Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from his remaining roles at Harvard over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the university confirmed to CBS News.
A British gym chain is offering classes in "kidulting," luring adults into fitness with classes built around playground and PE class classics.
Australian detectives arrested two men over the alleged kidnapping and murder of an elderly grandfather in a suspected case of mistaken identity.
Government reviews options for university graduates on Plan 2 loans, such as increasing repayment thresholds
Ministers are examining ways to ease the burden of student loans after weeks of pressure over a policy pulling more people into repayments, the Guardian understands.
The Treasury and the Department for Education are reviewing different options to offer relief to graduates with Plan 2 student loans, often paying tens of thousands more than their original loan amount.
Continue reading...Minister told MPs the deal had been been paused, but that was immediately denied by the Foreign Office
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published figures showing that local authorities in England dealt with 1.26m flytipping incidents in 2024/25 – 9% increase on the previous year.
And there was an 11% increase in incidents involving a “tipper lorry load” amount of rubbish. There were 52,000 of these, up from 47,000 in 2023/24. Defra said these alone cost councils £19.3m.
These figures show the equivalent of 142 monster landfills a day took place, confirming what communities across the country know all too well – our beautiful countryside is being used by criminal gangs as their personal landfill.
For far too long, waste gangs have pocketed millions in illegal earning, poisoning our environment and our health without consequence. The Liberal Democrats are demanding an end to this environmental vandalism.
Continue reading...Date for referendum on opening talks to join the EU yet to be decided but will be ‘in the coming months’, says Kristrún Frostadóttir
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was looking to repair the Druzhba oil pipeline but “it was not so fast,” Reuters reported.
Shipments of Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia have been cut off since 27 January, when Kyiv says a Russian strike hit pipeline equipment in western Ukraine.
Continue reading...Minister ‘misspoke’ by telling MPs UK was ‘pausing for discussions with our American counterparts’, officials say
Plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, was speaking on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Consumers today can easily spend more than $1,000 a year for streaming TV, music and other widely used apps, new analysis finds.
Gold is grabbing headlines, but silver, platinum and palladium tell a different investment story in today's market.
Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has apologized to staff of his foundation over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Feb. 25, 2026 — Researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have developed a new tool providing a first step toward the ability to forecast space weather weeks in advance, instead of just hours. This advance warning could allow agencies and industries to mitigate impacts to GPS, power grids, astronaut safety and more.
The left figure shows solar observations of two warped toroid patterns (derived from SDO/HMI magnetograms) in the southern and northern hemispheres. PINN-derived results (center) show magnetic vectors (black arrows) overlaid on bulges (red) and depressions (blue) match with observed toroidal bands. The velocity field is marked with black arrows in the right image. These results provide clues about the global sources of active regions that produce space weather, which can impact our technical society.
The research team’s newly published research highlights a tool they developed called PINNBARDS (PINN-Based Active Regions Distribution Simulator), which bridges surface observations of solar active regions and deep solar magnetic dynamics. The PINNBARDS framework is advancing a new generation of physics-informed, AI-enabled forecasting tools to better understand and anticipate extreme space weather. PINNBARDS offers the potential for substantially longer forecast lead times, which is critical for safeguarding satellites, communications infrastructure and future human space exploration.
“The reconstructed subsurface states from PINNBARDS provide initial conditions for forward simulations of solar magnetic evolution, opening the door to predicting where and when large, flare-producing active regions are likely to emerge weeks in advance,” said Mausumi Dikpati, NSF NCAR senior scientist, who led the team and co-authored the paper.
The simulations for the research – including code development, testing, and production runs – utilized the Derecho supercomputer at the NSF NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center. The research was funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Guest Investigator Open (HGIO) program and Consequences of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun (COFFIES) DRIVE Center, a NASA-funded initiative where Dikpati is a co-investigator.
“One of COFFIES aims is to predict where and when the Sun will produce its next big, flare-generating active region,” said Todd Hoeksema, Stanford University professor and the lead of the COFFIES DRIVE Center. “By combining physics-based modeling with AI, this work lets us peer beneath the Sun’s surface and reconstruct the magnetic conditions that give rise to those regions.”
For more about the research, see the SwRI news release here.
About the Article
Title: A Physics Informed Neural Network for Deriving MHD State Vectors from Global Active Regions Observations
Authors: Subhamoy Chatterjee and Mausumi Dikpati
Journal: The Astrophysical Journal
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Source: Audrey Merket, NCAR
The post NCAR: New Research Takes 1st Step Toward Advance Warnings of Space Weather appeared first on HPCwire.
States call move an illegal threat to public health and argue CDC puts children’s lives at risk with new guidance
More than a dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over its rollback of vaccine recommendations for children, calling the move an illegal threat to public health.
The states argue that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put children’s lives at risk when it announced last month that it would stop recommending all children get immunized against the flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV. Under the new guidance, which was met with criticism from medical experts, protections against those diseases are recommended only for certain groups deemed high risk or when doctors recommend them in what’s called “shared decision-making.”
Continue reading...Chuck Schumer says Democrats were right not to stand for Trump; Mike Johnson criticizes congresswomen’s verbal protests during speech
A newly revealed diplomatic cable calls on US diplomats to work against attempts by foreign nations to regulate how US tech companies handle their citizens’ data, as “data sovereignty initiatives” gather steam in Europe over security concerns.
More from Reuters:
President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services.
Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information - initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.“
Continue reading...Casey Means is an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an advocate for his "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
Fines for illegal dumping decreased over past year with only 0.2% of incidents resulting in court action
Fly-tipping incidents across England have reached the highest level since current records began, with most offences continuing to involve household waste.
In 2024-25, 1.26m fly-tipping incidents were recorded by local authorities, an increase of 9% on the 1.15m reported in the year before, according to data released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Wednesday.
Continue reading...About 50 million workers lack access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, a hurdle to setting aside money for old age.
We're reporting live from Samsung's Unpacked event in San Francisco, where the company's expected to reveal the Galaxy S26, S26 Plus and S26 Ultra.
Corporation says broadcasting of N-word by Tourette syndrome campaigner was ‘serious mistake’
The BBC is to undertake a fast-track investigation into the broadcasting of a racial slur aired during its coverage of the Bafta film awards, amid rising anger inside the corporation over the error.
Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson could be heard shouting the N-word as Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for special visual effects at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan's offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The source said Japan's antitrust authorities would also be seeking clarification from Microsoft's parent company in the United States. Microsoft Japan is suspected of setting conditions that effectively shut out other services by limiting access to popular services on other cloud platforms, the source said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Will recent declines in the mortgage interest rate climate continue this March? Here's what experts are expecting.
The Sharp Celerity oven harnesses the power of three types of heat to blast food to doneness even faster than an air fryer.
Looking to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage interest rates to know right now.
Microsoft co-founder admits affairs and calls meetings ‘huge mistake’ but denies involvement in Epstein’s crimes
Bill Gates apologized to staff of his foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to two affairs but stated he did not participate in the convicted sex offender’s crimes, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
At a town hall on Tuesday, Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” and to bring Gates Foundation executives to meetings with Epstein.
Continue reading...Committee to Protect Journalists report says Israel also to blame for 81% of ‘intentionally targeted’ journalist killings
A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, and two-thirds of them were killed by Israel, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said.
It was the second straight year that killings set a record and the second straight year that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of them, the CPJ, a New York-based independent organisation that documents attacks on the press, said in its annual report.
Continue reading...I looked back to discover the untold story of how western intelligence was misread, even in Kyiv. The conclusion offers a stark warning for the future
Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at this time of year it’s hard not to recall memories of the morning of 24 February 2022, when the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe were irrevocably changed by the decision of the man in the Kremlin.
Around 9pm the evening before, I had received a message from a colleague at another news outlet. It was an unequivocal warning from an intelligence source that the war would start that night. We discussed it among the Guardian’s Ukraine reporting team and international editors. My colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who was on an overnight train from Kyiv towards the frontline city of Mariupol, decided she would get off halfway, in the middle of the night, and beg a spot on the first train heading back to Kyiv. It turned out to be a wise move: Mariupol was soon under siege and the scene of much of the worst carnage of the war. Emma remained in Kyiv, part of our team covering the initial Russian attack on the capital.
Continue reading...Critics concerned as Casey Means, aligned with RFK Jr on vaccine stance, does not have active medical licence
Casey Means, Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general of the United States, appeared before lawmakers on the Senate committee for health, labor and pensions on Wednesday, after her initial confirmation hearing was postponed in October when she went into labor hours before she was set to testify.
Means is the president’s controversial pick for the role of the nation’s top doctor, responsible for disseminating the latest public health guidance.
Continue reading...“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to.
“This is who these people are. In some ways, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it,” says Lacy, in reference to Trump talking about kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “It is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.”
Washington adds, “The whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech.”
The co-hosts also dissect the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, Intercept contributor and co-host of this podcast, joined by my co-hosts.
Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
JU: Akela, Jessica, it is late. We just sat through — endured, rather —nearly two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union and the multiple responses. We’ll get into some of what will surely be the main takeaways from this speech, but in a word or a few words, what are both of your initial reactions to tonight’s State of the Union?
JW: My word is “long.” I don’t think it needs an explanation.
AL: This is not a word, but I kept having an image in my head of villains in a superhero movie, standing around, laughing at what they’ve accomplished. [laughs]
JW: No, but you’re totally right because that one line about the food stamps. So there was this line from the very long speech that we’re describing where Donald Trump says that, he — I can’t remember exactly what word he gave.
AL: “Lifted off.” I think he said “lifted off.”
JW: Lifted off.
AL: Yeah.
JW: Lifted off 2.4 million people from food stamps as like an economic accomplishment. And that does give like Disney villain in a very specific way.
AL: “Dark” — dark is my one word.
JU: Yeah, that was certainly one way to frame plunging millions of people into food insecurity. And of course that was an applause line.
My takeaway would be the weaponized contrast. One thing I thought was a significant departure from past State of the Unions was how Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points. Now in the state of the union’s past, of course, the opposition party for the most part remains seated, but tonight felt like a slight departure from that partisan tradition where he singled them out. Repeatedly pointed out that they weren’t standing and clapping, and even on some points remarked how he was surprised that they even clapped.
Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points.
Trump delivered his last [joint session of Congress] address a year ago in a very different environment, coming off winning the presidency for a second time and major GOP wins that year. Things aren’t so rosy this time around. What do you both think has been the biggest change for Trump? What was the primary obstacle that he needed to clear or try to spin in tonight’s speech?
JW: There’s a lot that he had to clear up. I think there’s his loss on tariffs, obviously he’s still smarting from that, now saying that he’s going to do it anyway. A little bit confusing on what he means by that.
I think his “anti-war” agenda that he’s been trying to spin himself as very anti-war is difficult when he just did what he did in Venezuela and when we’re watching the preparations for a very likely strike on Iran. So he’s got a lot that he has to spin because he’s tried to create this image of himself as anti-war, as good on the economy — and those things are not panning out even remotely close to what he’s promised.
AL: And the Epstein files blowing up in his face. There was reporting today that apparently DOJ scrubbed allegations against Trump sexually abusing a minor, and we have some Democrats, I think Rashida Tlaib was yelling at him during this to release the Epstein files. And this is high on many Democrats’ mind, but obviously not that he would address this, but that’s in the background here. Not even in the background, it’s in the foreground right now.
And then, yeah, his approval ratings are lower than they were at this point in his first term. His disapproval ratings, I would say are higher, and his approval is about the same.
And there are two very different stories being told about the economy right now. Obviously, Democrats are — we’ll get to the response later — but trying to focus on affordability issues. And you have Trump pretty much making a mockery of that and trying to throw that in their faces while claiming that everything is fine and dandy when we know very clearly that it’s not, people have lost their health care, are paying exorbitant amounts just to get through on a day-to-day basis.
And I feel like this didn’t really come through. If you haven’t been paying attention, and you might have just been watching the State of the Union for pleasure — which I don’t know many people who are doing that — but he was able to get the One Big Beautiful Bill. As Jessie mentioned, the tariffs are falling apart. That was another major part of his economic agenda.
But you also have Republicans who are saying that they’re not necessarily going to go through with his pressure to have them codify tariffs or codify any of these other things into law. And this is not a “Let’s hand it to Republicans” moment, but they have also broken with him on Epstein in very small numbers. But not everything is hunky dory with him and the Republican caucus right now as well.
JU: I think any Republican opposition in Congress to another attempt to institute tariffs isn’t out of concern for those costs being passed on to the consumer. It’s simply out of fealty to corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, their donors.
That’s where he would meet opposition, not out of any purported concern for their base. And like you’re saying, there are two different stories about the economy. He’s bragging, similar to Pam Bondi in the Epstein hearing, about the Dow hitting 50,000. He’s bragging about the stock market.
Donald Trump: The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year.
JU: Those gains rarely affect the average working person. And then on the other side, you have “60 Minutes” reporting that SNAP and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history.
Another part of the speech that stood out was the focus on militarism. Along those lines on these funding cuts for these social safety net programs, we’re seeing a massive uptick in military spending. He’s committing to 5 percent of GDP in our military spending. And we saw a report over the past few days from Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that said a requested $500 billion increase in military spending is slowing down the budget process because the military doesn’t even know how they would spend that additional $500 billion.
So I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, how do you think this lands in the minds of the average voter? Granted, like you said Akela, who’s watching this for fun? But we live in a shortened attention span economy where people will see clips, and surely some of these narratives will filter out. So when they see him bragging about the economy saying it’s robust and strong, meanwhile they’re looking at their bank accounts and they see a totally different story but ratcheting up military spending, how does this land?
JW: Yeah, I think that kind of stuff backfires. I think you’re talking about kind of two separate but connected things, which is military interventions, which we know are unpopular with a lot of, even the Republican base, a lot of Trump’s base is uninterested in that.
And then there’s also — which is the same mistake that the Biden administration made — which is telling people what the economy looks like for them. And I interviewed members of the Biden administration during the presidential election. And something that they kept saying was, people feel great, the economy is strong, people are doing fine. And people didn’t feel that, and they didn’t vote that way.
And so I think they’re going to run into the exact same problems that every administration runs into, when they’re campaigning on their accomplishments, which is, it actually has to match up with how people are feeling economically, and the indicators just aren’t there.
I also listened to Summer Lee’s rebuttal for the Working Families Party, and this was something she brought up really directly. And I think this is something that has been talked about in our politics a lot recently, which is, we have money for bombs overseas, but we don’t have money for health care. We don’t have money to actually provide a good life for our citizens. And that’s something that Summer Lee brought up. They’re trying to distract you with all these different issues when the real problem is we’re giving money to corporations, we’re spending money on bombs, and we’re not spending money feeding people as Donald Trump himself pointed out. And we’re also not spending money on people’s health care.
Summer Lee: Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t afford it. We somehow find endless money for ICE, for private prisons to warehouse Black and brown people and for bombs to be sent abroad. But we’re told health care and childcare are too expensive. And when we begin questioning those priorities, the powerful try to divide us once more. But that old playbook is losing its grip.
AL: I was reading some reporting in Punch Bowl on Tuesday that Republicans were talking about how they wanted Trump to frame this military spending. This is talking about him wanting to increase Pentagon funding by 50 percent. And they’re like, we don’t want him to sit to say the number $1.5 trillion. We want him to talk about it as a percentage of GDP and how it compares to past decades of military spending. Basically so it doesn’t sound as bad, but they also want him to frame it as what we’re doing to modernize the military and counter threats from our enemies around the globe.
“It’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance, the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.”
Which we did hear him, reverting to this, what is a theme for him, painting this image of himself as a strongman, like policing the world while also telling everyone that he’s not policing the world and he’s the president of peace. So it’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.
But to their credit, Republicans are at least acknowledging openly that you have to frame this in a way that makes sense to the American public, whether it’s accurate or not. And I think that is the one thing that if you’re someone who is already giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and you listen to this, that sounds good, right, on its face?
JU: Yeah. It’s much more abstract when you’re talking about percentages of GDP than a $1 trillion-plus military budget.
JW: You guys can’t forget that he ended the war in the Congo, though. That was a key accomplishment from the speech. [laughs]
JU: Oh, who could forget? Where were you?
AL: Can we talk about the Venezuela thing? Because that —
JW: Please,
AL: Freaked me out to my core. Like jokingly, let’s not forget about our buddy Venezuela, when you kidnapped the fucking president, and JD Vance and Mike Johnson are behind him, like, laughing. I don’t know, that moment for me was just so blatantly, this is who these people are. In some ways, yes, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways, they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it. And it is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.
JW: Yeah.
JU: Yeah. Not just that, but the deliberate reckless killing of fishers. Yeah, that was a laugh line. Yeah. Oh, we decimated their fishing industry, and you get hardy laughs from the Republican caucus.
DT: We have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that. [Laughter]
We very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also nobody wants to go fishing anymore. [Laughter]
JW: The Intercept’s reporting, which we’ve done a lot of great reporting on this from Nick Turse. But we’re talking about these strikes where people were clinging, dying with no relief. Just like these strikes are horrific, if you read about them the strikes have now passed over 150 dead. So just to keep that in mind for the laugh line there.
JU: The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me as yet another departure from past State of the Unions, and we saw that also in how they talked about the Somali population in Minnesota. Trump made, if you want to call it a joke, that once they crack down on Somali fraud in Minnesota to a sufficient extent, we will balance our budget. And this served as a segue to brutal crackdowns in our cities, the deliberate targeting of certain populations in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul. And what was also interesting to watch in this part of the speech was the vocal opposition from Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Talib. Now, what were both of your reactions during this part and what stood out to you?
AL: What really stood out to me beyond the disgusting racism was the fact that he telegraphed that they’re going to do this in other states. At the end of that whole thing, he was like, oh, the number of this fraud is much higher in California, Massachusetts, and Maine. Places where he’s also been sending ICE. There’s been ICE agents terrorizing people all over those states and ramping up operations in Maine, particularly after Minneapolis. So that was alarming.
DT: There’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse.
This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the War on Fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.
AL: We’ve been talking about this and doing a lot of reporting on this, but a perfect and fully disturbing example of how the racist conspiracy theories that incubate in the far-right corners of the internet, become policy like that in this administration. And where like where this whole thing came from is a far-right influencer who started peddling this online. Chris Rufo picked it up and a couple months later, ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis.
Like these are the consequences of this. And I think people understand that is directly linked to what he’s doing with ICE. This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens.
“This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens.”
JU: Chris Rufo, of course, for those unfamiliar, is with the Manhattan Institute and has been a key player in nationalizing right-wing controversies and culture wars, specifically the rights fight against “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives among other “hot-button issues.” He really does have a significant and outsized ability to shape narratives on the right.
AL: And while we’re talking about DEI, there was raucous applause to Trump saying we ended DEI. I think that was the most applause that I heard the whole time. And like, people were cheering.
JU: Kitchen table issue.
AL: You can also thank Chris Rufo for that.
JW: To your point, the whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech — not all of it, but large sections of it. Particularly when he says that Somali pirates are coming to commit fraud and also to ruin the culture. The cultural elements of the ways he was talking about Somali people, I think are some of the most kind of clearly racist elements.
“In some ways, he’s broken the racism barrier.”
But I have been just thinking about the State of the Union in the light of Trump posting that really racist image of the Obamas, because in some ways he’s broken the racism barrier is the way I would think about it is that he’s done something so blatantly racist in our culture. And just to be clear, I’m referring to the photo, sorry, the AI image that he posted on Truth Social of the Obamas as apes. So he’s already broken this racism barrier. So there is almost no point. to a certain extent, in even talking about him saying that Somali people are ruining the culture, the kind of Hitler-esque things that he said before about immigrants poisoning the blood — there is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. And so this white national speech, it just makes sense. It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.
“There is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. … It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.”
AL: It just makes me so upset because each of these things are issues where Democrats seeded so much ground in the beginning that like allowed him to just be like, OK, actually yeah, now we’re just doing racist stuff because you guys let us get really far on immigration and claiming this was a problem and claiming there were people flooding in.
They’re like, some people are ruining the culture, not quite in the way that you’re saying it. Some people are creating all this crime problem, not quite in the way that you’re saying it, and like that being their strategy to win back voters is like to seed ground on these issues effectively. And it just makes me really mad when I think about it for too long. That’s what you saw in my eyes.
JW: On that point, I do want to talk about his anti-trans rhetoric. Speaking of Democrats seeding ground on issues, Donald Trump brought a Liberty University college student at one point, who he had brought as a guest, to make this point about transgender children, essentially. And so he had said that a school had enabled her to transition, which had then led her to run away and be kidnapped and sex trafficked. Now the mom and this girl are suing multiple entities that they hold responsible, including the school. But Donald Trump really used this moment to try and fearmonger against trans children.
This kind of idea on the right that they’re going to kidnap your children and make them trans — I think this is really an issue where we’ve seen a lot of Democrats seed ground. Obviously there was the infamous Seth Moulton comment about not wanting his kid, his young daughters, to play with males — referring to trans children that they would potentially be playing soccer with, trans girls.
So we’ve seen Democrats really seed ground on this issue and say it’s fair that people have these concerns. It’s fair that people are scared about their children being kidnapped and turned trans — which is not a thing that’s happening.
But it’s really just this massive seeding of ground. We’ve seen obviously outlets like The Atlantic, the New York Times have obviously really contributed to this paranoia. And it’s legitimizing this fearmongering that Republicans have invested millions and millions of dollars, and it’s doing the work for them instead of actually talking about this issue directly or not just throwing trans kids under the bus is another option. So that’s my little rant.
AL: I’ll also just add one thing on that, I am not a fan of Abigail Spanberger. She’s a moderate and she’s an ex-CIA agent. We’ll leave it at that. But the fact that she delivered the Democratic response after winning a gubernatorial election, in which her Republican opponents repeatedly tried to bait her on trans issues and weaponize this issue against her — We did some reporting on that, talking with analysts about how her win was an example of Democrats sticking to their values on this issues is not necessarily a liability. I can’t speak to her record throughout Congress on this stuff, but at least in charting the path for midterms for both parties tonight and the Democratic response, I just thought that was interesting, that like after doing this whole dog-and-pony show over trans stuff, like they picked someone who stood firmly on that to give the response.
JW: I will also say anecdotally, so I’ve been covering the Senate primary race between Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, and I would say anecdotally, people are still really upset about those comments that Seth Moulton made about trans children.
And so there’s this idea that there’s only political upside to throwing part of your base and parts of your base that your base also cares about, right, even if they aren’t a large part of your voting block. I think there is a political penalty for that that Democrats don’t see, and I think that’s true with immigrants. That is true on issues related to transgender people. They only see the upside of winning over this kind of mythical moderate and they never seem to see the downside, where you lose people who actually thought that you supported their values.
[Break]
JU: One of the other areas on the topic of seeding ground that I’m really fascinated by that Trump talked about in this speech were his purported desires to ban private equity in Wall Street from buying single-family homes and his calls for Congress to pass a ban on congressional stock trading. Now the devil’s in the details with these sorts of things and with the stock trading ban further reporting shows that he opposes a version of this bill that would also apply to himself, the White House and the judiciary.
Then while he says he wants to stop Wall Street and private equity from buying single-family homes, he’s calling on Congress to do that. And similar to the expected opposition from Republicans in Congress on tariffs at the behest of corporate interests, I expect similar opposition on this. But in rhetoric alone, I do think those are two things that resonate with the average American. What did you both make of those two points tonight?
AL: It’s one of those things where he knows what to say. He knows to say the right thing. Less than 1 percent of the population is going to be like, is this true? Maybe that’s ungenerous, but you know what I mean. Democrats, on the flip side, tangle themselves up in the these particular issues, not only because they’re doing the thing that’s bad, like they’re doing insider stock trading, they’re siding with corporate landlords and fighting or doing everything they can to not really do anything on housing, but they’re so afraid to say something that isn’t poll tested that again, they’re seeding ground to him on this when he’s clearly lying and enriching himself and doing all these things that would negate this behind the scenes, particularly for himself, as you’re saying.
But the fact that Democrats are also hypocrites on this doesn’t really work because they won’t say the thing. It’s not that hard to go toe to toe with him. It’s actually very simple, but you’re so concerned about making sure that you’re not turning off again, this middle of the road person, that you don’t take this low-hanging fruit.
And like you saw Elizabeth Warren standing up. This is the only part that they panned to her during this. I don’t know if she stood otherwise, but she was like pointing at him, being like, what about you? OK, let’s get that. Let’s get that in the response. Let’s get Abigail Spanberger hitting that on the head.
JW: Yeah. To your point, Akela, in her response for the Working Families Party, Summer Lee brought up the fact that Democrats are hamstrung by their commitment to corporate donors.
SL: The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On one side are millions of working people demanding bold action, lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for all. On the other side are corporate donors and consultants who are terrified of upsetting the very interests that rigged this economy in the first place.
JW: You cannot be sworn to the American public, sworn to working people and to their benefit, and also sworn to corporations that we cannot bring down MAGA while also making billionaires comfortable. And I think she’s really poking at that weak center point of the Democrats that you keep mentioning, which is that they are unwilling to, I think there’s both the issue of everything needs to be tested, but they’re also unwilling to throw off the shackles of corporate money, corporate interests.
JU: And to add some context to Trump’s investments, specifically Dave Levinthal in NOTUS has a piece from December 23, 2025, where he wrote that Trump has invested tens of millions of dollars into corporate and government bonds, including those of companies and local governments his administration’s decisions could affect according to a new financial disclosure. So it’s not just that he’s enriching himself off of dealings with other governments, dealings with other oil Gulf state figures. He’s also making money in the market and his own decisions influence the performance of those investments. So of course, he’s going to oppose applying a stock trading ban to himself.
But I also want to go back to Spanberger and the Democratic Party’s decision to pick her to deliver the official response. Like you said Akela, you’re not necessarily a fan, she’s extremely moderate, we’ll say, former CIA official. What do you think this says at a time where we’re seeing surprising flips in state legislatures in red states, massive swings in favor of Democrats, poll numbers for Trump in the tank, you’re seeing Trump voters, some of Trump’s loudest supporters switch? They’re changing their tune entirely. They’re criticizing him over his handling of the Epstein files, of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies’ presence and actions in cities across this country. That seems like a window where they can shift things more to the left, but here they rolled out Abigail Spanberger. Does that send up a red flag for you going into the midterms?
AL: I’m of two minds about this because you can’t ignore the fact that she just won her race and that Glenn Youngkin was the governor of Virginia. For a while, Democrats thought they had it in the bag. She was openly talking about her win in her response, pointing to the fact that they had Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters, this big tent. And that’s important in a state like Virginia.
Is that a roadmap? Is that what’s going to help them win back the house? Wild card Senate even might be up for grabs. Republicans seem really concerned about this. I don’t think so, but I do think, again, the fact that she didn’t see it on some of these “cultural war” issues in her last race is a positive sign. Do I think that means that’s how Democrats are going to play this? Absolutely not.
I’ll also mention that Abigail Spanberger was a pretty big recipient of corporate PAC money while she was in the House and during the 2023 to 2024 cycle. AIPAC was her top single donor. So these are all issues that we know have lost Democrat support and mixing that with a couple of things that are positive and helped her win her election, I don’t think that’s enough to get them where they want to be.
I was not shocked at all that they pick someone like Abigail Spanberger. They typically pick a moderate. I was pleasantly surprised, I would say, because the bar is on the floor, the fact that she was saying Trump is not telling you the truth, talking about the fact that he’s enriching himself, talking directly about the impact that him unleashing federal agents on U.S. cities has had.
Abigail Spanberger: In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does. He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse. He tries to divide us. He tries to enrage us to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds.
And so you have to ask who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting. He is enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.
AL: She didn’t say this explicitly, but shortly after being sworn in as governor, she said Virginia law enforcement was going to stop cooperating with ICE. These are things that we know are moving Democrats. And so whether that translates into the whole party getting on board with this, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. But it wasn’t like, didn’t Elissa Slotkin give the response one year? And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is worse than the State of the Union, and I didn’t feel that way coming out of this. So what does that mean? I don’t know.
JU: I guess that’s good.
JW: That was a ringing endorsement from Akela [laughs]: The speech didn’t make me feel like it was worse than the two-hour speech we all just listened to from the president.
AL: Sorry, the thing that pissed me off the most about Abigail Spanberger’s speech, I will say, and I think this gets to the heart of the issue, was that she’s in Virginia, she’s in Williamsburg where I went to college. So I understand sort of the nerdy allusions to what our Founding Fathers would’ve wanted.
“It’s just like third-grade patriotism.”
But she was using this like trite device to be like, Trump is ruining the America that our Founding Fathers wanted for us. And we could sit here and talk about all day how stupid that is. But that is like the model: It’s just like third-grade patriotism — a couple of jabs here and there, and we’re going to get everyone back on board. Again, I just don’t think it’s enough.
JW: Like you said, I’m not at all surprised that they picked her. They want a moderate. It obviously looks good for the Democrats to have a woman combating Trump. So that’s clearly part of the calculus as well. Spanberger did just win her election, flip the governor’s mansion, if you want to call it that. But with Spanberger’s election, you also have to keep in mind the context of Trump and what he did to the federal government.
He decimated the economy of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The massive layoffs, the anger at Trump in this area is astounding, so it’s not at all shocking, frankly, that she would win in this exact moment. Is that something that can be replicated throughout the country? Are they feeling the same direct impacts of Trump? I think in some ways, they are. When you look at SNAP cuts, when you look at cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, when you even just see videos of the violence happening in cities from ICE. But it doesn’t have that same direct impact, and so I don’t know if she’s as exciting [for] somewhere that’s not Virginia.
JU: As we wrap, we’re all exhausted. We’re fed up. What was the bright spot tonight for both of you? Was there a funny moment?
JW: This is not necessarily funny, but it made me think of a funny joke, when he brought out the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Now, they’d also had this kind of video stunt where the team had also been hanging out with Kash Patel, the FBI director; they had Trump on the phone where he made a joke about, I’ve gotta invite the women’s hockey team [or be impeached] — which, by the way, declined.
But the only thing that kept going through my mind was that this was terrible hockey PR. And “Heated Rivalry” had worked so hard to get us all into the spirit, to get all of us woke people who are too woke for hockey into it, and they’ve just tarnished the reputation of hockey. Once again, it can’t recover.
JU: Akela, what about you?
AL: I’m somewhere between the communist mayor of New York City, his little homage to Zohran Mamdani, who he’s obsessed with, and I just think it’s funny. And said again, I don’t like his policies, but I like him a lot [laughs] which honestly probably applies to like more than 75 percent of people outside of New York in his age demographic. They’re like, there’s something about this guy, I like him.
Either that, or this is just my brain being broken, because this made me laugh — this is not funny at all, but the response was funny — when he was like, “This should have been my third term.” And in the audience, you hear — I heard — like a mixture of what sounded like “Awww” and like boos. And I was just like, yeah, that sums it up pretty much.
JU: Someone did yell out “Four more years,” which is —
JW: Oh, great.
JU: Disconcerting. I’d say mine was, again, not funny subject matter, but the reaction was funny when he was talking about Iran yet again, trying to escalate tensions there, making not-so-veiled threats. Credit to the camera people and the control room for the event because somebody wisely fixated their camera on Lindsey Graham, who looked like he had reached another plane — like just the bliss that was so visible on his face throughout his body did make me laugh, as horrifying as it is. And that one was mine.
AL: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
JU: Yeah. Good Lord. I want to thank you both for suffering through this with me, and hopefully we saved the listeners two hours of their precious lives.
JW: Thanks, Jordan.
AL: Thanks, Jordan.
JU: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept 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.
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Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.
The post Rambling Man: Trump’s State of the Union appeared first on The Intercept.
Fifa to allow traditional Highland accessory into grounds
Tournament rules only permit certain types of bags
Scotland fans have been given the all-clear to wear their sporrans at the team’s matches at the 2026 World Cup.
Tournament rules only permitted certain types of bags into stadiums, and the pouch traditionally worn by Scots at the front of their kilt was deemed too large to meet the strict criteria.
Continue reading...Coalition government agrees to remove parts of controversial law and allow homes to rely on fossil fuels
Germany’s coalition government has been accused of abandoning its climate targets after agreeing to scrap parts of a contentious heating law mandating the use of renewables in favour of a draft law allowing homeowners to rely on fossil fuels.
While the previous law required most newly installed heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, often with a heat pump, the amended legislation will allow households to keep using oil and gas.
Continue reading...With Republicans facing grim poll figures, Trump promised action to influence the vote citing debunked fraud claims
Donald Trump once again railed against imagined fraud in America’s elections on Tuesday during the State of the Union address.
“They want to cheat,” he said of Democrats. “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that their only way to get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it.”
Continue reading...CBS News fact checked President Trump's 2026 State of the Union address, and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger's Democratic response.
Hamas to almost certainly reject plan described in Israeli press, say experts, as no guarantee Israel will withdraw on surrender of weapons
Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.
The second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire, which Washington declared had begun in January, was meant to involve Hamas disarming, Israeli forces withdrawing, and a Palestinian interim administration moving into Gaza backed by a Palestinian police force and an international stabilisation force (ISF).
Continue reading...Capcom finally found the right formula to give fans the scares they've wanted with the fan service they've been demanding.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app. The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option for eligible routes. The Uber app will book a flight and an Uber Black to pick you up and drop you off at a Joby "vertiport." Joby's air taxis, built exclusively for city travel, can accommodate up to four passengers and luggage. (Uber says size and weight guidelines will be announced closer to launch.) The interior is about the size of an SUV and has "comfortable seating" with panoramic windows. They can travel up to 200 mph and have a range of up to 100 miles. Four battery packs and a triple-redundant flight computer are onboard for safety purposes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pros will reportedly include the iPhone's Dynamic Island feature on their OLED screens.
Proposal approved by Modi government will bring official English name into line with Malayalam language
The Indian state of Kerala, known as “God’s own country” for its golden beaches and lush tea plantations, is to be given a new name.
Narendra Modi’s cabinet has approved a proposal to change the southern coastal state’s name from Kerala to Keralam. The move will bring the official English name into line with how it is pronounced in Malayalam, the primary language spoken by the state’s estimated population of 35 million.
Continue reading...TORONTO and MUNICH, Feb. 25, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., a leading photonic quantum computing company, today announced that it has successfully integrated PennyLane and its Catalyst compiler with the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT). MQT is developed by teams at the Chair for Design Automation of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Munich Quantum Software Company (MQSC) and enables an interoperable and scalable quantum software stack, based on mature classical compilation technology. This collaboration creates more accessible quantum software by connecting a user-friendly Python interface through Xanadu’s PennyLane to high-performance code that is the foundation of Catalyst and MQT.
As quantum hardware scales, quantum programs are becoming exponentially more complex, and compiling these larger programs efficiently is expected to become a major challenge in the quantum computing stack. Together, PennyLane, Catalyst, and MQT’s Core project bring complementary capabilities. PennyLane offers an intuitive interface for writing hybrid quantum-classical programs, while Catalyst and MQT handle the heavy-lifting for compilation by using specialized, high-performance tools that have been built over decades in classical computing.
Users can now access advanced compilation techniques from both tools by adding a single line of code to their PennyLane programs. This integration works seamlessly in the background and lowers barriers for designing quantum algorithms using software – allowing researchers and developers to focus on innovation rather than managing complex software configurations.
“This integration represents a significant step forward for the quantum software ecosystem and a great collaboration between leading players from Canada and Europe,” said Robert Wille, Full Professor representing TUM.
Lukas Burgholzer, Chief Technology Officer of MQSC, adds: “By bringing MQT’s advanced tools for verifying and optimizing quantum programs directly into the Catalyst infrastructure, we are giving researchers and developers the best of both worlds: a convenient frontend with state-of-the-art tools underneath that run automatically and efficiently.”
“To make quantum computing practical, we need a software stack that is both modular and high performing. Our work with TUM and MQSC demonstrates the power of unifying tools with unique specializations into a single, cohesive workflow,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “We are accelerating the development cycle and ensuring that quantum programs are not only faster but also more efficient by enabling PennyLane users to leverage MQT’s methods without changing their code structure.”
The project highlights the use and value of modular infrastructure for quantum software. Connecting complementary technologies from different sources – such as those from Xanadu, TUM, and MQSC – allows for a “mix-and-match” approach that unlocks the software stack to become more accessible for users. The result is a flexible infrastructure where specialized technologies can interoperate freely, fostering greater connectivity across the growing quantum software ecosystem.
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu’s PennyLane Integrates with Munich Quantum Toolkit to Advance Quantum Compilation appeared first on HPCwire.
Talks reportedly focused on assets of owner Jim Ratcliffe’s vinyls business Inovyn as group scrambles to cut costs
The chemicals empire owned by the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is in talks to sell parts of the business in the hope of raising hundreds of millions of pounds to tackle its rising debts, according to a report.
The talks are at an early stage but have focused on selling assets from Ratcliffe’s vinyls business, Ineos Inovyn, the Financial Times said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Continue reading...The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2026 list of nominees, including Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Wu-Tang Clan and more.
Feb. 25, 2026 — Two researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2025 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. David Kaphan and Yong Zhao will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.
Two Argonne scientists selected for DOE early-career support for projects in catalysis and nuclear physics.
This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.
David Kaphan is a chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division. His research focuses on designing a new generation of catalysts — materials that speed up chemical reactions — for chemical transformations to overcome key kinetic limitations of today’s catalysts. His project aims to explore the potential of electric field-responsive oxides, such as ferroelectrics, to actively control the surface-level electronic characteristics of catalytic active sites. This approach could enable the development of catalysts that adapt during chemical transformations, optimizing reactivity for different phases of chemical synthesis processes.
Kaphan’s project will study the complex role that external electric fields can play in the modulation of electronic surface properties during catalytic processes. He will use X-ray absorption spectroscopy techniques and other methods at the Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials — both DOE Office of Science user facilities at Argonne — to measure properties such as field responsive surface electron density and catalytic reactivity. Additionally, the project will integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the exploration of reaction parameters and electric field conditions. This work has the potential to revolutionize catalyst design for critical processes such as selective methane oxidation and ammonia synthesis.
“Stimulus-responsive, nonequilibrium catalysis represents an exciting opportunity to overcome the classical limitations of static processes and increase efficiency in chemical transformations,” said Kaphan. “This support will allow us to explore new frontiers in field-responsive dynamic catalyst design and develop new solutions to address key challenges in energy-related chemistry.”
Yong Zhao is an assistant physicist in the Physics division. His research seeks to address one of the most fundamental questions in nuclear physics: understanding the internal structure of protons and neutrons. These are key objectives of multidimensional proton imaging efforts at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Both protons and neutrons consist of different combinations of quarks and gluons. Zhao plans to develop a new theoretical approach and use lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) for precise calculations of the underlying multidimensional quark and gluon structures. This approach will enable high-precision imaging of the proton, as well as reveal the contributions of quark and gluon spin and orbital angular momentum to the proton’s spin.
Using the Aurora and Polaris supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, Zhao’s project aims to reduce systematic uncertainties and improve numerical precision in proton and neutron structural studies. Its insights will provide crucial theoretical guidance for experiments at Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven and other facilities.
“This award is a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of our understanding of the strong force and the fundamental building blocks of matter,” said Zhao. “I am grateful for the support that will allow us to make significant strides in this area of research.”
“Sustained investment in early-career researchers is essential to the long-term vitality of the nation’s scientific enterprise,” said Kawtar Hafidi, associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Physical Sciences and Engineering directorate. “Programs like the DOE Early Career Research Program help ensure that bold ideas and new approaches have the support they need to advance fundamental science and deliver lasting impact for the nation.”
Source: Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne’s David Kaphan and Yong Zhao Receive 2025 DOE Early Career Research Awards appeared first on HPCwire.
Man, 32, shot dead by deputy after stabbing attack was the subject of domestic violence protection orders
A man shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy after he fatally stabbed four people outside his mother’s home near Gig Harbor, Washington, on Tuesday morning was the subject of domestic violence protection orders recording mental health and substance abuse issues stretching back at least five years.
Records reviewed by Associated Press show that the woman living at the address had obtained a 12-month protection order against her 32-year-old son in May. The order noted that he struggled from substance abuse, and had threatened his mother saying that her “grave has been already dug up”.
Continue reading...Oklahoma prosecutor Jimmy Harmon was making his usual points about why Richard Glossip belongs behind bars when he trotted out a not-so-casual dig at his opposing counsel.
It was mid-February in Oklahoma City, and one of Glossip’s lawyers had just explained the main reason why his client should be released on bond. Under Oklahoma law, defendants like Glossip are entitled to bail unless there is a firm basis to believe they are guilty. The evidence against Glossip had never been strong — and the U.S. Supreme Court demolished the state’s case when it vacated Glossip’s conviction over false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the attorneys argued, there was no justification for keeping him in jail.
Harmon responded with scorn. “The defendant’s argument reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song,” he said. “It’s called ‘Glory Days.’”
“The gist of that song is that glory days will pass you by,” he went on. Glossip’s attorneys were clinging to their cherished Supreme Court victory because, after years of losing in court, “they finally won one,” he said. “And they want to wave that Supreme Court opinion around.”
In other words, Glossip’s lawyers were like Springsteen’s former high school baseball star — still talking about his winning fastball at a roadside bar.
In the quiet courtroom, Harmon’s zinger landed with a thud. The comparison was clumsy and ill-fitting; a Supreme Court victory is anything but fleeting. Lawyers and courts are bound by Supreme Court decisions — invoking its rulings is sort of the point.
Glossip, meanwhile, sat at the defense table in his orange prison garb over a thermal shirt. Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai — the seventh judge assigned to his case since the high court sent it back to Oklahoma — had allowed him to be unshackled for the hearing. Just a few days earlier, Glossip had turned 63, his 29th birthday behind bars. He knew more than most people about time you can never get back.
Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of town. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese but insisted that Glossip pushed him to do it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.
But the case began unraveling soon after Glossip arrived on death row. Footage of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. In the decades that followed, Glossip’s attorneys discovered that prosecutors hid and destroyed evidence in the case — and that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony multiple times.
The case ultimately ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Glossip’s favor on February 25, 2025. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, that prosecutors had failed to correct his testimony, and that additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct “further undermines confidence in the verdict.”
Yet one year later, the case is far from over. Rather than release Glossip, as advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to keep him in jail awaiting trial. An Oklahoma County judge granted the request and refused to release Glossip on bond, only to later step down from the case after admitting that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at his second trial. A revolving door of recusals followed, with five more criminal court judges leaving the case due to their own ties to the district attorney’s office that sent Glossip to death row.
Natalie Mai is the seventh judge assigned to Glossip’s case since the Supreme Court sent it back to Oklahoma.
Mai, a civil judge, was assigned to the case in December. It was now up to her to reconsider whether Glossip should be released from jail. Standing before her, defense attorney Corbin Brewster urged Mai to consider the Supreme Court’s decision before weighing the other factors that judges use to make bond decisions — whether a defendant is a flight risk, for example, or a danger to the community. The “threshold question” before the court, he said, was whether prosecutors could show by clear and convincing evidence that Glossip should be presumed guilty of murder. The answer was clearly no. If Mai agreed, she could rule from the bench and free Glossip that day.
But Mai wasn’t ready to do that. She told Brewer that she had reserved the whole day for the hearing and would issue an order after considering all the evidence. “I would like to get all the information today, so that way I can make a written finding in an expedient manner,” she said.
After three decades insisting on his innocence, Glossip would have to wait a little bit longer.
The 2025 ruling in Glossip v. Oklahoma was momentous: an astonishing victory for a man who had stared down nine execution dates and lived. For Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, the ruling should have marked the end of a protracted legal battle that had made his client the most famous death row prisoner in the country — and which had won the support of the Oklahoma attorney general himself.
Drummond, who entered the attorney general’s office in 2023, once took unprecedented steps to stop Oklahoma from killing Glossip. After commissioning an independent investigation into his case, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Glossip’s conviction. When the court refused, setting Glossip up for execution, Drummond personally testified before the state’s pardon and parole board, urging them to spare Glossip’s life.
But things changed in the months following the Supreme Court’s decision. After initially basking in the justices’ ruling, Drummond vanished as the public face of the case. In June, he shocked Glossip’s longtime supporters — including conservative allies of the Republican attorney general — by announcing he would retry Glossip.
The most obvious explanation was politics: Drummond’s decision coincided with his run for governor — and his previous interventions in Glossip’s case had infuriated members of Oklahoma’s conservative legal establishment. In the months after the ruling, Drummond lurched noticeably to the right, going out of his way to align himself with the Trump administration’s political agenda. In the meantime, he left it to one of his deputies, Harmon, to retry Glossip’s case.
Harmon has since downplayed the significance of the Supreme Court ruling while peddling a warmed-over version of the state’s discredited case. The lack of new evidence was striking at Glossip’s first bond hearing, when he introduced exhibits designed to cast Glossip in a sinister light — but which fell far short of proving he was capable of murder. He presented affidavits from Glossip’s ex-wife and another woman who had previously provided him with financial support, both of whom wrote that they later felt used and manipulated. Harmon also played a recording of a phone call between Glossip and a third woman, in which Glossip expressed estrangement from his family — an attempt to show that he had no deep ties to Oklahoma.
At the time, Oklahoma County Criminal Court Judge Heather Coyle seemed somewhat skeptical of the evidence. She reminded Harmon that she needed “clear and convincing evidence” that Glossip was likely to be found guilty at a third trial, asking him to “please expand on the facts that support that.” Harmon directed her to the transcripts from Glossip’s previous trials, which ultimately proved persuasive enough.
There was little guarantee that the same approach would prove convincing to Mai. Yet Harmon mostly repeated his prior presentation, resubmitting the affidavits and phone recording, along with the transcripts from Glossip’s two trials. “We have a plethora of evidence,” he told Mai, only to acknowledge that there was nothing new. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said.
“The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials.”
Harmon also insisted that Glossip posed a danger to the community. “He’s not as young as spry as he was,” he said. But “Mr. Glossip’s manipulative behavior is dangerous in and of itself.”
Glossip’s attorneys, too, repeated arguments from the prior hearing. But there was one major development that had unfolded since then. In July 2025, while the decision to grant bond was pending before Coyle, Glossip’s lawyers revealed a secret deal between Knight and Drummond dating back to 2023. The attorney general had agreed to let Glossip plead to a lesser charge and then walk free. Although the deal was based on the erroneous assumption that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would grant Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, it remained current well after the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a lengthy affidavit filed by Knight last summer.
Lawyers for Glossip asked the court to enforce the agreement — an issue that is being litigated separately. At the bond hearing, Brewster invoked the deal to remind Mai that Drummond himself clearly did not buy Harmon’s portrayal of Glossip as a “killer.” If he did, he would never have agreed to a deal that allowed for Glossip’s immediate release.
At the end of the hearing, Mai told the lawyers she needed time to review the full record, which she had yet to receive from the state. She also requested a last round of briefs from both sides. “If you can get that to me in about 30 days, and give me another 15 to 30 days to work with it, I promise I will try to get it out as soon as possible,” she said. “But the reality is my docket is just so full right now, and so I’ll work on it to the extent that I can.”
Shortly afterward, Glossip was placed back in shackles and escorted out of the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies took him down the elevator to await transfer back to the county jail. Speaking to reporters, Knight reiterated that Drummond should honor their previous agreement to release Glossip — and if he refuses, the court should make him do it.
Knight expressed some hope that, by taking the time to study the record, Mai might see the case for the travesty it is — and give his client a long-overdue taste of freedom. Nobody should have to spend so much time waiting for their first fair trial. “This is wrong,” he said. “It’s been wrong for 30 years.”
Jordan Smith contributed to this report.
The post A Supreme Court Win Didn’t Free Richard Glossip. But This Judge Could. appeared first on The Intercept.
Whether you want a video doorbell to keep track of packages or visitors, these popular models from Ring, Blink and more will get the job done.
The company's new eSIM option should allow for a faster sign-up experience.
Adobe Firefly's Quick Cut tool clips and combines all your raw footage into a video in under two minutes.
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME. The overhauled policy, approved unanimously by CEO Dario Amodei and Anthropic's board, instead commits the company to matching or surpassing competitors' safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic considers itself to be leading the AI race and believes catastrophic risks are significant. The company also plans to publish detailed "Risk Reports" every three to six months and release "Frontier Safety Roadmaps" laying out future safety goals. Chris Painter, director of policy at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, who reviewed an early draft, told TIME the shift signals that Anthropic "believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Night owls will be able to check out the lunar eclipse when it appears this March.
Jamieson Greer warns tariffs may climb from 10% after Trump imposed global levy amid US supreme court setback
The US tariff rate for some countries will go up to 15% or higher from the newly imposed 10%, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said on Wednesday, without naming any specific trading partners or other details.
“Right now, we have the 10% tariff. It’ll go up to 15 [%] for some and then it may go higher for others, and I think it will be in line with the types of tariffs we’ve been seeing,” Greer said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria program.
Continue reading...Milwaukee city council member calls for inquiry into Uline’s previous ‘shuttle program’ to bring in Mexican workers
A Milwaukee city council member has called for an investigation into the immigration policies at Uline, the office supply company owned by Liz and Richard Uihlein, two of the biggest donors to Maga Republicans in the 2024 election.
The statement by JoCasta Zamarripa, who is running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin secretary of state ahead of November’s election, follows an investigation by the Guardian into Uline’s previous use of a so-called “shuttle program”. It involved the company bringing workers from its facilities in Mexico to staff warehouses at its headquarters in Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania, for weeks and even months at a time, using visas that are meant for workers who are being trained – not working regular full-time jobs.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Alvi Choudhury claiming damages against Thames Valley police after biased technology confused him with man looking ‘10 years younger’
Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.
Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.
Continue reading...If the future of toilets is one in which our toilet can clean itself in just one flush, that's a future we can get behind.
Iran accuses Trump of lying in his State of the Union about the country's nuclear ambitions, as the next round of bilateral talks looms.
The newly crowned Olympic champions were warmly greeted by both Republicans and Democrats. They were also used as props by the president
During Tuesday’s State of the Union, Donald Trump welcomed members of the US men’s national hockey team to the House gallery to chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A!”. Trump revealed that Team USA’s goaltender, Connor Hellebuyck, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “What special champions you are,” Trump told the players, who had beaten Canada on Sunday in the gold medal game of the Winter Olympics.
In Trump’s America, proximity is never neutral.
Continue reading...The Democratic congressman Al Green has addressed his protest at Donald Trump's State of the Union speech, in which Green held up a handwritten sign that read 'Black people aren't apes!'. The sign referenced a racist depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama that the president had shared on social media. After being ejected from the event, Green told journalists he had wanted to take a stand against the president doing 'these dastardly things with impunity'
Continue reading...Drinks maker cuts annual sale and profit forecast for second time in four months amid weak demand in US and China
Diageo has slashed its dividend and cut its annual sales and profit forecast for the second time in four months, as the maker of Guinness warned of capacity constraints affecting drinkers of “the black stuff” in London pubs.
The world’s largest spirits maker – which owns brands including Smirnoff vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky and Don Julio tequila – reported weak demand in the US and China in the first results released under the new chief executive, Sir Dave Lewis.
Continue reading...Tommy Schaefer was sentenced for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury vacation.
Leaked draft of $1bn memorandum of understanding reveals mandatory targets, sharing of data, and reported access to mining concessions
The US has been accused of “shameless exploitation” over a health financing agreement with Zambia worth more than $1bn (£740m), amid warnings that the country is getting a raw deal from the Trump administration.
A leaked draft of a five-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two countries, seen by the Guardian, reveals that Zambia may accept terms worse than health financing agreements the US has reached with 16 other African countries.
Continue reading...Study finds participants saw reduction in depressive symptoms as researchers welcome ‘promising’ results
A phase II clinical trial has found dimethyltryptamine (DMT), one of the psychoactive components traditionally used in the Amazonian psychedelic ritual ayahuasca, might be a promising therapy for depression.
The psychedelic pharmaceutical company Small Pharma (now Cybin UK) sponsored and designed the trial, which was led by Dr David Erritzoe, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Imperial College London. The results were published in Nature this month.
Continue reading...International conference circuit gives worldwide right wing opportunities to share ideas and learn from each other
The president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) is a featured speaker at a conference this week in Pretoria, South Africa, hosted by an Afrikaner nationalist group whose founder was instrumental in persuading the American right that white South African farmers face systematic attacks.
Stefano Forte, also the executive director of the billionaire-funded 1776 Project Pac, will speak at the Lex Libertas Future of Nations conference on 25 February alongside leading figures from the Afrikaner Solidarity Movement, members of Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang – whose predecessor was outlawed for racism – and a political analyst from a thinktank wholly funded by the regime of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Continue reading...We break down the complex tax rules for capital gains, pass-through entities, foreign investments and real estate to help you file your taxes in 2026.
A New Hampshire resident has been charged after a shooting involving a Border Patrol agent at a Canada crossing, the DOJ says
Witness claims suspect entered mosque during Ramadan evening prayers armed with axe
Police in Manchester have arrested a suspect after he allegedly entered Manchester Central Mosque with an axe and a knife.
Police were called at about 8.40pm to reports that two men had entered Manchester Central Mosque on Upper Park Roadand were acting suspiciously.
Continue reading...President’s address littered with false and misleading claims. Plus, how Trump’s big climate finding repeal could actually hurt big oil
Good morning.
Donald Trump declared his first year in office a success during his rambling State of the Union address, despite his presidency being plagued by low public approval ratings.
What misleading and false claims did Trump make? He presented the US economic situation positively, when job gains slowed in 2025; claimed that Iryna Zarutska was killed by an immigrant (false); and claimed that energy prices have fallen, when household energy bills have risen. Here are the biggest false claims, debunked.
What is Anthropic resisting? Anthropic has reportedly resisted allowing its product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can use AI to kill people without human input.
Continue reading...Details emerge after struggling carmaker reports pre-tax losses of £363.9m for 2025
The luxury carmaker Aston Martin Lagonda is to cut its workforce by 20% as it looks to save about £40m after reporting widening losses.
The group, which said earlier this month it was consulting on its latest redundancy programme, said it would reduce its workforce by up to a fifth, or about 500 employees, after action at the start of last year that cut 170 jobs.
Continue reading...With its longtime figureheads stepping aside, Microsoft’s gaming division faces a pivotal moment, raising questions about whether it can still balance creative ambition with corporate strategy in the age of AI
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And so it’s all change at Xbox. Last Friday it was announced that the CEO of Microsoft’s gaming division, Phil Spencer, is to retire, while its president Sarah Bond is resigning. In their place, a new partnership: Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to chief content officer, while the new CEO is Asha Sharma, who moves from her post as president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product.
In a company-wide email, Spencer stated that he would stay on until the summer in an advisory role before, “starting the next chapter of my life”. For her part, Bond issued a statement on her LinkedIn account: “I’ve decided this is the right time for me to take my next step, both personally and professionally.” It was all extremely good natured, but its doubtful these airy missives tell the full tale.
Continue reading...During his State of the Union, President Trump honored several service members and an Olympic athlete with awards that included the Purple Heart, the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Legion of Merit and the Medal of Freedom.
Tommy Schaefer released early from 18-year sentence for 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack during luxury holiday
Indonesia has freed and deported a US man after he spent 11 years in prison for the premeditated murder of his then girlfriend’s mother on the tourist island of Bali.
Tommy Schaefer was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the 2014 murder of Sheila von Wiese-Mack, the mother of Heather Mack, during a luxury holiday in a case that became known as the Bali suitcase murder.
Continue reading...Lilia Valutyte was attacked by Deividas Skebas, 26, in Boston in July 2022 while playing outside her mother’s shop
A man who murdered a nine-year-old girl by stabbing her in the heart while she played with a hula hoop in the street has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years.
Lilia Valutyte was attacked by Deividas Skebas, 26, in the town centre of Boston, Lincolnshire, on 28 July 2022, while she was playing outside her mother’s embroidery shop.
Continue reading...Christophe Leribault, most recently Versailles director, will be tasked with improving security and ‘restoring climate of trust’
France has appointed Christophe Leribault as the new head of the Louvre, bringing in the director of the Palace of Versailles to turn around the world’s most visited museum after a humiliating jewellery heist and staff strikes.
Leribault, who was chosen by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will succeed Laurence des Cars, who resigned on Tuesday. Des Cars had faced intense criticism since burglars made off in October with jewels worth an estimated $102m, exposing glaring security gaps at the museum. The jewels are still missing.
Continue reading...Lindsay Hoyle tells MPs that passing on the information to police was his ‘duty and responsibility’
The House of Commons speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has said he passed information to the Metropolitan police that Peter Mandelson planned to flee the country, after receiving information “in good faith”.
Mandelson was arrested on Monday on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, relating to his friendship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson has denied he planned to flee to the British Virgin Islands.
Continue reading...The TCL X11L is the first TV to feature Super Quantum Dots, which promise better color than ever before, and I went eyes-on.
Printers may be inexpensive, but the true cost of ownership is the ink refills. Here's why.
Apple has an epic roster of sci-fi shows.
The GR IV is a mild update to one of my favorite compact cameras that's perfect for travel and street photography.
The artist, who was controversially revoked and then reinstated by his government, is planning a ‘nurturing experience’ to bring people together
Australia’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in May will be a “nurturing experience” designed to bring people together – in the aftermath one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in the country’s 72-year history at the prestigious international art festival.
Artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, who were controversially dumped and then reinstated as Australia’s representatives, will present not one but two major works at the Venice Biennale in May – both informed by Sabsabi’s practice as a Sufi Muslim and exploring “spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity”.
Continue reading...He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years
Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing. In fact, he was arguably the bridge between the San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and present-day Silicon Valley: in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs eulogised the Whole Earth Catalog and Brand’s philosophy, and echoed its farewell mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
You could say that Brand has also lived big and long. He is now 87 years old, in the final chapters of an eventful and adventurous life that has crossed paths with some of the most consequential events and figures of his era. He has been a writer, an editor, a publisher, a soldier, a photojournalist, an LSD evangelist, an events organiser, a future-planning consultant, even a government adviser (to the California governor Jerry Brown in the late 70s). “There was a time when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I find things and I found things,’” says Brand, as in he is a founder. He is speaking from a library where he likes to work in Petaluma, California, not far from his houseboat in Sausalito. “I’m always searching for good stuff to recommend, and good people.”
Continue reading...The bill would ban distribution of taxpayer money for any "January 6th compensation fund" and any further refund of damage payments made by convicted Capitol rioters.
HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes." That sounds a lot like HP Inc is signing up new suppliers at a brisk pace. Broussard said the company has also "expanded lower-cost sourcing across our commodity basket, lowering logistics costs with agile end-to-end planning processes." The company is using its internal AI initiatives to power those new processes. The company is also "configuring our products and shaping demand to align the supply we have with our customer needs" and "taking targeted pricing actions to offset the remaining cost impact in close partnership with both our channel and direct customers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Officers say flood of low-quality reports is draining resources and slowing cases amid New Mexico lawsuit
Meta’s use of artificial intelligence software to moderate its social media platforms is generating large volumes of useless reports about cases of child sexual abuse, which are draining resources and hindering investigations, said officers from the US Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) taskforce.
“We get a lot of tips from Meta that are just kind of junk,” Benjamin Zwiebel, a special agent with the ICAC taskforce in New Mexico, said last week during his testimony in the state’s trial against Meta. The state’s attorney general alleges the company’s platforms are putting profits over child safety. Meta disputes these allegations, citing changes it has introduced on its platforms, such as teen accounts with default protections. The ICAC taskforce is a nationwide network of law enforcement agencies coordinated with the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute online child exploitation and abuse cases.
Continue reading...Bank reports better-than-expected annual results and CEO signals overhaul of lender is almost over
Bankers at HSBC are to share a bonus pot worth $3.9bn (£2.9bn), the highest in more than a decade, after Europe’s largest lender reported better-than-expected annual results.
The bonus pool for staff is 10% higher than a year earlier and the bank said it had determined it “based on a review of our performance against financial and non-financial metrics”, while the bank’s chief executive’s pay also rose.
Continue reading...If you're 55 or older you can save money using AT&T and T-Mobile. Here are the best discounts and special phone plans for people in their golden years.
President Trump delivered his 2026 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Read the transcript and watch the full video.
Your rice cooker is far more versatile than the name implies.
It's great to see Dell bring back the XPS and do so with such style.
Glowfrog Games; PC
Short but very sweet tale asks the player to compile a scrapbook of mementoes telling the story of a heartfelt bond that frays over time
There are few things sadder than the end of a close friendship. Whether it happens in a sudden moment of betrayal or after years of gradual separation, the feelings of loss can stay with you for a lifetime.
This is the theme of Pieced Together, a quiet, charming narrative game about best pals Connie and Beth, who meet at school in the 1990s and form an immediate, seemingly inseparable bond. Through the ingenious medium of an interactive scrapbook, we play as Connie, glueing in photos, notes and memories of her friend after years of separation. The game begins with several attempts to write Beth a letter, before we cut-out, stick and sort the story of their lives together.
Continue reading...In his new memoir, Art Manteris recalls raucous times in Nevada, and explains why the explosion of sports betting in the US presents serious risks
Forty years ago, the New England Patriots played in their first Super Bowl. It ended disastrously for New England, who lost 46-10 to the Chicago Bears. The Bears’ mammoth defensive tackle, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, even got involved in the scoring with a touchdown.
That moment looked like it would cause serious problems for Art Manteris, who at the time ran the sportsbook at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Under Manteris, Caesars had offered odds on whether Perry would score during the game – and, as fans scrambled to back the popular player, the house stood to lose a significant sum if he did. When Perry ran into the end zone, gamblers collected handsomely, to the tune of $250,000. The next day, Manteris was summoned to meet the boss of Caesars, Henry Gluck.
Continue reading...Timing and luck often dictate a team’s success at tournaments. And the co-hosts have players coming into form at just the right time
Bruce Arena once said that if his United States men’s national team had contested the 2006 World Cup a year earlier, the Americans would have done much better than the joyless, winless group stage elimination they suffered through. That team, he felt, had peaked during qualifiers and were past their best – despite being ranked an absurd fourth in the world by Fifa – when the World Cup kicked off.
Four years earlier, when the USMNT stunned the 2002 World Cup by nearly reaching the semi-finals, his side benefited from time’s relentless march, Arena argued. The Americans, cohesive and energized then, upset a golden Portugal generation that had already lost its sheen, 3-2, to spark their run.
Continue reading...President derided Biden’s ‘green new scam’ during State of the Union address, and hailed the rise in US oil production
Trump didn’t say the words “climate change” during the State of the Union, but it loomed large over his 108-minute speech as he touted his “drill, baby, drill” agenda and derided Joe Biden’s “green new scam”.
Toward the beginning of his address, the president discussed last year’s flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas, saying they were “one of the worst things I’ve ever seen”.
Continue reading...McDonald’s and other food industry players accuse the big beef packers of collusion and price-gouging. The packers deny these allegations
On 21 November, at the end of the first shift at the Tyson Foods beef processing plant in Lexington, Nebraska, all workers were called to the lunchroom and told they no longer had jobs. Many gathered afterward in the gravel parking lot. Some wailed and cried out.
“It’s a terrible thing to know that we won’t be able to pay rent, won’t be able to pay the electricity, our cars – all the bills coming our way,” said Constancio Perales, a 64-year-old worker born in Durango, Mexico, who has worked at the plant since 1996 – the last 25 years cutting the bone out of chuck steaks. “It’s very sad that they would fire us like that – just telling us there’s no more work, as if to say go away.”
Continue reading...Lenovo's compact gaming tower has great performance for the money and looks good, too, but could be more upgrade-friendly.
If you're wondering how to post about ICE on neighborhood apps, here are some tips.
Texas Democrat removed for holding ‘Black people aren’t apes’ sign as colleagues stay seated while Republicans cheer
As dozens of their colleagues boycotted Trump’s State of the Union address, several of the Democrats in the House chamber on Tuesday night made their opposition to the president’s remarks clear.
Congressman Al Green was ejected from the speech almost immediately, marking the second year in a row he has been removed from the annual event. After being ordered out by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, during last year’s speech for yelling responses as the president spoke, this year’s protest from the Texas representative was silent but pointed.
Continue reading...Former official at Altach given suspended prison term
Player says the sentence ‘leaves me speechless’
A man has been given a seven-month suspended prison sentence and fined €1,200 (£1,046) after being found guilty of taking secret videos and photographs from the changing room, gym and showers of the Altach women’s football team. He was also told to pay the victims €625 each in compensation.
The sentence was handed out in the regional court in Feldkirch, Austria, with the judge saying that it made a huge difference “if one looks at pictures or actually creates them oneself”. The defendant accepted the sentence but the prosecutor may appeal.
Continue reading...Amid Trump’s lies and xenophobic rants, people struggling to pay bills and make ends meet are unlikely to be moved
He wanted to give the king’s speech. Donald Trump entered the US House chamber on Tuesday like a medieval monarch, with Republicans lined up eager to touch his royal robes (or, in two cases, grab a selfie with him). But within moments, the illusion was shattered.
As the US president strolled by, soaking up adulation, Democratic representative Al Green of Texas held aloft a handwritten sign: “Black people aren’t apes!” – a reference to Trump recently sharing a racist video depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama.
Continue reading...President hails ‘turnaround for the ages’ but offers few policy pledges and repeats jibes against ‘crazy’ Democrats
Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to his Democratic opponents.
The annual address to a joint session of Congress came after months of turmoil for the Republican president, including a crackdown on immigrant communities in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two US citizens, and faltering progress on his campaign promise of lowering the cost of living.
Continue reading...Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections in which voters could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats. Trump spoke for two hours addressing a host of issues, from his supreme court challenges to Iran, with some Democrats reacting by walking out, holding signs and verbally clashing in the chamber
Continue reading...Spring is round the corner!
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Saw dome geese fly overhead last night which is usually a good indication the weather is going to be good again 🥰
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address showed how much more public political vitriol has become. At this watch party, viewers were waiting for it.
In the first State of the Union address of his second term, President Donald Trump proclaimed that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.”
“What a difference a president makes,” Trump said. “A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
But our review of his speech found that he distorted a number of facts about the state of the economy, health care, immigration and other topics.
Trump’s Feb. 24 address was longer than any prior SOTU, clocking in at over 1 hour and 47 minutes, as measured by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Trump falsely claimed that he inherited “a stagnant economy” with “inflation at record levels.”
Economists have told us that the U.S. economy under Joe Biden was not stagnant. “Real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us for a Feb. 11 story.
Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that under Biden, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation), grew at an annual rate of 6.2% in 2021 (during the COVID-19 recovery), 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate also decreased under Biden, going from 6.4% when he was inaugurated to 4% in his last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average monthly unemployment rate for Biden’s presidency was 4.1%, below the historical average
As for inflation, when Trump took office, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the BLS. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump later said in his speech that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” But under Trump, real GDP growth was down to an annual rate of 2.2% in 2025, and the unemployment rate was up to 4.3% as of January.
Trump also claimed that the 43-day shutdown of the federal government ended up “costing us two points” on GDP.
Fourth quarter growth in 2025 was 1.4%, much lower than economists had projected. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said that was partly due to the extended shutdown, but attributed just 1 percentage point — not 2 — of reduced GDP growth to the shutdown.
Trump misleadingly claimed to be bringing down “high prices” he blamed on Democrats.
“Their policies created the high prices,” the president said. “Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.”
He went on to name some food items that he claimed have seen average price declines and cited energy prices as well. “Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, especially energy,” he said. “When they see energy going down to numbers like that, they cannot believe it.”
Prices had increased substantially during the first half of Biden’s term, due largely to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic — not just Democratic policies.
Furthermore, overall prices are not down under Trump. As we said, in January, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%, which is above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In addition, while the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, have come down since the start of Trump’s second term, other items, such as beef, or ground chuck, have seen an average prices increase, contrary to what Trump said. And average food prices overall are up instead of down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it wasn’t clear from his remarks which energy prices Trump was referencing. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
During the speech, Trump claimed, “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.” While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions.
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump misleadingly said that he had taken prescription drugs “from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest.” He also said that Americans “will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs.”
The Trump administration’s negotiations with drugmakers may have lowered prices for specific drugs to some degree, and in limited situations. However, there’s no evidence of a broad decrease in U.S. drug prices, as we wrote in a recent story. In fact, the median list price for hundreds of brand-name drugs rose by 4% in 2025 and in 2026 thus far, according to the research firm 46brookyln.
Trump’s drug pricing strategy is based on the concept of most favored nation pricing. Under an MFN policy, a country bases its prices off of those in other countries.
So far, the Trump administration has made deals with 16 drug companies, securing commitments to offer selected brand-name drugs at discounted cash prices for people not using insurance. Companies have also promised to launch new drugs and offer drugs to Medicaid at MFN prices. In return, companies have gotten various benefits, including promised exemptions from tariffs and from future mandatory MFN policies.
TrumpRx, the federal website designed to highlight the administration’s cash deals, launched on Feb. 5 and so far shows cash prices for 43 brand-name drugs from the first five companies to make deals with the administration.
However, experts previously told us that while the site does offer a few good deals — for example, for people taking fertility or weight loss drugs that are often not covered by insurance — its impact is limited.
“Manufacturers have agreed to discount prices on some drugs that are not well covered by insurance or already have generic competition, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily going to help a lot of people, right now anyway,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, told us.
For most people, insurance will offer a better deal, she said. And even for people paying for their drugs in cash, at least 18 of the drugs on TrumpRx are available as generics for lower prices elsewhere, an analysis from STAT found.
Trump claimed that the prices are now the lowest in the world, but even for the select drugs on TrumpRx, it’s not clear if that’s true. A spokesperson for the White House previously told us the administration was using prices from other G7 nations as comparators on the site but didn’t specify what prices were being compared. Cubanski told us that it’s difficult to determine whether the prices are the lowest internationally, as countries may get rebates or discounts that are not disclosed.
Trump said he was asking Congress to “codify” his MFN program but his Great Healthcare Plan is light on specifics regarding the legislation he is suggesting Congress should pass.
Trump repeated a regular talking point, saying, “In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.” That’s an unsubstantiated figure.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
Trump made the unsupported claim that “the flow of deadly fentanyl across our border is down by a record 56% in one year.”
Experts who study drug flow and policy have told us before that it’s not possible to know how much more or less of an illicit drug is getting into the U.S. That’s because there is no comprehensive data on the total flow of drugs into the country, which includes drugs that have not been detected by authorities, as the Congressional Research Service has reported.
“The best thing that we have as a gauge for what comes into the country is the seizure data,” and that “is not a metric of how much is actually coming into the U.S.,” Katharine Neill Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us for an October 2024 story. “This is just the data that’s coming through the border security,” she said, noting that this excludes drugs that are smuggled into the country other ways, such as by mail.
Some use the seizure data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected, with more drug seizures suggesting that more drugs are coming into the country — or vice versa.
The amount of fentanyl seized by federal border officers decreased by about 49% in the first year of Trump’s second term, going from 21,075 pounds seized in Biden’s last full 12 months in office to 10,674 pounds seized in Trump’s first full 12 months, according to the most recent Customs and Border Protection data. A White House spokesperson pointed to a CBP announcement in September that said since Trump took office in January, “fentanyl trafficking at the southern border is down by 56% compared to the same period in 2024.”
The number of pounds seized has been on the decline since peaking in fiscal year 2023. The fact that the seized amount has gone down could mean that less of the drug is being trafficked to the country, but it could mean that authorities are simply catching less of it. (The declining number of fentanyl overdose deaths since late 2023 suggests that it may be the former.)
But not having the figure for the total fentanyl flow to the U.S. makes it difficult to know if the president’s claim is accurate. “If you don’t know the denominator, you can’t have an answer,” David Luckey, director of the RAND Rural America Partnership Initiative and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, told us in 2024.
Trump continued to making false claims about gasoline prices, saying: “Gasoline — which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor was, quite honestly, a disaster — is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states. And in some places, $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.”
As of Feb. 24, there were no U.S. states where the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was below $2.30, according to state price data from AAA. Oklahoma was the closest to that figure, with an average price of $2.37. That also means there are no states with an average price below $2 per gallon. In Iowa, the state Trump mentioned, the average price statewide was $2.55, at the time of his remarks.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us for a Feb. 19 story that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 24 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.69 was the “most common price being charged at stations nationwide.”
Nationwide, gasoline prices are roughly 17 cents (or about 5%) lower than they were when Trump took office. As of the week ending Feb. 23, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was almost $2.94, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Trump continued to make his inflated claim about ending “eight wars.”
“My first 10 months, I ended eight wars, including Cambodia,” Trump said. “Cambodia and Thailand, Pakistan and India would have been a nuclear war. Thirty-five million people, said the prime minister of Pakistan, would have died if it were not for my involvement. Kosovo and Serbia, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Rwanda. And, of course, the war in Gaza, which proceeds at a very low level, it’s just about there.”
When his claim was seven wars last year, experts in international relations told us that Trump played a substantial role in ending fighting in four of those conflicts — although the Indian government denied that the U.S. played a role in negotiating the ceasefire with Pakistan. Trump also counts some international disagreements that weren’t wars, as well as some battles that haven’t ended.
Trump includes the more than two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas as the eighth war, as the two sides agreed in October to a ceasefire and the return of hostages and prisoners. Many have said that Trump should get credit for getting the deal done, including Biden’s former national security adviser.
Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that implementing Trump’s 20-point peace agreement comes with challenges. “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question,” Cook said.
We’d note that both Israel and Hamas have accused the other of violating the terms of the ceasefire deal.
Trump claimed to have presided over a “tremendous renewal” of religion in America, but recent polling has found the opposite.
A Gallup poll conducted in November found that less than half of Americans reported that religion was an important part of their daily lives, which is a 17 percentage point decline since 2015, the year before Trump won his first election.
“The steady decline in U.S. religiosity over the past decade has been evident for years,” according to Gallup. “Fewer Americans identify with a religion, church attendance and membership are declining, and religion holds a less important role in people’s lives than it once did.”
That contradicts the president’s claim that “during my time in office, both the first four years, and in particular, this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God.”
Trump went on to claim, “This is especially true among young people, and a big part of that had to do with my great friend, Charlie Kirk.”
A study released by the Pew Research Center in December found that Americans have remained roughly steady in whether or not they identify as religious since 2020, and that there is no surge in religious belief among the young.
“On average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans,” according to Pew. “Today’s young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago. And there is no indication that young men are converting to Christianity in large numbers,” as had been suggested in some recent reporting.
The president touted the so-called “warrior dividend” bonus checks that were sent to military personnel in December.
“Every service member recently received a warrior dividend of $1,776,” Trump said, later adding, “we got the money from tariffs and other things.”
It’s true that about 1.5 million active-duty and reserve military members received checks, but the money didn’t come from tariffs.
Those bonuses were a reallocation of funds initially earmarked for an increased Department of Defense housing allowance, funded by a $2.9 billion appropriation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
During his address, Trump repeated — as he does in virtually every speech — his unsupported claim that many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. during the Biden administration “poured in by the millions and millions, from prisons, from mental institutions” in other countries. Trump has never provided any credible evidence of that.
Trump also claimed that Biden’s immigration policies allowed the entry of “11,888 murderers.” He has been citing variations of this figure for more than a year. But as we’ve written, he’s referring to noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, known as the agency’s non-detained docket, included 13,099 people as of July 21, 2024. The “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a 2024 statement, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.
Trump boasted, “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year. Boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and millions of Americans are all gaining. Everybody’s up, way up.” The stock market is up in Trump’s first year, but it’s down from the gains seen in the last two years under Biden.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.9% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on the Feb. 24, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
Trump claimed the Dow Jones “broke 50,000 four years ahead of schedule, and the S&P hit 7,000 where it wasn’t supposed to do it for many years.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,174 at the close of the market on Feb. 24.
Although Trump’s claim may make it seem like the stock market rebounded since he took office, the stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump said that “everybody’s up, way up,” only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
“With the great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors,” Trump said, recycling some of his favorite short descriptors to describe the reconciliation bill he signed into law in July.
As we’ve noted before, the law boosted the number of people who don’t have to pay any tax on their Social Security benefits through 2028, but does not eliminate the tax for all seniors since there is a phase-out for those with higher incomes.
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, 88% of Social Security recipients 65 years or older will not pay any tax on those benefits under the law. That’s up from the 64% of senior recipients who already did not have to pay. (The law does not exempt individuals younger than 65 from having to pay taxes.)
The situation is similar with Trump’s claims of “no tax” on overtime or tips, which are also temporary and have phase-outs as income increases and other limitations. There is a maximum deduction of $25,000 for tips and $12,500 for overtime pay.
As he has for years, Trump insisted, without evidence, that “cheating is rampant in our elections.”
Trump urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and also photo identification to vote in federal elections. Under the current law, registrants must attest that they are a citizen under penalty of perjury, and noncitizens who vote risk deportation and being permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states and Washington, D.C., don’t require identification at the polls.
We’ve written a lot of articles about Trump’s false, misleading and unfounded claims about fraud in the 2020 election (and other elections). We’ve also looked at the Trump campaign’s 2020 legal challenges, which lacked evidence of voter fraud and were almost universally dismissed by judges.
Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” And William Barr, U.S. attorney general in Trump’s first term, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud.” Barr told the committee the election fraud narrative the Trump campaign was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.”
Trump said the SAVE America Act was needed “to stop illegal aliens and others — they’re unpermitted persons — from voting in our sacred American elections.” He called that kind of illegal voting “rampant” in American elections. But that’s not what was found when numerous states used a program called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to check the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls in numerous states.
According to the New York Times, of the 49.5 million voter registrations checked, the Department of Homeland Security referred about 10,000 cases to investigators. As the Times noted, that’s about 0.02% of registrations that were flagged as potentially being noncitizens. But even that number is inflated. The Times found that when several counties began looking into those on the voter rolls who were marked as potentially noncitizens, it turned out that only a fraction of them were. Moreover, there was no indication of how many of those who may have improperly registered to vote actually voted.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration noted that most of the states using the verification program are Republican-led states, and that the program might identify more noncitizens if it were embraced by Democratic-led states, many of which have less strict voter ID laws.
A systematic review and analysis of claims about noncitizen registrants and voters in all 50 states by the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, updated in February, found that “sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically.”
Trump also criticized mail-in ballots, calling them “crooked,” and saying they should only be allowed, “for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Mail-in voting is widely used around the country. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 28 states offer “no excuse” mail-in voting, meaning that any voter can request a mail-in ballot without needing to provide a reason. As we have written, experts have told us that voter fraud via mail-in ballots is rare, though more common than in-person voting fraud.
Trump made the dubious claim that the federal budget can be balanced by eliminating fraudulent spending.
“I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance,” he said. “We’ll get it done, and if we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”
In a 2024 report, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” But the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which ended on Sept. 30, was nearly $1.8 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office projected in its February budget outlook that the deficit will be $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2026 and rise to $2 trillion or more in 2028 and subsequent fiscal years.
Trump claimed that he inherited “rampant crime at home” and later boasted “last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history. This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years.”
Crime data show that violent crime continued to decline in 2025, but the trend began in 2022 after a spike in crime, particularly murders, in 2020 — the year the pandemic began and the last year of Trump’s first term. Trump is right in touting the good news that violent crime continues to fall, but he wrongly paints this as a stark turnaround from when he took office.
U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has generally declined since, even with the bump up in 2020. The rate dropped by 33.2 percentage points under Biden and was less than half the 1990s peak in 2024, the year before Trump took office, according to estimates from the FBI, which relies on voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies nationwide. The number and rate of murders also declined since 2020.
In 2024, Trump claimed such crime data amounted to “fake numbers.” But now that he’s in office, and the drop in crime continues, he has embraced those numbers.
Full-year nationwide data from the FBI won’t be released until later this year, but, as we reported last month, other groups that aggregate crime data reported by law enforcement agencies across the country show violent crime, including murder, went down again in 2025. Trump has highlighted a report by the Council on Criminal Justice that found a 21% decline in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025 in 35 cities.
CCJ reported, “When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
The nationwide homicide rate was 5 per 100,000 in 2024.
Trump has attributed the crime drop to his policies of sending federal law enforcement, including the National Guard or immigration officers, into cities, as he mentioned repeatedly in the NBC News interview. But crime experts say such claims need robust research. “Without rigorous evidence, it is not possible to confidently pinpoint the factors fueling the drop in homicide,” the CCJ report said. “Any assertive claims about the influence of specific policy interventions, such as National Guard deployments and increased immigration enforcement or expanded community violence intervention programs, should be supported by robust research designs intended to measure their causal effects.”
Trump repeated a dubious claim he’s made several times before — and we’ve written about twice — regarding the ability of his increased tariffs to replace income taxes.
“I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.
But, as we’ve explained, there’s a wide margin between the revenues raised from personal income taxes versus those raised from tariffs.
For example, the federal government brought in a total of $560 billion in January, according to the Treasury’s most recent monthly report. More than half of that revenue came from individual income taxes, while just 5% came from tariffs.
“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in 2024. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”
Replacing the income tax with higher tariffs would cause job losses, higher inflation, larger federal deficits and a recession, Clausing and Obstfeld said.
“It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class,” they argued.
Many economists also say Trump is wrong to say tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries.” A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis published on Feb. 12 concluded that “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”
White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett blasted the report as an “embarrassment,” saying, “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.” Hassett claimed the authors “put out a conclusion which has created a lot of news that’s highly partisan based on analysis that wouldn’t be accepted in a first-semester econ class.”
But the New York Fed is hardly alone in holding that position. A working paper revised in February from Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund economist Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that “tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs.”
Trump said that last year, the U.S. “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and “wiped it out.” But experts told us at the time that the June bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities damaged the country’s nuclear capabilities but that they were not “obliterated.” A preliminary classified intelligence assessment, described by CNN and the New York Times, said that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back by just a few months.
Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program continues. On Feb. 21, special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” Meanwhile, the U.S. has been amassing warships and warplanes in the Middle East, and Trump has threatened military action against Iran. There will be further talks between the U.S. and Iran about the Iranian nuclear program on Feb. 26.
“We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Trump insisted, about a third of the way through his speech.
To partially pay for the tax cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans cut more than $990 billion in spending on Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for people who have low incomes or disabilities. The law has many Medicaid-related provisions, but a major way spending was brought down was by modifying Medicaid eligibility requirements and introducing new work requirements. With fewer people on Medicaid, the program costs less.
Republicans have previously argued that Medicaid remains available and has not changed, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid-related changes in the law would result in 7.5 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2034. A much smaller number of people — 100,000 — would lose coverage in a decade as a result of changes to Medicare under the law, CBO said. Another 2.1 million were estimated to lose coverage as a result of changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Trump exaggerated the increase in U.S. oil production and gave himself too much credit for the country’s record output of natural gas.
“American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day, and we just received, from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil,” he said. “American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill.”
As of November, U.S. crude oil production had increased to an average of more than 13.6 million barrels per day in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s up about 2.5%, or 334,600 barrels per day, from less than 13.3 million barrels per day during the same period in 2024.
Before Trump was inaugurated, and before any of his policies were in place, the EIA had already projected in its January Short-Term Energy Outlook that average daily production would increase to a 13.5 million barrels a day in 2025 — up from the previous record of 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024.
Meanwhile, through November, production of dry natural gas had increased to an average of nearly 3.3 trillion cubic feet per month in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to EIA data. That’s up about 4.2% from more than 3.1 trillion cubic feet produced per month during the same period in 2024, which was already a record year for natural gas production in the country, the EIA said.
Correction, Feb. 25: We have corrected Trump’s quote about the price of gasoline. He said gasoline is “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states,” not $2.36.
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The post FactChecking Trump’s State of the Union Address appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Film screening: Oscar-shortlisted The President’s Cake 9 April 2026 — 4:30PM TO 7:30PM Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House
Join us for a screening and panel discussion of the critically acclaimed film offering lessons from Iraq on dictatorship, corruption and the long-term impacts of sanctions.
Join us for a screening and panel discussion of the critically acclaimed film offering lessons from Iraq on dictatorship, corruption and survival under sanctions
From debut Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a poignant story of love, friendship and resilience told through the eyes of a child growing up under Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime. It was the first Iraqi film to feature at the Cannes Film Festival, premiering in Directors’ Fortnight and winning both the section’s Audience Award and the festival’s prestigious Camera d’Or.
As many states in the Middle East continue to prioritise internal control and regime durability, The President’s Cake shows how power is sustained not only through coercion, but also through everyday social practices that shape behaviour and reinforce compliance. These dynamics remain central to understanding current political trajectories, state–society relations, and the prospects for meaningful reform.
A panel discussion following the screening, featuring the director and leading Iraq experts, will explore these themes in greater depth—drawing lessons from Iraq’s experience on authoritarian resilience, social cohesion, and the long-term legacies of political control.
Opposition campaigners claim top figures in regime use state wealth to fund lifestyles counter to those they preach
Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.
Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.
Continue reading...Lio Cundiff, who is trans, told the Guardian he hopes the act shows everyone how ‘human we are – because all I did was a human act’
A Chicagoan who recently jumped into a perilously cold lake to help rescue a baby whose stroller was blown into the water by a wind gust has implored everyone in the US to “just take care of one another”.
In an interview Tuesday, Lio Cundiff, who is a trans man, said of himself: “All I did was a human act. I’m just a human who did the most human thing you could do – which is save someone who can’t save themselves.”
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s guest to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address helped protect a Delaware citizen from the administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement last year.
A tenacious Delaware immigrant rights advocate accompanied U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester to President Donald Trump’s second State of the Union Address on Tuesday — an attempt to underscore Delaware’s aid efforts following a year of heightened federal immigration enforcement.
Blunt Rochester invited Maria Mesias-Tatnall, director of outreach services for immigration assistance with Delaware’s Office of the Attorney General, to be her guest to the president’s annual speech to a joint session of Congress.
Mesias-Tatnall was chosen because she “epitomizes the moment,” as dozens of advocates work to help Delaware’s immigrant communities that are living in “terror,” Blunt Rochester said. Mesias-Tatnall played a crucial role in rescuing a survivor of domestic violence who was on the verge of being deported back to her abuser last spring — a story recounted by Spotlight Delaware last year.
The woman — who was identified under the pseudonym of “Isabela” in order to protect her identity — was in the process of obtaining a visa reserved for victims of crime and was temporarily shielded from deportation. Still, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested the mother of two with no criminal history inside her Sussex County home in March 2025, before she was sent to a detention center in Louisiana.
“We represent the people who cannot come in front of the camera,” Mesias-Tatnall said.
Earlier this month, Blunt Rochester hosted a roundtable discussion in Georgetown with leaders and members of Delaware’s Haitian and Latino immigrant communities, with Mesias-Tatnall in attendance. During the meeting, several attendees reported that people have not shown up to medical appointments while some families have stopped sending their kids to Head Start programs.
“It’s not just happening in one part of the country, it’s also happening right here at home,” Blunt-Rochester said.
On Feb. 3, the Department of Homeland Security moved to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants in the U.S. The termination would leave about 330,000 Haitian immigrants nationwide open to potential deportation.
But, that same day, a federal judge temporarily blocked the termination from taking place, setting up a legal battle that is slated to end with a Supreme Court decision.
In the days following the judge’s ruling, Blunt Rochester — alongside all Senate Democrats and Independents — sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding that she reverse her directive to end TPS for Haitians.
In March 2025, ICE agents burst into Isabela’s house in the middle of the night – without presenting an arrest warrant – looking for her brother. The agents arrested Isabela in front of her two children as they searched the house,
Agents did not ask about Isabela’s immigration status before she was taken away in handcuffs as a collateral arrest, she told Spotlight Delaware.
Isabela was living in Delaware under the legal protection of “deferred action” as part of the lengthy U visa process, which helps victims of crime who assist law enforcement in catching criminals. Other U visa holders across the country, who have temporary legal status, have also been detained and deported as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
As a victim of domestic violence, Isabela helped police find, prosecute and deport her ex-husband who stabbed her in 2019.
A U visa allows undocumented victims of crime to live and work in the U.S. for up to four years and places them on a pathway to citizenship. The status is intended for crime victims who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement during the investigation.
ICE moved Isabela to Baltimore and then to a Louisiana detention center. After nearly a month in custody, Isabela’s release was negotiated through the efforts of the Delaware Attorney General’s office and Community Legal Aid Society Inc.
ICE planned on dropping Isabela at Louisiana’s Monroe Regional Airport with no documentation, phone, or money. As a result, Mesias-Tatnall boarded a Louisiana-bound flight to meet Isabela and bring her back home.
Mesias-Tatnall arrived at Isabela’s hotel room door at midnight. Isabela skeptically opened the door, wearing the same pajamas she wore the night ICE took her.
“You’re safe,” Mesias-Tatnall said. “We got you.”
Isabela threw her arms around Mesias-Tatnall and cried.
Following the rescue, Mesias-Tatnall visited Isabela just before Christmas. Isabela and her family have since moved to a new house and her children are getting therapy, Mesias-Tatnall said.
The post Blunt Rochester invites immigrant advocate to State of the Union amid heightened enforcement appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
From fire alarms to telephone cables, low voltage contractors are behind a lot of the wiring that powers peoples’ daily lives. Discussions of new licensing and inspection requirements have raised concerns about what the future of the low voltage electrical industry could look like in Delaware.
Delaware’s electrical workers are in a state of uncertainty as an oversight board considers implementing new requirements that could fundamentally change low voltage electrical work processes.
In August, the Delaware Board of Electrical Examiners, a little-known state regulatory body, introduced a proposal that would make low voltage electrical workers, who install “energy limited” wiring like telephone systems, fire alarms and satellite dish antennas, obtain an electricians’ license to do their work.
Completing a full electricians’ license, which includes an apprenticeship and classroom instruction, typically takes at least four years. Low voltage workers, who install systems under 50 volts, often undertake specialized training depending on what they are installing, but are exempt from acquiring an electricians’ license under existing Delaware code.
Low voltage workers and contracting associations protested the board’s licensing idea en masse, both at meetings during the fall and online, prompting the board to later withdraw the proposal.
“By eliminating that exemption, they would have required all the voltage work to be done by a licensed electrician,” said Jen Cohan, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Delaware trade association.
The saga continues, however, as the board of examiners – which falls under the state’s Division of Professional Regulation – discussed at its most recent meeting on Feb. 17, implementing an inspection requirement as part of the installation process for low voltage cabling instead of full licensure.
What exactly the inspection requirement might look like, and why the board began exploring changes to the low voltage work systems in the first place, remain unclear.
Some low voltage electrical workers and contracting associations told Spotlight Delaware that they did not know why the board was looking at changing the processes for low voltage work, especially when there does not appear to be a problem with those operations in the first place.
“I don’t know what problem the board is trying to solve,” said Dave Sweeney, regional director for the company Advantech Security, which installs various types of low voltage cabling.
Many also pointed to a rumor circulating the electrical industry that the state fire marshal was advocating for the licensing and inspection requirements due to some fire safety concerns that had arisen.
State Fire Marshal John Rudd, however, said that was a “misconception,” and he had not brought any suggestions to the board of examiners.
“We haven’t really recommended anything to the board,” Rudd told Spotlight Delaware. “We defer to the board on their recommendations because they are the ones that are in charge of all that stuff.”
Members of the Board of Electrical Examiners did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment.
Get Involved
The Board of Electrical Examiners is scheduled to meet next on Wednesday, March 4, at 8:30 a.m. inside the Cannon Building, located at 861 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover.
Recent discussions of low voltage contract work provided more questions than answers about the board’s goals, and how it intends to move forward with the requirements.
At the Feb. 17 meeting, board president Karl Segner said the goal of an inspection requirement would be to ensure that low voltage projects are installed properly, and are in line with local and state codes.
He did not elaborate as to whether there have been incidents of low voltage installation not being up to code, or other safety concerns with low voltage work.
The Delaware Board of Electrical Examiners code defines low voltage contractors as those who install wiring for telephone systems, sound systems, cable television systems, closed circuit video systems, satellite dish antennas, and instrumentation and temperature controls.
To Sweeney, the Advantech director, it functions to “lump” all different types of low voltage workers into one licensing exemption, but trying to create a blanket licensing or inspection requirement for such varied low voltage jobs, he said, does not work.
“The board is going to have to take a more granular approach and look at specific trades or specific subsets of the low voltage industry,” he said.
Members of the Board of Examiners said at the meeting that they were not sure whether an inspection would be necessary for every single cable installation, or only for installations of a certain size.
They also mentioned that creating a new, separate licensing process for low voltage contractors, instead of the previous idea of combining them with electricians’ requirements, could be a possibility.
Some board members mentioned that nearby Cecil County, Md., has required inspections and licenses for low voltage work, which could serve as a model for a similar program in Delaware.
Cecil County did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment about their low voltage work requirements.
Sweeney, along with two other low voltage contractors, were asked to weigh in on the inspection and licensing discussions at the Feb. 17 meeting. Sweeney said he anticipates continuing to weigh in on the board’s discussions.
Cohan, with the builders and contractors association, said her group also plans to be involved in discussing ways to implement inspections with the board in the coming months.
Eddie Lesniczak, vice president of IBEW 313, the state’s electrical workers union, said he too has been following the discussion at recent board meetings, and has concluded there has been a lot of “confusion in the room” about what the board is trying to accomplish.
Lesniczak said he could see the merits of creating some licensing requirements for low voltage workers, but that those licenses should be entirely different from electricians’ licenses, as they are different crafts.
He added that the union has been struggling with workers who pretend to be certified electricians or pretend to know how to do low voltage cabling, and then they do installation projects incorrectly, so more verification of electricians’ licenses could be a way to assuage those concerns.
Amid the confusion about what inspired the low voltage discussion, rumors have circulated that the union encouraged the board of examiners to consider the licensing concept.
Lesniczak, however, said that is not the case.
“I’ve seen a lot of people’s comments pop up that the union is behind it,” he said. “We’re not behind this at all. It’s kind of surprising.”
Republican state lawmakers have also jumped into the conversation, criticizing the board’s proposals as a regulatory overreach and a detriment to the electrical work industry.
Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown), who has a background in data cabling work, said he does not understand why there is a conversation surrounding licensing and inspection because there is not a safety or fire risk with such low voltage cabling.
Pettyjohn added that low voltage cabling is an entirely different field from bigger electrical work, so the requirements must be kept separate.
“You’re talking about two different types of art,” he said. “And to lump them into one is something that would be devastating to the folks that do that now and drive up costs.”
House Minority Whip Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton) said similarly that there is already a labor shortage in the trades, and adding more steps for electrical workers will only cause more problems, “without really solving anything.”
The board will continue discussing low voltage inspection requirements at its next meeting on March 4.
The post Low voltage electrical work discussion prompts widespread confusion, pushback appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The plans for several data centers in Delaware have garnered backlash from residents who are worried about their potential impact on energy costs and the environment. The outcome of this fight over environmental law will impact several of those proposals.
The developer behind a billion-dollar plan to build a data center near Delaware City is not giving up without a fight.
Last week, Starwood Digital Ventures appealed a state decision issued last month by Environmental Secretary Greg Patterson that the data center is not allowed under the Coastal Zone Act — a landmark Delaware law designed to limit heavy industry along the state’s shorelines.
The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control publicly released the appeal on Tuesday.
In it, Starwood’s attorney Jeffery Moyer argued that the data center plan, dubbed Project Washington, does not have the characteristics of heavy industry, such as smokestacks, chemical processing equipment or waste-treatment lagoons.
“Project Washington will be a non-manufacturing data-center campus that stores and manages data,” Moyer stated in the appeal.
In recent years, the data center industry has been among fastest growing in the country, with investors seeking the profits from an ongoing artificial intelligence boom. The exuberance appeared in Delaware in recent months with developers proposing several data center plans.
One of them, proposed near land that hosts the popular Halloween attraction Frightland north of Middletown, also sits within Delaware’s coastal zone boundaries and may have to comply with the provisions of the act.
The Delaware General Assembly passed the Coastal Zone Act in 1971 to protect the state’s environmentally sensitive shorelines by prohibiting new heavy industry from them.
In his decision on the Starwood proposal, Patterson pointed to the data center’s proposed use of 516 backup diesel generators, which would operate in the case of a power outage, as a reason for the heavy industry classification.
Together, they would rely on 2.5 million gallons of stored diesel, which Patterson called “entirely unprecedented” in his ruling.
Moyer — who represents Starwood as an attorney with Wilmington-based Richards, Layton & Finger — argued in the appeal that Patterson’s analysis “improperly” determined that the diesel engines’ exhaust and fuel storage amounted to tanks and smokestacks, under the law.
The Delaware Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board will decide whether to reverse Patterson’s decision. The date of the hearing has not yet been determined.
Despite Pattenson’s Coastal Zone Act decision, Starwood is continuing to progress through its other county and state regulatory processes.
In January, the company filed a request with New Castle County’s Board of Adjustments for a special use permit to allow it to build an electric switch station for the project. The board will consider the request during a hearing on March 5.
Starwood’s plan is also continuing to move through the state’s land-use review process – in which representatives from multiple state agencies offer comments about how the data center plan may be impacted by their respective regulations. Among the agencies that typically participate in the process is Patterson’s DNREC.
The process is conducted by the Delaware Preliminary Land Use Service board, which does not have the power to make final decisions. Still, its recommendations can influence the ultimate decisions that local governments make.
Get Involved
The Board of Adjustments will meet at 6 p.m. on March 5 at 67 Reads Way in New Castle. Members of the public can also attend the meeting over Zoom. The Preliminary Land Use Service will meet from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on March 5
Moyer, Starwood’s lawyer, also stated in the appeal that Patterson should not have relied on a worst-case scenario when calculating the potential emissions from the backup generators.
In its Coastal Zone application, Starwood reported that the maximum possible hours the generators could operate would be 500 hours, or a little over 20 days, per year.
“Under this worst-case assumption, this proposed campus has the potential to emit more tons of nitrogen oxides than any other industrial use in the coastal zone, with the exception of the Delaware City refinery,” Patterson said.
Starwood’s Coastal Zone Act application did say the generators could operate for that long in the worst-case conditions.
But Moyer said that Patterson “downplay[ed] the project’s actual expected operating scenario” of the generators running 20 hours per year “and failed to evaluate the potential to pollute under realistic operating conditions.”
Patterson did reference the 20-hour estimate in his decision. But he used the 500-hour scenario to calculate potential emissions.
Those familiar with the Coastal Zone Act decision process are unsure of whether Starwood has a case.
Kenneth Kristl, former director of the Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, said Patterson, as DNREC’s secretary, generally has considerable discretion about how the Coastal Zone Act is implemented.
Still, whether large-scale data centers count as heavy industry has not yet been litigated, he said.
“To me, it’s an intriguing legal question that needs to be resolved,” Kristl said.
New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter, who is trying to regulate data centers, said he has been on both sides of the Coastal Zone Act decision process, as a DNREC employee and as a litigant.
He thinks Patterson’s decision that Project Washington is heavy industry aligns with the “functional reality” of the plan, not how the developers are labeling it.
“You can do all the wordsmithing you want, but if you look at the actual impact … it’s clearly heavy industry,” Carter said.
Carter said regardless of what the Coastal Zone Industrial Control Board decides, he thinks the losing side will likely appeal the decision to the Delaware Superior Court, then the Delaware Supreme Court.
“This could take years,” he said.
Kristl agreed, saying he thinks the whole process will take between 18 months and three years.
The post Delaware City data center developer appeals Coastal Zone denial appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The Maduro raid encouraged anti-government activists in Iran, some of them said. But it doesn’t appear to have sent a clear message to Tehran’s leadership.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
The post Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files appeared first on ProPublica.
President Trump defended his first year back in office in his 2026 State of the Union address, touting his record on immigration, the economy, tariffs and more.
Poet’s second collection The Rot won the Victorian prize for literature and the Indigenous writing category
Evelyn Araluen has won both the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 Indigenous writing category at this year’s Victorian premier’s literary awards, for her second poetry collection The Rot.
Selected from almost 700 books entered for the prize, The Rot won the two awards on Thursday night, having also been shortlisted in the poetry category. The Goorie and Koori poet won the 2022 Stella prize, and was shortlisted for three premier’s literary prizes, for her debut collection Dropbear.
Continue reading...Marco Rubio is attending a regional summit to emphasize the Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere even as the prospect of conflict in the Middle East looms.
Rumors point to new Galaxy Watches on the way, but the rugged Ultra may steal the spotlight this year.
Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans. The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user's finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click. Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year's Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Trump claims host of successes and attacks old foes in longest State of the Union
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Erika Kirk, the widow of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, will attend tonight’s State of the Union address as a special guest of the president.
After her husband was assassinated at a college event for his non-profit Turning Point USA, Erika Kirk took over the organization.
If he’s coming to our house, you got to be there. Otherwise, you let him own the house.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: With the latest supreme court ruling exposing the president’s tariff plans as unlawful, US politicians and the American people have found them to be unworkable. Where does Trump go from here?
Good morning. Let’s delve into the two Ts shaping the global economy right now: tariffs and Trump.
Last week, the US supreme court ruled that Donald Trump had unlawfully used executive powers to impose sweeping global tariffs. In a 6-3 decision, the court found that the 1977 law Trump relied on did not give him the authority he claimed to introduce tariffs across the world. The ruling dealt a significant blow to a central plank of the president’s economic and geopolitical agenda.
US news | Donald Trump proclaimed his first year in office a success at the State of the Union address overnight, even as his presidency is dogged by low public approval ratings before November’s midterm elections.
UK news | Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.
Reform | Unions and renters’ groups criticised Reform UK after the party’s business spokesperson pledged to introduce a “great repeal act” that would abolish Labour legislation on workers’ rights and protection for tenants.
Education | Teachers and schools face “a huge ask” implementing the government’s special needs proposals, according to education leaders and MPs who otherwise gave the plans a cautious welcome.
Health | Almost half the public delay or avoid contacting their GP surgery when they are ill, mainly because they think they will struggle to get an appointment, a survey found.
Continue reading...Throughout the speech, Trump seemed tired. He had difficulty reading from his teleprompter; he gripped the podium with a tightness bordering on desperation
It is one of Donald Trump’s unique talents that he reveals the absurd obsolescence of long-held traditions. In presidential election years, his screaming bloviations on stage make the exercise of gathering the candidates together seem futile. In power, when he divorces facts from policymaking and relies instead on myth and grift to guide his decisions, he renders useless and impotent vast fields of expertise.
When he lies in public, and insists that his fantasies and distortions will dictate the course of government action, he makes those of us in the news business wonder if there’s any point, any more, in gathering and printing the truth.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...  | I recently replaced my Pint X Enduro tire (soft) and the wear on the shoulders is significant, especially on my toe edge. If you look closely, you can see the surface is no longer flat as it is on the new tire. The old tire has 1200+ miles on it. [link] [comments] |
Surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island
Japan will deploy missiles to a tiny island near Taiwan within five years, its defence minister has said, in a move that is likely to inflame tensions with China.
The surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down aircraft and ballistic missiles, will be located on Yonaguni – Japan’s westernmost island – by March 2031, Shinjiro Koizumi said.
Continue reading...Virginia’s new governor gives State of the Union rebuttal while Alex Padilla echoes similar themes in Spanish response
Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger gave a crisp and pointed rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, focusing on what she called the president’s failure to deliver costs, safety and humanity to the American people.
“We did not hear the truth from our president,” Spanberger said in the 12-minute speech on Tuesday night, asking voters to reflect on how Trump’s agenda has directly affected their lives. “So let’s speak plainly and honestly,” she said. “Is the president working for you?”
Continue reading...Hi guys!
I recently got my first onewheel (pint) and I really want to screw around with VESCing the board, but there isn't a ton of information readily available. I have lots of questions, but I will try to be brief xD.
I'm a budget baller (obviously very difficult for onewheel, but 🙄) but it seems the easiest VESC to start with would be the floatwheel one. My main questions come from what kind of performance I could expect from various configs. Main two choices being: keeping the stock BMS and just building a higher quality battery than the stock one (21700s maybe), or fully upgrading and going to 20s or so. I really just want a speed increase (cruise 20-25mph or so). I really just want to hear more options and how different configs affect the final result.
TLDR: How good is the performance difference just by upgrading the controller?
Not all partnerships are worth reviving.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response to President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night as the party attempts to counter the president's message.
Secretary of state makes rare briefing to so-called ‘gang of eight’ as US deploys largest force of aircraft and warships to Middle East since 2003
Marco Rubio delivered a rare briefing to top US lawmakers on Iran, just a few hours before Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to say that Tehran would never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Amid the largest deployment of aircraft and warships to the Middle East since the 2003 buildup to the Iraq war, Trump said he wanted to solve the confrontation with Iran through diplomatic means while claiming that Tehran was seeking to develop ballistic missiles that could reach the US, without providing further details.
Continue reading...During the State of the Union address, President Trump awarded Royce Williams a Medal of Honor for his actions in a secret mission during the Korean War.
President Trump touted his work during his first year back in office, saying, "inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before."
President Trump pressed the Iranian government to reach a deal on its nuclear program as he weighs possible military action against the country.
Connor Hellebuyck stopped 41 of Team Canada's 42 shots in the Olympic gold medal match.
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill. The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects. In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rebound in the country – which has been having demographic crisis – said to be partly because of 3.6 million born between 1991 and 1995 having children
South Korea recorded 254,500 births in 2025, the largest annual increase in 15 years, driven largely by a temporarily enlarged generation – known as “echo boomers” – now in their early thirties, alongside marriage rates recovering from Covid-era delays.
The country’s fertility rate – the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – rose to 0.80 from 0.75 last year, returning to the 0.8 range for the first time since 2021, according to provisional figures released by South Korea’s ministry of data and statistics on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 25.
Just got myself a pint x just this last saturday and have been ripping it around town and all about learning a getting the feel for it. I was wondering what shoe helps with foot fatigue abit I've seen some things about vans mte, I know that I'm still new an my muscles have grow for this but once I ride for a while mostly my feet hurt I can put up with the leg pain.
The U.S. men's hockey team also visited the White House on Tuesday following their gold medal win at the Winter Olympics.
I tried skating once or twice in my youth and struggled to push my board and keep my balance on the board at the same time. Has anyone found their skills learned from riding a Onewheel helped learn using a regular skateboard? Thinking about grabbing a cheap board next time I see one at the thrift store.
Four-day Caricom summit dominated by debate about US interventions in the region as military strikes against suspected drug boats continue
US interventions dominated speeches at a summit of 15 nations from the Caribbean and the Americas on Tuesday, as the region’s leaders met amid deadly military strikes against suspected drug boats and an oil blockade on Cuba.
During the opening ceremony of the four-day Caricom summit in St Kitts and Nevis, leaders of the regional bloc called for a strategic collaborations to deal with the impact of recent US policies.
Continue reading...Dick Durbin accuses FBI chief of ‘irresponsible joyriding’ and says agency’s work marred by Patel’s poor decisions
A top Senate Democrat alleged on Tuesday that FBI director Kash Patel’s personal travel and decision-making have undermined high-profile investigations, citing a whistleblower report.
Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, wrote in a letter to two government watchdogs that Patel has “seemingly engaged in what amounts to irresponsible joyriding on DoJ and FBI-operated aircraft at the expense of the American taxpayer and to the detriment of ongoing bureau operations”.
Continue reading...I’m looking for a handle - I’ve seen some of you use a paranoia concoction or similar. What are you using to carry your ride like a briefcase?
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 25, No. 520.
A man fatally stabbed four people before being shot dead by a sheriff's deputy outside a home northwest of Tacoma, Washington, authorities said.
The Democratic Women's Caucus wore pink to President Trump's address to Congress last year. This year, they're returning to white.
Critics say proposal to fold department into a new ‘mega ministry’ will dilute accountability and put nature protections at risk
New Zealand’s government is seeking to abolish its dedicated environment ministry to cut down on bureaucracy, a move critics say could dilute environmental protections.
Under the plan, the department would be folded into a new “mega-ministry” that will cover housing, urban development, transport, local government and the environment.
Continue reading...A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 25, No. 1,712.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 25, No. 724.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 25 #990.
The acquisition, covering more than 13,000 parking locations, is aimed at commuters, large events and airports.
A federal magistrate judge has blocked the DOJ from searching through a Washington Post reporter's devices after they were seized by the FBI last month, instead ruling that the court would conduct a search.
Savannah Guthrie said in a new video that the family is offering an additional reward of up to $1 million for information about their mother Nancy Guthrie's whereabouts.
Lawmaker says DoJ appears to have withheld interviews with survivor who accused Trump of ‘heinous crimes’
Democrats on the House oversight and government reform committee announced on Tuesday the launch of an investigation to determine whether the US Department of Justice (DoJ) purposely withheld materials that pertain to allegations against Donald Trump in the government’s release of the Epstein files.
The lawmakers pledged to look into a report that Trump had been accused by a woman of sexually abusing her decades ago when she was a minor, and that material relating to the allegation in the Epstein files has not been released to the public.
Continue reading...Anthropic presents itself as most safety-forward AI firm and Pentagon has threatened penalties if it does not yield
US military leaders including Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, met with executives from the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic on Tuesday to hash out a dispute over what the government will be able to do with the company’s powerful AI model. Hegseth gave Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, until the end of the day on Friday to agree to the department’s terms or face penalties, Axios reported.
Anthropic, which presents itself as the most safety-forward of the leading AI companies, has been mired in weeks of disagreement with the Pentagon over how the military is allowed to use its large language model, Claude. US defense officials have pushed for unfettered access to Claude’s capabilities, while Anthropic has reportedly resisted allowing its product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can use AI to kill people without human input. The Department of Defense (DoD) has integrated Claude into its operations, but has threatened to sever the relationship over what its top brass perceives as roadblocks erected by Anthropic.
Continue reading...Melvin Trotter, 65, gets lethal injection for 1986 stabbing death, becoming second person executed by state this year
A man convicted of killing a 70-year-old grocery store owner was put to death Tuesday in Florida, becoming the second person executed by the state this year after a record 19 executions in 2025.
Melvin Trotter, 65, was pronounced dead at 6.15pm following a lethal injection at Florida state prison near Starke for the 1986 stabbing death of Virgie Langford, according to authorities. Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesperson for Republican governor Ron DeSantis, said there were no complications.
Continue reading...Lawsuit is latest action by Trump administration against a university and escalation of president’s feud with California
The justice department sued the University of California, Los Angeles on Tuesday, alleging the university created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff after protests against the war on Gaza broke out across campus.
The lawsuit claims UCLA violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by “failing to prevent and correct discriminatory and harassing conduct” after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war on Gaza. The lawsuit is the latest action against a US university by the Trump administration since the president took office last year, and an escalation of Donald Trump’s feud with the state of California.
Continue reading...In new CBS News poll, most describe the state of the country as "divided;" Republicans are optimistic. Democrats and Republicans alike want to hear Trump talk about the economy and the cost of living.
Most believe they will struggle to get an appointment, with over a quarter choosing to manage ailment themselves
Almost half the public delay or avoid contacting their GP surgery when they are ill, mainly because they think they will struggle to get an appointment.
Overall 48% of people across the UK did not bother to ask their family doctor for help – either initially or at all – when they got sick over the past year, a survey found.
Faster access to GPs and A&E are the public’s top priorities for the NHS.
Only 32% believe the NHS provides a good service nationally.
42% think the standard of NHS care has worsened over the past year and only 12% think that it has improved.
47% fear NHS care will decline further over the next year and just 15% expect it to get better
Continue reading...This blog is now closed. You can find our live coverage of the State of the Union here:
About 30 members of Congress are planning to attend a Democratic counter-program event tonight instead of the State of the Union, according to the organizers of the “People’s State of the Union,” led by liberal group MoveOn and progressive media outlet MeidasTouch.
Here are the lawmakers who are expected to attend the separate event and skip the Trump speech:
Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA)
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Senator Tina Smith (D-MN)
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)
Representative Yassamin Ansari (AZ-03)
Representative Becca Balint (D-VT)
Representative Greg Casar (TX-35)
Representative Lizzie Fletcher (TX-7)
Representative Maxwell Frost (FL-10)
Representative Robert Garcia (CA-42)
Representative Adelita Grijalva (AZ-07)
Representative Jim Himes (CT-04)
Representative Sara Jacobs (CA-51)
Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07)
Representative John B. Larson (CT-01)
Representative Summer Lee (PA-12)
Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-03)
Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37)
Representative April McClain Delaney (MD-6)
Representative Christian Menefee (TX-18)
Representative Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Representative Ayanna Pressley (MA-7)
Representative Emily Randall (WA-6)
Representative Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05)
Representative Melanie Stansbury (NM-01)
Representative Delia Ramirez (IL-03)
Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12)
Continue reading...The Supreme Court decision spiking Trump’s tariffs threatens to undermine the White House’s China strategy, just weeks before the two leaders are expected to meet.
Firefighters search for 39 people missing in debris after river burst and houses were swept away
Three firefighters pulled a man’s body from the mud amid the rubble of houses swept away in a landslide in south-eastern Brazil, where 30 people died and 39 were still missing on Tuesday after torrential rains.
A river in the state of Minas Gerais burst its banks and streets became raging currents of brown water after an overnight downpour in a region that has seen record rain this month.
Continue reading...Zohran Mamdani calls for ‘respect’ of New York police as hundreds of thousands in US still face power outages
New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, called for “respect” of local police officers in the wake of Monday’s blizzard after a viral video showed some getting pelted by snowballs in Washington Square Park while responding to a large snowball fight.
In the video, a crowd of people boo and jeer at two officers, and some throw snowballs in their faces. At one point, the officers push at least two people to the ground in response to the snowballs.
Continue reading...The Senate failed to advance a measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, 11 days into a partial government shutdown with no apparent end in sight.
Warner Bros. Discovery said it will engage with Paramount Skydance to assess if its latest offer is superior to Netflix's $83 billion bid.
The Pentagon inspector general recommended the military reduce the number of military working dogs until there are enough caretakers to provide all dogs with satisfactory care.
Government ignores pleas for a grace period before new rules come into force on Wednesday
British citizens with a second nationality risk being blocked from entering the UK from Wednesday, the Home Office has confirmed.
The government has decided to ignore pleas from families, the3million campaign group, the Liberal Democrats and the former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis for a grace period to allow British dual nationals to adapt to the new rules they face.
Continue reading...Republican Tony Gonzales allegedly pressured Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, who died by suicide, into sexual relationship
US congressman Tony Gonzales refused growing calls to resign from his fellow Republicans on Tuesday amid a furore over allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
Gonzales has been accused of sending sexually explicit text messages in which he appeared to pressure the senior staffer to share images of herself and, eventually, coerced her into a sexual relationship.
In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CBS News that GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales should resign, after a set of text messages drew fresh scrutiny to an alleged affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
A college degree still provides an edge when it comes to finding a good job, but a person's major may be just as important to career stability, research suggests.
Feb. 24, 2026 — CSCS is pleased to announce the Eurohack26: High-Performance Computing Applications Programming hackathon. Eurohack26 is devoted to porting scientific applications to GPUs of different vendors or other massive parallel architectures, as well as optimizing existing high-performance computing applications. AI applications are welcome if they require massive compute power provided by parallel architectures.
The event will take place in person, from September 7 to 11, 2026, at Hotel de la Paix in Lugano, located in the Italian speaking area of Switzerland.
Background
High Performance Computing utilizes more and more parallelism provided by modern supercomputers. One development is General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), which offers exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications together with many parallel programming units. Another development is increased parallelism in multicore processors. Today, these devices can be programmed with the CUDA/C++ programming platform, HIP or with OpenACC directives for accelerators, which offer straightforward extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle. Alternative programming paradigms such as OpenCL or Kokkos can also be employed.
The workshop does not solely focus on the programming techniques but also on the algorithmic aspects of the codes. These algorithms could be numerical ones such as parallel methods for linear algebra as part of parallel solutions of partial differential equations, but also non-numerical aspects for optimal performance like sorting of data and the optimal choice of communication patterns. Adaptations and redesign of codes will be discussed to accommodate massive parallelism.
Workshop Goal
EuroHack provides an opportunity for current and prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU–GPU systems to (1) port (potentially) scalable applications to GPU accelerators, (2) optimize existing GPU-enabled applications on a state-of-the-art GPU system, or (3) optimize applications for multicore architectures.
In all cases, the focus is on improving application-level parallelism. For AI workloads, particular emphasis will be placed on extending applications from single-GPU execution to multi-GPU and multi-node configurations.
By the end of the week, participating teams are expected to have applications that run more efficiently, or a clearly defined roadmap for achieving improved performance. The workshop will combine technical discussions with hands-on development and structured scrum sessions.
Target Audience and Format
This program is addressed to small teams of 3 to maximum 4 developers interested in porting or optimizing their application on a cluster of CPUs and GPU accelerators in a short but extremely intense time window. This is a great opportunity for grad students and Postdocs.
Collectively, the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from universities, supercomputing centers and industry, and they bring their extensive experience in programming GPGPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard.
The in-person portion of the event will be limited to 5 or 6 teams of 3 to 4 developers with 2 mentors for each team.
Submissions
Submissions for EuroHack26 are now open. CSCS invites teams to propose an application to be ported to or be optimized on GPU or other massive parallel architectures. The CSCS “Alps” Grace-Hopper machine will be utilized for the workshop. The selected teams will be joined by two mentors with extensive programming experience.
The submission deadline is April 30, 2026, anywhere on Earth.
Full details including the link for submissions can be found in the event page here.
Source: CSCS
The post CSCS Opens Submissions for EuroHack26 HPC and GPU Optimization Workshop appeared first on HPCwire.
JESSICA BASSION
Copy Desk Chief
Edward A. “Nick” Nickerson, founder of the university’s journalism program, passed away on New Year’s Day at the age of 100.
The program began in Nickerson’s windowless office in the basement of Memorial Hall. There, he built it from the ground up — teaching everything from news reporting to radio writing. Prior to his retirement, Nickerson led the program for 21 years.
“He had fun,” Matt Nickerson, his son, said. “He liked jumping on his desk. He liked making up songs. He just got a kick out of being a teacher.”
On his centennial birthday, Nickerson’s family gifted him a book that combined his writings with letters and reflections from those who cherished him.
Each tribute made clear that Nickerson demonstrated a commitment to service in all aspects of his life.
Nickerson fought in the Apennine Mountains of Italy in 1945 after joining the 10th Mountain Division in 1943. He was awarded the Silver Star medal by the United States Army for “gallant conduct under fire,” and “disregard for his own safety to save the lives of his comrades.”
McKay Jenkins, the Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English at the university, is the author of “The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe.”
“Ed granted me a lengthy interview about his experiences, and generously invited me to join him for a gathering of vets,” Jenkins said. “He was a gregarious, witty and entirely charming guy, and I felt honored to know him.”
After the war, Nickerson attended Dartmouth College where he majored in English and served as the associate editor of The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s student newspaper. He later returned to Italy for a year to study at the University of Rome.
Nickerson began his professional career at the Rutland Herald, a Vermont newspaper. He then joined the Associated Press (AP) wire service, working first in its Baltimore bureau and then at its New York headquarters. Eventually, he received a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Albany.
Still, his greatest contribution came through his work as a teacher.
“He checked his ego at the door and channeled his energies into delivering great experiences — and wonderful stories of his career — to his students,” Blake Wilson, a former student, said. “Thanks to his ability to paint a picture with his storytelling, the Rutland Herald and Associated Press seemed bigger than life to me.”
Wilson spent nine years in journalism, then pursued a 38-year career in public policy. Nickerson’s teaching extended beyond journalism; his lessons guided his students throughout their lives.
“Nick always closed his messages with the tagline ‘keep the faith,’” Wilson said. “This had such an influence on me that for decades I have used the same closing. I continue to use it today, nine years into retirement.”
Many of Nickerson’s students went on to have distinguished careers. His friends and family counted six Pulitzer Prize winners among his former students.
After Nickerson retired from the university in 1991, he volunteered to teach extension literature classes and sang in a barber shop group called the HousaTonics.
As he neared 100, Nickerson survived cancer, COVID and pneumonia.
“Nick has a zest for life and has never given up, even as his abilities have become diminished,” Liz Nickerson, his daughter-in-law, said in a tribute written to him.
Nickerson’s memory also lives on in the archives of The Review, where he once served as an advisor.
In a farewell article, Nickerson contributed to The Review as a guest columnist, thanking the staff who he said, “present the student perspective as no house organ of the university is capable of doing.”
“They share my faith that despite all the flaws of journalism, printing the news is worthwhile, for the simple reason that knowledge is better than ignorance, openness better than secrecy and light better than darkness.”
Nickerson signed his farewell article the same way he did with all closing remarks.
“Keep the faith.”
September can't come quickly enough.
This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs.
When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I’d be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown.
↫ Cadence
It’s remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I’ll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There’s barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it’s some model by either Samsung or Apple.
There’s definitely more choice once you’re willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren’t going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you’re just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that’s not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots – so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you’ve been happy with an older phone that just had those things.
It’s like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there’s no trunk.
Eufy's new Omni C28 robot vacuum comes with an extra-long roller mop and some premium features often seen on high-end models.
Hours before President Trump's State of the Union address, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CBS News the U.S. economy is on the right track — but inflation hasn't been "completely fixed yet."
Donald Trump invited team after Olympic gold
Women’s team chose to skip event
The victorious US Olympic men’s ice hockey team visited the White House on Tuesday, although there were several notable absences.
Donald Trump invited the team to celebrate in Washington DC after they beat Canada in a dramatic Olympic final on Sunday. He also invited the US women’s team, who declined citing “timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments”.
Continue reading...Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales has been accused of having an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The company has doubled its operating area for robotaxi services over the past several months.
If you have an Oura Ring and women's health-related questions, this new AI model is available for your feedback.
Should legislation pass House of Lords, the matter will require another vote after May’s Welsh elections
Wales’s Senedd has voted in favour of implementing Westminster’s assisted dying bill, overcoming a constitutionally awkward situation that could have forced terminally ill people who wish to end their lives to travel to England or seek private provision.
In a debate stretching into Tuesday night in the Senedd’s newly expanded chamber, members voted 28 for and 23 against, with two abstentions. Should the legislation pass the House of Lords, the matter will require another Senedd vote after May’s Welsh elections.
Continue reading...SambaNova today unveiled its latest chip, the SN50, which it says is five times faster than Nvidia Blackwell and offers 3X the throughput, enough oomph to run agentic AI models exceeding 10 trillion parameters. It also announced the deployment of SN50s into Japan’s SoftBank, a new partnership with Intel, and a $350 million fundraising round.
SambaNova is one of the new chipmakers looking to capitalize on the AI boom and the insatiable demand for data processing that it has unleashed. The company developed its Reconfigurable Data Unit (RDU) architecture, which implements custom processing pipelines where data flows through the complete computation graph, to address the inefficiencies in data movement experienced by instruction set architecture (ISA) used by traditional CPUs and GPUs.
Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO, and the new SN50 chip
Like the SN40, the SN50 features a tiered memory architecture that combines 64GB of high‑bandwidth memory (HBM), 432 MB of static random-access memory (SRAM), and 256 GB to 2 TB of DDR5. SambaNova says this memory architecture allows it to host the largest AI models, including models with up to 10 trillion parameters. “Models residing in HBM and SRAM can be hot swapped in milliseconds, a capability that is essential for agentic workloads switching frequently between multiple models,” the company writes in a blog post today.
SambaNova says the SN50 delivers five times more compute per accelerator and four times more network bandwidth than the SN40. It says that internal benchmarks show that, compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 GPU, the SN50 delivers 5X the maximum speed and more than 3X the throughput for agentic inference workloads running on models like Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B.
SambaNova sells its chips in preconfirgured racks, called SambaRacks, which can contain up to 16 individual SN50. The company supports the capability to scale its SambaRacks outward to support a cluster with up to 256 SN50s connected across a multi‑terabyte‑per‑second interconnect. Each SambaRack consumes an average of 20 kW of power, which allows it to use air cooling rather than liquid cooling.
AI inference workloads are the target for SambaNova and its chips, and that story hasn’t changed with the SN50. The company says that its capability to cache input tokens in memory reduces the time-to-first-token (TTFT) relative to mainstream GPU architectures. It can also keep multiple AI models in memory and swap them in a fraction of the time that it takes Nvidia GPUs, the company claims.
SambaNova chips support a reconfigurable dataflow architecture
SoftBank will be the first company to deploy the SN50, SambaNova said. The Japanese company will deploy SN50 in its next-generation AI data center, SambaNova said.
The company also announced a new collaboration with Intel, which reportedly tried to buy SambaNova in January for $1.6 billion. Instead, Intel is a participant in SambaNova’s Series E round of financing worth $350 million, which it says it will use to expand manufacturing and cloud capacity.
“AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova, said in a press release. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud.”
The post SambaNova Eyes 10-Trillion Parameter Models for Agentic AI with New Chip appeared first on HPCwire.
Volunteer group Citizens of the Reef made the find as part of the Great Reef Census
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Citizen scientists have discovered what they believe is one of the largest coral colonies ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef.
The coral spans approximately 111 metres in maximum length and covers an estimated area of 3,973 sq m – about half the size of a soccer field.
Continue reading...You're probably curious about these beverages. Here's what to know first.
 | For a big guy 260, I feel so much more comfortable cruising on my XR now. I don’t push it and just go 10-12 mph cruising around my neighborhood, carving and what not. I used to skateboard as teen so this is what got me attracted to Onewheel. I plan to ride this XR for a bit as a practice board and will get the XRC or GT later this year. Maybe the GTS if I can afford it. But man this is so much fun! [link] [comments] |
You can buy tickets to watch the limited event at select theaters.
Apple will begin manufacturing the wee desktop computer in Houston later this year.
Six in 10 employers want workers with AI skills, but few are offering higher base pay or bonuses for the know-how.
Meta will take a stake in the chipmaker in exchange for a commitment to buy billions of dollars' worth of AI chips.
The Pentagon may decide to officially designate Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" to push them out of government, sources say.
Dozens of Democrats are boycotting the State of the Union on Tuesday, as many opt to hold nearby counterprogramming rather than signs of protests like those seen within the House chamber in recent years.
What started as a joyous snowball fight Monday in New York City morphed into a political tempest after residents began pelting police officers with snow and ice.
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The close friend and passenger of a 23-year-old American citizen who was killed by an ICE agent in Texas last year disputed officials' account of the fatal shooting.
Former Labour grandee’s arrest over his links to Epstein came after Met police informed he was preparing to fly to British Virgin Islands
Peter Mandelson condemned the police for his arrest on Monday and claimed he was only taken into custody because detectives had wrongly believed he was about to flee the country.
In a remarkable rebuke to the Metropolitan police, lawyers for the former peer challenged the force to provide the evidence to justify their actions, insisting it was prompted by a “baseless” suggestion that he was planning to move abroad.
Continue reading...Sammy Azdoufal alerted New York-based outlet the Verge after he took control of DJI Romo devices around the world
A Spanish software engineer reportedly contacted a New York-based tech outlet recently to reveal he had remotely taken control of about 7,000 vacuums worldwide, in the process shedding light on a broad vulnerability with smart products, according to a cybersecurity expert.
The Verge reported that the situation came to light when Sammy Azdoufal was trying to reverse-engineer his new DJI Romo vacuum so that he could control it with his Playstation 5 gamepad.
Continue reading...Former US ambassador issues statement via lawyers saying his priority is to cooperate with police and clear his name
Keir Starmer is taking part in a coalition of the willing video call to discuss Ukraine. There is a live feed of his public contribution here.
Kemi Badenoch is holding a press conference now. She is appearing with the relatives of children who she says have died as a result of social media – either because they took their own lives, or because it led to them being attacked. She says she wants to give them a platform to tell their stories.
Continue reading...Funds promised for security have not been received
Officials warn of potential cancellations to fan festivals
Local and national officials expressed concern on Tuesday that the ongoing partial government shutdown in the United States could adversely affect planning and preparation for the 2026 World Cup, which is just over 100 days away.
In a hearing before the House committee on homeland security, representatives from Miami, Kansas City and New Jersey – three locations that will host a combined total of 21 matches in the tournament, including the final – said they are still waiting on federal funds to be released to their respective local agencies. Last July, lawmakers pledged $625m in federal assistance toward World Cup security via the Trump administration’s “big beautiful” policy bill.
Continue reading...Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16.
In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law.
This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy.
↫ Waydell D. Carvalho
The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There’s data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there’s also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse.
The problem isn’t social media in and of itself – it’s profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services.
I’m obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — SambaNova today announced the SN50 AI chip, a new processor designed for large-scale AI inference workloads. The company also outlined plans to collaborate with Intel on high-performance AI inference systems and disclosed additional funding totaling more than $350 million from new and existing backers. The SN50 will be shipping to customers later this year.
SambaNova SN50 chip
To quickly scale and distribute SN50, SambaNova is collaborating with Intel, and has obtained $350 million in strategic Series E financing to expand manufacturing and cloud capacity.
“AI is no longer a contest to build the biggest model,” said Rodrigo Liang, co‑founder and CEO of SambaNova. “With the SN50 and our deep collaboration with Intel, the real race is about who can light up entire data centers with AI agents that answer instantly, never stall, and do it at a cost that turns AI from an experiment into the most profitable engine in the cloud.”
“Customers are asking for more choice and more efficient ways to scale AI,” said Kevork Kechichian, EVP, General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel. “By combining Intel’s leadership in compute, networking, and memory with SambaNova’s full-stack AI systems and inference cloud platform, we are delivering a compelling option for organizations looking for GPU alternatives to deploy advanced AI at scale.”
SambaNova says the SN50 delivers five times more compute per accelerator and four times more network bandwidth than the previous generation. It links up to 256 accelerators over a multi‑terabyte‑per‑second interconnect, cutting time‑to‑first‑token and supporting larger batch sizes. The result: Enterprises can deploy bigger, longer‑context AI models with higher throughput and responsiveness — while keeping performance high and costs and latency under control.
“AI is moving from a software story to an infrastructure story,” said Landon Downs, co-founder and managing partner at Cambium Capital. “SN50 is engineered for the real-world latency and economic requirements that will determine who successfully deploys agentic AI at scale.”
The news follows SambaNova’s record bookings and revenue as they closed out 2025, reflecting accelerating demand for production-ready AI systems across financial services, telecommunications, energy, and sovereign deployments worldwide.
SoftBank Deploys SN50 Within Its AI Data Centers in Japan
SoftBank Corp. will be the first customer to deploy SN50 within its next‑generation AI data centers in Japan. The deployment will power low‑latency inference services for sovereign and enterprise customers across Asia‑Pacific, supporting both open‑source and proprietary frontier models with aggressive latency and throughput requirements.
“With SN50, we are building an AI inference fabric for Japan that can serve our customers and partners with the speed, resiliency and sovereignty they expect from SoftBank,” said Hironobu Tamba, Vice President and Head of the Data Platform Strategy Division of the Technology Unit at SoftBank Corp. “By standardizing on SN50, we gain the ability to deliver world‑class AI services on our own terms — with the performance of the best GPU clusters, but with far better economics and control.”
The SN50 deployment deepens SambaNova’s existing relationship with SoftBank Corp., which already hosts SambaCloud to provide ultra‑fast inference for developers in the region. By anchoring its newest clusters on SN50, SoftBank positions SambaNova as the inference backbone for its sovereign AI initiatives and future large‑scale agentic services.
SambaNova and Intel Plan Multi‑Year Collaboration
SambaNova and Intel have entered into a planned multi‑year strategic collaboration to deliver high‑performance, cost‑efficient AI inference solutions for AI‑native companies, model providers, enterprises, and government organizations around the world. The collaboration will give customers a powerful alternative to GPU‑centric solutions, offering optimized performance for leading open‑source models with predictable throughput and total cost of ownership.
As part of the collaboration, Intel plans to make a strategic investment in SambaNova to accelerate the rollout of an Intel‑powered AI cloud. The collaboration is expected to span three key areas:
Together, SambaNova and Intel aim to shape the next generation of heterogeneous AI data centers — integrating Intel Xeon processors, Intel GPUs, Intel networking and storage, and SambaNova systems — to unlock a multi‑billion‑dollar inference market opportunity.
Raises $350M+ Series E
The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with strong participation from Intel Capital. New investors joining the round include: Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Gulf Energy, Mayfield Capital, Saudi First Data, Seligman Ventures, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. Existing investors participating include: A&E, 8Square, Atlantic Bridge, BlackRock, GV, Nepenthe, Nuri Capital, and Redline Capital.
As agentic workloads expand, enterprises are discovering that infrastructure optimized for training struggles to meet production latency and cost requirements: “We’re proud to be investing in SambaNova at such a pivotal time in the company’s growth,” said Monti Saroya, Partner at Vista Capital. “SN50 is engineered for agentic AI systems that orchestrate multiple models and process requests in near real-time, and more efficiently than traditional GPU-centric systems.”
Proceeds will be used to expand SN50 production, scale SambaCloud, and deepen enterprise software integrations.
More from HPCwire: SambaNova Eyes 10-Trillion Parameter Models for Agentic AI with New Chip
About SambaNova
SambaNova is a leader in next‑generation AI infrastructure, providing a full stack platform that powers the fastest, most efficient AI inference for enterprises, NeoClouds, AI labs and service providers, and sovereign AI initiatives worldwide. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., SambaNova delivers chips, systems and cloud services that enable customers to deploy state‑of‑the‑art models with superior performance, lower total cost of ownership and rapid time to value.
Source: SambaNova
The post SambaNova Introduces SN50 AI Chip, Intel Collaboration, and $350M in New Funding appeared first on HPCwire.
RALEIGH, N.C., Feb. 24, 2026 — Red Hat today announced the Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA, a co-engineered software platform that combines Red Hat AI Enterprise and NVIDIA AI Enterprise to provide an end-to-end AI solution optimized for organizations deploying AI at scale. Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA is the latest milestone in the companies’ deep collaboration, accelerating the delivery of the newest AI innovations to enterprise customers today while also delivering Day 0 support for NVIDIA hardware architectures.
With enterprise AI spending expected to reach over $1 trillion by 20291, driven in large part by agentic AI applications, organizations are looking to shift their strategies toward high-density, agentic workflows and address the resulting demands on AI inference and infrastructure. To help organizations keep pace, Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA empowers IT operations teams to streamline management of both traditional infrastructure and the evolving demands of the AI stack.
“The shift from AI experimentation to industrial-scale, enterprise-wide production requires a fundamental change in how we manage the AI computing stack,” said Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Global Engineering, Red Hat. “We’re accelerating the path to deploy AI and move quickly to production using Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA. With a stable, high-performance foundation driven by our proven hybrid cloud offerings, we’re enabling our customers to own their AI strategy and scale with the same rigor they apply to their core IT platforms.”
Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA accelerates the path to production AI and delivers the software platform for AI factories, running on accelerated computing infrastructure that fuels higher performance for the models and NVIDIA GPUs driving the inference stack. The platform is supported on AI factory infrastructure from leading systems manufacturers, including Cisco, Dell Technologies, Lenovo and Supermicro. This empowers IT administrators and operations teams to scale and maintain AI deployments with the same operational rigor and predictability as any enterprise workload.
This co-engineered software platform integrates the open source collaboration, engineering and support expertise of both Red Hat and NVIDIA to deliver a trusted, enterprise-grade solution. The Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA provides a highly scalable foundation for AI deployments across any environment, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge. It includes core capabilities for high-performance AI inference, model tuning, customization and agent deployment and management, with a focus on security. This allows organizations to maintain architectural control from the datacenter to the public cloud, delivering:
Availability
Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA is available now. Learn more here.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.
Source: Red Hat
The post Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA Accelerates the Path to Scalable Production AI appeared first on HPCwire.
NAPA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, today announced significant expansion of its membership, with nine new members joining since December 2025. New members include Carnegie Mellon University, Clockwork.io, CommonAI CIC, Emmi AI, Monash University, National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), Nota AI, University of Leicester, and yasp.ai.
New PyTorch Foundation membership signals sustained growth and progress in agentic AI innovation, with the Foundation leading the way on open, community-driven AI. Fueled by industry participation from leading universities, AI startups, global governments, and more, the PyTorch Foundation’s production-ready tools and libraries – including PyTorch, vLLM, DeepSpeed, and Ray – play integral roles in the AI stack.
“There are no agentic systems without the models that power them,” said Mark Collier, GM of AI at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of the PyTorch Foundation. “From training frameworks like PyTorch and optimization systems like DeepSpeed that create capabilities such as advanced tool calling, to inference engines and orchestration layers like vLLM and Ray that operationalize them, the Foundation hosts critical layers of the open source AI stack. The growth of our membership reflects a shared recognition that these capabilities must be built collaboratively in a vendor-neutral environment.”
Clockwork.io, Emmi AI, NIPA, Nota AI, and yasp join the foundation as Silver members. CommonAI CIC, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, and University of Leicester join as Associate members.
This news follows Ray joining the PyTorch Foundation as a foundation-hosted project in October 2025. The open source distributed computing framework for AI workloads, developed by Anyscale, offers development teams a seamless way to execute data processing, forming an integrated open source distributed computing layer for agentic AI alongside vLLM and PyTorch as part of the foundation.
To learn more, join the global PyTorch community in Paris, France from April 7-8, 2026 for the inaugural PyTorch Conference Europe. Register here for early-bird pricing on the latest in open source AI and machine learning.
“At Emmi AI, PyTorch is a key part of how we bring AI into real-world engineering workflows. Becoming a member of the PyTorch Foundation is a natural step for us as we contribute to an open ecosystem that accelerates research, deployment, and impact,” said Miks Mikelsons, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Emmi AI.
“Open source AI plays a critical role in bringing research innovations into real-world applications. By joining the PyTorch Foundation, we look forward to collaborating with the community and contributing our experience in AI model optimization,” said Tae-Ho Kim, CTO, Nota AI.
“AI teams shouldn’t have to redesign their models every time the hardware changes,” said Reza Rahimi, CTO, yasp. “Our work focuses on separating model innovation from infrastructure constraints, so developers can run efficiently anywhere. Becoming part of the PyTorch Foundation aligns with our belief that open ecosystems are essential to reduce friction, avoid lock-in, and scale AI sustainably.”
About the PyTorch Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation is a community-driven hub supporting the open source PyTorch framework and a broader portfolio of innovative open source AI projects. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation provides a vendor-neutral, trusted home for collaboration across the AI lifecycle—from model training and inference, to domain-specific applications. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Source: PyTorch Foundation
The post PyTorch Foundation Announces New Members as Agentic AI Demand Grows appeared first on HPCwire.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, today announced that it will demonstrate PCIe 8.0 SerDes running at 256 gigatransfers-per-second (GT/s) data rate in the Marvell booth #904 at DesignCon 2026, February 24 to 26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
As AI workloads continue to drive a massive expansion in data center infrastructure requirements, PCIe technology continues to evolve to deliver higher bandwidth for in-chassis, in-rack and across-rack connectivity. Expected to be finalized by 2028, the PCIe 8.0 specification is expected to double the bandwidth of the PCIe 7.0 specification for up to 1 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth, supporting demanding applications including AI, machine learning, high-speed networking and other data-intensive workloads.
In preparation for the PCIe 8.0 specification, hyperscalers and cloud data center operators can start pathfinding now, solidifying strategies to re-architect their infrastructure and take full advantage of the new specification when it is released. Providing an early demonstration of the PCIe 8.0 specification with the TE Connectivity AdrenaLINE Catapult connector at DesignCon 2026, Marvell is committed to helping the industry scale beyond traditional copper interconnects.
Enabling low power, low latency and low bit-error-rate transmission over copper and optical channels, the Marvell Alaska P PCIe 6.0 retimer and its PCIe 7.0 and PCIe 8.0 SerDes technology will deliver the scalability, power efficiency and high performance required for next-generation infrastructure to support tomorrow’s AI and data center bandwidth demand.
“Marvell continues to drive industry leadership in the critical connectivity technologies that power the most demanding AI workloads,” said Xi Wang, senior vice president and general manager, Connectivity Business Unit at Marvell. “We enable hyperscalers and cloud data center operators to optimize their AI architectures for maximum performance and scalability, and we will provide the technologies and support required to prepare the industry take full advantage of the benefits of the PCIe 8.0 specification when it is released.”
“As AI and other data-intensive workloads stretch the capabilities of the data center, the industry is continually looking for new ways to increase performance, scalability and power efficiency,” said Alan Weckel, co-founder and analyst of 650 Group. “With support for the PCIe 8.0 specification and other innovations, Marvell continues to push the envelope in delivering the technologies to fulfill the demands of AI hyperscalers and data center operators today and well into the future.”
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we’re building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world’s leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world’s data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers’ current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we’re ultimately changing the way tomorrow’s enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
Source: Marvell
The post Marvell to Showcase PCIe 8.0 SerDes Demonstration at DesignCon 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
Savers who built a reserve worth $10,000 can boost it further in 2026 with select savings accounts. Here's how.
Collaboration with quantum computing company, co-founded by 2025 Physics Nobel Laureate Professor John Martinis, starting with new cryogenic filters development to address a critical bottleneck in building larger, more powerful quantum computers
SINGAPORE, Feb. 24, 2026 — Singapore is strengthening its role in the global quantum hardware ecosystem through a new collaboration between researchers at the National Quantum Federated Foundry (NQFF) and Qolab, a quantum computing company co-founded by 2025 Physics Nobel Laureate Professor John M. Martinis.
Credit: Singapore NQO
Drawn by Singapore’s strong semiconductor and deep tech ecosystem, Qolab will work with Singapore researchers to develop new components essential for scaling next-generation quantum computing systems.
The research focuses on developing critical components, specifically cryogenic low-pass filters, for quantum processor chips1. These filters address a critical bottleneck in building larger, more powerful quantum computers.
“Building useful quantum computers requires scaling from dozens to millions of qubits, and that means we need not just more qubits but also reliable, manufacturable supporting hardware,” said Professor Martinis, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Qolab. “Singapore’s strong capabilities in advanced semiconductor manufacturing makes it an ideal partner for Qolab as we develop critical components that will support the next generation of quantum computing.”
This collaboration comes as global momentum in quantum hardware accelerates. Through sustained research, innovation and enterprise (RIE) investments, Singapore has continued strengthening its capabilities across semiconductor manufacturing, advanced engineering, and quantum device development. This unique intersection of strengths, combined with Singapore’s open and collaborative approach to international partnerships, has positioned the country as an attractive base for leading quantum technology companies looking to develop and scale critical hardware.
The Role of Cryogenic Filters in Quantum Computing
Superconducting qubits are one of the most mature and pioneering technology used by technology industry leaders to power quantum processors. These operate at temperatures close to absolute zero and are extremely sensitive to environmental noise. Cryogenic low-pass filters act as shields, blocking unwanted high-frequency signals. However, conventional filter solutions currently used in quantum computers are large, subject to errors, and difficult to manufacture at scale.
The collaboration will leverage complementary strengths from NQFF’s quantum device nanofabrication capabilities, and Qolab’s quantum computing systems expertise towards developing cryogenic filters that can be manufactured on semiconductor wafers – similar to how computer chips are made. This approach enables denser integration of filters directly with qubit circuits, allowing more qubits to fit into smaller, more reliable packages. The filters are expected to be deployed in quantum systems at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
“This collaboration demonstrates how Singapore can contribute critical quantum hardware components to the global ecosystem,” said Mr Ling Keok Tong, Executive Director of the National Quantum Office. “It brings together our strengths in semiconductor engineering, advanced manufacturing and quantum research to address real-world hardware challenges. With partners such as UCLA already committed to deploying these filters, it signals growing confidence in Singapore’s capabilities and strengthens our role in the global quantum supply chain.”
The research collaboration agreement was signed between NQFF and Qolab and witnessed by Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo. It was part of a quantum-related event today which commenced with opening remarks by Guest-of-Honour Minister Josephine Teo.
The event featured a public guest lecture – organized by the National Quantum Office (a national platform hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research) and the National Research Foundation – by Professor Martinis on the history of superconducting qubits and the NQFF Industry Day, which showcased quantum hardware developments from industry partners and leading global players.
[1] About cryogenic low-pass filters and quantum processors
Cryogenic low-pass filters are specialized components that operate at extremely low temperatures (near absolute zero). They play a critical role in ensuring the accurate operation of the qubits by shielding the superconducting circuits from unwanted microwave noise.
The filters being developed through this collaboration are designed for solid-state quantum processors, including superconducting qubit systems (used by leading technology companies) and spin qubit systems (an emerging approach using electron or nuclear spin). Both types require precise signal control and noise reduction to scale effectively.
Source: National Quantum Office, Singapore
The post Singapore Researchers Partner with Qolab on Components to Scale Quantum Computers appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Paris-born artist reinvented the synthesizer through meditative and feedback-drenched sonic explorations
The French composer and musique concrète pioneer Éliane Radigue has died at the age of 94.
“It is with immense sadness that we learn of the passing of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94,” the Paris-based experimental music center INA GRM posted on Instagram. “A major figure in musical creation has left us.”
Continue reading...National security committee warns until tougher safeguards are in place, UK elections dangerously exposed to covert foreign money
Political donations in cryptocurrency should be subject to an urgent temporary ban to stop foreign interference in British elections, the chair of the national security committee has said.
Matt Western, who leads the committee of MPs and peers, said a moratorium was needed until the risks of donations in cryptocurrency have been dealt with – including adequate checks on the source of the money.
Continue reading...Richard Tice echoes Donald Trump with pledge of ‘great repeal act’ and ‘tight quotas and significant tariffs’
Unions and renters’ groups have criticised Reform UK after the party’s business spokesperson, Richard Tice, pledged to introduce a “great repeal act” that would abolish Labour legislation on workers’ rights and protection for tenants.
In his first speech since being appointed by Nigel Farage to a portfolio covering business, trade and energy, Tice promised a bonfire of regulations, including an end to net zero targets and a new push for home-produced shale gas using fracking.
Continue reading...Operating from the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre, the new spin-out is the only company in the UK manufacturing niobium-based components.
Feb. 24, 2026 — Quantcore, a University of Glasgow spin-out, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding to create a sovereign supply chain, as the UK races to build domestic capacity in technologies critical to national security and economic competitiveness. The round was co-led by PXN Ventures, Blackfinch Ventures and Scottish Enterprise, with investment also coming from Quantum Exponential and STAC.
Pictured left to right, Quantcore co-founders Dr Valentino Seferai (CTO), Dr Jack Brennan (CEO), Wridhdhisom Karar (Measurement Lead), and Prof Martin Weides (Scientific Advisor).
Quantcore is the only company in the UK manufacturing niobium-based components. One benefit of niobium is it can operate at higher temperatures than aluminum, which is one of the most common materials used by Quantcore’s global competitors.
Thanks to the use of niobium, Quantcore is helping its customers, which include UK national laboratories, to save energy and do more with its quantum components at a more scalable rate.
Operating from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt Nanofabrication Centre, the company designs, manufactures and tests the superconducting processors, resonators and sensors that form the core of quantum computers and advanced sensing systems.
Beyond computing applications, Quantcore’s quantum sensors enable secure communications and unprecedented accuracy in medical imaging that classical technology cannot achieve, which could lead to breakthroughs in areas such as neuroscience, early disease detection, secure infrastructure, and fundamental physics.
Following the investment, Quantcore plans to grow its team from four to 12 employees over the next 18 months, with engineering roles across design, manufacturing and cryogenic testing as well as non-technical positions to aid its commercial strategy.
Dr Jack Brennan, CEO and co-founder of Quantcore, said: “This technology is extremely powerful. One of the main features of quantum computers is that they will be really good at cracking codes. So, as a country, you have to ask: do you want to wait until other countries have this capability, or do you want to get there first?
“The world is not what it was. If you want this technology, which you do, you need to be able to manufacture it domestically so you can control every part of it. That’s what we’re building from Scotland.
“Classical computers are hitting a plateau as silicon reaches its limits. We’re entering a new paradigm based on fundamental physics, and it’s coming whether we like it or not. There’s no reason all the advanced tech in the UK has to be in London, Cambridge, and Oxford. Why not build it here?”
The investment comes at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and follows the UK government’s pledge to invest £670 million into quantum computing as part of its 10-year modern industrial strategy, with the global quantum computing market projected to reach $20.2 billion by 2030.
Quantcore was founded by Dr Jack Brennan, Dr Valentino Seferai, Wridhdhisom Karar, and Prof Martin Weides, and spun out from the University of Glasgow in August 2025. The company was also part the first cohort of deep tech startups to take part in the university’s Infinity G accelerator program, led by STAC.
Uzma Khan, Vice Principal, Economic Development and Innovation, University of Glasgow, said: “Quantum technology is a core area of research excellence for the University. This activity is generating new innovations with potential for scalable economic impact via spin-out company creation.
“Quantcore Technologies has the potential to become a market leader in supply of hardware for quantum computing. We wish the founding team and their investors every success.”
As a crucial anchor driving regional economic growth, the University of Glasgow is working to translate its research into commercial opportunities in sectors like life sciences and quantum technologies to create jobs and boost prosperity.
Spin-outs formed since 2020 have collectively secured over £100 million in investment, demonstrating the growing strength of the University’s innovation pipeline.
Meanwhile, the University is working with its partners Scottish Enterprise and Glasgow City Council to deliver jobs, training opportunities and economic growth through Glasgow Riverside Innovation District.
Source: University of Glasgow
The post Quantcore Raises £2.5M to Build UK Supply Chain for Quantum Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.
"We play for one team," House Speaker Mike Johnson told "CBS Evening News" anchor Tony Dokoupil ahead of the State of the Union. "We're all for America."
Huw Pill warns combined effect of national insurance and minimum wage rises have ‘acute’ effect on youth employment
The negative effect of a combined increase in employers’ taxes and minimum wages has been “particularly acute” for young people, the Bank of England’s chief economist has warned.
Huw Pill said on Tuesday that the increase in national insurance contributions (NICs) from April last year and the government’s efforts to equalise the “national living wage” had caused a particular problem for young people trying to find jobs.
Continue reading...The US president fights 1970s battles in a financialised age. America faces not a payments crisis but a slow erosion of industrial and technological power
When the US supreme court voted 6-3 last Friday to strike down Donald Trump’s tariffs, he was incandescent. Two judges he had elevated – Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett – were suddenly recast as traitors to the cause. Both were, he insinuated, under the sway of foreign interests. The court ruled that the tariffs overstepped the powers the US Congress granted under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Mr Trump responded by reaching for a 1974 trade law, invoking “international payments problems” to slap on a 10% tariff for 150 days.
Mr Trump was moulded by the 1970s. His political DNA was formed in that era’s crises and he governs as if America were still in the Nixon era of shock politics. In some ways there are parallels. The political mobilisation around economic insecurity echoes that period, as does distrust in elite authority. This explains why many populist politicians on the right reach for the 1970s, which fits the mood of decline and rivalry and offers a narrative of “restoring strength”. Internationally, Mr Trump also sees the world through the 1970s lens of industrial rivalry and trade grievance. But the world today is in a far more financialised and interdependent state.
Continue reading...The passenger received medical attention after the plane returned to Wichita, Kansas, Alaska Airlines and the FAA said.
Looking to avoid an endless scroll? Check out these essential Hulu movie picks for a guaranteed good night in.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feb. 24, 2026 — QEC4QEA, funded by the EuroHPC JU, is one of two Quantum Excellence Centres established in Europe. It will enhance the uptake of quantum computing technologies and the development of applications to ensure Europe’s leadership in quantum computing.
QEC4QEA (Quantum Excellence Centre for Quantum-Enhanced Applications) is designed to make quantum computing more accessible and easier to use. It will connect end users with quantum application developers, experts, and computing providers. By bringing these groups together, QEC4QEA will help users navigating the complexity of quantum computing technologies and apply them effectively in real-world workflows. For this purpose, the project builds on European quantum computing infrastructure that combines quantum and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities.
QEC4QEA will support users at every stage of the application journey. It will provide access to guidance, tools, and services needed to develop, test, and run quantum-enhanced applications. These services will include training, support in selecting appropriate computing resources, and assistance with efficient execution. The goal is to provide a complete and practical support chain that allows users to focus on results rather than technical barriers.
By guiding users to the most suitable resources and helping them optimize their workflows, QEC4QEA will enable applications to run efficiently and cost-effectively on European quantum computers and hybrid quantum-HPC systems operated by EuroHPC JU and national organizations. This approach is expected to accelerate innovation across Europe, encourage the development of new quantum-enhanced applications, and build lasting expertise and interest in quantum technologies.
Together with its sister project QEX, QEC4QEA supports EuroHPC JU’s vision of strengthening Europe’s knowledge base and building a thriving, sustainable quantum ecosystem.
More Details
The QEC4QEA project is coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and brings together 19 partners from eight EuroHPC JU participating countries (France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey), representing a broad range of scientific and technical expertise.
QEC4QEA is structured into five clusters led by major European supercomputing centers that are deploying and operating the EuroHPC quantum-HPC infrastructure: Forschungszentrum Jülich, CEA, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), CINECA, and PCSS. Led by these centers, the clusters combine advanced supercomputers and quantum computers with strong technical expertise, established application portfolios, and direct access to cutting-edge HPC and quantum computing infrastructures. This federated model will strengthen cross-regional cooperation, maintain close proximity to users, maximize synergies, and ensure scalable impact at the European level.
The consortium will also closely work with key European Quantum Flagship projects, including OpenSuperQPlus, PASQuanS2, and QuIC, as well as major national initiatives such as QSolid (Germany), HQI (France), Quantum Spain (Spain), and KCIK (Poland).
The QEC4QEA Quantum Excellence Centre has been selected following the call HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-QEC-05-01 and is funded by the Horizon Europe program, with a total EU contribution of around EUR 4.9 million.
Source: EuroHPC
The post QEC4QEA to Support Development of Quantum-Enhanced Applications Across Europe appeared first on HPCwire.
State District Judge Tony Graf decided in a Tuesday ruling to keep the Utah County Attorney's Office on the case against the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk.
A new player in the U.S. military’s decadeslong war on drugs announced itself to the world on Sunday, providing intelligence that supported a Mexican military operation that killed the head of the infamous Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Though details continue to emerge from the operation, which set off a spasm of violence that left at least 70 people dead, some of the information that led Mexican security forces to Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was delivered by a new Joint Interagency Task Force called Counter Cartel, based out of Southern Arizona.
The outfit operates out of Fort Huachuca, a military intelligence hub nestled in a rugged mountain chain 15 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border. According to media reports, the task force, staffed by a combination of some 300 military and civilian employees, provided its Mexican counterparts with a “detailed target package” in the run-up to Sunday’s operation. The CIA also provided key support for the mission.
Existence of the task force was first revealed in a little-noticed ceremony at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, last month. Its online footprint is slight. The information that is publicly available, however, confirms deepening ties between President Donald Trump’s domestic homeland security agenda and his lethal drug war operations abroad.
Known internally as JIATF-CC, the task force is part of the U.S. Military’s Northern Command, once considered a backwater that today enjoys renewed prominence under Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In the past year, Trump and Hegseth have used the Southern Command, NORTHCOM’s counterpart in the Western Hemisphere, as well the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, to conduct the kinds of targeted killing missions long associated with the war on terror against targets in Latin America.
To date, the military has conducted more than 40 airstrikes against alleged drug traffickers, killing at least 137 people without producing a shred of evidence to support its claims. While those strikes have been concentrated in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, the task force involved in Sunday’s Mexico operation is distinct for its focus much closer to U.S. soil.
“What the Trump administration has done more than its predecessors is give NORTHCOM a hugely bigger role,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group.
With that newfound stature has come a greater level of secrecy over what, exactly, the command is up to — and whether its operations might spill back over the border into the U.S.
In years past, when his organization would raise concerns over U.S. operations, the military would make available attorneys who could quote the Posse Comitatus Act — the law restricting military involvement in domestic policing — by chapter and verse, Isacson recalled. No more. Even his contacts on Capitol Hill, staffers working on armed services and homeland security issues, have found their letters to department chiefs met with silence.
“It freaks me out when I talk to oversight staff,” he said. “They’re just not getting answers.”
In a sparse January press release, Northern Command said the JIATF-CC is a component of the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center. Its mission, the release said, is to “identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel operations posing a threat to the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
While information on the coordinating center is similarly scant, FBI national security branch operations director Michael Glasheen testified in December before the House Committee on Homeland Security that the president created a wide network of Homeland Security Task Forces in accordance with an executive order he signed on his first day back in office in January 2025.
Titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” the order called on the attorney general and the DHS secretary to “jointly establish Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all States nationwide.” Their shared mission would be to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States” and “dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks.”
Though the order made no mention of the U.S. military, Glasheen’s testimony confirmed the Pentagon had joined the HSTF mission.
“This task force construct is the first of its kind,” he told lawmakers, taking a “whole-of-government” approach and “consolidating all of U.S. law enforcement, military, and intelligence efforts into a targeted effort in combatting these threats.” According to Glasheen, individual task forces are led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In addition to more than 8,500 federal agents and officers, hundreds of analysts and legal attachés from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies support the HSTF mission worldwide, Glasheen testified. The national coordination center that the new border-focused JIATF-CC belongs to, he continued, “serves as the primary federal coordinating entity to align law enforcement, defense, and intelligence efforts.”
A recent job posting for a database administrator for the center — requiring at least a “secret” security clearance and paying upward of $189,750 a year — described the “care and feeding” of hundreds of terabytes of law enforcement data.
The precise relationship between the U.S. military and federal agencies like ICE and the FBI in support of the president’s homeland security mission is unclear. Northern Command did not respond to The Intercept’s request for an interview.
For generations, the U.S. military has played a driving role in the drug war abroad, training allied security forces, sharing intelligence on wanted drug traffickers, and facilitating covert kill-capture operations in nations such Colombia and Mexico.
Beginning under President Ronald Reagan and continuing into the administration of Bill Clinton, Northern Command oversaw a steady growth in military counternarcotics operations on the U.S.–Mexico border, including on U.S. soil. Those operations ended when a Marine sniper team killed an American teenager named Esequiel Hernández while he was tending his family’s goats in West Texas in 1997.
Since then, the Pentagon has largely kept its focus south of the border. That, however, may be changing. A defense official speaking to Reuters said the new Arizona task military force is working to map suspected drug cartel networks on both sides of the international divide.
The director of the task force, U.S. Brig. Gen. Maurizio Calabrese, compared his team’s mission to the targeted killing campaigns previously waged against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The motivations were different, he said, but in terms of sheer size, the drug cartel threat was perhaps even larger.
The general estimated that hundreds of leaders occupied the upper echelons of Mexican organized crime, supported by as many as a quarter-million lower-level operatives, which he referred to as “independent contractors.”
Correction: February 24, 2026, 2:26 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to the military command responsible for strikes against alleged drug smugglers. It has been corrected to reflect that the strikes were carried out by the Southern and Special Operations Commands.
The post Mexico Got Help Killing Drug Lord From Secretive U.S. Campaign Led by FBI and ICE appeared first on The Intercept.
Chiquinho and Domingos Brazão accused of ordering shooting of Marielle Franco and her driver in 2018
Brazil’s supreme court has opened the trial of politicians accused of ordering the 2018 murder of Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco, a case that exposed deep ties between politics and organised crime in the city.
Franco, an activist who grew up in a favela and became an outspoken critic of Rio’s powerful militia groups, was 38 when she was shot dead in the city centre alongside her driver, Anderson Gomes.
Continue reading...Market swings can quietly reshape your nest egg, but there are ways to protect your retirement plan from losses.
Laurence des Cars steps down days after parliamentary inquiry called Paris museum a ‘state within a state’
The president of the Louvre in Paris has resigned, four months after a gang of thieves broke into the museum’s Apollo gallery and made off with €88m (£76m) of Napoleonic jewellery in France’s most dramatic heist in decades.
Laurence des Cars, who had offered to step down in the immediate aftermath of the burglary, tendered her resignation to Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday in what the French president called “an act of responsibility”, the Elysée Palace said.
Continue reading...Smart glasses let you follow a recipe and ask basic cooking questions hands-free. Here's how my first experience cooking with smart frames went.
Ursula von der Leyen talks up prospect of €90bn loan but appears cautious on timetable for Ukraine joining bloc
Zelenskyy says “we must be just as determined and strong as we were when the invasion began,” as “the threat hasn’t become smaller.”
He says Europe can only respond to this war working together with the US, even as he remarks it “is not an easy task to maintain transatlantic unity and cooperation in the current conditions.”
“So there must be no place in the free world for Russian oil, for Russian tankers, Russian banks, Russian sanctions …, schemes, or for any Russian war criminals. The time has come to fully ban all participants in Russia’s aggression from entire Europe.”
Continue reading...More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sunset phenomenon at national park’s Horsetail waterfall still drew large crowds even with freezing temperatures
Heavy snow did not deter visitors from flocking to Yosemite in recent days, in hopes of seeing the park’s spectacular natural light show.
Firefall occurs each year in February during sunset when the light hits Horsetail Fall in such a way that, for a brief period, the waterfall appears illuminated by lava. In recent years, the phenomenon has drawn large crowds – and lots of photographers.
Continue reading...AI safety, especially around images and videos, continues to be an evolving challenge.
Chatham House appoints Owen Jenkins as Research Director for Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific News release jon.wallace
Owen will join Chatham House on 9 March.
Owen Jenkins will join Chatham House as Research Director for Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific on 9 March.
Owen is a senior British diplomat and highly experienced leader in international affairs. He most recently served in the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) as Director General for the Indo-Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and was previously the UK’s ambassador to Indonesia and Timor-Leste.
Earlier in his career, he worked as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan to two prime ministers, and held diplomatic roles in Turkey, Argentina, Brussels and India.
Bronwen Maddox said:
‘Owen’s depth of regional and global experience makes him exceptionally well suited to join our Executive Leadership Team, providing leadership across Chatham House’s Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia Pacific Programmes.
‘This role is central to guiding our work on the evolving world order and shifting global alliances – questions shaped by the increasing influence of China, the assertiveness of regional powers, and the ambitions of countries across the Global South.
‘Owen’s experience working at the highest levels of diplomacy will be invaluable in sharpening our analysis, strengthening our external influence and developing our ideas.’
Owen said:
‘I’m thrilled to be taking up this great job at one of the world’s leading international policy institutes. I have drawn on Chatham House’s expertise in every job I’ve done, from gaining insight into the Balkan wars in the 1990s to understanding Indonesia as British ambassador there.
‘I look forward to working with the impressive teams in the Africa, Middle East and North Africa and Asia Pacific programmes and to using my own knowledge to increase still further the impact of Chatham House’s work.’
US president had said he would raise levy to 15% after last week’s supreme court ruling
Donald Trump’s new global tariffs have taken effect at 10%, even though last weekend he had threatened a higher rate, of 15%, providing “some relief” for British businesses, according to a lobby group.
After the US president suffered a defeat at the hands of the supreme court on Friday, which struck down his sweeping “liberation day” tariffs imposed last year, he angrily reacted by announcing a 10% global tariff, which he raised to 15% on Saturday in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Continue reading...Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Uranus and Neptune will all be in the night sky at the same time.
Mexico’s president says there is ‘no risk’ for those visiting for Fifa games after military killed drug lord ‘El Mencho’
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said that there is “no risk” for visitors coming to Fifa World Cup games scheduled to be held in the country, after the death of a top cartel boss triggered a wave of retaliatory violence from gunmen who blocked roads and attacked security forces across the country.
The Mexican military attempted to detain “El Mencho”, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in a dawn raid on Sunday, leading to a firefight in which he was fatally wounded, before dying while being airlifted to hospital.
Continue reading...Charles Kushner, father of president’s son-in-law Jared, failed to show up to meeting to explain US comments relating to death of far-right activist
Donald Trump’s envoy to Paris has called France’s foreign minister and pledged not to interfere in the country’s domestic affairs, a day after he was barred from talking to government officials for failing to attend a formal meeting at the ministry.
The foreign ministry said on Monday that Charles Kushner would not be permitted to carry out his diplomatic duties until he had explained his refusal to comply with the summons over US comments about the killing of a far-right activist in France.
Continue reading...A newly revealed text exchange appears to show Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales encouraging an aide who later died by setting herself on fire to send him an explicit photo.
According to sources close to the investigation, there are concerns that DNA recovered from Nancy Guthrie's home may not yield a usable profile for comparison.
Russia is intensifying efforts to push users away from foreign messaging apps and toward a domestic platform that has been criticized as a surveillance tool.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base. The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers to steer, verify and integrate AI output." In an earlier podcast on the subject, Russinovich said this basic premise -- that AI is increasing productivity only for senior developers while reducing it for juniors -- is a "hot topic in all our customer engagements... they all say they see it at their companies." [...] The logical outcome is that "if organizations focus only on short-term efficiency -- hiring those who can already direct AI -- they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders," Russinovich and Hanselman state in the paper.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sony, Bose and Apple are often considered the top names in premium wireless noise-canceling earbuds, but each has pros and cons. Here's how they compare in my testing.
Until now, you needed to upgrade to a pricier plan for these features.
Getty Images photographer Elsa Garrison shares how she managed to capture a "pretty iconic" image of Team USA's Jack Hughes.
Former US president’s part in ending the Troubles threatened by fallout from Epstein scandal, which has tainted his former envoy, George Mitchell
When Bill Clinton testifies later this week at a congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein there is unlikely to be any reference to his most precious foreign policy achievement – helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.
Whether Clinton is linked to Epstein’s predations or turns the tables on his inquisitors, his legacy in Northern Ireland might appear to stand apart, a jewel of his presidency that is immutable, enshrined in history.
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The rumored shade is reminiscent of OPI's Big Apple Red.
American snowboarder Chloe Kim told "CBS Mornings" she had to relearn some of her tricks for the Winter Olympics due to a shoulder injury.
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A grand jury refused to return an indictment against the six Democratic lawmakers earlier this month.
Richard Blumenthal seeks records from FCC and Paramount Global amid claims of political censorship
US Senate Democrats are launching an investigation into whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the CBS parent company, Paramount, prevented Stephen Colbert, the network’s talkshow host, from broadcasting an interview with the Texas Democratic candidate, James Talarico.
Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, has written to the FCC’s enforcement bureau and to the CEO of Paramount Skydance, David Ellison. The Democratic senator demands information and documents relating to the Colbert controversy, including any communications with Donald Trump’s White House.
Continue reading...Credit card debt forgiveness may be worth exploring this March, but borrowers should first consider certain items.
Christopher Trybus charged with manslaughter of Tarryn Baird, rape and coercive and controlling behaviour
A woman who took her own life after being subjected to a campaign of “physical and sexual violence” by her husband told her family “I am so sorry but I just couldn’t take it any more”, a court has heard.
Tarryn Baird, 34, was found dead at her home in Swindon, Wiltshire, on 28 November 2017.
Continue reading...SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MENLO PARK, Calif., Feb. 24, 2026 — AMD and Meta today announced a 6-gigawatt agreement to power Meta’s next generation of AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs. This agreement expands on the companies’ existing strategic partnership and aligns roadmaps across silicon, systems and software to deliver AI platforms purpose-built for Meta’s workloads.
Credit: Shutterstock
The first deployment will use a custom AMD Instinct GPU based on the MI450 architecture to deliver AI platforms that are optimized for Meta’s workloads at gigawatt-scale. Shipments supporting the first gigawatt deployment are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026 powered by the custom AMD Instinct MI450-based GPU and 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” running ROCm software and built on the AMD Helios rack-scale architecture. AMD Helios was developed jointly by AMD and Meta through the Open Compute Project to enable scalable, rack-level AI infrastructure.
“We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with Meta as they push the boundaries of AI at unprecedented scale,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD. “This multi-year, multi-generation collaboration across Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and rack-scale AI systems aligns our roadmaps to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient infrastructure optimized for Meta’s workloads, accelerating one of the industry’s largest AI deployments and placing AMD at the center of the global AI buildout.”
“We’re excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta. “This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute. I expect AMD to be an important partner for many years to come.”
In addition to the collaboration on GPUs, AMD and Meta are expanding their AMD EPYC processor partnership. Meta has been a close partner over multiple generations, deploying millions of AMD EPYC CPUs and significant deployments of AMD Instinct MI300 and MI350 series GPUs across their global infrastructure. As AI infrastructure grows in scale and complexity, CPUs are a strategic pillar of the AI compute stack, enabling efficiency, scalability and orchestration alongside GPUs. Building on deep roadmap alignment, Meta will be a lead customer for 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” and “Verano,” a next-generation EPYC processor designed with workload-specific optimizations to deliver leadership performance-per-dollar-per-watt.
As part of the agreement, to further align strategic interests, AMD has issued Meta a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, structured to vest as specific milestones associated with Instinct GPU shipments are achieved. The first tranche vests with the initial 1-gigawatt of shipments, with additional tranches vesting as Meta’s purchases scale to 6 gigawatts. Vesting is further tied to AMD achieving certain stock price thresholds and exercise is tied to Meta achieving key technical and commercial milestones.
“We expect this partnership to drive substantial multi-year revenue growth and be accretive to our non-GAAP earnings per share, marking another significant step forward in delivering on our ambitious long-term financial model,” said Jean Hu, EVP, CFO and treasurer, AMD. “The performance-based structure also tightly aligns AMD and Meta around execution and long-term value creation.”
Together, AMD and Meta are collaborating across silicon, systems and software to enable AI infrastructure at a global scale that accelerates AI innovation and brings AI-powered services and experiences to billions of users.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
Source: AMD
The post AMD and Meta Announce Expanded Strategic Partnership to Deploy 6 Gigawatts of AMD GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.
Campus clashes provide uneasy backdrop to third round of talks on nuclear programme in Geneva
Plainclothes police and security forces, many of them armed, have tried to flood Iran’s remaining open universities in an attempt to crush a fourth day of student protests against the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Running battles were reported on some campuses, with videos showing fistfights between the Basji state-backed militia and students at the University of Science and Technology in Tehran. Pick-up trucks with machine-guns were photographed parked outside the University of Tehran, with demonstrations also in Mashhad.
Continue reading...ATLANTA, Feb. 24, 2026 — Morehouse College has received a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to participate in a $457 million project to build one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the southeast. This historic investment in higher education cyberinfrastructure will elevate Morehouse’s ability to provide access to world-class computational resources for its students, faculty, and HBCUs nationwide.
Morehouse College students, faculty, and HBCUs nationwide will benefit from access to the supercomputer.
The Morehouse Center for Broadening Participation in Computing has received an initial $5 million portion of the NSF grant to start construction on a site that will house the cutting-edge supercomputer, Horizon, part of the NSF’s Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF). More funds will be disbursed to support ongoing operations. The supercomputer will push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, providing greater access to areas such as climate modeling, machine learning, and biomedical research.
The computing project is being led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a primary partner in the LCCF project, Morehouse will play a pivotal role in the deployment of Horizon. In addition to housing the system, Morehouse will serve as a national epicenter for programmatic support, leading free initiatives such as a summer enrichment program for middle and high school boys, a postbaccalaureate program in artificial intelligence, and three weeklong faculty accelerators in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, focused on research, teaching, and grant proposal writing.
“Morehouse College is honored to partner with the NSF and the University of Texas at Austin on this transformative project,” said Dr. F. DuBois Bowman, 13th President of Morehouse College. “By hosting one of the Southeast’s most powerful academic supercomputers, we are providing HBCUs with unprecedented computational power to explore bold ideas, accelerate discovery, and unleash new frontiers of creativity and innovation. This investment positions our students and faculty to help shape the future of science, technology, and global problem-solving.”
“This contribution cements Morehouse’s place as the undisputed HBCU leader in artificial intelligence,” says Dr. Kinnis Gosha, Principal Investigator of the grant and Hortinius I. Chenault Endowed Professor and Chair of Computer Science. “As a national resource provider, we will empower other HBCUs and non-research-intensive institutions to contribute to growing their research capacity and enhancing student learning.”
The NSF partnership underscores Morehouse College’s commitment to academic rigor and its growing influence as a leader in global STEM research. It reinforces the College’s position as a champion for equity in the technological landscape, a field with a workforce that is still lacking diversity. According to national labor statistics, some 62 percent of tech jobs are held by White Americans.
Morehouse will share its research and project progress at the Integrating Supercomputing-Powered Instruction, Research, and Entrepreneurship (InSPIRE) Workshop, which is held annually in Austin, Texas. The conference offers support to faculty and students using AI research in teaching and entrepreneurial endeavors.
For more information on Morehouse’s role in the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility or other AI initiatives offered by the Morehouse Center for Broadening Participation in Computing, please visit https://morehouse.edu/academics/centers-and-institutes/cbpc.
About Morehouse College
Founded in 1867, Morehouse College is the nation’s only college founded to educate men of color. Ranked as Georgia’s top liberal arts college for men, Morehouse produces more Black men who go on to receive doctorates than any other college in the country and is a top feeder school for Black men entering prestigious graduate schools and MBA programs. Also named Georgia’s #1 small college, Morehouse educates a selective group of some 2,800 students each year, 60 percent of whom come from families with household incomes of $40,000 or less, yet many of whom are highly recruited by Fortune 500 companies. The College has created more Rhodes Scholars than any other HBCU and has the #1 core curriculum among HBCUs nationally. It is the nation’s top producer of Black male graduates in the social sciences, and the top HBCU producer of Black male graduates in business administration, management, operations, English, foreign languages, mathematics, statistics, philosophy, religious studies, and physical sciences. As the national epicenter for thought leadership on human rights and equity, Morehouse is committed to helping the nation address the challenges caused by institutional racism, income and health care disparities, lack of access to capital, detrimental public policy, and the need for high-quality education.
Source: Morehouse College Office of Institutional Advancement
The post Morehouse College Selected as Host Site for NSF Supercomputing Project appeared first on HPCwire.
Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes. The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device that could play Xbox games, whether a PC, a smart TV, a phone, or a Windows handheld. Microsoft then went further and started publishing its biggest franchises on PlayStation, making it one of the largest third-party publishers on a rival's platform. Phil Spencer, who led the division for over a decade and drove the subscription pivot, announced his retirement last week, and incoming CEO Asha Sharma has pledged "the return of Xbox" -- though her memo also talks about expanding across PC, mobile, and cloud, which sounds a lot like the status quo.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Information Commissioner’s Office imposes largest fine yet for a breach of children’s privacy
The UK information regulator has fined the social news service Reddit £14.5m for using the data of children under the age of 13 unlawfully and potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content.
The hefty punishment from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the largest fine yet for a breach of children’s privacy and comes after the US-based company introduced age checks in July, including age verification to access mature content. Prior to this, the ICO said, there were “a large number of children under 13 on the platform and Reddit did not have a lawful basis for processing their personal information”.
Continue reading...Partnership with Idaho National Laboratory boosts computing power for Idaho universities, accelerating discovery, funding competitiveness and workforce development
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, Feb. 24, 2026 — A powerful supercomputer is expanding high-performance computing for researchers across Idaho, enabled by a partnership between Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the state’s public research universities.
High-performance computing systems like this enable researchers to run complex simulations and analyze large datasets in a fraction of the time required by standard computers.
The system, known as Lemhi, serves researchers at University of Idaho, Boise State University and Idaho State University and replaces the Falcon supercomputer, delivering substantially faster performance and improved efficiency. The upgrade strengthens Idaho’s capacity for research, education and innovation and provides computing capabilities comparable to those at major national research institutions.
“Access to this level of computing allows Idaho to punch well above its weight,” said Luke Sheneman, director of research computing and data services at U of I. “It helps us attract top faculty and graduate students, compete for federal research funding and tackle problems we could not address without this kind of infrastructure.”
High-performance computing, often called supercomputing, allows researchers to solve problems that require enormous computational power, not because of the amount of data involved, but because of the complexity and scale of the problem itself. These systems process information faster than standard computers, accelerating discovery across disciplines such as artificial intelligence, energy systems, engineering, health sciences and natural resources.
“My research uses large-scale molecular simulations to better understand how chemicals interact with liquids, which is important for applications ranging from drug development to energy storage,” said Bourgeois Gadjagboui, a doctoral student at Boise State. “Lemhi enables this work to scale by providing the computing power and data infrastructure needed to analyze thousands of molecules efficiently and support>
Researchers throughout the state can access Lemhi remotely using their university credentials, allowing them to complete computing tasks in just hours or days that might otherwise take weeks or months on a regular computer. This level of access supports advanced research, workforce development and collaboration among institutions.
Keith Weber, director of the GIS Training and Research Center at Idaho State University, said a task that previously took 12.8 hours on a Windows workstation was completed in six minutes on the supercomputer. The faster processing enabled researchers to create digital terrain and ladder fuel models used in pre-wildfire mitigation efforts and post-fire management studies funded by FEMA and NASA.
Lemhi is hosted at INL’s Collaborative Computing Center in Idaho Falls, where INL provides the secure facility, power and core infrastructure required to operate and sustain a supercomputer. U of I currently oversees day-to-day operations, with leadership set to rotate among the three universities in the future. Boise State is expected to assume the lead role in late 2026.
Both Falcon and Lemhi are the result of a long-standing collaboration between INL and Idaho’s research universities. As INL modernizes its computing systems, select resources are made available for academic use, extending the value of major research investments before systems are eventually retired through federal surplus processes.
INL researchers used Lemhi for approximately six years before making it available for academic research, reflecting INL’s ongoing commitment to supporting university partnerships. This approach helps maximize the value of advanced computing investments while expanding access to cutting-edge tools for education and research.
“Scientific computing and artificial intelligence are critical enablers of Idaho’s leadership in research and engineering,” said Eric Whiting, senior advisor of scientific computing and AI at INL. “University access to capable computer systems such as Lemhi will continue to elevate Idaho’s scientific reputation and create positive impacts for both the state and INL.”
By supporting research across a wide range of disciplines, Lemhi helps Idaho institutions compete for federal funding, attract top researchers and train the next generation of scientists and engineers, reinforcing the statewide impact of INL’s long-term investment in research excellence.
More from HPCwire: Idaho National Laboratory Deploys Teton Supercomputer to Expand Multiphysics Simulations
Source: University of Idaho
The post Lemhi Supercomputer Expands Idaho Research Capacity appeared first on HPCwire.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
While many exporters around the world cheered when the supreme court ruled against Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs last week, the unintended consequence could be that the trade war escalates further, says Neil Wilson at the broker Saxo Markets.
Trump warned countries not to ‘play games’ and threatened ‘a much higher tariff’ than they had agreed to...the unintended consequence of the Supreme Court ruling could be an escalatory trade war that markets hadn’t anticipated. Or as Trump put it the Supreme Court had ‘unwittingly’ handed him ‘far more powers and strength’ to levy fresh tariffs than before the ruling.
… The White House insists it’s working on a 15% levy at a later date, which gives the president a degree of optionality, but this is evolving into a far messier situation than we had a week ago.
We can all agree that the US is not facing a balance of payments crisis, which is when countries experience an exorbitant increase in international borrowing costs and lose access to financial markets.
Continue reading...The US men’s and women’s teams claimed titles at the Winter Games this past week. The warm fuzzy feelings didn’t last long
Keeping politics at arm’s length for the US men’s hockey team’s gold-medal matchup with Canada was always going to be difficult.
The game fell on the 46th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, when an underdog group of US college players upset the mighty Soviet Union team against the backdrop of the cold war. But the US team who took the ice on Sunday were no plucky band of amateurs making a stand for democracy against authoritarianism – a point underscored when the US and Canada met last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off. Canadian fans booed the Star-Spangled Banner and the US players, either unaware of, or unsympathetic to, Canadian desires to be neither the 51st US state nor the USA’s opponent in a scorched-earth trade war, dropped the gloves to fight their opponents as soon as the game commenced.
Continue reading...Nancy Guthrie has been missing for three weeks and officials believe she was kidnapped from her Arizona home
Savannah Guthrie’s family has offered up to $1m for information leading to the return of her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, who has been missing since 1 February.
The NBC Today show host posted the offer in a video on Instagram Tuesday, more than three weeks after Nancy’s disappearance. “Someone out there knows something that can bring her home,” Guthrie says in the clip. “We are begging you to please come forward now.
Continue reading...Natalie Fleet MP says politicians should not expect ‘death threats as standard’, as Lancashire councillor apologises
A Labour MP has said politicians should not expect to face “death threats as standard” after a Reform UK councillor shared a Facebook post which said she “should be shot”.
The picture of Natalie Fleet, who has spoken previously about being groomed and raped as a teenager, was accompanied by a fake quote misattributed to her, which read: “I voted against the grooming gang enquiry.”
Continue reading...Looking for recommended chargers for an ADV PRO on Amazon, must be prime so I can have it shipped to a locker location.
Thanks!
Shares in Uber, Mastercard and American Express fall on back of apocalypse scenario posted on Substack
US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.
The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.
Continue reading...Little sign Moscow’s ability to continue waging war for a fifth year is diminished, analysis suggests
Russia will be able to sustain its invasion of Ukraine throughout 2026 even allowing for emerging economic and manpower pressures, while its missile and drone threat to Europe is growing, according to a leading military thinktank.
Bastian Giegerich, the director general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said there was “little indication” that “Russia’s ability to continue its war against Ukraine for a fifth year is diminished”.
Continue reading...Starting in 2027, the Danish pharma firm will sell its weight-loss and diabetes drugs for $675 per month.
Stepbrother, 16, was charged in the death of Anna Kepner, a high schooler found dead on a Carnival cruise in November
A 16-year-old from Florida has reportedly been charged with homicide as a minor in the death of his stepsister, Anna Kepner, in November on a Carnival cruise ship.
News of the charges against the teen boy surfaced in court documents first reported on Monday by the Florida news outlet Wesh 2 News. CBS News also reported having seen the documents.
Continue reading...Read on for how to tune into the hit show starring Kaitlin Olson on ABC and Hulu.
New constructions delayed or cancelled, raising questions about US’s ability to expand infrastructure to support boom
Cancellations and delays of new US datacenters have increased as the artificial intelligence boom runs up against a slate of issues, including supply chain snags, energy shortages and tariff-induced restraints.
Grassroots opposition from local communities has also derailed some plans, and some investors have grown wary of datacenters amid fears of an AI bubble.
Continue reading...Toaster ovens are one countertop appliance you don't want to skip. Here's everything to know about choosing the right one.
A Pew Research Center survey found that just 4 in 10 parents talk to their teens about AI usage.
Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a tearful video, “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie, the missing 84-year-old’s daughter, pleaded with the public for help.
One deputy is killed in a traffic stop and a second dies when deputies track suspect to woods, sheriff says
Two Missouri sheriff’s deputies were fatally shot, one during a traffic stop and the other hours later during an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, who was also killed, authorities said.
Brad Cole, the Christian county sheriff, said the initial shooting happened during a traffic stop south of Highlandville on Monday in south-west Missouri, news outlets reported.
Continue reading...CAMBRIDGE, England, Feb. 24, 2026 — 4colors Research today announced that a consortium led by the company and comprising Airbus, DNV, NQCC, and ORCA Computing has been awarded an NQCC SparQ Grant under the 2025 STFC Cross Cluster Proof of Concept: SparQ Quantum Computing Call. The program is funded by the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) in the UK. The award will support a collaborative project titled “Quantum-Accelerated Mixed-Integer Optimisation for Aircraft Loading” whose goal is to develop a quantum computing use case in aerospace logistics.
“Through the SparQ program, NQCC is supporting important, industry-led projects that explore how quantum computing can deliver real-world impact,” said Dr. Rob Whiteman, Quantum Readiness Delivery Lead, NQCC. “This consortium exemplifies the collaborative innovation needed to advance practical quantum optimization.”
Advancing Aircraft Loading with Hybrid Quantum Computing
The project aims to demonstrate how hybrid classical–quantum computing can help solve the complex and high-impact problem of aircraft cargo loading. Optimizing both what to load and where to stow it, while satisfying trim, centre-of-gravity, structural, and operational constraints, can yield substantial benefits for airlines and cargo operators. Even small improvements in this process can lead to lower fuel burn and CO₂ emissions, faster turnaround times, and better utilization of existing fleet capacity.
Aircraft loading is a challenge faced by manufacturers as well as airlines and operators. Like other combinatorial optimization problems, it is computationally demanding yet critically important to operations. Enhancing efficiency improves payload utilization and overall performance, making the search for better algorithms essential. This project focuses on harnessing the power of quantum computing to deliver practical and sustainable benefits for industry.
“The NQCC SparQ grant brings together partners with complementary expertise, spanning aerospace, logistics, quantum hardware, and advanced algorithms,” said Dr Marcin Kaminski, Founder and CEO of 4colors Research. “We are excited to collaborate on this use case and, more broadly, to push forward quantum solutions for combinatorial optimization.”
“Hybrid quantum–classical optimization has real potential to unlock efficiencies in complex industrial workflows,” said James Fletcher, Head of Solutions Architecture at ORCA Computing. “We’re pleased to contribute our photonic quantum systems to this consortium and help advance a commercially relevant use case for aerospace.”
About 4colors Research
4colors Research is an algorithm technology company that develops and commercializes innovative classical and quantum algorithms for complex optimization problems. Based in Cambridge, UK, the company partners with industry leaders worldwide to deliver solutions that combine emerging computational technologies with rigorous scientific and optimization expertise. 4colors was the winner of the 2024 Airbus × BMW Quantum Computing Challenge and a semi-finalist in the 2025 XPRIZE Quantum Applications Competition.
About DNV
DNV is a global leader and independent expert in risk management and assurance, operating in more than 100 countries, helping customers safeguard life, property, and the environment through evidence‑based decisions. DNV brings a powerful combination of domain science and digital trust capabilities, covering digital assurance, data quality and governance, interoperability and conformance testing, and applied AI/ML analytics to ensure that data, models, and software‑enabled processes are transparent, secure, and reliable across the value chain.
About The National Quantum Computing Centre
The National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), based at the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, UK, is a national facility dedicated to accelerating the development and adoption of quantum computing. Established as part of the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, the NQCC works with industry, academia and government to bridge the gap between quantum research and real-world applications, providing access to quantum computing hardware, expertise and collaborative programmes.
About ORCA Computing
ORCA Computing, headquartered in London, UK, with offices in the United States, is a leading developer and provider of full-stack photonic quantum computing systems. The company delivers an innovative approach to quantum computing, providing robust, high-performance, and data center-standard systems for machine learning, generative AI and optimization workloads. ORCA Computing has successfully delivered ten on-premises quantum computers to leading global customers, including the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, Montana State University, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.
Source: 4colors Research
The post 4colors Research Leads NQCC SparQ Project on Quantum Optimization for Aircraft Loading appeared first on HPCwire.
We report from California’s Silicon Valley, where billionaires pour money into midterms, and the AI Impact summit, where India pushes back on ‘AI monopoly’ held by US and China
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, we’re examining the tech industry’s push for influence in two places separated by a time difference of 13 hours and 30 minutes. The first is where tech sees its next big market, the second its home turf. My colleague Robert Booth reports from last week’s India AI Impact summit, where tech companies pledged to spend tens of billions in the coming year to build customer bases and datacenters in the subcontinent. Dara Kerr and Lauren Gambino reported from Silicon Valley, where billionaires are marshalling their wealth to influence California’s politics at greater levels than they ever have before.
Nascent tech, real fear: how AI anxiety is upending career ambitions
How the anxiety over AI could fuel a new workers’ movement
The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’
Continue reading...Hey everyone, thought I would hop on here and gauge interest in my board.
Selling my Onewheel GT with ~1,700 miles. Board is in great mechanical condition and rides smooth.
Upgrades & Included Extras:
• New fm treaded performance tire (only ~100 miles on it)
• NSK bearings installed with the tire
• Float Life rim savers
• Includes pink bumpers (no stock bumpers)
$1100 OBO
I also have a pair of used lowboy footpads I would throw in for $100 extra
I am located in the SLC area for all of those interested
Dm me for photos
Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months.
In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car.
When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police.
The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids.
The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided.
But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids.
Child welfare officials and experts told ProPublica they are deeply concerned by the case, as well as several others like it that have been making their way through the courts and are now reaching a decisive point. “Imagine what a weapon it would be in ICE’s hands if child welfare is added to all the other areas where a conviction for the most minor offense means deportation,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group.
Indeed, if Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wins this case, thousands of immigrant moms and dads could be exposed to deportation for minor involvement in the juvenile court system, a new realm for President Donald Trump’s deportation regime. There aren’t exact numbers as to how many immigrants are accused of low-level parental negligence in juvenile courts. But as ProPublica has previously reported, millions of parents are accused of child neglect every year in this country, in many instances for reasons stemming from poverty like a lack of child care or food in the fridge, rather than physical or sexual abuse.
Immigrant parents are no more likely than U.S.-born parents to abuse children. But undocumented parents may be more likely to be accused of certain low-level forms of neglect, according to legal aid attorneys. For one thing, due to their lack of legal status, they sometimes avoid interactions with officials at schools and hospitals, leading to potential allegations against them for neglecting their kids’ health or education. They also disproportionately work long and unpredictable hours, sometimes having their older children look after their younger ones, which in the U.S. can be deemed inadequate supervision. Differing cultural norms regarding how much hands-on supervision is necessary also play a role.
There is no evidence yet that ICE has been actively looking for cases like these to identify parents to deport, according to interviews with over a dozen federal and state child welfare officials. But data on specific child welfare cases is reported from states to the federal government annually, via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (The data contain identifiers for children but not their names, though state agencies have those.)
“The million or so reports in NCANDS would be a gold mine for Noem and Miller,” said Andy Barclay, a longtime child welfare statistician, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
The first Trump administration did not seek to use such data for deportations, according to Jerry Milner, who was appointed to oversee the U.S. child welfare system as head of the federal Children’s Bureau from 2017 to 2021. “I never had any of those discussions around the data,” Milner told ProPublica. “I can’t guarantee that others did not, but they never made it to me.” But, he said, “things are different now.”
“I would have strong concerns if any of the data are used for purposes other than what they were intended for,” Milner said.
Medicaid data, for instance, is now reportedly being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and those files can have more identifying information than NCANDS does on families with child welfare cases. DHS has also accessed Office of Refugee Resettlement data on migrant children, which can be used to identify young people’s locations and the (sometimes undocumented) adults taking care of them. Indeed, DHS and FBI agents have visited migrant kids at the homes of their caretakers, ostensibly to perform “welfare checks.”
The White House declined to answer questions for this article. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson in an email accused the Biden administration of letting Mendoza-Rivera’s case languish and said that “as part of this Administration’s commitment to making America safe again, the Attorney General will continue to defend efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, especially those convicted of offenses which place children in situations likely to endanger their health or welfare.”
The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens.
One of the main federal laws that the Trump administration has been relying on in its effort to deport millions of people comes from the Bill Clinton era. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act overhauled immigration enforcement in part by stating that noncitizens, even lawful permanent residents, must be expeditiously deported if they’ve been convicted of certain offenses, including aggravated felonies, crimes of “moral turpitude,” drug crimes or domestic violence, or a “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.”
The motivation for including this sort of language, at the time, was clear. Amid the violent crime wave of the ’90s, the law’s co-author, Bob Dole, said on the Senate floor that the crimes he wanted to make deportable included “vicious acts of stalking, child abuse and sexual abuse.”
Yet over the three decades since, societal norms around what constitutes bad — and even criminal — parenting have come to include all sorts of nonviolent and even harmless behavior. A range of parenting practices that were considered normal for most of the 20th century are now investigated and prosecuted as child maltreatment in many states; letting your kids play at the park and walk home alone could be “neglect,” especially if you’re poor and a person of color. So could leaving them in their car seats briefly with the windows cracked and the car alarm on while you run into a store to buy diapers, or failing to properly secure their bedroom windows at night.
Some rulings by other courts have blocked deportations for people with these sorts of alleged parenting lapses, while the federal Board of Immigration Appeals has offered changing guidance on the issue. Immigration advocates fear that the current appeals court proceeding, which groups together several similar cases including Mendoza-Rivera’s, could become hugely influential across the legal system — and with much higher stakes now given the present administration’s enforcement focus.
Although the Obama and Biden administrations took similar positions to the Trump administration on this point, in general they didn’t pursue deportations as aggressively. “There was some discretion being exercised,” said David Zimmer, Mendoza-Rivera’s appellate attorney. “So it was at least possible, in a given case, that they might have decided not to pursue removal if the parent hadn’t done anything meaningfully wrong.” That’s no longer the case in a regime that is seeking any reason to expel an immigrant, Zimmer said.
This case could be heard by the full 9th Circuit next and then head to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the justices choose to take it up. Much of the debate rests on the question of whether it matters if immigrant parents meant to harm their children, given that intention is part of the definition of most crimes. If the parent both didn’t harm and wasn’t aware they might harm their child, advocates argue, it shouldn’t qualify as a “crime” worthy of deportation.
The Oregon misdemeanor negligence statute under which Mendoza-Rivera was convicted doesn’t require proving any intent to harm a child, any actual harm to a child or even exposure of a child to any harm, acknowledged Justice Department lawyer Imran Zaidi at a 9th Circuit hearing in January. But negligence is still a “culpable mental state” deserving of deportation, he said, because it is “incompatible with a proper regard for consequences.”
Jed Rakoff, a New York federal district judge serving as a visiting member of the 9th Circuit panel, responded that he’s been hearing this argument since “my first year of torts class.” Negligence, he said, is by definition unconscious; otherwise it would be “recklessness,” which is a different, more serious act involving consciously disregarding potential harm. In the context of these family court cases, it is often just conduct that’s a small deviation from some middle-class “reasonable person’s” — a neighbor’s, a caseworker’s — subjective opinion of what “good” parenting looks like.
“I’m talking about the term ‘crime’: What did Congress mean by that single word?” Rakoff said, referring to the 1996 law’s description of a “crime” of “child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” Lawmakers clearly meant something more serious than briefly leaving kids unattended, Rakoff continued. After all, the consequence they were prescribing — deportation — was so much more severe than any other possible consequence for any similar misdemeanor.
Zaidi, the Justice Department lawyer, responded that if many state laws say that something is a crime of child neglect, then it is a crime of child neglect, and Congress said that a crime of child neglect is deportable. The two judges other than Rakoff seemed more open to this argument.
The fundamental question that the appeals court is considering, then, is whether these essentially harmless parental “crimes” alleged by increasingly hands-on local child welfare authorities are the same category of crime that the U.S. Congress was talking about when it passed a law on immigrants committing violent crime, domestic violence and terrorism.
Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic, said that it appears Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez “were not a safety threat to their children, let alone to anyone else,” even if they showed bad judgment by leaving toddlers alone for a half hour. So it is “fair to question,” he said, how pursuing either of their deportations serves the Trump administration’s “stated interest in public safety.”
McMinnville, Oregon, where Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez bought those pajamas at Walmart, is where they’ve lived for nearly a quarter century and where they had their two children, who are now teenagers. It’s also where Mendoza-Rivera spent all those years picking and packaging produce.
But he has now been locked up for months in a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and his family has in turn lost much of its income. His kids are without him. And if the Trump administration gets to use a law against him that was intended to protect children, they will lose their dad to a foreign country for good.
The post Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases appeared first on ProPublica.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2026 — Scality and WEKA today announced a new jointly validated solution that combines WEKA’s NeuralMesh high-performance storage with Scality RING’s cost-efficient object tier. The solution offers enterprises the best of both worlds: flash-speed performance for active AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data, combined with scalable, durable capacity for large datasets, while reducing cost and complexity without compromising speed.
WEKA Delivers Ultra-High-Performance, Scality Extends the Capacity and Economic Benefits, Providing Faster Data Pipelines with Lower Cost for AI and HPC Workloads.
At the heart of the new solution is Scality’s proven object connector for NeuralMesh, a lightweight, REST-based integration validated by WEKA at scale. Compared to conventional S3 interfaces, Scality RING achieved up to 10x faster performance on similar hardware in Scality testing, with up to 20% lower infrastructure costs. This enables organizations to extend their NeuralMesh-powered AI and HPC data pipelines more economically while avoiding the management overhead associated with traditional object stores.
“WEKA’s NeuralMesh storage system delivers the high-performance software foundation modern AI pipelines require to run optimally. Enterprises that leverage the Scality RING lightweight connector together with NeuralMesh can achieve additional economic benefits, leveraging a cost-efficient object tier,” said Nilesh Patel, chief strategy officer at WEKA. “This enables our mutual customers to achieve their AI project outcomes faster and more efficiently.”
The joint solution architecture keeps new and active data on WEKA’s NeuralMesh flash tier, while seamlessly tiering data to Scality’s exabyte-scale, resilient object storage. This ensures optimal performance and long-term cost control — without forcing customers into expensive, all-flash deployments.
Customer Benefits Include:
“Our partnership with WEKA provides enterprises a smarter way to extend the economics of their AI pipelines,” said Erwan Girard, Chief Product Officer at Scality. “WEKA drives the performance; Scality provides the scale. Together, we help customers reduce infrastructure costs and management complexity while keeping their AI and HPC environments running at peak efficiency.”
Availability: The integrated Scality RING with NeuralMesh by WEKA solution is available now, detailed information is available at https://www.scality.com/partner/weka.
About Scality
Scality solves organizations’ biggest data storage challenges — growth, security, performance, and cost. Designed for end-to-end cyber resilience, only Scality S3 object storage with CORE5 safeguards data at every level of the system, from API to architecture. Its patented MultiScale Architecture enables limitless, independent scalability in all critical dimensions to meet the unpredictable demands of modern workloads. The world’s most discerning companies depend on Scality to accelerate high-performance AI initiatives, optimize cloud deployments, and defend their data with confidence. Recognized as a leader by Gartner, Scality software is reliable, secure, and sustainable.
About WEKA
WEKA is transforming how organizations build, run, and scale AI workflows through NeuralMesh, its intelligent, adaptive mesh storage system. Unlike traditional data infrastructure, which becomes more fragile as AI environments expand, NeuralMesh becomes faster, stronger, and more efficient as it scales, growing with your AI environment to provide a flexible foundation for enterprise and agentic AI innovation. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50 and the world’s leading neoclouds and AI innovators, NeuralMesh maximizes GPU utilization, accelerates time to first token, and lowers the cost of AI innovation.
Source: WEKA
The post Scality and WEKA Partner to Deliver High-Performance AI Storage with Efficient Object Tiering appeared first on HPCwire.
Hungary’s veto over European funding could constrain Ukraine’s ability to fund its army and weaken its hand in U.S. talks with Russia over the war.
Leader says Vladimir Putin has not achieved his goals and visit by Trump might make clear ‘who the aggressor is’
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed to Donald Trump to visit Kyiv, in a video address on the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, and said Ukraine would not betray its people in any negotiations with Russia.
Zelenskyy said Putin had not achieved his original war goals or “broken the Ukrainian people”. “He has not won this war,” he said. “We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do everything to achieve peace. And to ensure justice.”
Continue reading...Almost a year after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was first targeted by the U.S. government as part of its violent mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is still not done punishing him.
The 30-year-old father of three became an emblem of Trump’s cruelty and lawlessness after being abducted and sent to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran torture prison where hundreds of people were incarcerated last year at the behest of the White House. After conceding that Abrego had been expelled in “error” — violating a court order barring Abrego’s deportation to his country of origin — the Trump administration nonetheless refused to bring Abrego back to the U.S., smearing him as a terrorist and leaving him to endure months of violence, deprivation, and psychological torture.
Abrego was finally returned last June. But his arrival only marked a surreal new chapter in his ordeal. Rather than bring him back to Maryland, where he lived with his wife and young children, he was jailed in Tennessee, as federal prosecutors devised a dubious new case against him. Before he’d even landed on U.S. soil, Abrego was indicted on sweeping criminal charges for allegedly smuggling gang members across state lines over the course of a decade.
Abrego, who has pleaded not guilty, was supposed to go to trial in January at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. But late last year, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw canceled the trial date, instead scheduling an evidentiary hearing on a pending question before the court: whether Abrego is the target of a “selective and vindictive prosecution” by the Trump administration.
The hearing, set for Thursday morning at the federal courthouse in Nashville, will ultimately determine whether the criminal case against Abrego moves forward. If Crenshaw concludes that Abrego was indeed the target of a revenge campaign, he could dismiss the case altogether.
As a legal and historical matter, this would be a big deal — and a major defeat for federal prosecutors. But it would also fall far short of accountability for those who have dedicated themselves to ruining Abrego’s life. Nor does it stand to impact the countless others whose lives have been destroyed by Trump’s lawless mass deportations. Abrego’s case, which so shocked the American public in the early days of the president’s term, was a harbinger of things to come. “We really thought this was going to be one of a kind,” one of his immigration lawyers recently told NPR. “If anything, it was just the tip of the spear.”
Abrego was released from jail last year and spent the holidays with his family. While not currently incarcerated, he remains under federal supervision and still faces deportation. He entered the country illegally as a teenager to escape gang violence in El Salvador, was given “withholding from removal” status by an immigration judge in 2019, which allowed him to live and work in the U.S. while checking in once a year with ICE. But the Trump administration dismantled such protections, arresting Abrego in March 2025. While his criminal case has placed his removal on hold, the federal government has gone to extreme lengths to make his eventual deportation a punishment unto itself, scheming to send him to a third country in Africa rather than Latin America.
Abrego’s prosecution is also a potent example of Trump’s eagerness to weaponize the Justice Department against those who cross him. In the year since Abrego was sent to CECOT, the DOJ — whose headquarters now feature a large banner of Trump’s face — has dropped any pretense of independence. One associate deputy attorney general who was apparently instrumental to Abrego’s prosecution reportedly told U.S. attorneys last month that Trump is their “chief client.”
This makes Abrego’s upcoming hearing a new test of the courts. Crenshaw, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2015, has already put himself in the crosshairs by considering Abrego’s rare vindictive prosecution challenge. The hearing comes at a moment when federal judges are increasingly vocal about the threat posed by the Trump regime, while the president and his backers increasingly villainize the judges who stand in their way.
On the surface, the question of whether Abrego is the target of a “vindictive prosecution” is no mystery. The government’s brazen retribution campaign has been publicized at every turn.
To recap: After Trump invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to declare an “invasion” of gang members in mid-March 2025, exiling hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to CECOT, Abrego appeared in a photo taken at the prison, released by the Salvadoran government. The overhead image showed two rows of men kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their shaved heads. His wife recognized Abrego from his tattoos.
On March 24, 2025, Abrego sued for his release. Less than two weeks later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return — and the Supreme Court upheld her order. Rather than complying, Trump held a backslapping Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to Bukele, not Trump, to bring Abrego back to the U.S.
For the next several weeks, the Trump administration demonized Abrego, repeatedly labeling him a gang member and releasing records showing that his wife took out an order of protection against him years earlier. The Department of Homeland Security posted on X that Abrego was “not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as” — a line loudly amplified by Trump’s supporters.
Abrego was finally flown back to the U.S. in June 2025 — but only after the DOJ laid the groundwork for a new criminal case against him, which allowed Trump to put a new spin on the government’s narrative. At a press conference on June 6, Bondi announced that Abrego had been indicted for playing a “significant role in an alien smuggling ring” — crimes she described as his “full-time job — and that he had been returned to the U.S. to face justice.
The same line was parroted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, on Fox News. As Abrego’s lawyers lay out in their vindictive prosecution motion, Blanche — who was previously Trump’s defense attorney — declared that the DOJ began investigating Abrego only after “a judge in Maryland” interfered with Trump’s decision to deport him.
Abrego’s motion also points to comments made by Trump aboard Air Force One, in which he said the DOJ made its decision in response to “these judges [who] want to try and run the country.” Asked by a reporter how the criminal case came to pass, Trump said, “I could see a decision being made — bring him back, show everybody how horrible this guy is. And frankly we have to do something because the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide.”
Finally, Abrego’s lawyers highlight the resignation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Schrader, who quit his position as chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee the same day Abrego was indicted, “reportedly over concerns that the case was being pursued for ‘political reasons.’” (In an email to The Intercept, Schrader, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on the case.)
These arguments have already proven persuasive to Crenshaw. The federal district judge concluded last year that there was at least some evidence to show that Abrego’s prosecution was retaliatory in nature. “The totality of events” point to a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” he wrote last fall. He was struck by the timing of the government’s investigation of Abrego, which came “a mere seven days after he prevailed” at the Supreme Court, as well as by Blanche’s “remarkable statements,” which appeared to confirm that the prosecution was born of revenge for Abrego’s successful lawsuit “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”
Another STRONG SIGN that Abrego is the target of a vindictive prosecution is the weakness of the government’s criminal case itself. While the DOJ has insisted that it has damning evidence to show that Abrego is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the allegations look increasingly like a house of cards.
In September, prosecutors submitted a sworn affidavit laying out how the case against Abrego unfolded. The document, which was signed by Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire, traces the case back to November 30, 2022, when Abrego was pulled over on the highway in Putnam County, Tennessee, while driving a Chevy Suburban carrying eight passengers, all of whom were Latino. State troopers questioned Abrego but ultimately sent him on his way without a ticket.
The affidavit acknowledges that the traffic stop did not lead to a prosecution until 2025. As McGuire tells it, he got a call the night of April 27, 2025, from the local Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations about “potential human smuggling committed by Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia,” who by then was already famous for being sent to CECOT. According to the affidavit, McGuire, who had experience with smuggling cases, “decided to handle the matter himself.” After examining body camera footage from the Tennessee Highway Patrol, he “immediately noted the similarities” between the footage and cases he had handled.
“Over the next several weeks, law enforcement conducted multiple interviews of individuals with information about Abrego Garcia’s activities in Tennessee and elsewhere,” the affidavit goes on. McGuire ultimately concluded that Abrego “had been involved in a human smuggling conspiracy for years.” The evidence was in fact “overwhelming.”
But at a lengthy detention hearing last year, the government’s case against Abrego looked flimsy at best, cobbled together from dubious statements made by highly incentivized federal informants, none of whom actually took the stand. Prosecutors’ sole witness was an HSI special agent whose testimony was based on interviews he neither conducted nor attended — evidence the presiding judge skeptically described as “multiple levels of hearsay.”
McGuire, who represented the government at the hearing, also sought to link Abrego to “a mass casualty event” involving some of the “same actors” involved in his alleged smuggling scheme. But when the judge asked whether any testimony would show that Abrego himself was involved in this mass casualty event, McGuire said no.
“The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues.”
Lawyers with the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, which represented Abrego at the time, pointed out myriad holes in the government’s case. “The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues,” one attorney argued. The informants provided their statements as part of deals that would allow them to avoid deportation, giving them an obvious incentive to lie. What’s more, “their stories are facially implausible.” The informants claimed that Abrego often brought his own children with him as he zig-zagged across the U.S. for his smuggling operation. “The idea that he is taking them on these cross-country trips multiple times per week is just ridiculous on its face.”
A few weeks later, the judge ruled in Abrego’s favor, finding that there was no evidence that justified keeping him in jail while awaiting trial. But she noted that he would almost certainly be kept behind bars either way, given the “anticipated removal proceedings that are outside the jurisdiction of this Court.” While this might make her decision appear to be “little more than an academic exercise,” she wrote, “the foundation of the administration of our criminal law depends on the bedrock of due process. … The Court will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed.”
In their motion alleging that Abrego is the target of a selective and vindictive prosecution, his lawyers acknowledge that the legal threshold is high. To win, they must prove that Abrego was specifically targeted for exercising his constitutional rights in court. Such claims “are infrequently made and rarely succeed,” they write. “But if there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”
Indeed, as the lawyers lay out, Abrego was sent to CECOT, successfully sued for his release, and was then slapped with a dubious and apparently politically motivated criminal case. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”
In the six months since they first asked Crenshaw to throw out the case on these grounds, the evidence supporting their argument has only gotten stronger. Crenshaw has repeatedly ordered the DOJ to turn over materials that might further illuminate the DOJ’s decision to prosecute Abrego, often to no avail. When prosecutors have turned over evidence, the disclosures have undermined their own case.
“This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”
On December 30, Crenshaw unsealed an order that appeared especially damning. The judge had examined thousands of pages of government documents submitted for his review, ultimately determining that a portion should be turned over to Abrego’s legal team. “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker,” Crenshaw wrote, “but he, in fact, reported to others in DOJ with others who may or may not have acted with improper motivation.”
The “others” in question include Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche, and who appeared to have “a leading role” in the decision to prosecute Abrego. A recent Bloomberg Law profile of Singh described the former gang prosecutor as “the Trump Justice Department’s brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on US attorneys’ autonomy,” noting that Singh pushed prosecutors to go after people like Abrego, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CNN host Don Lemon.
Crenshaw’s order supports this characterization, highlighting emails and conversations between Singh and McGuire last year. On April 27, 2025 — the same day McGuire reportedly heard about HSI’s investigation into a potential smuggling case against Abrego, according to the previously submitted affidavit — Crenshaw noted that Singh contacted McGuire “to discuss Abrego’s case.” This detail was not included in the government’s original narrative.
Also absent from McGuire’s affidavit was the fact that Singh told McGuire that Abrego’s prosecution was a “top priority” for Blanche — and that McGuire, who explicitly said that he’d decided to handle the Abrego case “himself,” later wrote to his staff in mid-May that Blanche wanted Abrego charged “sooner rather than later.”
To Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who famously traveled to El Salvador to see Abrego and remains an outspoken advocate in his case, the disclosures were a “smoking gun.” As he told CNN, the unsealed document shows that the DOJ “decided to bring these charges against [Abrego] because he asserted his due process rights when they illegally shipped him off to CECOT.”
With the evidentiary hearing approaching, the Trump administration has kept stalling, rather than turn over additional evidence. Last month, prosecutors filed a new motion explaining why it should not have to provide material it had previously agreed to disclose. Whereas the DOJ once agreed it was obligated to turn over the prior statements of the witnesses they planned to call to the stand — tentatively two HSI investigators, as well as McGuire himself — prosecutors now argued that, in fact, they do not have to turn those statements after all. Their previous position was rooted in “an honest misunderstanding” of the applicable law, they wrote, a mistake “largely based on the fact that these kinds of hearings are exceedingly rare.”
Whether or not DOJ prosecutors ever turn over the materials in question, the government’s witnesses could face a hard time if called to testify on Thursday. Crenshaw already appears to have caught the Trump administration in a series of lies, which could ultimately prompt him to simply call the government’s bluff and just end the farcical prosecution altogether.
“If there were any communications or documents that helped the government prove its narrative that this case was not motivated by vindictiveness, the government would no doubt have produced them,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote last month. “The Court should draw the obvious inference that flows from the government’s stonewalling: the presumption of vindictiveness is warranted and unrebutted, and this case must be dismissed.”
The post Trump Won’t Stop Trying to Punish Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared first on The Intercept.
Ashley Fairbanks launched Stand with Minnesota as ICE raids rocked her home town – now donations are pouring in, and families’ rent is being paid
From thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Ashley Fairbanks watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis– federal immigration authorities flooding the streets and regular people stepping up to defend and care for their communities. She knew she had to do something. So the 39-year-old writer, artist and digital strategist started a Google Doc.
Soon, the list of resources for residents grew so long it became unwieldy, and Fairbanks, who builds websites for a living, launched Stand With Minnesota.
Continue reading...COLLEGE PARK, Md., Feb. 24, 2026 — IonQ is pleased to announce it was awarded a contract under the Missile Defense Agency Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract with a ceiling of $151 billion. This contract encompasses a broad range of work areas that allows for the rapid delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter with increased speed and agility.
IonQ is among more than 2,400 companies eligible to compete for future task orders issued under the SHIELD IDIQ contract framework.
IonQ delivers a full portfolio of quantum technologies spanning quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, and quantum security. The company also includes subsidiaries with established capabilities across space-based intelligence, secure communications, and precision timing technologies.
IonQ’s subsidiary companies include Capella Space, which provides on-demand, all-weather synthetic aperture radar imagery from space to support data-driven decision-making for operational and security missions; Skyloom, which delivers high-capacity optical communications technologies designed to enable secure, high-speed data transfer between space and ground systems; and Vector Atomic, which develops precision timing and navigation technologies designed to support system performance in GPS-degraded or denied environments.
“IonQ brings together a broad set of quantum technologies and supporting capabilities that reflect years of investment across computing, networking, sensing, and security,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “We look forward to continuing our work with U.S. government partners across a range of research, development, and innovation programs.”
Participation in the SHIELD IDIQ contract provides a contractual framework through which IonQ may compete for future task orders, subject to agency requirements, and competitive selection processes.
IonQ has a history of supporting U.S. government research and development initiatives, including work with agencies such as DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and organizations across the national security community.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the forthcoming IonQ Tempo, will be the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
Source: IonQ
The post IonQ Selected to Support Missile Defense Agency SHIELD IDIQ Contract appeared first on HPCwire.
Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services. The articles, credited to materials from Russia's FSB security service, accused Telegram of enabling attacks in Russia and said that Durov's "actions ... are under criminal investigation." Russia has restricted Telegram's functions, accusing it of flouting the law and is seeking to divert users towards Max, a state-run rival messenger. The steps escalate pressure on a platform that remains deeply embedded in Russian public life.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two sheriff's deputies were killed and two more were wounded in southwestern Missouri, after a suspect opened fire during a traffic stop and fled.
‘Extraordinary’ golden lamb’s head pillaged in 1874 from what is now Ghana remains hidden in officers’ mess
The Royal Artillery is facing criticism after it emerged they are refusing public access to an “extraordinary object” looted by the British army in the 19th century from the Asante people in modern-day Ghana.
The glistening golden ram’s head would seemingly be worthy of any museum, but it remains hidden within the regiment’s mess at Larkhill in Wiltshire.
Continue reading...From AI hardware to wearable phones, these products promised a lot. So what happened to them?
Facebook owner’s investment described by semiconductor company as ‘big bet’ on artificial intelligence
The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) of artificial intelligence chips from the US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices – despite fears about the vast sums committed to AI infrastructure projects.
It is one more massive deal in a year in which US tech companies are expected to spend $660bn on AI assets, and may represent part of a broader pivot in Meta’s AI strategy, said Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester.
Continue reading...Joshua Orta was passenger when Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in his car by immigration agent in March 2025
The passenger in the car when Texas driver Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot in March 2025 by a federal immigration agent gave a lengthy statement to lawyers for the slain man’s family disputing the government’s version of events.
That witness died on Saturday in a fiery car crash in San Antonio, a lawyer for Martinez’s family said.
Continue reading...The Hedgehog Go is the world’s first dual-purpose dryer for both hair and winter gear, but does it actually work? I tested it on my own hair and winter accessories.
Claim of ‘abetting terrorist activities’ comes as Kremlin attempts to steer users on to state-controlled app
Russia has launched a criminal investigation into the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, on suspicion of “abetting terrorist activities”, further escalating the Kremlin’s standoff with the widely used messaging app.
The state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday that a case had been opened “based on materials from Russia’s federal security service”, which accused the app of being compromised by western and Ukrainian intelligence.
Continue reading...New York City, New Jersey, southern New England and coastal communities along the East Coast faced blizzard warnings and some of the biggest snowfall totals in years.
Ford is recalling almost 413,000 Explorers from model years 2017 through 2019 due to a defect that could cause drivers to lose steering control, the U.S. auto safety regulator said
Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The president and his aides vilify the judiciary with brutal rhetoric, hoping to delegitimize a co-equal branch of government
When Donald Trump attacked several supreme court justices as “fools”, “lapdogs”, “disloyal to our constitution” and a “disgrace to our nation” after they ruled against his tariffs on Friday, it was probably the most vicious public tirade that a US president ever leveled against the country’s highest court. But as extraordinary – and extraordinarily ugly – as Trump’s rant was, everyone should realize that it was part of a systematic campaign in which Trump and his top aides have vehemently denounced and smeared judges as part of Trump’s quest for ever more power.
Whether it’s Trump, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi or others, Trump and his lieutenants often pummel judges with brutal rhetoric. To many judges, these attacks no doubt spur fears that some Trump loyalists will threaten them or worse.
Continue reading...Mixtape is an upcoming game about being a teenager when "everything meant the end of the world or the start of the world."
Raising the rainbow Pride flag instead of the more inclusive Progress flag excludes the trans community, activists say
Thousands of protesters gathered outside the iconic Stonewall Inn on a near-freezing night last week to re-raise the rainbow Pride flag in defiance of the Trump administration, which had unceremoniously ordered its removal days earlier.
It was meant to be a joyous occasion, an act of protest for the New York City LGBTQ+ community, but trans activists in the crowd were deeply disappointed by what they say was exclusion of their community in choosing to raise the historic rainbow Pride flag instead of the newer, inclusive Progress Pride flag.
Continue reading...Choice of Virginia governor to give Trump rebuttal suggests DNC believes moderate approach could bring midterm wins
On Tuesday night, Abigail Spanberger will walk out on to the historic grounds of Colonial Williamsburg and deliver the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. With midterm elections approaching and Democrats desperately searching for a roadmap back to relevance, the party has turned to a moderate who once flipped a Republican-held congressional seat in the suburbs of Richmond and then parlayed that into the governorship by 15 points.
Since taking the office from Republican Glenn Youngkin in January, Spanberger has moved with lightning speed that has caught conservatives flat-footed, much to the delight of those who still identify as liberal.
Continue reading...Once a left-leaning political campaigner, Brand has rebranded himself as a conservative guru to millions of social media followers
David Lammy backs jury trial measures as Ministry of Justice figures published
The backlog in criminal courts in England and Wales will continue to rise for nearly a decade before it falls despite radical reforms including curtailing jury trials, according to figures from the Ministry of Justice.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, said the government was determined to press ahead with the jury trial reforms despite a potential rebellion from Labour MPs, warning that no other measures would stop the backlog from rising exponentially.
Continue reading...This iPhone feature has helped me get better sleep over the past five years, even when I travel.
Without federal climate regulation, fossil fuel industry may be more vulnerable to local lawsuits
The Trump administration’s repeal of a foundational climate determination could clear a path for new litigation and policies targeting big oil, legal experts say.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule revoking the “endangerment finding”, a 2009 determination that established that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The move eliminated federal limits on climate-warming emissions from motor vehicles, and is expected to extend to all other pollution sources.
Continue reading...Europe is helping Ukraine resist a US push for peace at any price Expert comment LToremark
European governments are realizing how Ukraine is helping fill the void left by a diminished US presence.
The latest round of US-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine concluded without a significant breakthrough. While the parties reached near-consensus over a ceasefire monitoring mechanism, they remain deadlocked over the key issue of territory. Kyiv maintains that a comprehensive ceasefire must precede any peace agreement or elections. Meanwhile, Moscow insists that Ukraine must cede the entire Donbas region – including territories Russia has failed to secure militarily – before fighting can stop.
Moscow has managed to convince US President Trump’s team that it is engaging in peace talks ‘in good faith’ and that ceding Ukrainian-held territory is the only path to a lasting peace. This has added pressure on Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to finalize a peace settlement and establish a timeline for national elections by the summer. Increasingly aware of Ukraine’s importance to European security, Europe has stepped up to help Kyiv withstand US pressure for a quick deal – which would only embolden the Kremlin.
Notwithstanding US diplomatic pressure, Zelenskyy’s main constraint is the risk of a domestic backlash against terms perceived as a betrayal of the nation’s wartime sacrifices. Zelenskyy has warned that he cannot accept territorial concessions because the Ukrainian people would ‘never forgive this’. According to a January 2026 survey, 54 per cent of Ukrainians categorically reject the idea of Ukraine withdrawing its troops from parts of Donbas it still controls and transferring these to Russia in exchange for Western security guarantees. Cementing Russian control over Donbas would leave Ukrainians vulnerable to further Russian attacks. Any changes to Ukrainian territory would also require a nationwide referendum, which must be approved by parliament. Not only would a referendum face severe security and legal challenges but any conditions that would undermine Ukrainian sovereignty would likely be rejected.
In terms of pressure to hold elections, Ukraine is currently under martial law and thus constitutionally barred from holding elections. There are other concerns too. Without a ceasefire, polling stations would become targets for Russian missile strikes. A quarter of the country’s population are internally displaced or have fled the country, meaning voter registration data is largely outdated. Millions are still serving in the military or living under occupation and would be unable to cast ballots or run for office. There would also be the threat of destabilizing Russian influence campaigns during the election. A December 2025 survey showed that 59 per cent of Ukrainians oppose holding elections before fighting ends and a peace deal is reached.
As the US scales back its military support for Ukraine and pushes for a quick deal, European governments have stepped up to ensure Ukraine is able to defend itself and negotiate from a position of strength. Europe has effectively replaced the US as Ukraine’s main donor. EU military aid rose by 67 per cent in 2025 and the EU has approved a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for budgetary and military support in 2026–27.
Increased European burden-sharing has provided Kyiv with a defensive buffer. The responsibility for funding new advanced equipment (like Patriot air defence systems) has shifted from the US to European NATO allies through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL). Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has indicated that the alliance could secure an additional $15 billion in 2026 (on top of the $5 billion allocated in 2025) to sustain Ukraine’s military needs. With the US stepping back from the Ukraine Defence Contact Group (the ‘Ramstein format’), the UK and Germany assumed co-leadership to ensure the continued coordination of weapons deliveries.
European leaders are also working to ensure Kyiv is not coerced into a bad deal. The ‘coalition of the willing’ – led by France, the UK and Poland – has proposed security guarantees that include potential European troop deployments to enforce any future ceasefire. Critics fear that post-ceasefire deployments create an incentive for Russia to prolong the conflict. But this commitment sends an important signal that Ukraine is now an inextricable part of Europe’s future security architecture – and boosts Zelenskyy’s leverage.
An even stronger signal is Ukraine’s integration into Europe’s defence industrial base. The EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence fund offers member states up to €150 billion in loans for long-term rearmament and allows Ukraine to participate in joint procurement. This mechanism will reduce Europe’s reliance on US supply chains, scale up domestic arms production, and enhance interoperability. There are other innovative schemes too. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway are funding weapons production inside Ukraine through the so-called ‘Danish model’. Meanwhile, major European firms like Rheinmetall (Germany) and BAE Systems (UK) have established production hubs inside Ukraine under the ‘Build in Ukraine’ initiative.
There is also increasing cooperation on drone production as Europe aims to bolster its defences against Russia’s sub-threshold operations. European defence giants have high-quality tech but suffer from slow production cycles and high costs. Ukraine, meanwhile, is a world leader in producing cheap and effective drones capable of destroying multimillion-dollar assets. Ukraine’s defence sector has developed a direct feedback loop between frontline units and producers, adapting technology to battlefield realities in real time. The UK–Ukraine Project Octopus leverages Ukrainian battlefield innovation and British industrial capacity to mass-produce autonomous interceptors that cost less than 10 per cent to produce than the Russian strike drones they are designed to destroy. There is also a new joint venture to mass-produce Ukrainian-designed drones in Germany.
Europe is wielding its financial, diplomatic and industrial leverage to support Ukraine, but significant challenges remain.
One is continued European hesitation to repurpose frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. Europe’s seizure of these funds would send the message that Moscow will be held liable for war damages without burdening European taxpayers. Even if the rift in the transatlantic alliance deepens, this move would secure funding for Ukraine’s long-term defence and recovery.
Film-maker Jonte Richardson cites ‘harm inflicted on both the black and disabled communities’, while New Black Film Collective and MP Dawn Butler criticise BBC’s failure to edit
A black British film-maker has said he will step down as a Bafta judge over the organisation’s handling of the incident during Sunday’s ceremony during which a Tourette syndrome campaigner shouted a racial slur while two black actors were on stage.
Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan were presenting the award for special visual effects when John Davidson, whose life story was adapted into the acclaimed film I Swear, shouted the N-word from the stalls. The actors continued with their presenting duties but appeared shocked.
Continue reading...A 10% levy has been put in place, but the US leader has other economic ‘bazookas’ he can fire in his trade battle
Donald Trump did not carry through his threat to introduce 15% tariffs overnight.
However, he did impose 10% tariffs on imports into the US on Tuesday, and the threatened 15% may be the least of his trade partners’ worries.
Pharma and active ingredients.
Processed critical minerals.
Commercial aircraft and jet engines.
Polysilicone used in solar panels and semiconductors.
Drones.
Wind turbines.
Robots.
PPE and medical devices.
Continue reading...Robert Carradine, a member of a famed acting family, has died aged 71. He made his film debut alongside John Wayne in The Cowboys in 1972 and later became best known for his roles in Revenge of the Nerds and Lizzie McGuire
Continue reading...The traffic stops on a rural California base appeared routine – until immigration agents showed up. Experts and lawmakers say the incidents could violate US law
Francisco Galicia paced his cell at Fort Hunter Liggett, a vast army base 160 miles south of San Francisco, on a Friday evening in January. His mind raced with thoughts of his five daughters waiting for him at home.
Over several hours, immigration agents brought six more men into the frigid, cement-walled cell. As the men shared eerily similar stories of their arrests, Galicia realized they had all driven straight into a trap.
Continue reading...From brushes for those on a budget to the best high-end model, these are our favorite picks.
Commentary: Here's what Samsung needs to do to make its next Galaxy Ultra phone even better. We'll soon find out whether the company delivers at its next Galaxy Unpacked event.
A trusted associate of one of the cartel leader's romantic partners escorted the woman to Tapalpa, Jalisco, for a meeting with the drug lord, officials said.
The highest-ranking officials in Washington will be present for President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night — here's what to know about where they're sitting.
Before she took her own life at 14, Molly Russell accessed thousands of harmful posts on Instagram and Pinterest. A new documentary recreates the inquest where her father was told the images were safe
Molly Russell was 14 when she took her own life in 2017 after months of viewing content relating to self-harm and suicide on social media. Nearly a decade later, her best friends from school, interviewed for this documentary, have grown into articulate, impressive women in their early 20s. Watching them, you can’t help but be struck all over again by the terrible tragedy of Molly’s death and the loss to her family, who will never see the young woman Molly would be now. Her father, Ian Russell, says life before Molly’s death was absolutely normal; in the years since, he has become a leading campaigner for better online protection for children.
On the night Molly died, Russell says, they sat down together as a family, in front of the TV. Molly’s last message to her friend Nieve was two laughing emojis. She had been feeling depressed, but no one suspected how bad it was. Nor were they aware of the content being fed to Molly by Instagram and Pinterest’s algorithms. In the months before her death she accessed thousands of harmful social media posts. One reads: “Dear me, I hate you. You’re weak. You deserve the pain. You’ll never be good enough. I hope you die.” At the inquest into Molly’s death, Meta’s head of health and wellbeing policy, Elizabeth Lagone, told the court the majority of posts Molly saw were “safe” for children. Nothing to see here.
Continue reading...The US president will deliver his State of the Union address this evening – here’s what you need to know
Donald Trump will deliver the State of the Union in Washington on Tuesday, his second major address to Congress this term and the last before the 2026 midterms. It’s also the first time Trump will be confronted with the supreme court justices since they ruled his tariffs illegal.
Historically, the State of the Union is an opportunity for the president to lay out their agenda and talk about key policy objectives. While it’s not officially a campaign event, it’s likely Trump will use the speech as an opportunity to tout his accomplishments.
Continue reading...U.S. envoy Charles Kushner will be denied access to French government ministers due to his lack of attendance after comments about the death of a far-right activist
More than 385,000 Ukrainian teenagers are enrolled in a defense course, expecting war, or threats, to go on for years. In Russia, children are learning the same skills.
Want to make your own app or create a dream project? It's all about the prompt.
Comedian denies one count of rape and one count of sexual assault related to two women
Russell Brand has pleaded not guilty to two further sexual offences, including rape.
The 50-year-old comedian was charged in December with one count of rape and one count of sexual assault in relation to two women. The two alleged offences took place in 2009.
Continue reading...President has not yet made a final decision on any strikes as the US prepares for ‘last-ditch’ negotiations on Thursday. Plus, most US adults feel the country is moving in the wrong direction
Good morning.
Donald Trump’s decision on whether to order airstrikes against Iran will depend partly on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its nuclear capacity, according to people familiar with the matter.
What will happen if there’s no deal? Trump has told advisers he is considering limited strikes to put pressure on Iran and, failing that, a far larger attack to force regime change.
What has Iran said about how it might respond? Iran has vowed to retaliate as hard as possible against any US attack, and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said last week that he had the ability to sink a US warship.
What about the 15% tariff? The uplift to 15% announced by Trump on social media on Saturday has not yet been implemented – but could come at any time.
Want the latest business news? Follow along on our live blog.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
New Castle County residents have pushed back against large-scale development projects in recent years, with many complaining that the county’s land-use process is not transparent. Now, some council members want to give the neighbors earlier notice of development proposals.
It’s no secret that many New Castle County residents do not pay close attention to the goings on of their local government. Some may not even hear about a county land-use approval for a large development near their house until shovels are in the ground.
Now, three New Castle County Council members want to change how residents learn about land-use plans — just as increasingly controversial proposals for big commercial developments creep closer to isolated neighborhoods.
During a meeting on Tuesday, Councilmembers Brandon Toole, Dave Tackett and Dee Durham will introduce an ordinance that proposes to widen the circle of who gets advance notice when a developer first proposes a building project.
This move comes after the County Council faced citizen backlash in recent years to several large-scale building projects, such as the proposed data center near Delaware City and a massive warehousing complex near Middletown.
Under current rules, county officials must mail land-use meeting notices to all owners of property that sit within 300 feet of a new building project. In an email, Durham said she thinks that radius – which is about the length of a football field – is too small.
“That is simply not sufficient public notice about major projects being proposed,” she said.
The new ordinance would increase the radius to 1,000 feet. It would also require developers to update yellow notice signs posted at properties with the dates of upcoming hearings if the plan for the development changes.
Tackett said he hopes the ordinance will encourage more people to get involved with the public hearing process.
“The changes are really about transparency and accountability,” he said.
Though the ordinance will be introduced on Tuesday, the County Council won’t discuss it until the following week, or perhaps later, Durham said.
Three years ago, then-New Castle County Council President Karen Hartley-Nagle proposed a similar public notice ordinance amid the controversy surrounding a comprehensive rezoning of more than 80 different properties across New Castle County.
The rezoning plan at that time faced fierce pushback, largely from suburban residents who feared it would accommodate plans for distribution warehouses and other large developments.
Among those criticising the comprehensive rezoning plan then was Dale Swain, a local land-use activist. On Monday, he said the idea for the increased radius came as part of a larger conversation in the past surrounding how to better notify the public about developments.
“Not that you’re going to stop the development, but it would at least be nice to know about it,” Swain said.
Hartley-Nagle said the council did not pass her ordinance three years ago, partially because New Castle County staff said it would cost too much to send notices to more people. Her original proposal would have required residents to sign the mail to show they received it.
But, she said, it would be a worthy use of public funds because it would directly help people.
“We spend a lot of money for things [constituents] never see,” Hartley-Nagle said.
Tackett said New Castle County staff wrote the ordinance at his direction and did not raise any concerns about cost.
Swain said he and others residents have also discussed cheaper ways to notify residents of developments proposed nearby, such as emails or clearer posts on the county website.
The post Who should be alerted to new developments? NCCo to consider widening the circle of neighbors appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Sometimes, even when it’s wrong it’s right.
Drug Lord Killed: Or, one El Mencho down, who knows how many to go.
Video Break: Jack Hughes, because he can.
Iran and the Cosy Crypto Cache: What’s it like to have friends in high places.
It’s the Zombies: No, not the ‘60s band or the movie villains…
What I’m Watching: The latest by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Jukebox Playlist: The Harder They Come
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” —usually attributed to Mark Twain
This is not an actual quote from Mark Twain. It’s attributed to him only because it fits snugly into something he might’ve said. When I looked to see who actually said it, the answers were less than satisfying, so we’ll have to say “anonymous” for now. But there’s a reason the line, whoever’s it is, hits so hard. It’s not just about a person being tricked. Being tricked is the easy part. It’s about that uncomfortable sensation of realizing the ground you were standing on isn’t nearly as solid as you thought.
I’ve seen this play out in sports, in politics, in business, in everyday life. When I was younger, I thought being wrong meant something was wrong with me. That’s a heavy weight to carry. Most people feel the same way, even if they don’t say it out loud. And that’s scary and embarrassing as hell. So, instead of admitting we were misled, we double down. We defend the thing that fooled us because it feels safer than facing the shame of being wrong. Because being wrong begs the question: “What else have I been wrong about?” And that’s where the proverbial ground starts to shake.
But here’s the truth I learned over the years, especially during my time in the NBA and then later as a writer: being wrong is not a character flaw. Ignorance doesn’t equal stupidity. But staying wrong because you’re afraid to face the truth, is where the real damage happens. (And, frankly, it’s also where ignorance ends and stupidity begins.)
You see this everywhere today. Leaders promise simple fixes to complicated problems. Companies talk about “transparency” while hiding what really matters. Institutions tell us they’re protecting us, even when the results say otherwise. And when the truth finally comes out, people cling to the original story because it’s familiar and comfortable. It’s what they voted for, what they pledged allegiance to, what they were certain they learned, what they based their future on. It’s become a part of them, and suddenly the truth is suspect, even dangerous.
Admitting you were fooled means admitting you trusted the wrong person, or believed the wrong headline, or followed the wrong crowd. I try to remind myself that changing my mind is a sign of strength, not weakness. The world is full of people who will lie to protect their power, money and image. But the only person who can keep me stuck in a lie is me.
The real courage is in saying, “I didn’t know then what I know now.”
The real maturity is in choosing truth over pride.
The real freedom is in letting go of the story that fooled you and writing a better one.
Whoever came up with the supposed Mark Twain quote wasn’t warning us about con artists. It was, and is, a warning about ourselves, about how easy it is to hold onto the wrong thing just because it feels familiar. But every time we learn to face the truth, even when it stings, we become that much harder to fool the next time.
So, even if Mark Twain didn’t say it, or especially because he didn’t, let’s keep it in mind. And if we’ve been fooled, let’s admit it and move on.
The LG Evo AI G5 OLED has set a new standard for gaming and movie watching among premium TVs.
In Milan, athletes showed that patriotism can be generous. In Los Angeles, that definition will be tested on the biggest, loudest stage sport can offer
The Milano Cortina Winter Games ended on Sunday night as the Olympics always do: in light, spectacle and speeches about unity. In Verona, the Olympic flag passed to the French Alps and the twin flames were extinguished. But unofficially, at least, a flame also flickered 6,000 miles west.
If these Games felt political, just wait until Los Angeles a little more than two years from now.
Continue reading...Trump doesn’t deserve our attention. And we already know the state of the union – it sucks
I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.
I hope Neilsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump crazy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now
Continue reading...These are the best TVs I’ve reviewed for every budget, including top brands, including LG, Samsung and TCL.
These are the kitchen scales that met our testing criteria.
Here's why we believe our rigorous, objective TV reviews are the best in the industry.
Some House Republicans have rebuked Mr. Trump on tariffs, war powers and the Epstein files, and defections could grow as the midterms approach.
Exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled to Italy translated Hebrew bible into their common language
In 1553, a community of exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had found refuge and patronage in the northern Italian city of Ferrara did something that would have been unthinkable, and very possibly fatal, in their former homelands.
They printed their own Hebrew bible in Spanish.
Continue reading...Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked the start of the fifth year of the Ukraine war by saying Russia has failed to achieve its goals — and the Kremlin agreed.
Add percussive therapy to your post-workout routine with our expert picks, including mini and deep-tissue models. Plus, a brand new frontrunner now in top spot
• The best running shoes, tested
Massage guns are often pitched at the highly active. They can help you warm up for workouts, accelerate recovery and generally keep things loose and injury-free. However, you don’t have to be training for an Ironman triathlon to benefit from a percussive pummelling. A good session can also alleviate the general soreness, stiffness and pain that comes from desk-bound days and the daily grind – all without having to cough up for a spell on a masseuse’s table or be handled by a stranger.
These personal-care power tools use rapid, repetitive pressure and vibrations to penetrate tired muscles, with a selection of heads, variable speeds and even automated routines to tailor treatments towards tight trouble spots. Dozens of massage guns are available from various brands, and you can spend anything from £50 to £500. But not all muscle massage guns are made equal.
Best massage gun overall:
Therabody Theragun Sense 2
Best budget massage gun:
Renpho Active Thermacool 2
Not enough support for freed victims, say aid agencies, with growing numbers sleeping on the streets, unable to travel home without passports or money
Charities and aid workers have called for urgent international government support for victims of south-east Asia’s deadly scam compounds, following a damning report by Amnesty International.
The numbers of survivors of cyberscam “farms” left destitute and abandoned on the city streets of Cambodia and Myanmar is an “international crisis”, according to the research published in January.
Continue reading...The so-called ‘pocket book’ sold in supermarkets is being phased out across the US, the latest sign of an ongoing shift in how people are choosing to read
Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”
For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.
Continue reading...We explore the strange food-obsessed world of a new game whose tech was once called ‘an insult to life itself’ by Hayao Miyazaki, the film-maker behind Spirited Away
A strange piece of software has recently landed on the PC gaming store Steam. And “software” feels like the cleanest way to describe it. Existing somewhere between a full-blown life sim, a science project and a kind of haunted fish tank, Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution probably would have disappeared without making much impact if it wasn’t for one unusual factor. Several years ago some of its creators were absolutely roasted on camera by one of the genuine legends of Japanese animation.
Back in 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, the director of movies such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, was shown new technology that used AI in order to animate models. Faced with a zombie that utilised its head to move by knocking its skull against the ground and wriggling its body like a fish, Miyazaki declared what he had seen was “an insult to life itself”. It’s hard not to watch the clip without feeling slightly seared – but now, a decade later, the ashen-faced developers from that room have sufficiently recovered to make their work widely available.
Continue reading...The Texan made the mistake of his life when he ordered gummies to soothe symptoms of Crohn’s disease. Now his health is suffering in a foreign jail
Jarred Shaw is locked up in an Indonesian prison – but at least he isn’t facing execution, something that appeared a possibility less than a year ago.
The 35-year-old American was a key member of the Prawira Bandung team who won the Indonesian Basketball League (IBL) in 2023, the latest highlight in a fascinating professional career that had taken him to countries as varied as Tunisia, Lebanon, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Continue reading...Daughter was ‘heartbroken’ after Michelle Hundley Smith requested her location not be disclosed to family she had walked away from
A North Carolina woman says she was simultaneously “ecstatic … pissed … [and] heartbroken” to learn authorities recently found her mother living safely and well – while also wanting her location kept secret – more than 24 years after she suddenly vanished from her family.
“I am all over the map!” Amanda Smith, the daughter of Michelle Hundley Smith, wrote in a lengthy statement on a social media page dedicated to searching for her mother. “Will I have a relationship once more with my mom? Honestly, I can’t answer that [because] I don’t even know.
Continue reading...Elected officials visited Trump properties 145 times since his inauguration, records show
Elected leaders from Israel to Iowa have visited Donald Trump’s various properties 145 times since his inauguration last year, according to a new report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a political watchdog group.
Trump’s luxury resorts have offered the chief executive an unusual political arena – and a source of profit. A Guardian analysis of campaign finance records found that US political campaigns and committees spent at least $1.3m at Trump properties since January 2025.
Continue reading...Documents might help scientists shed light on unexplained phenomena and government secrets, experts said.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem. "We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project," Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Speech comes as midterms loom and opinion polls show more voters disapprove than approve of his performance
The last time Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union address, it produced the memorable optics of Nancy Pelosi ripping up his speech after he finished talking.
Pelosi’s theatrical gesture at the end of the February 2020 address (his 2025 speech was technically a joint session of Congress, not a State of the Union) eloquently expressed the Democrats’ contempt for Trump’s rosy description of the union he presided over, when he boasted of a booming economy and restoring US strength in characteristic Maga (make America great again) rhetoric.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Measles is a highly contagious virus able to spread quickly among people. Though it has been considered “eliminated” in the U.S. since 2000, cases have been rising in recent years in states like South Carolina and Utah. A reported exposure at a Wilmington area children’s hospital could bring the virus to the First State.
Delaware’s principal pediatric facility, Nemours Children’s Health, reported a measles exposure in its emergency room last week, which could lead to the first case of the virus in the state in more than a decade. The state says it is still in the process of contact tracing and will notify those who may have been exposed.
There have not been any confirmed measles cases in Delaware since the exposure, a spokesperson for the state’s health department said, and the incident involved someone from out of state who sought care at the Wilmington-area hospital.
In a statement from Nemours, a spokesperson said that the hospital is following “all public health guidelines” surrounding the exposure at the hospital.
“We will continue to work with the Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Nemours Children’s Employee Health for appropriate follow-up for individuals in line with all public health guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
For those exposed, early symptoms of measles could include a fever, runny nose, cough and pink eye. After three to five days, a rash around the face could appear and spread down the body. In severe cases, measles could lead to brain inflammation, pneumonia or death.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), most measles deaths in 2024 were unvaccinated children younger than 5 years old. The WHO also said vaccination is the best way to prevent getting measles.
In 2000, the U.S. declared measles was eliminated. But last year, cases hit their highest level since that elimination declaration amid a wave of vaccine skepticism, according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In South Carolina, where a measles outbreak has reached nearly 1,000 cases, officials have recommended that residents seek vaccination.
Last March, as the number of measles cases continued to rise across the country, state officials released information on how to protect children from contracting measles and information about vaccines. According to that release, Delaware had not experienced a case of measles in more than a decade.
A report from the News Journal in 1926 said the state had experienced 410 cases of measles since the start of that calendar year. That same report also said state officials weighed closing public schools as the cases started to rise.
Measles is highly contagious, and one person can infect multiple other people if those people aren’t vaccinated. Symptoms can take days, or even weeks, to show themselves, the state said.
If someone is exposed or begins showing symptoms, the state health department said they should call its Office of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. The state offers two phone numbers, one for business hours, as well as a 24-hour hotline:
The state recommends that people exposed to measles find a dose of the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine within three days. According to a press release, these vaccines can be found at primary care clinics and pharmacies, and residents should notify their preferred providers to find out more.
Two of the nation’s top pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens, both offer the MMR vaccine. Patients can schedule appointments online:
Children ages 1 through 12 are eligible for the vaccine and usually receive two doses. The first dose is usually administered after a child’s first birthday and then again after a few years.
According to the state, those who receive the vaccine are protected for life if they receive both doses, though like all vaccines, the state says there is still a nominal chance someone could contract the virus if they are vaccinated.
The post Delaware reports measles exposure in Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The buildup comes after a round of nuclear talks between the two nations concluded last week without a deal.
Traders appear to be hedging against worst-case scenario of a conflict between the two nations, analyst says
Oil prices have reached seven-month highs, as traders reacted to heightened tensions between the US and Iran ahead of nuclear talks this week.
US crude futures rose to $67.28 a barrel on Monday, while Brent crude touched its highest level since 31 July at $72.50 a barrel. Prices fell back late in the session, but were up again on Tuesday morning, approaching Monday’s highs.
Continue reading...Booking system freezes and screens crash amid rush of fans trying to secure tickets to 21 March free concert
Tickets for BTS’s comeback concert in central Seoul were snapped up almost immediately on Monday night, with authorities expecting an estimated 260,000 fans to descend for the K-pop group’s first full performance in nearly four years.
At one point, more than 100,000 people flooded the booking website when sales opened at 8pm for the free concert at Gwanghwamun square on 21 March, causing screens to crash and booking systems to freeze.
Continue reading...Grace Bell says she is ‘the happiest I’ve ever been in my life’ after giving birth to baby Hugo in UK first
A baby boy named Hugo is the first child to be born in the UK to a mother with a womb transplant from a dead donor.
Hugo Powell was delivered at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospital in London weighing 3.09kg (6lb 13oz), after his mother, Grace Bell, received a transplanted womb from someone who had died.
Continue reading...A record-setting snowstorm has prompted managers of The Boston Globe to postpone the printing of their daily newspaper for the first time in its 153 year history.
Detectives say tools supplied by Palantir were integral to convictions of a criminal gang that stole £800,000
It was fraud on a grand scale. The “Fuck the Police” criminal gang based in Luton and Romania stole £800,000 in more than 3,000 withdrawals from cash machines in dozens of locations throughout 2024.
The police investigation matched the crime in its complexity. When detectives in Bedfordshire seized the suspects’ two dozen smartphones, they were faced with a mountain of potential digital evidence – 1.4 terabytes of information, according to the authorities, connecting co-conspirators across eastern England and the Bacau region of Romania.
Continue reading...Exclusive: NCA’s Alex Murray says he hopes new £115m police AI centre can limit unfairness found in tools
A police chief has admitted artificial intelligence used to boost crime fighting will contain bias but pledged to combat the risks.
Labour wants a dramatic expansion of police use of AI within England and Wales, with police chiefs also believing it could help keep law enforcement up to date with new criminal threats.
Continue reading...U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries. Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the countryâ(TM)s largest battery storage market in 2026. Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods. The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIAâ(TM)s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Tokyo is adjusting to a more dangerous world.
U.S. military strikes and the risk of a quagmire.
 | Opened my brand new onewheel pint, and it started making this weird sound. If this is a completely normal sound and I’m just freaking out over nothing please don’t make fun of me. I’m new to Onewheel. And I also rode about 8 miles on it. [link] [comments] |
The Supreme Court agreed to take up an effort by energy companies to end a lawsuit filed in state court that seeks billions of dollars in damages.
An image the FBI released of the suspect at Nancy Guthrie's front door, without a backpack, was captured by her Nest doorbell camera prior to the night of her abduction.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 24.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men. As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price. In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | I ride my XR Classic like I stole it and never hold back! It's competed in battle for the rail, raced in Seek and Shred, and was the mileage leader for over 1000 miles, and is still #14 on the mileage leaderboard. After all that, how do you think it aged? [link] [comments] |
In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing her promotion, noting "great games," "the return of Xbox" and the "future of play" as her three main commitments to the gaming community. So first, what makes a great game for Sharma, whose roles prior to CoreAI include top positions at Instacart and Meta? The new Microsoft Gaming CEO tells Variety it's all about games with "deep emotional resonance" and "a distinct point of view." She wants to develop stories that make players "feel something," like the kind of feelings Campo Santo's 2016 first-person mystery "Firewatch" elicited in her. Sharma takes on the mantle as head of the leading competitor to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo knowing full well she's entering the role as an outsider to the larger gaming community and has "a lot to learn" still. But Sharma says she's got a commitment to "being grounded in what the community is telling us." "I'm coming into gaming as a platform builder," Sharma said, adding that her goal is to "earn the right to be trusted by players and developers" and show the fanbase that "consistency" over time. In her interview with Variety, Sharma acknowledged the tumultuous state of the gaming industry, referencing Matthew Ball's recent State of Video Gaming in 2026 report as evidence that the larger "transformation" of the sector is "protecting what we believe in while remaining open-minded about the future." Due to her strong background in AI, initial reactions to Sharma's appointment have raised concerns about what her specific views are on the use of generative AI in game development. Sharma says her stance is simple: she has "no tolerance for bad AI." "AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be," Sharma said, noting that gaming needs new "growth engines," but that "great stories are created by humans."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anna Kepner, 18, was on a Caribbean cruise with her father, stepmother and three stepsiblings when she was discovered dead on the Carnival Horizon in November.
Firm does not specify amount but seeks reimbursement after supreme court ruled against president last week
FedEx sued the US government on Monday, seeking a refund for the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump that were deemed illegal by the US supreme court last week.
The lawsuit marks the first attempt by a major company to receive reimbursement of their share of an estimated $175bn in levies after the highest court found Trump had overstepped his authority in issuing the tariffs. Other companies are expected to follow.
Continue reading...joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app. [...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor) will suddenly vanish as users move it across Outlook's interface. "When using classic Outlook, you may find that the mouse pointer or mouse cursor disappears as you move the pointer over the Outlook interface," it said. "Although the mouse pointer is not there, the email in the message list will change color as you hover over it. This issue has also been reported with OneNote and other Microsoft 365 apps to a lesser degree." Microsoft added that the Outlook team is investigating the issues and will provide updates as more information becomes available. While a timeline for a permanent fix is not yet available, Microsoft has offered three temporary workarounds that require affected users to click an email in the message list when the cursor disappears, which may cause it to reappear. Alternatively, switching to PowerPoint, clicking into an editable area, and then returning to Outlook may also restore the mouse pointer.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Newsom's remarks about his 960 SAT score went viral as he told Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and a packed auditorium: "I'm not trying to impress you, I'm just trying to impress upon you I'm like you, I'm not better than you."
Part 6 of the Delaware Civics 101 Series:
Understanding How Delaware Organizes, Spends, and Balances Its Money
When economic headwinds begin to blow, small states feel them quickly.
Delaware enters the 2026 budget cycle in a position that is both stable and delicate. The state maintains a AAA bond rating, fully funded reserve accounts, and a globally respected corporate legal system that drives significant revenue to the state’s budget. Yet beneath that stability lie slower economic growth, rising fixed costs, and intensifying pressure to fund competing priorities.
At the center of nearly every budget conversation is a structural reality: Delaware’s corporate franchise system generates roughly $1.8 billion to $2 billion annually, accounting for about 25% to 30% of the General Fund. Next to personal income taxes, it is the largest single funding pillar supporting education, healthcare, public safety and infrastructure.
Understanding the coming fiscal debate means understanding seven distinct headwinds — and how they interact.
Delaware’s operating budget has grown from about $2.1 billion in 2000 to roughly $6.5 billion in
FY2026 — an increase of nearly 210%.
In FY2026 alone, the operating budget rose about 7.3% year over year, exceeding the roughly 4% annual growth rate often considered sustainable over the long term.
Gov. Matt Meyer’s FY2027 proposal aims to slow that pace to around 5%, signaling a shift toward restraint. But maintaining discipline over multiple years will require careful prioritization.
When spending grows faster than recurring revenue, lawmakers face three options: slow growth, raise revenue, or risk structural imbalance. None are politically simple.
Delaware’s five-year GDP growth rate — approximately 1.9% — ranks near the bottom nationally. National forecasts suggest U.S. GDP growth could slow into the high-1% range in 2026.
Slow growth affects corporate profits, wage growth, consumer spending and investment — all of which influence state tax collections.
In a slower-growth environment, revenue gains flatten even as spending demands rise. For a state heavily dependent on corporate-related revenue, economic momentum matters greatly.
Like most states, Delaware faces steadily increasing obligations in healthcare programs, public education salaries, pensions and retiree benefits, and state employee compensation.
These fixed costs are difficult to reduce quickly and consume a growing share of available revenue.
If franchise-tax collections were to weaken during a period of slow economic growth, fiscal pressures would intensify rapidly.
If nearly a third of Delaware’s budget rests on franchise-related revenue, a natural question follows: Should the state broaden its base?
Recent efforts to restructure income-tax brackets — projected to raise about $15 million annually — stalled amid concerns about economic impact. The governor has proposed higher tobacco taxes, but even a significant increase would generate only a fraction of what franchise taxes provide.
The larger conversation is less about replacing the franchise system and more about reducing concentration risk.
Possible long-term strategies include modernizing the franchise framework for digital-era and emerging entities, strengthening Delaware’s role as a fintech and financial-services hub, expanding high-wage sectors such as biotech and advanced manufacturing, updating land-use and housing policies to attract employers and expand the personal income-tax base, and reviewing certain fees or consumption-based taxes that distribute revenue impact more broadly.
None of these represent quick fixes. They are structural growth strategies.
As DEFAC Chair Alan Levin has observed, “Almost a third of the budget comes from the corporate franchise, so if it changes markedly we’d have to go find that revenue somewhere else.”
That is not alarmism. It is arithmetic.
Diversification is not ideological. It is insurance.
Lawmakers face ongoing pressure to invest more in affordable housing, early childhood education, energy affordability, public education and infrastructure improvements.
At the same time, others call for fiscal caution.
One stabilizing factor is Delaware’s reserve structure. The Rainy Day Fund holds roughly $360 million, and the Budget Stabilization Fund adds nearly $470 million — together providing a cushion of roughly 12% of the operating budget, stronger than many neighboring states.
That cushion provides protection — but not permanent immunity from structural imbalance.
In recent years, Delaware has used surplus revenue and pay-as-you-go funding to reduce reliance on borrowing for infrastructure. That strategy has helped limit long-term debt.
But if recurring programs depend on temporary surpluses, structural gaps can appear when economic conditions tighten.
Understanding the difference between one-time money and recurring commitments remains critical to long-term fiscal stability.
Delaware’s corporate franchise system is not an accident. It is the product of more than 125 years of legal development and policy refinement.
The Delaware General Corporation Law, established in 1899, is widely viewed as the model corporate statute in the United States. More than a century of case law — developed primarily through the Court of Chancery — has created predictability valued by corporations nationwide.
Delaware’s Court of Chancery is staffed by non-elected judges with deep expertise in corporate and business law. Their specialization and consistency have made Delaware the most recognized business-law jurisdiction in the country.
That legal framework is reinforced by responsive state agencies, including the Secretary of State’s Office and the Division of Corporations, which are capable of processing filings within hours rather than days. The state also benefits from a deep bench of nationally recognized attorneys whose practices span corporate governance, alternative entities, bankruptcy, intellectual property, and complex commercial litigation.
The Corporate Law Council of the Delaware State Bar Association — made up of 30 practitioners — meets regularly to consider updates to the General Corporation Law. They present their proposals to the DSBA who then present them to the Delaware General Assembly. Any changes must ultimately pass the General Assembly by a two-thirds vote, preserving stability while allowing modernization.
Recent high-profile criticism prompted legislative adjustments designed to maintain confidence in the system. So far, incorporation activity remains steady, and revenue from alternative entities such as LLCs and LPs continues to broaden the base.
The franchise ecosystem also supports high-wage jobs — attorneys, finance professionals, technologists, paralegals, hospitality workers and many others.
But reliance carries responsibility.
If franchise revenue were to shift significantly, Delaware would need to replace it. That would be neither simple nor painless.
Delaware is not in crisis.
The state retains strong reserves, stable employment and a diversified professional economy. Revenue growth has moderated from the rapid pace of the early 2020s, but Delaware remains fiscally sound.
Stability, however, requires awareness.
Throughout this Civics 101 series, we’ve explored:
When citizens understand those mechanics, budget debates become grounded in shared facts.
If spending has grown faster than sustainable benchmarks, pacing matters.
If nearly a third of the General Fund comes from franchise-related revenue, protecting and diversifying that base matters.
If fixed costs are rising, prioritization matters.
None of those realities require fear.
They require prudence.
With a shared foundation of understanding, Delawareans are more likely to develop common-sense solutions, debate options constructively and resolve fiscal challenges responsibly.
The purpose of this Civics 101 series is not to predict crisis.
It is to encourage informed citizenship.
Because when Delawareans understand how the budget works — where our money comes from, how it is spent and how it is structured — we are better prepared to shape it.
And better prepared to plan wisely for Delaware’s future.
About the Civics 101 Series: Civics 101 is a continuing explanatory series by Delaware LIVE and the Spotlight Delaware content marketing team designed to help readers understand how state government works and how budget decisions affect everyday life in Delaware. To read other stories in the series, visit the Civics 101 home page.
The post Civics 101: To understand Delaware’s budget, you must also appreciate its challenges appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Internal investigators said at least two accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups
Shortly after Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, last fall, company employees revealed the cryptocurrency exchange may have funded Iranian entities with billions of dollars, according to a report by the New York Times.
The discovery was made by a group of internal Binance investigators, who reportedly found that people in Iran had accessed more than 1,500 accounts on the crypto platform. Two of those accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups that included Yemen’s Houthi militants throughout 2024 and 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading...So I was riding my one wheel with my dog and we had to go up on the sidewalk well, she just wanted to sniff some shrubs. Anyways, in low confidence I go up the curb and surprisingly it was easy and I stayed on but, my low confidence led me to sort of jump off because I had assumed I was about to fall. Anyways, I rolled my ankle pretty bad and just stood there for a minute and then ride home just a few houses away. It doesn’t hurt it just feel like it’ss throbbing but I know I’ll probably feel it for the next few days. As if last week I no longer have health insurance I guess I aged out if my parent’s plan so I can’t get it checked out. I mean I’ve gotten injured far worse than this and all I had to do was keep a splint on it and stay off it as much as I can so that’s what I’ll do. Think it’ll be good?
China has opposed the ‘smearing of its nuclear policy’ while insisting Beijing would not ‘engage in any nuclear arms race’
The US has accused China of dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal, while doubling down on claims that Beijing had conducted secret nuclear tests.
Washington said the lapsing of New Start – the last treaty between top nuclear powers the US and Russia – earlier this month presented the possibility of striking a “better agreement” that included Beijing.
Continue reading...Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 24, No. 723.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 24, No. 519.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 24, No. 1,711.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 24 #989.
The U.S. women's ice hockey team said Monday they will not be attending President Trump's State of the Union address, citing scheduling conflicts.
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On Sunday, in the wake of a military operation to kill one of the country’s most infamous drug traffickers, clashes broke out across the Mexico, leaving dozens dead and producing shocking images of roadblocks, armed men in the streets, and panicked civilians ducking for cover.
Within hours of the operation in which troops killed cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” in a rural hideout outside Guadalajara, gunmen loyal to his Jalisco New Generation Cartel group poured into the streets of several cities, burning buses and firing automatic weapons.
“The city was completely emptied,” said David Mora, an International Crisis Group analyst who happened to be in Guadalajara on Sunday, of the aftermath of the violence. “I mean it was a ghost town — there was no one on the streets yesterday.”
The fighting left at least 70 people dead, including 25 members of Mexico’s National Guard, which carried out the mission guided by intelligence from counterparts in U.S. military and law enforcement, according to President Claudia Sheinbaum.
“The country is at peace,” Sheinbaum said at her daily press conference Monday. “It’s calm.”
The spasm of violence came amid a heavy-handed pressure campaign by the Trump administration, which for the past year has explicitly blamed Sheinbaum’s government for allowing traffickers to flood the U.S. with fentanyl and other drugs. President Donald Trump has previously insinuated that the government of Mexico is captured by trafficking networks, and threatened unilateral military action to stop the flow of drugs.
“Going after a big fish like this was kind of an indication of the new framing of this government’s security strategy,” said Mora. “But it also has to do with the elephant in the room, which is the pressure that Donald Trump is putting on Mexico to deliver this.”
Despite an almost unprecedented willingness on the part of Sheinbaum to hand over high-profile narcos to stand trial in the U.S. — and Trump’s willingness to pardon convicted drug traffickers — Trump has given little indication of relenting. Even as top U.S. officials took a victory lap and the deadly cost of the operation was just beginning to become clear, Trump hardly seemed satisfied.
“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” he wrote Monday on his social media platform.
“Now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption?”
In Mexico, however, the death toll, which is likely higher than what has so far been reported, and the chaos that was unleashed were a stark reminder of the heavy cost paid by Mexicans in a war on organized crime that is dictated in large part by pressure from Washington — even as the paramilitary groups in question are armed with guns and ammunition from the U.S. and fueled with money from drugs consumed by people north of the border.
“This is a breakthrough,” said Jesús Esquivel, a journalist with La Jornada and a longtime chronicler of the war on drugs. “But now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption? What are you going to do to stop arms trafficking?”
In many ways, the violence that played out on Sunday was a familiar scene. On multiple occasions over the past decade, confrontations with high-profile drug traffickers have sparked bloody battles with heavily armed paramilitary groups, leaving numerous people dead and cities paralyzed.
Perhaps the most controversial incident of this scale came in 2019, when Mexican troops seized Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, only to release him following a siege of the city of Culiacán by gunmen loyal to Ovidio and his brothers.
In previous operations, Mexican troops and Marines have frequently operated in conjunction with “advisors” from the Drug Enforcement Administration and occasionally with the help of special operations forces and the CIA. Details are still emerging about how exactly the operation played out on Sunday, but it appears to have been carried out entirely by Mexican security forces.
“For the first time, I feel proud of the Mexican Army,” said Esquivel. “It’s a message to the U.S. government, and especially to Trump, that we may need your information, but we don’t need you to intervene unilaterally in our territory. We can take care of these guys.”
For others, the scenes that unfolded on Sunday had a grim sense of repetition. It has been almost 20 years since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels, a heavily militarized, U.S.-backed mission that has — despite endless arrests of high-level narcos — has done virtually nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Instead, Mexico has faced decades of horrific violence, a widespread paramilitarization of drug gangs, and a fractured criminal landscape that has turned many areas of the country into low-intensity war zones fueled by weapons from the United States.
As the smoke clears in Jalisco, there are fears that a familiar pattern will repeat itself. In other areas in which a top trafficker was arrested or killed, it has become common for criminal groups to atomize into warring factions, according to Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist who studies organized crime in Mexico.
“This is a continuation of this militarized approach to organized crime,” said Jusionyte. “With the fracturing of these organized crime groups, there is more violence, but the structure remains intact — the drug demand in the U.S. and the gun supply from the U.S. remains, and in Mexico the impunity and the weakness of the justice system remain.”
The post Trump Demanded El Mencho’s Head. Mexicans Are Paying the Price. appeared first on The Intercept.
A 7,000-word "doomsday" thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, "painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work," reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish for the economy that it is actually bearish? "For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input," Citrini wrote in a post it described as a scenario dated June 2028, not a prediction. "We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium." Many of Monday's moves roughly aligned with the situation outlined by Citrini, in which fast-advancing AI tools allow spending cuts across industries, sparking mass white-collar unemployment and in turn leading to financial contagion. Software firms DataDog, CrowdStrike and Zscaler each plunged more than 9%. International Business Machines' 13% decline was its worst one-day performance since 2000. American Express, KKR and Blackstone -- all name-checked by Citrini -- tumbled. That anxiety, coupled with renewed uncertainty about trade policy from Washington, weighed down major indexes Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average led declines, falling 1.7%, or 822 points. The S&P 500 shed 1%, while the Nasdaq composite retreated 1.1%. [...] Monday's market swings extended a run of AI-linked volatility. A small research outfit that has garnered a huge Substack following for macro and thematic stock research, Citrini said in its new post that software firms, payment processors and other companies formed "one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth" that AI is poised to disrupt. [...] Shares in DoorDash also veered 6.6% lower Monday after Citrini's Substack note called the delivery app a "poster child" for how new tools would upend companies that monetize interpersonal friction. In the research firm's scenario, AI agents would help both drivers and customers navigate food deliveries at much lower costs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FedEx sued the Trump administration over its tariffs on Monday, asking for a "full refund" of all payments it made to the government under a set of tariff policies that were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.
WBD board says it is assessing revised offer as Paramount seeks to trump agreed offer by Netflix
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has said it is reviewing a sweetened takeover bid from Paramount Skydance but did not reveal details of what its board had asked to be Paramount’s “best and final offer” to attempt to derail Netflix.
Last week, WBD, which has so far stuck to its binding agreement with Netflix, had given Paramount seven days to table its final offer to best the $82.7bn deal with the streaming company.
Continue reading...First amendment group criticizes Aileen Cannon’s order to permanently block release of Jack Smith report after dismissing case against Trump in 2024
Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.
In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.
For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.
Continue reading...Military planners are advising President Trump that any strike on Tehran's assets would almost certainly not be a singular, decisive blow.
Aileen Cannon denounces ‘brazen’ special counsel for compiling report after she had dismissed case in 2024
A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump permanently barred the justice department on Monday from releasing the former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after his first term.
The ruling by US district judge Aileen Cannon marked the latest effort to stop the report from being sent to Congress or otherwise becoming publicly available.
Continue reading...The killing of El Mencho triggered violence across Mexico. In cities including Puerto Vallarta and Cancún, the U.S. warned citizens to shelter in place.
Dominic Ethan Stewart was among 19 killed when vehicle veered off road and plunged down mountainside
Tributes have been paid to a young British hiker who was among 19 people killed when a packed passenger bus veered off a treacherous stretch of road and plunged 200 metres down a steep mountainside in Nepal.
Twenty-five others were injured in the pre-dawn crash in the Himalayan foothills on Monday. The bus was carrying 44 people, including a number of tourists.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave's economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin -- a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar -- are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined. But officials have discussed the idea as part of their plan for the future of the enclave, where economic activity collapsed during Israel's two-year war with Hamas and the traditional banking and payments system has been severely impaired. A person familiar with the project said the stablecoin was expected to be tied to the US dollar, with the hope that Gulf Arab and Palestinian companies with expertise in the field of digital currencies will help spearhead the effort. "This will not be a 'Gaza Coin' or a new Palestinian currency, but a means to allow Gazans to transact digitally," the person said. Work on the idea is being led by Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former reservist who is now working as an unpaid adviser to Trump's "Board of Peace," the US-led body tasked with rebuilding Gaza, according to two people familiar with the matter. [...] According to the person familiar with the project, the "Board of Peace" and NCAG will decide on the stablecoin's regulatory framework and access, although "nothing definitive" has yet been finalized. Speaking at a meeting of the "Board of Peace" in Washington last week, Tancman said the NCAG was working on building "a secure digital backbone, an open platform enabling e-payments, financial services, e-learning, and healthcare with user control over data", but did not elaborate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Criminal barristers welcome justice secretary’s move to remove limit on hearing days at crown courts in England and Wales
A cap on court sitting days is to be lifted as the government seeks to ease the cases backlog, David Lammy has announced.
The justice secretary and deputy prime minister said every crown court in England and Wales would be funded to hear more cases in the next financial year.
Continue reading...Prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand say they would not object to his removal from royal succession line
A parliamentary inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein is a matter for MPs, Downing Street has said, as ministers faced a new push to uncover details about the former prince’s role as a trade envoy.
It comes as the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, wrote to Keir Starmer to say his country would have no objection to Mountbatten-Windsor being removed from the royal line of succession. Later, a spokesperson for New Zealand’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, said his country would also support the proposals.
Continue reading...Dr. Peter Attia has stepped down from his CBS News contributor role weeks after crude emails he exchanged with Jeffrey Epstein were made public.
As Iran's new academic year began over the weekend, large-scale protests erupted across several universities.
While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita’s/GNOME’s CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems.
But what if you could turn CSDs off?
GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps.
CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.
This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality.This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content.
↫ GTK-NoCSD’s Codeberg page
This isn’t the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won’t be the last, and I’m glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application ‘modified’ by it should never be reported to the application’s developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it’s actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application’s developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD.
Keep that in mind.
That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that’s entirely fair game. There’s packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself.
As for my personal opinion – well, let’s just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.
OpenAI has formed a multi-year "Frontier Alliance" with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI's enterprise-focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers' tech stacks. The company launched OpenAI Frontier in early February. The no-code open software allows users to build, deploy, and manage AI agents both built on OpenAI's AI models and beyond. OpenAI argues in its latest announcement that consultants are the right avenue to get enterprises on board. "AI alone does not drive transformation. It must be linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes," BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer said in OpenAI's blog post. "Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI's Frontier platform with BCG's deep industry, functional, and tech expertise and BCG X's build-and-scale capabilities to drive measurable impact with safeguards from day one."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A memo shows Jeffrey Epstein was the subject of a previously undisclosed U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency investigation targeting him and 14 others for suspicious money transfers possibly linked to illegal narcotics.
When the most profound human emotion becomes an automated transaction in an online shop, the techlords have won
The Guardian reported on the arrival of “Fate” and, friends, I laughed. Or maybe I cried.
It’s apparently the first “agentic AI dating app”. An AI personality named “Fate” interviews users, runs data matches on their hopes and dreams, then suggests five potential matches based on the hard data of observable complementary language patterning, “No swiping involved!”.
Continue reading...Anthropic says three Chinese firms used ‘distillation’ technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot
US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month.
Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.
Continue reading...Company had suspended account of Tumbler Ridge shooter in June 2025 over ‘furtherance of violent activities’
Canada’s artificial intelligence minister says he has summoned representatives from the technology company OpenAI after the company declined to alert police after suspending the account of a user who became the perpetrator of one of the country’s worst-ever school shootings.
Evan Solomon says he is “deeply disturbed” by reports that the company, which operates the popular ChatGPT chatbot, suspended the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar over the “furtherance of violent activities” in June 2025 but did not reach out to Canadian law enforcement.
Continue reading...Feb. 23, 2026 — Begun as an exploratory software project at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory focusing on parallel numerical algorithms for partial differential equations, PETSc has evolved into one of the world’s most widely used software libraries for high-performance computing, with a core development team and numerous contributors. But with such a long history, a challenge has emerged: important knowledge is getting lost or buried.
“We’ll have developers thinking, ‘I’m sure we solved this problem back in 2015 — but where’s the solution?’” said Barry Smith, one of the original PETSc developers. “And sometimes developers get nuanced questions from users that the developers recall were discussed at length and could not be answered simply; but those discussions are buried in thousands of emails or GitLab issues or the like.”
PETSc has two types of knowledge. “Dry” knowledge is written down and can be read by computers; it includes official material that has undergone review and unofficial knowledge, such as emails, that has not been reviewed. In contrast, “wet” knowledge is unwritten and is not machine accessible. Both “wet” and “dry” knowledge bases are hard to search through — especially the “wet” kind — and even the written material is often unorganized or hard to find.
Now, new tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) could help change that.
Can AI Help PETSc?
One promising AI tool is the large language model, or LLM — like ChatGPT. LLMs are designed to understand and generate human language based on patterns learned from large amounts of text. That sounds perfect for making sense of PETSc’s vast information — from documentation to emails to user questions.
Types of knowledge in PETSc. Credit: Argonne.
But LLMs have a big drawback: they sometimes make things up — a problem known as “hallucination.” In science and high-performance computing, where accuracy is everything, that’s a serious issue.
Still, the PETSc team saw potential. So they decided to create a custom AI system — not just using LLMs off the shelf, but designing tools specifically built for PETSc.
“Our vision is to create PETSc AI assistants — kind of like virtual team members — that can help users ask questions, support developers and organize information more effectively,” said Lois McInnes, a senior scientist at Argonne and long-time PETSc developer.
Their first steps are outlined in a paper titled “AI Assistants to Enhance and Exploit the PETSc Knowledge Base.” In it, they describe six key areas where AI could help — from answering user questions to customizing user guides, checking code, exploring new research ideas and even helping manage team tasks.
Why Not Just Use ChatGPT?
The team considered using already available tools like ChatGPT, but such general LLMs aren’t trained specifically on PETSc. That means they often give incomplete or wrong answers about it.
“Mainstream AI tools just don’t have enough knowledge about PETSc,” said Junchao Zhang, another PETSc developer at Argonne. “So we built a special AI system that brings PETSc-specific information into the mix — which helps avoid those made-up answers.”
The PETSc team also designed a workflow that brings developers into the question-answer loop. Developers review the answer generated by the LLM and decide whether to approve, revise or discard it.
Finding and Reordering Relevant Information
Another method the team used is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. When a user asks a question, the system first searches PETSc’s knowledge base for relevant information. That information is then added to the original question before being sent to the LLM, leading to a more accurate answer.
They also used a method called reranking, which improves how search results are ordered. Instead of just grabbing the fastest results, the system looks for the most relevant ones and puts those at the top.
“Using RAG and reranking together means our AI assistant can find better, more accurate answers,” Smith said.
In the future, the PETSc team hopes their AI assistants will work alongside real developers — helping speed up work, support users, and even spark new scientific discoveries.
For further information, see the full paper “AI Assistants to Enhance and Exploit the PETSc Knowledge Base,” by Barry Smith, Junchao Zhang, Hong Zhang, Lois Curfman McInnes, Murat Keceli, Archit Vasan, Satish Balay, Toby Isaac, Le Chen, and Venkatram Vishwanath; available here.
Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne National Laboratory
The post Argonne: Using AI to Unlock 30 Years of PETSc Knowledge appeared first on HPCwire.
Einstein is a new AI tool that can watch lecture videos, read essays, write papers, complete quizzes and basically take your class for you.
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 23, 2026 — The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced the launch of a cloud service providing access to Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) developed by TII’s Quantum Computing Hardware Lab. Initially available to TII partners, the service enables users to run quantum workloads directly on TII’s physical quantum hardware in the cloud.
Established four years ago, the Quantum Research Center’s Quantum Computing Hardware Lab has advanced from foundational capability-building to delivering cloud-accessible quantum systems based on superconducting devices. The lab currently operates multiple QPU systems ranging from 5 to 25 qubits, including in-house fabricated chips that demonstrate quantum coherence times up to ten times longer than TII’s first-generation prototypes. These advances reflect growing in-house expertise across quantum design, fabrication, and system-level integration.
The launch is the result of a coordinated effort between the Quantum Computing Hardware Lab and TII’s Quantum Middleware team, with Qibo serving as the software layer for job submission and execution workflows. Qibo is TII’s open-source quantum software framework that enables users to build quantum circuits and hybrid quantum-classical workflows, and to execute them seamlessly across simulators and QPU backends through a unified interface.
Dr. Leandro Aolita, Chief Researcher of TII’s Quantum Research Centre, said: “Launching a cloud-accessible QPU service only four years after establishing the lab demonstrates both the pace and ambition of our quantum program. Until now, this infrastructure has been used internally by TII’s Quantum Algorithms team to develop, validate, and benchmark quantum workflows. With today’s launch, we are extending that same cloud-based access model to our partners, providing a practical platform to accelerate experimentation and hybrid quantum-classical development on locally developed infrastructure.”
The service will continue to expand over time, with additional capabilities, system upgrades, and partner access pathways introduced as the quantum ecosystem matures.
By enabling cloud-based access to its physical quantum hardware, TII is advancing applied quantum research and hybrid quantum–classical experimentation on locally developed systems. To learn more, visit: https://q-cloud.tii.ae.
Source: TII
The post TII Launches Cloud Service Providing Access to In-House Quantum Processing Units appeared first on HPCwire.
US president suggests trade war could escalate as administration says it will stop collecting levies ruled illegal by supreme court
Donald Trump has declared that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”, as the UK and the EU said they were seeking urgent clarity on the US trade deals they struck last summer.
Trump threatened to escalate his global tariff war on Monday, after a supreme court ruling last week that he had overstepped his legal authority to impose his “liberation day” measures last year.
Continue reading...Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be "a top three global provider of the Android TV platform." In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn't been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic made its announcement at a "launch event," FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said: "Under the agreement the new partner will lead sales, marketing, and logistics across the region, while Panasonic provide expertise and quality assurance to uphold its renowned audiovisual standards with full joint development on top-end OLED models." Panasonic also said that it will provide support "for all Panasonic TVs sold up to March 2026 and all those available from April." Skyworth-made Panasonic TVs will be sold in the US and Europe. In the latter geography, the companies are aiming for double-digit market share. [...] The news means there's virtually no TV production happening in Japan anymore, as other Japanese companies, like Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Pioneer, have already exited TV production. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it was ceding control of its TV hardware business to TCL.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Blizzard warnings issued as some areas receive two feet of snow, creating whiteout conditions
Millions of people in the north-eastern US were stuck at home on Monday as heavy snow and strong winds created whiteout conditions, grounding flights in the area and leaving hundreds of thousands without power.
Snowfall totals in 21 cities and towns across New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts had reached at least 2ft, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). In some areas, that snow has been accompanied by strong wind gusts of over 30mph (48km/h) and low visibility.
Continue reading...The British company gives a sneak preview of its new phone ahead of its March 5 launch.
The researchers say the data could be retrieved from the glass in 10,000 years.
Designer Daniel Lee’s trenchcoats and bomber jackets fizz with urban energy in collection that embraces bad weather
In a winter of record-breaking rain, Burberry – purveyor of the stalwart British coat – is back in the zeitgeist. A season of downpours has provided an apt backdrop for a return to form, as the brand re-entered the FTSE 100 last autumn after an ignominious year out of the charts.
The classic check scarf was ranked the fourth hottest fashion item in the last quarter of 2025 on the search, sales and social media metrics of the Lyst index, with overall demand for the brand up 239% year on year.
Continue reading...Stocks slumped amid investor fear of AI disruption and uncertainty surrounding President Trump's new tariffs.
We’ve seen a significant metamorphosis occur in AI in the past year, thanks to the emergence of large, capable Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, such as DeepSeek-R1 (which is also a reasoning model). With momentum behind MoEs and reasoning models building, Nvidia is looking to boost their performance on scale-up systems connected with NVLink.
The core architectural concept behind MoE is not new. Indeed, Geoffrey Hinton was describing MoEs four decades ago. But it wasn’t until DeepSeek-R1 landed on the scene in early 2025 that the world was exposed to an MoE model that really worked. The timing couldn’t have been better, as large language models (LLMs) were pressing up against scaling laws that blocked progress.
The problem is, as AI models got bigger and smarter, they also got slower. Instead of trying to cram more parameters into a neural network, AI researchers decided to mimic the human brain (again) and create partitions of the neural network that were dedicated to certain topics.
“They realized, just like a human brain, we probably don’t need all of these neurons to ask every question,” Ian Buck, VP and general manager of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, said in a recent podcast. “Simple questions, probably just a few neurons [are needed]. Different parts of the brain may encode different information. Let’s just activate those.”
This partitioning functions as a compression mechanism for AI models. While an entire model may be composed of 100 billion parameters, with any given question posed to an MoE model, only about 10 billion parameters will be used, which translates to a 10 to one compression. That means fewer tokens and lower cost to the user, Buck said.
“That’s a way of making AI cheaper but still being able to encode all the possible information and answer all the questions,” Buck said. “So [MoE] are allowing models to get bigger, smarter, it’s going to get cheaper and as a result advancing AI.”
According to Buck, the approach that DeepSeek took with R1 couldn’t have been done without a breakthrough at the network level via NVLink, Nvidia’s proprietary scale-up interconnect, which allows up to 72 Nvidia GPUs to function as a single GPU.
“The [DeepSeek] model was so large it couldn’t really fit on a single GPU. It had to use multi-GPUs,” Buck said in the podcast. “Before we had NVlink, you would have to send things over a PCIe bus and only one could talk at a time. And it was much slower. Because we have NVLink, all those GPUs can talk to every other GPU at full speed. It’s a totally unblocked, literally at gigabytes and terabytes per second of bandwidth without any concern for collision.”
DeepSeek was trained on Hopper GPUs, and cost about $1 for a million tokens, Buck said. Now the cost is down to about $.10 for a million tokens. The cost per token continues to go down as Nvidia innovates at the processor and network level, and AI software developers take advantage of the new hardware capabilities.
Ian Buck, VP and general manager of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia
“Being able to further parallelize and run all those experts across, it could actually increase the performance so much that we actually got a 15x improvement on running DeepSeek-R1 versus only adding about 50% more total cost of on a per GPU basis,” Buck said. “That actually generated a 10x reduction in the cost per token.”
Buck recalled when Nvidia was building “little basic graphics cards” that plugged into the PCIe bus and delivered a boost in floating point calculation. Over time, Nvidia built bigger GPUs, added high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and then created NVLink when it exceeded the capabilities of PCIe. With today’s advances in AI, researchers needed not just incremental improvements, but 10x improvements. Nvidia is giving AI reseaerchers what they need with massive NVL72 systems, fast NVLink interconnects, heaps of on-chip HBM, and Blackwell and (soon) Rubin GPUs that deliver exaflops of AI performance.
“People look at this and say it’s expensive, right?” Buck said. “But the way you do that is actually you put all that investment in NVLink, in all the connectivity and all the next generation software…to make it all work really well. And generation over generation, you get that multiple that 10x multiple production cost.”
MoE models today dominate the AI landscape. The majority of the top models today are MoE models, and that trend doesn’t appear to be likely to change any time soon. The U.S. DOE Genesis Mission is looking to MoE powered by HPC to help drive innovation in science and engineering, and other governments are doing the same. As the hardware limits are reached and progress slows, human innovation helps to find ways over, under, or around it to keep the innovation moving.
Nvidia certainly is a sync for much of this innovation. “We’re looking to figure out what technologies can we incorporate, expand, double down on, invest in, pull from the community or pull from our partners in order to deliver X factors of performance improvement,” Buck said.
Nvidia formally announced NVLInk 6 and Rubin GPUs earlier this year. Next month at the GTC 2026 conference, we’re likely to hear more how Nvidia intends to lean on “extreme co-design” to keep innovation moving forward for MoE, reasoning models, and the future of AI for science.
“There’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship that happens in the market between the AI hardware and the models that are being created to serve AI,” Buck said. “We’re starting to see some models come out that are trained on Blackwell and you’re going to see that now raise the bar and go even further. So this is the virtuous cycle that we’ve been working so fervently to help make happen.”
You can watch all of Nvidia’s podcasts here.
The post Why NVLink Is Nvidia’s Secret Sauce Driving a 10x Performance Boost in MoEs appeared first on HPCwire.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. "It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego. [...] With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. The company's researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. "We'd like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices. ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst. [...] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The incident follows a controversy last year when officials temporarily downgraded the hate symbol to “potentially divisive” in the service’s workplace harassment manual.
Every OpenBSD admin has booted
bsd.rdat least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns outbsd.rdis a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages — we’re just following the trail.
↫ Wesley Mouedine Assaby
What am I supposed to add here?
Court turns aside GOP request to block new map, second setback in recent days for state’s Republicans
New Utah voting districts that give Democrats an improved shot at winning a US House seat can be used in this year’s election, a federal court ruled Monday while turning aside a Republican request to block the new map.
The ruling marked the second setback in recent days for Republicans, who also lost an appeal at Utah’s state supreme court.
Continue reading...40-something fighters will meet in Las Vegas
Mayweather won previous encounter in 2015
Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao will face each other on 19 September in Las Vegas in a rematch of one of the biggest fights in boxing history.
Their first fight, in 2015, was generally seen as a tame affair with both fighters past their peaks. September’s bout, which will be streamed live on Netflix, is likely to be of an even lower quality. Mayweather and Pacquiao will be 49 and 47 respectively when they fight. Mayweather’s last professional fight, which preserved his unbeaten record, came in 2017, although that was a glorified exhibition against UFC star Conor McGregor. Pacquiao fought for the WBC welterweight championship last year, but is far from the force he was in his prime.
Continue reading...Two skiers died Friday in separate incidents at Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain Resort, marking the latest in a series of ski-related deaths in the region this month.
President Donald Trump has cited dramatic results from U.S. strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, saying they’ve nearly stopped the flow of drugs trafficked to the U.S. by water.
Since September 2025, the U.S. has struck at least 40 alleged drug vessels, killing 149 people.
"With our action in the Gulf of America, that sounds so nice when I hear the Gulf of America, drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%," Trump said at a Jan. 29 White House event. "So when you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat." We’ve rated the statement about 25,000 deaths Pants on Fire.
Even though Trump mentioned the Gulf of America, his comments appeared to reference the Caribbean and Pacific strikes.
When asked for evidence about the 97% claim, the White House pointed us to Customs and Border Protection statistics from July 2025 to November 2025. Those numbers show a 98% drop in the pounds of drugs seized by CBP air and marine operations.
But drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S. There isn’t data to show how many drugs are being sent to the U.S. or how many are making it in. Drug experts also say changes in drug seizure data aren’t sufficient to make definitive statements about policy outcomes.
"No one knows how much doesn't get caught, so no one can cite a precise percentage change," Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, said. "Trump is making a claim about something that is unknowable."
The White House didn’t explain why it chose those months. There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since September 2025 when the vessel strikes began, but the percentage drop fluctuates depending on the months compared.
Additionally, the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters, an agency spokesperson told PolitiFact. Its data shows a spike in annual cocaine seizures — 200% in fiscal year 2025 compared with its yearly average. (The Coast Guard generally focuses on cocaine seizures, while CBP’s 98% decline is mainly related to marijuana.)
While the White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success, the Coast Guard cites an increase in seizures as a sign of strong enforcement.
This image from video provided by U.S. South Command, shows a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean shortly before it was destroyed by the U.S. military, killing two and injuring one, Jan. 23, 2026. (U.S. Southern Command via AP)
The White House’s calculation starts in July 2025, which was an outlier with an uncharacteristically high number of marijuana seizures. In July, CBP seized 224,000 pounds of drugs, including 203,000 pounds of marijuana. CBP seizes about 20,000 pounds of all types of drugs in a month.
From August 2025, the last month before the vessel strikes began, to January, the latest available data, CBP drug seizures dropped 79%.
For the Coast Guard, drug seizures are up.
In the 2025 fiscal year which ended in September, the Coast Guard seized 510,000 pounds of cocaine, a 200% increase from a typical fiscal year when the Coast Guard seizes about 167,000 pounds of cocaine.
In August 2025, the Coast Guard launched an operation to target cartels and criminal organizations. From August 2025 to February 2026, the Coast Guard seized 200,000 pounds of cocaine more than it seizes in a typical year, according to agency press releases.
The Coast Guard has hailed the increase in seizures as a success in "preventing the flow of dangerous drugs into American communities."
Regardless of the data point, it’s unknown how many drugs enter the U.S. each year. Drug seizures show only how many pounds of a drug were stopped from getting into the U.S.
"It's a black market. And so by definition, we do not have good market data," Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy program director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that researches global crises.
The decrease in CBP seizures could point to less enforcement or fewer drugs moving on a specific route, Dickinson said. "There's really not a good way to understand that data," she said.
Dickinson said the Trump administration’s drug enforcement efforts, such as the vessel strikes, have "scared some traffickers away from using specific routes."
Rather than stop trafficking, they might have rerouted.
"Drug trafficking is a very old and mature business, in many ways, these organizations have been in a cat and mouse game with law enforcement, not just for years, but really for decades," Dickinson said. They "are expert at reconfiguring routes, finding new ways to ship things, and innovating in a way to avoid enforcement."
Trump said, after U.S. vessel strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, "drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%."
The administration hasn’t provided any evidence that the vessels it has struck were carrying drugs.
There has been a drop in CBP drug seizures since the strikes began. But the Coast Guard — not CBP — oversees most drug seizures on water, especially in international waters. And that agency has seen a steep increase in drug seizures.
The White House cites a drop in CBP drug seizures as a success at the same time the Coast Guard cites an increase in drug interdictions as a success, too.
However, neither an increase nor a decrease in drug seizures shows how many drugs are entering the U.S. That number is unknowable, according to drug experts. Drug seizures tell us only how many drugs are stopped from entering the U.S.
Trump’s statement is unsubstantiated. We rate it False.
Controversial doctor steps down as contributor after Epstein files reveal communication between the two men
Controversial longevity expert Dr Peter Attia has resigned from his post as a CBS News contributor after correspondence between Attia and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was made public.
The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news of Attia’s departure.
Continue reading...IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations. Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Trump’s decision will be driven by envoys’ judgment on whether Iran is stalling on a nuclear deal
Donald Trump’s decision to order airstrikes against Iran will hinge in part on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its capacity to produce nuclear weapons, according to people familiar with the matter.
The president has not made a final determination on any strikes, as the administration prepares for Iran to send its latest proposal this week, ahead of what officials have described as a last-ditch round of negotiations scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.
Continue reading...Killing of Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader sparks wave of violence across western Mexico
Mexican authorities tracked down and killed “El Mencho”, one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, by following a romantic partner to his safe house near a picturesque mountain town, the country’s defence secretary has revealed.
In a press conference, officials provided the first details about the operation that led to the death of the leader of Mexico’s most powerful organised crime group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
Continue reading...Documents given to Congress appear to show courses involving use-of-force were eliminated from ICE officer training.
Nick Reiner, 32, was charged with two counts of murder in the killing of his parents, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner.
More than 40 million people were under blizzard warnings along 700 miles of the East Coast from Maryland to Maine.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has said that a lack of munitions and allied support could mean greater danger for U.S. troops, people familiar with the talks say.
British police arrested Peter Mandelson on suspicion of misconduct in office, just days after the detention of former prince Andrew.
As the drama shows, private firms no longer able to pollute the coast of England of Wales just switched to rivers instead
There is a moment in Channel 4’s drama Dirty Business when Julie Maughan holds the body of her dead child and lets out an anguished cry. It is as brutal as it is compelling.
Her eight-year-old daughter Heather had just died in hospital, two weeks after playing in the sea on the beach at Dawlish Warren in Devon, where she contracted E coli O157, a bug which comes from raw sewage. She became ill with diarrhoea and blood loss. Transferred to Bristol children’s hospital, her parents agreed to switch off her life-support machine after she suffered kidney failure and brain damage.
Continue reading...See if you qualify for one of these student-focused discounts.
The Mexican military killed Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, Mexico’s most wanted cartel boss, during an operation aided by U.S. intelligence information in Tapalpa, a town within the Mexican state of Jalisco.
Violence spread after Oseguera Cervantes’ Feb. 22 killing, with suspected gang members torching buses and businesses while clashing with the authorities in multiple Mexican cities, including Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco.
Images of Puerto Vallarta in flames have been widely reported, but one photo shared online is not real.
A Feb. 22 TikTok post said it shows an image of Puerto Vallarta with scattered buildings on fire.
"This is not a scene from a movie, this is the city of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco in Mexico. Look at all these fires going around the city," says the man in the TikTok video. "Well, what’s happening is they’re saying that they took down the leader of El Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, AKA El Mencho… and all his people are going around all the city and just burning cars, shooting random people, fighting against the police."
Instagram and X users also shared the same image with English and Spanish captions claiming to show the unrest in Puerto Vallarta.
(Screenshot of the Instagram post.)
But that was generated with artificial intelligence.
The image shows the logo of Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, at the bottom right corner.
PolitiFact uploaded the image to Gemini and it confirmed the image was generated using its generative AI program.
Visual inconsistencies signal the image is fake. Some of the cars on the streets are indistinguishable, while others look on top of each other. Some of the buildings look distorted and the smoke and the fire have unusual patterns. For example, the fire is bright orange and it sits on top of the buildings without consuming the structure, and the smoke seems to be going up in the same direction without being disrupted by the wind.
(Screenshot of AI-generated image highlighting with red circles visual inconsistencies. At the bottom right is the Google Gemini logo.)
This image doesn’t show Puerto Vallarta after the killing of Oseguera Cervantes. We rate this claim False.
The Trump administration is unlikely to back down from pursuing additional tariffs following the Supreme Court decision, according to trade experts.
Epstein links have taken political operator from a vaunted position in British diplomacy to arrest in under six months
Just six months ago Peter Mandelson seemed unassailable as the UK’s ambassador to the US, one of the most vaunted positions in British diplomacy. As our man in Washington, Mandelson appeared to have used his skill for schmoozing, learned over years as a cabinet minister and a European commissioner, to secure a good relationship with the tricky Trump administration. He was considered instrumental in securing a relatively favourable US trade deal for the UK.
He was also an influential voice in Labour politics with the ear of the prime minister and his inner circle, notably his friend and protege Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s then chief of staff.
Continue reading...Round 1 stage 2 of the Critical Technologies Challenge Program will fund cutting-edge projects including mine site sensors, data center cooling and optical imaging projects.
Feb. 23, 2026 — The Australian Government has announced it will fund 8 projects through round 1 stage 2 of the Critical Technologies Challenge Program (CTCP).
Credit: Shutterstock
CTCP provides up to $36 million in grant funding to test and demonstrate solutions to market-led challenges of national significance using quantum technologies.
It works in 2 stages:
Eight of the round 1 stage 1 projects are progressing for stage 2 funding. They include:
The CTCP aligns with Australia’s National Quantum Strategy. The strategy aims to foster a vibrant and resilient innovation ecosystem that can harness emerging technologies for the benefit of all Australians.
The CTCP also aligns with the Future Made in Australia plan by backing Australian-led projects that deliver innovations in science and digital capability. By nurturing quantum capabilities, the program strengthens Australia’s high‑tech manufacturing base.
Read more details about the CTCP round 1 projects here. View the full funding details on business.gov.au.
Source: Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources
The post Australian Government to Support Quantum Tech Projects with $12.7M appeared first on HPCwire.
ExpressVPN is also expanding its reach to virtual reality through support for the Meta Quest platform.
 | Badgering(waterproofing) my board does not work great for me as I like to swap parts between all my boards and occasionally take them apart for cleaning. I also do not want to worry about my board breaking on me just because I rode through some wet conditions or puddles. Ive had my fair share of water related issues on my boards. So I wanted a middle ground of water proofing my boards enough to still take them apart with ease and waterproof them again. For my connectors this self bonding waterproof tape does the trick. Easy to wrap around your connectors when assembling, soft enough to cut off when disassembling, and keeps my connectors dry! Just stretch and wrap around 2/3 times and you’re set. If you guys have any other easy preventative maintenance tips please share! [link] [comments] |
Sinners film-maker’s much-anticipated relaunch of the paranormal hit show finally receives official green light
Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files has received the official green light with Danielle Deadwyler set as the first co-lead.
The film-maker behind Black Panther and Sinners has long talked about his love for the hit paranormal drama series and how he wants to make some new episodes that are “really fucking scary”.
Continue reading...Study released a day before State of the Union address shows president has lost support among Republicans
Most US adults think Donald Trump is moving the country in the wrong direction during his second presidency, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released the day before his State of the Union speech.
Fifty-five percent of adults feel that Trump is changing the country for the worse, a 13-point increase from around the same time of his first presidency, the survey conducted from 27 to 30 January found.
Continue reading...Other nations are catching up with the US in its traditional strengths such as snowboarding. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Americans
In 2002, on home ice and snow in Utah, the USA obliterated its records for most gold medals (10, beating the previous high of six) and most overall medals (34, more than two times the previous high of 13) by the country in a single Winter Olympics.
In 2026, the USA broke that national record for gold medals with 12, and broke the 30-medal mark for the first time outside North America (Norway broke the overall record with 18 golds).
Continue reading...It is the third such attack in a week, and is part of increased US forces in the Caribbean
The US military launched a strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, which killed three men – its third such attack over the course of a week.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” US Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said on X.
Continue reading...NotebookLM can transform information in surprising ways, and that's why we love it.
Trump tells Mexico to ‘step up’ effort to combat cartels even after military operation kills drug lord known as ‘El Mencho’
With schools still closed, flights cancelled and the charred carcasses of buses smouldering on streets across the country, Mexico was still reeling from the cartel backlash prompted by the killing of cartel kingpin Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as “El Mencho”.
Defense minister, Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, was moved almost to tears on Monday as he offered his condolences to the families of soldiers felled in the operation to kill the country’s most-wanted drug lord. Mexican military personnel, he said, “fulfilled their mission”.
Continue reading...These are the best soundbars to upgrade your TV audio for better intelligibility.
 | I’ve put 2,966 miles on my XR Classic over the past few years — street riding, trails, drops, curb nudges, pretty much everything — and I finally made a long-term review about what actually happens after that much mileage. Not a hype video. Just real ownership experience. Some honest takeaways: I know a lot of people are still picking these up used, so I figured real high-mileage feedback might help someone. Curious — anyone else here over 2k miles on an XRC? What started wearing out first for you? [link] [comments] |
I’ve been interested in a one wheel for a long time and lately have seen many crash results on this sub full of comments about spin injuries, broken bones, and other rough injuries.
I began wondering, are there riders that don’t crash?
Can you just float and keep the wheel in its happy place? Are there rules to follow like:
Never ride below 30%
Never go above 60% of max capable speed
No riding past X mileage
Anything someone does to avoid the cut outs, crashes, broken bones, injuries, while still riding often and for a long time, like years with success in staying on the wheel?
Feb. 23, 2026 — This month, 13 early-career researchers from Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Area (CSA) presented their work at the 2026 Postdoc Symposium, an event focused on articulating the real-world impact of their discoveries.
Credit: Berkeley Lab
More than just a showcase, the annual symposium is a launchpad for the next generation of scientific leaders. Through weeks of intensive coaching from CSA staff, participants hone their presentation skills and leave equipped with a professional recording of their talk to share with future employers. Since its inception in 2020, the program has helped shape 134 presentations, solidifying its role as a vital training ground for early-career researchers.
“Our postdoctoral researchers represent the future of scientific innovation, and the CSA Postdoc Symposium is one of our most direct and impactful investments in their success. This program provides a unique platform not only to share their work but also to receive expert coaching and feedback that cultivates the essential communication skills they need to become leaders in their fields. These are the skills that will help them secure funding, build collaborations, and translate discovery into real-world solutions,” said Stefan Wild, Director of Berkeley Lab’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division and a key champion of the program.
Many of this year’s participants echoed the value of the program:
Alec Decktor
“Having participated before, I knew the Postdoc Symposium was a fantastic event and the perfect venue to communicate my research progress to a broad Berkeley Lab audience. It’s excellent practice for giving a non-technical talk—an invaluable skill for any scientist—and a great networking event. The connections I’ve made have led to exciting new research opportunities.
“What makes the symposium unique is the opportunity to receive extremely valuable feedback on your presentation from senior scientists across different fields. This has directly helped me develop my ability to prepare talks for other conferences. To anyone who might be hesitant, I’d say the environment is incredibly supportive. The work you put in pays off directly; I’ve reused slides I created for the symposium in several other presentations. It’s well worth the time and a great opportunity to develop yourself as an early-career scientist,” said Alec Dektor, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Scalable Solvers Group.
Durga Mandarapu
“The symposium process fundamentally changed how I approach presentations. The feedback from Lab leadership and communication experts was invaluable, and it helped me rethink how to design slides—for instance, learning to use the title to state the key takeaway instead of just a topic. That kind of clarity has a direct impact. When I later reached out to a Division Deputy who had provided feedback, he already had a clear understanding of my skills and research from the symposium. That familiarity made it much easier to identify opportunities for collaboration. It showed me that our work has more impact when people truly understand it, and this is the perfect place to learn that skill,” said Durga Mandarapu, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR.
Navjot Singh
“What sets this symposium apart is that you’re presenting to experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines, not just specialists in your own field. The feedback I received on how people outside my immediate area perceive certain concepts was invaluable—that’s a perspective you don’t easily get within your own research group. Learning to adjust my slides and delivery for that audience is a critical skill. It’s an investment in one of the most important qualities of a successful scientist: the ability to communicate your work effectively across disciplinary boundaries,” said Navjot Sing, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR.
Alex Morehead
“After seeing recordings of past events, I was convinced of the value of sharing my research at the Postdoc Symposium. The process of revising and presenting my research presentation has given me more confidence and knowledge for future presentations. The tight-knit community here at Berkeley Lab makes it an incredible place to connect with researchers interested in similar topics and gather relevant, valuable feedback. I’d encourage everyone to seriously consider it—practicing your presentation skills is a great long-term investment for any career,” said Alex Morehead, 2025 Hopper Postdoctoral Fellow at NERSC.
Shubhabrata Mukherjee
“What makes the Postdoc Symposium so unique is how supportive and well-structured the entire experience is. The focus isn’t just on presenting results; it’s on helping you translate technically deep work for a broad audience in a collaborative environment. Condensing my research in AI and scientific data analysis clarified my thinking and built new collaborations across the Lab. It’s a fantastic opportunity to gain confidence and practice a skill essential for any interdisciplinary career,” said Shubhabrata Mukherjee, a Machine Learning Postdoctoral Fellow in AMCR.
Nabin Giri
“The symposium is an excellent experiential learning opportunity. The feedback from organizers and peers was incredibly helpful, teaching me to communicate my work with clarity and impact. It’s the perfect preparation for job interviews and conferences because it gives you a safe space to practice the kind of communication that is essential for your career. The networking was terrific, and I made great connections and friends across the Lab,” said Nabin Giri, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SciData), who is working on applying AI to structural biology.
About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab
High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
Source: Linda Vu, Berkeley Lab
The post Berkeley Lab: 2026 CSA Symposium Helps Researchers Amplify Their Scientific Impact appeared first on HPCwire.
Singer criticizes Trump administration’s ‘violent theater’ as she supports people caught up in Minneapolis crackdown
Brandi Carlile’s weekend concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota, raised more than half a million dollars for families affected by the disruptive presence of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol agents in the city.
Carlile, a Grammy-winning Americana artist from Washington state, livestreamed her show Be Human: A Concert for Minneapolis from the Target Center on 21 February. The show, played for over 12,000 people, raised more than $600,000 for the Minnesota-based Advocates for Human Rights organization, “so that they can help and represent thousands of families who desperately need it”, the singer announced on Instagram.
Continue reading...Education secretary and her team have won over some critics but obstacles remain in their attempt to overhaul system
In her first week as a cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson held a meeting for new Labour MPs with one subject – special educational needs. Almost 100 MPs came to that first meeting.
There were new MPs for whom the issue was personal to their own families – Jen Craft, Daniel Francis, Steve Race, as well as the then business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds. Dozens more knew the system was at breaking point because of their previous work in the charity sector, for unions and in the disability sector.
Continue reading...Britain's film academy and the BBC apologized after a broadcast of the BAFTA awards ceremony that included an offensive outburst by an audience member with Tourette's syndrome.
Since the administration began targeting those it calls "narcoterrorists" in small vessels last year, at least 148 people have been killed in the strikes.
Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless. "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.â He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 -- a process that takes about 3.5 years -- and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable. "I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big," he admitted, "by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The arrest followed search warrants at two addresses in the Wiltshire and Camden areas, police said
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has been speaking about the Send reforms at an event in Peterborough.
This is what she said about the need for inclusion.
Inclusion is a choice. It is an educational choice, and it is also a political choice because we could duck this challenge, ignore the injustice of a postcode lottery in life chances putting off fixing the Send system yet again.
The system works well for some at least.
We welcome the scale of vision contained in the white paper which has the potential to create an education system that fully values children and young people with additional needs and their families.
We also welcome the commitment to retain statutory education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for children and young people whose needs cannot be met through this new model. We know that many parents will welcome the legal requirement for schools to create individual support plans (ISPs) for all children with Send.
Continue reading...SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Pure Storage today announced its new name: Everpure. This change reflects the company’s greater impact from reshaping storage to defining the future of data management. The company also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 1touch, an innovator in data intelligence and orchestration that provides a comprehensive, unified view of an enterprise’s information. With 1touch, Everpure furthers its commitment to data management innovation, making data secure, accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform.
“Everpure reflects the company we have become as we help enterprises unleash the full power of their data. It captures the power of our Enterprise Data Cloud architecture and adaptability of Evergreen, reinforcing what has always set us apart as we redefine important markets,” said Charles Giancarlo, CEO of Everpure. “With 1touch, we are taking the next step in helping organizations not only gain control of their most valuable asset—data—but also understand, enhance, and contextualize that data for actionable intelligence.”
Accelerating Data Management Innovation in the AI Era
As AI becomes central to business operations, the modern enterprise has reached an inflection point. AI has exposed the weaknesses of current infrastructure, where siloed data, manual processes, and inflexible architectures cannot support the scale, speed, and intelligence demands of enterprise AI.
Data is an organization’s most valuable asset, but it is trapped by these inefficiencies. Its full value can only be derived if it is effortless to manage, continuously protected, instantly available, and infused with context. Everpure is breaking these barriers with its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) architecture. Powered by the Everpure Platform (formerly the Pure Storage Platform), Everpure’s EDC architecture transforms storage into a unified, virtualized cloud of data, governed by an intelligent control plane. It manages datasets globally, through policy, eliminating the friction of manual configurations, which brings unprecedented simplicity, agility, and efficiency to data management.
Extending Everpure’s Data Management Roadmap with 1touch
The acquisition of 1touch will extend Everpure’s data management capabilities by adding data discovery and semantic context to the Everpure Platform. By integrating storage with 1touch’s ability to discover, classify, contextualize, and enrich data across all datasets and any environment—from SaaS to the edge—Everpure will ensure enterprise data is inherently AI-ready at the source. This will allow organizations to transform raw data into actionable insights faster than ever.
“Data is the lifeblood of the AI era, but without the proper controls and semantic context, it remains an untapped resource,” said Ashish Gupta, CEO and president, 1touch. “By joining forces with Everpure, we can eliminate the barriers that have kept enterprises from realizing the true ROI of their data. Together, we will further expand the Everpure platform to provide a level of contextual intelligence that is unmatched in the industry—giving customers the foundation they need to move AI projects from pilot to production at record speed and trust.”
Pure Storage will begin trading as Everpure on the New York Stock Exchange as of March 5, 2026. The ticker symbol (NYSE: PSTG) will remain unchanged.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in Q2 FY27. The terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.
About Everpure
Everpure (NYSE: PSTG) allows organizations to take control of their data with an industry-leading, ever-evolving storage and data management platform. We help companies unleash the power of their data by ensuring it is secure, accessible, intelligent, and ready to perform in the AI era. We make data management effortless while simultaneously scaling performance and significantly reducing energy consumption. With one of the highest Net Promoter Scores for over a decade, Everpure is the choice of the world’s most innovative organizations. For more information, visit Everpuredata.com.
Source: Everpure
The post Pure Storage Becomes Everpure, Announces Intent to Acquire 1touch appeared first on HPCwire.
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23, 2026 — Skorppio, a new self-serve platform for on-premise high-performance computer rentals, has launched with a fleet of workload-qualified, enterprise-grade systems available for delivery nationwide. The platform serves AI startups, ML developers, VFX studios, simulation teams, and research organizations that need bare-metal compute on-premise, without ownership costs, cloud lock-in, or long-term contracts.
Temporary access to high-performance, on-premise hardware has traditionally offered limited options: purchasing infrastructure requires extended lead times and significant capital investment, while public cloud solutions often reduce margins, predictability, and control. Skorppio addresses this gap with an on-demand, flexible rental model for enterprise-grade compute, broadening how organizations secure critical infrastructure.
Skorppio’s rental fleet spans performance laptops, multi-GPU professional workstations, NVIDIA DGX-class enterprise AI systems, and GPU servers. A PNY Pro partnership enables Skorppio to provide NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs (including the RTX 6000 PRO) and AMD processors (EPYC, Threadripper PRO, and Ryzen). Unique to Skorppio, its flagship workstation delivers up to 786 GB of VRAM and is engineered to run on standard electrical circuits, with no specialized power infrastructure required, bringing enterprise-grade AI compute into conventional office environments. Both current- and previous-generation systems are available to match a range of performance requirements and budgets.
Founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein began his career as a Network Systems Administrator at a global bank before founding a creative technology agency that built large-scale installations for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies including General Motors, YouTube, and Amazon Studios, as well as global music artists including Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Alicia Keys.
“Access to performance compute has gotten expensive enough that teams end up buying what they can afford or what’s available quickly, instead of what the work demands,” said Founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein. “Skorppio delivers dedicated, workflow-built systems with bare-metal performance, on ultra-flexible terms, without the cost of ownership.”
Through a digital-first experience on web and mobile, users can access real-time pricing and curated KIT Collections. Pre-built assemblies, such as AI Startup Dev Kits, Simulation Packs, and VFX Render Farm configurations, are validated against real-world workloads by domain experts, including PhD-level AI researchers and VFX technical directors. KITs ship with the necessary infrastructure components, such as high-speed interconnects, fiber optics, and network switches, to speed deployment.
The launch follows a successful pre-seed investment. Later this year, Skorppio plans to introduce a program that provides compute resources to early-stage AI startups in exchange for equity, bringing an incubator model to high-performance infrastructure.
For more information and to reserve early access, visit skorppio.com.
About Skorppio
Founded in 2024 in Los Angeles, Skorppio is a self-serve rental platform for on-premise high-performance computing with nationwide delivery. The company delivers servers, enterprise AI systems, GPU workstations, and performance laptops to AI startups, ML developers, VFX studios, and innovators across industries. Every configuration is curated and validated with leading domain experts. Skorppio provides an alternative to cloud computing with transparent pricing, no lock-in, and compute that scales on customers’ terms.
Source: Skorppio
The post Skorppio Launches On-Premise HPC Rental Platform for AI and HPC Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Backblaze, Inc. today announced B2 Neo, a purpose-built offering for neocloud platforms. B2 Neo provides these platforms with enterprise-grade cloud object storage their customers require for data-heavy AI and machine learning workloads, allowing platforms to offer a full-stack experience without the massive capital costs or time and resource investment required to build a storage backend from scratch.
B2 Neo launches based on nearly 20 years of cloud storage expertise and over five exabytes of storage under management, with the ability to provide throughput speeds up to 1 terabit per second (1Tbps). Built in collaboration with leading neocloud platforms already running production workloads with Backblaze, B2 Neo gives neoclouds a storage layer they can integrate into their existing platforms and seamlessly offer to customers. These partnerships include the company’s largest total contract value (TCV) and commitment to date and conversations with multiple emerging neoclouds—underscoring the strategic value neoclouds place on having a reliable, high-performance storage partner.
With B2 Neo, neocloud customers experience storage as a native service via branded endpoints and partner-controlled pricing. The offering allows neoclouds to provision accounts, manage permissions, and handle billing through existing platform tools without a separate console or manual setup.
The neocloud market is projected to grow from $35.22 billion in 2026 to $236.53 billion by 2031 at a 46.37% CAGR. As these platforms scale to meet explosive demand for AI compute, storage has become a critical bottleneck—one that diverts capital and engineering resources away from the GPU infrastructure that defines their competitive advantage.
Neocloud customers running AI training, inference pipelines, and media workflows need somewhere to store datasets, model checkpoints, and output artifacts. Without integrated object storage, they’re forced to move massive datasets in and out of the cloud, creating latency and delays that stall GPU utilization and drive up costs.
“Neoclouds are under pressure to scale GPU capacity as fast as possible. Building and operating high-performance scalable object storage competes directly with that mission,” said Gleb Budman, Co-Founder and CEO of Backblaze. “B2 Neo lets them launch a storage offering in weeks, not years, so they can stay focused on what makes them different.”
One global edge services platform selected Backblaze after a rigorous technical and business evaluation, and now leverages B2 Neo as a core component of its AI, high performance compute (HPC), and media storage strategies.
“As our AI business scales, our customers increasingly demand cost-effective storage. Backblaze gave us the ability to deliver object storage as a first-class tier of our own platform, without taking focus away from our GPU roadmap,” said the company’s Director of Product Management.
By powering their back-end object storage with B2 Neo, cloud providers can accelerate time-to-market, control infrastructure costs, and meet rising customer demand for efficient, high-performance data pipelines.
“With B2 Neo as a first-party service offering to neoclouds, I see the advantage for those organizations of being able to turn on cloud storage without the toil and expense of building it themselves. It is a near-instant value-add offering, helping their customers control costs and achieve the ROI of AI faster,” said Rob Strechay, Principal Analyst, Smuget & theCUBE research.
About Backblaze
Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) gives businesses the freedom to innovate without limits by removing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our high-performance cloud object storage accelerates AI workflows, powers data-heavy applications, streamlines media management, and protects critical data. As an award-winning independent cloud, we provide unparalleled levels of interoperability that enable over 500,000 of our customers to reach and serve hundreds of millions of end users in 175 countries around the world. For more information, please go to www.backblaze.com.
Source: Backblaze
The post Backblaze Launches B2 Neo to Power Surging Neocloud Market appeared first on HPCwire.
The son of Rob and Michele Reiner has struggled with mental health and drug issues, but there was no indication in court whether those would factor into his defense.
Officials at California Democratic convention celebrated the former House speaker’s advocacy as she prepares to retire
It was a “Nancy Pelosi-palooza” in San Francisco over the weekend, as thousands of California Democrats gathered in her beloved city by the bay, a place the former speaker of the House has represented in Congress for nearly four decades. They were there to attend the state party’s annual convention – but with Pelosi retiring at the end of her term, it was also a days-long celebration of a woman many Democrats regard as a living legend.
A video salute during the general session charted her rise from a stay-at-home mom to the US House of Representatives, where she shattered the marble ceiling and became the first – and to this day only – woman to wield the speaker’s gavel. Tote bags were emblazoned with her silhouette in every color of the rainbow – a nod to her trailblazing advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. It also included one of her favorite aphorisms: “We don’t agonize, we organize.”
Continue reading...Feb. 23, 2026 — From space exploration to artificial intelligence, modern scientific breakthroughs depend on moving large amounts of data quickly. At Kennesaw State University, Associate Professor of Information Technology Xuechen Zhang is developing new methods to help supercomputers process information faster.
Zhang’s work aims to deliver scientific insights in a fraction of the time. Instead of constantly moving data to a processor for computation, his project moves the computation closer to where the data already lives. This approach, known as computational storage, allows portions of data processing to happen directly on storage devices before information ever reaches the main processor.
“When we train scientific machine-learning models, we need a lot of data,” Zhang said. “Moving that data from storage to processors takes time, and preprocessing can become a major hurdle.”
By shifting where work is completed, researchers can reduce delays that often slow artificial intelligence training and large-scale scientific simulations, especially when datasets grow into the terabyte and petabyte range. The long-term impact of Zhang’s project extends beyond computer science. Faster data processing can shorten the time it takes scientists to reach conclusions in fields ranging from climate modeling to medical research. A simulation that once required hours or even days could potentially be completed in significantly less time, allowing researchers to test more scenarios and refine their findings more quickly.
“In the future, supercomputers will be more heterogeneous and specialized,” Zhang said. “Different components will handle different tasks, and that flexibility will open the door to faster and more scalable scientific applications.”
Zhang’s project received a $479,358 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the research over the next three years. The funding supports doctoral students at KSU, provides access to high-performance computing resources, and enables the team to present findings at national conferences while strengthening curriculum offerings for students.
The investment also helps create opportunities for undergraduate researchers to gain early exposure to advanced computing systems and real-world problem-solving, Zhang said.
“This funding allows us to build a pipeline for our students and give them hands-on experience with state-of-the-art systems,” Zhang said. “It is not only about research results, but also about preparing students for careers in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.”
The research is a collaboration with Xiaokun Yang of the University of Houston–Clear Lake. The partnership blends hardware and software expertise, which Zhang said is essential for building efficient systems.
Leaders in the College of Computing and Software Engineering say Zhang’s work highlights the growing impact of faculty research on both student learning and technological innovation.
“Dr. Zhang’s work reflects the type of forward-thinking research we strive to cultivate in the College of Computing and Software Engineering,” CCSE Interim Dean Yiming Ji said. “His efforts advance scientific discovery while creating meaningful learning opportunities for our students.”
After joining KSU, Zhang began building the AI Systems and Storage Lab on the Marietta Campus, where he is assembling servers and recruiting doctoral students. Early testing has reinforced the team’s belief that data preprocessing can become a barrier in large-scale computing workflows. He expects the lab to expand in the coming semesters as additional graduate researchers join the project.
Source: Raynard Churchwell, KSU
The post Kennesaw State Research Explores Computational Storage to Speed Scientific Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
There's no official word on a sale yet, but another one this spring is likely to happen soon.
Former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson has been arrested weeks after a series of emails between him and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released.
Exclusive: Former health secretary throws weight behind campaign to boost diagnosis of placenta accreta spectrum
Jeremy Hunt has urged leading doctors to do more to help maternity specialists detect a rare complication of childbirth that can lead to a women bleeding to death within minutes.
The former health secretary has thrown his weight behind a new campaign, aimed at improving the NHS’s identification of placenta accreta spectrum. The Action for Accreta campaign was set up by Amisha Adhia and her husband, Nik, after five hospitals failed to spot that she had PAS.
Continue reading...Money market account interest rates are still competitive. Here's how much savers can earn with an account by 2027.
Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of fentanyl into a cocktail that her husband drank, prosecutors say.
The Wall Street Journal reports the graphics and AI chip giant will soon take on Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple for consumer laptop chip supremacy.
Deadliest start to a year in more than a decade, according to the International Organization for Migration
A least 606 people trying to reach Europe in search of refugee have been reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean since the beginning of 2026, marking the “deadliest start to a year” in more than a decade, the UN’s migration agency said on Monday.
The figure includes at least 30 people who are feared dead or missing after their boat capsized in severe weather off the coast of Greece on Saturday. Authorities rescued 20 people, including four minors, and recovered the bodies of three men and one woman, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said.
Continue reading...Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria actor died on Thursday less than a year after he publicly revealed ALS diagnosis
A GoFundMe campaign meant to provide financial support for the widow and daughters of Eric Dane after the actor’s recent death had raised more than $415,000 as of Monday.
The fundraising platform over the weekend had temporarily paused the “In Honor of Eric Dane” campaign while it underwent a standard review. But by Monday, GoFundMe said it had verified the effort and listed the Grey’s Anatomy star’s family as the beneficiary.
Continue reading...Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kouri Richins, the Utah mother accused of killing her husband and then publishing a children's book about grief, is now on trial for his murder.
Apple's March 4 event might be presented in an entirely new format. Here are the new products we expect to see during the lead-up to the big day.
Despite relentless attrition at appalling human cost, the Kremlin has not achieved its goals. Maximum economic pressure can undermine its war aims
Four years after Vladimir Putin launched the biggest conflict on European soil since the second world war, the human cost of his revanchist ambition mounts ever higher. Across a 750-mile frontline in the east of Ukraine, Russian forces make minimal progress despite relentless attrition, advancing more slowly than troops during the battle of the Somme. In 2025, the estimated number of Russian casualties in “the meat grinder” was 415,000.
For Ukraine, the suffering will scar generations to come. Battlefield casualties are estimated to be about 600,000. Since the invasion, as many as 6 million people have been displaced inside the country and 4 million, mainly women and children, have left. Civilian deaths soared last year as Russia stepped up its bombing campaign of cities and infrastructure in an effort to break Ukrainians’ will.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...  | Headed to Smashville for 24hours. Who’s up for a cold ride ? [link] [comments] |
Law enforcement is monitoring potential increases in violence, coercion or debt-collection activity in domestic trafficking corridors after cartel head "El Mencho" was killed Sunday.
Ofgem says about 140 proposed projects, driven by AI use, could require more power than current peak demand
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.
Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.
Continue reading...U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ralph Abraham, who started CDC role in January, is second top official to step down from agency this month
Ralph Abraham, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s principal deputy director, has stepped down, the agency said on Monday, announcing the exit of a top official for the second time in February.
The agency known as the CDC – which is temporarily being run by Dr Jay Bhattacharya – said the departure was effective immediately and attributed it to unforeseen family obligations. It did not comment on who would replace Abraham.
Continue reading...Workers who claim the new deduction will see an average tax cut of around $1,400, although some could realize larger savings.
Stock your pantry like a pro with these eight undercelebrated ingredients.
US president’s international trade war spooks investors, with drops in US share prices after European losses
Stock markets stumbled on Monday as Donald Trump pushed ahead with fresh tariffs on the US’s trading partners despite a supreme court strike-down and growing opposition from domestic voters.
Uncertainty over the status of global trade deals spooked investors, triggering a drop in US shares prices including on the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled 1.6% by Monday’s closing. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 fell 1.4% and 1.1%, after losses for European stock markets.
Continue reading...The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ron Wyden, Ed Markey and Jeanne Shaheen unveiling bill requiring CBP to issue refunds and pay interest
A trio of Senate Democrats is calling for the government to start refunding roughly $175bn in tariff revenues that the supreme court ruled were collected because of an illegal set of orders by Donald Trump.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are unveiling a bill on Monday that would require US Customs and Border Protection to issue refunds over the course of 180 days and pay interest on the refunded amount.
Continue reading...Hungary’s veto prevents EU countries from adopting latest round of sanctions
One other thing we will be keeping an eye on today is the latest on the EU-US trade relationship after last Friday’s US supreme court ruling on Trump’s tariffs.
The European Parliament is expected to discuss what to do with the EU-US trade deal later today.
Continue reading...A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing former special counsel Jack Smith's report on the classified documents investigation.
Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes — known as "El Mencho" — was the boss of one of the fastest-growing criminal networks in Mexico.
The State Department has ordered some staff in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to begin to leave Lebanon, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.
Some Chicago-area residents currently in Puerto Vallarta recounted hearing explosions and saw thick black smoke billowing from cars and businesses throughout the city.
Repeat of BBC series gave clue to Paul Gostelow about 19th-century altar cards taken from crypt in Hampshire
Two priceless artefacts stolen more than a decade ago from the crypt of Napoleon III in England have been recovered after an antiques dealer realised he had them while watching a repeat of the comedy drama Lovejoy.
The wooden 19th-century altar cards were taken in a burglary at St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough, Hampshire in February 2014 and were feared lost for ever.
Continue reading...A Bloomberg report suggests a potential one-two-three punch of product launches over consecutive days from Apple, including three new MacBooks and an iPad with an M4 chip.
SOLLEFTEÅ, Sweden, Feb. 23, 2026 — atNorth today confirmed plans to develop a 300MW data center in Sollefteå Municipality, Sweden. Located at Hamre Industrial Park in Långsele, the new site will be developed on a 50-hectare plot (Hamre 1) and is expected to be operational in H1 2028.
The Hamre Industrial Park supports an accelerated construction timeline, as the site is fully zoned and prepared for development. This speed to market is essential, as demand for AI-driven, high-performance computing infrastructure continues to surge, requiring scalable capacity delivered quickly.
“We are very pleased that atNorth has chosen Hamre Industrial Park for this significant investment,” says Emelie Wrede, Mayor and Chair, Sollefteå Municipality. “This establishment confirms that Sollefteå offers the right conditions for large-scale, future-oriented industry. The development will strengthen the local economy, create skilled employment opportunities, and further position our municipality as an attractive destination for sustainable digital infrastructure.”
Hamre Industrial Park was selected for its strategic location, strong grid capacity, and access to renewable energy resources. The campus will be designed in line with atNorth’s modular architecture to cater for data intensive workloads and colocation needs, whether that be for built-to-suit projects or tailor-made data center space at large scale.
As with all new atNorth developments, the company will actively pursue heat reuse partnerships to ensure excess heat generated by the facility can be captured and redirected for local benefit.
“We face a critical point in time right now, where we must balance unprecedented growth in high density workloads with an increasingly urgent need for sustainable, scalable digital infrastructure,” said Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO at atNorth. “Our Sollefteå campus represents a significant milestone for the company and demonstrates our commitment to building data center ecosystems that deliver both technical excellence and long-term value for local communities.”
The news follows atNorth’s recent announcements with the expansion of two new data center sites in Iceland and its plans for an additional data center in Stockholm. atNorth has also recently formed new colocation partnerships with Nokia, Crusoe and 6G AI Sweden AB as well as signed a heat reuse agreement with Vesforbrænding, Denmark’s largest waste-to-energy company, to repurpose excess heat from its DEN01 data center campus.
About atNorth
atNorth is a leading Nordic data center company that offers cost-effective, scalable high-density colocation and built-to-suit services trusted by industry-leading organizations. With sustainability at its core, atNorth’s data centers run on renewable energy resources and support circular economy principles. All atNorth sites leverage innovative design, power efficiency, and intelligent operations to provide long-term infrastructure and flexible colocation deployments. atNorth is headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland and operates eight data centers in strategic locations across the Nordics, as well as a ninth under construction in Kouvola, Finland, a tenth site in Ølgod, Denmark and an eleventh campus in Stockholm, Sweden. The business has also secured land for a future mega site in the Sollefteå Municipality in Sweden.
Source: atNorth
The post atNorth Plans 300MW High-Density Data Center in Northern Sweden appeared first on HPCwire.
Last Week Tonight host delved into the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in relation to the Epstein files and Musk’s poisonous ownership of X
On his new episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver wasted no time digging into the files related to late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which have once again ensnared former prince Andrew.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known after being stripped of his royal titles for his connection to Epstein, was arrested last week – the first arrest of a senior member of the royal family in modern history – on allegations that that he had shared confidential material with Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy.
Continue reading...As another major storm brings to the area up to 2ft of snow, people brave the weather to commute and shovel
Continue reading...Bridget Phillipson announces plans to make special educational needs system less reliant on cash-strapped councils
Bridget Phillipson has presented sweeping plans to overhaul special educational needs provision in England, with a package of measures designed to make the system less reliant on cash-strapped councils and give schools greater responsibility.
The education secretary on Monday announced her long-awaited Send proposals, which will result in hundreds of thousands fewer students getting education, health and care plans (EHCPs) than would otherwise have been the case.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter. The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reform UK has promised to create an ICE-style agency dedicated to mass deportations if the party came to power. Nigel Farage and his party’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, have pledged to start a ‘UK Deportation Command’ to remove thousands of people, under plans that Labour has condemned as ‘divisive’. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot – watch on YouTube
Continue reading...As multiple investigations unfold back at home footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with team in locker room
The FBI director, Kash Patel, has a lot on his plate just now. There’s the shooting death of the armed man who entered Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home; the weeks-old search for missing Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie; not to mention the ongoing furor around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.
So eyebrows were raised on Sunday when phone footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan after their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.
Continue reading...Seventeen nonprofit organizations, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief today urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to prevent the Federal Trade Commission from conducting a retaliatory investigation into Media Matters for America, brought after Media Matters published critical reporting about allies of the Trump administration.
The brief, authored by Albert Sellars LLP, notes that this sort of coercive tactic — where a federal agency will launch a pretextual investigation, keep it open as a way to coerce compliance, and resist any effort to have a court review the lawfulness of the agency’s actions — has become a troublingly common form of government intimidation under the current administration. From the Justice Department to the Federal Communications Commission, court intervention has been one of the few tools that organizations have to prevent federal overreach. The amicus brief asks the appellate court to uphold a preliminary injunction. Without judicial remedy, such investigations are an acute danger to the nonprofit organizations that Americans rely on for information on matters of public concern. The brief argues that courts must intervene to prevent such investigations from chilling coverage of issues that might be adverse to those currently in power.
“Nonprofit organizations must be aggressively vigilant to protect First Amendment rights in the face of a federal government’s onslaught,” said David Bralow, legal director of the Press Freedom Defense Fund. “The chilling investigation into Media Matters is one of many affronts to free speech. These unabridged regulatory invasions, combined with such other attacks like the arrest of journalists in Minnesota and the invasive seizure of confidential communications in Washington, D.C., demonstrate the perilous state of our democracy.”
The coalition includes a mix of nonprofit research, advocacy, and media organizations, including CalMatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the Dangerous Speech Project, Defending Rights & Dissent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment Coalition, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Lion Publishers, MuckRock Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Open Vallejo, the Project on Government Oversight, Public Knowledge, and Reporters Without Borders USA.
“The Press Freedom Defense Fund exists to confront exactly this kind of abuse. When the government uses open-ended investigations to drain resources, intimidate funders, and silence critics, the damage goes far beyond one organization — it sends a warning to every journalist and researcher in the country. We’re standing with Media Matters because the First Amendment is not negotiable,” said Annie Chabel, CEO of The Intercept.
For more information, please contact The Intercept’s Miroslav Macala at miroslav.macala@theintercept.com.
The post Nonprofit Coalition Asks Courts to Prevent Coercive Federal Investigation Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.
I have an OG XR, not the new Classic.
I'm pretty sure my BMS failed on my XR (The controller still sends info to the app) since I am getting a constant incompatibility error.
I am looking for a replacement BMS, but FM doesn't sell them, and I have been finding conflicting information in regard to "pairing" the BMS and Controller. My XR has the latest software/firmware update. Some of the information I find indicates the BMS and Controller are paired and I can not relace only one or the other.
If I get a BMS used for VESC builds will it work with the stock controller, or do I need to "pair" them somehow? Or do I need to get a new controller too?
Any information here would be appreciated.
Is it a known defect that older model pints can take off out from under you while you are hovering? I’m really comfortable on my OW, grew up on skateboarding circuit, so I’ve got my legs, but the other day I got up on the board and it shot out from under me and put me on my ass in a bad way. I was lucky, but It could’ve been real bad. It had been a while since I’d been on it - maybe 3-6 months so I’m wondering if it was me just leaning too hard forward too quick from being out of practice, or if this is a known defect issue.
Ex-president, accused of crimes against humanity, selected targets and promised immunity for death squad members, prosecutor says
Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was “at the very heart” of brutal anti-drugs campaigns that led to the killing of thousands of people, prosecutors at the international criminal court (ICC) have argued, as they called for charges against him to proceed to trial.
Duterte, 80, who was arrested in Manila last year and flown to The Hague, is facing three counts of crimes against humanity over campaigns against drug users and dealers during his presidency, and his earlier tenure as mayor of the city of Davao.
Continue reading...American skier Lindsey Vonn, who crashed seconds into her downhill race at the 2026 Winter Olympics, said she is finally out of the hospital as she recovers.
CALGARY, Alberta, Feb. 23, 2026 — SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM (Fraunhofer ITWM), a member of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The collaboration is governed by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on joint technical evaluation and research-oriented cooperation in the area of quantum and hybrid optimization.
This partnership marks SuperQ’s official entry into the European quantum ecosystem. By aligning with Fraunhofer, the MoU represents a de-risking of SuperQ’s commercial roadmap and opens new market opportunities with Europe’s industrial “Mittelstand” and Fortune 500 giants. SuperQ transitions from a North American innovator to a global peer.
Under the MoU, the collaboration will focus on technical exchange and exploratory activities, including:
“This is not just a geographic expansion; it is a validation of our ‘One-Click’ philosophy by the most respected names in industrial mathematics,” said Dr. Muhammad Khan, CEO and Board Chair of SuperQ. “Investors should recognize that we are moving beyond the ‘quantum lab’ phase. Working with Fraunhofer ITWM allows us to engage with one of Europe’s leading applied mathematics institutes in a rigorous and practice-oriented setting turning complex math into executive-ready ROI.”
Within this collaboration, Fraunhofer ITWM will evaluate the Super platform in terms of performance, scalability, and potential integration into its HPC infrastructure for industry-scale simulation and algorithm acceleration. This ensures that as quantum hardware matures, SuperQ’s software remains the indispensable “operating system” for industrial-scale simulation. Together, they aim to develop and evaluate hybrid quantum-classical computing workflows that combine gate-based quantum computing, quantum annealing, and classical high-performance computing to enhance modelling, simulation, and optimization, while jointly identifying application areas – such as logistics, energy, manufacturing, finance, defense-related optimization, or resource exploration.
“Fraunhofer ITWM is dedicated to bringing cutting-edge innovation into industrial practice,” said Dr. Pascal Halffmann, Research Coordinator Quantum Computing at Fraunhofer ITWM. “By coupling our expertise in quantum algorithms and HPC with SuperQ’s orchestration technologies, we aim to advance next-generation computing for industrial use cases.”
More from HPCwire: SuperQ Expands into Quantum Hardware
About the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM
The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern is one of the largest research institutes for industrial mathematics worldwide. Fraunhofer ITWM sees its task in further developing mathematics as a key technology and providing innovative impetus. Its focus is on the implementation of mathematical methods and technology in application projects and their further development in research projects. Fraunhofer ITWM’s integral components are consulting, implementation and support in the application of high-performance computer technology and the provision of tailor-made software solutions. Its various competencies address a wide range of customers: automotive industry, mechanical engineering, chemical industry, energy and finance. This also benefits from Fraunhofer ITWM’s network such as the Fraunhofer Competence Network Quantum Computing and the “Simulation- and software-based innovation” high-performance center.
About SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc.
SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. (CSE: QBTQ) (FSE: 25X) (OTCQB: QBTQF) is reducing the technical and financial barriers to quantum and supercomputing commercialization. It is defining the next era of enterprise transformation, emerging as a partner for global organizations seeking direct quantum and supercomputing ROI. SuperQ’s flagship Super platform strives to make the most advanced computational power intuitive and accessible. This will empower executives, leading research institutions, and critical government agencies to unlock immediate business impact across finance, healthcare, logistics, defense, and beyond, leveraging SuperQ’s proprietary AI Autopilots to turn complex challenges into executive-ready results with one-click productization and deployment. SuperQ Quantum is headquartered in Canada with a growing international presence, particularly in the US, Middle East and Asia.
Source: SuperQ
The post SuperQ Enters European Quantum Ecosystem Through Fraunhofer ITWM Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
The London stock market has dipped slightly in early trading.
The FTSE 100 index is down 19 points, or 0.18%, at 10,668 points.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Figures led by New York Sun owner may seek judicial review after restrictions lifted on DMGT offer
Figures involved in a rival bid for the Telegraph are drawing up legal action against the government, after ministers gave the owner of the Daily Mail permission to take a significant step towards clinching its £500m takeover.
The Telegraph titles, which include the daily and Sunday editions, have been in limbo for three years after previous owners, the Barclay family, lost control of them over huge unpaid debts.
Continue reading...Bankruptcy can offer a fresh financial start, but there are complex rules on how often you can file for relief.
JOHN BECKER
Staff Reporter
For Blue Hen fans, the view of Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium from the Blue Ridge Mountains was not pretty on Nov. 21. Delaware fans had to watch as they took the biggest loss of the season against their one and only Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) opponent of the year, the 7-3 Wake Forest University Demon Deacons.
Delaware began the game struggling on offense as the Blue Hens were unable to score on their first two drives. The offense was so stagnant that they were unable to cross the 50-yard line during the first quarter.
The story of the defense was very similar. Delaware allowed Wake Forest to march 130 yards down the field over two drives, resulting in two rushing touchdowns for the Demon Deacons.
The final minutes of the first quarter contained the beginning of Delaware’s only scoring offensive drive of the first half. Delaware would drive down the field with a healthy mix of passing and running the ball, getting them to the Wake Forest 43-yard line and setting up the biggest play of the game for the Blue Hens.
Delaware quarterback Nick Minicucci tossed a pass to running back Viron Ellison Jr. at the line of scrimmage, who ran 15 yards before encountering Wake Forest defensive back Nick Andersen.
In an instant, Ellison Jr. performed an electrifying juke move that evaded the tackler and gave him a wide-open lane to take it to the house for a 43-yard touchdown run, making the score 14-7 in favor of the Demon Deacons.
Unfortunately for the Blue Hens, this era of good feelings was short-lived. Delaware’s offense would not score for the rest of the first half, and only stopped the Wake Forest offense from scoring once in the first half.
The aforementioned defensive stop from Delaware was the beginning of a five-play sequence that both energized and then demoralized the Delaware faithful in a matter of minutes. Delaware defensive back KT Seay intercepted a pass from Wake Forest quarterback Robby Ashford on the first play of the Demon Deacon offensive drive.
The Blue Hens followed up, showing signs of hope after Minicucci completed three straight passes totaling 26 yards. Unfortunately, on the fourth play of the drive, Wake Forest defensive back Karon Prunty forced a fumble on wide receiver Sean Wilson, which was recovered by the Demon Deacons.
With only 29 seconds left in the first half, the Delaware defense hoped this would be an inconsequential offensive possession. On the first play of the offensive drive, wide receiver Carlos Hernandez was able to create separation deep downfield and Ashford found his man, connecting for a 79-yard touchdown pass and making the score a daunting 35-7 that would only get worse for the Blue Hens as the game went on.
The third and fourth quarter would not get better for Delaware, as the Blue Hens allowed three straight Wake Forest scores totaling 17 points. The Delaware offense scored only one touchdown late in garbage time after backup quarterback Braden Streeter came in and tossed a 25-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Max Patterson creating the final score of 52-14, outlining a dominant Wake Forest performance.
By the end of the game, the Delaware defense had allowed 314 yards through the air and 263 on the ground. Hernandez had a career-high 197 yards on five receptions and another career-high two touchdowns to go with it.
However, for Delaware, Minicucci continued to add to his historic season totals as he sat in third place after the game for most passing yards in a single season with 3,380, trailing only Joe Flacco (4,285) and Andy Hall (3,474).
Delaware fell to 5-6 overall on the season after the game, but held their heads up high as they finished their season at home against the 2-9 University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Miners. With a win against UTEP, Delaware eventually qualified for and won a bowl game despite being ineligible as a first-year member of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
Judgment in city of Boulder’s lawsuit against Suncor Energy USA and ExxonMobil could affect wave of climate litigation
The US supreme court has decided to hear arguments in a climate accountability lawsuit, marking the first time the high court has weighed in on such a case. The decision could potentially hinder the wave of climate litigation the US has seen in recent years.
“It’s not a good sign,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Continue reading...Company admits three pollution events that killed fish and insects in Pools Brook country park near Chesterfield
A water company has been fined more than £700,000 for repeatedly releasing sewage into a stream.
Yorkshire Water was issued with the penalty after pleading guilty to three offences of sewage pollution in Pools Brook country park near Chesterfield.
Continue reading...Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Solidarity campaign mobilizes as thousands of children like Liam Ramos taken amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
On 28 January, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dilley immigration processing center in south Texas, where hundreds of children are being held. Days earlier, immigration lawyer Eric Lee filmed a video of detainees screaming and chanting “libertad,” or “freedom.”
Soon after, solidarity events arose in the state. “Community members saw the children and families crying out [and] having their own protests from within and said to everybody: we need to show up there too,” said Rev Erin Walter, executive director of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry.
Continue reading...Home equity loans this spring may be smart in some scenarios, but ill-advised in others. Here's what to consider.
41-year-old developed compartment syndrome
Skier credits Team USA surgeon with saving leg
Lindsey Vonn says she came close to having her leg amputated in the aftermath of her crash during the Olympic downhill earlier this month.
The 41-year-old sustained a complex tibia fracture to her left leg in the crash and underwent multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment last week. But in an Instagram post on Monday, the American said the crash also led to compartment syndrome in her leg. The condition occurs after traumatic injuries such as falls from heights and car crashes. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “compartment syndrome happens when there’s too much pressure around your muscles. The pressure restricts the flow of blood, fresh oxygen and nutrients to your muscles and nerves. Compartment syndrome is extremely painful.” The lack of blood flow can lead to permanent damage to patients.
Continue reading...now that craft and ride is dead, is there any other aftermarket handles out there? I liked what they had
A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Authorities mounted rescue operation after group of five lost control of ice sheet in Stockholm archipelago
Five people have been rescued from an ice floe carrying a sauna tent, a motorised saw and an onboard motor after they lost control of their DIY vessel in the Stockholm archipelago.
Swedish authorities believe the passengers, who were German tourists, had been attempting to create their own motor-powered floating sauna when the swell from a passing passenger ferry broke the piece of ice and stranded them near Värmdö, an island near Stockholm.
Continue reading...Reiner, 32, charged with two counts of first-degree murder after parents were stabbed to death in December
Nick Reiner was expected to return to court on Monday for arraignment on two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of his parents Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner.
A judge postponed the legal proceedings last month after his attorney withdrew from the case, and was replaced by a public defender. Reiner’s former attorney, Alan Jackson, said at the time that he could not share why he was stepping down, but that his client was not guilty.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Cadence today announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Hexagon AB’s Design and Engineering (“D&E”) business, significantly expanding its System Design and Analysis (SDA) portfolio and strategically positioning the company to capitalize on the Physical AI opportunity.
The acquisition accelerates Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy by combining its compelling multiphysics portfolio with Hexagon D&E’s leadership in structural analysis, acoustics and multibody dynamics. The integration of Hexagon D&E’s flagship MSC Software solutions—including MSC Nastran and Adams—with Cadence’s leading multiphysics portfolio spanning electronics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and BETA CAE’s structural pre and post processing technologies, will enable Cadence to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end multiphysics simulation platform —elevating the industry standard for integrated design and analysis solutions and enabling more seamless system level innovation.
“This acquisition marks a major milestone in advancing our vision for intelligent system design,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence. “By combining our industry-leading computational software and AI-driven design expertise with MSC Software’s world-class structural and physics-based analysis technologies, we’re empowering customers to push the boundaries of what’s possible—from autonomous systems and advanced robotics to the future of transportation.”
The combined portfolio further positions Cadence at the forefront of the emerging Physical AI era by tightly coupling high-fidelity, physics-based simulation with AI-driven design exploration. This will enable customers to create virtual representations of real-world systems that accurately predict system behavior under complex operating conditions. With advanced capabilities spanning motion, vibration, structural response and fluid-structure interactions, engineers can generate richer, physically grounded data to train and validate AI models, improving the performance and reliability of intelligent vehicles and industrial systems.
The purchase price of approximately €2.7 billion, which includes an estimated €150 million of transaction-related taxes owed by the acquired entities, is structured as 70% in cash and 30% in Cadence common stock.
Under its financial model, Cadence expects the incoming business to add an incremental $160 million to its 2026 revenue. On a non-GAAP basis, Cadence expects the transaction to be approximately 28 cents dilutive to its 2026 earnings per share, becoming accretive in 2027.
About Cadence
Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies. Cadence solutions offer limitless opportunities—learn more at www.cadence.com.
Source: Cadence
The post Cadence Completes Acquisition of Hexagon’s Design and Engineering Business appeared first on HPCwire.
Pay attention to the snow on your roof. If you don't clear it off in a timely manner, you're asking for trouble.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans. In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality." On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PRINCETON, N.J. and ESPOO, Finland, Feb. 23, 2026 — IQM Finland Oy, a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company, today announced they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement, which will result in IQM becoming a public company and listing American Depositary Shares on one of the two leading U.S. stock exchanges. The transaction provides funding with the aim to accelerate 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 is also considering a dual listing that would see the trading of IQM’s ordinary shares on the Helsinki stock exchange, which would be expected to take place following the completion of this transaction.
IQM is a quantum computing company that builds full stack, open-architecture systems that can be deployed on-premise or accessed via the cloud. IQM operates a vertically integrated business model, boasting a unique combination of proprietary infrastructure from their own chip design tool and software developer platform, to a quantum chip fab, assembly line and data centre, allowing the company to accelerate its innovation cycles, deliver best-in-class quantum computing to its customers and enabling the quantum ecosystem to grow.
Transaction Highlights
Following completion of the transaction, IQM’s cash on its balance sheet is expected to be in excess of USD 450 million cash at closing4 (including IQM’s existing cash), providing runway for continued broad commercial advantage:
Jan Goetz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, IQM, said: “We built IQM from the beginning for one purpose — to put working quantum computers in the hands of the people who will use them to solve real problems. Not someday. Now. Quantum computing is a science project no more. It is an industry where customers own, operate, and build on advanced quantum computers. That’s what IQM makes possible.”
Peter Ort, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Real Asset Acquisition Corp, said: “IQM has built and delivered more on-premises quantum systems than any other competitor5 — to some of the most demanding research institutions on earth. This transaction will accelerate the growth of a company that has already earned its position in the field, with real customers, running real quantum systems, today.”
Sierk Poetting, Chairman of IQM’s Board of Directors, said: “Going public is not a change of direction but is rather an acceleration. The board stands fully behind IQM’s mission and goals to make quantum infrastructure as foundational and accessible as classical computing.”
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.
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.
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Finland Oy is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers. IQM provides both on-premises full-stack quantum computers and a cloud platform to access its systems. IQM customers include leading high-performance computing centres, research laboratories, universities, and enterprises that require full access to quantum hardware and software. IQM has over 300 employees, with headquarters in Finland and a global presence including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, UK and the United States.
Source: IQM Quantum Computers
The post IQM Announces Business Combination to Take Quantum Computing Company Public appeared first on HPCwire.
 | Hey everyone! Hope you folks are doing well, had a quick question. I feel like I've been searching for days without finding what I'm looking for, hopefully one of you can help! Trying to find a front bumper 3d print file for my Pint, and for the life of me I cannot find one, and I can't justify buying a 3D scanner just to scan a front bumper that I'm going to print once or twice for myself. I'm not good enough at 3d modeling to modify someone's rear bumper file to fit the front unfortunately... I've found multiple rear bumper prints, nothing for the front bumper though, can anyone help me out? I'm guessing a pint x front bumper would work too, but I can't seem to find a file for those either lol. Send me a dm if you don't feel comfortable posting the link in here. Thanks for listening! [link] [comments] |
Novo Nordisk’s shares fall sharply after testing of CagriSema falls short of investors’ expectations
The owner of Wegovy and Ozempic has suffered a significant setback, as its highly anticipated new weight-loss treatment was labelled “obsolete” after disappointing clinical trials.
Novo Nordisk’s shares fell sharply on Monday after the results from testing the Danish company’s CagriSema drug fell short of investors’ expectations.
Continue reading...Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was killed by Secret Service after entering Trump’s Florida resort with a shotgun on Sunday
The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.
The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said.
Continue reading...Growing frustrations with AI on social media have us clamoring for better solutions.
The Social Security Administration wouldn't stop issuing benefits once its trust funds are exhausted, but it could be forced to cut benefits.
These frozen fries may be better than most restaurants' offerings.
The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero. The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Health secretary probably referred to Harvard psychiatrist who says he’s ‘never used the word “cure” in my work’
Psychiatric researchers are pushing back against the claims by the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that a doctor at Harvard “cured schizophrenia using keto diets”, while also acknowledging that a carefully supervised ketogenic diet shows promise for a variety of mental health conditions.
Kennedy Jr’s statement probably referred to the Harvard psychiatrist Dr Christopher Palmer, who said he has “never once used the word ‘cure’ in my work. I have never claimed to have cured any mental illness, including schizophrenia,” but added: “I have talked about ketogenic diet being a very powerful treatment, even to the point of inducing remission of symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Continue reading...Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, known for lavish lifestyle, also accused of theft and being illegal immigrant after man allegedly shot in back
A son of the late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has been charged with attempted murder after a 23-year-old man was allegedly shot in the back on 19 February in an upmarket area of Johannesburg.
Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, 28, appeared in court on Monday for a brief hearing alongside co-accused Tobias Mugabe Matonhodze. Mugabe’s lawyer Sinenhlanhla Mnguni declined to comment when asked by reporters whether the two men were related. Mnguni said he would request bail for his clients at the next hearing on 3 March.
Continue reading...Feb. 23, 2026 — The performance of rechargeable batteries is governed by processes deep within their components. A fundamental understanding of electrochemistry, structure–property–performance relationships and the effects of processing and operating conditions is essential for accelerating the development of next-generation battery technologies capable of powering electric vehicles, portable electronic devices and grid-scale energy storage.
Overview of the key processes that are fundamental for understanding single-crystal battery materials. Image credit: Yuan et al.
However, laboratory exploration, design and optimization remain extremely time-consuming and expensive. In contrast, advanced modeling and simulation provide powerful tools to elucidate the complex, tightly coupled processes that govern battery performance. These approaches can accelerate rational development of advanced energy storage systems with properties tailored to specific needs.
In a recent paper, published in Chemical Reviews, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) outlined how state-of-the-art computational modeling can help to unravel the fundamental relationships among battery processing, structure, properties and performance across multiple scales, ultimately paving the way for the implementation of new materials, microstructures and innovative architectural designs in next-generation electrochemical devices.
At the micron scale, battery electrodes are often composed of tiny crystalline particles that can exist in two primary forms: polycrystalline, consisting of multiple grains joined together, and single crystals, which exhibit a continuous and uninterrupted lattice structure. Polycrystalline materials resemble a snowball with many small ice crystals lumped together, while single crystals look more like a uniform ice cube with consistent properties throughout.
The team focused specifically on single-crystal battery materials. Although these materials have not yet been fully commercialized, they offer the potential for improved performance, enhanced tunability and reduced degradation over extended cycles.
“Once a fundamental understanding is obtained, single-crystal materials can be leveraged to inform design strategies for improved battery performance, such as better capacity retention, enhanced safety and longer cycling life,” said author and LLNL scientist Sabrina Wan.
Many open questions remain regarding this essential underlying knowledge, but simulations provide a critical first step toward addressing them. Modeling approaches spanning length scales from the atomistic level to the full battery cell can be used to investigate the key factors governing the electrochemical behavior of single-crystal battery materials.
“It is our intention to provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art physics-based modeling approaches for studying properties and phenomena relevant to single-crystal applications in batteries,” said Wan. “We aim to equip the community with the knowledge needed to effectively use these tools.”
Coupled with experiments, computational models enable iterative refinement of material designs, yielding new insights and guiding optimization. By cycling between simulation predictions and laboratory validation, scientists can rapidly optimize battery materials without costly trial-and-error testing.
Looking ahead, the authors emphasized the importance of fully integrated, experimentally validated multiscale modeling frameworks, further enhanced by state-of-the-art machine learning and data science approaches, to enable reliable and predictive design of next-generation battery systems.
Source: LLNL
The post LLNL: Advanced Simulation and Modeling Pave a Path Forward for Single-Crystal Battery Materials appeared first on HPCwire.
The Santa Cruz Fire Department said the surfers helped save the passengers from a “potentially tragic incident.”
Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho," was the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel prior to his death on Sunday.
Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, also known as "El Mencho," had a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head.
Dragon-types are extremely powerful in this Pokemon game. Here’s how to catch them early and strengthen your team.
Trump invites Olympic champions to State of the Union
FBI director Kash Patel joins locker-room revelry in Milan
USA women turn down invite over previous commitments
Donald Trump made a congratulatory phone call to the United States men’s hockey team after their dramatic win over Canada in the Olympic gold medal game on Sunday afternoon, praising what he called an “unbelievable” performance and inviting the players to Washington DC this week.
The US president addressed the team by speakerphone shortly after their 2-1 overtime victory, telling them they had delivered a moment the country would remember for decades.
Continue reading...Everyone Hates Elon campaigners fix photo of ex-prince slouched in backseat of car after arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office
Activists have hung a photo in the Louvre museum in Paris of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being driven from a police station after his arrest.
The British political campaign group Everyone Hates Elon fixed the photo, which shows the former prince slouched in the backseat of a Range Rover, on a wall of the Paris gallery on Sunday.
Continue reading...As details of the death toll for January’s protests continue to emerge, three students explain why they are resisting a return to normality
More than 45 days after a brutal January crackdown that left thousands of Iranian protesters dead, students across several universities are protesting again. As Iran’s new academic term began on Saturday, students in Tehran gathered on campus, chanting anti-government slogans, despite a heavy security presence and plainclothes officers stationed outside university gates.
The Guardian spoke to protesting students about why they were rallying despite the fact that thousands had been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the January demonstrations.
Continue reading..."In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate. They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place." Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead. The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift: — TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year — JavaScript grew 24% — Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206% That last one matters. We didn't suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost. "When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers," they point out. "Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems." "AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..." "Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see." "Test AI-generated code harder, not less."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Chinese tech company is branching out from phones to robots, via its robot phone -- and it'll show them all off next week at MWC in Barcelona.
Dollar slumps and gold rises as authorities say they will halt levies linked to emergency powers but give no word on refunds. Plus, meet some of the people suing the president over civil liberties
Good morning.
Donald Trump’s administration has said it will stop collecting tariffs the supreme court ruled were illegal as they were imposed using emergency powers, as investors attempted to digest the US president’s latest volley of replacement levies.
What’s happening with the stock markets after the news? Gold jumped 0.6% to $5,135 an ounce, its highest level since the end of January, as investors flocked to the safe haven asset, while bitcoin dropped as much as 4.8% to $64,300 before recovering some ground, at $65,734. Futures tracking the US S&P 500 stock market slipped 0.5% on Monday morning.
This a developing story. Follow the live blog here.
Who was the intruder? Bradshaw did not immediately identify the intruder. However, the Associated Press reported that the man killed had been identified by investigators as 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, citing a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.
Continue reading...Commentary: Apple's $599 iPhone 16E has good value, but the iPhone 17E is expected to launch soon, possibly at a March 4 Apple media event.
Ties to the disgraced financier run deep through the academic world, documents released by the DoJ show
Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.
In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.
Continue reading...The latest Apple phone brings notable improvements to the camera, display and battery. But is it worth the upgrade?
Report into ‘unprecedented’ violence between members of two communities in 2022 calls for action on communalism
Violence between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester in 2022 was fuelled by online disinformation and met with a failure of leadership from the city’s mayor, council and police, an independent inquiry has said.
Researchers from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the London School of Economics carried out the study after the unrest between predominantly young Hindu and Muslim men in Leicester between May and September 2022.
No single group was solely responsible, with members of Hindu and Muslim communities described as “both victims and perpetrators”.
Online disinformation was a “central accelerant of the crisis”, fuelling distrust.
Community coexistence in Leicester is “increasingly fragmenting” amid new migration patterns, economic decline and the importation of political ideologies such as communalism, Hindutva and political Islamism.
Communalism within south Asian communities in the UK “needs to be urgently recognised and addressed”.
The response from local authorities, including the city council, mayor and police was “lacking or inconsistent” with “major gaps” in intelligence and communication.
Continue reading...Comments by Ted Sarandos follow Donald Trump’s demand for company to remove Democrat from board
The boss of Netflix has launched a fresh defence of its $82.7bn (£61bn) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) assets, as he defended the streaming company’s contribution to the UK film and TV industry.
Ted Sarandos claimed Netflix buying WBD would bring “growth” to the entertainment industry, amid attempts by rival Paramount Skydance to launch a counter offer for the studio business which he said would do the opposite.
Continue reading...Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a preposterous story demonizing immigrants in high-profile public remarks alongside President Donald Trump and on Fox News last summer, about a cannibal who ate other people and then, on his Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight, began to eat himself. At the time, The Intercept was unable to substantiate any part of the tale.
Now, three officials from federal law enforcement agencies — including Noem’s own Department of Homeland Security — with knowledge of the allegations say the entire story was fabricated.
“It is completely false,” said one senior law enforcement official who is familiar with the allegation but not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.
Two other federal law enforcement officials echoed this, telling The Intercept that the claims were ludicrous and that there was no evidence corroborating the story.
Asked for comment, a DHS spokesperson said Noem was simply relaying the claims of an air marshal. “What ‘fabrication’ of the story of the cannibal?” the spokesperson said. “She was told that story on a deportation flight by one of the air marshals.”
Amid growing calls for Noem to resign — after tarring Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as guilty of “domestic terrorism” in the immediate aftermath of their killings by federal agents — or face impeachment for obstruction of Congress, self-dealing, and violation of public trust, the false story about a supposed cannibal shows that a willingness to deceive the American public began long before Minneapolis.
The false story about a supposed cannibal shows that a willingness to deceive the American public began long before Minneapolis.
While falsehoods by Noem and the department have frequently been exposed during Trump’s second term, they are rarely acknowledged, much less corrected, by the secretary or DHS.
“This administration’s pattern of abusing innocent Americans in the street — from tear-gassing kids to shooting and killing citizens — and then turning around and lying about it to try and cover their asses cannot be allowed to continue,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept.
Sitting alongside Trump during a July press conference, Noem offered a prime example of the “kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country.” Noem said that federal agents had “detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself.”
Noem also told the story to Fox News’ Jesse Watters, claiming a U.S. Marshal said that the cannibal had previously eaten other people before he began to consume himself aboard an ICE deportation flight.
“Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” Watters asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”
“There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie.”
The three federal law enforcement officials said the story is fictional. “That is completely made up,” the senior federal law enforcement official told The Intercept. “That never happened.” All three law enforcement sources said attempts to verify Noem’s claims came up empty. “They went to ERO,” one source said, referring to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit tasked with the standard immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. “There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie.”
Asked if the story came from Noem or the U.S. Marshals, one official was unequivocal: “Noem.”
The senior official told The Intercept that Noem had crossed a line: “I cannot condone somebody making up a story that absolutely never happened.”
After a July 2025 article by The Intercept on the failure by Noem or DHS to answer questions about the cannibal incident, this reporter regularly asked about it to officials at ICE, DHS, the Marshals Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies.
Noem failed to reply to close to two dozen requests for comment since July.
Months of messages and multiple phone calls finally yielded a non-denial denial. “ICE media folks went to ERO to ask them about it,” Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, told The Intercept in November. “We do not have information on a flight with a cannibal.” When asked if that was confirmation that the cannibal did not exist, Covington responded: “That is not what I’m saying, whatsoever.”
A Marshals Service spokesperson told The Intercept that information regarding its Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System flights is kept under wraps for the “safety and security of all parties.”
Members of federal law enforcement — including some speaking off the record — expressed discomfort with having to answer for what they said was a clumsy yarn told by Noem. (All agreed to allow The Intercept to reference these remarks.) “Why would she even say something so insane as this?” asked one of the officials, who said that even a young child would never make up such an outlandish story.
Another was at a loss to explain why Noem would tell a tale that was “obviously utterly false.”
Noem has come under frequent criticism for headline-grabbing stunts, aggressive operations, and hobbyhorse programs of dubious efficacy. The impeachment resolution against Noem for high crimes and misdemeanors, filed in the wake of Pretti’s death last month, now has 187 co-sponsors, a spokesperson for the office of Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., told The Intercept.
“Kristi Noem has blood on her hands,” said Kelly, who introduced the articles of impeachment. “Each time, Secretary Noem lied to our faces and tried to justify the murder of innocent lives. People are disgusted by her.”
Noem’s department has followed her lead when it comes to false statements.
“Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. The woman, Marimar Martinez, driving one of the vehicles, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxxing federal agents,” reads an October press release on DHS’s website.
Recently, Martinez explained to members of Congress how a car driven by federal officers sideswiped her truck and cut her off. “I could hear my back passenger window shatter, and I felt bullets continue to pierce my body,” she testified. “As I attempted to drive to a safe location, I began to feel lightheaded. I looked down and saw blood gushing out of my arms and legs and realized I had been shot multiple times.”
Martinez pleaded not guilty to a federal charge of assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, and federal prosecutors soon dropped all charges against her. But the October press release, complete with Martinez’s photo, remains on the DHS website.
“I am outraged that Marimar Martinez is still being smeared as a ‘domestic terrorist’ on DHS’s official website, despite DOJ rightfully dropping all its baseless charges against her,” said Duckworth.
DHS did not respond to a request about why Martinez is still cast as a domestic terrorist on their website.
Martinez’s case is typical. A 2025 Associated Press investigation of federal criminal cases against anti-immigration protesters in four Democratic-led cities found that of 100 people initially charged with felony assaults on federal agents, 55 saw their charges reduced to misdemeanors or dismissed outright. At least 23 pleaded guilty, most of them to reduced charges resulting in scant or no jail time.
In case after case, however, DHS refuses to acknowledge dropped or reduced charges. The department accused Francisco Longoria of attempting to “run over” Customs and Border Protection officers and injuring them with his pickup truck. Criminal charges against Longoria were ultimately dropped. Still, DHS recently cited Longoria in a press release about “vehicle attacks” on immigration officers.
Noem and DHS routinely paint immigrants rounded up by DHS as the worst of the worst — and even created a website to showcase such persons. But last week, DHS admitted that the site was rife with inaccuracies and that the charges against hundreds of immigrants listed were incorrect.
Noem routinely peddles blatant falsehoods before Congress, during press conferences, and on television and has been excoriated for it by editorial boards from the mainstream New York Times to the right-wing Free Press. Lawmakers have similarly called her out for what Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens termed “nonstop lies to the American people.”
Noem, for instance, declared “no American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally,” during an October 30 press conference in Gary, Indiana. She added that claims to the contrary are “simply not true and false reporting.”
But less than a month before, federal agents conducted a pre-dawn military-style raid — personally overseen by Noem — on a home in Illinois, using armored vehicles, a helicopter, and officers in tactical gear with high-powered rifles. That flashy operation resulted in the detention and arrests of two U.S. citizens. Last October, a ProPublica investigation documented 170 cases of U.S. citizens who were arrested by immigration agents during Trump’s second term.
During a December House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Noem falsely claimed that the DHS had “not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., then released a letter from Noem, dated September 2, 2025, that reads: “Regarding your question on the number of veterans that have been removed since January 20, 2025, ICE has removed eight veterans.”
The vilification by Noem and DHS of Martinez, Longoria, Good, Pretti, and others is far more dangerous than her cannibal fiction — but the latter is part of a larger effort to demonize immigrants and those that support them. For centuries, claims of cannibalism have been used to justify all manner of racism, violence, and territorial conquest.
For years, Trump has leaned on this racialized rhetoric and also expressed a fascination with the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump frequently mentioned Lecter during rants about immigrants. “They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff,” Trump said in 2024. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”
Since taking office a second time, Trump has continued to talk about Lecter. “The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? The fake news would say, ‘Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.’ He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border,” Trump said last year, prior to Noem’s comments. “But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.’”
Right-wing influencers on social media and pro-Trump media outlets seized on Noem’s “horrifying” cannibal claims to criticize Democrats, demonize immigrants, and call for “mass roundups” and “mass deportations” of “sub-human pieces of trash.” What followed were increasingly brutal anti-immigrant crackdowns across the country by the Trump administration.
Noem and her agency remain under fire in the wake of the killings of Good and Pretti last month. The Department of Homeland Security shut down earlier this month after Republicans failed to agree to Democrats’ demands for new restrictions on federal immigration agents, including a ban on masked officers, requirements that agents wear visible identification, and a mandate that DHS obtains warrants from judges to make arrests in homes.
“Kristi Noem and other officials in this administration have proven beyond a doubt that they cannot be trusted to credibly investigate their own agents’ abuses, let alone implement the commonsense safeguards that Democrats are pushing for,” Duckworth told The Intercept. “That’s why it’s so important we get these DHS reforms codified into law.”
The post Kristi Noem Repeatedly Claimed ICE Deported a Cannibal. It Was “Completely Made Up.” appeared first on The Intercept.
Apple's streamer is jam-packed with excellent TV shows.
The past year has been turbulent for Tinder and Bumble. Fortunately, it turns out the real world has its charms
Valentine’s Day is mercifully behind us for another year, so we can all go back to not loving each other again. How wonderful it is to be freed of the burden of expressing our emotions in public. I didn’t post a flowery declaration of devotion for my girlfriend on social media, and I kept expecting a flood of messages asking me if we’d broken up already. Such is the peer pressure of a holiday designed purely to justify our own self-worth. Well, someone is willing to put up with me, therefore I have value.
Needing to rub your love into other people’s faces is a natural outgrowth of how absolutely miserable it is out there for finding romance. The world is not exactly filled with optimism these days, as we all hunker down with our cans of tinned fish, waiting for the next disaster to strike. Couple that (pun intended) with the onslaught of digitized dating solutions like the apps Hinge, Raya and Bumble and you have a rancid stew of solitude to look forward to. Why not mark yourself safe from loneliness by posting a picture of you and your partner snogging in the middle of a Walgreens (contraception aisle, of course)?
Continue reading...It's a trap! There are some great deals on used and refurbished desktops and laptops that are still running Windows 10. Don't do it.
Tenants have powerful home security options, too. These kits use peel-and-stick sensors, simple apps and other rent-friendly tricks.
Amid talk of artificial intelligence taking our jobs, the big unasked question is: how will we be fed?
How will we be fed? That’s the biggest question not seriously being addressed amid all this talk about whether or not artificial intelligence will end up taking over all of our jobs.
Formidable though the technology appears, similar fears have popped up repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution, and most working-age adults remain employed. Still, what is sorely missing is a serious debate about what to do if this future in fact materializes.
Continue reading...Three thoughts on the opening weekend of MLS in 2026, including a new Galaxy forward to fear and a pointed celebration in DC
You know a situation is dire when it casts Luis Suárez as its level-headed participant.
Such were the scenes after Inter Miami opened their MLS Cup defense with a pitiful 3-0 defeat at Los Angeles FC. Through 90 minutes, with LAFC coming off a midweek continental match, both team’s stars stuck it out to try starting the 2026 season on the right foot. Son Heung-min made it 89 minutes, subbed out when the result was beyond doubt. Lionel Messi played every minute but was held without a goal contribution, failing to place either of his shot attempts on target and seeing all three created chances go uncashed by his teammates.
Continue reading...In June 2012, an invitation appeared on HPCwire that would quietly ignite a transformation in engineering simulation. This announcement invited engineers worldwide to submit real-world simulation projects to be tested on remote High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems—both on-premises and in the cloud. At the time, cloud-based HPC was still viewed with skepticism. Security concerns, performance doubts, software licensing hurdles, and cultural resistance stood firmly in the way. But rather than debate theory, the Cloud team chose experimentation, and the Cloud Experiments were born.
The first annual Compendium of case studies appeared in 2013, documenting 25 hands-on engineering experiments. Each project tested whether complex CAE applications could run efficiently in the cloud.
Early results were sobering. Success rates hovered around 40% in 2013 and 60% in 2014. Engineers encountered roadblocks everywhere: slow onboarding, licensing friction, data transfer bottlenecks, configuration complexity, and the ever-present need for scarce HPC expertise.
Yet every case study concluded with two powerful sections: Lessons Learned and Recommendations. These weren’t marketing summaries. They were hard-earned operational insights from real engineers trying to get real work done. Those lessons would later become the seeds of SimOps.
A major turning point came in 2015. Based on patterns emerging from dozens of experiments, the team introduced novel HPC software containers tailored specifically for engineering workloads. Instead of installing and configuring simulation software on every cluster, applications were packaged into portable, ready-to-run containers.
The impact was dramatic. Onboarding time dropped from an average of three months to just a few days. Engineers no longer needed deep knowledge of system architecture or cloud infrastructure. Through a browser-based interface, they accessed what felt like a familiar remote desktop—backed by powerful bare-metal or virtualized HPC resources.
This abstraction between software and hardware removed one of the biggest operational barriers to cloud HPC adoption. It also quietly shifted the narrative: HPC was no longer just for specialists. It could become part of everyday engineering design.
As annual Compendiums of case studies continued—eventually totaling 232 cloud-based engineering projects—the evidence accumulated.
At Rimac, engineers designing some of the world’s fastest electric hypercars gained on-demand access to powerful cloud resources. Simulation cycles shortened. Design iterations accelerated. More sophisticated geometries and physics became feasible. And because cloud resources were elastic, they paid only for what they used.
In another study, marine engineers running NUMECA/Cadence FINE/Marine simulations found that bare-metal cloud infrastructure provided performance advantages over local upgrades—without the overhead of maintaining in-house HPC expertise. Containers enabled immediate access to clusters without installation delays.
An implantable planar antenna simulation project demonstrated a fourfold speed increase compared to a local workstation. Preconfigured containerized ANSYS HFSS environments ran instantly, eliminating the traditional setup burden.
Across industries—automotive, marine, aerospace, medical devices—the same themes emerged:
The experiments were no longer about “Can HPC run in the cloud?” They were about “How do we make simulation operationally scalable?”
As the Compendiums expanded—supported by industry leaders such as Ansys, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, and media partners including HPCwire—the UberCloud initiative evolved into Simr, reflecting its broader mission: delivering simulation-ready infrastructure as a service.
By 2024, the experiment success rate had reached 100%. More importantly, the accumulated Lessons Learned across 232 projects were distilled into structured Best Practices. Patterns became frameworks. Recommendations became repeatable methods. Operational insights became a philosophy. That philosophy became SimOps.
In 2024, the SimOps initiative has been launched. Announced on HPCwire, SimOps (Simulation Operations) positioned itself as “The DevOps of HPC.”
The comparison is deliberate. Just as DevOps transformed how software is built and deployed, SimOps addresses how engineering simulations are run, managed, and scaled. SimOps is not about software development. It is about operational excellence in technical computing.
SimOps provides guidance on:
It recognizes that simulation bottlenecks are rarely just about compute power. They are about process, governance, data management, cultural adoption, and operational repeatability.
Inspired by community-driven movements like DevOps and FinOps, SimOps was incorporated as an independent non-profit organization serving the HPC, AI, cloud, and engineering simulation communities. Today, SimOps offers:
What began in 2012 as a practical cloud experiment has evolved into a broader operational philosophy. The early HPC Cloud experiments asked whether and how simulations could move to the cloud. SimOps asks how simulations can become a scalable, automated, and reliable enterprise capability. Over twelve years, the journey revealed a powerful insight: The true challenge was never just compute performance. It was operations.
Simulation projects fail not because solvers are weak—but because workflows are fragile, data is chaotic, onboarding is slow, licensing is complex, and collaboration between engineering and IT is often misaligned. SimOps addresses those systemic gaps.
The story of SimOps is not one of a single product or breakthrough technology. It is the story of a community learning, documenting, refining, and sharing operational knowledge across more than a decade. From 25 case studies in 2013 to 232 cloud-based engineering projects by 2024, the trajectory reflects a maturation of both technology and mindset. What started as an experiment has become a movement.
And if DevOps reshaped software engineering, SimOps may well define the next chapter in simulation-driven innovation—where HPC, AI, cloud, and engineering converge into operational excellence. The experiment worked. Now the operations scale.
Want to join the movement? Explore the best practices, start your SimOps Fundamentals training, get certified, or join the SimOps Practitioner Club at www.simops.com.
About the SimOps Foundation
The SimOps Foundation is an independent non-profit community organization dedicated to the standardization and automation of simulation operations (SimOps) within the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and engineering sectors. By bridging the gap between engineering simulation and HPC infrastructure, the Foundation provides a vendor-neutral framework for improving the efficiency, scalability, and reproducibility of complex simulations and data flows. Through its tiered certification programs, the “SimOps-compliant” software stack, and a global community of practitioners, the Foundation empowers organizations to accelerate AI-powered innovation and streamline product development. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the SimOps Foundation is built on a decade of expertise and over 200 real-world engineering use cases. For more information, visit www.simops.com.
The post From HPC Experiments to a Movement: The Rise of SimOps in HPC appeared first on HPCwire.
South-western France could hit 25C, while a powerful Nor’easter is forecast to bring blizzards to Boston
An early taste of spring is on the way for millions across northern and western Europe this week. Temperatures could climb close to a near record-breaking 20C (68F) in parts of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with south-western France approaching 25C on Wednesday.
The warmth is being driven by a highly amplified synoptic pattern, featuring a region of low pressure over the Atlantic and strong high pressure over central Europe. The setup will allow exceptionally mild air to spread across much of the continent, with temperatures in some places rising to 10-15C above the seasonal average.
Continue reading...At 31% off, this compact blender is hovering just above its all-time low -- but it won't be for long.
Following a ProPublica article revealing that the U.S. Forest Service had for years issued clothing to wildland firefighters that it knew contained potentially dangerous “forever chemicals,” the agency has stopped distributing those garments. It also says that it will instruct its equipment manufacturers to avoid using PFAS in the future.
This month, ProPublica reported that until at least 2023 one of the Forest Service’s suppliers, TenCate, used finishing products made with a PFAS compound on a Kevlar-blend pant fabric. According to emails from the supplier, the finishes were used to repel gasoline and water. Despite knowing about the use of PFAS, officials with the Forest Service had not previously informed wildland firefighters about it.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have long been used in protective gear to repel substances like fuels. But many municipal fire departments have moved away from the chemicals as researchers revealed more about health risks associated with them. Firefighters in multiple states have filed class-action lawsuits against manufacturers alleging they were harmed by PFAS in the gear they wore. Research specific to wildland firefighters has lagged, and wildland firefighting agencies have been slower to publicly address the issue.
On Feb. 11, one day after ProPublica published its article, a Forest Service cache manager — an official who oversees a gear repository — wrote in an email that he asked colleagues to distribute widely, “I received notice from the Washington Office Cache Management staff late last night that we are to place a hold on issuing” the pants. But the agency didn’t immediately clarify further. A wildland firefighter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment said last week that incident management teams had been asking the agency for advice about the pants. “As of right now, our logistics folks haven’t gotten any guidance at all from higher-ups,” the firefighter said.
On Friday, the Forest Service issued a statement to ProPublica: “PFAS in protective gear is a complex, industry-wide issue and any suggestion that the agency has sought to obscure information does not reflect the extensive work to expand testing and improve long-term occupational health protections for firefighters. Firefighter pants manufactured with PFAS water repellent fabric treatments have been removed from available stock in the National Interagency Support Caches.”
TenCate has not responded to repeated inquiries, but in an email reviewed by ProPublica, it told the Forest Service that a PFAS-free finish was available in January 2023. On Friday, the Forest Service sent an email to its staff saying that its supplier had switched to a PFAS-free finish that year. In the same email, the Forest Service wrote that anyone with the older pants “should discontinue use and replace” them. The agency also said that it was updating its requirements “to specify that fabric treatments and fabrics will not contain PFAS.”
Fire departments typically adhere to safety standards set by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit that gathers input from expert committees including firefighters and representatives from companies that supply them with equipment. While the association is not a certifying body, its standards are used by government agencies including the Forest Service. Last year, an NFPA technical committee updated its standards for municipal firefighters to restrict levels of certain PFAS chemicals in protective gear. But the organization has not yet made a parallel update to its standard for wildland firefighters.
Rick Swan, an NFPA committee member, said the lag reflects a long and deliberative process for developing standards, but he added that a restriction on PFAS chemicals in wildland gear is all but inevitable. “I think it’s a no-brainer,” Swan said. In an email, a spokesperson for the NFPA wrote that the committee overseeing the wildland firefighting standard “will likely consider this issue again.”
Experts can’t say for certain what risks PFAS in gear pose to the health of wildland firefighters and agree more research is needed. Jeff Burgess, a professor and researcher at the University of Arizona who is leading a series of long-term studies of firefighter health, said smoke inhalation and the accumulation of soot on gear are primary ways wildland firefighters encounter carcinogens. Understanding of wildland firefighters’ exposures to PFAS has lagged behind understanding of exposure in municipal fire departments. Historically, researchers have had less access to wildland crews, and in recent years they have focused on studying risks related to smoke.
The post U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting appeared first on ProPublica.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized the broadening use of anxiety medications, but doctors and researchers say the MAHA movement is misrepresenting drugs that have been proven to help.
As sordid allegations engulfed Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II showed a mother’s love, King Charles III a brother’s fury, and Prince William, a nephew’s dismay.
Israeli officials say they won’t initiate a strike on Iran but the public is bracing for the possibility of another war.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. It also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. How the state responds to the setbacks may determine the shape of Delaware’s workforce into the future.
A buildup of sediment around the confluence of the Christina and Delaware rivers is blocking fully loaded fruit ships from docking at the Port of Wilmington – a facility long known as the top banana port in North America.
In conversations with port workers as well as with state and federal officials, Spotlight Delaware has learned that over the previous month cargo ships bound for Delaware and carrying Chiquita Brands fruit have been sailing past the Port of Wilmington because the waterway leading to the Christina River facility has become too shallow.
The ships have been docking instead at ports in Chester and Philadelphia, where workers at those facilities have unloaded as much as a third of the vessels’ cargo, according to Port of Wilmington workers.
Then, with lighter loads and sitting higher in the water, the ships return to Port of Wilmington where they can navigate through the shallow Christina River to unload the rest of their cargo.
While the workaround has kept fruit moving, the situation could amount to a reputational setback for Delaware’s port. It comes at a time when the facility’s operator, Enstructure Inc., has been seeking out new lines of business amid an increasingly intense competition between regional ports.
The situation also means that the hours worked at the publicly owned, privately run Port of Wilmington are lower than what they would have been otherwise. And in some cases, those hours have been filled by non-union labor at upstream ports, sparking outcry from Delaware workers.
“Normally, we’ll work the ship around-the-clock for two days, or at least a day and a half. Now we’re lucky to get one around-the-clock,” Port of Wilmington union leader William Ashe Jr. said, referencing time spent unloading the Chiquita ships recently.
Ashe noted that the only ships impacted so far have been those carrying fruit from Chiquita, and not those bringing in perishables from Dole.
“They tell me that the draft is deeper on Chiquita than it is on Dole” ships, he said.
Spokespersons for Enstructure and for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which is in charge of maintaining the navigable waters in the United States – each blamed the sediment buildup on delays in dredging that began last fall.
In an email, Army Corps spokesman Stephen Rochette said a dispute over an awarded dredging contract initially pushed back the start of the project.
“We awarded this contract in the fall and experienced a delay due to a contractual protest from another bidder. Additionally, the selected contractor had other project commitments as well that impacted their start time,” Rochette said.
The project was then hit by more delays last month when the United States Coast Guard prohibited dredging during a cold snap that caused ice flows to form along the Delaware River, Rochette said.
He said an expedited dredging operation is scheduled to begin imminently.
“Our contractor is mobilizing equipment and setting up the pipeline,” Rochette said in the email.
The Army Corps’ website lists the dredging contract for Wilmington Harbor as having been initially scheduled to begin last October. It was supposed to be complete next month.
It is one of 33 “maintenance dredging” projects within the Philadelphia region that are either proposed or ongoing.
The dredging delays at the Port of Wilmington have occurred just as the Army Corps has been suffering through a period of uncertainty. Similar delays in dredging have also recently been reported for projects in New York and in Michigan.
Also last fall, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget announced that the Army Corps would pause over $11 billion in low-priority projects within Democratic-leaning states, in response to the government shutdown at the time.
A subsequent Congressional statement indicated that one of those projects is in Delaware.
It is not immediately clear which Delaware project the statement was referencing as the complete list of paused contracts does not appear to be publicly available.
Former-New Castle County Council President Karen Hartly-Nagle was first to report on the Port of Wilmington dredging issues in an article published last week.
The head of the Delaware office that oversees operations of the Port of Wilmington said tests of water depths conducted late last fall indicated that the channel leading to the Port of Wilmington “remained operational.”
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Brian Devine, the new interim executive director at the Diamond State Port Corporation, asserted that a rapid accumulation of sediment would have built up around Wilmington’s harbor near the end of last year
“While sediment accumulates in Wilmington Harbor throughout the year, significant weather events can result in periods of quicker accumulations,” Devine said.
Despite the explanation, Ashe insisted that dredging along the Christina River should have been complete long before the depth became an obstacle for ships — and before the rush of the winter fruit season. And while the Army Corps manages dredging, Ashe directed his criticism at state officials for what he said was their failure to press the issue.
“It should have been done in July,” he said. “Why would you wait until the winter months, knowing that you haven’t done any maintenance dredging in a year.”
Prior to the Port of Wilmington’s most recent dredging contract award, the Army Corps lists on its website a massive project posted in 2024 to dredge the Delaware River’s main navigation channel from Philadelphia to the sea.
That project’s documents also list dredging along the parallel “Wilmington Harbor, Christina River,” but it appears that the Army Corps separated that portion of the project, and re-awarded it last fall on its own.
Beyond Delaware port officials, Ashe has also criticized Chiquita’s actions in recent weeks.
When Chiquita diverted its first ship away from Delaware a month ago, he said the company violated a union agreement when its ship docked at a non-union Penn Terminals, near Chester.
In response, Ashe said attorneys from the his union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, successfully pushed Chiquita to move their next ship to docks at the Port of Philadelphia, which uses union labor.
“We raised so much stink, and we got lawyers involved,” he said.
Nevertheless, subsequent Chiquita ships have returned to Penn Terminals, according to Ashe and three other port workers.
Chiquita did not immediately respond to a request to comment on this story.
The post Dredging delays divert ships past the Port of Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
In 2020, officials across the United States removed dozens of statues of historical figures from public property following protests over racial injustice. In Wilmington, those included the statues of Caesar Rodney and Christopher Columbus. Recent advocacy from Italian American residents for the famed explorer has since revived the debate, leading the Wilmington City Council to consider its stance on the statue’s potential return.
Six years after Wilmington took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, the sculpture is again exposing tensions in the city over who gets to determine which symbols to publicly embrace.
During a city council meeting last week, members of Wilmington’s large Italian-American community stated that the Columbus statue should return to public display – either at the city’s Father Tucker Park or at its previous location along Pennsylvania Avenue. They argued that Columbus was a historical figure who, while flawed, sparked pride within their community.
But, in response, a mixture of older Black residents, younger white residents and Black city council members stated that Columbus should not be publicly celebrated, citing his role in slavery and in the colonization of the Americas.
During the meeting, Albert Greto – an attorney who is leading a broader Italian-American community coalition – said he wants Wilmington to turn over the statue to his coalition. Then, if the city determines the statue will not be placed at a public site, he said his group will restore it to private property.
During his public comment, Greto also acknowledged that Columbus had enslaved people.
“I think there’s no dispute in that,” he said. “Be that as it may, there’s good and bad in everyone.”
After nearly an hour of public comments and council debate, the Wilmington City Council voted down 6-3 a resolution that would have formally opposed the statue being placed on public land, including city parks.
The resolution had been introduced by City Councilwoman Shané Darby.
The council members opposed to the resolution, such as Councilwoman Christian Willauer, said they wanted to allow different communities to be able to celebrate their cultural symbols.
“I believe our communities are better when we give each other space to express ourselves according to our own traditions, as long as those traditions are not about taking something away from someone else or putting someone else down,” Willauer said.
For months, multiple Italian American community groups have been organizing to push the city to return and re-erect the Columbus statue, which once stood on a strip of land at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Franklin and 13th streets.
Many have said that Father Tucker Park, which sits across the street from the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in the Little Italy neighborhood, would be an ideal location.
The recent advocacy comes amid an ongoing national conversation about the kind of monuments that should be displayed in public. On the other side of the ideological spectrum from Darby, the Trump administration last month removed over two dozen panels at the President’s House site in Philadelphia that exhibited stories of people enslaved by President George Washington.
The city and others sued the Trump administration, and last week a federal judge ordered the exhibits to be temporarily restored until the pending case is resolved.
The removal of the panels were part of broader efforts by the Trump administration to examine monuments and other historical markers to ensure they are not displaying content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living.”
The Christopher Columbus statue was originally erected on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1957.
The Christopher Columbus Monument Committee, a group composed of Italian Americans in the community, had raised $40,000 to commission the statue. Committee members also maintained it over the subsequent decades.
Then, in 2020, the administration of then-Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki contacted Mike Panfile, the head of the Columbus Monument Committee, asking for permission to take down the statue amid protests against racial injustice that occurred following the police murder of George Floyd.
The committee agreed and the city then took down the statue. At the same time, Purzycki also had taken down a statue in the city central square of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney.
Following the removals, Purzycki said he wanted to hold more discussions with the community about the public display of historical figures and events.
“We cannot erase history, as painful as it may be, but we can certainly discuss history with each other and determine together what we value and what we feel is appropriate to memorialize,” Purzycki said in a public statement in 2020.
More than five years later, Darby introduced her resolution, opposing the effort to restore the statue to a public place. She said she supports the statue being returned to private property, but believes that the statue shouldn’t be placed on land that taxpayers are funding.
“Globally, he just represents something so terrible and bad. In a predominantly Black and brown city, we shouldn’t have to pay to maintain him at a city park,” she told Spotlight Delaware.
The council heard about 40 minutes of public comments before discussing the measure.
More than a dozen residents, many of them older, came in opposition to the resolution. Several referenced the discrimination that Italian Americans faced after immigrating to the United States. Some described Columbus as a “sign of hope” for their community. Others characterized him as someone who “connected two great continents and paved the way for others to follow.”
“Ask yourself, how would you feel if a council member presented false toxic narratives designed to malign MLK’s character and campaigned against the legacy,” city resident Rob Savarese said to the 13-member city council, which is made up of nine Black members.
Like Savarese, most of the city residents who spoke during the public comment period opposed Darby’s resolutions.
Those who supported it emphasized Columbus’ role in colonization and slavery. Some even urged their Italian-American neighbors to choose another historical figure to honor.
“Every kind of disgusting thing that could happen happened on his watch,” city resident Baba Hamine said. “Christopher Columbus did that to my ancestors.”
Wilmington’s Columbus statue is currently being stored in a facility that “specializes in high-dollar art and sculptures,” according to Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff for Mayor John Carney.
Walker declined to disclose the exact location, but he emphasized that the mayor’s office has made multiple offers for the community to see and pick up the statue.
Carney’s office had not been involved in conversations involving the statue, according to Walker. Asked whether Carney was in support of re-erecting the statue, Walker said the community needs to have that discussion with the City Council.
In a more recent interview after the city council vote, Walker said that Carney’s office will be in discussions with the city council and members of the community to find a path forward.
Walker noted that placing the Columbus statue in a public park would not require City Council approval through an ordinance. Still, he said ordinances have been used in the past to take similar actions.
The resolution voted down by the City Council last week was only a declaration emphasizing the position of the public body.
Councilmembers Willauer, Chris Johnson, Alex Hackett, James Spadola, Nathan Field, and Zanthia Oliver voted against it.
Councilmembers Darby, Coby Owens, and Council President Trippi Congo voted for it.
Councilmembers Michelle Harlee and Latisha Bracy voted present.
Later, Johnson, who represents Little Italy and stood as the main opponent to Darby’s ordinance, told Spotlight Delaware that if an ordinance were required to put the statue back up, he would be willing to propose it.
He said it could also include a broader monument to highlight the history and achievements of indigenous communities.
Amid protests by organizations like Black Lives Matter amid the George Floyd killing in 2020, Wilmington’s Columbus statue was one of at least 33 statues around the nation that were taken down, as well as other confederate monuments, as reported by CBS News.
Individuals throughout Delaware and other states have spoken out about Columbus’s efforts to colonize land occupied by Indigenous people, which some say led to his role in a “genocide” of the native population.
The first contact between Europeans and the indigenous civilizations that occupied the Americas occurred after Columbus arrived in 1492 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is currently Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
A report from the College of Charleston’s Lowcountry Digital History Initiative asserts that Columbus directly captured about 500 Taino slaves to be sold in Spain. About 200 of them did not survive the voyage, according to the report.
By the year 1600, the arrival of Europeans led to the deaths of roughly 55 million indigenous people, according to a 2019 study published by the Quaternary Science Reviews Journal.
During a community meeting at the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in Little Italy last week, residents pushed back against criticism of Columbus, with some saying claims of genocide were myths.
Greto’s coalition gave a presentation discussing the history of Columbus, the oppression faced by Italian Americans, and how the celebration of Columbus Day, which was made a national holiday in 1937, gave his community hope and pride.
About 70 residents were present, including Johnson, the councilmember who represents the area. Darby did not attend the meeting.
During the presentation, Peter Frattarelli, cultural director of Societa da Vinci, argued that Columbus’s actions did not fit the definition of genocide.
Frattarelli also argued that most scholars agree the decline of the Taino people was primarily due to European diseases, not systematic extermination. He also framed Columbus’s violence as retaliatory warfare.
Finally, Frattarelli also strongly pushed back against claims that Columbus was a sex trafficker of young girls.
“Was he a saint? Was he a sinner? I’m going to tell you he was closer to a saint than a sinner,” he said.
The post Which monuments should Wilmington celebrate? Columbus statue sparks renewed debate appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Ukrainian ambassador Valerii Zaluzhnyi says future wars will require ‘technological alliances, not treaty articles’ News release thilton.drupal
The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK addressed the evolution of the war in the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the future ‘robotization’ of war.
At Chatham House, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK said future conflicts will be fought by ‘autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic systems’.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, delivered a speech at the London-based international affairs think-tank on Monday 23 February, presenting his insights on the transformation of battlefield war and marking four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion against Ukraine.
Zaluzhnyi said technological advancements will transform the future of war, stating that modern conflicts have gone beyond conventional weapons and tactics.
Zaluzhnyi added that the ‘robotization’ of warfare will ensure military effectiveness without the need for human involvement, and that, as a result, there will be fewer casualties.
Ambassador Zaluzhnyi at Chatham House
But he warned that while states could develop and control specific technologies, no one country would be capable of dominating all vital military technologies needed in future conflicts.
Nations would also need to combine their efforts, otherwise Russia will remain a threat to Europe and beyond. ‘We will need technological alliances, not treaty articles,’ he said.
Zaluzhnyi also called for sanctions against Russia to be maintained, and argued that Russia’s economy should be pushed to breaking point: ‘…it is necessary to move away from the classic strategy of inflicting maximum damage and consistently defeating the enemy… We need to make the war more costly for Russia, and as a result, lead to its inevitable defeat.’
During the question and answer session after his keynote speech Zaluzhnyi was asked by a member of the press whether he hoped to be president of Ukraine, following speculation in recent news media coverage.
He replied that he could not consider his political future until after the war, ‘When it is over, when martial law is lifted in Ukraine…only then will we be able to discuss my personal future,’ he said, adding that such speculation was a distraction from Ukraine’s war efforts.
‘We Ukrainians no longer have a choice. We will either perish or survive. The formula for survival is simple: continue to fight, strengthen the economy and maintain unity,’ he said.
"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..." "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...." As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added. ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation. Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Motorway stretch plays music as a safety feature but those close to it say ‘intrusive’ noise is constant and distressing
Residents of one of India’s most upmarket neighbourhoods say the country’s first “musical road” has turned their daily lives into a nightmare soundtrack.
A stretch of Mumbai’s recently opened Coastal Road seafront expressway has been engineered to play the pulsating Oscar-winning tune Jai Ho from the movie Slumdog Millionaire when vehicles drive on it at lower speeds.
Continue reading...Premier Chris Minns says state has been working with federal government as group of 11 women and 23 children attempt to leave refugee camp
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New South Wales authorities are preparing for about a third of the group of Australian women and children linked to Islamic State fighters to return to the state, if authorities in Syria allow them to leave the Roj refugee camp.
The premier, Chris Minns, said the state government had been discussing the possible return of some of the 11 women and 23 children with federal government agencies since late 2025, and a strong law enforcement response was expected.
Continue reading...Footage of Punch, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque, has gone viral around the world after he was rejected by his mother and formed a bond with a soft toy
A baby monkey in Japan has captured hearts around the world after videos of him being bullied by other monkeys and rejected by his mother went viral last week.
Punch, a Japanese macaque, was born last July at Ichikawa zoo. He has drawn international attention after zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan toy after he was abandoned by his mother.
Continue reading...When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.) Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same... It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn't normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It's worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate's behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they'd have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI's role in it becomes obvious. The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he'll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. "You're saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this' when I know a good chunk of them do this!" Obligatory XKCD.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau shared a post on X about Quentin Deranque, a far-right activist, who died of brain injuries after being beaten.
An economic revival can’t happen without political transformation.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 23, No. 518.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 23.
Drug lord who was killed by Mexican special forces on Sunday led a cartel known for aggression and military-style arsenal
The drug lord “El Mencho”, who was killed on Sunday by Mexican special forces, was the co-founder and leader of a gang that in recent years had become the country’s most powerful criminal organisation: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
While less internationally famous than the Sinaloa cartel of the now imprisoned Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the CJNG is a household name in Mexico, where it is known for its displays of ultraviolence and its big, military-style arsenal.
Continue reading...This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw." The Register explains: The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, "aleabitoreddit," that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook... In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web... In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster... The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren't as cheap as they used to be "thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago." "You know what's cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
East coast scrambles to prepare for storm forecast to bring major disruption to more than 35 million people
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered a citywide travel ban for all but emergency travel, as the north-eastern United States was preparing for an intense winter storm that is forecast to reach blizzard strength and bring major disruption.
Residents along the east coast scrambled to prepare for the late-winter storm that spurred weather warnings from Maryland to Massachusetts, affecting more than 35 million people. More than a foot of snow was expected, with wind gusts of up to 70mph and warnings of potential coastal flooding from Cape Cod to Delaware.
Continue reading...So i am a big guy riding a used XR. All is going well, learning the dismount is a bit tricky but I am getting used to it. I can carve a little bit at slow speeds.
One evening I floated to 7/11. When I went to cross the street I nose dived coming off the curb at low speed, i didn't fall, was able to run it out, any idea why this happened? I'm assuming its because I am a big rider?
Anyways. Do you guys have any tips on small speed bumps and transitioning from the road to the sidewalk? I am a bit intimidated by them because i don't want to nose dive lol
Through a sudden death overtime goal, the U.S. men's hockey team is golden over Canada.
The Milan Cortina Olympics ended Sunday with a closing ceremony inside the ancient Roman amphitheater, Verona Arena.
Here is a look at the total medal count for Team USA and other nations at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
A defense lawyers group has posted a tracking tool to enable users to check on the status of some of the controversial prosecutions attempted by DOJ in the first year of Trump's second term.
President and first lady were in Washington DC at time of intrusion at their Florida residence – key US politics stories from 22 February 2026 at a glance
US Secret Service agents have killed an armed man who breached the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, were not at the club and residence at the time.
The authorities said agents confronted a white male in his early 20s carrying shotgun and gasoline can early on Sunday.
Continue reading...Curious what you all are getting on your X7 miles per charge?
Really looking at the Sport, but honestly will probably never use the the full charge of a LR.
What is your real world usage getting you?
Death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, one of world’s most wanted drug traffickers, sets off wave of disorder across several Mexican states
One of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, the Mexican cartel boss known as “El Mencho”, has been killed by security forces, Mexico’s defence ministry has confirmed. The operation set off a wave of violence, with torched cars and gunmen blocking highways in more than half a dozen states.
The drug lord, whose real name is Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, was killed on Sunday in the western state of Jalisco along with at least six alleged accomplices, the ministry said in a statement.
Continue reading...Two Olympic finals between Canada and the US were settled by sudden death. The format made the showpieces feel more like a coin toss than a climax
Two Olympic finals against the US, two strong performances, two sudden-death losses. Canada is so over overtime.
While all good things must come to an end, it’s hard to fathom why hockey’s international rule-makers think that the very best things – huge clashes that were some of the hottest tickets of the entire Olympics – should be ended using three-on-three golden-goal overtime, a concept beloved only by people with a train to catch or firm dinner reservations.
Continue reading...Advertised roles dropped 3% last month to 695,000 – first dip below 700,000 since January 2021, job site Adzuna says
The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic.
The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3% in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021.
Continue reading...McDowell County, West Virginia barely survived coal's collapse and the opioid crisis. Now cuts to food stamps and Medicaid threaten to push its poorest residents to the edge.
Immerse yourself in an installation by Refik Anadol while debating how AI-generated creations stack up in the art world.
60 Minutes travels to South Africa to investigate President Trump's claims that White farmers are victims of a genocide that reporters aren't covering.
Art made with AI is selling for over $1 million and being embraced by some of the world's most prestigious museums, but critics question if it really belongs in those spaces.The art world is divided.
McDowell County, once the nation's largest coal producer, is now one of the poorest places in the United States. Residents have little faith in the government.
A pioneering artist says collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence can bring in a "new age of imagination." Critics question if it's even art.
President Trump claims White farmers in South Africa are victims of a genocide. South Africans dispute his claim.
Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative." Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Telegram — a popular messaging app owned by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov — over a week ago for failing to comply with Russian laws requiring personal data to be stored locally. Voice and video calls were blocked via Telegram in August. The pressure is the latest move in a long-running campaign to promote what the Kremlin calls a sovereign internet that's led to blocks on YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp... Foreign intelligence services are able to see Russia's military messages in Telegram too, Russia's Minister for digital development, Maksut Shadaev, said on Wednesday, although he added that Russia will not block access to Telegram for troops for now. Telegram responded at the time that no breaches of the app's encryption have ever been found. "The Russian government's allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens onto a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship," it said in an emailed response.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | The nose dive happened as i was trying to accelerate too fast too soon. Suffice to say i think i need a Rally XL. Have about 300+ miles on this, did around 300 also on my og XR before selling that. I knew i needed a jacket and have a motorcycle jacket perfect for the occasion but want to get one more specific to this hobby. oddly enough the scuffed the top center of my knee. either the pads were hanging low or i skidded on the asphalt long enough for the pads to move down and expose the top of the knee. [link] [comments] |
I've been looking into phones and watch options, outside of iOS and android recently. With Pebble making a come back and being open source, I was wondering if there was a onewheel/vesc app for it?
Emboldened by recent wins, elected officials gathered in San Francisco to share strategy for a midterm ‘reckoning’
Fury at Donald Trump was the coin of the realm, as thousands of California delegates, activists and elected officials gathered in San Francisco this weekend, emboldened by a string of victories and confident the Golden state would help deliver a power check on the president in the upcoming midterm elections.
On Saturday, Democrats streamed through the Moscone Center convention complex, sporting lanyards emblazoned with Gavin Newsom’s name and tote bags adorned with one of Nancy Pelosi’s favorite aphorisms: “We don’t Agonize, we organize” – symbols of a party in transition as the former speaker approaches retirement and the term-limited governor eyes a presidential campaign.
Continue reading...Calls mount for Mountbatten-Windsor to be dropped from royal line of succession
Police searches of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s former home on the Windsor estate in Berkshire continued on Sunday as a government minister did not rule out having a judge-led inquiry into the former prince’s links with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, representing the government, did not rule out such an inquiry but said it was premature because of the police investigation.
Continue reading...The Mexican military’s killing of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. “El Mencho,” set off violence in areas controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes. "A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution," said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It's remarkable." The study was done at the University of Southern California's medical school, by researchers using high-resolution satellite data, reports Electrek: The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that's often taken for granted — that EVs don't just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now... The researchers ran multiple checks to make sure the trend wasn't driven by unrelated factors. They accounted for pandemic-era changes by excluding 2020 in some analyses and controlling for gas prices and work-from-home patterns. They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012... Next, the researchers plan to compare EV adoption with asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If those trends line up, it could provide some of the clearest evidence yet of what we already know: that electrifying transportation doesn't just clean the air on paper; it improves public health in practice. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jhoegl for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
‘Generational’ reforms are a key moment for Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and for Keir Starmer
Ministers will unveil a “generational” overhaul of special educational needs and disabilities (Send) support, pledging £4bn to transform provision in schools in England and warning councils they could lose control of Send services if they fail to meet their legal duties.
The reforms are expected to be a key policy moment for Keir Starmer and for the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson – who delayed the changes last autumn after a ferocious backlash from MPs and parents.
Continue reading...Nigel Farage’s party plans to deport up to 288,000 people a year on five flights a day and expand stop and search
Reform UK would create an ICE-style agency dedicated to deporting hundreds of thousands of people, as well as terminating the status of those with indefinite leave to remain (ILR), the party will say.
It would also ban the conversion of churches into mosques and fund a radical expansion of stop and search, the party’s new home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, will also say in a speech on Monday. The deradicalisation programme Prevent would also have its mandate redrawn to focus on Islamist extremism.
Continue reading...Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet's growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom's lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. "For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. "Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real." In 2003, NBC News reported: Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. "We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom," Armstrong said. Added Esrey, "We couldn't figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were.... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?" AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom's level. "The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, 'these guys aren't keeping up.' So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt," Armstrong says. "It just wrecked the whole industry," says Esrey.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have 2 Pints that I'm looking to get off of my hands.
I have no interest in fixing them up - I'm just kind of done with the Onewheel experience.
I know that one of them has battery issues, and it's likely the other one does too, as it's been sitting in storage for quite some time.
I live in West Virginia and have gotten no kind of interest from anyone in my area, so I'm just reaching out to see if I can maybe sell them. Or maybe I could be directed somewhere that would take them off of my hands.
Center secures first men’s title for US since 1980
Americans break Canadian hearts in overtime
It might not have been a shocker on the order of a bunch of scrappy college kids toppling the polished Soviet juggernaut at Lake Placid. But 46 years to the day of the Miracle on Ice, it often felt that way as another underdog United States men’s hockey team ended their Olympic gold drought in a white-knuckle contest dominated by Canada until Jack Hughes’ seismic overtime winner.
Call it the Marvel in Milan.
Continue reading...Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement that TSA and Customs and Border Protection are "suspending courtesy and special privilege escorts."
Mexico's Ministry of Defense security forces killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho," in a military operation.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 23 #988.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 23, No. 722.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 23, No. 1,710.
Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations. And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need..." In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly's for Crates.io). Adding to that bill is the growing cost of identifying malware, the proliferation of which has been amplified through the use of AI and scripts. These repositories have detected 845,000 malware packages from 2019 to January 2025 (the vast majority of those nasty packages came to npm)... In some cases benevolent parties can cover [bandwidth] bills: Python's PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month. Yet the costs Winser was most concerned about are not bandwidth or hosting; they are the security features needed to ensure the integrity of containers and packages. Alpha-Omega underwrites a "distressingly" large amount of security work around registries, he said. It's distressing because if Alpha-Omega itself were to miss a funding round, a lot of registries would be screwed. Alpha-Omega's recipients include the Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation for Node.js and jQuery, and Ruby Central. Donations and memberships certainly help defray costs. Volunteers do a lot of what otherwise would be very expensive work. And there are grants about...Winser did not offer a solution, though he suggested the key is to convince the corporate bean counters to consider paid registries as "a normal cost of doing business and have it show up in their opex as opposed to their [open source program office] donation budget." The dilemma was summed up succinctly by the anonymous Slashdot reader who submitted this story. "Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The space agency said Sunday it's targeting Tuesday for the slow, four-mile trek across Kennedy Space Center, weather permitting.
Paul Thomas Anderson drama scores six awards, as Jessie Buckley becomes first Irish woman to win leading actress prize
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture comedy about a washed-up revolutionary trying to protect his daughter from a ruthless military officer, has dominated the Baftas, taking home six awards including best film, best director, best cinematography, best editing, best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay.
The film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, was nominated for 14 awards going into Sunday’s ceremony, the most of any contender – including nods for stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor.
Continue reading...Miami star confronted officials in a doorway after 3-0 loss
League determined area was not off-limits to players
MLS has suspended players for entering officials’ room
Major League Soccer has cleared Lionel Messi of wrongdoing after the Argentinian appeared to pursue match officials after Inter Miami’s season-opening loss to LAFC on Saturday evening.
In a video posted to X by Síntesis Deportes reporter Giovanni Guerrero, Messi appears to confront match officials as they entered a doorway within the LA Coliseum after the match, a 3-0 win for LAFC. Miami forward Luis Suárez is seen restraining Messi, who slips out of his teammate’s grip and disappears behind a door. He emerged seconds later and retreated with Suárez to Miami’s locker room.
Continue reading...The American center’s overtime goal will go down in history as the United States ends its 46-year Olympic drought.
The outcry and activism of the 2010s – itself enabled by earlier generations of feminists – brought us to this moment. But if the Trump administration has its way, opposing forces will prevail
This week, for the first time since 1647, a member of the royal family was arrested in the United Kingdom, not over allegations of sexual wrongdoing but for trade-related communications with the supplier of those victims, Jeffrey Epstein, to whom he is supposed to have leaked state secrets. The public outrage in the US about Epstein forced the government to release the files, including emails between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein now under investigation in the criminal case.
The arrestee formerly known as Prince Andrew was accused by Virginia Giuffre with having had sex with her when she was a minor being trafficked by Epstein. He has always denied wrongdoing. Until his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, only his family had held him accountable for his ongoing association with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. “Today our broken hearts have lifted,” Virginia Giuffre’s family stated, “at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.”
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and the forthcoming The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change
Continue reading...Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time. This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place." With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm. But the bot isn't constrained by human anatomy... When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm. The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fresh Geneva negotiations suggest Trump’s team believes the Iranian government is making serious proposals
Iran and the US are expected to meet for a further round of talks in Geneva this week in a sign that Donald Trump’s team believes Tehran is making serious proposals to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and show it is not seeking a nuclear weapon.
As fears loomed of renewed conflict after Washington carried out a major redeployment of military assets to the region, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said he thought there was still a good chance of finding a diplomatic solution.
Continue reading...Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey include wide range of body shapes on catwalks
Body diversity has made a comeback at London fashion week despite a wider shift towards ultra-thinness in the fashion industry.
Emerging designers including Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey included a wide range of body shapes on catwalks over the past four days. Sizes have ranged from a UK size 10-16, a category referred to as mid-size in the industry, to plus-size, also known as curve models, which measures from a UK size 18 upwards. Sample size, often referred to as straight models, ranges from a UK 4-8.
Continue reading...Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran has "every right to enjoy a peaceful nuclear energy, including enrichment" as the U.S. pushes for a deal on its nuclear program.
 | so just yesterday my pint x started making a grinding sound when I'm riding. This happens every one kna while, but now it's every time. it feels like it's skipping gears or something cause it over corrects for balance ive noticed. I looked around and saw maybe loose cables, so I checked all the connections and it was still making the sound. I noticed that the bolts on the motor were loose, so I tightened them down and it seems to have sorta fixed it, from my 30s ride. I don't want to damage my board even more, so I'm here. I also check the axle bolts and they seem fine. [link] [comments] |
The following is the transcript of the interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 22, 2026.
Reform UK leader flew to the Maldives for a day despite not having permit to visit nearby archipelago
Nigel Farage has been accused of “performing Maga stunts” after claiming the British government stopped him from travelling to the Chagos Islands on a humanitarian mission.
The Reform UK leader said he had flown to the Maldives to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius.
Continue reading...Investigation under way regarding death of Cpl Lucy Wilde, 25, who prince said ‘served with courage and distinction’
Prince William has paid tribute to a young army medic found dead in her barracks who “served with courage and distinction”.
Cpl Lucy Wilde, 25, who posted videos on TikTok documenting her daily life in the army, was found dead in her barracks in Warminster, Wiltshire, on 5 February. An investigation is under way, the Ministry of Defence said.
Continue reading...Authorities say agents confronted a white male in his early 20s carrying shotgun and gasoline can early Sunday
The US Secret Service shot and killed an armed intruder who breached the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida residence and private club in Palm Beach, early on Sunday.
Although the US president often spends weekends at the oceanfront resort, he was at the White House in Washington during this incident, as was the first lady, Melania Trump.
Continue reading...Jamieson Greer also said US won’t pull out of deals with UK, EU and others after court declared Trump tariffs illegal
Top US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer insisted on Sunday that the Trump administration was set to persist with its tariffs policy, two days after the supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal.
The ruling issued on Friday by the highest US court was a sharp rebuke to the Republican president that toppled a key pillar of his aggressive economic agenda – even as it prompted Trump to announce a new global tariff using different statutes, albeit temporary.
Continue reading...DHS official reportedly says Global Entry program would remain halted amid partial government shutdown
The Department of Homeland Security partially reversed course Sunday morning on an order that had suspended the TSA PreCheck and Global Entry airport security programs as a result of staffing shortages caused by the partial government shutdown.
“TSA PreCheck remains operational with no change for the traveling public,” the Transportation Security Administration said in a social media post. “As staffing constraints arise, TSA will evaluate on a case by case basis and adjust operations accordingly.”
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
Continue reading...On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer join Margaret Brennan.
Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." reports SFGate, "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in." Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex... At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for our tour and asked for "Grace P," the leasing agent who had emailed us. "Oh, that's just our AI assistant," the woman at the front desk told us... At Aqua Via, another towering apartment complex across the street, I emailed back and forth with a very helpful and polite "Sofia M." My pal Sofia seemed so human-like in her responses that I did not realize she was AI until I looked a little closer at a text she'd sent me. "Msgs may be AI or human generated...." [S]he continued to text me for weeks after I'd moved on, trying to win me back. When I looked at the fine print, I realized both of these complexes were using EliseAI, a leading AI housing startup that claims to be involved in managing 1 in 6 apartments in the U.S... [50 corporate landlords have funded a VC named RET Ventures to invest in and deploy rental-automating AI, and SFGate's reporter spoke to partner Christopher Yip.] According to Yip, AI is common in large apartment complexes not just in the tech-centric Bay Area, but across the entire country. It all kicked off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he said, when contactless, self-guided apartment tours and completely virtual tours where people rented apartments sight unseen became commonplace. Technology's infiltration into the renting process has only grown deeper in the years since, Yip said, mirroring how pervasive AI has become in many other facets of our lives. "From an industry perspective, it's really about meeting the renter where they are," Yip said. He pointed to how many renters now prefer to interact through text and email, and want to tour apartments at their convenience — say, at 7 p.m. after work, when a typical leasing office might be closed. The latest updates in technology not only allow you to take a self-guided tour with AI unlocking the door for you, but also to ask AI questions by conversing with voice AI as you wander through the kitchen and bedroom at your leisure. And while a human leasing agent might ghost you for days or weeks at a time, AI responds almost instantly — EliseAI typically responds within 30 seconds, [said Fran Loftus, chief experience officer at EliseAI]... [I]n some scenarios, the goal does seem to be to eliminate humans entirely. "We do have long-term plans of building fully autonomous buildings," Loftus said.... "We think there's a time and a place for that, depending on the type of property. But really right now, it's about helping with this crazy turnover in this industry." The reporter says they missed the human touch, since "The second AI was involved, the interaction felt cold. When a human couldn't even be bothered to show up to give me a tour, my trust evaporated." But they conclude that in the years ahead, human landlords offering tours "will probably go the way of landlines and VCRs."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, officials said ‘nobody is above the law’. Sadly that doesn’t seem true
Schadenfreude isn’t a particularly noble sentiment. But who cares, eh? These days bad things never seem to happen to bad people; accountability is fleetingly rare. So I think we should all take a moment to really appreciate how glorious the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office on Thursday was. Not only was the disgraced royal dragged in for questioning like a mere commoner; the arrest happened on his 66th birthday. Instead of birthday cake, he got his just deserts. And, to top things off, the occasion was immortalized with a photo – an instant classic – of Andrew leaving the police station looking shellshocked and decrepit.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Letter to Shabana Mahmood describes controls that could block British dual citizens’ entry to UK as ‘unacceptable’
The Liberal Democrats have called on the home secretary to “move at speed” to delay the rollout of new border controls that could result in British dual nationals being blocked from entering the country.
A letter sent by the party to Shabana Mahmood echoes one sent by the former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis on Friday asking for a grace period to be implemented urgently after one of his constituents living in the Netherlands told how she could no longer visit her dying mother in a care home in Yorkshire.
Continue reading...US secret service and local police officers shot and killed an intruder armed with a shotgun early on Sunday after he breached the perimeter at Donald Trump's resort in Palm Beach, Florida, law enforcement officials said. Trump was not at his residence at the time
Continue reading...  | Hey Y’all, I recently converted my XR to XRV, and I love it sooooo much, but I think I converted the wrong board. I think I like riding the pint s better. They are both solid boards, and for different uses. I just love the carviness of the pint. I’m only going to keep one board, but I need help deciding if I should sell the pint S, keep the XRV, and just get a slightly thinner tire & better foot padding… or I just sell the XRV, and convert the pint as it is? I’m about 200 lbs, 6’2, so the XR undoubtedly fits my feet better, I just wish it carved like the pint. [link] [comments] |
Your $1,000 laptop deserves a protective home on the road. A tech journalist and frequent traveler recommends his nine favorites
The four best personal-item backpacks that fit under US airline seats
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Whether you’re flying across the country on vacation, meeting with an important client downtown or just heading to your local coffee shop for work, there is a good chance you’re bringing a backpack along, with a laptop squirreled away inside.
While you can toss a laptop into just about any bag, the best laptop backpacks are specially tailored to pamper what is probably one of your most expensive (and delicate) possessions. That means a padded pocket lined with soft non-scratch material, easy access to your computer without unpacking everything and lots of extra pockets for portable mice, chargers and other accessories. Add in all of the standard backpack considerations such as capacity, comfort and durability, and you have a lot of factors to consider.
Best overall:
Mission Workshop Meridian backpack
Best for travel:
Peak Design Travel Backpack
After decades of American children routinely receiving polio vaccines, the virus that had doomed many to paralysis was nearly eliminated in the United States. But vaccine avoidance today may allow the crippling disease to return.
 | Testing the Neo 2. I clenched my cheeks going through the gates but it worked out! [link] [comments] |
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said "stand by" the trade deal agreements it has signed with its partners despite the Supreme Court's tariff decision.
Trump says he’s sending a ship to care for Greenland’s sick. But the territory doesn’t want the help and the U.S. appears to have no hospital ships available to send.
Friday Amazon published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies" in a Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December. Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims." And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false." The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action. We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | would I need the footpad connector or the motor connector, or would my xrc already have ones that would work? Also, is their tool kit really needed? [link] [comments] |
Promise comes as minister admits to ‘uncertainty’ about new 15% levy on imports from around the world
The US will not back out of tariff deals it has already sealed with countries around the world, including the UK, the EU, Japan, Switzerland and others, Donald Trump’s trade representative Jamieson Greer said on Sunday.
The US supreme court ruled on Friday that many of the tariffs imposed by the US president were illegal, leading Trump to announce a new 15% global tariff on all imports the next day.
Continue reading...American fractured tibia in downhill last week
Skier is recovering from injuries in US
Lindsey Vonn has hit back at the “haters” who were critical of her decision to take part at this year’s Winter Olympics.
The American crashed out early in her run during the women’s downhill competition during the opening weekend of this month’s Games. She suffered a complex tibia fracture and underwent multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment earlier this week.
Continue reading...U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, made his comments during an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that aired Friday.
The reversal came after discussions with the White House and TSA, an official said. DHS will still suspend the Global Entry program as the partial shutdown continues.
US president calls for removal of Susan Rice as streaming platform pursues takeover of Warner Bros Discovery
Donald Trump has told Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice from its board or “face the consequences”, while the streaming platform is locked in an extraordinary corporate battle to take control of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).
In comments posted on his Truth Social platform, the US president described Rice – who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama and UN ambassador and White House adviser under Joe Biden – as a “political hack” and accused her of having “no talent or skills”.
Continue reading...In April 2024, college student Sade Robinson, 19, went on a first date and never came home. Her car was found set on fire 3 miles from her apartment. Using data from an app on her phone, law enforcement began to piece together where she went — and who she was with.
The Pennsylvania governor and Democratic star is embroiled in a dispute with his neighbor that has escalated into an unlikely political saga.
Friedrich Merz to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing, with goods worth €251bn traded between two countries in 2025
China has overtaken the US as Germany’s top trading partner, figures have shown, as the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, prepares for his first visit to Beijing since taking office.
Merz will head to China on Tuesday and will be welcomed with military honours on Wednesday in Beijing by the prime minister, Li Qiang, before later meeting the president, Xi Jinping, for talks over dinner, his spokesperson Sebastian Hille said.
Continue reading...Kaillie Humphries Armbruster won her sixth career Olympic medal, tying fellow American Elana Meyers Taylor for the most by any woman in bobsled history.
A 19-year-old Newark woman was killed in a crash on Interstate 95 north of Wilmington on Friday night.
Delaware is under a state of emergency as a blizzard bears down on the state.
The US supreme court ruled against the president. Let’s hope the court removes its pro-Trump glasses on other issues and stands up for the rule of law
There’s no denying that the US supreme court’s long-awaited ruling that overturned Donald Trump’s global tariffs is important, and if the ruling turns out to be a harbinger that the court is ready to abandon its startling sycophancy toward the US president, it could prove hugely important. The ruling this Friday is the first time during Trump’s second term that the justices have struck down one of his policies. Not only that, the policy they struck down is Trump’s signature economic policy – he has used tariffs to bash, lord over and terrorize dozens of other countries and make himself the King of the Economic Jungle.
In the court’s main opinion, joined by three conservative justices and three liberals, the chief justice, John Roberts, used some sharp language to slap down Trump’s tariffs, writing that the constitution specifically gives Congress, not the president, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. (Roberts noted that tariffs are indeed taxes.)
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
Continue reading...Kareem’s Daily Quote: When power meets principle
A Historic Arrest Signals the End of Royal Immunity: Randy Andy goes to jail
A Promise Made, A Promise Broken: Health‑Care T…
Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Editor’s Note: Monday morning’s State Employee Benefits Committee was canceled due to inclement weather. Tuesday and Wednesday’s Joint Finance Committee hearings also were rescheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25, and Monday, March 2.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, was scheduled to meet on Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs.
That meeting was canceled due to inclement weather, and a reschedule date has not yet been shared.
Those changes could mean employees covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.
The SEBC previously met on Friday, Feb. 13, to introduce the potential coverage changes.
At that meeting, the committee heard multiple different options that could save the state money, but they would pass costs onto consumers using the drugs in the form of higher co-pays, almost four or five times higher than the current rate.
According to a presentation at the meeting, members pay $32 for a 30-day supply of the drug or $64 for a 90-day supply. If new copays are added to the state plan, those numbers would jump to $120 and $200, respectively.
Another option would be to completely eliminate coverage of the drugs for state employees who use them for weight loss, which officials suspect would save the state $179 million over the next three years.
If the state continues its coverage as is, the SEBC estimates it would cost nearly $211 million by 2029.
📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee meeting was canceled due to inclement weather.
The Public Service Commission, the state body charged with regulating utility services, will hear public comment on Wednesday about Delmarva Power’s proposed “large-load tariff” for energy-hungry facilities like data centers to ensure they do not shift energy infrastructure costs onto other ratepayers.
The tariff, if approved by the PSC, would set a new electricity rate for data centers and require them to pay deposits to cover the engineering and equipment cost of electrical infrastructure improvements.
The proposal comes months after Delmarva revealed it is working with five data center developers whose projects would demand a combined 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy.
The peak load, or demand for electricity, of the entire state is 2.3 GW in the winter and 2.7 GW in the summer, according to PJM.
That means the proposed data centers would together almost double the power demand for all businesses and homes in the First State.
📍 The Public Service Commission will hear comments at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the PSC Hearing Room, located at 841 Silver Lake Blvd. in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Editor’s Note: Tuesday and Wednesday’s Joint Finance Committee hearings were rescheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25, and Monday, March 2. See below for the updated JFC hearing schedule.
State lawmakers’ budget hearings will continue this week with testimony from the Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Transportation, two of the largest state departments by budget size.
Lawmakers will also review the Fire Prevention Commission’s budget proposal.
The Joint Finance Committee’s budget review for DHSS will span the entirety of both Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings, as the department oversees a swath of large-scale programs used by many Delawareans, including Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
📍 The Joint Finance Committee will meet from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover.
Tuesday’s hearing was canceled. Wednesday’s hearing also was canceled.
Thursday’s hearing will feature orientation for the Department of Health and Social Services and testimony from the Fire Prevention Commission in the morning, and testimony from the Department of Transportation in the afternoon.
Beginning at 9 a.m. on Monday, March 2, the JFC will hear from Department of Health and Social Services Secretary Christen Linke Young, as well as department-wide presentations.
For information about virtual attendance for the Tuesday meeting, click here. For the Wednesday meeting, click here. And for the Thursday meeting, click here.
The Public Education Funding Commission, created by the General Assembly to recommend how dollars should be distributed to Delaware schools, will meet on Monday to discuss the “legislative timeline” of its proposed hybrid funding formula.
The hybrid proposal incorporates the state’s traditional framework of distributing money on a per-student basis with one that allocates dollars based on student needs.
The commission will also discuss local education funding models, comparing Delaware’s referendum model to that of other states.
The commission’s work to reform public education spending comes after Gov. Matt Meyer made the issue a pillar of his gubernatorial campaign.
📍 The Public Education Funding Commission will meet virtually at 4 p.m. Monday. For more details, click here.
Nick Stonesifer and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.
The post Get Involved: GLP-1 coverage, data center regulations, budget review, and more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Two 16-year-olds committed an armed robbery in a Newark apartment, assaulted the victim and stole his car, police said.
The two-day summit in San Diego convenes leaders in AI, power electronics, and future energy, plus an optional technical tour focused on battery energy storage.
Feb. 20, 2026 — San Diego State University will host the 2026 AI x Energy Summit in San Diego on March 19–20, 2026, bringing together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of AI, power electronics, and clean energy—with a specific focus on emerging demands of AI-era data center power and the enabling role of solid-state power conversion and protection.
AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20. Image credit: leolintang/Shutterstock.
The summit will be held at the Tula Community Center, 5110 East Campus Drive, San Diego, CA 92182. Lodging suggestions include downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, or near campus, with convenient access to SDSU via the MTS Green Line Trolley.
The program features plenary talks, panels on topics such as solid-state transformers, energy for AI data centers, and nuclear fusion, a poster session, and an awards ceremony recognizing posters and leaders in AI-energy. Registration ends on February 28, 2026.
This year’s keynote speakers include:
This year’s sponsors include Vertiv, SDG&E, Novos Power, DG Matrix, WattEV, and RockeTruck.
The summit welcomes sponsor participation and provides sponsor packages. Interested organizations can contact the conference chair via the event website.
Event Links
More from HPCwire: SDSU Women in STEM Seminar to Host Public Lecture by Kathy Yelick on March 5
Source: SDSU
The post SDSU to Convene AI and Energy Researchers at 2026 AI x Energy Summit, March 19–20 appeared first on HPCwire.
Feb. 20, 2026 — T-Labs, the research and development division within Deutsche Telekom, and Qunnect have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over a commercial network in Berlin, marking a major milestone in advancing deployable quantum technologies on existing telecommunications infrastructure. By using newly commercial technologies to overcome instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure, T-Labs and Qunnect demonstrated how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks.
Credit: Shutterstock
During trials conducted in a real-world telecom environment in January 2026, the team achieved quantum teleportation over 30 km of commercial fiber cables. The experiment was performed using Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware and Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, representing the first practical test of core components required for a future teleportation service. For this demonstration.
Paving the Way for the Future Quantum Internet
Quantum teleportation is a key building block for the future quantum internet enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.
“Our fiber optic network is quantum ready,” says Abdu Mudesir, Telekom Board Member for Product and Technology. “In Berlin we have now proven that quantum information can be transmitted over 30 kilometers of commercial Telekom fiber optics outside of a laboratory. This is done in parallel with regular data traffic and with a very high average accuracy of 90 percent. With quantum teleportation, we are laying the technical foundation for networking quantum computers over longer distances in the future and pooling computing power in more than one location. This will create the next generation of secure communication and a building block for Europe’s technological sovereignty.”
“Teleportation is a novel tool for moving information around networks leveraging quantum physics,” said Mael Flament, Chief Technology Officer at Qunnect. “We are showing the building blocks of teleportation can operate inside a real network, in real racks, under operator control, advancing it from a laboratory experiment to something a telecommunications provider can deploy.”
Quantum teleportation unlocks new applications for quantum networks including quantum cryptography, distributed quantum computing, secure cloud-based quantum services paving the way for quantum data centers, and networks of highly sensitive quantum sensors.
The Demonstration
The trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30-km fiber loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fiber testbed. Qunnect’s Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons for distribution over telecom fiber, along with a polarization compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fiber, enabling high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes. As a result, the teams achieved teleportation fidelities at an average of 90%, according to the preliminary publication of the data. At its peak, an accuracy of 95 percent was achieved.
Importantly, the teleportation part is done at a wavelength (795nm) essential for many platforms such as neutral-atom quantum computers, atomic clocks, and various quantum sensors, paving the path for connecting such systems to the telecom infrastructure for the future quantum internet.
The achievement builds directly on a series of earlier field trials carried out by the same partners, which progressively demonstrated quantum networking over metropolitan fiber links. Qunnect, Deutsche Telekom, and other partners will extend this demonstration to multi-node teleportation configurations, expanding the distance across which they will transfer quantum states. This expansion will evaluate broader deployment and next generation use cases within a metro-scale carrier network infrastructure.
For those who would like to dive deeper, the results of the experiment are published at: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16613
More from HPCwire: Qunnect and Cisco Demonstrate Metro-Scale, High-Speed Quantum Entanglement Swapping Over Commercial Fiber
Source: Deutsche Telekom
The post Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect Successfully Test Quantum Teleportation Over Live Berlin Network appeared first on HPCwire.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) and Industrial Technologies Office (ITO) announced on Feb. 19 selections totaling $4.8 million for 12 projects that will improve America’s manufacturing competitiveness by harnessing the processing power of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Funded through DOE’s High-Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program within its High-Performance Computing for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the selected teams will work with staff from one or more DOE national laboratories to advance the development and optimization of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and digital simulations to address their material design and manufacturing challenges. The solutions developed through HPC4Mfg help companies improve the performance of their technologies and/or the efficiency of their processes.
Learn more about the selected projects here.
HPC4Mfg is funded by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. HPC4EI is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Visit the HPC4EI website for additional information.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy
The post DOE Awards $4.8M to 12 HPC Projects Supporting US Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.
US Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariffs: Early analysis from Chatham House experts Expert comment thilton.drupal
Chatham House analysts give their initial reactions to the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling, its likely impact on President Donald Trump’s economic agenda, and his angry response to the ruling.
The US Supreme Court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs in a long-awaited ruling that will be seen as a blow for the president’s economic agenda.
By 6-3 the court found that President Trump exceeded his authority by using a law reserved for national emergencies.
Trump called the ruling ‘deeply disappointing’ and said he will impose global tariffs of 15 per cent. Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts, who are are monitoring developments.
The head-spinning changes in US tariff policy in the last few days – first the Supreme Court decision invalidating the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), then President Donald Trump’s imposition of a 10 per cent across the board tariff under Section 122 of US trade law, followed just a day later with the president upping that duty to 15 per cent – have left the American and foreign business communities, US consumers, and foreign governments with more questions than answers.
Any sighs of relief in the wake of the Court’s decision should be tempered by a new reality.
The effective global U.S. tariff rate was 13.7 per cent before the Court decision, according to the Yale Budget Lab. With Trump’s new Section 122 action duties will now be 8 per cent. But in January 2025, before the Trump administration came to power, the effective US tariff rate was roughly 3 per cent. More than a doubling of American protectionism is better than a quadrupling, but it is still higher than at any time in more than 60 years.
It is highly likely some affected party will challenge the use of Section 122, which has never been invoked by any president in its half century on the books.
The law stipulates this power is to be used for a balance of payments problem. But the Department of Justice lawyers claimed in the IEEPA case that: ‘Nor does [122] have any obvious application here, where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.’ This awkward statement may come back to haunt the Trump Administration.
For those outside the United States, a major question is how the many trade and investment deals Washington has imposed on countries around the world will be affected by the scrambling of US tariff policy.
The Financial Times was quick to opine that: ‘Analysts say the risk of retaliation is likely to deter countries from seeking to backtrack on already agreed deals.’
But the Japan Times saw it differently: ‘Trump’s treasured negotiating edge dulled by tariff defeat…With a stroke of a pen, the U.S. Supreme Court wreaked havoc on President Donald Trump’s favorite method of wielding leverage over other countries.’
At the very least, the uncertainty created by the Court’s decision may lead to more foot dragging by other nations as Washington attempts to finalize the details of its framework trade and investment deals with the EU, Japan, India and others. If they do, who knows what America’s hair-triggered President may do.
It is a fallacy to assume that Trump will play by the rules. The 122 tariffs expire in 150 days. To be extended, Congress must vote to do so. Congress has shown no appetite for tariffs, especially with Congressional mid-term elections in November.
The Administration claims they can use other trade powers – Section 301 that deals with ‘unfair’ trade practices and Section 232 that allows duties for ‘national security’ purposes – to replace the 122 tariffs.
But the scope of these sections is not as broad as an across the board 15 per cent tariff. Once this becomes apparent to the president, his past behavior suggests he may simply extend the 122 tariffs or use his 301 and 232 authority in unprecedented and arguably illegal ways, challenging importers to ‘sue me’. As the IEEPA suit showed, this could take months.
Finally, it is not clear that the invocation of Section 122 and its 15 per cent tariffs will help the president politically. Just before the Court ruled, the Washington Post and ABC News conducted a public opinion survey showing that 64 per cent of Americans disapproved of how Trump was handling tariffs on imported goods.
And in the wake of the Court decision a snap YouGov poll found that 60 per cent of Americans strongly approve of striking down the IEEPA tariffs.
So the bottom line is that US protectionism will continue, and it may be even more chaotic, unpredictable and disruptive.
Bruce Stokes is a US-based non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Read his full biography here.
At first glance, this is a more comprehensive repudiation of the Trump administration’s tariff policies than many (including me) expected.
The language of the majority opinion appears to include an attempt to close off some of the other unilateral options that President Trump had said he had at his disposal.
I do wonder if the more recent rounds of purely geopolitical tariff threats influenced the decision. It may reflect both the breadth of corporate support for the lawsuit and concern with Trump’s recent rounds of tariff threats, including against Europe over Greenland.
The SCOTUS ruling covers President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ baseline 10 per cent tariff that he announced on 2 April 2025, higher tariffs on many countries, and fentanyl and other ‘national security’ tariffs.
However it does NOT cover steel/aluminum and many other product-specific tariffs issued as a result of a “232” or “301” investigation. (‘232’ and ‘301’ refer to specific sections of decades-old trade laws passed by Congress, which authorize the executive branch to impose tariffs in specific circumstances, after an investigation. 232 tariffs may include national security as a justification.)
President Trump still has lots of ways to impose tariffs. He’s not going to back down.
I’m very struck by this phrase from Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent: ‘So the Court’s decision is not likely to greatly restrict presidential tariff authority going forward.’
The court also did not mandate refunds of the tariffs collected to date, either to consumers or to manufacturers reliant on tariffed imports.
Does that suggest that Chief Justice Roberts identified an approach to the law that feels like a momentous defense of the Constitution but has relatively little practical effect?
Or will this ruling presage a vibe shift that gets the administration to change course?
Senator Bernie Moreno, the senior Republican senator from Ohio, has called on Congress to use reconciliation to enact the president’s tariffs.
This would presumably be challenging given that Republicans in both houses have joined Democrats in opposing President Trump’s tariffs.
Heather Hurlburt served as Chief of Staff to US Trade Representative Katherine Tai from 2022 to 2024. Read her full Chatham House biography here.
The 20 February US Supreme Court 6-3 decision on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is a significant fork in the tariff-driven trade policy road taken exactly 13 months ago by President Donald Trump when he announced his America First Trade Policy.
It does not, however, mark an end to his expansive use of Executive authority to shape his engagement with global trading partners.
In his combative reaction to the ruling, the president previewed alternative legal authorities that his administration will use as a basis for continued tariff action, including a new 10 per cent global tariff under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows for temporary import surcharges or import quotas to address balance-of-payments issues.
With details on scope, applicability and implementation of additional actions still unclear, US trade partners around the world will scramble in the coming days to determine the potential impact on their respective deals or framework agreements reached with Washington. Uncertainty will continue to be the name of the game.
The ruling comes on the heels of the release of the US Census Bureau’s 2025 international trade data confirming Mexico and Canada’s place as the first and second US trading partners, export markets and sources of imports, and as the three countries undertake the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)’s first joint review.
In North America, with intraregional annual trade at almost 2 trillion dollars and millions of jobs and investment decisions linked to the continuity of the agreement, a great deal is at stake.
In its initial reaction to the ruling, the government of Canada stated that it reinforces its view that the IEEPA tariffs ‘are unjustified’. Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy said he would be reaching out to his US counterparts and await more details on the announced 10 per cent global tariff. Both countries were subject to IEEPA tariffs (35 per cent on Canada and 25 per cent on Mexico) on non-USMCA compliant exports, in addition to various Section 232 sectorial tariffs which continue to apply.
It’s important to keep in mind that roughly 85 per cent of massive Canadian and Mexican USMCA-compliant exports – totalling approximately 780 billion dollars – maintains tariff-free access to the US market.
Beyond specific negotiating strategies with Washington, Ottawa and Mexico City will continue to focus on reducing uncertainty and preserving their current relative competitive advantages in a rapidly changing tariff environment.
Ambassador Julián Ventura is a career diplomat, currently on leave from the Mexican Foreign Service, with over 33 years in public service. Read his full Chatham House biography here.
The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs may have removed one instrument from his tariff toolkit, but it has done nothing to make US trade policy more predictable. If anything, it may herald even greater volatility.
Trump retains several alternative instruments now that tariffs imposed under the IEEPA have been ruled unlawful. Each entails procedural hurdles, evidentiary thresholds, time limits and litigation risks. Yet, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in his dissenting opinion, ‘the Court’s decision might not prevent Presidents from imposing most, if not all, of these same sorts of tariffs under other statutory authorities.’
That Trump, visibly angered by the ruling, quoted Kavanaugh’s statement not just once but twice suggests that he is not reconsidering his long-held belief in the benefits of tariffs. He has already pledged to introduce a new global tariff of 15 per cent, while signalling that further measures may follow.
For US trade partners – including several that negotiated agreements intended to reduce IEEPA tariffs on their exports – the outlook is unclear. The uncertain status of those arrangements, together with the prospect of new tariffs, now adds an additional layer of unpredictability to an already unstable picture.
Canada, for its part, gains little from the removal of the IEEPA tariffs, since goods compliant with the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement were already exempt. Meanwhile, the tariffs inflicting real pain on key Canadian sectors – including autos, steel, aluminium and lumber – remain in place because they rest on different statutory authorities. And any new US global tariffs may prove more damaging than the IEEPA measures if they eliminate existing exemptions.
The logic of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, in other words, remains unchanged: the US is no longer a predictable or reliable partner, leaving its jilted allies with little choice but to diversify their trade partnerships and invest in their own resilience.
Canada-based Roland Paris is director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and former foreign policy adviser to the prime minister of Canada. Read his full Chatham House biography here.
Today, Spotlight Delaware unveiled a months-long project taking an in-depth look at the data underpinning the state’s first property reassessment in nearly 40 years.
Spotlight’s analysis underscored the concerns raised for months by Wilmington residents, community leaders and city officials: predominantly Black, brown and low-income communities were hit hardest by rising property values and tax bills spurred by the reassessment.
While many expected reassessment to bring new relief to some of the state’s lowest income residents, it actually raised their tax burdens.
The data for the project was compiled through Freedom of Information Act requests made by Spotlight Delaware and mapped in partnership with Tech Impact’s Data Lab.
The following Q & A is meant to inform readers about the map and be transparent about the choices made by Spotlight Delaware and Tech Impact’s Data Lab in its design.
We recognized that the reassessment of every property in Delaware was a seismic event intended to reshape how we fund government services and our school districts, but there was no public accounting for the results of that work in a way that would be easily understood by the public.
We set out to understand how communities fared in the reassessment and whether the micro-level results matched the public beliefs about Delaware.
Beginning in September 2025, Spotlight Delaware submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the master assessment data from New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties.
In the cases of New Castle and Sussex counties, we acquired parcel-level data from the 2024 tax year and 2025 tax year to compare the work of the reassessment.
Because Kent County completed its work a year earlier, however, its data is from the 2023 tax year and 2024 tax year.
In order to translate hundreds of thousands of parcel-level details into a readable map, we contracted with Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a Newark-based initiative that helps government agencies and nonprofits leverage data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for social good.
It cost Spotlight Delaware about $10,000 in contract costs on top of significant staff time to complete the project.
We used Census tracts, which provide a detailed and statistically reliable view of neighborhoods across the state while preserving privacy.
We could have used ZIP codes, which more people may be familiar with, but they often include communities of very different types, which could skew the results.
These maps are constructed as heat maps, but unlike most heat maps that you have seen before, blue areas don’t always signify that a reduction has occurred.
Because Delaware hadn’t done a reassessment in decades, all property values were set to rise. So the heat map conveys the change in value relative to the median value in the dataset.
That means that red areas are higher than a median value while blue areas are lower than a median value. Most properties saw increases in assessed value due to the nearly 40-year-long gap between reassessments.
We chose to use a Census tract’s median value – or the value at the absolute center of its data set – because it more accurately depicts how a community member might feel about the reassessment.
Using the average value, or the value of all property divided by the number of properties, allows a few large increases or decreases in a data set to skew how it would appear to the public.
The first map is the assessment map, which shows the percentage change for the total assessed value of property in a given Census tract from before reassessment to after.
The second map is the taxation map, which shows the percentage change for the total taxes levied for property in a given Census tract. That includes county, school district and municipal taxes.
The third map is the tax burden map, which shows the percentage change for the calculation of taxes levied versus the assessed value of property for a given Census tract. This is a calculation of what percentage of property value is paid in taxes annually. Essentially, the tax burden map showcases places in Delaware that were more or less impacted by the ramifications of reassessment.
That is due in part to how the southern counties previously accounted for their tax rates. Before the reassessment, Sussex County used 50% of a property’s assessed 1976 value for its tax rate, while Kent County used 60% of a property’s assessed 1987 value.
On the other hand, New Castle County previously used 100% of a property’s assessed 1983 value for its tax rate.
Now all three counties will use 100% of assessed value for its tax rates, which means that the southern counties saw bigger jumps to catch up.
We did. Areas where there is a lot of new construction could have skewed the results if newly improved properties were left in our datasets.
We limited the dataset to properties that existed in both the pre- and post-reassessment years to ensure we were only tracking changes to existing properties.
We did not. We aimed to check the work produced by Tyler Technologies – which turned over the data seen here as its completed work – not the government intervention that followed.
The decision to increase the taxation on commercial properties was a political reaction to concerns by homeowners and lawmakers, and was only a short-term fix that is due to expire this year.
Our map does not go down to the parcel level, but users can get a sense of how their larger community fares compared to others.
There are other available resources to determine your property assessment and tax bill, and those of neighboring properties.
One such website, MyDETax.com, allows you to compare individual parcels.
Our map is not meant to be representative of every property in a jurisdiction, but it allows for a larger comparative look for how different areas of the state are assessed and taxed. The results for each Census precinct is representative of the median property, but that means virtually all others will be some degree above or below it.
The post Spotlight Delaware’s Reassessment Map Explained appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has made a series of claims about the economy, a topic that should feature prominently in his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 24.
“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said at a White House press briefing on Jan. 20, adding later that “America is booming.” He made similar comments the following day, asserting that “we were a dead country” a year ago.
But his economic boasts include false or misleading claims, and he sometimes pushes an incorrect narrative of an abrupt change in some economic indicators since he came back to the White House.
As preparation for what we might hear in Tuesday night’s speech, we offer a guide to a dozen of Trump’s recent claims about the economy, most of which we’ve written about before. They touch on inflation, economic growth, manufacturing, wages, jobs, the deficit, stock market and more.
Proud of federal data showing that economic growth in the second and third quarters of 2025 exceeded expectations, Trump in Iowa on Jan. 27 falsely claimed that “under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of. They’ve never had them before.”
After declining by an annualized rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the three months from January to March, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and at a rate of 4.4% in the third quarter, according to estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
But those were not record-setting numbers. They were the largest quarterly increases since the economy expanded at a rate of 4.7% in the third quarter of 2023, under President Joe Biden.
As we wrote this month, the quarterly growth record is 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, which was at the beginning of the economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, according to BEA estimates back to 1947, the record was 16.7% growth in the first quarter of 1950. Yearly growth in GDP has averaged about 2.75% over the last 50 years.
Trump told NBC News in a Feb. 4 interview: “We have, it was just announced, more jobs right now occupied in the United States of America than at any time during its existence, 250 years. There are more people working today than at any time in the history of our country. Pretty good stat.”
While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions. This graph from BLS gives the long-term picture:
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump has frequently cited this hollow statistic about more people being employed than ever before during both his first and second terms, including during his State of the Union address in 2019.
In the NBC News interview, Trump repeated his false claim that he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country,” and added that “now we have almost no inflation.”
When Trump took office in January 2025, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump has repeatedly mocked Democrats for raising the issue of “affordability,” which Trump says he has since solved.
“Prices are way down. You don’t hear the Democrats talking about affordability anymore, which they caused the affordability problem, very badly,” Trump said on Feb. 6. “But you don’t hear that word. I haven’t heard that word spoken in a week and a half because they can’t speak because the prices are down.”
But overall prices are not down. As of January, one year into Trump’s second term, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%. However, that’s above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In the Jan. 20 press briefing at the White House, Trump falsely claimed to have “ended Biden stagflation,” which he said is “far worse than inflation.” The U.S. was “plagued by the nightmare of stagflation” under Biden, and now “we are witnessing the exact opposite,” Trump said at a World Economic Forum meeting on Jan. 21.
But, as we’ve written, economists told us that the U.S. economy under Biden did not experience stagflation, which Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us “refers to a sustained period of high inflation combined with weak or stagnant real economic growth, typically alongside rising unemployment.” He said that definition did not apply to the Biden economy.
Inflation was high during Biden’s first two years in office, then declined sharply in the last half of his presidency. “However, real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Handley said.
In addition, Aeimit Lakdawala, an associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University, told us that there has not been a complete economic turnaround under Trump.
“What we’re really seeing is a continuation of trends that were already well underway before Trump took office in January 2025,” Lakdawala said. He noted that the annual inflation rate is “modestly lower” under Trump, while the average annualized increase in real GDP under Trump is “a touch lower” than in Biden’s last two years. The unemployment rate, at 4.3% as of January, is also slightly higher than it was when Trump took office.
Trump has repeatedly boasted that the stock market has outperformed expectations. “Your 401(k)s are doing very well,” Trump said in a speech to military families in North Carolina on Feb. 13.
A Feb. 16 press release from the White House put some additional spin on the claim, saying the stock market has “rebounded strongly under President Trump’s leadership.” The release notes that the S&P 500 “surg[ed] nearly 40% from its early-year low.” That’s true. But the low in 2025 came just a few days after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2 that sent stock prices tumbling. Since then, stocks have rebounded and achieved new highs.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.5% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on Feb. 18, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
“And if you remember when I was first elected, everybody said, if I got it to 50,000, the Dow, or 7,000 with the S&P, if I got it to 50,000 with a Dow, that would be an amazing — that would be in four years from then, from the election,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 13.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,576 at the open of the market on Feb. 19.
But it’s misleading to suggest the stock market “rebounded strongly” under Trump. The stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P 500 grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump often boasts that everyone’s 401(k) retirement account has risen, only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
In a Feb. 6 gaggle with reporters, in which he claimed that “we’ve had massive price reductions,” Trump misleadingly said that “if you look at gasoline, $1.99 a gallon.” That was far from the national average price.
Gasoline prices are about 19 cents (or 6%) lower than they were when Trump took office, but, as of the week ending Feb. 9, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.90, nearly $1 more than Trump said, according to the Energy Information Administration. One week later, the average price was $2.92, as of the week ending Feb. 16.
There also were no states in which the average price was below $2 at the time of Trump’s claim. Oklahoma had the lowest average price at $2.36 per gallon on Feb. 6, according to AAA data. That state, at $2.29, also had the lowest average price on Feb. 18.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in an email that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 16 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.79 was the “most common U.S. gas price encountered by motorists.”
In a Jan. 27 press gaggle, Trump also claimed to have “made a lot of progress” on the “very, very high prices” that he inherited. “So, we have the groceries going down. We have the energy going down,” he said. That’s misleading.
While the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, has decreased since the start of Trump’s second term, average food prices overall are up — not down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it’s not clear what Trump is referring to. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
In his Jan. 30 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Trump exaggerated when he wrote that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.”
Budget deficits occur when federal spending exceeds revenue. The White House has said that Trump’s figure was calculated by comparing the cumulative budget deficit from February to November in 2025 with the combined deficit for the same 10 months in 2024.
But organizations that track the budget deficit typically compare deficits based on months in fiscal years, not calendar years. The $1.78 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which began on Oct. 1, 2024, and ended on Sept. 30, decreased about 2.3% from the $1.82 trillion budget gap in fiscal year 2024. (Trump alone was president for a full eight out of the 12 months in FY 2025.)
As of January, the budget deficit was down about 17% through the first four months of FY 2026 when compared with the same period in FY 2025. An increase in federal revenue, including from tariffs, contributed to the decline. On Feb. 9, the Congressional Budget Office said, “Customs duties, including tariff revenues, collected this year were more than four times the amount recorded in the first four months of last year, an increase of $90 billion.”
However, in its most recent long-term budget outlook, the CBO projected that the final FY 2026 budget deficit will end up being close to $1.9 trillion, higher than the deficit in FY 2025. That would be about $140 billion higher than the deficit that CBO projected for FY 2026 in January 2025, before any of Trump’s policies had been implemented.
Trump’s claim that he has “slashed our gaping trade deficit by a staggering 77%,” as he said Jan. 27 in Iowa, is misleading. In 2025, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services decreased by 0.2%, or about $2.1 billion, from 2024, according to data the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Feb. 19. The 2025 goods-and-services trade deficit of roughly $901.5 billion was the third largest going back to 1960.
Instead, as we wrote on Feb. 3, Trump’s claim appears to compare the monthly trade deficit in January 2025 to the deficit nine months later in October, a 16-year low. That’s a decrease of 77.6%, according to BEA figures revised this month. (The decrease from January to December was 45.2%.) But economic experts told us that comparing the trade deficit in one month to another is not preferable because monthly trade figures can be volatile.
For instance, in the first three months of 2025, the trade imbalance surged to between roughly $120 billion and $136 billion, as U.S. importers loaded up on foreign goods to get ahead of tariffs on imported products that Trump had proposed. Imports went back down after the tariffs went into effect, producing smaller trade deficits in the months later in the year.
“Large month-to-month swings are common, even in periods with no underlying structural change in trade policy or economic conditions,” Handley, at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email for our story. “For that reason, economists almost never evaluate claims about the ‘trade deficit’ based on comparisons between two individual months.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that “factory construction is up by 41%” under his second term. That’s misleading. The Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data, which the White House referred us to, shows that spending has declined since Trump took office.
The quarterly data show a 6.7% decline, while the drop was 7.3% on a monthly basis, from January 2025 to October, the latest data available.
As we’ve explained, the White House gets a 41% increase by comparing the monthly average from January to August 2025 with the yearly average for 2021 to 2024. But that methodology fails to take into account the 212% increase in factory construction spending over Biden’s four years, partly fueled by the 2022 CHIPS Act, which helped fund semiconductor manufacturing facilities and continues to affect construction spending. Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade association, told us that the manufacturing construction spending in 2025 is “largely due” to the CHIPS Act.
It’s worth noting that the economy lost 83,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first 12 months. In the year before he took office, the decline was 202,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has repeatedly mentioned the decline in real wages, meaning they are adjusted for inflation, over the four years of Biden’s presidency and the increase in real wages so far under his second term. It’s true that real average weekly earnings fell 4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, during Biden’s term, and they’ve gone up 1.9% in the year since January 2025. But Trump at times has left the misleading impression that this has been an abrupt turnaround. Over Biden’s last year, real wages went up 0.7%
On Jan. 13, Trump said: “After real wages plummeted by $3,000 under sleepy Joe Biden, real wages are up by $1,300 in less than one year under President Trump.” Later that month, he said that “wages have gone up … much faster” than inflation. With Biden, he said, “it was just the opposite. Wages in the United States in the last year have gone up.”
Wages rose faster than inflation over the last year-and-a-half of Biden’s presidency. They’ve outpaced inflation since June 2023, and they’ve continued to do so since Trump took office.
“It remains the case that both at the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is to say, inflation has been rising more slowly than wages have been,” Gary Burtless, a senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a phone interview when we wrote about this topic in December.
As for the specific dollar amounts Trump has mentioned — a $3,000 decline in real wages under Biden and a $1,300 increase under his term — the White House told us that’s based on weekly wage data from BLS that’s adjusted for inflation using the CPI-W, which is the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. It measures the change in prices for a basket of goods purchased by such workers, and it’s the index Social Security uses to calculate cost-of-living adjustments. Using that method, we got a decline of nearly $2,900 over Biden’s four years and an increase of about $1,400 for Trump’s first year ($1,363 to be exact), a figure that includes January data released this month.
Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, cautioned against looking at wage growth only over presidential terms, calling it “deeply misleading” because “macroeconomic cycles occasionally have huge effects that have nothing to do with presidential performance.”
Bivens noted that average wages jumped up during the COVID-19 pandemic when the unemployment rate also spiked as mainly low-wage workers lost their jobs. As those low-wage workers regained employment, “it had the effect of artificially lowering measured wages in the aggregate.” (Burtless also said the pandemic had this impact on wage data.)
“The lesson is that the proper way to measure macroeconomic variables like average wages is from business cycle peak to business cycle peak, not from the trough to a peak. That’s why, for example, we measure from 2019-2024 or 2025,” Bivens said.
But presidents of both parties are apt to take credit or cast blame for increases or declines in real wage growth.
The president continues to make the exaggerated boast that “we secured commitments for a record breaking plus $18 trillion” in “new investments,” as he said in Iowa in late January. In his pre-Super Bowl NBC News interview, Trump also made the claim, saying “$18 trillion is being invested in our country as we speak.” At times, he has attributed this to his policies on tariffs.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
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The post A Pre-SOTU Guide to Trump’s Economic Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Why are Middle Eastern governments lobbying against a US attack on Iran? Expert comment jon.wallace
Threat perceptions have changed. Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt all wish to avoid a war that would bring even more upheaval to the region.
Not long ago, most leaders in the Middle East were frustrated with the US for not taking a firmer stance towards Iran. Many regional elites were furious with the Obama administration for pursuing diplomacy with Tehran, adopting an accommodating stance, and prioritizing a nuclear deal, which culminated in the short-lived JCPOA.
The reason was clear: Iran was widely viewed as a major threat to regional stability.
Between 2003 and 2023 its influence had grown across the region. In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, Iraq came increasingly under Tehran’s influence, alongside Iran’s long-standing alliance with Syria (under the now deposed Assad regime), and its considerable clout in Lebanon wielded through Hezbollah. Conflict in Yemen saw Iran’s influence in the country deepening through its alliance with the Houthis. Iran, therefore, had created a powerful network of state and non-state allies across the region, commonly referred to as the ‘Axis of Resistance’.
This Iran-centric network was previously a highly potent way for Tehran to capitalize on conflicts and instabilities and deepen its influence. Arab leaders feared this network: King Abdullah of Jordan portrayed it as an emerging ‘Shia Crescent’, following the Iraq invasion.
Yet today, with a real prospect of US military action against Iran, regional states are pursuing energetic diplomacy to dissuade the US from attacking. Oman, Qatar, and Turkey have all ramped up their efforts to mediate. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also advocated for de-escalation and diplomacy. What explains this striking reversal?
Iran’s power and ambition across the region is diminished, and the prospect of an Iran-centric order has receded. For Middle Eastern leaders, the threats have changed: the greatest risks are now an expansionist and aggressive Israel, and the chaos of a potentially collapsed Iranian state.
The Axis of Resistance, once a powerful network, is increasingly transforming into a resistance without an axis. It has been severely damaged since Hamas’s cross-border attacks of 7 October 2023, the war in Gaza, and a sequence of Israeli military campaigns.
Hezbollah has been degraded in Lebanon by relentless Israeli attacks. Assad has been toppled in Syria. The Iraqi Shia militias and Houthis in Yemen are under increasing pressure. Iran itself has been weakened by the damage to its network, the 12-day war with Israel, and the US strike on its nuclear facility. That, in turn has diminished the Iranian threat to regional states.
Conversely, Israel’s expansionism and unpredictability have grown, and increasingly alarm countries in its near neighbourhood.
Its September 2025 attack on Doha in particular indicated a willingness by Israel to breach commonly held understandings about regional security and the US security umbrella, amplifying the Gulf’s threat perception emanating from Israel.
The prevailing view across the region is that they have overestimated the Iranian threat, and underestimated the Israeli one. The less the region’s leaders perceive a threat from Iran, the more they will feel threatened by Israel and seek to counterbalance its power.
The changing nature of regional states’ threat perceptions informs their strategy towards Iran. Broadly speaking, there are three main policy approaches: regime change, containment, and policy-based pushback.
The US and Israel remain wedded to the first two approaches. There were indeed times when some regional states favoured elements of these approaches too. As late as 2018, during Trump’s first term, the US tried to midwife the stillborn Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), commonly known as the Arab NATO, composed of the six Gulf states plus Egypt and Jordan as a bulwark against Iran.
But in the post-7 October context, the regime change and containment policies hardly find any receptive ears amongst the Arab states.
Regime change, through a war, is viewed as highly dangerous. There is no organized, nation-wide, popular and credible opposition in Iran, and the regime and state are so intertwined, any regime collapse raises the prospect of a state collapse – or a regime that metamorphizes into something even more militarized.
The repercussions of a state collapse would far exceed what the Middle East has experienced as a result of conflict in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, whether in the form of instability, migration, radicalism, the proliferation of armed groups, or regional spillover.
And Iran’s demographic composition, with its sizeable ethnic minorities concentrated in specific areas of the country, heightens fears that the country could become internally fragmented.
Plus, it is widely believed among regional leaders that an Iran knocked out of the equation will embolden Israel to attempt to reshape the region in its image – something that is an anathema to most regional states.
Trump’s lack of clarity regarding the scale and aim of any military option further heightens regional fears about the implications of a potential military strike.
Containment of Iran was one of the central elements of US-backed regional initiatives, such as the Abraham Accords, which were premised on the idea of an order built on Arab-Israeli cooperation within a US-centric framework.
This containment logic was probably more applicable to Israeli policy than to the Arab-Gulf states. But Arab-Gulf countries increasingly dismiss the strategy. In the Middle East, containment-based policies have seldom achieved the intended outcomes. They failed to contain and instead contributed to increased regional polarization and fragmentation.
Given the high cost and danger linked to the first two options, regional states have increasingly adopted the policy-based approach towards Iran. That means opposing and pushing back against certain Iranian policies rather than seeking regime change or a broad containment. In the ongoing US–Iran dispute, Tehran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, and regional network and policy are the core elements.
Regional states oppose a US strike on Iran as a means to resolve these issues – but are concerned by them too. Opposition to Iran’s proxy network is a common policy position that unifies most regional countries. Similarly, these states do not want to see a nuclear Iran, although they do not believe this is likely to happen anytime soon.
Conscious of regional concerns about the core elements of the US-Iranian negotiations, Tehran has a limited appetite for a diplomatic approach that involved not only the US and Iran but also regional states, as proposed by Turkey. Another possible reason for Iran’s opposition to a broader diplomatic track is that, if diplomacy fails in a bilateral negotiation, Iran can blame the US’s bad faith: whereas a wider format might see regional states assign part of the blame to Iranian intransigence.
Saudi–UAE Tensions: Yemen and Regional Implications 5 March 2026 — 1:00PM TO 2:15PM Anonymous (not verified) Online
Panellists examine how tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi reflect broader divergences in regional strategy, security priorities, and approaches to influence.
Panellists examine how tensions between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi reflect broader divergences in regional strategy, security priorities, and approaches to influence.
In the final days of 2025, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), once key partners in the Yemen coalition, became more visible as differences over the conflict’s endgame resurfaced. A central source of friction was their opposing relationships with local actors, particularly the UAE’s support for the Southern Transitional Council (STC), whose push for southern autonomy conflicted with Saudi Arabia’s backing of Yemen’s internationally recognized government and its preference for preserving territorial unity. As Saudi Arabia intensified efforts to stabilize the front lines and advance a political settlement, the UAE’s announcement of a full withdrawal from Yemen brought these underlying disagreements into sharper focus.
Panellists will discuss how the episode underscores not only differing assessments of Yemen’s political future and security architecture but also broader divergences in regional strategy that had been developing between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in recent years. Speakers will also discuss how the Yemen file became one arena in which evolving economic ambitions, security priorities, and approaches to regional influence have increasingly shaped the relationship between the two Gulf states, with implications likely to extend beyond the conflict itself.
For a month, Michael Rectenwald had been trying to get Nick Fuentes to notice him. Rectenwald had a new political action committee devoted to anti-Zionism, and he hoped the far-right influencer would promote it to his legions of perpetually online, often antisemitic fans. But Rectenwald, a former New York University professor and one-time presidential hopeful, had struggled to stand out to the ascendant Fuentes, who has come to symbolize the formerly fringe extremes of the online right. So in October, Rectenwald posted something sure to catch Fuentes’s eye: “Nick has sold out to the cabal.”
It worked. “Fuck you,” Fuentes wrote back.
This was Rectenwald’s shot. He apologized, calling Fuentes “a brilliant guy.” He reposted an uncannily gorgeous, computer-generated woman in a cross necklace and blazer encouraging the two men to “drop the beef.” She sat in front of an American flag and six light-up letters spelling “AZAPAC,” the acronym for Rectenwald’s new group. If Fuentes would just endorse it, Rectenwald promised, he’d “take it all back.”
Rectenwald launched the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee in August, vowing to fight to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and root out pro-Israel influence in Congress. AZAPAC aims to raise money to unseat pro-Israel legislators in the coming midterm elections, targeting some of the main recipients of cash from influential groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel.
It’s a goal that might sound appealing for the electoral left, whose members have long struggled to make meaningful progress on Palestinian rights in Washington, D.C., largely because of the strong grip the pro-Israel lobby holds on U.S. politicians. And as Israel’s genocide in Gaza stretches into a third year, AZAPAC’s policy goals may tap into a political energy currently unaddressed by either major party: growing anti-Israel sentiment on the right.
Though the Republican party loudly backs Israel and its war effort, far-right online spaces are growing increasingly critical of Israel. While accusations of antisemitism from the pro-Israel mainstream often dog Israel’s critics on the left, they appear as little cause for concern to far-right figures and their followers. As the nonpartisan AZAPAC works to sway the 2026 midterms, Rectenwald’s group will test whether candidates across the political spectrum will be similarly pressed on the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The AZAPAC founder has attempted to connect with openly antisemitic figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who famously praised Hitler. Rectenwald is a regular on The Stew Peters Show, which streams on the Peter Thiel and JD Vance-funded YouTube alternative Rumble, where the host has used slurs to describe Jewish and Black people — to no objection from Rectenwald. He’s courted support from popular manosphere influencer Dan Bilzerian, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has falsely claimed Jewish people are behind DEI policies, transgender identity, and “open borders.” AZAPAC is helping fund at least one candidate who is a Hitler apologist and another who has participated in white nationalist demonstrations.
In a conversation with The Intercept, Rectenwald made clear he’s aware such affiliations could be detrimental to his cause. He said he is no longer seeking the support of Fuentes, though he remains interested in his fan base — they’re “more sincere than him on some things” — and that he was unaware of “the depth of” Bilzerian’s antisemitic views, which are well–documented online.
Asked about Peters’s language, Rectenwald told The Intercept he would no longer appear on his show, then reversed and said he didn’t want to “throw him under the bus.” Peters, Rectenwald added, has “helped us quite a bit.”
Affiliating with such figures perpetuates harmful and often violent rhetoric toward Jewish people, antisemitism and hate speech experts told The Intercept, and in the most extreme cases, conspiracy theories can motivate violence, as occurred when a white nationalist shooter massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
These antisemitic allyships also risk undermining legitimate criticism of the state of Israel — a heightened liability at a time when the federal government and its pro-Israel allies have launched largely spurious claims of antisemitism against advocates on the left who support Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide.
“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders,” said Ben Lorber, an author and researcher of antisemitism and white Christian nationalism. “It stands to really harm the movement.”
“If we give any quarter to antisemitism anywhere near our movements, we are opening ourselves up to the charges from Israel’s defenders.”
Rectenwald appears to understand what he’s risking. After The Intercept reached out to AZAPAC-endorsed candidates for this story, two rejected the group’s backing and were scrubbed from the site, and a third threatened to do the same. Rectenwald accused The Intercept of trying to sink his PAC.
Rectenwald himself has used language commonly associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories of global Jewish control, and he argues that other Israel critics embrace similar language. Online, he regularly refers to “the Jewish mafia” and “Jewish elites,” and last April, he self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” as he said on a podcast, but Amazon barred him from using the title.
“We don’t use the same language and talk about the same things with the same terms,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, referring to Peters. And yet, he said, “I do believe he’s doing pretty good work in terms of exposing the Zionist network and what it’s up to.” He said a significant portion of AZAPAC’s early donations arrived after his appearances on Peters’s show, which also runs commercials for the group.
Rectenwald self-published a novel called “The Cabal Question.” He originally wanted to call it “The Jewish Question,” but Amazon barred him from using the title.
During a September episode while introducing Rectenwald, Peters referred to Jewish people using a common antisemitic slur. A month earlier, he used an anti-Black slur to describe Department of Justice attorney Leo Terrell in another episode with Rectenwald. In that episode, Peters said the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad, satanic, Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.”
Rectenwald promised Peters in his August appearance that AZAPAC does not have “infiltrators,” “dual allegiances,” or “sneaky Jews coming in and running the show.” He closed out the episode by offering Peters an invite — which he told The Intercept has since been rescinded — to be a member of AZAPAC’s board.
An AZAPAC ad launched in November and produced by the far-right company Dissident Media shows Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, Palestinian children killed by Israel, re-enactments of the American Revolution — and the red, clawed hands of a puppet master manipulating strings overlaying a mashup of the American and Israeli flags.
Rectenwald told The Intercept that he was not aware “puppet master” was a well-known antisemitic trope and that the strings represented the pro-Israeli donor class’s influence on the Trump administration. Plus, the trailer was a success: Donations poured in as it drew attention online, Rectenwald said.
AZAPAC had raised $111,556 by the end of December, according to recent FEC filings.
Of AZAPAC’s 10 publicly endorsed candidates, six are running as Republicans with three Democrats and a Libertarian on its slate. The group is more focused on Republicans, Rectenwald said, because he aims to put a dent in the GOP’s pro-Israel base. AZAPAC is backing Aaron Baker, for example, an America First conservative who is running to unseat Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a vocal supporter of Israel and Netanyahu.
At least one AZAPAC candidate drew national headlines five years ago. Tyler Dykes, a Republican candidate running for Rep. Nancy Mace’s congressional seat in South Carolina, was famously accused of performing a Nazi salute, which he denies, while storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers with a stolen riot shield. (Trump pardoned Dykes on his first day in office.) Dykes also received a felony conviction for his participation in the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where organizers protested the removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and yelled, “Jews will not replace us.”
Reached by The Intercept, Dykes said in an emailed statement he denounces “violence and extremism in all its forms.” He added that “Robert E. Lee was a hero, and deserves to be honored as such.”
Rectenwald told The Intercept that AZAPAC’s board had vetted Dykes and other candidates. He said he was willing to tolerate certain disagreements with the candidates and their views. The endorsements, Rectenwald said, are “a pragmatism of sorts.”
“We don’t agree with all of these candidates,” Rectenwald said. “We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”
AZAPAC’s endorsement process is primarily based on a 19-part questionnaire, which Rectenwald shared with The Intercept. It asks things like whether a candidate would pledge not to receive campaign donations from prominent pro-Israel groups or “any other foreign lobby/PAC”; what they think of laws restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement or imposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism; and whether they would vote to end military aid to Israel.
“We’re trying to put together a coalition of sometimes very unlikely bedfellows, if you will.”
The group’s contradictions are perhaps best captured by two brief recent endorsements: two former American soldiers, Anthony Aguilar and Greg Stoker, running for Congress as progressive Green Party candidates. As a contractor working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Aguilar, who is running in North Carolina, became a whistleblower alleging that GHF employees were firing into crowds of starving civilians at aid sites. Stoker, running in Texas, took part in last year’s Global Sumud Flotilla, a humanitarian mission meant to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
Their AZAPAC endorsements were short-lived.
After receiving questions from The Intercept about Rectenwald’s language and AZAPAC’s associations with far-right figures, both Aguilar and Stoker rejected the group’s backing. Mentions of them had been erased from AZAPAC’s online presence by Tuesday.
In explaining his withdrawal, Aguilar’s campaign acknowledged that anti-genocide and anti-Zionist activists “are falsely accused on antisemitism on a regular basis” to discredit their work. “For that reason, we want to avoid being associated with any group whose statements or actions raise credible concerns of actual antisemitism,” Aguilar’s campaign manager said in a statement.
Stoker told The Intercept that “I have always used my platform to fight against racial superiority,” adding that AZAPAC’s narrow focus on “old conspiracy theories” and eradicating the pro-Zionist lobby “is not going to fix any of the larger systemic issues facing working class Americans.”
Christine Reyna, a professor at De Paul University who studies the psychology of extremism, questioned why AZAPAC would endorse candidates like Dykes and Casey Putsch, a racecar driver and AZAPAC-backed Republican candidate for Ohio governor. In August, Putsch posted a video asking Grok to list “all the good things Adolf Hitler did or was responsible for creating in his life” and railed against the Jewish right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whom he called “an annoying little rodent.” While there’s a growing number of other candidates who oppose sending military aid to Israel or have sworn off AIPAC donations, backing candidates like Putsch and Dykes could serve as a dog whistle, Reyna said, to some of the most extreme corners of the far right.
“When you package these really frightening and terrible and dangerous ideologies and you hide them behind this front-facing organization that gives them legitimacy,” Reyna said, “That can be extremely dangerous.”
Aligning with such America First nationalists, who tend to ignore the issue of America’s own ambitions of control and profit, can harm other communities, antisemitism researcher Lorber warned, because of their anti-Blackness, xenophobia, or anti-LGBTQ views. In the case of Israel, these far-right alliances can also injure the movement for Palestinian liberation, he said.
“If we get distracted chasing fantasies of Jewish cabals, it harms our analysis, it makes our work less informed and less effective,” Lorber said, “and it also divides our movements.”
“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel. But neo-Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”
Palestinian-American advocate and analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa, whose family is from Gaza, is acutely aware of the ways pro-Israel institutions have attacked anti-Zionist work for being antisemitic. He said those bad-faith attacks were why he was concerned about AZAPAC’s affiliations with the far right, which has long rooted its criticism of Israel in “actually racist and antisemitic” beliefs.
“There is a big umbrella for a movement against unconditional support for Israel,” Kenney-Shawa said. “But neo Nazis and far-right antisemites will never be welcome in that.”
The day after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Putsch, who did not respond to outreach from The Intercept, doubled down on his support for ICE’s mass deportation campaign. On social media, Putsch, who is Christian, often attacks his opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith and Indian ancestry. On his campaign site, his platform includes anti-immigrant calls to “accelerate deportations” and limit the number of H-1B visas offered to immigrant workers.
His platform makes no mention of Israel or foreign policy.
“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist,” Rectenwald told The Intercept, acknowledging that on occasion, he has used the words “Jew” or “Jewish” instead. A search of his X account turned up at least 43 references to the “Jewish mafia,” and he’s repeatedly invoked the “Jewish elite” on his Substack. He claimed to have borrowed the latter term from Norm Finkelstein, a pro-Palestinian author and activist who, unlike Rectenwald, is Jewish himself.
“It’s not just an ‘israeli lobby.’ LOL. It’s a Talmudic Jewish mafia that runs the U.S. and the world,” Rectenwald wrote in one post in March. The same day, he claimed that “the Jewish mafia did 9/11.”
“Maybe one time I failed to say Zionist.”
When The Intercept asked about Rectenwald’s use of the term “Zionist Occupation Government,” which has a history of popularity among white supremacists, he brought up AZAPAC-backed candidates like Bernard Taylor, a firefighter and Democrat hoping to unseat Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, a former IDF volunteer. Rectenwald cited Taylor, who is Black, as proof that “we are not like bigots,” adding that AZAPAC planned to endorse other people of color.
Taylor, who accepted an endorsement from AZAPAC in December, said he also was not aware of Rectenwald’s rhetoric until approached by The Intercept for this story.
“I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s not concerning to me,” Taylor told The Intercept in a phone call, referring to Rectenwald’s language. In an emailed statement, he said his campaign rejects antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy, but would keep the AZAPAC endorsement based on policy. Taylor said that if he feels AZAPAC is “crossing the line” into overt antisemitism, he will reject its endorsement and refund donations from the group.
“If I made, you know, some slips here and there, it isn’t intentional — I’m not trying to dog whistle to anybody,” Rectenwald said. “I’m just trying to be precise, and sometimes, you know, precision is difficult.”
In “The Cabal Question,” Rectenwald’s self-published novel, a former professor finds his worldview transformed when a friend “thrusts him into the JQ,” or Jewish question, as the book’s Amazon summary puts it, working with “a steadfast ex-occultist turned Christian nationalist to trace the strands of the cabal’s reach.” The story mirrors his own evolution of getting “J-pilled,” or “Jew-pilled,” Rectenwald has said, though he insists the novel is not about promoting antisemitism but rather “a Christian redemption story.”
Rectenwald once identified as a leftist. He taught liberal studies as a Marxist at New York University — until a fallout that began in 2016, when it was revealed that he was behind the since-deleted Twitter account @AntiPCNYUProf with the screen name “Deplorable NYU Professor.” Rectenwald used the account to act “in the guise of an alt-righter,” as a way to argue against politically correct use of pronouns, trigger warnings, and safe spaces.
He took a paid leave from NYU and claimed he was a victim of liberal censorship in a splashy op-ed and a sit-down on Fox & Friends. When he came back, Rectenwald invited far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class and later sued NYU for defamation. Court records indicate the case was dropped with prejudice, and Rectenwald said he settled out of court for a cash payment in exchange for his departure from the school in 2019.
NYU did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
The experience prompted Rectenwald to denounce the left and his several decades of Marxist scholarship, and in 2024, he launched a failed bid for president as a Libertarian, representing the conservative Mises Caucus.
It’s unclear when his fixation on Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories took hold. But on the right-wing podcast The Backlash in May, Rectenwald used the protagonist of “The Cabal Question” to describe how his views developed.
In the book, Rectenwald said, the main character flees persecution and surveillance from the government controlled by “the Jewish mafia.” The character ends up finding refuge with “radical right wingers,” who help him escape the country. The more closely he affiliates with the right-wing network, however, the more he risks damaging his own reputation.
“Art imitates life, right?” said the host. Rectenwald agreed.
The post A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists. appeared first on The Intercept.
When Benjamin Franklin set out on what he called his “bold and arduous project” of moral perfection, he did not imagine he would arrive at the summit of virtue. He knew better. The point was not arrival but effort. “Though I fell far short of perfection,” he wrote late in life, he became “a better and a happier man” for having tried.
That insight captures a central conviction shared across the founding generation: virtue is a lifelong journey, not a mere destination. And happiness, rightly understood, is not a mood to capture, but a character to cultivate.
Happiness as Self-Government
For the Founders, happiness was inseparable from disciplined self-government.
Franklin operationalized this in his famous list of virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, tranquility, and humility. He built a chart, examined himself nightly. Franklin began each week by focusing on a single virtue, starting with temperance because he believed it produced the clarity necessary for governing the rest.
Thomas Jefferson echoed this same framework. Drawing from Cicero’s reflections on the tranquil soul, he praised a life governed by restraint and consistency rather than ambition or fear. For Jefferson, liberty was not license. It was the power to pause, deliberate, and choose long-term good over short-term impulse.
John Adams made humility his lifelong project. In his diaries, Adams recorded his battle with vanity and resolved that no one is fit for high office who leaves a single passion unsubdued. George Washington practiced resolution by cooling the first heat of emotion and acting only after reflection. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton translated this philosophy into constitutional design, crafting institutions that would check public passion and allow reason to prevail.
To these Founders, the personal and the political were never separate spheres. A constitutional democracy has always required citizens who could do internally what the Constitution required externally: let reason, not rage, rule.
The Daily Struggle for Character
Key figures throughout American history understood life as a daily struggle for self-improvement and emotional discipline.
Franklin’s method was practical. “If Passion drives, let Reason hold the reins,” he advised. Imperfectly practiced, these habits nonetheless formed the architecture of his happiness.
John Quincy Adams kept a diary for 70 years as a second conscience, recording his failures, restraining temper, and renewing resolutions. For him, self-rule preceded public rule. You cannot sway a nation if you cannot govern yourself.
Phillis Wheatley drew on the same classical tradition to ground her poetry in virtue. Writing in the shadow of slavery, she asserted the universal capacity for moral excellence and exposed the gap between America’s professed principles and its practices.
Abraham Lincoln, shaped by early reading and lifelong self-education, warned against the “mobocratic spirit” and called for “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” to preserve liberty. Passion may ignite change, he suggested, but only disciplined judgment sustains a constitutional democracy.
Frederick Douglass called education and disciplined labor the path to self-making. Character, he insisted, is built by regular and thoughtful exercise of one’s faculties.
The lesson is constant across generations. Virtue is not an inheritance nor a heroic display; it is the steady discipline of daily practice.
Being Good and Being a Citizen
Being a good person and being a good citizen are inseparable.
George Mason insisted that liberty can be preserved only through justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue. The stability of free government depended on habits formed long before a ballot was cast.
Madison warned that passion can “wrest the scepter from reason” in popular assemblies. Constitutional checks were essential, but they could not succeed unless citizens themselves practiced self-restraint and civic virtue.
Jefferson believed that a free people can govern themselves only if individuals first master their own passions. Liberty without self-discipline gives way to faction and instability. The pursuit of happiness is thus public work: cultivating the character required to sustain freedom.
A Call to Pursue Happiness Together
In an age that often confuses happiness with impulse and success with speed, the Founders and other key figures offer a different path. Happiness means disciplined self-government. It means aligning reason and passion. It means learning, reflecting, correcting, and beginning again.
Temperance, humility, industry, moderation, and sincerity are not relics of the 18th century. They are practices for every generation seeking to strengthen constitutional democracy. The pursuit of happiness is not solitary or self-indulgent. It is the steady work of forming character so that we can contribute to the common good and sustain the freedoms we inherit.
Franklin did not achieve moral perfection. Neither did Jefferson, Adams, nor Washington. That is precisely the point. The work continues, calling each generation and each individual to take it up anew.
If you are ready to engage in that work, we invite you to continue the journey through the National Constitution Center and Arizona State University’s new free online course for adult learners, What the Founders Meant by Happiness: A Journey Through Virtue and Character. Building on NCC CEO Emeritus Jeffrey Rosen’s 2024 book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, this course brings the Founders’ moral world to life through engaging video lectures with Jeff, close study of primary sources, and interactive materials.
At the heart of the course, and at the heart of the American experiment, is a simple but demanding truth: self-government begins with government of the self.
Julie Silverbrook is vice president of civic education at the National Constitution Center.
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