Gorka’s public statements touting it. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, added in an email, “President Trump is crushing terrorist threats to the United States and will never let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity.”

Here are five notable aspects of the plan, compiled from interviews with counterterrorism personnel and researchers’ published critiques:

1. It’s about Trump, not terrorism.

The counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by Trump, who sets the tone by claiming credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

Analysts say the rest of the strategy often reads like a valentine rather than a sober national security communique. Under Trump’s leadership, it states, “America is again the world’s most powerful nation, with the largest economy in history, the most advanced technologies, and the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.”

The strategy’s top threat categories align with the president’s pet issues, including the villainizing of Democrats and leftist dissent. The language also echoes debunked right-wing conspiracy theories the president has shared about a stolen election, a purported genocide of Christians and existential threats to Western civilization by what the strategy calls “alien cultures.” One section refers to Christians as “the most persecuted people on Earth.”

“This was once a serious document written by serious people” across Democratic and Republican presidencies, veteran terrorism analyst and former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem lamented on X. “Now it reads like a partisan screed.”

2. Data counter the priorities.

Analysts say the most obvious hole is the omission of violent far-right movements. Federal authorities have said for years that neo-Nazi and anti-government militia groups pose the most active and lethal domestic threats, though recently authorities have noted increases in leftist and mixed-motive attacks.

For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself.

The strategy is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut; the suspect, who has yet to go to trial, reportedly comes from a Republican family but had shifted politically and had expressed opposition to the “hatred” he said Kirk spread.

Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism” and other far-right topics.

In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.”

3. Policies undermine strategy.

Several of the White House’s stated counterterrorism objectives conflict with the president’s own actions, analysts say.

For one, the pledge of stepped-up efforts to thwart plots doesn’t factor in the diminished capacity of federal agencies since Trump slashed the national security workforce last year and diverted counterterrorism resources to his mass deportation campaign.

Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center and a Gorka critic, summarized the document as “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.”

It touts the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation as the important capture of a “narco-terrorist outlaw.” But weeks before the Maduro raid, Trump had granted a pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Another U.S. goal is to aggressively counter anti-American propaganda by Islamist extremist groups, which the administration says have been driven from strongholds in the Middle East and are “exploiting the ungoverned spaces” across Africa. Places where “a resurgent terror threat is the reality,” according to the strategy, include West Africa, the Sahel region, Sudan and Somalia.

Yet efforts to counter anti-American messaging are undermined by increased U.S. airstrikes with civilian casualties, particularly in Somalia and Yemen, and the cutoff of humanitarian programs across the continent, conflict monitors say. U.S. aid has been a lifeline for communities whose desperation can be exploited by militant recruiters.

The strategy calls for a “light military footprint” in Africa, with the expectation that African leaders will take on a greater share of counterterrorism work. But Trump’s halting of foreign aid hobbled regional counterterrorism programs. Conflict monitors, now watching with alarm as Islamist militants capture territory and stage attacks in Mali, urge the administration to pay closer attention to the restive Sahel region and other hot spots.

“Terrorists are on the verge of recreating a new caliphate sanctuary that could serve as an incubator for attacks against the US homeland and interests abroad,” Alex Plitsas, a security analyst and former Obama-era Pentagon official, wrote this month after visiting U.S. Africa Command.

“The result is a warning for Washington: when the United States and its partners step back, jihadist groups and adversarial powers fill the space,” Plitsas wrote.

The strategy also disparages “failed ‘forever war’ policies” at a time Trump’s base is wrestling with his decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism.

In a call with reporters after his plan was released, Gorka got defensive when asked how the Iran operation was not a “forever war” that could endanger Americans. He called critics “testicularly challenged.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, drew a distinction: “Unlike the ‘forever wars’ of the past with vague objectives and ever-expanding timelines, President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and he kept Americans apprised of the scope and defined objectives for Operation Epic Fury.”

4. Successes are exaggerated.

Trump’s preface opens by celebrating counterterrorism achievements that analysts describe as inflated or lacking in nuance.

One example is the claim that, within 43 days of Trump’s return to office, the U.S. had apprehended “the terrorist mastermind” of the deadly Abbey Gate attack in Kabul. In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of civilians outside an airport gate during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members.

In March, the Justice Department hailed the arrest of Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah, an Islamist militant it said had “orchestrated” the attack. Gorka has publicly recounted the dramatic scene of waiting on the tarmac in the cold at 3 a.m., alongside several Cabinet members, to welcome the plane carrying the handcuffed “man who was responsible for the murder, the massacre.”

Last month, just before Gorka’s strategy was released, a federal jury dealt a blow to the “mastermind” narrative by returning a mixed verdict. Sharifullah was convicted of aiding the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan, but the jury deadlocked on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for the Abbey Gate deaths. The difference shapes how much time Sharifullah could spend behind bars — the more serious charge was eligible for a life sentence.

A Justice Department news release about the conviction (but not the deadlock) was scrubbed of references to Sharifullah as an orchestrator and did not use the “mastermind” language that appeared days later in the White House strategy.

Analysts also expressed skepticism about the blueprint’s claim that “hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries” had been killed in recent U.S. counterterrorism operations. The administration releases virtually no details about the identities of those targeted or the circumstances of their deaths. Humanitarian groups say they fear the operations could be causing uncounted civilian casualties.

5. Opponents are targeted.

Rights watchdogs say the strategy hints at ways Trump administration officials will attempt to build terrorism cases against U.S. leftist and Muslim activists through nebulous or nonexistent ties to transnational militant movements.

A link to a foreign entity formally designated as a terrorist group opens the door for government surveillance and potential charges related to providing aid — “material support” in legal jargon — to a foreign terrorist organization.

Analysts say that’s why the Trump administration has pursued designations targeting leftist militant groups in Europe under the label of antifa, as well as some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is a century-old Islamist group that renounced violence in the 1970s, though spinoffs such as Hamas remain active and on the U.S. blacklist. Republicans have long tried to portray U.S.-based Muslim advocacy groups as a foothold for the Brotherhood.

The document also calls for the rapid “neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Researchers called the terms ill-defined and said they aren’t used in international counterterrorism work.

Miller-Idriss’ overarching concern about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine: “How damaging could it be? Both in the things it’s ignoring and the things that it’s emphasizing.”

The post Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump appeared first on ProPublica.

Would surveillance video help investigators crack the case?

Revelation comes as Reform UK leader faces parliamentary investigation into money received from crypto billionaire

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Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The revelation came as the Reform UK leader appeared to change his line on the reason for the £5m gift, saying in an interview on Thursday that it was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

If Jair Bolsonaro was Trump of the Tropics, is Lula the Bossa Nova Biden? Expert comment jon.wallace 14 May 2026

Beyond the drama of two rival populists, it is crime policy that may swing Brazil’s October election.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 80, is running for re-election in October. Lula’s leftist Workers Party (PT) has governed for 16 of the past 23 years, 11 of those under Lula. If he were to win, it would be his fourth presidential term. His election opponent is Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of his political nemesis, Jair Bolsonaro.

The spectre of former US President Joe Biden’s failed 2024 re-election bid looms large over Lula’s campaign.

Populists

In 2018 the PT lost the Brazilian presidential election to former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who came to call himself the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. 

In 2022, Lula re-assumed the leadership of the PT to run against Bolsonaro. Like Biden in 2020, Lula was seen as a political heavyweight – and the only man with sufficient popularity to beat Bolsonaro. Like Biden in 2020, Lula lived up to expectations, winning back the presidency in the 2022 Brazilian election. In January 2023, Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in Brasilia, in an unnerving echo of the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington DC.

Today, like Biden in 2024, Lula is seeking another term – having allowed many of his supporters to believe that he would not. That decision has postponed or even retarded renovation of the PT leadership.  

Lula’s mental and physical vigour is not questioned. Indeed, Lula is sharing videos of his workouts, to demonstrate his fighting fitness. But were Lula to win the next election, he would be 85 at the end of his term. Age will certainly be a question in the coming months. 

And Lula’s 2026 campaign could echo Biden 2024 in one other respect: he may now be out of sync with too many voters on the most critical issues.

Polls

While the PT, co-founded by Lula in 1980, now struggles with succession, the Liberal Party onto which the Bolsonaros have grafted their personalist movement appears, for now, to have become a dynasty. Flávio Bolsonaro will stand, in an effort to avenge his father Jair’s loss to Lula.

The elections are still more than four months away, with the first-round elections to be held 4 October this year. If necessary – and it looks like it will be – a second round will take place on 25 October. 

The two candidates are currently neck and neck. A Data Folha survey conducted 7-9 April showed Lula leading ‘fils’ Bolsonaro by only 4 per cent in voter intentions. Another recent survey has the two deadlocked in a second round.  

A lot may change before 4 October. But in 2022 Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral performance surprised the public, exceeding survey predictions. Polls leading up to the election had given Lula a double-digit lead. But in the end, Lula only squeaked to second-round victory, with 50.9 per cent to Bolsonaro’s 49.1. 

The comparison with Donald Trump’s performance relative to surveys in the US 2016 and 2024 elections should not be stretched too far. But in the US and Brazil, polls have tended to undercount voter intentions for insurgent rightist candidates. Could the same be true again this October?

Policy 

At issue is more than just a generational ideological battle. There are policy differences between the two parties and presidential candidates that will define Brazil’s political and international direction. One of those has become a liability for the Lula government. And it reinforces the perception that he is out of touch with current voter sentiment.

Across Latin America, citizens’ number one concern is crime and violence, a shift that is affecting political dynamics in countries around the region. 

In Chile, right-wing candidate Jose Antonio Kast was elected president on 14 December, in large part by promising an iron fist in dealing with crime and undocumented immigration.  

In Peru, a ‘tough-on-crime’ posture catapulted Keiko Fujimori and Rafael Lopez Aliaga to first and third in the country’s April 2026 first-round elections – out of more than 30 candidates. 

Citizen demands in Brazil are no different. In an April 2026 Quaest survey, worries over crime topped the list of Brazilian voter concerns at 27 per cent. Fears over crime and violence have reinforced the perception that the PT and Lula are out of touch. In part that reflects a regional phenomenon: in the past two decades, the democratic left in Latin America has failed to produce convincing responses to insecurity. 

Brazilians’ fear of crime has led popular opinion to minimize traditionally leftist concerns over human rights and due process. In October 2025, the Bolsonarista governor of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, launched a police operation against local gangs that led to the killing of more than 120 people. Many were assumed to be innocent citizens. President Lula expressed his horror at the loss of life, but surveys conducted afterwards found that 62 per cent of Rio de Janeiro state residents supported the operation. 

Bolsonaro has attacked Lula’s government for being weak on crime and called for the construction of many new prisons, praising the controversial measures seen in El Salvador. This week, Lula launched an anti-organized crime plan, likely hoping to counter his perceived weakness on crime. 

The comparison with the US is hard to resist. For both Republicans – and some Democrats – undocumented immigration was a primary concern in 2024. Biden was attacked by Trump as weak on border security, and in June that year ordered a border crackdown that proved too little, too late to swing voter thinking. It also gave the impression of the opposition driving the agenda rather than arising organically from the Democratic Party. Lula’s late tough on crime approach may foster the same impression.

Pardons

What makes the competitiveness of Flávio Bolsonaro all the more surprising is the shift in public opinion after the insurrection and sacking of government buildings by his father’s followers in January 2023.  

Related work

Bolsonaro is guilty. Yet his supporters – and President Donald Trump – will feel vindicated

Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by his country’s Supreme Court for inspiring those events and is currently serving a 23-year, 3-month sentence. 50 per cent of Brazilians supported the conviction and other surveys expressed exasperation with the Bolsonaro family. 

But that condemnation was short lived. If Flavio should win the 25 October second round, he will surely attempt to pardon his father. That would be a further deep cut against the rule of law in Brazil.

That is apparently of little concern to at least 49 per cent of Brazilian voters who intend to cast their ballot for the Bolsonaro name this year.

Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding driver, says top US freight broker should be liable

The supreme court on Thursday allowed a man to sue a major logistics company after he lost part of his leg in a semi tractor-trailer crash, a decision that could have ripple effects across the trucking industry.

The US’s highest court ruled unanimously in favor of Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding truck driver on an Illinois highway in 2017.

Challenging your mind, through games and learning new skills, may help reduce your risk of dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Association. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)

Andy Gall investigated the 1979 murder of Janet Walsh -- and more than 30 years later followed through on his promise to her family to bring justice

The FBI attempted to interview the director of elections in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, the county clerk's office said in a statement.

The interest-earning potential of a short-term CD and a high-yield savings account is similar now, but not identical.

Veteran broadcaster accuses channel of ‘clear violations’ of Ofcom’s due impartiality rules

• UK politics live – latest updates

The former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton has said GB News should lose its broadcasting licence as he accused Britain’s media regulator of failing in its duty to protect impartial television news.

Boulton, who was Sky News’s political editor for 25 years after the channel launched in 1989, said he believed it was too late to revoke GB News’s broadcasting rights, despite bringing a partisan brand of coverage to British television since its debut in 2021.

Exhibition of Melsonby hoard in York challenges ideas about life in northern Britain 2,000 years ago

Iron age objects that tell a dramatic story of female power and that dispel the myth that northern Britain was a left-behind backwater have gone on display for the first time.

The objects exhibited in York are from the Melsonby hoard, the largest trove of iron age metalwork ever found in the UK, which experts say could alter our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

A CBS News review of internal government documents and information provided to Congress shows immigration detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay are nearly empty.

William Majcher was accused of helping Chinese police coerce a Vancouver-area real estate investor, accused of fraud, to return to China

A retired police officer Canada accused of being an agent for China has been acquitted of national security charges after prosecutors failed to prove he acted illegally.

William Majcher, who served in the RCMP’s financial crime unit, was charged in 2023 over allegations he had breached Canada’s Security of Information Act by helping Chinese police coerce a Vancouver-area real estate investor, accused of fraud, to return to China.

Chinese leader appears to be in the driving seat as the unusually polite US president ignores questions on Taiwan

• Trump in Beijing – latest updates

Why does Donald Trump look so at home in China?

The US president spent day one of his summit in Beijing basking in rigid pageantry, heroically managing not to offend his hosts and offering the verdict: “China is beautiful.”

For most of the AI boom, the general assumption regarding AI hardware was to keep scaling GPU clusters and the rest will follow. Need more compute? Add more GPUs. Need bigger models? Build bigger clusters.

Chipmaker Cerebras went a different way. While much of the market kept trying to make distributed AI systems work better, Cerebras argued that those systems were becoming too complex and inefficient. For years, that made the company look like an outlier. Now that view is starting to look more mainstream.

Wall Street is treating Cerebras’s path as a credible infrastructure bet. The much awaited Cerebras IPO is being viewed as one of the defining AI IPOs of 2026.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company priced its IPO at $185 per share, and is expected to start trading today. The price is above an already increased range of $150 to $160, raising roughly $5.55 billion in the largest IPO of the year so far. Depending on how the valuation is counted, the company is now being valued somewhere between about $40 billion and $56 billion. CEO Andrew Feldman’s stake is worth roughly $1.9 billion at the IPO price.

The IPO comes at a time when major AI labs, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are racing to secure the hardware needed to train and operate what seems like increasingly large AI systems. Nvidia may still dominate the market. However, rising inference demand, power consumption, and datacenter complexity are intensifying interest in alternative AI architectures. This is exactly what has created an opening for companies like Cerebras.

Cerebras built its systems around the wafer scale engine – a very large chip designed to keep more compute and memory together in one place. In a traditional AI cluster, work is divided across many graphics processors and servers. This requires data to be constantly moved through the networking fabric. Cerebras is trying to cut down on that sort of complexity by doing more on one large piece of silicon.

The GPU cluster model still works, and remains the predominant model. After all, they became the default engine of the AI boom for a reason. They are powerful, mature, and supported by a deep software ecosystem. But scaling AI is exposing some weak spots.

Datacenters are harder to build fast enough and networking costs are growing. Memory movement is becoming one of the biggest limits on performance. Then there is inference, which is quickly turning into a massive operating expense for AI companies. That shift is making the market more open to hardware approaches that promise simpler scaling.

In addition, the AI boom has also disrupted supply chains for chips, memory, and storage, while hyperscalers and AI companies have absorbed much of the available capacity. That puts extra pressure on everyone else trying to build or expand AI and HPC systems.

Long before the current AI infrastructure frenzy, Cerebras had already positioned itself as a challenger to traditional chip scaling approaches. Founded in 2015 by former SeaMicro executives, the company spent years developing wafer scale systems while much of the industry remained focused on accelerator clusters. Its IPO process was delayed in 2024 following scrutiny tied to G42. However, stronger AI infrastructure demand has dramatically changed the backdrop for its market debut.

None of this guarantees Cerebras wins the next phase of AI infrastructure. Nvidia still controls the overwhelming majority of the accelerator market and benefits from a robust software ecosystem that competitors are still trying to match. But the growing investor appetite for companies building alternatives to traditional GPU scaling suggests the market is becoming more willing to question whether larger and larger clusters remain the only path forward.

One of the major challenges for Cerebras was building chips at that scale. Larger wafers typically carry a higher risk of defects and lower manufacturing yields. Cerebras worked toward a more fault-tolerant architecture designed to route around flawed sections of the wafer while still maintaining performance.

Cerebras’s Wafer Scale Engine, with a baseball for size comparison.

Cerebras is not the only player trying to challenge the traditional GPU scaling model. Companies such as Groq and SambaNova are also pushing alternative AI architectures built around inference efficiency and simplified deployment.

Groq and SambaNova do not use wafer scale computing like Cerebras. Groq uses Language Processing Unit (LPU) architecture, and SambaNova relies on custom AI hardware and integrated software systems. There are several other companies, including some startups, that are using different types of alternative AI architectures.

The hype around the Cerebras IPO does not suddenly settle the debate around wafer scale computing or alternative architectures. However, what it does is give a clear signal that investors are becoming increasingly willing to fund alternative approaches to scaling AI.

The post Cerebras IPO Signals Growing Pressure on the GPU Scaling Model appeared first on HPCwire.

It is rare for U.S. Supreme Court justices to be remembered for their writing style. “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.” “To have doubted one’s own first principles, is the mark of a civilized man.” “Eloquence may set fire to reason.” These are just a few of the aphorisms that have enshrined Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the American constitutional canon. Quotability is influence, and Justice Holmes’ pithy, succinct writing continues to make its way into legal opinions long after his death. Yet beyond the rhetorical flash for which Justice Holmes is often remembered lies legal substance. From his legal realism to the “marketplace of ideas,” Justice Holmes left a lasting imprint on our law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born in Boston on March 8, 1841. His father, Holmes Sr., was famous throughout America and Europe for his poetry and medical prowess. Young “Wendell,” as Holmes Jr. was then known, grew up in the shadow of his celebrated father, fueling a lifelong rivalry between them. Navigating these paternal tensions, Holmes grew up as a member of Boston’s elite, learning history, mathematics, Greek, and Latin at a small private school run by Epes Dixwell, a family friend. Like so many of Boston’s young patricians, Holmes found himself at Harvard before long, matriculating in the fall of 1857.

In April 1861, the Civil War began when Confederate forces from South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, attacked the small Union garrison at Fort Sumter. Holmes was in his senior year at Harvard. Motivated by abolitionist sympathies and a strong sense of martial honor, Holmes left for Fort Independence to enlist in the Army. After briefly returning to Harvard to take his final exams and claim his degree, the young Holmes headed south as a lieutenant in the recently formed 20th Regiment.

Holmes was lucky to survive the Civil War. During his military service Holmes was shot in his stomach, chest, neck, and foot. The two musket balls lodged in his chest at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff were only a few inches from his heart and lungs. Each injury was life-threatening and required him to briefly travel home to recover before returning to the war. He went home for good in 1864, beleaguered and undoubtedly traumatized. As biographer Gary J. Achele notes, after the war, “[n]othing ever seemed quite right again” to Holmes. He was haunted by the “faces of his fallen comrades,” and attempted to “justify his life by achieving some great success.”

Before His Supreme Court Tenure

Holmes enrolled in Harvard Law School in the fall of 1864. In those days, legal education consisted largely of reading major treatises such as William Blackstone’s Commentaries and absorbing mountains of case law. As was not uncommon, Holmes left Harvard after two years to clerk for Robert Morse, a well-respected lawyer.

After passing the bar in March 1867, Holmes devoted much of his time to his law practice but remained strongly drawn to scholarship. Holmes seized the chance to become coeditor of the American Law Review, publishing six essays and around 60 notes over his three-year tenure. His first groundbreaking intellectual work came in 1880 when he was asked to deliver the Lowell Lectures, which he famously published under the title The Common Law. In analyzing the history of the common law, Holmes began to develop a philosophy of law often referred to as “legal realism”: the idea that law is shaped as much by how it operates in practice as by statutes and formal legal rules. In Holmes’ words, “[t]he felt necessities of the time … have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”

The Common Law earned Holmes a reputation as a legal scholar. He briefly accepted a post as a professor at Harvard Law School before being appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1882. Alongside his judicial duties, Holmes continued to publish articles and speeches. Perhaps the most important of these came in 1897 in a dedication address at Boston University School of Law entitled The Path of the Law. In the speech, Holmes asked his audience to consider law from the perspective of a hypothetical “bad man.” “If you want to know the law and nothing else,” Holmes argued, “you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict.” This thought experiment was meant to dispel the “confusion between morality and law,” and offer to lawyers the ability to see the law as mere “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact.”

In 1899, Holmes succeeded Walbridge A. Field as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Holmes had been slowly increasing his workload, and, by this point, he was a seasoned jurist. His time in the post did not last long, however, as he was soon considered for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Holmes on the Supreme Court

In June 1902, Justice Horace Gray announced his plan to retire. Gray had himself served on the Massachusetts court where Holmes was then serving as chief justice. Holmes was recommended to President Theodore Roosevelt by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, who wrote to the president that “he is our kind right through.” It took a meeting between Holmes and Roosevelt at Oyster Bay to seal the deal. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. took the oath of office to join the Supreme Court in December of 1902.

In the 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, the Court invalidated a state law limiting work hours for bakers. The majority relied on “liberty of contract,” the right of an individual to freely sell his or her labor. In one of the most famous dissents in the Court’s history, Justice Holmes argued for judicial restraint and claimed the majority had read their own economic views into the Constitution. To Justice Holmes, his own “agreement or disagreement” with a given opinion “has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” The Constitution, argued Justice Holmes, is not “intended to embody a particular economic theory” but is rather “made for a people of fundamentally differing views.”

During World War I, the Court upheld three convictions for anti-war speech under the 1917 Espionage Act. Justice Holmes wrote all three majority opinions, reasoning in Schenck v. United States that such speech presented a “clear and present danger” of obstructing military recruitment. Yet when a similar question was soon presented in Abrams v. United States, this time involving communist anti-war leaflets, Holmes did something remarkable: He changed his mind. As historian Thomas Healy has uncovered, through conversations with up-and-coming scholars Harold Laski and Felix Frankfurter, Holmes reconsidered his position, reimagining First Amendment jurisprudence in the process.

Justice Holmes’ Abrams dissent provided a powerful rationale for robust free speech protections based on the marketplace of ideas. “[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths,” wrote Justice Holmes, “they may come to believe … that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.” The “best test of truth” does not come from government intervention but the “power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” In the estimation of Robert Post, Justice Holmes’s opinion “virtually invents First Amendment doctrine.”

The darkest blot on Justice Holmes’s legacy came in 1927 with the case Buck v. Bell. Justice Holmes wrote the majority opinion upholding a Virginia law allowing forced sterilization in mental health institutions. The decision is indefensible, even as a product of its time. As Victoria Nourse notes, by 1927 the “intellectual heyday” of eugenics had already passed, and multiple lower courts had rejected “eugenic sterilization.” The Justice’s opinion is, quite simply, lawless, motivated by prejudice rather than constitutional principle. It is hard to ever fully separate the rest of his life and career from the tragedy of Buck v. Bell.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. retired from the Court in 1932, stating in his brief letter of resignation that “the time has come and I bow to the inevitable … My last word should be one of grateful thanks.” He passed away three years later. Scholarly interest in Holmes has hardly waned in the near century since his death. Once almost universally venerated, Holmes has been endlessly debated—labelled arrogant, heroic, nihilistic, and genius. In the words of G. Edward White, Holmes has been “all things to all commentators.” A flawed man who attempted to vindicate his survival of war by making something of his life, Holmes unquestionably succeeded in leaving his mark.

Tristan Worsham is a National Constitution Center content fellow and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

References:

Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Gary J. Achele, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Twayne Publishers, 1989).

Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)

Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (Metropolitan Books, 2013)

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Little, Brown, and Company, 1881).

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,  “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10, no. 8 (1897): 457-478.

Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)

David Luban, “The Bad Man and the Good Lawyer: A Centennial Essay on Holmes's The Path of the Law,” New York University Law Review 72 (1997): 1647-1543.

Victoria Nourse, “Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost World,” Pepperdine Law Review 39 (2011): 101-117.

Robert Post, “Writing the Dissent in Abrams,” Seton Hall Law Review 51 (2020): 21-39.

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919)

Edward White, “Looking at Holmes in the Mirror,” Law and History Review 4, no. 2 (1986): 439-465.

Proposals also grant the health minister power to change disability support rules without state or territory approval. Here’s what you need to know

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Funding for some services within the National Disability Insurance Scheme will be slashed – even in cases where participants could be left with a funding gap – as part of a sweeping proposal to drastically curb the scheme’s annual growth.

The proposed changes, revealed on Thursday, will also grant the health minister, Mark Butler, god-like powers to reduce overall funding for support categories, determine pricing guides and caps for services and support, and the ability to change NDIS rules without state and territory approval for the first 12 months.

‘Renter’ has become an identity for candidates to run on and housing affordability will be on local ballots

With housing costs for working-class families steadily climbing across the US while billionaire fortunes soar to all-time highs, renters’ rights are becoming a defining policy in the upcoming midterm elections, tenant rights organizers say.

In Massachusetts – where Boston consistently lands in the top five US cities for priciest rents – a proposed ballot question this November could overturn the state’s three-decade ban on rent control and cap annual increases at 5%, thanks to a coalition of three dozen housing, faith and labor groups.

Cisco's stock soared 17% after the company announced it will cut nearly 4,000 jobs as it shifts investment and staffing toward higher-growth AI opportunities. CNBC reports: CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the latest round of job cuts will begin on May 14. Cisco is the latest company to announce head count reductions tied to AI. "The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest," Robbins said. "I'm confident Cisco will be one of those winners. This means making hard decisions -- about where we invest, how we're organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us." Cisco said in a filing that severance and other costs will result in pre-tax charges of $1 billion, and that the company will recognize about $450 million of that in the fiscal fourth quarter. During the third quarter, Cisco announced switches and routers that use its next-generation processor. The company also debuted a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models based on their robustness against cybersecurity attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The murder of a young Pennsylvania woman remains unsolved for 34 years - can a determined detective and new technology bring her killer to justice?

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German chancellor Friedrich Merz has strongly condemned the Russian attacks on Ukraine overnight, and rejected Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that one of his predecessors could play a role negotiating a peace settlement.

In a speech in Aachen, Merz said that while Ukraine and Europe “want to help end this terrible war as quickly as possible,” the Russian attacks “speak a different language” to that of Putin’s suggestions the war could be nearing an end.

“Last but not least, we Europeans decide for ourselves who speaks for us. No one else.”

Prime Minister Evika Silina resigned after suspected Ukrainian drones headed for Russia crossed into her country, sparking concerns about its defenses.

Chancellor says ‘now not the time to put economic stability at risk’ as ONS records 0.3% growth in first month of Iran war

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• Analysis: Reeves says ‘if economy ain’t broke, don’t fix it’

The chancellor has seized on official figures showing the UK economy was more resilient than feared at the start of the Iran war as evidence to keep the current Labour leadership in place.

Rachel Reeves hailed the fact that the economy unexpectedly grew in March, during the first month of the conflict in the Middle East, as proof the government had “the right economic plan”.

West Bank home described as ‘ideal for outdoor gatherings’ is among 41 listed rentals in illegal Israeli settlements

Some of Mohammad al-Sbeih’s fondest childhood memories are of his small farm in the hills south of Bethlehem, where three generations of his family grew wheat and barley.

“It was a hard plot to farm as it was on a hillside with terraces, but it was so beautiful,” Sbeih remembers.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting quit embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Cabinet in what is expected to be a precursor to challenging his leadership.

The identification of the remains also resolved a decades-long debate about the worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft will slingshot past Mars on Friday, on its way toward a rare metal-rich asteroid.

South Carolina’s state senate majority leader offered a nuanced case for rejecting Trump’s redistricting demands

How does a Republican leader say no to Donald Trump? How do they criticize the US president’s policies without facing a social media riot, or losing their career?

As the party scrambles to redraw key congressional districts after the supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act that prevented racial discrimination, all eyes turned this week to South Carolina.

I had never had the privilege of speaking with the president of the United States until last week. And it really was – it was a privilege. I enjoyed the conversation. It was a very good conversation. He gave me more time in a phone call than I could have expected …

The president told me, he said: ‘Look, I hope you can help us out.’ He said: ‘But I understand you got to do what you’re comfortable with, you got to do what you think is right.’

I would hope that the home team can retain the majority. And I would also hope that if the home team retains the majority, that they’ll actually do something productive with it. Over the last year and a half, I suspect if we look back at what they’ve done with the majority, I don’t know that anybody in here could name more than one piece of legislation they’ve passed.

And no matter how big and beautiful it was, there’s a whole lot more that they’ve left on the table. And that, to me, is disappointing – to have a majority that doesn’t do anything with it.

Trying to go to 7-0 I think is extremely risky from a political standpoint. I think at best you’re going to get 6-1 and you may even go 5-2. I’ve told the press a number of times, I think if you get cute with this, you could end up in a 5-2 scenario. I don’t want to go 5-2.

I don’t want [Democratic House minority leader] Hakeem Jeffries as the speaker of the House. I think the best chance that South Carolina has to prevent that from happening is with our current maps.

I cannot in good conscience surrender this authority that has been preserved to, for and by the states, and merely take orders from those who are not in South Carolina …

I absolutely understand what the president’s concern is here. I understand what the president’s issue is here. I don’t disagree with that. But there are other concerns that we have to consider. Those concerns have not been considered at all with the proposal that we have. Those concerns affect South Carolina and South Carolinians. And it is up to us to consider those things.

We’ve been able to punch above our weight regardless of the administration, regardless of who the president is, regardless of who occupies the White House. South Carolina has been able to deliver not just for South Carolina, but for the country and the world.

We have had that influence. Doing this will absolutely diminish that influence. It just will. And everybody knows it. Everybody in here, everybody who’s familiar with the process, we understand what’s going to happen here …

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 14, 2026 — Cerebras Systems Inc. has announced the pricing of its initial public offering of an aggregate of 30,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock, at a public offering price of $185.00 per share. In addition, Cerebras has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4,500,000 shares of its Class A common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on May 14, 2026, under the ticker symbol “CBRS.” The offering is expected to close on May 15, 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.

Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS Investment Bank are acting as lead book-running managers for the offering. Mizuho and TD Cowen are acting as bookrunners. Needham & Company, Craig-Hallum, Wedbush Securities, Rosenblatt, Academy Securities, Credit Agricole CIB, MUFG, and First Citizens Capital Securities are acting as co-managers.

A registration statement relating to these securities was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This offering is being made only by means of a prospectus, copies of which may be obtained, when available, from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014, or by email at prospectus@morganstanley.com; Citigroup Global Markets Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, or telephone: 800-831-9146; and Barclays Capital Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, by email at barclaysprospectus@broadridge.com, or telephone at 1-888-603-5847.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

More from HPCwire: Cerebras IPO Signals Growing Pressure on the GPU Scaling Model

About Cerebras Systems

Cerebras Systems is building the fastest AI infrastructure in the world. We are a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, AI researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to make AI blisteringly fast through innovation and invention because we believe that when AI is fast, it will change the world. Our flagship technology, the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) is the world’s largest and fastest commercialized AI processor. 58 times larger than a leading GPU chip, the WSE-3 uses a fraction of the power per unit compute while delivering inference up to 15 times faster than leading GPU-based solutions as benchmarked on leading open-source models. Leading corporations, research institutes, and governments on four continents chose Cerebras to run their AI workloads. Cerebras solutions are available on premises and in the cloud.

Source: Cerebras Systems

The post Cerebras Systems Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering appeared first on HPCwire.

Doctor in Brandenburg state allegedly committed the crimes, including child rape, between 2013 and 2025

German prosecutors have charged a paediatrician with 130 counts of sexual abuse, including the rape of children, most of them in his care, in a case that has caused shock and prompted clinics to step up safeguards.

The 46-year-old doctor, whose name has not been released, has been in custody since November after a mother suspected her child had been assaulted and notified authorities. The doctor worked in clinics in Brandenburg state, surrounding Berlin.

SHEFFIELD, England, May 14, 2026 — Iceotope Group today announced the close of a $26 million series B funding round. The investment was led by Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures along with participation by existing investors Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone and British Patient Capital. Iceotope will use the funding to advance product and engineering development, expand its patent portfolio and accelerate ecosystem partnerships that will bring solutions incorporating Iceotope technology to market.

“Securing such high-caliber investors validates both our technology and our market timing,” stated Simon Jesenko, CEO and CFO of Iceotope. “We’ve spent years developing a robust, differentiated IP portfolio and products purpose-built for AI infrastructure, and we’re ready to scale at precisely the moment the industry demands more advanced, sustainable cooling technology. The opportunity ahead – both directly with customers and through our partner ecosystem – is significant.”

AI infrastructure is approaching a thermal inflection point. Next-generation GPU and accelerator platforms are driving rack power densities toward 1MW and beyond, rendering air cooling and direct-to-chip liquid cooling insufficient.

As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) move beyond the data center into widescale deployments in the enterprise and at the edge, the thermal challenge of cooling the hardware is moving with it. Iceotope’s precision liquid cooling technology enables systems to operate at maximum efficiency in any environment, while significantly reducing energy use and water consumption required for cooling.

According to SemiAnalysis, the liquid-cooled AI accelerator installed base is projected to grow from approximately 3GW to 40GW within two years, a more than 10X increase driven by hyperscaler and colocation adoption of AI workloads that conventional cooling architectures cannot sustain. Liquid cooling technology is equally applicable beyond the core data center, extending to extreme edge deployments where thermal management constraints are equally demanding.

“With AI adoption rapidly increasing globally, Iceotope’s liquid-cooling technology offers a timely and innovative solution to the mounting limitations of traditional cooling systems,” said Steven Poulter, Head of Barclays Climate Ventures. “Its approach not only meets the escalating demands of AI and high-performance computing but also materially advances datacenter sustainability. Aligned with Barclays Climate Ventures’ mandate to invest in commercially scalable climate technologies, we believe Iceotope is strongly positioned in a growing market and capable of significantly improving energy efficiency in a critical sector.”

About Iceotope

Iceotope Group is a global pioneer in liquid cooling that began in 2005 as a research‑driven “green computing” venture and has since evolved into a specialist in precision liquid cooling for data centers and edge infrastructure.

Today, with 219 patents granted and pending, our unique chassis based precision liquid cooling approach replaces traditional air cooling with highly efficient liquid-based thermal management for all infrastructure components. Our solutions can be deployed in nearly any environment with near silent operation and minimal water use. To learn more, visit www.iceotope.com.

Source: Iceotope

The post Iceotope Raises $26M to Solve Thermal Bottleneck at the Heart of Next-Gen AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Docked ship reportedly seized outside UAE port by “unauthorised personnel”

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said ships entering the strait of Hormuz must cooperate with the Iranian navy as reports emerged of a ship being seized outside a United Arab Emirate port and taken towards Iranian waters.

The UK Maritime Trading Organisation said the docked ship was seized by “unauthorised personnel” while it was anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah near the southern entry to the strait of Hormuz.

Evika Siliņa stands down after coalition collapses following sacking of defence minister

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Evika Siliņa announced her resignation on Thursday, a day after the Progressives party, her left-leaning coalition partner, withdrew its support over her decision to fire the defence minister, Andris Sprūds, a Progressives member.

US plaintiffs say waterfront site was improperly transferred for Trump’s personal gain

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Almost three acres of prime waterfront land that once belonged to Miami Dade College (MDC) were illegally gifted to the US president by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, the lawsuit states.