News Reel

Lu Jianwang was accused of operating a ‘secret police station’ in Manhattan’s Chinatown at the behest of Beijing

A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after he was accused of operating a “secret police station” on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the US attorney general that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.

The Army identified the soldier as Spc. Mariyah Collington.

Google has been quietly downloading a large AI model, Gemini Nano, without asking or notifying users.

The new Alexa for Shopping feature can use data about the customer to help find products.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department has no plan to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, following reports that companies hired by Florida to operate the detention center were told it would close.

Utah woman accused of murdering husband loses $12 million real estate deal after his death.

When her husband Eric died in March of 2022, Kouri Richins wrote a children's book to help her sons cope with the loss of their father – then she was charged in his death. Follow the timeline for a deep dive into the history of Eric and Kouri's relationship.

Ring's latest upgrades complete its new generation of higher-resolution cameras, now available with bright LED lights.

A medical examiner ruled Eric Richins, a Utah father of three, died of a lethal dose of fentanyl. His wife Kouri was charged in his death.

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Donald Trump touched down in Beijing at around 7:50pm local time/7:50am ET.

The president will be greeted by China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, along with David Perdue, US ambassador to a China.

Homebuyers more cautious due to possible mortgage rate rises and higher inflation as sellers sit on properties

Fears of higher mortgage rates and rising inflation as a result of the Middle East conflict are leading to a subdued and downbeat housing market, according to estate agents.

Demand from potential homebuyers across England and Wales has shown a “noticeable softening” recently, according to a monthly survey of estate agents by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Greenpeace finds cocktail of pesticides including seven banned in EU may have been used on seven categories of vegetables and soft fruit

It is a beautiful early summer Sunday afternoon and you have stopped for a pub lunch. A waiter sets down a roast served with carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and onion gravy, and then for pudding, strawberries and cream. It feels like the perfect rustic meal to accompany a day in the country.

However, a report by Greenpeace, published on Thursday, has found that the ingredients of the traditional Sunday roast have potentially been treated with a cocktail of more than 100 pesticides. Data from the Fera pesticide usage survey for 2024, showed 102 – including seven banned in the EU – were used on seven vegetable and soft fruit categories.

Medicines watchdog approves two treatments for patients with spinal muscular atrophy

Hundreds of children with a rare muscle-wasting disease will be able to receive two drugs that can improve their survival in a move parents hailed as a “lifeline”.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has published final draft guidance recommending that any patient who would benefit can have either drug.

Mariyah Symone Collington and Kendrick Lamont Key Jr, who also died, had fallen off a cliff during an off-duty hike

The remains of the second US army soldier who went missing during military exercises in Morocco have been recovered, the army said on Wednesday, ending a multinational search operation that deployed air, naval and artificial intelligence assets.

The soldier was identified as Spc Mariyah Symone Collington of Taveres, Florida, the US Army Europe and Africa said in a statement. She was 19 years old.

The senator's son apologized Wednesday, saying he was seeking help for his drinking problem.

Today's pet cameras offer two-way audio, pet recognition and more. We tested models to find the top performers.

A man accused of stealing hard drives containing unreleased Beyonce music, tour plans, and other materials from a rental car in Atlanta has pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year sentence, including two years in custody. Slashdot Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Kelvin Evans was by the Atlanta police department in September in connection to a July 2025 car robbery where two suitcases containing Beyonce music and tour plans were stolen from a rental car. [...] According to a July police report, Beyonce choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue called 911 to report a theft from their rental vehicle, a 2024 Jeep Wagoneer, before Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour dates in Atlanta. An October indictment stated that Evans entered the car on July 8 "with the intent to commit theft." The stolen hard drives contained "watermarked music, some unreleased music, footage plans for the show and past and future set list," according to a police report. Clothing, designer sunglasses, laptops and AirPods headphones were also stolen, Grant and Blue said. Local law enforcement searched for the location of one of the stolen laptops and the AirPods to try and locate the property. One police officer wrote in the report: "I conducted a suspicious stop in the area, due to the information that was relayed to me. There were several cars in the area also that the AirPods were pinging to in that area also. After further investigation, a silver [redacted], which had traveled into zone 5 was moving at the same time as the tracking on the AirPods." Evans was arrested several weeks after Grant and Blue filed a report, and was publicly named as the suspect in September. He was released on a $20,000 bond a month later. At the time of his arrest, Atlanta police said that the stolen property had not been recovered. It is unclear whether it has since been found. Bruce66423 commented: "Just for stealing a couple of suitcases from a car. Funny how the elite punish those who inconvenience them. Can you imagine an ordinary victim see their offender get that sort of sentence?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The photos shared using Instagram's new feature will vanish after 24 hours.

Survivors say decades-old school sex abuse lawsuits deliver overdue accountability. Schools say today's students are paying the price. CBS News California investigates.

Prime minister under pressure over failure to grant military service exemptions as multi-party government looks at risk of collapse

Israel’s ruling coalition has submitted a proposal to dissolve parliament to pave the way for early elections as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came under mounting pressure from ultra-Orthodox parties.

The move, initiated by Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, came as Netanyahu appeared to be facing a possible collapse of his fractious coalition.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told CBS News that ICE arrests at the FIFA World Cup are not off the table, but the agency will not be at the global sporting event for the purpose of immigration arrests.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he was unaware for years that Jeffrey Epstein was a registered sex offender, according to a transcript of testimony released Wednesday.

In House committee transcript, commerce secretary denied any further contact with disgraced financier

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The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told lawmakers in a closed-door interview earlier this month that he met Jeffrey Epstein only three times and had no “personal or professional relationship” with the disgraced financier, according to a newly released transcript of the meeting.

“I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities,” Lutnick said in his opening statement before the House oversight and reform committee.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are launching a bipartisan task force aimed at addressing how sexual misconduct claims are handled within the House of Representatives, multiple sources confirm to CBS News.

Dalton Eatherly, 28, known as Chud the Builder, accused of firing at another man outside courthouse in Clarksville

An influencer has been detained in Tennessee following his alleged involvement in a shooting, according to local police.

On Wednesday afternoon, Dalton Eatherly, 28 – known online as Chud the Builder – was involved in a confrontation with another man outside the Montgomery county courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee, during which shots were fired, the office of the district attorney general said in a statement.

The crackdown on foreign-made routers labeled a "national security risk" affects most major router brands. Here’s what you need to know if you plan to buy a router soon.

Foreign-made Wi-Fi routers will continue receiving security patches until at least Jan. 1, 2029, but this doesn't eliminate the long-term risk of buying an outdated device.

BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says the device supports frameworks and tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and Hermes, while emphasizing local control, automation, and privacy-focused workflows running directly from a home network. While SOLAI markets the Solode Neo as an "AI computer," the hardware itself appears aimed more at lightweight automation and cloud-assisted agent tasks than heavy local inference. The low-power Intel N150 should be sufficient for browser automation, scheduling, monitoring, containers, and smaller AI workloads, but the system is unlikely to compete with higher-end local AI hardware designed for running larger models offline. Even so, the idea of a dedicated low-power Linux appliance for persistent AI and automation tasks may appeal to homelab users and self-hosting enthusiasts looking for a simpler alternative to building their own always-on workflow box from scratch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new map will eliminate one of the state's majority Black, Democratic-leaning districts while keeping one Democratic-leaning district.

In Ohio’s gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy blames Democrat Dr. Amy Acton, former health department director, for calling off the state’s March 2020 primary election during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said it was his decision.

"Amy Acton called off Ohio’s election at the last minute, defying a judge’s orders and abusing her power," one Ramaswamy April campaign ad said. "Ohio can’t afford liberal Amy Acton. Vivek Ramaswamy will fight for us to protect our voice at the polls." 

Another April ad said, "Nobody ever cast a vote for Amy Acton, but she stopped yours." 

Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson pointed to an order Acton signed in March 2020 to close polling sites. But DeWine, who endorsed Ramaswamy, said that was his call after a judge declined to delay the primary. Other Republican state officials also supported postponement, which came at the beginning of the pandemic.

Acton served as Ohio health department director in 2019 and for part of 2020. Republicans attacking her actions during the pandemic are referring to her as "Dr. Lockdown."

Ohio among states that shook up 2020 primaries

More than a dozen states postponed 2020 primaries and expanded voting by mail as the COVID-19 virus spread. Government officials were concerned about the virus spreading at voting sites.

One of Ramaswamy’s ads showed CNN and The Daily Wire headlines about Ohio closing the polls the night before the primary, scheduled for March 17, 2020.

DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, also a Republican, asked a judge to move the primary to June. The judge denied the last-minute request, saying it would set a "terrible precedent." 

The governor and LaRose lacked the legal authority to postpone the election on their own amid a public health crisis, The Associated Press reported. Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson pointed to Ohio code, which said the governor can postpone an election in the "event of an emergency resulting from enemy attack." 

With the primary quickly approaching, state officials turned to another potential path: a health department order.

Conducting an election would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at "an unacceptable health risk of contracting coronavirus," DeWine said in a statement at the time. He added, "Acton will order the polls closed as a health emergency." 

On Twitter, DeWine wrote on March 16, 2020, "It is my recommendation that we postpone in-person voting until June 2, 2020. We cannot tell people to stay inside, but also tell them to go out and vote."

LaRose also supported postponing the election.

The order Acton signed said the state had 50 confirmed COVID-19 cases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended not holding gatherings of more than 50 people. The Ohio Supreme Court denied a legal challenge to her order delaying the primary.

At a March 17, 2020, press conference with Acton and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, DeWine said everyone who wanted to vote would later have the opportunity. 

The governor expressed concern about the health of tens of thousands of poll workers, many of whom were elderly. When asked by a reporter about his reasoning, DeWine said the state faced an imminent health crisis. He said Acton, based on her medical knowledge and in consultation with LaRose, "made that decision. I fully fully support that decision."

During the press conference, Husted said a county poll worker exhibited COVID-19 symptoms. He also said LaRose told him it would have been impossible to run the election because poll workers would not have shown up.

The Ohio General Assembly postponed the primary until April 28 and converted it to a vote by mail election.

Election worker Thurayya Umb reviews applications for election ballots at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, April 22, 2020, in Cleveland. (AP)

DeWine said again in 2026 it was his decision

In April, DeWine told NBC4’s Colleen Marshall that he consulted with state officials, including Acton, but the decision to delay the primary was his. DeWine said he ordered Acton to sign the directive for two reasons: Older voters told him they were afraid to head to the polls and he feared for poll workers’ health.

Marshall said DeWine told her, "I ultimately thought if I did not make that decision people were going to die." 

During NBC4’s April report, the TV station aired months-old statements by DeWine and Husted in which they attributed the decision to the governor.

DeWine said that "the decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it, the buck stops with me." 

Husted said, "The governor ultimately made those decisions."

Statehouse News Bureau reported in April that DeWine supported Acton’s actions: "I'm the one who appointed her. The fact is she worked for me, as all the members of the cabinet do. And decisions that were made, were made by the governor. So if there is a member of the cabinet who issues an order, that was at my direction."

Our ruling

Ramaswamy’s ad said Acton "called off Ohio’s election at the last minute" in 2020.

That’s a distortion of what happened. The day before the March 17, 2020, primary, Ohio called off the election during the COVID-19 pandemic. State officials made clear that they would allow people to vote, and the primary was held about a month later. 

DeWine said at the time it was his decision to postpone voting. Some of his 2020 statements showed that he reached the decision in consultation with other state officials, including Acton. The secretary of state and lieutenant governor also expressed support for the voting delay.

In April, DeWine told NBC4 that it was his decision to delay the election.

The kernel of truth here is that Acton signed the order closing the polls, but DeWine has taken ownership of that decision and as an appointee, Acton worked for the governor.

We rate this statement Mostly False.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks on the 2026 midterm elections

The Verizon-owned prepaid carrier replaced its old plans with ones that have better features.

May 13, 2026 — Reinforcement-learning agents — AI systems that learn by trial and error — can convert computation into new knowledge. That’s the focus of a new engineering-level collaboration between NVIDIA and Ineffable Intelligence, the London-based AI lab founded by AlphaGo architect David Silver in the wake of Ineffable’s emergence from stealth last week.

“The next frontier of AI is superlearners — systems that learn continuously from experience,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We are thrilled to partner with Ineffable Intelligence to codesign the infrastructure for large-scale reinforcement learning as they push the frontier of AI and pioneer a new generation of intelligent systems.”

Silver is one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, an approach that has transformed AI research. He’s focused on further developing this approach into a new paradigm.

“Researchers have largely solved the easier problem of AI: how to build systems that know all the things humans already know,” Silver said. “But now we need to solve the harder problem of AI: how to build systems that discover new knowledge for themselves. That requires a very different approach — systems that learn from experience.”

That kind of learning needs a powerful and highly optimized pipeline to support it. Unlike pretraining, where a fixed dataset of human data flows through the system, reinforcement learning workloads generate their data on the fly.

The system has to act, observe, score and update continuously in tight loops, which puts pressure on interconnect, memory bandwidth and serving in ways that pretraining doesn’t. Furthermore, the system will train on rich forms of experience that are quite distinct from human language and other human data, and may require novel model architectures and training algorithms.

That’s where NVIDIA and Ineffable are focusing their technical work: building a pipeline that can feed reinforcement learning systems at scale. Engineers from both companies have teamed up to explore the best way to create this training pipeline.

This work is starting on NVIDIA Grace Blackwell, and will be among the first to explore the upcoming NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The goal is to understand the next generation of hardware and software that will be required as the AI world shifts beyond human data toward models that learn through simulation and experience.

Getting this infrastructure right will unlock an unprecedented scale of reinforcement learning in highly complex and rich environments, allowing agents to discover breakthroughs across all fields of knowledge.

Source: NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and Ineffable Intelligence Partner on Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

WhatsApp and Meta AI users can access this turbocharged temporary chat in the coming months.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 13, 2026 — XRDNA, a leader in spatial computing and executable systems, today announced a landmark strategic research and development partnership with the University of Utah’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering. The collaboration establishes a multi-year framework to transform advanced research into real-world, operational systems across aerospace, defense, infrastructure, and beyond.

Charles Musgrave (left), Dean of the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah, and Charles Adelman (right), CEO and co-founder of XRDNA, shown in a split image representing the expansion of Mission Fabric to universities, an initiative advancing collaboration across AI, engineering, defense, aerospace, and industrial innovation.

The agreement creates a formal structure for ongoing joint research initiatives, enabling both organizations to define and execute targeted R&D programs through collaborative task orders, shared resources, and coordinated innovation efforts.

As one of the original ARPANET nodes, the University of Utah helped lay the foundation for the internet. Through this partnership with XRDNA, that legacy evolves—moving from a connected web to an executable one, where systems don’t just communicate, they act.

At the center of this transformation is XRDNA’s Mission Fabric — the company’s real-time orchestration layer designed to unify identity, security, infrastructure, and execution into a continuously coordinated system. Mission Fabric will serve as the foundational layer upon which the University of Utah can build next-generation research, operational systems, and cross-domain innovation initiatives.

Together with XRDNA’s Elastic Vector Addressing (eVa) and Spheres of Influence (SoI) technologies, Mission Fabric enables physical infrastructure, laboratories, sensors, data systems, and digital environments to operate as a living, executable ecosystem rather than disconnected silos.

“This partnership represents a fundamental shift in how innovation happens,” said Charles Adelman, Founder and CEO of XRDNA. “Mission Fabric is the orchestration layer that turns infrastructure into executable systems. By partnering with the University of Utah, we’re creating a living R&D environment where research, operations, and real-world deployment can function as one continuously coordinated system.”

The collaboration focuses on building a unified R&D operating system that integrates infrastructure, data, workflows, and research capabilities into a coordinated, real-time ecosystem capable of accelerating discovery and deployment.

“We are living through a period of rapid technological disruption, and engineering colleges have a responsibility to help shape that future rather than simply respond to it,” said Charles Musgrave, Dean of the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah. “Our partnership with XRDNA gives our faculty and students an excellent opportunity to collaborate with an industry partner with pioneering technology on complex systems-level challenges involving data, infrastructure, sensing, aerospace, defense, and digital engineering. Our goal is to create an environment where research, education, and real-world problem solving reinforce one another—and where promising ideas can move more quickly from the lab into practical use.”

Key areas of collaboration include:

• Defense and Space Systems: Advancing adaptive, coordinated mission networks
• Multimodal Sensor Systems: Transforming raw signals into real-time, actionable intelligence
• Materials Innovation: Creating closed-loop engineering systems for continuous optimization
• Digital Twins & Infrastructure: Building real-time, spatially aware models of physical systems
• Executable Research Environments: Enabling coordinated, secure, and continuously adaptive R&D ecosystems powered by Mission Fabric

Under the agreement, both parties retain ownership of their existing intellectual property while enabling structured pathways for commercialization of jointly developed innovations, including exclusive licensing opportunities within defined fields such as space systems and advanced sensing.

The partnership reinforces Utah’s growing role as a national leader in advanced technology and innovation, positioning the region at the forefront of next-generation R&D ecosystems.

Together, XRDNA and the University of Utah are building a new paradigm—where research is no longer static, but continuously coordinated, executable, and impactful.

More from HPCwire

• University of Utah Advances AI-Driven Health Research with New Computing, Data Infrastructure
• University of Utah, DOE’s National Laboratory of the Rockies Sign MOU on Energy, Critical Minerals
• University of Utah to Launch Statewide AI Supercomputer This Summer with $15M Support

About XRDNA

XRDNA is a spatial computing and executable systems company building the foundational technologies for real-time coordination across physical and digital environments. Through its core platform technologies — Elastic Vector Addressing (eVa), Spheres of Influence (SoI), and Mission Fabric — XRDNA transforms infrastructure into intelligent, secure, and executable systems capable of operating in dynamic, real-world environments. The company’s technologies are designed to support next-generation applications across aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, industrial operations, digital twins, and advanced research ecosystems.

About the University of Utah John and Marcia Price College of Engineering

The John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah is a nationally recognized leader in engineering research, innovation, and education. Located in Salt Lake City, the College advances breakthroughs across aerospace, biomedical engineering, materials science, computing, sensing systems, and energy technologies. As one of the original ARPANET nodes that helped lay the foundation for the modern internet, the University of Utah has a long history of pioneering transformative technologies and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration that drives real-world impact. For more information, visit https://www.price.utah.edu.

Source: XRDNA

The post XRDNA and University of Utah Partner on Executable Systems R&D Framework appeared first on HPCwire.

King Charles unveils government agenda for the next year as PM faces leadership threat from within Labour

Keir Starmer attempted to reassert his authority over his restive party on Wednesday, announcing his plans for the next parliamentary session even as speculation grew that he would be challenged for his job as soon as Thursday.

Starmer announced his second king’s speech as prime minister, promising a package of measures with bills to abolish NHS England, overhaul the provision of special educational needs teaching, limit trials by jury, introduce digital ID and end the leasehold system in England and Wales.

With Mexico under pressure from Trump to tackle drug trafficking groups, analysts say ‘it’s the most tense situation since the 1980s’

Relations between Mexico and the United States are being pushed to breaking point amid accusations by Washington that Mexican officials have been “in bed for years” with drug traffickers, and reports of CIA agents freely operating south of the border.

“There are many who are betting on the defeat and failure of the Mexican government,” said Claudia Sheinbaum tersely on Wednesday, when asked about the allegations at a news conference. ”We want a good relationship with the United States government. What are our limits? The defence of sovereignty and respect for the Mexican people and their dignity.”

Utah mom Kouri Richins was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on Wednesday, after a jury convicted her of murder and other charges in her husband's 2022 death.

A hacker group stole data from more than 9,000 schools using an exploit in Instructure's service. Now the House Homeland Security Committee is getting involved.

Medicare has already paused hospice and home healthcare agency signups as potential fraud is investigated

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JD Vance has threatened to “turn off” federal funding for government health insurance programs in states that refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on suspected fraud.

States which fail to “get serious” about fraud would lose Medicaid and Medicare funding, the US vice-president announced on Wednesday, sparking fresh accusations that Trump officials are using unfounded allegations to punish political rivals.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently made a secret visit to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with President Mohammed bin Zayed, sources told CBS News.

"Your doctor could be making decisions around treatment based on studies that never existed," one expert said.

In interview with Stateside with Kai and Carter, Abrams says Republicans have raised the stakes beyond party lines

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has slammed Republican-led states’ efforts to redraw their congressional maps to favor their party as “evil incarnate”.

In an interview with the Guardian’s new podcast, Stateside with Kai and Carter, Abrams argued that what she said amounted to intentional “cheating” to suppress racial minority voting power must be fought in the courts and on the ballot.

The US supreme court demolished the 1965 Voting Rights Act when they ruled in Louisiana v Callais in April that states can’t consider race in redistricting. Southern states from Tennessee to Alabama have rushed to erase majority Black districts, sparking chaos for the midterm elections. Kai Wright talks with Stacey Abrams, voting rights activist and former Georgia house minority leader, about the fallout from the decision, and why, even now, she thinks the way forward is still through engaging more voters to participate in democracy: “They have fractured communities and said we’re going to scatter these seeds. Our job is to grow.”

LAUREN BOYD
Editor-in-Chief

JESSICA BASSION
Executive Editor

To our readers,

If you had told the two freshman girls who showed up to an interest meeting for their student newspaper — because they were unassumingly nosy and loved “Gilmore Girls” — that they would one day become Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor, they would have shyly insisted you were mistaken. Three years later, here we are.

Cooped above The Den in the Perkins Student Center, our office sits behind a steel blue door, tucked away at the top of a quiet, dusty stairwell that can be hard to find the first time around. 

Luckily for us, it was in that stairwell that we bumped into each other for the first time; two girls from complete opposite ends of the country (Lauren from California and Jess from New Jersey), brought together by the winding search to find The Review’s office. The rest is history.

That early September meeting remains especially memorable to us for many reasons. It marks the day our friendship began to blossom, but more importantly, the day that our leadership, work ethic and confidence within the newsroom began to develop and would be forever changed.

That growth was deeply shaped by the senior editors and reporters whose endless curiosity and thoughtful criticism mentored us through every stage of conducting interviews, formatting articles and storytelling. Their long nights spent editing and early mornings distributing print copies may have gone unseen by many, but they made our work feel larger than life. 

The passing years brought several dreaded graduations, and we assumed our own roles as section and copy editors. In these positions, we gained invaluable lessons — from adhering to nuanced AP style rules and facing website crashes, to the importance of asking tough questions and upholding journalistic standards.

The Review has offered us, as it has countless student journalists before us, a way to orient ourselves on campus. Countless interviews have brought us closer with our community, protests have shown us where students are being failed and The Review has offered us the critical lens to represent these stories.

In the year ahead, we hope to continue a legacy of coverage that informs, engages and connects with students and faculty across disciplines, as well as community members in and outside of the university. 

Simultaneously, we are tasked with remaining attuned to the demands of a waning journalistic landscape. Print journalism continues to dwindle. Artificial intelligence has impacted storytelling. Resources are tight, and fewer students are seeking careers in the field.

Nevertheless, our work at The Review is inspired by the commitment our staff has made for decades: to provide fair, accurate coverage and give voices to those seldom heard.

With that mission in mind, we are eager to lead The Review through another academic year equipped with an unwavering and intelligent staff — our 144th since the first issue in 1882. 

From sitting next to each other at that very first interest meeting to seeing our names side by side as leaders of the newsroom, we could not be more thrilled and honored to step into these roles. 

On behalf of The Review staff, we thank you, our readers, for supporting our work. We hope you continue to engage with us and, as always, we welcome you to hold us accountable in return.

Keep the faith,

Lauren Boyd and Jessica Bassion

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. "We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. "We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)." "I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code," the software developer at a small web design firm told 404 Media. "It's making me dumber for sure," the fintech software developer added. "It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before." A software engineer at the FAANG said: "When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a mental model of the code I was working with. Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company's] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A confidential assessment, circulating as President Donald Trump begins his highly anticipated trip to Beijing, shows shifts in several key areas of competition.

The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don’t need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It’s stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases.

This past month also saw which projects Haiku’s GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku’s Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku’s Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.

Nearly every router is affected by the FCC’s unprecedented ban. Until we learn more, you should wait on a new purchase if you can.

Kouri Richins was convicted for lacing her husband’s cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl

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A Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband and was later found guilty of killing him has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Kouri Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing her husband’s cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022.

Resolution fails by 49-50, with Lisa Murkowski and fellow GOP members Rand Paul and Susan Collins voting in favor

The Senate on Wednesday rejected the seventh attempt by Democrats to force an end to American involvement in the war on Iran, even as the ranks of Republicans opposed to Donald Trump’s strategy grew.

The war powers resolution proposed by Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, failed in a 49-50 vote. All Democrats with the exception of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania supported its advancement.

The T1 phone is shipping at last, according to an emailed confirmation from the CEO of Trump Mobile.

The iconic dog competition event will stream live on Netflix.

The GenAI boom has made hardware hot, both literally and figuratively. Unfortunately, the huge demand for infrastructure has completely disrupted the supply chain for chips, memory, and disk, making it nearly impossible to get the sort of hardware you need to run enterprise IT workloads–let alone HPC or AI jobs–without breaking the bank. So how can the average Joe navigate this brave yet expensive new world?

These are unusual times. The GenAI boom has led to a surge in construction of data centers around the country and the world. In the United States, there are approximately 3,000 data center projects under construction or planned, which will bolster the 4,000 that already exist. Hyperscalers and AI giants are behind many of these AI factories, which can span a million square feet of space and consume up to a gigawatt of power.

(Matthew-G-Eddy/Shutterstock)

Beyond the need for concrete, steel, and copper piping to build the data center itself (let alone the electricity to power them and the water to cool them), you need servers, memory, and storage to put inside of them. Problem is, the cloud giants and AI big wigs have practically snapped up all available supply.

The good news is the law of supply and demand has held. The bad news is that this law means that prices for processors, storage, and memory have soared.

Canceled Orders

Consider what’s happened with regular DDR memory. As the demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has soared, the three primary memory chip makers–SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron–have cut back on production of regular DDR memory. The result is that the cost of regular DDR memory has increased several hundred precent over the past six months.

This has caused a raft of problems for downstream tech users, including for RapidScale, a cloud provider owned by Cox Communications. RapidScale typically buys a number of servers every year for its growing cloud business, but the requisition process is anything but normal this year.

“A server fully populated with 2TB of memory in December was like $30,000,” said Duane Barnes, the president of RapidScale. “That same server today is $80,000.”

DDR-5 memory prices have increased by about 300% in the past eight months (Source: PCPartPicker.com)

The increases have led OEMs to make hard decisions about their businesses. Earlier this year, RapidScale placed a $1.2 million order for new servers with a major OEM provider. Instead of delivering the servers at the agreed-upon price, the computer maker welched on the agreement and tried to increase the cost by 300%, Barnes said.

“We’re certainly not the only customer they decided to not honor their orders with,” Barnes said in an interview. “If I sold something underwater to a client, I’d still honor that and make it up on the next order and the next customer, just like any normal business would do. They chose to take a different path, which is their decision, their business. But ultimately, I don’t think that’s a good way to handle your business.”

(HPCwire reached out to the server maker, whom we are not identifying at the moment, for comment for this story. But as of press time, we have not heard back. This story may be updated if the vendor chooses to respond and new data comes in.)

Shared Burden

Other vendors are taking a more open approach to dealing with the unprecedented situation. In an open letter posted April 23, Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO and Chairman of the storage vendor Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), apologized to customers for increasing prices by an average of 70% since the beginning of the year. But more importantly, he provided some details and rationale behind the price hike.

“A 70% increase might seem unconscionable until one understands the reality behind it,” Giancarlo wrote in the blog post. “Everpure’s input costs of many high-volume semiconductor components have surged between 300

Server makers are increasing prices (Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock)

% and 900% (4x to 10x) since mid-2025. In some cases, suppliers could not supply committed volumes because of surging demand, requiring us to find alternative sources (at higher prices) to meet delivery promised times.”

As Giancarlo noted, prices began to rise in the middle of the third quarter of 2025. Then the prices essentially doubled from December to January, and doubled or tripled again between February and March. Despite the rising costs through January, Everpure honored the prices it quoted customers with terms of 60 to 90 days.

The company also told its customers and channel partners about price hikes coming in the new fiscal year, which started February 1. Everpure has also moved to 30-day terms to minimize its exposure to continued hikes in component costs, which other vendors are also doing.

“We are keeping our price increases significantly below our actual supply chain cost increases,” Giancarlo wrote. “We will not profiteer from this crisis….We are choosing to share the burden alongside our customers.”

What This Means To Customers

The reality is that everything in the data center has gotten more expensive. Every customer’s situation is different, but they still have options.

One option is to source more computing capacity from the cloud instead of expanding on-prem. After all, the hyperscalers are the ones snapping up huge numbers of processors, memory chips, and NVMe drives, in preparation for an expected surge in demand for AI workloads.

As Brandon Whitelaw, the SVP and Head of Product at storage vendor Qumulo, noted in a recent BigDATAwire story, the big cloud companies have spent $700 billion in infrastructure this year, essentially cornering the market. There may be deals to be had with cloud providers, especially if OEMs are having trouble sourcing gear.

(GenAI/Shutterstock)

“Back in 2021, the top five hyperscalers spent about $100B, on par with the Big Seven Enterprise hardware vendors,” Whitelaw wrote in “The Cloud Already Ate Your Hardware Lunch.” “In 2025, the top five had jumped to $410B, and their year-over-year increase to $700B – that is double the entire Big Seven’s spend at $145B.”

Whitelaw recommends that customers take the time to implement a unified data fabric as one way to reduce storage costs. By eliminating data silos across a single fabric, total storage requirements can go down and efficiency goes up. Unified data fabrics also enable customers to more efficiently utilize hybrid cloud storage environments that span on-prem and cloud, allowing customers to shift storage according to price signals.

Barnes, the RapidScale president, advises customers to adopt FinOps practices to cut spending on cloud environments and increase utilization of existing investments. RapidScale provides FinOps services as part of its cloud offering, but any customer can adopt FinOps, for cloud or on-prem environments.

“I’ve got infrastructure. I think I need more, but do I really need more?” Barnes said. “We can come in and show you modern techniques to optimize that and then build a plan that’s more economically sound. in bite size chunks, to get you through the next few years of this chaos.”

Cloud computing has been dinged for being more expensive than on-prem for many types of workloads with steady and predictable demand, a category that includes some HPC and AI workloads. For a primer on the three main ways that FinOps can cut your bill, check out this BigDATAwire story from April 2025.

The final option is to simply wait out the storm and hope that it blows over in a year or two. Barnes said he has spoken to many CIOs and VPs who simply are punting on server upgrade projects for 2026. “They’re hoping the prices come down next year,” he said. “It’s sort of like the energy crisis. If I don’t need to take a vacation, I’m not going to drive my car to Florida for and pay six bucks a gallon for gas.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though the prices will come down any time soon. New chip fabrication plants are being built, but they won’t come online any time soon. For instance, Micron is building a new plant in Upstate New York, but it won’t start churning out DDR or HBM until 2028.

These are exciting times, to be sure. The AI gold rush will likely make a few companies who hit paydirt extraordinary wealthy, while making the tool providers merely rich. Unfortunately, the AI boom is also upsetting the supply chain, which impacts everybody who needs a computer. Customers who create a plan for navigating these disruptions are likely to come out of the boom better than those who don’t.

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The post Navigating Supply Disruptions Generated by Rising AI Waters appeared first on HPCwire.

Now they're gonna be golden live on stage.

Warsh will serve four-year term as chair, taking over amid rising inflation and pressure from Trump to lower rates

The US Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, one of the most powerful roles in the federal government that holds enormous sway over the economy.

The 54-45 Senate vote on Wednesday was split along party lines, with the exception of the Democratic senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, who joined the Republican majority. It was most divisive confirmation vote for the position in history.

President Trump said before he left that he and President Xi Jinping "have a lot of things to discuss."

Lindsay and Craig Foreman were given 10-year sentences after entering the country on a motorcycling trip

The “terrified” family of a British couple jailed for 10 years in Iran on spying charges have said they have lost all contact with them.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both 53, were arrested in January 2025 while travelling through Iran during an around-the-world trip by motorcycle.

Brian Kemp’s move makes Georgia latest southern state to initiate map-making after dismantling of Voting Rights Act

The Republican governor of Georgia called a special session for next month to redraw electoral maps, the latest southern state to initiate new map-making after the US supreme court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Brian Kemp announced the special session, which will start on 17 June, on Wednesday. It will focus on “enacting, revising, repealing, or amending” district lines for the state legislature and congressional district, in light of the supreme court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais.

INDEPENDENCE, Mo., May 13, 2026 — Nebius has announced that it has broken ground on its flagship AI factory campus in Independence, Missouri – the company’s first gigawatt-scale digital infrastructure project in the US.

The ceremony brought together state and local leaders, economic development partners, community members and company representatives to mark the start of construction of the multi-building AI factory on approximately 400 acres in eastern Independence.

State and local leaders, development partners, and community members joined company representatives at the Nebius Independence, Missouri groundbreaking ceremony on May 12, 2026.

Nebius already operates in the Kansas City area and sees the Independence AI factory as a critical next step in its long-term growth in the US.

“Projects like this are built for the long term, and we are committed to developing this facility in a way that directly benefits Independence,” said Nebius Board Chairman, John Boynton. “We want to create lasting opportunities, act as a good partner with the community, and set a standard for developing AI and digital infrastructure responsibly.”

“Missouri continues to lead in innovation, infrastructure, and investment, and this facility in Independence is another example of that momentum in action,” said Governor Mike Kehoe. “This investment from Nebius strengthens Missouri’s position as a national leader in digital infrastructure, while creating quality jobs, supporting local schools and businesses, and generating long-term opportunity. We are proud to support investments that keep Missouri competitive and moving forward.”

Construction of the first phase of the AI factory is now underway. In both the construction and operation phases, Nebius has put in place intentional design measures to minimize impact at a local level, including by minimizing water use, containing noise and light, and protecting ratepayers.

Creating approximately 1,200 construction jobs – overwhelmingly drawn from local union building trades – and 130 permanent high-tech positions at full operation, Nebius’ Independence investment is also expected to generate $650 million in tax payments to local school districts and taxing jurisdictions over the next 20 years.

Nebius is committed to transparent operations and sustained community engagement. As part of this, the company has established a community benefits plan focused on education and local investment, and has already begun to put this into practice, including a recent donation to eliminate school meal debt at Independence and Ft. Osage School Districts and an initial agreement with Metropolitan Community College focused on AI literacy and workforce development.

More information about the Nebius AI factory in Independence, Missouri, can be found at nebius-independencemo.com.

About Nebius

Nebius, the AI cloud company, is building the full-stack platform for developers and companies to take charge of their AI future — from data and model training to production deployment. Founded on deep in-house technological expertise and operating at scale with a rapidly expanding global footprint, Nebius serves startups and enterprises building AI products, agents, and services worldwide.

Source: Nebius

The post Nebius Breaks Ground on Gigawatt-Scale AI Factory in Missouri appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft is adding a Windows Update feature called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery that can automatically roll back faulty drivers to a previously known-good version without waiting for hardware makers or users to fix the problem manually. PCWorld reports: The way faulty drivers work today is that the hardware partner is responsible for pushing an updated driver, or the end user is responsible for manually uninstalling the problematic driver. "This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period," says the blog post. With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft will be able to remotely trigger a rollback of the faulty driver to a previously "known-good" version of the driver via the Windows Update pipeline. Microsoft says that testing and verification of Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery will continue until August this year, aiming to deliver this feature to Windows PCs starting in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 14, No. 1,068.

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Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 14, No. 802.

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.

↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC

The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there’s no indication they won’t vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there’s no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.

Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there’s going to be many individual member states who simply won’t reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans.

Of course, we’ve got a long way to go, and I’m sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.

The streamer's upcoming NFL season coverage includes five total games.

On the night of the military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a loud boom woke the Nigerian man who lived in Unit 215. Tolulope Akinsulie stood up from his bed and saw heavily armed federal agents rushing into his apartment. He then felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Akinsulie screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his ankle, thighs, hip and wrist. 

Down the hall, agents took a Venezuelan mother and her 16-year-old son from their apartment at gunpoint to another unit. There, they saw agents hit a man with what looked like the butt of a  rifle and kick another who was lying on the floor. As he watched, her son began to hyperventilate.

“Here is another one,” agents said about a Mexican man who lived in Unit 502, before zip-tying his hands behind his back and marching him out of the building. Agents told the man he wasn’t welcome in the United States, took his city of Chicago identification card and ripped it up in front of him. 

While much has been documented about the Sept. 30 raid by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, new accounts from 17 men, women and children detained that night paint a violent and terrifying portrait of how the federal agents conducted the operation.

Their descriptions form the basis of administrative claims filed on their behalf Tuesday against DHS and several other federal agencies that took part in the midnight raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

The claims mark the tenants’ first step toward seeking accountability, their lawyers said, as well as millions of dollars in damages, for federal agents’ actions during the raid, a key moment in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago. The claims allege that agents didn’t have warrants before entering apartments.

“There was no reason to do me like that,” Akinsulie said in an interview with ProPublica. His body still bears the dark scars from the dog bites. The complaint, he said, is meant to send a message that officials are not above the law. “Everybody can get a check and balance,” he said. “People have to learn how to act right.”

The claims allege that federal agents caused physical injuries, emotional trauma, “brutal detention” and financial loss. Each of the claimants — 15 are immigrants, and two are U.S. citizens —  is seeking about $5 million, an amount the attorneys believe is comparable to similar court judgments in Chicago.

“There is no amount of damages that will compensate our clients for the trauma they experienced that night,” said Susana Sandoval Vargas, the Midwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national Latino civil rights organization that is representing some of the tenants. “It is about holding the federal government accountable for their unlawful actions.”

A DHS spokesperson said Wednesday that the “operation was performed in full compliance of the law” and that tenants are not owed compensation. “DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about Akinsulie’s injuries. But federal immigration agents have said they issued verbal warnings as they entered Akinsulie’s unit and believed he had been trying to hide and evade arrest, according to documents filed in an unrelated lawsuit. Akinsulie said he was in a deep sleep and did not hear any warnings or the dog barking.

Within DHS, the South Shore tenants’ claims also were submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In addition, they were sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, neither of which responded to questions from ProPublica.

An 18th claim also was filed Tuesday on behalf of a tenant who was detained outside the building a week before the raid and lost property.

The Federal Tort Claims Act provides one of the only avenues for people who believe they were harmed by federal employees acting unlawfully and allows for compensation for emotional distress, property damage, injury or death. If the agency does not respond or settle a claim within six months, or if it denies a claim, individuals can then file a lawsuit. 

DHS would not say how many claims have been filed since last year. But already there have been dozens across the country: A pregnant woman in California said she went into premature labor after being detained and shackled. A Marine Corps veteran said he was tackled by federal agents while protesting in Oregon. A Chicago alderperson said agents swore at her, shoved her and handcuffed her after she questioned their presence in a hospital emergency room. The DHS spokesperson said the three individuals were obstructing or interfering with law enforcement.

In interviews, a half dozen attorneys said they expect to see more claims in the coming months. “Hopefully this case and others will be a check against the most aggressive and reckless forms of (immigration) enforcement,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which worked on the case along with MALDEF, the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago and the MacArthur Justice Center.

During the South Shore raid, some 300 heavily armed agents stormed the dilapidated, five-story building; some descended from a Black Hawk helicopter. They hurled flash grenades, broke down apartment doors and zip-tied dozens of immigrants and U.S. citizens who lived in the building. The drama was captured by a television crew that accompanied agents.

The Trump administration repeatedly justified its actions by claiming it had intelligence that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building, and that there were guns, drugs and explosives inside. ProPublica journalists, who over the past several months have interviewed 16 of the 37 immigrants detained that night, previously reported that there was little evidence to back the government’s claim. To this day, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested.

The tort claims detail what families, including those with young children, allegedly experienced during the raid. A Venezuelan mother and father huddled together in their apartment with their four children, the youngest a 1-year-old U.S. citizen, who “screamed and cried in terror” while agents pointed guns at them. Agents marched them outside in their pajamas and separated the father. One of the boys, now 9, had a panic attack, according to the claim.

DHS officials previously insisted children were not zip-tied, but the account from the 16-year-old boy who hyperventilated at the sight of agents assaulting immigrants said he and his mom were zip-tied outside the building. DHS called that an “abject lie” and said no children were handcuffed or restrained. 

While the tenants were detained, the records allege, many of their possessions were stolen or lost: shoes, Playstations, smartphones, jewelry, mattresses, a backpack with $1,300 in cash and toys. Several reported losing their vehicles, too.

The raid upended tenants’ lives. Many of the immigrants, mostly Venezuelan, have already been deported. Many U.S. citizens who lived in the building, including some on public housing assistance, were forced to relocate late last year after a judge ordered the building shuttered for safety issues and code violations.

José Miguel Jiménez López, 42, the Mexican man who lived on the fifth floor, worked as a welder in Chicago before the raid disrupted his life. Jiménez said he wasn’t a gang member or involved in criminal activity. So even when agents pointed guns at him, zip-tied his hands and told him to go back to his country, he thought they would let him go. They didn’t.

Over the next four months, he was shuttled to detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana before being released at the Mexico border in February. He is now living in his childhood home in the state of Guanajuato. “I have friends and family who are still there, and they are afraid,” he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t like to see them go through what I had to go through.”

His claim details harsh conditions at the facilities, including insufficient food and water, constant air conditioning during winter and little time outside. Others described getting sick from the drinking water, a lack of adequate medical care and a constant worry that they would never see their loved ones again. The DHS spokesperson said the “safety and well-being of detainees are prioritized” and that detainees have access to medical care and nutritious meals.

In his claim, Jiménez alleged that “ICE officers treated him and other detainees as if they were sub-human and not entitled to basic dignity or respect.” He said he lost $3,000 worth of property, including a TV and a drill. 

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan woman and her 16-year-old son were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. They spent three weeks there until they were released into the U.S. on electronic monitoring. The woman now has trouble sleeping, while her son sees a psychiatrist to process what happened that night. 

Akinsulie, 42, said he is grateful to be alive. A devout Christian, he finds peace reading the Bible and in prayer. But while he was in detention, he had so many nightmares that he needed to see a psychiatrist. He dreamed about dogs barking behind him. Chasing him. Talking to him.

“The one that really baffled me was when the German shepherd was chasing me. Then I was running,” Akinsulie said. “The German shepherd was about to bite me. That really scared me because I don’t want no more bites.”

The nightmares stopped after he was released in March; the government had conceded that he and others had likely been arrested unlawfully. Akinsulie, who said he has lived in Chicago since 2007, has no criminal history, according to the arrest report from the night he was detained. 

He is back in Chicago now, staying with a friend and doing odd jobs. He finds it difficult to stand for a long time, and sometimes pain shoots from his hip to his right foot. Once an avid soccer player, he said he can’t kick the ball or run like he used to. He worries that the injuries might be permanent, but he can’t afford to see a doctor.

The post Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages appeared first on ProPublica.

Jordan Derrick charged in connection with deadly attack in the French Quarter on New Year’s Day 2025

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Federal authorities have filed charges against a Missouri man accused of publishing online tutorials on how to manufacture explosives that the terrorist who carried out the deadly attack in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter on New Year’s Day 2025 used as a blueprint to make his own improvised bombs.

R Matthew Price, a US attorney, announced Tuesday that 40-year-old Jordan Derrick, of the Missouri city of Sweet Springs, had been charged with one count each of engaging in the business of manufacturing explosive materials without a license, unlawful possession of an unregistered destructive device, and illicitly distributing information relating to manufacturing explosives.

Advancements in Google's AI and more are coming during I/O 2026.

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Elias Calocane says he thought violent messages sent by brother related to suicidal thoughts not harming others

The younger brother of Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in an attack in Nottingham, said he felt “powerless” over his sibling’s mental ill health and believed violent messages his brother had sent concerned suicidal thoughts.

Valdo Cacocane, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, stabbed to death Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65, on 13 June 2023, and seriously injured three others.

CBS News' Nikki Battiste gets to know Maggie Murdaugh through two of her longtime friends for "48 Hours."

The Senate rejected another attempt by Democrats to limit President Trump's ability to use military force against Iran, but one new Republican senator voted in favor of advancing the measure.

The Senate voted to confirm Kevin Warsh as chairman of the Federal Reserve, marking a victory for President Trump.

Prosecutor in the Murdaugh case tells "48 Hours" Paul's cell phone video was him "leaving something behind that lets you know what happened to him."

Fed chairs usually have a great deal of influence over the committee that sets interest rates, but their power is not absolute. And experts say Warsh will need to work to form consensus.

President Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping comes as members of Congress are calling for a crackdown on China's ability to acquire U.S. farmland, citing national security concerns.

A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans oppose data centers, which require extensive amounts of electricity and water to operate, and negatively affect local communities.

The Trump administration is also warning states to crack down on Medicaid fraud or risk losing funding for their anti-fraud units.

A young woman dead in a boating crash, a mother and her son killed in a double homicide, and two other mysterious deaths – all with a connection to one family.

KEL MARQUEZ
Contributing Writer

Have you ever received the “I think you’re a really great person but…” text? Or the “I could see myself in a relationship with you, but I met someone else” paragraph? I have, and honestly, I’m so over it. 

This New Year’s Day, I made a resolution to be actively single all year long. Taking this new direction means no dating apps, flirting or accepting/giving phone numbers. The goal to be single all year long is simple, but I’m doing it for one major reason — to be committed to myself. 

For the past few years, I’ve been on dating apps, given my number to men I found intriguing and gone on a few dates. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it also drains my energy. Most of the time, those dates went nowhere because I was the one putting in the most effort. In the end, I would just be disappointed that nothing worked out. 

So I asked myself, why would I give my precious energy and time to people who want nothing to do with me?

It’s not just energy-consuming, but it’s also kind of embarrassing. I might just be influenced by the surge of swag gaps and the Vogue opinion article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” But the underlying reason behind these trends is something I resonate with deeply. 

It comes up when I’m talking to a guy I like and realize he will definitely forget me in a week. Or even when I mention a crush to a friend and think there are more interesting things to talk about. It’s the realization that in this era of dating, everything is temporary. 

The funny thing is, I actually love romance. It’s my favorite thing to read, watch and hear about. Love is what makes the world go round. It’s beautiful, but in this day and age, romance is dead. It’s no longer about the natural chemistry, yearning and human connection I read about. Today, we are overcome with prolonged talking stages, situationships and dating apps over real-life bonds. This has tainted my perception of love, which I now keep at a distance, at least for the time being. 

That’s not to say I’m giving up on the idea of love entirely. To get to know someone so honestly and truthfully is one of life’s most special gifts. I want to believe that romance will persevere. I want to believe that someday love will be waiting for me too. For now, though, I want to get to know myself better. If I pour out all of my vibrant energy onto others, I also deserve to feel it flowing within me.

If you’re tired of the failed talking stages or love interests who send mixed signals, maybe you need some time off, too. There is so much more to life than wondering when you’ll get that text back or what those mixed signals mean. 

Choosing yourself is an important skill to have, and trust me when I say, being single is fun. I love going on solo dates, getting myself a latte and spending time with friends and family. I’ve made the joke to my friends that I’m my own girlfriend now, and I’ve been loving it. 

In the words of the icon RuPaul, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

A new Linux local privilege escalation flaw called Fragnesia has been disclosed as a Dirty Frag-like vulnerability, allowing arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files through a separate ESP/XFRM logic bug. Phoronix reports: Proof of concept code for Fragnesia is already out there. There is a two-line patch for addressing the issue within the Linux kernel's skbuff.c code. That patch hasn't yet been mainlined or picked up by any mainline kernel releases but presumably will be in short order for addressing this local privilege escalation issue. More details can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health secretary’s move to force race sparks scramble on left of Labour for candidate to oppose him

Wes Streeting is preparing to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer on Thursday if the health secretary can secure the support of enough MPs to trigger a contest.

Streeting’s move to force a race has sparked a frantic scramble on the left of Labour to find a candidate to oppose him, with Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner both possible contenders.

The new feature will let you highlight a recipe and ask to double all the ingredients, among other tasks.

Emirates’ foreign ministry rejects claims that Netanyahu visited the country describing them as ‘baseless’

Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed he made a secret trip to the United Arab Emirates at the height of the Iran war to meet the president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

“This visit has led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Wednesday night.

Stream the new Sam Raimi-directed film Send Help.

Georgia lawmakers will return to the Capitol on June 17 for a special session focused on redistricting.

Health secretary’s lack of challenge had reassured Starmer and his allies – but then briefings for a speculative Thursday launch emerged

As the unofficial political truce of the king’s speech approached, with still no sign of a leadership challenge from Wes Streeting, some of his Labour colleagues assumed the health secretary’s chance to go for the top job might have passed for ever.

“There is a risk he becomes the David Miliband of this generation if he doesn’t do something,” one MP said, a reference to another longtime heir apparent who never made the final step.

St John the Divine, Kennington has built one of UK’s largest youth choral programmes in area marked by deprivation

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N’raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

“No,” she said, beaming. “Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully.”

Justices said decision was due to ‘improper external influences on the jury’ by a court clerk during the trial

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The South Carolina supreme court on Wednesday overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina attorney, due to “shocking jury interference” and ordered a new trial in the 2021 killing of his wife and son.

“Our justice system provides – indeed demands – that every person is entitled to a fair trial, which includes an impartial jury untainted by external forces bent on influencing the jury toward a biased verdict,” the justices wrote in a unanimous opinion.

Brand owner Mondelēz was accused of reducing weight of Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the packaging

Many chocolate lovers consider shrinkflation a serious crime – and they have been vindicated after a German court ruled that the makers of Milka cheated consumers by cutting the bar’s size, while keeping the wrapper the same.

The three-week case in a regional court was brought by Hamburg’s consumer protection office. It accused the chocolate brand’s US owner Mondelēz of deceiving shoppers by cutting the weight of Milka’s classic Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the distinctive purple packaging.

LEMONT, Ill., May 13, 2026 — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are developing a new way for robots to learn and adapt to many different hands-on laboratory tasks. The goal is to create robots that can work alongside scientists in real lab environments and adjust to changing conditions.

Argonne scientists are exploring using a series of interoperable robots to conduct biological research in an experimental lab. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

“Robots with fine motor skills already exist but using them safely and effectively in real laboratories is still very challenging,” said Nicola Ferrier, senior computer scientist. “Our approach starts by learning directly from expert scientists as they do their work.”

The RoSA: Robot Scientific Assistant for Accelerating Experimental Workflows project is part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a bold national initiative to double America’s research and development productivity within a decade. The key is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and world-leading supercomputers.

As a first step, researchers will outfit fellow scientists with sensors and observe them as they prepare for and perform lab procedures. The recorded data will then be used to train computer models that allow robots to mimic expert actions and learn how tasks are performed correctly.

Ferrier brings experience in using computer vision systems to guide robots and machines. Her collaborator, computational scientist Arvind Ramanathan, has worked on self-driving laboratories and AI systems that can make complex decisions.

“Our main goal is to strengthen the basic robotics and computing tools needed so that large-scale, automated robotic systems can carry out experiments faster and more reliably,” Ferrier said.

Ramanathan said the techniques developed as part of the RoSA project will complement other research efforts such as Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL). That multi-lab project will create a network of autonomous laboratories that can learn and adapt, to accelerate breakthroughs across biology, biotechnology and energy science.

“In OPAL, dexterous robotics – which are well coordinated and nimble – are being planned for executing biological experiments,” he said. “By integrating AI-driven decision-making with advanced robotics, we aim to create systems that can accelerate discovery across a wide range of scientific disciplines.”

RoSA will also organize common lab tasks by how difficult and precise they are and map them to the most suitable type of robot. Fixed station robots have a stationary base and perform tasks within a defined workspace, whereas humanoid robots are mobile systems designed to resemble and move like the human body. Hybrid robots combine aspects of both. The project team will test robot performance in a virtual lab environment.

“Within the next year we hope to show a fivefold improvement in how efficiently these tasks can be completed,” Ferrier said. “In the long term, we envision robot scientific assistants that can work with existing laboratory equipment, making complex experiments both safer and more efficient. RoSA is a key step toward that future.”

The work is funded by DOE’s Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

Source: Gail Pieper, Argonne National Lab

The post Argonne Researchers to Develop Learning-Based Robots as Step Toward a Scientific Assistant appeared first on HPCwire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: LinkedIn planned to inform staff of layoffs on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a widening of technology sector cuts this year. The Microsoft-owned social network plans to cut about 5% of its headcount as it reorganizes teams and focuses personnel on areas where its business is growing [...]. LinkedIn employs more than 17,500 full-time workers globally, its website says. Reuters was unable to determine the teams affected. The cuts come as revenue at LinkedIn, which sells recruiting tools and subscriptions, rose 12% in the just-ended quarter from a year prior, in an acceleration of growth in 2026, according to Microsoft's securities filings. The layoff rationale was not for artificial intelligence to replace jobs at LinkedIn, one of the people told Reuters. The specter of AI-fueled disruption has nonetheless hung over software incumbents and workers generally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

May 13, 2026 — Using an infusion of state funding, the University of Utah is building an AI-assisted computing infrastructure expected to advance population-based medical and policy decisions.

Under a funding bill passed in the 2026 Legislature, state lawmakers and the governor have invested $18.6 million in a new technology system to maximize understanding of data stored in the Utah Population Database (UPDB) and the expertise of researchers at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and across campus, speeding health innovations and discoveries for generations to come. The Utah Health AI Vault (UHAIV) will be developed and housed at the university in a partnership between Huntsman Cancer Institute, the database, and the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC).

Credit: University of Utah

Another $15 million will support a new data center and broader AI ecosystem. Together, the state investment adds up to more than $33 million, positioning Utah to lead the nation in AI-enabled health innovation.

University leaders say the state’s commitment to advanced computing infrastructure will expand the university’s research capacity and establish a statewide AI foundation—supporting researchers, clinicians, educators and innovators across Utah. At the same time, the technology is expected to accelerate discovery, improve patient outcomes and drive economic growth.

“This is a powerful example of what becomes possible when a state chooses to invest boldly in the health and future of its people,” said Taylor Randall, president. “Utah’s leadership understands that world-class discovery, advanced computing, and responsible data stewardship are essential to improving the lives of patients, families, and communities across our state. We are deeply grateful for this partnership and the trust it represents, and we are committed to delivering innovation that serves the public good.”

The funding for UHAIV will update UPDB’s data architecture to make it compatible with innovations in data science and AI. UHAIV will be a university-wide initiative, jointly managed by Bradley Cairns, CEO of Huntsman Cancer Institute, and James Hotaling, chief innovation officer at University of Utah Health.

Together, the database and institute have enabled breathtaking discoveries over the past decades. For more than 20 years, Huntsman Cancer Institute has managed the UPDB as it powered landmark advances in cancer genetics, including the identification of inherited risk genes for breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA1 and BRCA2), melanoma (CDKN2A/p16), and colon cancer (APC)—discoveries that have reshaped cancer risk assessment, screening guidelines, and prevention worldwide.

UHAIV will develop a secure, modern platform that maximizes both resources, modernizing the UPDB to enable and develop advanced AI analytics within a secure environment, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy, data security, and ethical oversight. Huntsman Cancer Institute will play a key stewardship role in advancing the initiative, ensuring that the power of AI is applied thoughtfully and responsibly to accelerate discovery.

“Huntsman Cancer Institute is honored to help steward these initiatives,” Cairns said. “We take seriously both the opportunity and the responsibility that come with this investment, and we are committed to ensuring that it translates into meaningful advances for patients and families in Utah and beyond.”

U researchers will gain unprecedented capabilities to accelerate breakthroughs in prevention, early detection, personalized treatments and survivorship across numerous diseases—all while ensuring sensitive and private data remains protected.

“Infrastructure is the engine behind AI-enabled innovation,” said Manish Parashar, the university’s chief AI officer. “We’re grateful the state recognizes these investments as essential to keeping Utah at the forefront of AI. Once these resources are online, researchers and entrepreneurs will be able to move from concept to application at scale much faster.”

Peter Huntsman, chairman and CEO of Huntsman Cancer Foundation, worked closely with legislative leaders during the session to advocate for the initiative. Peter and Brynn Huntsman and the Huntsman Family Foundation also have contributed $10 million to the U to help launch the supercomputer project.

“We are grateful for the state’s leadership and partnership,” he said. “Together, we are building a future where discovery moves faster, care reaches farther, and innovation serves everyone.”

More from HPCwire

• University of Utah, DOE’s National Laboratory of the Rockies Sign MOU on Energy, Critical Minerals
• University of Utah to Launch Statewide AI Supercomputer This Summer with $15M Support

Source: University of Utah

The post University of Utah Advances AI-Driven Health Research with New Computing, Data Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Using the 1,000 most influential voices in AI that also happen to be on X, Digg wants to be your source of AI news.

May 13, 2026 — Fractile has raised $220 million to accelerate the path to getting its chips and systems into customers’ hands. The financing round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC, investing alongside existing backers.

Fractile was founded in 2022 on the bet that, eventually, the world’s most capable AI systems would be limited in their impact by the amount of time they take to produce useful outputs. The company bet on the logical conclusion: that the only way to truly unlock this latent value, to make speed viable at scale, was to radically re-invent the hardware used to run frontier AI models. Since then, Fractile has been building chips and systems designed to tackle this problem.

Raw AI capability has already reached the point where time from query to output is the key limit to frontier capabilities. As models have improved, so has their ability to be orchestrated over increasingly long output sequences. The toughest problems demand generating many tens of millions of tokens, and there are continual capability returns to generating longer outputs. At the same time, the unit economics of inference have become a brutal constraint. Inference is both the revenue engine of the AI industry and the rate-limiting factor on expanding it.

The positive correlation between performance and the amount of compute deployed at inference time has been a longstanding hallmark of frontier AI systems. DeepMind’s AlphaGo achieved superhuman performance through not just running a neural network once to pick one particular next move, but running a tree search over many possible futures, with each future explored by sequential, repeated inference of a neural network. The emergence of reasoning models in 2024 made clear that similar principles applied to LLMs. What is being seen now, though, with some of the most valuable applications of AI consuming many millions of tokens, is also a reflection of a fundamental property of hard work. Serious intellectual work involves many sequential steps, each dependent on the last.

For very hard work, these sequential steps can sum to an extraordinary body of intermediate output, yet lead to incredibly valuable outcomes when those outputs are synthesized. After years of work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, Andrew Wiles realized that the approach he was working on that day looked like a dead end, but fit perfectly to resolve an approach he had explored three years earlier. The ability to operate over long context, exploring different directions in sequence – and the enormous stack of papers Wiles accumulated – is what frontier LLMs are starting to be pushed towards as they are applied to increasingly difficult problems.

Today’s LLMs are already producing up to 100 million tokens in pursuit of tackling these hard problems. At the ~40 tokens per second or so at which these models tend to run on existing chips, a single output of this length takes a month to complete. The technical and economic limits on inference speed, above all from memory bandwidth that has failed to scale on current architectures, are what is constraining progress. To compress that month into a day, output will need to be generated at ~1,200 tokens per second, while handling the complexity and capacity challenges of operating large models at very long contexts. This is exactly the problem Fractile has been building from the ground up to tackle.

However, what is most exciting about the hardware moonshot is not accelerating the workloads of today, but rather the entirely new workloads that it could enable. Compressing a month of work into a day, a weekend of lab computation into a coffee break, will make all that work happen radically faster, but it will also make far more ambitious AI use cases economically viable. Agentic coding is only the start of the story. The defining work of the 21st century will be marked by the engine of inference delivering immense and diffuse chains of intellectual inquiry, in drug discovery, in software engineering, in materials discovery, and in any field where humanity will benefit from sheer intellectual work to resolve complex problems. As with any technological revolution, those who drive this progress fastest, who push the frontier furthest, will capture the greatest share of the value. The workloads that push to the limits of the current frontier are already transformational. The ones that lie beyond that frontier, which this next phase of hardware aims to open up, will stretch imaginations and redefine the entire economy. Fractile is seeking to increase the clock speed of global progress, one chip at a time.

Making this possible begins with people. Since founding, the company has been working across the full stack, from foundational AI research to foundry process innovation to chip micro-architecture, to aggressively pursue the most promising solutions and develop systems that break the trade-off curve, reject the inference pareto frontier of cost-versus-latency, and chart a course to changing what can be done with the world’s best AI models.

Fractile’s journey has only just begun, and the most important work lies ahead. The company is hiring across the UK (London, Bristol), the US (San Francisco), and Taiwan (Taipei). Those looking for the opportunity to join what Fractile describes as a singularly ambitious, hard and consequential mission are encouraged to apply.

Source: Fractile

The post Fractile Raises $220M to Build the Next Generation of Inference Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.

Tiffany McElroy says inmates assisted in delivering her baby in May 2024 after jail staff left her to fend for herself

An Alabama woman has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that her civil rights and those of her infant daughter were violated after jail staff where she was incarcerated allegedly left her to labor alone for more than a day.

Tiffany McElroy, now 28, was booked into an Alabama jail in May 2024. Three days after arriving, she said she felt her water break weeks before she was expected to give birth.

Finding the right job candidates can be a tough task, but there are simple ways to improve the hiring process.

Inflation is now at its highest level in three years. Here's what that could mean for mortgage interest rates.

Give your desk setup an upgrade with the best standing desks you can buy right now.

NEW YORK, May 13, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Monika Henzinger of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) as the 2026-2027 ACM Athena Lecturer. Henzinger is recognized for outstanding contributions to the fields of dynamic graph algorithms and web algorithms, and for dedicated mentoring and service to these communities.

Monika Henzinger

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Two Sigma.

Dynamic Graph Algorithms and Web Algorithms

Monika Henzinger’s research focuses on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for processing large, dynamic data. Her work spans fundamental areas of computer science, including graph algorithms, data structures, information retrieval, and web search technologies, and many of her contributions have made their way into standard textbooks. She developed the first linear-time algorithms for a variety of algorithmic problems such as computing shortest paths in planar graphs.

She has made significant contributions to dynamic algorithms, which maintain solutions efficiently as data changes, particularly in network and graph settings; establishing, for example, the first poly-logarithmic upper and lower bounds in the time per operation for the fundamental problem of graph connectivity.

A major theme of her research is handling massive, real-world datasets such as web graphs and social networks. She contributed to early developments in web search and link analysis, helping shape modern search engine technology. For her contributions, she was awarded the SIGIR Test of Time Award in 2017 and she is the co-inventor of over 80 patents in that field. More recently, her work has expanded to privacy-preserving data analysis, developing algorithms that ensure strong protection of individual information through differential privacy. Her research also addresses algorithmic challenges in distributed systems, network optimization, and approximation algorithms. Ultimately, her work bridges theory and practice, advancing fundamental algorithmic theory while applying it to large-scale, real-world problems.

Leadership Within the Field

In addition to her technical contributions, Monika Henzinger is a prominent leader in the research community. She has laid the foundations for several research fields such as data streams, web search algorithms, and the empirical evaluation of dynamic graph algorithms, co-initiated major conferences such as the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, and helped shape the trajectory of major technology companies. She serves in editorial capacities for leading journals and has chaired numerous conferences and award committees. Her mentorship is widely recognized; her research group members are considered worldwide leaders in dynamic and web algorithms.

Biographical Background

Monika Henzinger is a Professor and Vice-President of Technology Transfer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and was a Visiting Scientist at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley and at Stanford University. Monika has held prominent academic positions at institutions including Cornell University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In addition to her academic career, Henzinger has played a significant role in industry, notably as the first Director of Research at Google, where she contributed to the development of large-scale web search technologies, and as a member of Research Staff at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center.

She holds a PhD from Princeton University and an Honorary Doctorate from the Technical University of Dortmund. An ACM and EATCS Fellow, she is also a member of the Academia Europaea, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her honors include two ERC Advanced Grants, the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina, the Wittgenstein Award of the Austrian Science Fund, the European Young Investigator Award, and the NSF Career Award.

Henzinger will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 13, 2026, in San Francisco.

About the ACM Athena Lecturer Award

The ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. It includes a $25,000 honorarium provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Each year, the Athena Lecturer honors a preeminent woman computer scientist. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom; with her knowledge and sense of purpose, she epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the “Athena Lecturers.”

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Source: ACM

The post ACM Selects ISTA’s Monika Henzinger as 2026-2027 Athena Lecturer appeared first on HPCwire.

The US president’s late-night Truth Social vitriol riddled with erratic capitalization and spelling? That’s leadership

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Gas prices are soaring because of blockages in the strait of Hormuz as part of the unauthorized war in Iran. There’s a highly consequential meeting with the president of China on the books for this week. The FDA director just stepped down over a disagreement over fruit-flavored vapes. Southern states are redrawing maps at breakneck pace to gerrymander Black voters out of their electoral voices.

You know what that means: it’s time for some conspiracy-laden, high-speed Truth Social posting.

WILL MCCARTHY
Managing Sports Editor

Curveballs, clutch hits, diving catches and walk-off moments.

The 2026 Delaware softball season was another campaign for the bookkeepers to update records and accolades for legacy players in the program. 

A season that started out rocky for the Blue Hens only improved as they progressed into conference play. The team rallied around exciting young talent and strong veteran performances to turn the proverbial ship around, landing the Hens with a fourth-place finish in the regular season Conference USA (CUSA) standings. 

The program sealed the deal on May 1, with a 4-2 victory over the Western Kentucky University (WKU) Hilltoppers. This was the 12th straight win at home for Delaware, and marked the third straight season of at least 30 wins for the Blue Hens.

Celebrations rang throughout the 302 over the course of the season, with prominent out-of-conference victories over schools such as the University of Maryland Terrapins and Villanova University Wildcats, as well as big conference wins like the aforementioned Hilltoppers. 

In the process, Katie Scheivert, Sydney Shaffer and Kristen Luzon became the winningest senior class in program history as they won their 136th game together. The morale at the Delaware Diamond was high as the Blue and Gold prepared for the CUSA Softball Championships, hosted locally in Newark.

Earning a top seed in the conference, Delaware punched its ticket to the first round of the tournament, granting the opportunity to skip the single-elimination games of the bracket. The Blue Hens would avoid finding themselves in a win-or-go-home scenario to start off the tournament, and instead, in double elimination. 

After a contentious first match between the New Mexico State University Aggies and the Sam Houston State University Bearkats, Delaware found its first-round opponent in the Aggies. 

The Blue Hens outlasted the fifth-seeded Aggies in a home run derby, winning the game 11-7 off the sheer power of freshman Maddie Diamond’s two home runs and sophomore Bridget Chapman’s timely homer.

Diamond’s first home run set a new freshman home run record as she hit her 16th and 17th longballs of the season, putting punctuation on her stellar rookie season for the Blue Hens. 

After a downpour of scoring from the Blue and Gold, the Aggies tied the game with a grand slam by redshirt sophomore Madi Bachman, leaving the Blue Hens scrambling for answers in the bottom of the sixth inning.

Without hesitation, Delaware scored four consecutive runs and sent the game to the top of the seventh on the way to a major victory. The Blue Hens notched their first CUSA postseason win, doing so on their home turf. 

Delaware would move on in the CUSA Championship to take on first-seeded Jacksonville State University, falling to the Gamecocks 7-0 and being relegated to the consolation bracket of the tournament. The Blue Hens were next tasked with a familiar opponent, the WKU Hilltoppers. 

The Hilltoppers lingered in The First State after the conclusion of their weekend series against Delaware just a few days prior to the start of the tournament. The second-seeded Hilltoppers sought revenge against the Blue Hens as a clear rivalry brewed between the two teams. 

After an equally hard-fought game, WKU and Delaware were all knotted up heading to the bottom of the seventh inning, with one last chance for the Hilltoppers to walk it off on Delaware’s own field. 

WKU worked themselves into a bases-loaded situation, with two outs and junior Morgan Sharpe stepping up to the plate. In a flash, Sharpe made contact with a pitch from Delaware graduate student pitcher Claire Woods that bounced right to Delaware second baseman Katie Scheivert, who flipped it to Blue Hen Gianna Costaro perched at first base in an attempt to record the third out of the inning. 

By a matter of inches, Sharpe was called safe at first base, and sophomore Anna Mauck scored on a run from third base to home. WKU had won the softball game, advancing to the next round of the tournament, eliminating Delaware in the process.

Although Delaware’s season ended in a heartbreaking fashion, the team’s representation in the CUSA All-Conference awards is something to be proud of. The Blue Hens were recognized for eight postseason honors, the most of any CUSA team this postseason.

Shaffer, Diamond and freshman Allie Nankivell were named First Team All-CUSA selections, while Scheivert and sophomore Josie Crossman earned Second Team honors. Freshman Karli Challburg, Diamond and Nankivell were also selected to the CUSA All-Freshman Team, the league announced on May 5.

In her first season in Newark, Nankivell set a program record for runs scored in a season by a freshman, notching 39 trips around the basepads this year. The New Jersey native lived on base this year for Delaware as well, ending her season with a .400 AVG and stealing 19 bases for the Hens.

Delaware softball has cemented itself as a dominant program in CUSA with so much to be proud of in 2026. As we approach next season, the sky is the limit for the blossoming young talent that represent the Blue and Gold on the Delaware Diamond and in the “No Limits On Us” conference.

The German Sovereign Tech Fund has invested 1.2 million euros ($1.4 million USD) in KDE Plasma technologies to help strengthen the structural reliability and security of the desktop environment's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services. Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin shares an excerpt from the announcement: For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures: operating systems, desktop environments, document viewers, image and video editors, software development libraries, and much more. KDE's software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization. KDE will use Sovereign Tech Fund's investment to push its essential software products to the next level, providing every individual, business, and public administration with the opportunity to regain their privacy, security, and control over their digital sovereignty. Slashdot reader Elektroschock also shared a statement from Fiona Krakenburger, Technical Director at the Sovereign Tech Agency. "We have long invested in desktop technologies for a reason: they are the primary way people access and use digital services in everyday life," says Krakenburger. "The desktop holds personal data and mediates nearly every service we depend on, from booking the next medical appointment, to education, to the way we work. We are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology. Strengthening KDE's testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how we invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A city official in Miami Beach, Florida paid thousands of dollars to hire billboard trucks with text attacking specific members of an anti-Zionist Jewish group, according to a new filing in federal court.

David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

Related

StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing.

Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

Suarez and his attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

Related

She Criticized the Mayor’s Support for Israel on Facebook. Then the Cops Showed Up at Her Door.

The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

The Justice Department is probing suspicious trading timed to market swings, two sources say.

USA Today reports the T1 phone is shipping at last, citing an emailed confirmation from the CEO of Trump Mobile.

The delegation of business leaders underscores the deep ties many major U.S. companies maintain with China despite years of trade tensions.

Tate Reeves cancels special legislative session but expects to redraw four congressional districts before 2027 elections

On Wednesday morning, Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, said that he was canceling a special legislative session that was scheduled to redraw the state’s supreme court districts next week. However, Reeves, a Republican, noted that he does expect the state to redraw its four congressional districts at some point in the near future.

Reeves, in an appearance on SuperTalk radio, a conservative talk radio network, also said that it would be difficult for the state to redraw the congressional districts in the Republicans’ favor in time for the upcoming midterm elections, slated for November. Doing so might also hurt Republicans in congressional races.

This marks the longest decline in overdose deaths in decades, according to preliminary government data.

• ‘My job is to create a culture,’ he says

• Captain may ask Tiger Woods for his input

Jim Furyk has admitted the United States need to make the Ryder Cup more of a priority as the 56-year-old plots a reversal of fortunes at Adare Manor in September 2027.

Speaking expansively for the first time since being handed the US captaincy for a second time, Furyk pointed towards an overhaul of approach to the biennial event. He also suggested he will be keen to involve Tiger Woods on his backroom team.

Iran's military says it's trained and ready for any new U.S. assault as Trump predicts a "long talk" about the war with China's President Xi in Beijing.

Alex Murdaugh was convicted of his killing his wife and his son at the family's home in 2021.

The South Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new trial, saying the 2023 trial was improperly influenced by a county clerk’s comments to jurors.

Apple Maps now keeps a running history of everywhere you go. Here's how to disable it, delete your history or limit how long it's stored.

Harvard faculty are voting on a proposal (PDF) to curb grade inflation by limiting solid A grades to 20% of students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Axios reports: Grade inflation is at a tipping point at Harvard. A move to make A grades harder to come by at one of the world's leading universities could influence grading debates at peer institutions. Solid A's account for nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate letter grades. That's up from roughly a quarter 20 years ago. More than 50 members of last year's class graduated with perfect GPAs. [...] Faculty are voting on three separate provisions. Each requires a simple majority to pass. A cap to limit solid-A grades to 20% of enrolled students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Changes to how internal honors are calculated, moving from traditional grade point average scoring to an average percentile rank. Allowing courses to use new "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" marks with a "satisfactory-plus" distinction. A pre-vote faculty poll showed around 60% of the 205 respondents favored the 20-plus-four formula over an alternative. Supporters of the cap argue it's intentionally modest as it places no restrictions on A-minuses. The four-grade buffer is designed to protect small seminars where a higher proportion of students may succeed. [...] If passed, changes would take effect in fall 2027, followed by a mandatory three-year review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No 10 confirms Streeting is still health secretary despite reports he could launch a leadership bid as early as tomorrow

• Streeting to resign and challenge Starmer, allies say

• Farage faces inquiry over £5m gift from crypto billionaire

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

An odd dispute of interpretation has emerged overnight between the Scottish and UK governments. Yesterday evening a Scottish government spokesperson announced that, during a call between first minister John Swinney and prime minister Kier Starmer, both parties agreed to meet face to face next month to discuss a referendum on independence.

It is particularly welcome that the prime minister agreed to meet next month to discuss a referendum on independence.

The PM committed to meeting to discussed shared issues including the cost of living.

As the PM told the first minister, the manifesto this government was elected on was unambiguous that ‘Labour does not support independence or another referendum’. Our position remains unchanged.

We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.

Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.

This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable.

Wes Streeting is expected to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer as soon as Thursday. News of the health secretary’s plans came during the king’s speech, derailing what was supposed to be another chance for the prime minister to reset the political agenda. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s head of national news, Archie Bland

Exclusive: Doctors say ‘highly concerning’ poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice

One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found that – of the 15% turning to chatbots – one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists.

With interest rates likely to stay higher for longer, it helps to know the interest-earning potential of a $100,000 CD now.

Beloved animated series will return for 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media reaches deal with Disney

Fans of Les Simpson have a message for anyone who doubted the future of the beloved and long-running Québécois version of the animated satirical show: Mange de la crotte.

Les Simpson will return for its 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media said it had reached an agreement with Disney for the rights to air and dub the show. The deal caps nearly a year of uncertainty surrounding the adaptation, which is beloved in Canada’s lone francophone province.

New rules would enable single-ticket bookings across multiple rail operators throughout Europe

Cross-border train journeys through several European countries are the stuff of many a holidaymaker’s dreams.

But the reality of trying to buy the tickets, navigating multiple websites without knowing who can help if a connection is missed, can prove less than relaxing. As one MEP puts it, it can often require “five tabs, three apps and a prayer”.

This blog is now closed, you can read more of our Ukraine war coverage here

Responding to the Guardian’s questions, the operator also confirmed that the vast majority of the 1,187 guests on board are British. There are also 514 crew members.

Ambassador Cruise Line also confirmed that a 92-year-old man died on board earlier this week, but he did not report any symptoms at the time and the cause of his death is yet to be established.

The Hormuz inflation shock is only just beginning Expert comment thilton.drupal 13 May 2026

A major inflation shock is likely thanks to high global energy prices.

As statistics authorities across the globe start to publish inflation data for the month of April, the scale of the Hormuz inflation shock is slowly becoming visible. The US announced its Consumer Price Index (CPI) had risen by 0.6 per cent in the last month, and 3.8 per cent over the last 12 months, its highest rise since May 2023. 

Elsewhere, annual inflation in the Philippines reached 7.2 per cent last month, from 4.1 percent in March. In Turkey, inflation accelerated to 32.4 per cent in April, from 30.9 percent a month earlier. 

There will be much more of this to come, and the reason is straightforward: the price of energy is a central variable in shaping overall inflation. And since the US-Israeli war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, energy prices have soared and show no signs of returning to pre-war levels. 

Energy is central to inflation  

Under almost any scenario, global energy prices will remain way higher than they were last year, when the price of Brent crude averaged a mere $69 per barrel, the lowest level since 2020. In contrast, the price of Brent crude these days is closer to $100 per barrel. 

This will be enough to keep inflation fears ignited, and central bankers will face very unpleasant challenges in the coming months. 

It is very difficult to find previous episodes of accelerating global inflation that don’t have rising energy prices at their heart. The most famous, of course, were the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which pushed inflation in the US, for example, towards 15 per cent in early 1980. In response, Paul Volcker’s US Federal Reserve raised its interest rate to 20 per cent to tame that beast. 

The global economy is considerably less energy-intensive than it was in the 1970s, and monetary policy is a lot more disciplined. 

Yet the role of energy prices in shaping inflation seems undiminished. 

Rising energy inflation – the change in energy prices – has played a critical role in the two notable broader inflation surges in the past decade: in 2016–2018, and following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021–2022 (see chart).

Equally, the moderation in global inflation that the world enjoyed between January 2023 and the Iran war in late February 2026 would have been inconceivable without a sustained collapse in global energy price inflation. During this period, there were only six months in which the inflation rate of global energy prices was above zero; the rest of the time, the change in energy price decreased. This energy price deflation paved the way for sharp declines in overall inflation measured by CPI. 

The role of demand

An important challenge to this admittedly simple view of things is that it confuses cause and effect: One might argue that it is really only demand conditions, shaped by monetary policy, rather than supply disruption, that determine the price of energy and therefore its effects on CPI. 

For example, there is an argument that the post-Covid inflation surge was only really made possible by excessively loose monetary and fiscal policies that many governments put in place to help soften the economic blow of the pandemic. Those loose policies, in turn, allowed global demand to outstrip supply, generating inflation in goods and services prices across the board – including the price of energy. 

Related work

The Strait of Hormuz energy crisis shows the EU’s carbon pricing is the right approach

That view of things may be right when it comes to explaining the specific post-COVID increase in inflation. But it doesn’t work quite as well in the other direction, when a general decline in global inflation began from late 2022. This decline was not accompanied by much of a decline in global demand growth, even though central banks almost everywhere had been tightening monetary policy in response to the inflation surge. 

Rather, the broad macroeconomic story of the past three years has been the incredible resilience of global demand – with global growth running at 3.3 per cent both in 2024 and 2025, well above its long-term average of around 2.7 per cent – despite the global monetary tightening. Instead, it is global energy inflation that has been the primary driver of inflation more broadly.

Second-round effects

Given this, the current surge in oil prices is likely to make central bankers worried. Of course, there’s not much they can do to address the direct effects of higher energy prices – rate hikes can’t make the oil price go down. 

However, they will need to be very concerned about ‘second-round effects’, or the way in which the initial energy price increases feed through into the broader processes that shape inflation. One of the world’s most respected central bankers, South Africa’s Lesetja Kganyago, made this clear in a recent speech. 

After drawing delighted crowds since first sighted in Orkney the young male has swum 400 miles across the North Sea

A peripatetic walrus who became a local celebrity as he toured the north-east coast of Scotland has now been spotted in Norway, bringing to an end his Celtic sojourn.

The young male was christened Magnus after he after first hauled his estimated 2.5-metre frame out of the sea on to Stronsay pier in Orkney on 16 April.

Richard Werstine, wanted in connection with killing of Cold as Life vocalist Rodney Barger, was arrested in Panama

A suspect accused of murdering his rock singer friend in 1993 has been apprehended in Central America after spending more than 30 years successfully evading authorities.

According to the US Marshals Service, Richard Werstine, who was wanted in connection with the killing of Cold as Life vocalist Rodney Barger, was arrested in Panama.

Xi and Trump won’t discuss China’s growing nuclear arsenal Expert comment jon.wallace 13 May 2026

But they can make important progress at their summit, by sharing their threat perceptions about the nuclear escalation risks brought by AI.

President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping will discuss some difficult topics at their summit this week – not least of which is the issue of nuclear weapons. China is reported to be growing and modernizing its nuclear arsenal on a scale unlike any other signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. At the same time, the US’s Golden Dome missile defence project, announced by President Trump in 2025, threatens to fuel a new arms race.

US negotiators want to discuss the increase in Chinese nuclear numbers. But China has already said that it will not do so. Any agreement on nuclear limits at this summit is therefore highly unlikely. Nor even is discussion of Chinese nuclear expansion plans. However, despite tensions between the two powers, there are areas where progress could be made.

One way to approach strategic topics could be for one or both countries to share their threat assessments of new military systems and technologies – and how investment in them informs their concerns about pathways to nuclear escalation. 

Either side could share their analysis of specific systems – particularly relating to artificial intelligence – and how they interpret their risk potential. The other country could then comment on or correct these assumptions. That could be an important first step towards beginning a strategic stability dialogue. 

A 2024 statement by President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden on keeping AI out of nuclear launch decisions was helpful, reducing concerns that major nuclear powers might consider automating those decisions. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated that agreement was possible among major powers on this topic. Trump and Xi could reaffirm this commitment – and perhaps go further.

That in turn could make an important contribution to the Non-Proliferation Treaty review currently underway in New York, building on reports of an emerging consensus at the conference.  

An AI hotline

The Trump administration is reportedly willing to talk about AI at the summit. That creates room to broaden discussion beyond the role of AI in nuclear launch decisions.

The US and China could discuss AI risks in escalation more generally, including how to handle AI errors: concerns are rising about the additional risks that AI-human interfacing might introduce into decision-making. 

These are new risks, and Washington and Beijing should discuss how to add crisis communication about an AI-caused emergency to their crisis communication protocols and exercise patterns. If the US and China were able to address this at the summit, it could lead to exploring an ‘AI hotline’ – as has already been suggested by the US summit team. 

Space

Over the last decade, space issues have, on and off, provided an area for dialogue between the US and China. Partly that is because dialogue on space contained fewer historic tensions, and in part because the domain was recognized as  ‘global commons’. 

But, as both states have invested more heavily in their space-based capabilities, and space-based enablers have become more central to modern warfare, dialogue on outer space has taken on a new strategic significance. 

The US is concerned about China’s space capabilities and whether it is planning to station weapons in space. China is concerned about Golden Dome. Discussing threats emerging from space-based systems, and maintaining space as a global common good, could once again provide an opportunity to tackle strategic questions without reference to nuclear stockpiles.

Problem areas

There are a number of thorny issues that could intensify tensions between the superpowers, hindering progress on nuclear issues. The US would like China to stop its material support for Iran, and to pressure Tehran to end the conflict on terms acceptable to the US. Washington might also want Beijing to help find a solution to the problem of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. However, China has not indicated any willingness to support the US in this.

Related work

Avoiding a new nuclear arms race

Another contentious issue is whether or not China has conducted low-yield nuclear tests. Earlier this year, at a session of the Conference on Disarmament at the UN in Geneva, the US accused China of conducting secret nuclear tests. 

China denies these accusations, and the CTBTO, which monitors compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, has not been able to substantiate the US allegations. If the US pushes too hard on this point, it could break the talks prematurely.

Finally, the US’s Asian allies will be watching the talks anxiously. Taiwanese leadership is nervous about potential concessions on US arms sales to Taiwan, or any changes in US language about Taiwanese independence. 

Strikes killed at least six people as Moscow and Kyiv trade long-range attacks after brief ceasefire

• Europe live – latest updates

Russia targeted Ukraine with more than 800 drones in a large-scale daytime assault that killed at least six people on Wednesday, hours after a previous deadly barrage.

The strikes came as Kyiv and Moscow traded long-range attacks after a brief ceasefire, and despite the latest suggestion from Donald Trump that the war could soon come to an end.

• Niners-Rams open in September at MCG

• London will stage three games in October

• Munich, Madrid, Mexico City and Rio also to host

The NFL revealed the matchups for all nine international games on Wednesday, with the Jacksonville Jaguars and San Francisco 49ers each playing two contests.

The league’s most ambitious global schedule to date spans seven countries and four continents, including its Australia debut (Week 1 in Melbourne) and its first game in France (Week 7 in Paris).

Just one garnishment has a major impact on your finances, and adding a second could lead to even bigger trouble.

Catherine, the Princess of Wales, is in Italy for her first foreign trip after undergoing cancer treatment.

Captain of French football team expressed concerns about far-right National Rally party gaining power

The French football captain, Kylian Mbappé, has angered Marine Le Pen’s far-right party after expressing concerns about it winning next year’s presidential election.

Mbappé, 27, who grew up in Paris’s northern suburbs in a family with Algerian and Cameroonian heritage, told Vanity Fair this week: “I know what it means and what consequences it can have for my country when people like them come to power.”

The guard helped the Atlanta Hawks to their best season for years but sees room for improvement

He is a shooting guard that doesn’t often shoot. A wing deployed less for lift than pressure. The style of Australia’s best basketballer, Dyson Daniels, is difficult to describe. “It’s kind of hard for me to describe it too,” he says. “It’s unique.”

He runs the point, and rebounds to make another. And, yes, he is perhaps the NBA’s best defender. “It’s different every game, put it that way.”

Researchers say rise not inevitable and it is important to unpick what is behind differences in obesity trends

A continuing rise in obesity around the world is not inevitable, research suggests, with rates in some countries levelling off or potentially in decline.

Researchers say focusing on what has been described as a global epidemic of obesity hides large variations in trends across different countries, sexes and age groups.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters. [...] The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network says criticism of Israel is routinely misrepresented as antisemitic – and that Palestinian voices are being excluded from debate

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Palestinian voices are being excluded from the debate on social cohesion, the peak body for Palestinians in Australia has said after it was refused leave to appear before the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion.

The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (Apan) made detailed submissions on the issues of antisemitism – including how it is defined – as well as on racism and social cohesion, but was told it did not have a “direct and substantial” interest in the public hearings, which are under way in Sydney.

Case attracts widespread attention as example of China balancing enthusiastic adoption of AI with job security

A court in China has ruled in favour of a worker whose company replaced him with artificial intelligence (AI), awarding him more than £28,000 in compensation.

The worker, whose surname is Zhou, joined a tech company in the eastern city of Hangzhou in 2022 as a quality assurance supervisor overseeing large language models used in AI products.

Ronald dela Rosa, accused of crimes against humanity by international criminal court, has holed up in building to evade arrest

Gunshots have been fired in the Philippines senate as a senator who is wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) remained holed up in the building to evade arrest.

Ronald dela Rosa, a Philippine senator accused of crimes against humanity for his role in overseeing the former president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”, has spent two nights in the country’s senate in a standoff with the authorities.

Uline, owned by billionaire Republicans Richard and Liz Uihlein, halts construction of a new facility in Kenosha

Uline, a business and shipping supplies company owned by billionaire Trump supporters Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, is pausing the construction of a new distribution facility in Kenosha, Wisconsin, citing economic uncertainty.

The construction pause comes in a key battleground state, where Trump won in 2016 and 2024, but lost to Biden in 2020.

Exclusive: In letter seen by the Guardian, 30 members of Congress warn US president’s Cuba military operation would worsen ‘mass suffering’

• US politics live – latest updates

More than 30 members of Congress have urged Donald Trump’s top officials to end the use of the Guantánamo Bay naval base for immigrant detention and rule out any plans for military action on Cuba.

In the letter to the secretaries of defense, state and homeland security on Wednesday morning, reviewed by the Guardian, Democratic lawmakers led by Delia Ramirez, a representative from Illinois, linked a rise in migration from the island nation to the heightening US aggression on Cuba.

Looking to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage rates to know now.

State officials told vendors at the facility to prepare for a breakdown of the tented camp beginning next month

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An alliance of environmental groups and immigration advocates has welcomed what looks to be the imminent closure of Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigration jail in the remote Florida Everglades celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions.

State officials told vendors at the facility on Tuesday to prepare for a breakdown of the tented camp beginning next month, the New York Times reported, citing its ongoing cost.

ULM, Germany, May 13, 2026 — NVision, a leader in quantum technologies for healthcare, today announced a $55 million Series B financing round anchored by Abbott. The company also announced a major expansion from quantum sensing into quantum computing, advancing its efforts to build an end to end, quantum based approach to designing and validating therapies.

The company’s quantum-enhanced sensing platform, POLARIS, already uses quantum technology to boost the MRI signal of sugar-based imaging agents by orders of magnitude, enabling real-time measurement of metabolism on standard MRI systems. This allows researchers to assess treatment response within hours to days based on disease biology, rather than relying on traditional imaging that can take up to months to show changes in morphology.

Building on the quantum molecular approach behind POLARIS, NVision is now extending its platform into quantum computation. While developing its MRI signal enhancement technology, NVision discovered a new class of organic molecule-based qubits. With this expansion, NVision lays the foundation for a new quantum-driven approach to drug development. Quantum computing will enable the design of more effective drug candidates, including for previously inaccessible targets, while quantum-enhanced MRI with POLARIS will rapidly validate them in the real biological environment. Together, this will establish a unified “compute and validate” approach, combining quantum computing for design with quantum sensing for real-world validation.

POLARIS systems are already being installed at leading cancer centers worldwide and are expected to be deployed in approximately 20 centers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia by the end of the year. Sites include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Cambridge, and the Technical University of Munich. Importantly, POLARIS operates as a practical quantum device in real hospital environments and does not require specialized quantum expertise, demonstrating that quantum technologies can already deliver value today.

Drawing on the experience with POLARIS, NVision is extending the same molecular approach into quantum computing. The architecture is designed from first principles with scalability as a requirement. At its core are single photon emitting organic molecules forming an entirely new class of qubits, fundamentally different from legacy approaches.

The new qubits are now being integrated as a thin organic layer directly onto photonic chips, forming the basis of NVision’s quantum computing platform: Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC, pronounced “Pixie”). By combining this molecular layer with established photonic hardware, the approach enables a scalable path to building quantum computers using standard semiconductor manufacturing technologies.

“I see a future where quantum computers generate an explosion of drug hypotheses for diseases that are exceptionally difficult to treat today,” said Sella Brosh, CEO and Co-Founder of NVision. “As we expand our ambition into quantum computing, building on our remarkable new class of organic molecule-based qubits, that future comes closer. But without translational speed, we won’t fully realize those gains. POLARIS is built exactly to address this, enabling rapid in-vivo validation and closing the loop between design and reality.”

“NVision is fundamentally changing how we find, diagnose, and treat cancer by making the biology of disease visible in ways that weren’t possible before,” said Peter Barrett, General Partner, Playground Global. “That same molecular quantum capability now enables both the design and testing of new therapies – defining a new category in quantum health.”

To support this expansion, NVision also announced $55 million in new funding. The Series B includes a $17 million venture loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB). The round is anchored by Abbott, a global leader in diagnostics and medical devices, with participation from Playground Global, Matterwave/b2ventures, Entrée Capital, and others. The new funding brings NVision’s total capital raised to $120 million.

Abbott joins as the sole strategic investor in diagnostics, reflecting its interest in exploring how NVision’s quantum technologies can be applied across the diagnostic field. The investment provides Abbott with early access to emerging capabilities in quantum sensing and computing, supporting the evaluation of future applications in disease detection, monitoring, and clinical decision-making.

About NVision

NVision is a quantum technology company focused on healthcare, with deep expertise in engineering and controlling the quantum properties of organic molecules. This approach underpins both its POLARIS platform, which enables real-time measurement of metabolism on standard MRI systems, and its quantum computing platform, Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC, pronounced “Pixie”). Together, these capabilities are helping bridge the gap between understanding disease and delivering effective therapies. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ulm, Germany, NVision is backed by Playground Global, Entrée Capital, Matterwave/b2venture, Lauder Partners, Pathena Investments, The European Investment Bank and others. Learn more at nvision-quantum.com.

Source: NVision

The post NVision Raises $55M, Expands from Quantum MRI Sensing into Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

The Trump Organization says its former Australian construction partner is just distracting from "his own defaults and failures" as he bails on plans for a Trump Tower.

The country’s new leadership has pledged to reverse years of democratic backsliding, but they must act quickly

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Under blue skies on Saturday, crowds cheered as the EU flag was raised on the facade of the Hungarian parliament after a long absence. It was a powerful symbol on the day Péter Magyar was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister, with a declaration that Hungarians had given his party a mandate to launch “a new chapter” in the country’s history, and change the system.

The new government, seen as an experienced technocratic team, immediately signalled its new direction. “Hungary’s place is in Europe; naturally, firmly and without question,” foreign minister designate Anita Orbán said. Soon after, Hungary dropped its long-standing veto over sanctions against violent Israeli settlers – a sign it no longer sought to be outside the EU mainstream.

"Monster Wolf" is an animatronic scarecrow with flashing red eyes that howls and growls menacingly to scare away wild animals.

I can't believe I didn't discover this earlier.

With US inflation at a three-year high, US president insisted he’s not focused on economic hardship sparked by the conflict

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Donald Trump has said the growing financial pressure inflicted on Americans by the war on Iran is “not even a little bit” motivating him to make a peace deal with Tehran.

With US inflation at a three-year high, and fuel costs still climbing after a sharp rise in oil prices, the US president said on Tuesday that he is not focused on the economic hardship sparked by the conflict.

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Lineup to include pastor who called Democratic platform ‘demonic’, Christian author who said he would die in fight to overturn 2020 election and rabbi who has defended torture

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will this weekend headline a faith rally on the National Mall in Washington DC hosted by a private foundation operating in partnership with the White House, which includes some speakers that experts have characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.

Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled “The Virtue of Hate”; and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.

Organizers are concerned Fifa tournament will deepen housing crisis as short-term listings spawn and unhoused people are further displaced in sweeps

More than 10 million people are expected to visit the US for the World Cup this summer. However, where and how to accommodate these visitors has been a concern among residents and affordable housing advocates in host cities from Seattle to Atlanta.

Hotels remain under-booked in America’s 11 host cities, while short-term rental listings in some cities have increased by as much as 30% in recent weeks. To incentivize homeowners and landlords to become hosts during the World Cup, platforms such as Airbnb are offering a $750 sign-up bonus, with some rental listings already reaching $6,000 a night. Advocates worry that an increase in short-term listings will lead to a tighter rental market and higher rents for residents in host cities.

ETHAN GRANDIN
Contributing Reporter

Luqmaan Khan, a 25-year-old former university student accused of plotting an attack against the university in November 2025, was arraigned in federal court in late April, entering a plea of not guilty.

Khan arrived in the courtroom surrounded by United States Marshals and shackled in a green jumpsuit, alongside three other men awaiting their pleas before presiding Magistrate Judge Eleanor G. Tennyson. 

The courtroom remained calm as Khan and Special U.S. Assistant Attorney Olivia Duke awaited proceedings. Khan continually looked back at his family and others seated behind him before U.S. Marshals instructed him to face forward.

The arraignment comes one week after his federal indictment on a single charge of possession of a machine gun — which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

In November 2025, Khan was arrested in a Wilmington parking lot by the New Castle County Police Department (NCCPD) after officers conducted a traffic stop. 

During the stop, officers ordered Khan out of his vehicle. When he refused to comply, he was arrested, according to court documents.

Inside the Wilmington resident’s truck, officers encountered a .357 caliber Glock handgun loaded with 27 rounds. Officers also discovered three additional loaded 27-round magazines, a loaded Glock 9mm magazine, an armored ballistic plate and a composition notebook.

When officers opened the notebook, it included detailed attack plans against the university’s police department, noting “hard” and “soft” points of entry into the building and identifying a specific University of Delaware Police Department (UDPD) officer as a target.

When the charges were originally filed, the university separated from him and banned him from all campuses.

A federal grand jury indicted Khan on Wednesday, April 16. The charge was for possession of a Glock 19 equipped with a machine gun conversion device.

“The United States has charged Luqmaan Khan with possessing a weapon that could have killed scores of Delawareans in mere seconds,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware Benjamin Wallace said. “And as we have previously alleged, the evidence indicates that Khan was planning to use that weapon, and potentially others, in an attack on the Delaware community.”

Khan’s lawyer, Assistant Federal Defender Conor Wilson, waived his client’s federal detention and preliminary hearings. 

Wilson had previously asked the court to delay Khan’s proceedings to a later date. The indictment, along with the waiving of preliminary hearings, allows the case to move forward more quickly.

Court documents also show ongoing discussions regarding a potential release plan, with more time deemed necessary to ensure conditions meet the court’s standards for “community safety,” according to Delaware Online. 

Khan remains incarcerated and has been since his arrest on Nov. 24, 2025. Khan’s attorney declined to comment.

Alzheimer's Association CEO and president Joanne Pike shares some recommendations on which foods to eat, and which foods to limit, for better brain health. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)

Trump–Xi summit will be about managing US–China rivalry, not resolving it Expert comment LToremark 13 May 2026

The summit’s short agenda reveals a preference for continuing stability, which buys time. The question is how each side will use it.

When US President Trump and China’s President Xi meet in Beijing this week, the US list of concrete deliverables is short: keep rare earths flowing, create a board of trade mechanism for non-sensitive sectors, and secure Chinese purchase commitments. The gap between this short agenda and the long list of issues between two nations engaged in grinding, multidimensional competition reveals a shared preference for managing their rivalry rather than resolving it. But while Xi pursues this relationship management as strategy, Trump takes a more transactional and improvisational approach. With three more Trump-Xi meetings expected this year – at APEC in Shenzhen, the G20 in Miami and a Xi state visit – the question now is how each side will use this continued stalemate. 

Trump brings a commercial focus to Beijing and will be accompanied by a CEO delegation, reflecting a turn away from focusing on more structural issues. Among his aims are Chinese purchases of American products like soybeans, LNG and Boeing aircraft. While such purchases, even if fulfilled, are unlikely to compensate for the damage to US businesses from the 2025 trade war, the optics are helpful for a politically vulnerable administration. 

Xi also brings economic concerns – especially with further US tariffs pending – and will push on technology access. He has also signalled that Taiwan tops his agenda. China has long criticized US military support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers Chinese territory. The Trump administration approved an $11 billion arms package for Taiwan in December but has not yet followed through with delivery – even after Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan approved a special defence budget last week. On Monday, Trump indicated he would discuss the package with Xi, casting doubt on longstanding US policy regarding Taiwan. 

The brief agenda spans only a fraction of the US–China relationship. On AI, officials seek to establish a communication channel rather than address underlying competition. On China’s nuclear build-up, Beijing has shown little appetite to engage. Although communication beats silence, such underwhelming efforts sidestep structural dynamics. Other issues like the South China Sea, industrial overcapacity and currency issues are marginal or absent. While the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed Iran up the agenda, the focus will be on immediate resolution levers rather than underlying Chinese support for Iran, Russia and North Korea.

Washington’s narrow focus is itself revealing. It partly reflects the Trump administration’s transactional, short-term approach. More significantly, the 2025 trade war and Chinese rare earth export controls reoriented leverage and exposed vulnerabilities – even more acute given depleted US munitions stocks amid the Iran war. 

Going into the summit, both leaders face domestic constraints. Trump is navigating affordability politics, inflation, an unpopular war and setbacks to his trade agenda, with his approval rating at second-term lows. Agricultural communities, core to his support, have lost export markets and face rising fertilizer prices. For Trump, the pressure is on ahead of November’s midterm elections when his Republican party must defend Congressional majorities. He is also on the clock to resolve the Iran war. 

Xi, meanwhile, faces debt, deflation, demographic headwinds and softening global demand. China’s latest economic growth target is its lowest since 1991, even as pre-war stockpiles and diversified imports help buffer Iran shocks. But Beijing operates on a longer timeline; Xi answers to party elites and the focus is on stability.

An asymmetric stalemate

The US and China have taken very different approaches to managing their economic rivalry. As the two leaders seek continuing stability to buy time, how they use it is telling.

China has spent the past decade – especially since Trump’s first term – building its economic statecraft architecture, including export controls, the unreliable entity list, the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, and rare earth export licensing. China’s October 2025 rare earth export controls showed a willingness to use its dominance over rare earth supply chains as leverage. Although these measures were largely suspended by the so-called ‘Busan truce’, earlier April 2025 controls on permanent magnets and heavy rare earths remain in place. Beijing’s recent order directing companies not to comply with US sanctions against five refineries, accused of importing Iranian oil, also points to China’s growing assertiveness. 

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Trump’s treatment of US allies has weakened his negotiating position with Xi 

Cohesive strategy and patient investment have strengthened China’s hand in other critical domains too. China installed more solar capacity in 2024 than the rest of the world combined and dominates battery and EV supply chains. It is also accelerating frontier technology progress and increasingly pushing towards indigenization – even after Washington opened a door by giving the green light for Nvidia H200 chip sales. 

But there are gaps, notably advanced lithography, the machinery required to produce cutting-edge semiconductors. And China’s foundations are not unshakeable: fixed-asset investment struggled in 2025, the property sector continues to drag, and industrial policy draws mounting external backlash. 

The US picture is more mixed. Trump administration policy is an uneven companion to private sector innovation – and often a hindrance. In areas with bipartisan support, consistent policy and strategic coherence can deliver progress. Continued export control coordination with the Netherlands and Japan on lithography is one example; efforts to develop alternatives to China’s critical minerals dominance are another, though they will take years to fully realize. 

In other areas, progress is hampered by policy improvisation: the back-and-forth on tariffs, curtailed deployment of renewables, damaged research and state capacity, narrowing talent pathways, and a pattern of White House policy reversals. The US economy has nonetheless proven resilient, drawing on deep inherited advantages, such as AI infrastructure investment, energy abundance, deep capital markets, and innovation ecosystems. But tailwinds alone are insufficient. Without more coherent policy, including an industrial policy doctrine, gaps will emerge and grow.

Evaluating summit outcomes

For trade partners looking ahead, little will change. Hedging and trade diversification remain prudent policy. More broadly, evaluating the summit’s outcomes demands looking past immediate headlines and statements to the data and execution that follow. What commitments are made on the economic side – and whether they are fulfilled – are particularly important and will set the stage for future meetings.

HAMBURG, Germany, May 13, 2026 — ISC High Performance today announced that nine topics focusing on practical challenges, emerging ideas, and shared community interests have been selected for the newly introduced ISC Community Stage. This is a space specifically created to promote interactive meetups, peer exchange, and community-led discussion across advanced computing and related ecosystems.

Credit: ISC

Unlike traditional presentation formats, the community stage places audience participation at the center, with sessions built around discussion, networking, live feedback, lightning talks, and collaborative problem-solving. The Community Stage access is included as a benefit for Exhibition Pass holders.

“This new program stems from the intention of offering our community a relaxed space for sharing ideas, asking questions, and connecting with one another,” said Tanja Gruenter, Head of Conference Program Team. “It is about creating open dialogue on important topics.”

Gruenter noted that the selected sessions address pressing issues in HPC, AI, and quantum computing, including how to build a community, train future leaders, enhance collaboration, improve access, and turn advanced computing into real-world impact.

The selected Community Stage sessions are:

1. Show Up, Stand Out, Stick Around: Activate ISC’s Full Potential: Led by BeeGFS / ThinkParQ, this peer-to-peer session explores how exhibitors and organizations can make better use of the full ISC lifecycle — before, during, and after the event. Drawing on BeeGFS’s experience in building a strong HPC user community, the session will examine pre-show outreach, meaningful on-floor engagement, post-show follow-up, and the role of user groups, BoFs, and peer knowledge exchange in creating lasting community visibility.
2. Managing EuroHPC Collaborative Projects: Expectations and Best Practices from the Funder and Consortia: Aimed at project managers and principal investigators working on EuroHPC Joint Undertaking projects, this meetup brings together EuroHPC project officers and experienced consortium managers for an open discussion on effective project management. The session will address internal coordination, communication with granting authorities, reporting expectations, governance structures, and practical ways to manage complex multi-partner projects with less friction and greater clarity.
3. Open OnDemand Community Flash Talk Forum: Organized by members of the Open OnDemand development team, this session will provide a forum for the Open OnDemand community to share experiences, best practices, and practical tips. Through a series of short flash talks, audience questions, and discussion, participants will explore how institutions are using Open OnDemand to make HPC systems more accessible through browser-based portals, shared applications, and community-developed tools such as Appverse.
4. Bridging HPC Operations and Users from Industry and Academia: Let’s Talk: This highly interactive session will examine how HPC centers can better connect infrastructure, operations teams, researchers, and industry users. Through lightning talks, live polling, and moderated audience discussion, participants will explore how to move beyond fragmented one-off collaborations toward scalable engagement models, especially as AI, digital twins, quantum workflows, and workforce pressures reshape users’ expectations of HPC centers.
5. EuroHPC Virtual Training Academy (EVITA): HPC Training for Everyone: This session will introduce the EuroHPC Virtual Training Academy and its work toward a structured, modular European framework for HPC training. Participants will discuss the Competence and Qualification Framework, prototype training modules, the HPC Certification Forum Skill Tree, and opportunities for training providers to contribute material through funded calls. The session is designed to gather community feedback on the training needs and how EVITA can support universities, HPC centers, and industry.
6. Finding Your People in HPC: A WHPC Community Meet-Up: Hosted by Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) representatives, this informal meetup is designed to help its members, allies, and newcomers build genuine connections within the HPC community. Through facilitated networking, rotating conversations, and opportunities to meet WHPC Chapter and Affiliate leads, the session aims to make ISC feel more welcoming and to help participants leave with a stronger sense of belonging and an ongoing support network.
7. Sustainable Collaborations and Knowledge Exchange Across the UK and Europe: Supported by the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) project, this session will focus on turning conference conversations into lasting collaborations. Open to researchers, early-career scientists, mentors, mentees, and digital research professionals, the session will combine lightning talks with facilitated group discussions to identify shared interests, skills, and possible next steps, including joint proposals, shared software, mentoring, training, and cross-border collaboration.
8. AI Factories in Europe: Powering the Convergence of HPC and AI for Scientific Breakthroughs and Digital Sovereignty: This session will explore how AI factories are reshaping the role of HPC in Europe by integrating compute infrastructure, data pipelines, software stacks, and talent to support AI development at scale. Through lightning talks, polling, moderated discussion, and open Q&A, participants will examine how AI factories differ from traditional HPC centers, how they can support scientific and industrial innovation, and what they mean for Europe’s digital and AI sovereignty.
9. #hacktheworldabetterplace – Why It Still Matters to Inspire Our Youth to Code: Led by Hacker School in Hamburg, this session connects the future of HPC with the need to inspire young people to code. It will highlight how early coding education, especially for girls and socio-economically disadvantaged students, can help broaden the talent pipeline for HPC, AI, and advanced computing. The session will invite attendees to reflect on their own path into technology and consider how the HPC community can support grassroots initiatives that make coding literacy more accessible.

In addition to the Community Stage, ISC encourages attendees to take part in networking opportunities across ISC 2026, including the Meet & Greet sessions, Birds of a Feather discussions, poster sessions, and exhibition-floor activities. You can view the full program on the ISC event platform.

Join ISC High Performance 2026 in #ConnectingTheDots

ISC 2026 returns to the Congress Center Hamburg from June 22 to June 26 for its 41st edition. Since its inception in 1986, it has been recognized as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most attended event for HPC, AI, and quantum professionals and organizations interested in performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

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About ISC High Performance

ISC High Performance is the leading global event for high performance computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and quantum computing. It brings together researchers, technology providers, and industry leaders to explore the latest advancements and practical applications shaping the future of computing.

Source: ISC

The post ISC 2026 Expands Networking and Peer Exchange with New Community Stage appeared first on HPCwire.

Santa Clara county claims Meta Platforms violated the state’s false advertising and unfair business practices laws

California’s Santa Clara county has sued Meta Platforms, alleging it has profited from Facebook and Instagram ads promoting scams in violation of California’s false advertising and unfair business practices laws.

The lawsuit – filed on Monday in Santa Clara county superior court on behalf of all California residents – accuses the social media giant of tolerating fraudulent advertising on a global basis. The suit seeks restitution, civil damages and an order prohibiting Meta from engaging in unfair business practices.

Davis is the country’s first leader to serve a second consecutive term in nearly 30 years

The Bahamas prime minister, Philip Davis, and his ruling Progressive Liberal party (PLP) have been re-elected, making him the country’s first leader to serve a second consecutive term in nearly 30 years.

“The Bahamian people have spoken, and I receive their verdict with humility and gratitude,” Davis told Reuters. “This victory is a mandate to keep moving the Bahamas forward, to expand opportunity, strengthen security, ease the pressure on families, and deliver progress across our islands.”

Sen. Ronald dela Rosa of the Philippines is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in the killings of at least 32 people.

BOULDER, Colo., May 13, 2026 – IonQ has announced a new laboratory suite in Boulder, Colorado that will house state-of-the-art Quantum Computing R&D and semiconductor chip testing facilities that will be used to develop and refine technologies central to future generations of its leading quantum computing systems.

Credit: IonQ

Presiding over the festivities were company leaders Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO; Dr. Chris Ballance, President of Quantum Computing; Colorado Governor Jared Polis; and Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett. Other prominent figures from the Boulder deep tech and business communities also attended, welcoming this latest addition to the extensive roster of IonQ teams that are already proud contributors to the thriving Colorado tech economy. Senior executives from the Louisville-based IonQ Space Missions and Broomfield-based IonQ Optical Communications product families also joined their IonQ Quantum Computing colleagues for the occasion.

”Quantum is Now!” said company Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi in advance of the official ribbon-cutting ceremony. “IonQ is delivering, today, on the promise of using our advanced quantum technologies to solve the world’s most complex problems, aiding communities and businesses in everything from improving lives with faster pharmaceutical development, to enhancing reliability of infrastructure and optimizing manufacturing processes. IonQ is proud to partner with Governor Polis, the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade, and the city of Boulder to continue to drive Colorado’s reputation as a leader in quantum innovation. We’re deeply appreciative of the support Colorado has demonstrated in helping bring our new R&D labs here, and excited to tap into its highly skilled workforce as we continue to grow.”

“Colorado is a quantum hub, and we are only growing. The selection of Boulder as IonQ’s North American expansion, is proof of Colorado’s strong and growing quantum economy, and will bring more high-paying skilled jobs to the region, and attract more businesses to Colorado,” said Governor Polis.

Chris Ballance, IonQ’s President of Quantum Computing, spoke at the ceremony of the company’s pioneering approach to building trapped-ion quantum computers using electronics, instead of lasers – enabling mass manufacturability via the standard semiconductor supply chain. Through this innovation, IonQ has achieved world record quantum performance at a fraction of the cost and complexity of competing approaches, enabling a scalable production technique that will empower the company to accelerate through the milestones on its development roadmap to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

“IonQ’s decision to locate this facility in Boulder reflects the city’s commitment to building the infrastructure and innovation ecosystem needed to support emerging industries like quantum technology,” said City of Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett. “Through city and state incentives and initiatives like the CHIPS Zone Program, we are continuing to build on the conditions that make Boulder an ideal place for innovative companies to thrive. This milestone also highlights the strength of Boulder’s collaborative ecosystem, where universities, government, industry and economic development partners work together to advance our community as a global hub for innovation.”

Honored guests participating in the event included Dr. Justin Schwartz, Chancellor, CU Boulder; Erin Kuhn, Consul with the UK Government Office in Denver; and Jessi Olsen, CEO of Elevate Quantum, a leader in accelerating quantum technology commercialization.

The new laboratories – which are planned to have a first quantum computer fully installed later this year – will enable IonQ to design, test, and iterate on new generations of its semiconductor ion trap chips, under the direction of IonQ’s Quantum Computing VP Science David Allcock, who presided over the ribbon cutting ceremony. With the work in Boulder, IonQ expects to continue its long history of innovating and increasing the technological sophistication and performance of its trapped-ion chips and of the quantum computers they power as the company rapidly scales.

The 22,000 square feet of new laboratories that IonQ is outfitting occupy two floors in Boulder 38, a 9.3 acre Class A research and innovation campus developed by Breakthrough Properties and located at the intersection of 38th Street and Arapahoe (street address 1685 38th Street).

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 IonQ Tempo, is 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 Opens New Quantum Computing R&D Lab in Colorado appeared first on HPCwire.

And how governance reform can break the cycle.

The US president arrives with tech leaders including Elon Musk and Tim Cook, with trade, AI and Taiwan all set to be discussed

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.

Trump pumped his fist, descended the stairs of Air Force One and walked a red carpet flanked by 300 young Chinese people wearing light blue and white, waving red flags and chanting welcome. He was greeted late on Wednesday by China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, the vice-minister of foreign affairs, Ma Zhaoxu, and a military band and honour guard.

The ex-lawyer who Trump described as ‘very talented’ was previously deputy commissioner for food at the FDA

The new acting commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who Donald Trump described as a “very talented person”, is a former corporate lawyer who previously defended a popular formula maker against claims of its product harming premature babies.

Kyle Diamantas, who most recently served as the FDA deputy commissioner for food, will be taking over as acting FDA commissioner.

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Yaoji Chaogan, a no-frills canteen next to Beijing’s historic Drum and Bell towers, once proudly displayed photographs of Joe Biden, who visited the restaurant when he was US vice-president in 2011. Biden’s visit went viral in China, with media praising his “noodle diplomacy” (one of the dishes that Biden ordered was zhajiang mian, a traditional style of Beijing noodles with bean paste).

But evidence of Biden’s visit was removed when the restaurant was redecorated a few years ago. A visit from a US leader is no longer something to boast about.

Ofcom attempts to block UK access to site cited in multiple coroners’ reports as it levies fine under Online Safety Act

A nihilistic internet suicide forum implicated in over 160 UK deaths has been fined £950,000 by the online regulator in its latest attempt to shut it down.

Ofcom said the US-based website remained accessible in the UK despite over a year of warnings. Online safety campaigners have accused the regulator of taking an “interminable” amount of time to act.

GRENOBLE, France and TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 13, 2026 — Quobly, a French pioneer in silicon-based quantum computing, and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Research Institute, the R&D arm of Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn), have announced the release of an open-source numerical toolbox, jointly developed by the two partners, dedicated to the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm, a cornerstone of fault-tolerant quantum computing with major applications in quantum chemistry and materials science.

QPE is widely regarded as a key algorithm for computing ground-state energies of molecular systems on future fault-tolerant quantum computers. While its theoretical properties and asymptotic cost scalings are well understood, practical resource estimates and realistic performance trade-offs remain largely unexplored, due to the difficulty of simulating QPE beyond toy models.

The newly released toolbox aims to bridge this gap by providing researchers with a practical environment to explore QPE implementations and their resource implications, with a strong focus on understanding algorithmic building blocks and their practical implementation constraints.

From Theory to Practice: Exploring the Full QPE Pipeline

The QPE Toolbox is designed to give quantum algorithm practitioners a hands-on, numerical understanding of the full QPE workflow, from chemistry preprocessing to phase estimation, in a regime that challenges classical simulation while remaining computationally tractable.

Built on advanced tensor network techniques, the toolbox enables users to:

• Prepare physically motivated initial states using DMRG and matrix product states.
• Encode molecular Hamiltonians into quantum circuits via trotterization or block-encoding / qubitization methods.
• Compare textbook QPE with single-ancilla Robust Phase Estimation (RPE).
• Analyze circuit depth, gate counts, and error sources without necessarily executing the circuit.

The toolbox relies on the open-source quimb library and interfaces with standard quantum chemistry tools such as PySCF, ensuring compatibility with established workflows.

The first release is designed as an educational and exploratory framework, enabling researchers to build intuition around the practical implementation of QPE and its variants.

A Modular Tool for Realistic Numerical Experiments

Rather than attempting to simulate early fault-tolerant quantum computers, the QPE Toolbox focuses on practical, interpretable numerical experiments in regimes accessible to classical computation, where algorithmic choices, initialization fidelity, and Hamiltonian encoding strategies can be explored in detail.

Illustrative use cases enabled by the toolbox include (non-exhaustive):

• Full circuit executions for ~10–20 qubits and circuits ranging from <1,000 to ~100,000 gates.
• Ground state preparation for systems up to ~20–30 qubits.
• Hamiltonian encoding for systems up to ~20–30 qubits.

These capabilities allow researchers to study trade-offs between precision, circuit depth, and resource requirements, and to build practical intuition about the behavior of QPE building blocks. The toolbox is therefore designed primarily as a pedagogical and exploratory platform, helping bridge the gap between theoretical proposals and their concrete implementation constraints.

Open, Collaborative, and Evolving

The QPE Toolbox is released as open source and is intended to evolve with the community. Future developments will include variational circuit synthesis, compressed fermionic encodings, and larger-scale tensor-network simulations.

The toolbox is available on GitHub: https://github.com/quobly-sw/qpe-toolbox.

Documentation and example workflows are provided to help researchers explore the different components of the QPE pipeline.

“Our goal is to provide a practical, numerical playground for QPE, one that helps researchers move beyond purely theoretical cost models and develop realistic intuition for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms,” said Thibaud Louvet, Quantum Algorithms Scientist at Quobly.

“By combining state-of-the-art quantum algorithms with advanced tensor-network techniques, this toolbox offers researchers a structured environment to explore and better understand the practical requirements of future quantum applications,” said Min-Hsiu Hsieh, Director of the Quantum Computing Research Center at Hon Hai Research Institute.

The jointly developed software is free for use by academics and researchers. This collaboration reflects a shared commitment by Quobly and Hon Hai Research Institute to advancing algorithm-hardware co-design and accelerating progress toward practical fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Source: Hon Hai Research Institute

The post Quobly and Hon Hai Research Institute Release Open-Source QPE Toolbox for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 13, No. 597.

Under pressure from Beijing, the president has indicated an openness to rethinking U.S. support for Taiwan, alarming its backers.

Trade, Taiwan and tensions with Iran are surefire topics for President Trump's meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

As our phones become more advanced, batteries are feeling the strain. But advances in technology and shifts in our habits could help close the gap.

Between a crowded AI market and trust issues, all eyes are on what Google will do next.

Commentary: Google's Android Show debuts new features that might actually simplify a few things, including when I need a break from my phone.

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Experts say latest move by acting attorney general suggests more cases against foes amid claims of vindictive DoJ

The second indictment of ex-FBI director James Comey, a top target of Donald Trump in his drive for revenge against critics, suggests more charges could be coming against other Trump foes as the US president continues to use the department of justice to settle political scores, ex-prosecutors and law professors said.

Legal critics also see the new indictment by acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, as “embarrassing” and “ridiculous” and revealing Blanche’s desire to quickly appease Trump and persuade him to make his appointment as America’s top justice official permanent.

Sony sweeps CNET's headphone categories, including active noise cancellation, battery life and comfort.

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Watchdog to examine whether Reform UK leader should have declared donation received before entering parliament

Nigel Farage is facing a formal investigation by the parliamentary standards watchdog over a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The Reform UK leader received the money weeks before announcing he would stand as a candidate in the 2024 general election.

Suspect was seen on fuzzy security photo running between benches of church carrying skull, police say

Czech police are hunting a thief who snatched the 800-year-old skull of a saint from a display box in a church and ran away with the relic.

A fuzzy security camera photo released late on Tuesday appeared to show a figure dressed in black carrying what police said was the skull of Saint Zdislava of Lemberk.

Facility would require more power than entire state uses and suck up vast amount of water in drought-stricken area

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

FTSE 100 business ‘minded to recommend’ £60-a-share tilt from company owned by billionaire Wallenberg family

The laboratory testing company Intertek has become the latest FTSE 100 business to agree to a takeover, backing a £10.6bn approach from a private equity firm owned by Sweden’s billionaire Wallenberg family.

After rebuffing three previous approaches, Intertek’s board said it was “minded to recommend” the £60-a-share tilt from the Swedish buyout firm EQT to shareholders, if there is a firm offer.

One elderly passenger on vessel docked in Bordeaux has died and about 50 people have symptoms, say officials

French authorities have confined more than 1,700 passengers and crew members to a cruise ship docked in Bordeaux after a passenger died from suspected norovirus, officials have said.

The Ambassador Cruise Line vessel carrying 1,233 passengers, most of them British or Irish, arrived in Bordeaux on Tuesday. One 90-year-old passenger had died and about 50 people had shown symptoms of the virus, French health officials said.

Ceremonial event marks start of new parliamentary year, and outlines government policies and proposed legislation

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A CBS News review of internal government documents and information provided to Congress shows immigration detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay are nearly empty.

Lady Pachar was shot that day while traveling by car to a gym in the southwestern city of Machala.

The Iran war will cast a long shadow over the talks. Plus, the 100 best novels of all time

Good morning.

Donald Trump is due to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday evening, the first visit to China by a US president since he was last there nearly a decade ago, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.

What is the state of US-China relations? The two countries remain locked in a fragile tariff truce, reached last autumn after tensions threatened to erupt into a full-scale trade war. Trump has long complained about China’s trade surplus with the US, while Beijing has opposed American export controls and sanctions.

What is the latest with the US-Iran ceasefire? The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement. Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China to put pressure on Iran to reopen the strait and accept US terms for peace.

What did the Atlantic allege? It reported that Patel’s alcohol consumption had become “a recurring source of concern across the government” which made him a “national-security vulnerability”, citing interviews with more than two dozen people including current and former FBI officials. Patel denies all the allegations, calling them “outrageous” and “malicious”.

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: CERN, a longtime Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN has also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Demarcation of 410,000 hectares of territory is intended to protect the Amazonian community from farming, illegal mining and logging

More than 25 years after the existence of one of the Amazon’s most vulnerable nomadic hunter-gatherer communities was confirmed, the Brazilian government has begun demarcating the Pardo River Kawahiva Indigenous territory, giving greater protection to the uncontacted people.

The demarcation of the 410,000-hectare (1m-acre) territory located between the states of Mato Grosso and Amazonas in north-west Brazil, was confirmed by the National Indigenous Peoples’ Foundation (Funai) last week. But the process remains fraught, with legal challenges from groups linked to the country’s agribusiness sector, and the forthcoming presidential election in October.

Sources say health secretary intends to trigger leadership election as early as Thursday

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Allies of Wes Streeting have said he is preparing to stand down as health secretary amid deep frustration with Keir Starmer’s leadership, and could mount a formal challenge for the leadership as early as Thursday.

Downing Street insiders had suggested Streeting did not yet have the required support from 81 MPs, which is needed to formally launch a leadership bid, after the prime minister issued a “put up or shut up” ultimatum to his cabinet.

Rapper known as Ye must pay six-figure sum to four plaintiffs who successfully argued he infringed copyright

Kanye West has lost a lawsuit which alleged he infringed on other artists’ copyright by playing an uncleared sample of their work during a live event.

In July 2021 the artist, now legally known as Ye, played his then-unreleased album Donda to 40,000 fans at a listening party held at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The version of the song Hurricane featured a sample of MSD PT2, an instrumental composed by four musicians: Khalil Abdul-Rahman, Sam Barsh, Josh Mease and Dan Seeff. They had made the instrumental in 2018, and it made its way to Ye via another producer.

Prosecutors said Kouri Richins laced her husband's cocktail with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl in 2022.

Fugitive faces charges including corruption and money laundering in US and Malaysia for role he allegedly played in scandal

The fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, a central figure in the multibillion-dollar scandal at the state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), is reportedly seeking a pardon from the US president, Donald Trump.

Low faces multiple charges including corruption and money laundering in the US and Malaysia for the important role he allegedly played in the misappropriation of at least $4.5bn (£3.3bn) from 1MDB.

A new feature lets you designate someone to be notified if a chat conversation suggests a potential safety concern.

Condolences poured in for the Louisiana beaver-like legend who once appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show

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Condolences have poured in for a Louisiana couple who successfully battled wildlife authorities to keep their domesticated nutria as a pet, watched the semi-aquatic rodent appear on cable news and accumulate a social media following tens of thousands strong, and then endured the animal’s recent death from cancer.

Denny and Myra Lacoste announced Neuty’s death on Monday on Instagram, where more than 37,000 users followed an account dedicated to documenting the nutria’s life.

Lai wins $60,000 literary award for her study of a young woman’s repression and rage as she struggles to juggle the needs of those around her

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As the 2026 winner of the Stella prize, Lee Lai has established two new firsts: the first ever non-binary winner with her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.

Cannon follows the titular, queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the “uncool side of [her] twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, which became Luce then (loose) Cannon – and much like her unwanted nickname, she shoulders responsibility without complaint. During the day she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant enfeebled by age, without any help from her emotionally avoidant mother; and by night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, corralling chaos into order. Cannon’s longtime best friend Trish uses her as a soundboard for all of her problems, and is secretly mining Cannon’s life as a troubling source of inspiration for her writing career.

Why Should Delaware Care?
On Tuesday, seven of Delaware’s 19 school districts held elections for their boards of education. Local school boards are the governing authority for school districts, and these elected officials can play a large role in the educational outcome for the state’s students. 

Incumbent school board members generally had a rough day Tuesday when Delaware voters opted for several candidates who were fresh faces to their districts and who tended to push for greater transparency. 

More than 12,100 people voted in the elections for school board members in districts in all three counties. While small compared to general elections, the turnout more than doubled the totals in 2024 when a similar number of districts held competitive elections. 

Those results were particularly powered by the vote in the Middletown-Odessa-Townsend area, where the Appoquinimink School District saw more than 4,000 voters turn out. Two years ago, fewer than 900 voters cast ballots.

Boards of education are responsible for a variety of governance-related tasks at their school districts, including hiring or firing superintendents, approving budgets, and determining when to ask voters for more money through a referendum request.

Contested races were held Tuesday in seven of Delaware’s 16 public school districts, including Appoquinimink, Christina, Colonial, Delmar, Caesar Rodney, Milford, and Red Clay Consolidated.

Below we’ll focus on the results for races in the Appoquinimink, Christina, Delmar, and Red Clay Consolidated school districts. 

Appoquinimink opts for change

The Appoquinimink School District will swear in two new members to its board of education after Britney Mumford and Elena Brenner handily beat the incumbents by receiving 29% and 27% of votes, respectively. 

Mumford and Brenner’s election comes nearly a year after the district revealed it had failed to properly track millions of dollars it believed were in reserve, sparking widespread criticism of school officials, including current board President Richard Forsten and member Nichelle DeWitt.

In September, a Change.org petition that garnered nearly 1,000 signatures called for the “immediate resignation” of the district superintendent, as well as of Appoquinimink school board members.

The crisis led to an investigation by Delaware State Auditor Lydia York, who found that the district’s deficit resulted from years of failure by staff and leadership to properly track and record expenditures.

Voters told Spotlight Delaware that trust was still an issue between the community and board members. 

Chris, a parent of an Appoquinimink elementary and middle school student who only gave his first name, said he was concerned about a lack of transparency and accountability in the district following the controversy over finances.

“There needs to be a change,” he said.

Adrian, a teacher in the Appoquinimink School District who only gave her first name, said she voted for Brenner and another challenger, Mark Heck, who failed to garner enough votes to be among the top two. 

Adrian liked that Brenner and Heck have had experience inside of a classroom.

“So they both know what is needed inside the schools. Hopefully they both are able to clean house a little bit … and really figure out what happened to that money,” she said.

Another Appoquinimink teacher, Katelynn Scott, said she always votes in school board elections, but was particularly concerned this year.

“I think, in this political climate, it’s really important to make sure we have people who are supportive of kids, teachers and the actual community here, and not politics going on nationally,” she said.

Referendum talk powers Delmar change

Neil Baker and Jordan Johnson were elected as the two newest Delmar Board of Education members, after beating Shawn Brittingham, who has previously served on both the Delmar and State Board of Education.

The Delmar School District made news last fall when then-Superintendent Andrew O’Neal warned of overcrowding, rising salaries and inflation as reasons the district might need to raise taxes.

Four months after the board announced it would not move forward with a referendum, Brittingham told Spotlight Delaware he would fully support a future referendum request because the district capacity challenges are growing. The Delmar district only has one building, where both its middle and high school students attend classes.

On Tuesday, Johnson said he would decide whether to support a referendum after reviewing additional information.

“If I feel that it is right and that we need it, I will vote for it,” he told Spotlight Delaware on Tuesday, “and if I do not feel that it is right and that we do not need it, I will not vote for it.” 

The other candidate, Baker, previously told the Laurel Star that “a strategic review is necessary.”

He said the review should account for enrollment growth, and “the relative value of school tax dollars in western Sussex compared to other districts statewide,” among other issues, according to the report from the Laurel Star. 

Delmar Board of Education President Ray Vincent told Spotlight Delaware he was voting because it’s important for the community to “support the candidates of our choice so that we can continue to drive this district forward.”

Asked whether the possibility of a referendum influenced his decision, Vincent said the district will be moving forward with a referendum “once we figure out what the state’s new funding form is going to look like.”

But not all community members had a potential referendum on their minds when selecting their candidates. 

Stacy Culver, a Delmar Elementary teacher, said she did not think about referendums when making her decision. Instead, she said she was voting “for somebody to stand up for our kids.”

Red Clay votes out president

The Red Clay Consolidated School District is one of four northern New Castle County districts that could be consolidated into one larger district, along with Brandywine, Christina, and Colonial.

Both board of education candidates aimed to address the district’s ongoing enrollment concerns before a possible consolidation. 

But voters chose newcomer Jenny Howard over current Board President Victor Leonard, as she received 60% of the votes. 

Howard, a mother of four and a former educator, told Spotlight Delaware that the distrust among community members regarding the board’s decision making is what inspired her to run against Leonard. 

Last month, the Red Clay Consolidated Board of Education voted to postpone the transformation of one of its high schools into an “innovation campus,” following months of pushback from community members concerned about the future of a program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

If the plan had been successful, the McKean Innovation Center would have opened in August 2027, reducing the number of traditional high schools in the district from three to two, and increasing enrollment numbers at Alexis I. du Pont High School and The John Dickinson School. 

The plan would also have moved the district’s Meadowood program for students with intellectual or developmental disabilities, serving students in kindergarten through age 22, from McKean to A.I. du Pont.

Some parents have voiced concerns for months to district leaders about the program’s future, saying they feel Meadowood has been an “afterthought.”

Howard also spoke against the innovation center at multiple meetings.

​​”The district and the board were not listening to the families and the community and just doing whatever they wanted,” she said. “I was like, ‘You know, maybe [my election] will change things.’”

Jane Marcozzi is a graduate of McKean High School and said her grandaughter currently attends the school. She ultimately voted for Howard because she felt the board’s original decision to close McKean was rushed, and does not want to see the school closed. 

“I feel like it came up all of a sudden, and everybody kind of was like, ‘Oh, OK,’” she said.

Marcozzi, who said this was her first time voting in a board of education election, added that she admired Howard’s public comments toward the board regarding McKean during public meetings.

Cherry to remain on Christina board

Tuesday’s election marked the second year in a row that the Christina School District community selected a representative for the board’s lone Wilmington-based seat. 

Last May, the Wilmington-based seat on the Christina Board of Education was filled by Shannon Troncoso after she received 67% of the votes cast. 

After Troncoso resigned in December, board members appointed Celita Cherry, a self-empowerment coach, to fill the vacancy until Tuesday’s election.

Cherry is one of the few incumbents across the state to retain her seat after obtaining 66% of the votes. 

Cherry has a daughter in the Bayard School, and is also the president of Mothers Advocating for School Kids, an advocacy organization. In January, Cherry said she applied for the seat because she felt it was time for someone who grew up in Wilmington and attended Christina schools to “serve as a voice directly from the community.” 

Cherry also said the person filling the vacant seat should serve as a bridge between the district and the city to better communicate how district policies are made. 

Only 540 votes were cast throughout the Christina School District. 

At the polls, one resident, Dawn Patton, said she voted for Cherry’s challenger, Charlene “Amina” Sams, because she felt Sams would be the best candidate to “implement change for the better.” 

Patton does not have children in the district, but her granddaughter is graduating from Glasgow High School this year. 

As a taxpayer, she noted the importance of education and voting for someone who could guide young people and “lead them in the right path.”

Other competitive races

• Caesar Rodney: Incumbents Dave Failing and Michael Marasco will maintain their seats on the Caesar Rodney Board of Education. The two received 29% and 28% of the votes, respectively. 
• Colonial: Dawn Green won Colonial’s District F seat on the board after beating Rasheeda Campbell by 142 votes. Carlos Dipres will maintain his seat on the board’s Nominating District G after receiving 66% of the votes cast. 
• Milford: Cynthia McKenzie received an overwhelming number of votes at 91% to win Milford’s Nominating District C seat. 

Tim Carlin and Jacob Owens contributed to this report.

The post A slew of newly elected board members set to shake up Delaware schools appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware ranks among one of the costliest states in the country for healthcare. In recent months, Spotlight Delaware reported that the state’s largest hospital had provided miniscule amounts of free care to patients, despite having a tax-exempt status and hundreds of millions of dollars in excess revenue each year. 

Delaware lawmakers introduced a bill Tuesday that would greatly increase the number of patients eligible to receive free treatment, often called charity care, from the state’s nonprofit hospitals.

The legislation, Senate Bill 13, comes months after a Spotlight Delaware investigation called into question the charity care practices at the state’s largest healthcare system, ChristianaCare. 

The new legislative push also follows a separate effort last summer in which the state paid off medical debts for thousands of Delawareans, despite hospital charity care policies that could have made that treatment free.

Nonprofit hospitals, like ChristianaCare, are required by the Internal Revenue Service to provide a “community benefit” to earn their tax-exempt status. Historically, that benefit has been charity care. 

But changes in recent decades to federal and state guidelines have allowed nonprofit hospitals to set charity care policies at their own discretion, removing any requirement of providing it in order to receive a tax break. 

And Spotlight Delaware’s investigation found ChristianaCare had reported massive excess revenues to the IRS while its free care remained stagnant for more than a decade. 

Now, it appears lawmakers are hoping to open the door for more patients to receive free treatment through SB 13. The bill would raise the income cutoff level for receiving discounted or fully covered care. 

“We collectively can be doing a lot better in terms of executing on the promise of charity care and making sure that more working Delawareans can afford the care that they’re entitled to,” Meyer said.

Meyer said his office reached out to Delaware hospital systems after discovering that many patients who received debt relief from the state should have already qualified for free care under existing hospital charity care policies. This new legislation ensures hospital charity care policies are “making an impact,” he said.

At the time, Spotlight Delaware reported the state earmarked half a million dollars to pay off medical debts for nearly 18,000 residents. State leaders argued costs were too high in the state, and patients had been unfairly burdened by often crippling medical debt.

But as taxpayers footed the bill for that initiative, which ultimately erased $50 million in unpaid medical debt, ChristianaCare had often set aside a miniscule fraction of its multi-billion-dollar budget each year to ease those medical bills for Delawareans in the first place.

What’s in the bill?

Senate Bill 13 would dramatically increase the level at which patients can receive charity care. 

In October, Spotlight Delaware reported hospitals had to provide free or discounted care to patients living at or below 350% of the Federal Poverty Line, or $55,860. 

Under the new proposal, all of the state’s nonprofit hospitals would be required to provide free care to patients living below 300% of the Federal Poverty Line, with large discounts for patients in higher percentage brackets. 

• Below 300% of the FPL ($46,950 a year) – Full discount
• 300-350% of the FPL ($46,950 to $54,775 a year) – 75% discount 
• 350-400% of the FPL ($54,775 to $62,600 a year) – 50% discount

Separately, the legislation allows people living at 500% of the Federal Poverty Line — $78,250 a year — to seek out a 50% discount if the billed expenses are greater than 10% of their income. 

Senate Bill 13 keeps sections of the previous code that places enforcement of charity care requirements on the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services. It also maintains that nonprofit hospitals seeking out a Certificate Public Review, a government approval for hospital expansion, must provide charity care. 

The bill exempts psychiatric, rehabilitative and long-term acute facilities from charity care requirements. 

But SB 13 does leave a door open for hospitals to receive compensation from patients who otherwise would have been eligible for free care. One provision of the bill says it would not prohibit hospitals from assisting patients to enroll in Medicaid or Medicare, which pays hospitals, but at a lower reimbursement rate than private insurers. 

The bill also implements strengthened enforcement levers for the state to intervene when hospitals are not in compliance, allowing state regulators to impose fines or sanction a hospital’s license. It also allows the Delaware Attorney General’s office to open civil or class-action lawsuits on the behalf of improperly billed patients. 

The bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear), said SB 13 would protect patients from “aggressive” medical debt collection practices, expand notification and screening requirements for hospitals to determine if patients are eligible for financial assistance. 

According to the bill, patients can’t have their outstanding medical debt sent to collection agencies while they have pending financial assistance claims. And if those hospitals do send patients to collections, the proposal would require them to invalidate that debt. 

Hospitals must also “prominently” post their charity care policies in admission and registration areas in addition to on patient bills.

“This bill recognizes something very simple,” Pinkney said. “Healthcare is not truly accessible if people are afraid that getting care will financially ruin them.”

What is charity care?

Before 1967, federal regulations surrounding charity care were clear: Hospitals received their tax-exemption in exchange for providing relief for the poor. 

But following the creation of federal subsidies like Medicare and Medicaid, which were also meant to subsidize health costs, those regulations changed from offering relief for the poor to offering community benefits. 

With that change, providing free care to disadvantaged patients was no longer required. However, the IRS still considers it a “significant factor” in determining a hospital’s tax-free exemption.

According to the IRS, a community benefit could mean providing charity care, using surplus funds to improve facilities or spending money to increase access to medical training.

Guy David, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania, told Spotlight Delaware in October that providing free care is not the only way to determine whether a hospital is charitable. 

He also said there are two types of charity care. One is a hospital providing care with no expectation of payment. The second is a provider’s “bad debt.” 

Bad debt is when a hospital issues a bill to a patient hoping to get paid, but for one reason or another, that payment never comes. David said a key indicator of a hospital’s charitability is if that hospital decides to send that debt off to a collection agency, or simply write it off as a loss. 

He said it is important to look at all of the uncompensated care a hospital provides, which represents both of those figures.

In an email on Monday, David called the bill a “relatively strong intervention” meant to standardize charity care policy and prevent medical debt collections. He also said he believes the bill would improve access for patients that may have otherwise put off care because of the cost. 

Still, he said the bill does not do much to address the underlying cost-drivers of healthcare, such as workforce, technology and market power. He added that hospitals with more market power would have the ability to cost-shift — or charge commercially insured patients more — to make up for fewer paying patients, while smaller hospitals may face higher losses. 

“In that sense, this is a redistributional reform rather than a productivity-enhancing one,” David said. “As a result, it should be viewed as an effective equity and patient protection policy, but a limited tool for controlling overall healthcare spending.”

Senate Bill 13 is awaiting a hearing in the Senate Health and Social Services Committee.

The post Lawmakers to reform free hospital care rules following Spotlight Delaware investigation appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

In a case of ‘oh dear diary’, the OpenAI president Greg Brockman is having to read extracts from his musings about Elon Musk in court. It’s a terrifying reminder that what’s divulged to AI really isn’t private

The hottest new read of 2026 may well be The Secret Diary of Greg Brockman, Aged 38¾. It’s got everything: feuding billionaires, scheming CEOs and a perhaps somewhat unreliable narrator. You won’t find it in the library, but you can watch Brockman, a co-founder and president of OpenAI, being forced to read the juiciest bits out loud in court.

Before you ask ChatGPT to explain, here’s the backstory: Elon Musk is in a legal battle with Brockman and the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Musk, a former board member of OpenAI, is accusing the men of violating the AI firm’s founding agreement by turning it into a for-profit entity. Meanwhile, Altman et al are arguing Musk is just upset he’s not in control of the company and wants to bring down his competition.

British pop-metallers’ frontman Oli Sykes suffers concussion after phone strikes him on the head, in latest in spate of similar incidents faced by musicians

Eric Clapton and Bring Me the Horizon’s frontman Oli Sykes have both been struck by objects thrown at them while performing, the latter incident leaving Sykes with concussion.

As Bring Me the Horizon performed in St Louis on Monday, a member of the audience threw a phone at Sykes, striking him on the head. Sykes continued to perform but cut one of the songs from the band’s set as well as a fan interaction section.

The man who shaped the Raptors’ NBA title has moved to Texas. But his ideals may clash with his new team’s ownership

On its face, the fit between Masai Ujiri and the Dallas Mavericks is perfect. “It’s almost like a match made in heaven,” Ujiri said after being introduced as the franchise’s president of basketball operations and alternate governor last week. “Every single one of us in this world is chosen for something special, and we just have to find it,” he added. “And I found basketball.”

Since he became the first African to run a major sports franchise in the United States as the general manager of the Denver Nuggets in 2010, Ujiri has accomplished everything. After winning Executive of the Year with the Nuggets in 2013, he moved to Toronto and inherited a Raptors franchise unsure of itself. The Raptors were the only NBA team outside the US – one centered in a city that hadn’t won anything since 1993 – and Ujiri had to convince Raptors fans to believe in themselves. He built one of the deepest and most international teams in the NBA after hitting on numerous draft picks and finally swapping franchise cornerstone DeMar DeRozan for pending free agent Kawhi Leonard in 2018.

Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France.

But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation.

Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote.

Immigration and election experts say her case, which hasn’t previously been reported, marks a new escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to find and prosecute instances of noncitizen voting, despite voluminous evidence showing it is rare. (Estelle asked that her last name not be used because of safety concerns.)

Historically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has played no part in election-fraud investigations. But the transcript of Estelle’s interview, which was provided to ProPublica by her attorney, makes clear that the agency had flagged her for special scrutiny and that officers knew her voting history. Estelle told the officer during questioning that she thought she could vote in local elections because a state motor vehicles department employee had told her when she renewed her driver’s license that she was eligible.

Kerry Doyle, a deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security in the Biden administration, said she’d never heard of someone being detained at a port of entry on suspicion of voting illegally.

“It took them a whole lot of energy and effort to sift through all these things to find this needle in the haystack,” said Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney. “And it is a needle in the haystack.”

A CBP spokesperson confirmed that officers detained a woman matching Estelle’s description at the Detroit airport, placing her in removal proceedings. The official didn’t answer questions about whether the agency is now routinely questioning noncitizen travelers about voting at ports of entry but emphasized that voting illegally is a deportable offense.

“The Trump Administration will continue to enforce our nation’s laws,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required.”

Estelle’s attorney, Matthew Hoppock, said she had no prior criminal history and hadn’t otherwise violated the terms of her green card. He said she registered to vote as part of renewing her driver’s license in 2023. Estelle voted in a November 2023 election that included races for city council and school boards, according to Douglas County records. She did not vote in any subsequent election, including the 2024 presidential election.

An immigration judge granted a request from Estelle to cancel her removal proceedings, after Hoppock spoke with DHS officials about her case. It’s unclear whether she will face any future criminal charges. (CBP declined to comment about whether there are any pending.) Still, Hoppock said, CBP had overstepped in its aggressive handling of the matter, which he called “really something.”

“It’s clear as day she wasn’t trying to break the law,” he said.

Though Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of noncitizens vote, data shows there are few such cases and that, of these, most involve people like Estelle, who register in error, said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit voting rights organization.

“My concern is about the publicizing of these kinds of incidents as a tool to frighten people,” Weiser said.

When these rare cases do happen, they are typically identified by local and state election officials who refer them to law enforcement. They often do not move forward, according to several election lawyers, because the voter often was registered by mistake by an elections clerk or voted without knowing it was illegal. Depending on the charges, prosecutors may have to prove that it was intentional.

Trump has made it clear he wants the federal government to do more to prevent and punish election fraud, despite the paucity of evidence that it’s a widespread issue.

He pushed unsuccessfully for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have required Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship when they registered to vote. In March 2025, he issued an executive order that, in part, directed federal agencies to use their resources to help find and prosecute noncitizen voters. His Justice Department began demanding that states hand over their voter-roll information, and DHS revamped a tool to allow states to check registered voters’ citizenship status en masse.

As ProPublica has reported, the tool proved highly error-prone. But despite its flaws, it appears DHS is still using the tool to pursue noncitizen voting prosecutions. DHS said in a recent statement that a branch of the agency, Homeland Security Investigations, will look into more than 24,000 voters flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens.

A former CBP official, who spoke anonymously because their current job doesn’t permit them to comment publicly, said it is likely that potential noncitizen voters have been flagged in the system that customs officers use to check the records of international travelers, such as passports. If that’s the case, officers would see in the person’s file that they should be questioned further on their voting histories.

Hoppock said Estelle was detained on a layover, as she traveled home from visiting her ailing father in France. According to the transcript of her interview with a customs officer, the official asked Estelle if she had ever registered to vote or voted, and she told him yes, she had voted once. The officer then asked if she had voted in the Nov. 7, 2023, local election, which she had.

After questioning Estelle, officers put her in the cell with a thin mattress on top of the concrete slab and a blanket donated by an airline, Hoppock said. She heard officers talking about Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, he said, and worried she might be moved there next. Instead, she was released after more than 30 hours in custody.

Jamie Shew — the clerk for Douglas County, Kansas, where Estelle was registered — said in an interview that he found out about Estelle’s case on March 23, when he received an administrative subpoena from CBP asking for her voter registration application and voting records.

Shew said he didn’t have the application, just data passed on by the secretary of state’s office showing she’d registered in September 2023 and wasn’t affiliated with a political party.

Shew said he’s only supposed to be given registrations to process if the would-be voter attests they are a U.S. citizen, as federal law requires. Estelle insists she told the employee at the motor vehicles department she was not a citizen.

Shew said Estelle reached out shortly after he received the CBP’s subpoena. She asked him to cancel her voter registration, he said, and he did on March 31.

Hoppock worries that by moving straight to deportation proceedings, the federal government has found a way to skip prosecuting and convicting.

“You’re going to get people like Estelle,” he said, “who haven’t meant to do anything wrong, getting detained in a jail cell in Michigan.”

The post A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her. appeared first on ProPublica.

The cheap weapons have helped the militants rearm despite the loss of a sponsor in Syria and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

As Putin imposes Iran-style controls, citing security concerns, many Russian fear losing their connection to the global internet.

They’ve maintained a special bond through the years, getting together to celebrate milestones like her birthdays and his retirement.

Tours of the Forbidden City, state dinners and theatrical handshakes. We a look back at previous visits ahead of Donald Trump’s trip

Invitation to be part of group including Elon Musk and Tim Cook highlights American AI and tech ambitions

The billionaire chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has joined Donald Trump’s China delegation after a reported last-minute invitation, highlighting the US’s AI and tech ambitions.

Huang will join a roster of US bosses including the Tesla chief executive and X owner, Elon Musk, the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, and Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon at Trump’s 36-hour meeting with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.

• El Paso Locomotive describe forward as ‘a great addition’

• Fernández portrayed Dani Rojas in TV show

The Ted Lasso actor Cristo Fernández has taken his role as a footballer from the small screen to the pitch after signing a professional contract with the US second-tier side El Paso Locomotive. Fernández, who played youth football in Mexico before stepping away from the sport at the age of 15 because of a knee injury, portrayed Dani Rojas in the Apple TV show about a British team with a US coach.

On the sidelines of his acting career, the 35-year-old had been pursuing a return to professional football and trained with the reserves of the Major League Soccer side Chicago Fire this year. Before signing for El Paso he underwent a two-month trial with the USL Championship club, which included a pre-season appearance.

fjo3 shares a report from Phys.org: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. "It's not a misconception -- mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP. "But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added. A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another -- mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes -- which are the only ones that bite -- detect these signals with finely tuned receptors, then choose their target accordingly. "We have known for over 100 years that mosquitoes are attracted by the carbon dioxide that we exhale -- this is the first signal that triggers their behavior" when they are dozens of meters away, Swedish scientist Rickard Ignell told AFP. Within around 10 meters, "mosquitoes will start detecting our odor, and in combination with carbon dioxide," this attracts them even more, said the senior author of a recent study on the subject. As they get closer, body temperature and humidity make particular humans even more enticing. [...] For Ignell's recent study, the researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- known for spreading yellow fever and dengue -- on 42 women in a lab, to see which ones they preferred. "We have shown that mosquitoes use a blend of odorous compounds (we identified 27 that the mosquitoes will detect, out of the possible 1,000) for their attraction to us," Ignell said. The woman the mosquitoes most liked to bite -- which included pregnant women in their second trimester -- produced a large amount of a particular compound made by a breakdown of the skin oil sebum. That even a small increase of this compound -- called "1-octen-3-ol", or mushroom alcohol -- made a difference came as a surprise, Ignell emphasized.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US overdose deaths have plunged, but experts warn the ‘supply shock’ from Chinese precursors may only be a temporary fix

As Donald Trump travels to Beijing this week, fentanyl – and China’s role in its supply chain – remains an enduring point of acrimony in bilateral relations.

At a UN meeting in March, the US again accused China of failing to stop its chemical industry selling the precursors required to make the potent synthetic opioid, while China suggested the US was shifting the blame for its domestic drug problem.

Cindy Burbank, who bested an alleged Republican plant, says she’ll step aside for Dan Osborn in general election

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A Democratic challenger who said she intends to drop out of November’s race for the US Senate in Nebraska to clear the way for an independent candidate has won the state’s Democratic primary.

Cindy Burbank ran against William Forbes, who Democrats contended was a Republican plant in the race, with the intent to drop out if she won. Forbes, a pastor who has voted for Trump and opposed abortion access, is currently registered as a Democrat.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 13.

Filmmaker who was long on the outer in Hollywood over #MeToo allegations will scout locations for Rush Hour 4, according to spokeswoman

Brett Ratner, the director behind the Rush Hour movies and a documentary on Melania Trump, is accompanying Donald Trump to China for his summit with Xi Jinping.

Trump is due to hold talks with the Chinese leader on Thursday and Friday over pressing economic and geopolitical issues, including Iran and Taiwan. The US president was accompanied on Air Force One by CEOs and top executives from major US tech and finance firms, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and BlackRock’s Larry Fink. Ratner was among the groups as well.

Horticulturalists express alarm after award-winning Matt Keightley launches app that can automate designs

With glasses of champagne sipped among the peonies, Chelsea flower show is generally a friendly and genteel occasion. But this year, the secateurs have been drawn as gardeners clash over the use of AI in designing the exhibits.

Matt Keightley, an award-winning designer who has created gardens for figures including Prince Harry, is using artificial intelligence to design his garden for the prestigious show, held at the Royal Hospital gardens in Chelsea, London, next week.

Activists claim use of laws to curtail internet freedoms part of well-documented history of cracking down on dissent

When Gabon’s media regulator indefinitely suspended major social media platforms in February, citing security concerns during anti-government protests, it became the talk of town – literally.

Within weeks of the announcement, use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to bypass the restrictions surged in the central African country. When gendarmerie began stopping young men at road checkpoints in the capital Libreville and other urban centres to confiscate mobile phones with VPNs installed or detain the owners, warnings spread by word of mouth. Activists and opposition members said their accounts were also suspended due to efforts of state officials.

How Trump and Xi could cement Beijing’s advantage for years to come.

What Xi wants from Trump—and Trump might get from Xi.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stand Tuesday in Elon Musk's trial against the company, testifying that Musk repeatedly sought control of OpenAI before leaving in 2018. Altman said he opposed putting AI "under the control of any one person," while Musk's lawyer used a pointed cross-examination to attack Altman's trustworthiness. An anonymous reader shares updates from the testimony via the New York Times: Before Elon Musk left OpenAI in a power struggle in 2018, he wanted to merge the nonprofit artificial intelligence lab with Tesla, his electric car company. Mr. Musk and other OpenAI co-founders met several times to discuss the merger. OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, was even offered a seat on Tesla's board of directors, according to a court document. But folding OpenAI into Tesla would have eliminated the lab's nonprofit status, and that, Mr. Altman said on the witness stand on Tuesday, was something he wanted to avoid. [...] "I believed that A.I. should not be under the control of any one person," Mr. Altman said. [...] Mr. Altman testified about his feud with Mr. Musk. He said he had become worried that Mr. Musk, who provided the early investment money for OpenAI, wanted to take control of the lab. He described what he called a "particularly harrowing moment" when his OpenAI co-founders asked Mr. Musk what would happen to his control of a potential for-profit when he died. Mr. Altman said Mr. Musk had replied that the control would pass to his children. "I was not comfortable with that," Mr. Altman said. When Mr. Musk lost a power struggle for control of the lab, he left, forcing Mr. Altman to find another big financial backer in Microsoft. But Mr. Altman ran into trouble in 2023 when OpenAI's board fired him because, as several of its members have testified in the trial, it didn't trust him. Steven Molo, Mr. Musk's lead lawyer, homed in on Mr. Altman's trustworthiness during an aggressive cross-examination. "Are you completely trustworthy?" Mr. Molo asked. "I believe so," Mr. Altman answered. After questioning Mr. Altman's trustworthiness for nearly 20 minutes, Mr. Molo turned to Mr. Altman's relationship with Mr. Musk. Mr. Altman said that after he met Mr. Musk in the mid-2010s, Mr. Musk had occasionally expressed concern about the dangers of A.I. But Mr. Musk spent far more time saying he was worried that companies like Google would get ahead in A.I. development, Mr. Altman said. (Mr. Musk testified in the trial that he had wanted to create OpenAI to prevent Google from controlling the technology.) Mr. Altman, the lawyer intimated, took advantage of Mr. Musk's concerns and was never sincere about his own A.I. fears. "Are you a person who just tells people things they want to hear whether those things are true or not?" Mr. Molo asked. The lawyer also questioned whether Mr. Atman, who became a billionaire through years of tech investments, was self-dealing through OpenAI. Mr. Molo showed a list of Mr. Altman's personal investments across a number of companies that stand to benefit from their association with OpenAI. They included Helion Energy, a start-up that has deals with Microsoft and OpenAI, and Cerebras, a chip maker in business with OpenAI. Mr. Molo asked if Mr. Altman, who is on OpenAI's board as well as its chief executive, would ever fire himself. "I have no plans to do that," Mr. Altman said. OpenAI's odd journey from nonprofit lab to what it is today -- a well-funded, for-profit company that is still connected to a nonprofit called the OpenAI Foundation with an endowment that could be worth more than $130 billion -- provided grist for Mr. Molo's questions about Mr. Altman's motivations. He implied that Mr. Altman could have continued to build OpenAI as a pure nonprofit. But the only way to build such a valuable charity was to raise billions through a for-profit venture, Mr. Altman responded. Still, the giant sums being raised appeared to upset Mr. Musk. In late 2022, according to court documents, Mr. Musk sent a text to Mr. Altman complaining that Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. "This is a bait and switch," Mr. Musk said at the time. But Mr. Altman, under questioning from his own lawyers, said: "Every step of the way, I have done my best to maximize the value of the nonprofit. I would point out that there are not a lot of historical examples of a nonprofit at this scale." Before Altman took the stand, OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor continued his testimony that began on Monday. He said Elon Musk's 2024 bid to buy the company's assets appeared to conflict with his lawsuit and was rejected because the board did not believe OpenAI's mission should be controlled by one person. "We did not feel like it was appropriate for one person to control our mission," he said. Recap: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Illinois Department of Public Health said it is investigating a potential case of hantavirus in an Illinois resident, that they said is not linked to the deadly cruise ship outbreak.

Voters went to the polls in Nebraska and West Virginia on Tuesday, with Democrats vying for the chance to run in an open seat in Nebraska that the party has long been eyeing.

The closure comes amid escalating operating costs for the facility, which are now estimated to total nearly $1 billion.

Ethylene oxide (EtO) is about 60 times more carcinogenic than believed in 2006, research finds

A new Trump administration plan to rescind 2024 regulations for toxic ethylene oxide (EtO) pollution more broadly aims to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to strengthen public health protections around hazardous emissions and could result in more of the toxin being released into the air.

Recent research has found EtO is about 60 times more carcinogenic than thought when the last regulations were developed in 2006. In 2024, the Biden EPA passed a rule that strengthened the regulations to reflect the updated science, and required the nation’s EtO emitters to collectively cut their emissions by about 90%.

From supermarkets to corner shops, live facial recognition could be coming to retailers near you. Jessica Murray on the AI systems increasingly used by the police and stores

Live facial recognition is being hailed as a powerful new frontier in the fight against crime, not only by police but by private companies too. Retailers from supermarkets to corner shops hope it will help them fight back against shoplifting.

But the Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Jessica Murray, points out that it will also expand surveillance into more and more public spaces. And the technology doesn’t always get it right.

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The Pentagon revealed on 29 April that the US war on Iran had cost about $25bn for roughly two months of spending. Today, when asked if there are any updated costs associated with the war, Jules Hurst III, chief financial official for the Pentagon, said:

“At the time of testimony … it was $25bn dollars. But the joint staff team and the comptroller are constantly looking at estimates and now we think it is closer to 29.”

Chinese government appears to be using the workaround of a different character to represent part of the secretary of state’s name, to allow him to visit the country for the Trump summit

US secretary of state Marco Rubio is heading to Beijing with president Donald Trump despite being under Chinese sanctions – a breakthrough that might have been made possible after China changed his name’s transliteration.

As a US senator, Rubio, who is visiting China for the first time, fiercely championed human rights in China, which retaliated by imposing sanctions on him twice – adopting a tactic more often used by the US against adversaries.

Bloomberg reports that iOS 27 will bring a more flexible Camera app, a chatbot-style Siri and design changes across Safari, Weather and more.

Review: Jon Bernthal is excellent as always as The Punisher, but this story doesn't give us much.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 13, No. 1,789.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 13, No. 1,067.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 13, No. 801.

Jason Collins, the NBA's first openly gay player, who went on to become a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the league, has died, his family announced Tuesday.

Noa and Niko are AI pets that react to gestures and voice commands while remembering everything they see.

Successful AI deployments require a solid infrastructure underneath. For Hewlett Packard Enterprise, this infrastructure is delivered via its Greenlake hybrid cloud product suite, which it upgraded with a range of new capabilities today, including enhancements to its Alletra Storage MP X10000.

HPE launched Greenlake back in 2017 as a hybrid cloud platform that offers a “cloud-like” experience directly on customer’s on-prem gear or edge location. HPE has enhanced the product over the years, including the new capabilities that it unveiled today.

For starters, HPE is updating Private Cloud, its on-prem server runtime for Greenlake customers. In its four generation, HPE Private Cloud, which is based on HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12, now offers Kubernetes for unified management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers on a single platform.

The company also upgraded the Alletra Storage MP X10000, which HPE launched in November 2024 as its first disaggregated, all-flash, scale-out storage system. The X10000 now scales to 16 nodes and 23PB of raw capacity of file and object storage.

More importantly, the storage array is supporting RMDA-accelerated connections to file storage, which builds on its previous support for RDMA for S3. HPE says these capabilities will simplify how customers store and access data across AI training, inference, and KV cache workloads.

In a video, HPE claims the X10000 delivers 20 times faster time-to-first-token and 17 times higher effective throughout. It’s also the first object storage solution to claim Nvidia-Certified Storage validation at the foundation level.

HPE also upgraded the Alletra Storage MP B10000, which is a software-defined storage platform that supports file, block, object data access for enterprise workloads. The company has increased the number of controller nodes from four to six, which it says will boost performance by 50% and provide better fault tolerance. The B10000 also gets a new agentic support mechanism that HPE says can autonomously detect, analyze, and resolve storage issues.

HPE has updated its Data Fabric Software to provide new policy-based data placement and movement capabilities, which it says will help customers prepare for running AI workloads in a hybrid environment. HPE says it enhanced the metadata integration capability with support for Apache Polaris, which will improve data visibility, classification, and lineage processes in support of governance and compliance goals. Finally, it added a conversational interface and an agentic AI assistant that simplifies reporting across the namespace.

HPE CTO Fidelma Russo, who is also the EVP and GM of hybrid cloud, says these new capabilities will help customers that are rapidly modernizing for AI and cloud-native runtime. “With these innovations, we’re helping organizations adopt a unified operating model that brings together private cloud, data, and protection, simplifies migration from legacy platforms, strengthens resilience, and delivers superior TCO to operate at scale,” she said.

The post HPE Preps Customers for AI Inference with Greenlake, Storage Updates appeared first on HPCwire.

A Chinese manufacturing giant tells CBS News how its sprawling factory runs with a fraction of the human workforce previously required.

President Trump said Americans' financial situation isn't motivating him to make a deal, "Not even a little bit," and that he is only focused on preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

U.S. consumer prices rose in April, fueled by a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.

Pete Hegseth and other officials appear before House to face grilling on Iran war expenditure and military operations

Iran has expanded its definition of the strait of Hormuz into a “vast operational area” far wider than before the war, according to a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy in comments likely to anger the US.

The strait is no longer viewed as a narrow stretch around a handful of islands but instead has been greatly enlarged in scope and military significance, according to Mohammad Akbarzadeh, deputy political director of the IRGC Navy, the state-affiliated Fars news agency reported this morning.

FBI director also dismisses allegations of unexplained absences as Democrats challenge him over Atlantic report

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Embattled FBI director Kash Patel has denied under oath recent allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing.

Democrats challenged him over the “extremely alarming” reports, first reported in the Atlantic mid-April, which they argued would amount to a “gross dereliction” of duty. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.

The Trump administration plans to name longtime immigration official David Venturella as the interim head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, replacing acting director Todd Lyons, a spokesperson and two U.S. officials said.

Collins, a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the NBA, died after eight-month battle with glioblastoma

Jason Collins, the retired NBA player who made history as the league’s first openly gay athlete, has died after a short battle with stage 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his family announced on Tuesday. He was 47.

“Jason changed lives in unexpected ways and was an inspiration to all who knew him and to those who admired him from afar,” Collins’ family said in a statement released through the NBA. “We are grateful for the outpouring of love and prayers over the past eight months and for the exceptional medical care Jason received from his doctors and nurses. Our family will miss him dearly.”

Party held out prospect of act while in opposition but plan did not make it into election manifesto

Ministers should bring forward a new clean air act that would ban wood burning, clear diesel vehicles from the roads and force councils to cut pollution, a group of more than 60 charities have urged before the king’s speech on Wednesday.

Labour held out the prospect of a clean air act while in opposition in 2023, but this was dropped from the final election manifesto, and the government has made no move to reinstate it.

Despite concerns super-rich are leaving due to tax burdens, 88% of those surveyed were proud to live in UK and would pay more to fund public services

Nine in 10 UK millionaires are proud to live in Britain and three-quarters would be willing to pay more tax to ensure public assets get the funding they need, according to research.

Despite widely reported concerns that the wealthy are choosing to leave the country owing to higher taxes, the survey found millionaires were much more concerned about medical workers moving away than wealthy people emigrating.

Researchers find 50+ hours a week can be detrimental to health but lighter responsibilities have positive effect

The stresses and strains of caring for someone for 50 hours or more a week leads to “accelerated cognitive decline” in middle-aged and older people, research shows.

However, providing care for only five to nine hours a week has the opposite effect, boosting brain health so much that the benefits last until older age.

The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say

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Do insects feel pain? Crickets certainly seem to, according to new research which finds they stroke and groom a sore antenna in much the same way as a dog nurses its hurt paw.

Associate Prof Thomas White, an entomologist from the University of Sydney, said the experience of pain was a “longer, drawn-out, ouchy feeling”, that differed from a hardwired nerve response.

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South Korea's presidential policy chief is calling for a "citizen dividend" that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens." That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim's comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung's main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company's labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees. The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. "Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated," Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He was the first active, openly gay player in the league’s history. In December, he announced that he had a deadly form of brain cancer.

Michael Mott, 41, jumped the fence at Denver international airport and had reached the runway when he was struck

The man who was fatally struck on Friday by a departing Frontier Airlines flight on the runway of Denver international airport died by suicide, the city’s medical examiner said on Tuesday at a news conference.

On Friday evening, the man, identified as 41-year-old Michael Mott, jumped an 8ft fence with barbed wire on to the runway, according to Phillip Washington, the airport’s chief executive. Roughly two minutes lapsed between Mott’s breach of the runway and when he was hit by the Frontier aircraft.

Research on weight limits of elevators made in UK and Europe 1972-2004 raises concerns over safety and equity

Lifts are no longer big enough to fit the UK’s larger citizens, according to researchers.

A study of maximum capacity in elevators in the UK and mainland Europe found lifts have not kept up with increasing obesity levels, raising concerns about safety and equity.

Instructure, the company behind the widely used Canvas learning platform, says it reached an agreement with the hackers who stole 3.5 terabytes of student and university data. The company says it received "digital confirmation" that the information was destroyed and that affected schools and students would not be extorted. The BBC reports: Paying cyber criminals goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies around the world, as it can fuel further attacks and offers no guarantee the data has been deleted. In previous cases, criminals have accepted ransom payments but lied about destroying stolen data, instead keeping it for resale. For example, when the notorious LockBit ransomware group was hacked by the National Crime Agency, police found stolen data had not been deleted even after payments had been made. Instructure said in a statement on its website that protecting students' and education staff data was its primary motivation. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible," the company said. Instructure did not set out the terms of the agreement but said that it meant that: - the data was returned to the company - it received "digital confirmation of data destruction" - it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident - the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

May 12, 2026 — The Department of Energy is seeking experts in science, technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to serve as reviewers for the “Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI” Request for Application (RFA).

Applications address the Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges to accelerate scientific discovery and research and development workflows using novel AI models and frameworks. Anyone who applied as a principal investigator (PI) or senior/key personnel on an application to the RFA has a conflict of interest and may not serve as a reviewer.  Please share this invitation with your network.

“The Genesis Mission has caught the imagination of our scientific and engineering communities to tackle national challenges in the age of AI,” said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil and Genesis Mission Director. “With these investments we seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our National Laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies.”

The RFA is open to interdisciplinary teams from DOE National Laboratories, U.S. industry, and academia. Phase I awards will range from $500,000 to $750,000 and will support a nine month project period. Phase II awards will range from $6 million to $15 million over a three year project period.

For more information about the RFA, see the press release.

Individuals interested in serving as reviewers should complete the form here by May 18, 2026.

More from HPCwire: DOE Announces $293M Funding Opportunity as Genesis Mission Moves Toward Operational Phase

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Seeks Researchers to Review Genesis Mission AI Proposals appeared first on HPCwire.

Your Rivian can now manage your calendar, warm your passengers' seats and text your ETA -- all without even looking at the screen.

Request is one of the justice department’s latest attempts to track and regulate gender-affirming care for minors

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A Texas federal prosecutor has subpoenaed NYU Langone Health (NYULH), a major hospital network in New York City, for information about minor patients who received gender-affirming care between 2020 to 2026.

The US attorney’s office in the northern district of Texas’s subpoena, which was sent on 7 May, also requested the names of medical providers and others who provided such medical treatment during that period. NYULH was one of several institutions that were issued a subpoena, according to a statement on its website.

Republican leader acknowledges ‘likely consequences’ for resisting US president’s demands to redraw map

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South Carolina state senators on Tuesday defied pressure from Donald Trump to approve plans to redraw the state’s congressional map after the US supreme court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.

As Republicans scramble to redraw key districts after the US supreme court rendered ineffective a major section of the civil rights law that prevented racial discrimination, Shane Massey, the Republican majority leader in South Carolina’s senate, argued in an extraordinary address that doing so would be against the interest of his state.

Amazon Now launched Tuesday in dozens of cities including Seattle, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta.

Comedian will host the 99th Oscars in 2027 after viewership dipped this year despite rise in social media engagement

Conan O’Brien’s era as Oscars host is becoming a trilogy. The Emmy-winning comedian will be back to host the 99th Academy awards in 2027, leaders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science said on Tuesday.

O’Brien hosted the last two Oscar ceremonies to positive reviews. Earlier this year, in his opening monologue, he said he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards … Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”

Planned legislation includes housing, immigration and energy measures, and comes amid awkwardness with the palace over Charles’s role

Keir Starmer will attempt to regain the political initiative on Wednesday as his government announces a package of 35 bills for the next parliamentary session, covering everything from housing to immigration.

The embattled prime minister will release details of dozens of bills that he intends to pass over the next 12 months, even as his own MPs line up to demand his resignation.

Additional reporting by Caroline Davies

The California case involving a 19-year-old's death last year specifically calls for new safeguards around AI models' discussion of drug use.

Kyle Diamantas, a top official at the agency, will replace Makary and serve as acting FDA commissioner

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Marty Makary resigned from his position as commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday, concluding a 13-month tenure at the regulatory agency that frequently drew the ire of the White House, Congress, industry and the public, Donald Trump confirmed on Tuesday.

Kyle Diamantas, who previously worked as the top food official at the agency setting the strategic direction and operations for food policy in the US, will be Makary’s acting replacement. Trump called Diamantas a “very talented person” in a Truth Social post confirming he’d be Makary’s temporary replacement.

"I'd been checking the status feverishly to see if anything was in my bank account," one small business owner said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house "MeshClaw" product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens -- units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. "There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee told the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage." Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. "Managers are looking at it," said another current employee. "When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The OpenAI chief rejects claims he deceived Elon Musk as high-stakes AI trial nears its end

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The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, took the stand on Tuesday to defend himself and his company against a lawsuit by Elon Musk. Altman is set to be one of the final witnesses in the trial, which has pitted two of the tech industry’s most powerful men against each other in a dramatic courtroom showdown.

Musk has accused Altman and OpenAI of breaking the AI firm’s founding agreement by restructuring it into a for-profit enterprise, alleging that Altman essentially swindled him into co-founding the company and providing tens of millions in financial backing. Musk also claims Altman unjustly enriched himself in the process and is seeking the CEO’s removal from OpenAI, the redistribution of $134bn to the firm’s non-profit and the undoing of its for-profit conversion.

At HPCwire we have covered how the race to deploy agentic AI is already heavily contested. However, the real question is whether enterprise data infrastructure is ready for it. It appears it is struggling to keep pace.

Fivetran’s 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index found that while 41% of organizations are already using agentic AI in production, only 15% believe they are fully prepared to support it with the necessary data foundation. What can enterprises do about this?

To get to that, let’s understand the key issues. That AI readiness gap becomes more important as AI systems move beyond generating recommendations and begin operating autonomously across enterprise workflows. Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on access to trusted and governed data in order to trigger actions and make operational decisions in real time.

The report argues that the next major enterprise AI challenge is whether organizations can build interoperable and reliable data environments capable of supporting autonomous AI at scale.

Enterprises are entering a more difficult phase of AI adoption – one where deployment speed by itself is not an issue, but it is beginning to outpace operational maturity. Organizations seem to steam ahead as they continue investing aggressively. Nearly 60% report multimillion dollar commitments toward agentic AI initiatives. Meanwhile, many others are still in the phase of evaluation and pilots before broader rollout.

What complicates that transition is the condition of the underlying data environment itself. Many enterprises continue operating with brittle integrations. They face siloed systems, inconsistent governance standards, and limited visibility into how operational data moves across the organization. Those weaknesses matter as more AI systems operate autonomously.

Simply getting AI into production is not enough anymore. It is equally if not more important to make sure the surrounding infrastructure can support autonomous systems safely and consistently once they arrive there.

According to the report, organizations further ahead on readiness are approaching data movement differently, and this could offer you a clue on what you can do. These organizations are prioritizing continuously refreshed pipelines instead of periodic updates and improving observability across systems. They are also consolidating trusted data into centralized warehouse and lakehouse environments.

The report emphasizes that scaling autonomous AI requires scaling reliable infrastructure first. That takes us to our next finding that the biggest obstacles to scaling agentic AI are no longer centered around model performance.

Fivetran’s report reveals that the most common blockers are data quality and lineage issues (42%), followed closely by regulatory compliance and sovereignty concerns (39%), which is tied with security and privacy risks (39%).

We’ve seen these challenges as part of a broader shift happening across enterprise AI. For years, most organizations focused on experimentation, proof of concepts, and access to increasingly capable models. Agentic AI changes the equation because these systems are expected to operate inside real business environments, often with the ability to trigger actions automatically.

In that environment, poor governance is not a technical inconvenience – it becomes an operational problem. An autonomous AI system operating on incomplete or poorly governed data does not gradually improve over time. It simply scales mistakes faster and across more systems.

(Bishop Iuliia/Shutterstock)

That concern is already shaping enterprise purchasing decisions. The report found that 65% of organizations would either heavily restrict or completely reject vendors unable to meet governance and sovereignty requirements, including 25% that would reject those vendors outright.

The report recommends that organizations should start treating governance as production infrastructure. Many still think of it as compliance paperwork. What they need to do is to build stricter access controls around what AI agents can see or modify and improve end to end lineage and auditability. They should also work on enforcing regional sovereignty controls. It would help to clearly define which systems agents are allowed to interact with before deployment.

Interoperability is highlighted by the report as a growing strategic priority for enterprises deploying agentic AI – especially for those deploying at scale. An overwhelming majority (86%) of organizations consider platform interoperability and extensibility important or critical, while many increasingly worry about becoming locked into rigid data integration ecosystems. In fact, respondents ranked data integration platforms as a larger vendor lock-in concern than cloud providers or enterprise applications.

That concern becomes understandable once agentic AI moves beyond isolated pilots. Autonomous systems increasingly require access across warehouses, operational environments, analytics platforms, and enterprise software – all at the same time. If those environments remain disconnected, the AI systems operating on top of them become harder to scale consistently.

The report argues enterprises should focus on flexibility now before infrastructure complexity becomes harder to unwind later.

One of the recommended approaches is to include adopting vendor neutral integration layers, centralizing governed data access, and building around open formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake can also help. These would enable organizations to move across tools and platforms more easily over time.

Enterprises are also being encouraged to design infrastructure in ways that allow models and AI services to evolve without repeatedly rebuilding core pipelines underneath them.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the next phase of the enterprise AI race may depend heavily on which organizations can build infrastructure that can actually support autonomous systems across what appears to be increasingly complex environments. The recommendations in the report could be a good starting point for organizations to overcome these challenges.

Editor’s note: A version of this story first appeared in BigDATAwire.

The post What Can You Do to Prepare Better for Agentic AI? appeared first on HPCwire.

A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past?

That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality.

↫ Filip Fila

Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it’s an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it’s the mundane buildings all around us that just don’t seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn’t merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design.

There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the ’90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design.

Anyway, bring back beveled edges.

IBM used its Red Hat Summit conference that’s taking place this week in Atlanta, Georgia as the location for the launch of Red Hat AI 3.4, a new release of its overarching product suite for building and deploying AI. Among the items in this new suite is a new service called Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, new AI developer tools, better security, Red Hat Hardened Images, and a new Dev Spaces framework, among other enhancements.

In the early years of the AI boom, most of the focus was on using big data to train large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models. But things have changed, and today it’s all about running AI against real world data, or AI inference.

AI inference has different requirements than AI training. There are real-time performance and latency requirements. There are a large number of AI agents to manage. Users also demand that each AI sessions is secure and that the AI models are well-governed.

These are all factors that IBM is taking into account with its Red Hat AI Inference Server, a shrink-wrapped offering that is based on a pair of open source libraries, including vLLM, which includes an AI inference server and AI inference engine, as well as llm-d, a Kubernetes-based framework for running LLMs in a distributed and disaggregated manner.

Red Hat says its AI Inference Server is “optimized for high throughput and low latency” of AI applications and agents. Its model catalog ships with IBM Granite 4.0 H Small, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, GPT-OSS-120B, and Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-FP8, with more open models and custom models on the way.

With the launch of Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easy for IBM Cloud customers to get up and running with the Red Hat AI Inference stack, according to Jason McGee, CTO of IBM Cloud.

Red Hat CEO and President Matt Hicks delivers the keynote address at Summit 2026

“Enterprises are eager to operationalize AI, but the gap between pilot and production may hold them back,” McGee stated. “With Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, we’re giving clients a managed platform that is built for real workloads, not just experiments. At the same time, our new virtualization offering on IBM Cloud is enabling enterprises to migrate to a resilient and security-focused virtualization environment while giving them the flexibility to adopt Red Hat OpenShift at their own pace for future AI workloads and containerization.”

The new service is in limited release, with general availability expected next month.

IBM also announced that Red Hat AI Inference can now run on other flavors of Kubernetes besides Red Hat OpenShift, including Kubernetes distributions hosted by CoreWeave and Microsoft Azure. This will give customers another option if they don’t want to run on IBM Cloud.

Red Hat AI 3.4 also includes several other new and enhanced capabilities, including:

• A new governed model as a service (MaaS) capability, which governs the use of internal models as well as external APIs;
• A centralized registry for developing and managing prompts;
• Built-in evaluations for models and agents to replace fragmented testing of models;
• Integrated security technology from Chatterbox Labs to screen models and agents for risks like jailbreaks, prompt injections, and bias;
• Built-in observability via support for MLflow and OpenTelemetry to provide end-to-end tracing of LLM calls, reasoning steps, model responses, and token usage;
• Support for cryptographic identity management via SPIFFE/SPIRE;
• Built-in support for AutoRAG and AutoML that automate AI tasks;
• And support for Nvidia Blackwell and AMD MI325X GPUs.

IBM is also improving tools for AI developers. Included in the new release of Red Hat Desktop is a build of Podman Desktop, which provides a foundation for developing containerized AI apps. IBM/Red Hat is also giving developers new tools for building isolated AI agent sandboxes, which will help developers test and iterate in a safe manner.

The updated Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite brings access to Red Hat Trusted Libraries, as well as security services aimed at preventing AI-driven exploits. IBM/Red Hat says it’s using AI “to determine if known vulnerabilities in generated code are relevant to a specific application runtime, allowing developers to prioritize remediation based on actual risk.”

“The transition to agentic AI expands the requirements for modern application development,” said James Labocki, senior director, product management, Red Hat. “We’re helping developers accelerate and own their AI strategy with the same rigor they apply to their core IT applications.”

Also announced is an update to Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, which it describes as “an extensible framework that allows developers to integrate preferred AI-driven tools directly into their cloud-based IDE.” With this release, IBM/Red Hat is now incorporating the AWS Kiro coding assistant to go along with existing integrations for Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude CLI, Cline, Continue, Roo, and others.

The company aims to bolster security via Red Hat Hardened Images, which is a collection of secure components for deploying AI. IBM/Red Hat says the Hardened Images are developed using its “trusted software pipeline” and are secure out of the box. It’s part of IBM/Red Hat’s strategy for developing a “Zero-CVE” environment, referring to the US Government’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure database.

“Our goal is to cut through the security noise and give developers a foundation where they can build and scale without having to patch or manage software that their applications do not actually need,” stated Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The post Red Hat Learns New AI Tricks appeared first on HPCwire.

Commentary: Google assumes I'm wealthy and sexy. It shouldn't.

Instructure says ShinyHunters has destroyed stolen user data after the group targeted more than 9,000 schools.

CPI gas price index has surged 28% from a year ago, while overall energy costs are up nearly 18%, new inflation data shows.

Memphis Grizzlies forward Brandon Clarke has died at the age of 29, the team announced.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned his position, stepping aside amid a swirl of reports that his tenure was coming to an end.

A larger COLA would boost monthly checks for retirees, but also strain Social Security's already depleted trust funds.

The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years. At an Android event today, the company finally unveiled the culmination of all this work: Googlebooks.

We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser. The result is Googlebook: a new category of laptops built with Gemini’s helpfulness at its core, designed to work seamlessly with the devices in your life and powered by premium hardware. We’re sharing a sneak peek into the Googlebook experience today and will have a lot more to share later this year.

↫ Alex Kuscher at The Keyword, a Google blog apparently

The approach here seems very similar to Chromebooks, with Googlebooks being designed and built by various OEMs, but instead of Chrome OS they run Android in desktop mode. Of course, “AI” has been creamed all over these things, to the point where not even the venerable mouse cursor is safe: if you wiggle your cursor, it will turn into “Magic Pointer”, which will highlight various “AI” actions as you hover over stuff on your screen. Google also showed off an “AI”-based feature to create widgets, as well as the ability to access files on your phone right from a Googlebook.

That’s about all we know as far as functionality and features goes. They’re supposed to go on sale later this year, with models coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

Google is teasing a new line of "Googlebook" laptops for this fall, powered by a new Android-and-ChromeOS-derived operating system that will run Chrome, Android apps, phone-connected apps and files, and deeply integrated Gemini features. The company says Chromebooks will continue "after the launch of Googlebook" and "...all Chromebooks will continue to receive support through their device's existing date commitment." The Verge reports: "We'll have more to share on the exact OS branding later this year," Peter Du of Google's global communications team tells The Verge. [...] Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. Google's examples include setting up a meeting by pointing at a date in an email or selecting images of furniture and a living space to visualize them together. Beyond your mouse pointer, Googlebooks will also feature the custom AI-created widgets that Google is also debuting today for Android phones and Wear OS smartwatches. I don't know what kind of horrors people will be able to make into widgets, but Google gives the example of making one to organize your flights, hotel information, restaurant reservations, and another for creating a countdown timer for an upcoming family reunion. (It's always flights, hotels, and restaurants, isn't it?) While there are many outstanding questions to be answered about Googlebooks, the biggest and most obvious ones are what will these laptops look like, what chips will be in them, and what will they cost? We've got none of that so far. Google only has some initial renders of a mysterious Googlebook and the promise that it's working with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first models. There are no model names. No specs. Nada. Google isn't even saying if the laptop in its renders is made by a partner or a tease of some first-party Pixel-like Googlebook to come or is just a cool mockup. The one distinct hardware feature shown, the bar of glowing Google-colored light, will be a signature of all Googlebooks. (Sure, bring on the RGB. Why not?)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congresswoman says she did not condone radio host’s language about Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat

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Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman, is facing calls from Democrats to resign for agreeing with a radio host after he said the top US House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, should get his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia”.

Kiggans, who represents a swing district in southeastern Virginia, has said she was agreeing with the host that Jeffries – who is the first Black American to lead a party in Congress – should stay out of the state’s politics. She also said she did not condone the host’s language, which multiple Democrats criticized as racist.

The wrong cooking oil can sabotage dinner. Here's a guide to using high-, low- and medium-heat oils.

A number of Streeting’s allies resigned from their ministerial posts on Tuesday and called for Keir Starmer to quit

• Starmer tells cabinet he will not quit without leadership challenge

Here are some pictures from No 10 this morning.

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM, is now being interviewed on the Today programme. Nick Robinson, the presenter, is asking him if he knows whether Keir Starmer has decided how to respond to the pressure on him to resign. Jones is avoiding the question, as he did on Sky News earlier. (See 7.43am.)

Downing Street insiders suggest health secretary does not yet have the support for a leadership push

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer was increasingly confident that he had seen off the immediate threat to his job on Tuesday after a challenge from Wes Streeting failed to materialise despite several of the prime minister’s allies quitting the government.

Downing Street insiders suggested that the health secretary did not yet have the required support from the 81 MPs he needed to formally launch a leadership bid after Starmer issued a ‘put up or shut up’ ultimatum to his cabinet.

It wasn't a matter of if it would happen, only a matter of when.

May 12, 2026 — In 2018, an artificial intelligence (AI) program called AlphaFold achieved a major breakthrough by placing first in the critical assessment of structure prediction, a competition for predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. It scored close to 90 on a 100-point scale for moderately difficult targets, marking a turning point in the use of AI for understanding protein structure and highlighting its potential applications. While predicting protein structures was a major step forward, proteins in living systems are not fixed. They constantly move, change shape, and interact with other molecules, and AI is now being tasked with helping with this.

DeepAFM is a deep learning-based method that analyzes high-speed atomic force microscopy images of proteins. It removes noise and identifies protein shapes, enabling accurate detection of transitions between closed and wide-open states during protein function.

Conventionally, determining the different shapes a protein takes involves fitting a known three-dimensional structure to two-dimensional high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) images, which capture proteins in action at the single-molecule level. However, HS-AFM images are often noisy and can be distorted due to the line-by-line scanning process, where each part of the image is recorded at slightly different times. This temporal lag, along with background noise, makes it difficult to determine the exact shape of a protein at any given moment.

Associate Professor Takaharu Mori from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, explains the problem with current approaches: “Because of the noise present in the images, these methods can lead to overfitting, where the models may capture artefacts or false details caused by the noise rather than true structural features of the protein.”

To address this challenge, his team has developed a deep learning-based method called DeepAFM, designed to both reduce noise in HS-AFM images and accurately estimate the different shapes that proteins adopt as they move and function.

The team included Mr. Katsuki Sato of TUS, who completed the Master’s course in 2025, along with Dr. Takayuki Uchihashi and Dr. Yui Kanaoka from Nagoya University, Japan; and Dr. Tomoya Tsukazaki of Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. The study was made available online in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling on April 4, 2026, and published in Volume 66, Issue 8 on April 27, 2026.

In this approach, the team creates a dataset of synthetic HS-AFM images representing different protein shapes from molecular dynamics simulations, where each image is labeled according to the corresponding protein conformation. These simulated images include both ideal, noise-free versions and more realistic ones that incorporate experimental effects, such as background noise, scanning distortions, and Brownian motion.

The researchers trained DeepAFM on a protein called SecA, which can switch between closed and wide-open states. Using molecular dynamics simulations, they generated a wide range of possible protein shapes and used them to create millions of synthetic HS-AFM images. This dataset was then used to train a deep learning model that can both remove noise from HS-AFM images and identify the underlying protein shape.

When tested, the method produced denoised images that closely matched the ground truth, with errors as low as around 0.1 nm. In addition to improving image quality, the AI was able to accurately classify the protein’s conformational state. Across 0.8 million test images, the model correctly identified the exact state out of 19 possible conformations with an accuracy of 93.4%, which increased further when allowing for small tolerances. Importantly, when applied to experimental HS-AFM images, the AI inferred protein conformational states consistent with independent experimental measurements, demonstrating its practical applicability.

“DeepAFM provides a new deep learning-assisted strategy for analyzing noisy HS-AFM data and facilitates studies of protein dynamics,” said Assoc. Prof. Mori.

The team further demonstrated that the method can be extended to other protein systems using transfer learning, where knowledge gained from one system is applied to another. This suggests that DeepAFM could become a broadly useful tool for studying a wide range of biological molecules.

This work is part of a broader effort to advance AI-driven research in preparation for next-generation computing platforms such as Fugaku NEXT, being developed by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in collaboration with Fujitsu and NVIDIA, with operations expected to begin around 2030.

Reference

• Title of original paper: Estimating Protein Conformational States from High-Speed AFM Images with Molecular Dynamics and Deep Learning
  Journal: Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
  DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.6c00142

About The Tokyo University of Science

Tokyo University of Science (TUS) is a well-known and respected university, and the largest science-specialized private research university in Japan, with four campuses in central Tokyo and its suburbs and in Hokkaido. Established in 1881, the university has continually contributed to Japan’s development in science through inculcating the love for science in researchers, technicians, and educators.

With a mission of “Creating science and technology for the harmonious development of nature, human beings, and society,” TUS has undertaken a wide range of research from basic to applied science. TUS has embraced a multidisciplinary approach to research and undertaken intensive study in some of today’s most vital fields. TUS is a meritocracy where the best in science is recognized and nurtured. It is the only private university in Japan that has produced a Nobel Prize winner and the only private university in Asia to produce Nobel Prize winners within the natural sciences field.

Source: TUS

The post Tokyo University of Science Develops ‘DeepAFM’ AI Method for Protein Motion Analysis appeared first on HPCwire.

A recently released FBI file shines new light on the days immediately leading up to the arrest of then-Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil.

On March 6 of last year, two days before unidentified officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted and arrested Khalil at his home, the FBI received an anonymous tip claiming that Khalil, listed incorrectly as a 22-year-old, had called for “violence on behalf of Hamas.” 

According to the heavily redacted documents, as of March 19, 2025, the FBI had closed an investigation into the tip and determined that Khalil “does not warrant further FBI investigation.” But by then, ICE had already secretly taken Khalil, now 31, thousands of miles away to a detention center in Louisiana. Despite the FBI’s decision to close the tip, the Trump administration continued to paint Khalil as a “Hamas supporter” and a threat to national security. 

It’s unclear if the FBI tip was directly related to Khalil’s ICE arrest, and the FBI did not respond to The Intercept’s question about whether the tip was shared with ICE. But Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has worked with Khalil since his arrest, said the timing reflects “a threat to us all.”

Though the FBI document says Khalil did not warrant further investigation, “that didn’t stop ICE from holding him in a detention center and separating him from his wife and newborn son for months,” Bendaas said. 

The document comes to light as the Trump administration has fast-tracked Khalil’s deportation case, which Khalil’s legal team argues is a form of retaliation against his protected political speech in support of Palestine. Khalil’s team received the FBI document, which has not been previously reported, via a lawsuit over a public records request and shared it exclusively with The Intercept.

Related

Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom?

Khalil was the first of thousands of students the Trump administration targeted for deportation over First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestine or criticizing Israel. The Trump administration exploited an obscure provision in immigration law to claim that Khalil and other students, including Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered Khalil to be deported, has repeatedly claimed that he sympathized with terrorists, echoing claims from far-right doxing groups that had targeted Khalil in the months leading up to his arrest. Trump’s unprecedented crackdown came after years of similar attacks on pro-Palestine students that gained speed under former President Joe Biden. 

“Under Trump’s rogue presidency being led by extremists and conspiracy theorists,” Bendaas said, “any of us can be kidnapped by federal agents in the middle of the night simply for speaking against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, no matter what the facts or Constitution says.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, part of Khalil’s legal team, submitted a request for public documents related to his arrest nearly a year ago, on May 29, 2025. After denials and delays, CCR filed a lawsuit on November 20 claiming that federal agencies, including the FBI, had improperly withheld the records. CCR said it has since received other documents from the Department of Justice and is expecting more from other agencies in the coming months.

“Despite the FBI closing its investigation with no findings to support the accusation, the Trump administration continued to label Mr. Khalil a supporter of Hamas in public comments,” said CCR staff attorney Samah Sisay. “This document further supports our argument that the Trump administration had no legitimate reason to target Mr. Khalil besides his free speech in support of Palestine.”

Related

How the FBI Sought a Warrant to Search Instagram of Columbia Student Protesters

In a statement to The Intercept, an FBI spokesperson said, “We let documents obtained through the FOIA process speak for themselves and decline to comment further.”

Reacting to the FBI file, an attorney at Palestine Legal condemned the Trump administration’s approach but called it “representative of the tactics used more broadly against Palestine activists.”

“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”

Khalil’s team also plans to appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals order rejecting Khalil’s appeal to terminate his deportation proceedings. He is still fighting a separate federal habeas corpus case and cannot be deported while the case proceeds.

Update: May 12, 2026, 4:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from an attorney at Palestine Legal sent after publication.

The post FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

BOISE, Idaho, May 12, 2026 — Micron Technology, Inc. today announced it has sampled 256GB DDR5 registered dual in-line memory modules (RDIMM) to key server ecosystem enablers. The module is built on the company’s leading-edge 1-gamma technology, which is capable of speeds up to 9,200 megatransfers per second (MT/s), greater than 40% faster than modules in volume production today.

Micron’s module employs advanced packaging techniques, 3D stacking (3DS) multiple memory dies connected by through-silicon vias (TSVs). Combined with Micron’s 1-gamma DRAM, these innovations provide the capacity, speed and power efficiency required to scale next-generation AI systems. A single 256GB module can reduce operating power by more than 40% versus two 128GB modules, enabling greater efficiency for modern AI data centers.

Ecosystem Partner Validation

Micron is collaborating with key ecosystem enablers to validate the 256GB 1-gamma DDR5 RDIMM across their respective current and next-generation server platforms. This co-validation ensures broad platform compatibility and accelerates the path to production deployment for data center customers building AI and HPC infrastructure at scale.

“Capacity, bandwidth, and power are the defining drivers of AI efficiency. With our 256GB DDR5 RDIMM, Micron is enabling servers to deliver significantly higher performance,” said Raj Narasimhan, senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Memory Business Unit at Micron. “Built on our 1-gamma DRAM using advanced 3DS and TSV packaging, this solution delivers industry-leading speed and power efficiency, helping data center architects scale AI infrastructure more efficiently.”

Meeting the Memory Demands of the AI Era

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs), agentic AI, real-time inference and high-core-count CPU workloads is driving an urgent need for greater enterprise server memory capacity, higher bandwidth and improved power efficiency. Micron’s 256GB DDR5 RDIMM addresses these growing requirements head-on, enabling server architects, hyperscale operators and platform partners to maximize memory capacity per socket while operating within the thermal and power boundaries of modern data center infrastructure.

Sampling and Availability

Micron’s 1 gamma-based 256GB DDR5 RDIMM is currently sampling to key server ecosystem enablers for platform validation. For more information on Micron’s data center solutions, visit the Micron data center memory webpage.

About Micron Technology, Inc.

Micron Technology, Inc., is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience.

Source: Micron

The post Micron Samples 256GB DDR5 RDIMM Built on 1-Gamma DRAM for AI Servers appeared first on HPCwire.

Health officials in Paris say French woman who contracted disease on MV Hondius is on ventilator in intensive care

The head of the World Health Organization has told countries to prepare for more hantavirus cases as authorities in Paris said a French woman who contracted the virus onboard the MV Hondius had the most severe form of the disease and had been put on a ventilator.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked Spain for the “compassion and solidarity” it had shown by taking in the stricken cruise ship and urged authorities to follow the WHO’s advice and recommendations, which include a 42-day quarantine and constant monitoring of high-risk contacts.

Microsoft and G42's planned $1 billion AI data center in Kenya has stalled amid disagreements over power commitments, with President William Ruto saying the country would need to "switch off half the country" to support the project at full scale. Tom's Hardware reports: The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto's visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya's Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt. President Ruto isn't exaggerating about shutting off half the country's power. Kenya's total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country's government-owned electricity producer. The full 1 gigawatt build would therefore have consumed roughly a third of the country's total capacity, and even the first 100 megawatts would have required a significant share of the Olkaria geothermal complex's output, which currently generates around 950MW across all its plants. John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya's Ministry of Information, told Bloomberg that the project hasn't been withdrawn and that talks are continuing, adding that the "scale of the data center they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring." A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud is also still under discussion. [...] Microsoft is spending $190 billion on capex in 2026, and the company adds approximately 1 gigawatt of data center capacity every three months globally. But power constraints are proving to be a universal bottleneck: nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds this year have been delayed or canceled due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PM accused of dragging heels on forcing tech firms to block transmission of nude photos on children’s phones

Internet safety and children’s rights campaigners say they have been frustrated for months by Keir Starmer’s lack of leadership on blocking child abuse images on children’s phones, speaking out after Jess Phillips resigned from the government saying she was tired of seeing “opportunities for progress stalled and delayed”.

The influential Labour politician was one of four ministers who quit on Tuesday and joined more than 80 MPs to have called for the prime minister to go.

New high-performance OoO superscalar vector processor IP, ideal for area- and power-constrained consumer applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 12, 2026 — SiFive, Inc., the gold standard for RISC-V computing, today announced the launch of the SiFive Performance P570 Gen 3, the most powerful and efficient out-of-order processor core in its class. Purpose-built for demanding edge AI, high-end consumer, and commercial IoT applications, the P570 Gen 3 delivers a large leap in performance compared to the popular P550 Gen 1, and also provides the most modern RVA23 ISA profile support.

This versatile IP can be used as the control processor in embedded IoT devices, running a full networking stack, or can be used as the main applications processor in consumer devices, running rich OSs, such as Android or enterprise-grade Linux. The high-performance vector unit supports running AI models and inference on edge devices.

“The P570 Gen 3 is built to meet the demands for today’s most demanding consumer and commercial applications,” said Krste Asanovic, SiFive co-Founder and Chief Architect. “With world-class RVA23 capabilities, the new P570 IP will meet next-generation customer requirements for high performance with leading area and power efficiency. This enables tremendous new possibilities coupled with the capability to work most of the major operating systems.”

Industry-Leading Performance and Efficiency

The P570 Gen 3 introduces significant architectural improvements, featuring a 3-wide, 13-stage fully out-of-order superscalar execution pipeline and an upgraded vector engine.

• Traditional CPU workloads: 7- 13% performance improvement on SpecInt 2006-2017 combined with a 13% reduction in dynamic power vs. P550 Gen 1
• Modern AI CPU workloads: The 128-bit VLEN vector pipeline delivers a 2X increase in Geekbench and up to 21X more performance in specific AI-relevant workloads vs. Gen 1, and up to 4.5X vs. Gen 2, utilizing specialized dot-product instructions to accelerate convolution and matrix-multiply operations.

More Than Just the Core

SiFive also provides a complete solution around the P570 core including system IP, such as the RISC-V standard-compliant advanced interrupt architecture (AIA), WorldGuard to support trusted execution environments on secure SoCs, and a second-generation RISC-V standard-compliant IOMMU. P570 Gen 3 is also scalable up to 16 cores in a compute subsystem.

A New Baseline for RISC-V Standardization

The P570 Gen 3 is fully compliant with the RVA23 profile (backed by major ecosystem players, including Google, Red Hat, and Canonical), providing software developers with a stable, consistent set of instructions and ensuring the P570 is ready for mainstream application development. As well as supporting all the RVA23 mandatory requirements, including the Hypervisor (H) and Vector (V) extensions, the P570 includes optional extensions for enhanced security and management, and support for FP16 and BF16 to accelerate modern AI workloads. The additional security features include secure branch prediction and RISC-V standard Vector Crypto (both NIST and SM) and Enhanced Protected Memory (smepmp) extensions.

The P570 is available today and we are working with customers in several market segments.

The P570 is ideal for use cases requiring high-performance and power efficiency in a small area budget. For customers with very strict area constraints who don’t require vectors, the updated P550 Gen 3 provides a highly efficient RVB23-compatible core.

Learn more in our video featuring Krste Asanovic here.

Download the product brief here.

For more information on the SiFive Performance P570 Gen 3, please visit SiFive.com.

More from HPCwire: SiFive Raises $400M Series G to Advance RISC-V Architecture for AI Infrastructure

About SiFive

As the pioneers who founded RISC-V, SiFive is transforming the future of computing by bringing the power and flexibility of RISC-V to the world. SiFive’s market-leading IP provides the blueprint for high-performance, customizable, and energy-efficient processor cores across the entire computing spectrum, from the intelligent edge to the most advanced AI data centers. SiFive achieved record growth in 2025 and its IP is featured in more than 500 designs, with over 10 billion cores shipped to date, SiFive is the trusted IP partner for the world’s most innovative technology companies.

Source: SiFive

The post SiFive Sets New Bar for High-Performance RISC-V with 3rd Gen Performance P550 and P570 IP appeared first on HPCwire.

The Inter Miami and LAFC stars are the highest-paid players in the league by a distance, while other new arrivals’ numbers are revealed for the first time

Lionel Messi is receiving even more on his second MLS contract, as unveiled in the MLS Players Association’s latest drop of player salary information. The union drops offer a fascinating lens into MLS squad construction, a chance to play sporting director and give pass/fail verdicts on roster construction across the 30-team circuit.

The Argentinian – whose take-home figure does not include additional amounts earned via Apple streaming subscriptions or jersey sales through Adidas and Fanatics – remains far and away MLS’s top earner, receiving $28.3m in his fourth season with Inter Miami. Son Heung-min ranks second, with Los Angeles FC paying the Tottenham icon $11.2m, while Rodrigo De Paul joins Messi on the podium not as his bodyguard but as the earner of a $9.7m income.

Russia tested a new long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, months after the last treaty with the U.S. expired.

SAN DIEGO, May 12, 2026 — AIwire, the leading publication covering scientific and technical AI news, today unveiled its AIwire People to Watch for 2026. This feature highlights key AI community members who are poised to drive the industry forward in the coming year.

The AIwire editorial team searched for AI professionals who are driving the next wave of innovation and bridging academic breakthroughs and real-world deployment through deep technical insight, and carefully selected six remarkable individuals within our vast and dynamic community.

“I’m happy to present the 2026 AIwire People to Watch,” said TCI Media Editorial Director Alex Woodie. “AI is changing rapidly at the moment, and our 2026 AIwire People to Watch are at the forefront of these trends. I’m pleased to honor such a distinguished group of people during such an incredible period in the history of computing.”

We are at a remarkable point in history, thanks to the tremendous growth in the field of artificial intelligence. From reasoning models that surpass PhD-level capabilities to AI agents transforming workflows in enterprise, science ,and engineering, the pace of change is incredible. Trillions of dollars are being invested in massive data centers based on the potential of AI, and quantum computing promises even more disruption to come.

Our intent is to showcase the profound impact of these individuals’ contributions to our industry, reshaping how AI will power science, enterprise, and society. This feature offers our readers the opportunity to learn who they are and why they were chosen as the best and brightest that our community has to offer in 2026.

The 2026 AIwire People to Watch selections are:

Daniela Amodei
President & Co-Founder, Anthropic

Andrew Feldman
Founder & CEO, Cerebras Systems

Ranjay Krishna
Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington

Adam Lewis
Head of AISim Innovation, SandboxAQ

Fei-Fei Li
Sequoia Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, and Denning Co-Director of Stanford HAI

Lisa Su
Chair & CEO, AMD

To read exclusive interviews with each Person to Watch, please visit: https://www.aiwire.net/people-to-watch-2026.

About AIwire

AIwire, the successor to 12-year-old “EnterpriseAI,” continues as the trusted global news site for scientific and technical AI. As the role of artificial intelligence in scientific computing intensifies, AIwire’s reporting explores use cases illustrating its dramatic impact across scientific and technical disciplines and industries. As a news portal and weekly newsletter, AIwire covers ground-breaking developments in machine and deep learning, LLM training, and the GenAI ecosystem, showcasing how leading organizations and global community initiatives combine both HPC and AI to accelerate the utilization of AI for scientific discovery and innovation. Subscribe now at www.aiwire.net.

About TCI Media

TCI Media (formerly Tabor Communications Inc.) is the home of the Wire publications: AIwire, HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and QCwire, which broadly cover Advanced Scale technologies for scientific and technical computing. The Wire publications closely follow the convergence of AI, HPC, and Big Data, and the evolution of Quantum Computing. Together, they unify the IT communities that we serve, providing news, analysis, and information to educate and engage users and decision-makers seeking high performance and advanced scale computing solutions for scientific and technical workloads across AI, HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. More information can be found at www.tci-media.com.

The post AIwire Unveils 2026 People to Watch appeared first on HPCwire.

HOUSTON, May 12, 2026 — HPE today announced new GreenLake innovations across private cloud, storage and data protection that reshape how enterprises modernize infrastructure and accelerate AI data readiness. GreenLake delivers a cohesive approach that enables organizations to modernize virtualized and cloud-native workloads without forcing customers into fragmented, multi-vendor tools or risky migrations.

“Enterprises are rapidly modernizing for AI and cloud-native runtimes and this transformation is placing new demands on how environments are managed, protected, and scaled,” said Fidelma Russo, EVP & GM, Hybrid Cloud & CTO at HPE. “With these innovations, we’re helping organizations adopt a unified operating model that brings together private cloud, data, and protection, simplifies migration from legacy platforms, strengthens resilience, and delivers superior TCO to operate at scale.”

Next-Generation Private Cloud Unifies Cloud-Native and Virtualized Workloads

HPE Private Cloud is now in its fourth generation and delivers a flexible experience for organizations modernizing infrastructure beyond traditional virtualization environments. HPE Private Cloud now offers Kubernetes for unified management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers on a single platform, with independent scaling for cloud-native workloads. HPE also offers a seamless path for current HPE Private Cloud Business Edition customers to upgrade their software to manage both VMs and Kubernetes using their existing infrastructure.

By offering unified infrastructure, operations, and data in an integrated, single-vendor solution, HPE Private Cloud gives customers control and consistent operations, helping them reduce cost and manage risk.

• For customers that want to build a unified cloud operating model with hybrid and multicloud management, orchestration, migration and automation, HPE Private Cloud offers a streamlined upgrade path to the enterprise edition of HPE Morpheus Software.
• The new HPE Private Cloud system is built on the latest HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12, delivering improved performance per watt, higher workload consolidation, and enhanced security with HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO).
• HPE Zerto Software now enables live workload migration from VMware environments to HPE virtual machines with continuous data protection. This integration helps organizations migrate with minimal disruption while maintaining enterprise-grade continuous workload protection and ultra-fast granular recovery from cyber events.
• New integrations for the Veeam Data Platform provide data protection for HPE Private Cloud with agentless, host-level, image-based backup, native changed block tracking for efficiency, and cross-platform recovery to provide data mobility.
• HPE StoreOnce now integrates with HPE Private Cloud to deliver efficient, space-saving backup for real-time replication with near-zero RPO/RTO recovery.

For hyperconverged infrastructure in edge and distributed use cases, HPE SimpliVity now supports HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and extended resilience and backup with HPE StoreOnce Gen5 systems. Native StoreOnce integration gives customers seamless, secure and space-efficient backup for their data. These capabilities help standardize operations, improve resilience, and simplify data protection for virtualized workloads.

HPE Advances Unified Data Platform for AI and Modern Workloads

HPE is expanding its unified data layer with new native file storage, additional scale-out block storage, and agentic AI management. These new innovations enable organizations to accelerate AI data pipelines with intelligent data and transform how data is managed, protected, and activated across the enterprise.

• HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 expands how customers access data by giving them new native file storage alongside existing object storage on a single platform. The X10000 now scales to 16 nodes and 23PB raw capacity and offers a new 100% data availability guarantee to keep applications running without disruption1. The X10000 will deliver remote direct memory access (RDMA) enabled file storage, building on existing support for S3 (object storage) over RDMA. These advanced capabilities simplify how data for AI pipelines is stored and accessed across training, inference, and KV cache workloads. The X10000 also enables a broader range of analytics, cyber resilience, and backup use cases with industry-leading backup ingest performance of up to 2.5 PB/hour using the X10000 Data Protection Accelerator Node.
• HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 expands performance and resilience for mission-critical workloads with new real-time, agentic support that autonomously detects, analyzes, and resolves storage issues and a new 5:1 data reduction guarantee to increase efficiencies and lower overall cost per TB. The B10000 also allows additional scaling from four to six controller nodes to provide 50% more performance and built-in dual-node fault tolerance.
• HPE Data Fabric Software features new policy-based data placement and movement, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations to prepare and manage data for AI workloads across hybrid environments. A new conversational interface and agentic AI assistant provide natural language access to the global namespace for faster insights, automated reporting, and improved decision-making. Enhanced metadata integration improves visibility, classification, and lineage, and support for open standards like Apache Polaris for consistent governance and compliance across platforms.
• HPE Zerto offers new AI-powered data protection through a simple AI assistant and is now integrated with Microsoft Defender to deliver real-time threat visibility and faster recovery, building on HPE’s orchestrated recovery at scale innovations announced at RSAC 2026.

Customer and Partner Perspectives

“At the Dallas Cowboys, we operate as a global, technology-driven sports and entertainment enterprise, where delivering a seamless, high-performance experience across AT&T Stadium is critical to our success,” said Matt Messick, CIO at the Dallas Cowboys. “HPE’s unified approach to private cloud platforms allows us to modernize our infrastructure while maintaining the flexibility and resilience we need to support everything from real-time fan engagement to large-scale event operations.”

“Veeam’s partnership with HPE is focused on helping organizations simplify and strengthen data and AI trust as they modernize their infrastructure,” said Dave Russell, SVP and Head of Strategy at Veeam. “By integrating Veeam Data Platform with HPE Private Cloud, we’re enabling organizations to protect their environments with greater speed, resilience, and flexibility, while also ensuring they can recover quickly, confidently and intelligently from any disruption.”

Availability

• New fourth-generation HPE Private Cloud systems are available now.
• Support for unified management of VMs and containers on HPE Private Cloud will be generally available in Q3 2026.
• Integrated support for HPE StoreOnce, HPE Zerto Software, and Veeam Data Platform for HPE Private Cloud are available now.
• HPE SimpliVity integrations with HPE StoreOnce Gen5 systems will be generally available in Q3 2026.
• HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 with file storage will be generally available in Q2 2026, with 16-node scale out and RDMA for file support generally available in Q3 2026.
• HPE Data Fabric Software updates are available now.
• HPE Zerto Software enhancements will be generally available in Q2 2026.

About HPE

HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.

Source: HPE

The post HPE Delivers Unified Private Clouds and Data Platforms to Accelerate Enterprise Modernization and AI Data Readiness appeared first on HPCwire.

It's not every day you can take more than $200 off one of Apple's most high-performing laptops.

ST. PAUL, Minn., May 12, 2026 — 3M today announced it has joined a group of leading technology companies to establish a new multi-source agreement (MSA) focused on advancing open, interoperable specifications for expanded beam optical (EBO) connectivity in AI infrastructure. Expanded beam optical technology is increasingly seen as a critical enabler for AI infrastructure, offering advantages in reliability, ease of maintenance, and performance in high-density environments. As hyperscale and enterprise AI deployments grow, standardized approaches to optical connectivity are expected to play a key role in reducing complexity and accelerating time to deployment.

Credit: Shutterstock

The MSA brings together industry leaders including 3M, Accelink, Aperion, AMD, Amphenol, Arista Networks, Cisco, Meta, Molex, Nexthop-ai, Oracle, Senko, Source Photonics, Sumitomo, TE Connectivity, viaPhoton, and Xscape Photonics to collaboratively develop standardized specifications for a range of EBO connector solutions. The effort is designed to accelerate deployment of high-performance optical interconnects required to support the rapid scaling of AI data centers.

“As AI workloads scale, the physical layer of data centers is being pushed to new limits — requiring optical connectivity solutions that are not only high-performance, but also interoperable and scalable across a growing ecosystem,” said Alex An, vice president, 3M data center vertical. “By participating in this MSA, 3M is helping enable an open, standards-based approach that can accelerate adoption, improve reliability, and support the next generation of AI infrastructure.”

The MSA will provide a collaborative framework for members to contribute to a shared specification covering multiple EBO connector configurations.

“The increasing bandwidth density and scale of AI networks are driving the need for a highly resilient Layer 1, which today relies on multi-fiber physical contact connectors,” said Rajagopal Subramaniyan, senior vice president, OCI networking, Oracle. “Strict connector hygiene requirements slow network builds and add operational overhead for ongoing link triage. Expanded beam technology can overcome these bottlenecks, enabling more resilient cluster topologies and future rack-scale optical architectures. Reflecting Oracle’s commitment to innovation and industry leadership, we are pleased to serve as co-chair in the formation of the EBO MSA, which is essential to establishing a diverse supplier ecosystem for hyperscale cloud and AI operators.”

3M’s participation in the MSA builds on its broader commitment to advancing data center innovation through materials science — including solutions that help enable reliable connectivity, manage heat and power, and support resilient infrastructure at scale. As momentum builds across the ecosystem, additional contributors to the MSA are underscoring the importance of open, standardized approaches to expanded beam connectivity.

“As optical data networks scale and evolve rapidly, the industry faces increasing demand for solutions that deliver not only high performance, but also reliability and ease of deployment and operation,” said Jim Hasegawa, president of the Optical Communications Division at SENKO Advanced Components, Inc. “Expanded beam optical technology directly addresses these needs, especially as the industry moves toward open, consistent standards that enable seamless integration across transceivers, backplanes, and cable assemblies.”

The MSA is open to additional members across the data center and networking ecosystem. The initial technical working group has begun development of the first connector specification. More information can be found at www.ebomsa.org, or by contacting the EBO MSA administrator and co-chair, Richard Ward, at admin@ebomsa.org.

About 3M

3M (NYSE: MMM) is focused on transforming industries around the world by applying science and creating innovative, customer-focused solutions. Our multi-disciplinary team is working to solve tough customer problems by leveraging diverse technology platforms, differentiated capabilities, global footprint, and operational excellence.

Source: 3M

The post 3M Joins Multi-Vendor Expanded Beam Optical Standards Group for AI Interconnects appeared first on HPCwire.

• Player’s agency confirms death on Tuesday

• Clarke was named to NBA All-Rookie team in 2020

Memphis Grizzlies forward Brandon Clarke has died at the age of 29, his sports agency has confirmed. A cause of death was not announced.

“We are beyond devastated by the passing of Brandon Clarke,” Priority Sports said. “He was so loved by all of us here, and everyone whose life he touched. He was the gentlest soul who was the first to be there for all of his friends and family. Our hearts are so broken as we think about his mom, Whitney, his entire family and all of his friends. From high school to San Jose State to Gonzaga to the Grizzlies, Brandon impacted everyone who was part of his life.”

Spotlight Delaware has been named a 2025 News Organization of the Year by the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association, thanks to a strong showing in regional journalism awards announced this month.

Spotlight shares the award with the Baltimore Beat in Division D after the two publications won the most first- and second-place prizes in the annual contest honoring excellence in local coverage.

Spotlight Delaware’s nonprofit newsroom also won three first-place awards in the Delaware Press Association’s 2026 Communications Contest, marking an especially rewarding spring for the startup that launched just over two years ago.

“These awards confirm something that more and more people in Delaware already know – that Spotlight Delaware is seen as a must-read source of free, fair local news,” said Spotlight’s founder, CEO and Publisher Allison Taylor Levine.

The MDDC contest judges also named Spotlight reporter Nick Stonesifer as “Rookie of the Year,” for his “well-researched, well-written and important work.” The judges praised Stonesifer’s impressive hand with Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as his “focused work ethic.”

“He was holding institutions and their leadership accountable,” the judges said. “The health care stories were looking out for segments of his communities that often don’t have a voice, or aren’t heard. And the story about the suicide rate among farmers was an eye-opener. 

“He has a bright future in the business.”

Spotlight Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens agreed. “Nick has become a backbone for editorial coverage in our newsroom, as his ability to fact-find and create story ideas independently has led to coverage not otherwise being provided in the state and not being generated by an editor,” Owens said.

In total, Spotlight’s entire staff earned awards in the MDDC or DPA contests. 

In particular, MDDC judges also awarded former Spotlight reporter José Ignacio Castañeda Perez the second-place prize in a new category, the A-Mark Prize for Investigative Journalism.

Judges praised his work on a series of articles that “blends FOIA information with consistent follow-up reporting on how local police departments responded to ICE outreach, placing these proposed partnerships in the context of the broader national and state debate over whether they should be encouraged or even allowed.”

Other MDDC Division D awards included:

• 1st place, Best Event – Delaware Legislative Summit 2025
• 1st place, Best Editorial News Graphic – Elsa Kegelman (GOP finance questions)
• 1st place, Best Use of Interactive Media – David Stradley, Brianna Hill (Wilmington rent stabilization)
• 1st place, Editorial Series – Editorial Staff (The Meyer Plan)
• 1st place, Continuing Coverage – Brianna Hill (Gibraltar Estate rehab raises concerns)
• Editorial Staff – nominee for James S. Keat FOIA Award 
• 1st place, Local Government – Maggie Reynolds (Georgetown homeless population spurs resident ire)
• 1st place, State Government – Nick Stonesifer (As home improvement fraud arrests rise, convictions remain elusive)
• 1st place, Public Service – Karl Baker, Tim Carlin (Get Involved feature)
• 1st place, Medical/Science Reporting – Nick Stonesifer (As ChristianaCare’s profits rise, free care remains stagnant)
• 1st place, Education Reporting – Julia Merola (How a Wilmington Educator is taking guessing out of classroom reading)
• 1st place, Impact of Trump administration on local communities – José Ignacio Castañeda Perez (ICE enforcement upends lives for rural DE immigrants)
• 2nd place, Business Reporting – Jacob Owens (ChristianaCare explores mega merger)
• 2nd place, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coverage – José Ignacio Castañeda Perez (Our Delaware: The Haitian community)
• 2nd place, General Web Site Excellence – Jacob Owens, Angela Reives, Elsa Kegelman
• 2nd place, Local Government – Brianna Hill (Should Wilmington ban new corner stores?)
• 2nd place, Medical/Science Reporting – Nick Stonesifer (Farmers face higher risk of suicide)
• 2nd place, Environmental Reporting – Mike Smith (State planning chief: Sussex growth is “unsustainable”)

In the Delaware Press Association contest, three Spotlight reporters won first-place awards for coverage in specialty categories:

• Continuing Coverage – Karl Baker (Port of Wilmington board battle)
• Feature Story [Online Publication] – José Ignacio Castañeda Perez (Delaware abuse victim rescued from ICE deportation)
• Expanded Obituary – Jacob Owens (Mike Castle dies at 86)  

Other DPA prizes included:

• 2nd place, Health Reporting – Nick Stonesifer (Farmers face higher risk of suicide); 
• 2nd Place, Business Reporting – Jacob Owens (ChristianaCare explores mega merger with N.J.’s Virtua Health); 
• 2nd place, Agriculture Reporting – Maggie Reynolds (Delaware soybean farmers remain optimistic amid dropping prices); 
• 2nd place, Continuing Coverage – Brianna Hill (Wilmington Land Bank scrutiny)
• 3rd place, Agriculture Reporting – Olivia Marble (Trump admin cutting solar spending. Some Delaware farmers are celebrating)
• 3rd place, Health Reporting – Maggie Reynolds (Kent County groups have big plans to address homelessness)
• 3rd place, Business Reporting – Nick Stonesifer (As ChristianaCare’s profits rise, free care to the poor remains stagnant)
• 3rd place, Podcast – David Stradley (Beyond the Headlines: Rent Stabilization in Wilmington)
• Honorable Mention, Continuing Coverage – Karl Baker, Nick Stonesifer (PAL of Delaware faces financial upheaval as Longhurst resigns)
• Honorable Mention, Feature Story [Online publication] – Jacob Owens (A decade after Bradley abuse case, survivors still seek help)      
• Honorable Mention, Continuing Coverage – Jacob Owens, Karl Baker (SB 21 debate) 
• Honorable Mention, Feature Story [Online Publication] – Julia Merola (Wilmington mom struggles to secure therapy for son with autism)
• Honorable Mention, Education Reporting – Julia Merola (How a Wilmington educator is taking guessing out of classroom reading)

For more information, reach out to Spotlight Delaware COO Matt Sullivan at msullivan@spotlightdelaware.org.

ABOUT SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE

Spotlight Delaware is on a mission to engage, empower and connect Delawareans with local news and information. We envision a Delaware where all neighbors have access to the local news and information they need to thrive on a daily basis, participate in local democracy and engage with their communities. Sign up for our free newsletter at spotlightdelaware.org/newsletters, and donate at spotlightdelaware.org/support. 

The post Spotlight Delaware named News Organization of the Year for 2025 appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Oversight panel Democrats hold event at ‘the scene of the crime’ in Florida and ask Trump to not pardon Maxwell

Democrats tore into government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein abuse scandal on Tuesday – revealing new details of the scale of his international sex trafficking ring, and warning Donald Trump not to grant a presidential pardon to the late sex offender’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell.

Several survivors of Epstein’s abuse also gave tearful testimony at a congressional field hearing in Florida of their experiences as teenagers in s orbit. Some spoke of being retraumatized after they were “outed” by the justice department’s failure to redact their names from the so-called Epstein files.

Commentary: Between Android 17 and the new Googlebooks, Gemini is the new Google.

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, May 12, 2026 — Oklo Inc., an advanced nuclear technology company, today announced a Strategic Partnership Project (SPP) with Battelle Energy Alliance (BEA), the management and operating contractor for Idaho National Laboratory (INL), to use AI technologies to accelerate advanced reactor and fuel-system design work.

Strategic Partnership Project to apply INL’s Prometheus AI platform to accelerate reactor and fuel-system design workflows in support of the federal government’s Genesis Mission, including work related to Oklo’s Pluto reactor.

The National Nuclear Security Administration SPP, which gives partners access to specialized national-lab expertise and facilities, aims to bolster conceptual design work for an Oklo reactor system through the use of AI-enabled engineering workflows, modeling, simulation, and technical documentation. Under the project, Oklo and INL will integrate the Prometheus AI platform with Oklo’s Multiphysics design and analysis infrastructure to streamline engineering workflows and support development of Pluto, Oklo’s reactor system designed to use plutonium-bearing fuels. The Pluto reactor is a part of DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program.

“This work brings together advanced reactor design, AI-enabled engineering tools, and INL’s deep technical expertise,” said Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo. “Applying AI to reactor design workflows can accelerate development, improve engineering efficiency, and support progress on advanced systems, including on Oklo’s Pluto reactor.”

The project scope includes the development and application of technical guidance on model setup, benchmarking and validation strategies, and AI agents to accelerate existing workflows.

“Collaborations like this are critical for driving innovation in advanced nuclear systems,” said Rian Bahran, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Reactors at the U.S. Department of Energy. “By leveraging AI-enabled technologies, national laboratory expertise, and industry collaboration, we are accelerating the development of next-generation reactors to support our nation’s energy goals.”

Project tasks include enabling an agent to interact with Oklo’s existing multiphysics workflows, execute and monitor design pipelines, process results, and generate compliant documentation, all while keeping a human operator in the loop for oversight, review, and decision-making.

This work will progress the Genesis Mission, a national initiative to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery, and reflects Oklo’s broader focus on advancing both reactor design capabilities and fuel-related work through collaboration with leading national laboratory partners.

About Idaho National Laboratory

Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.

About Oklo Inc.

Oklo Inc. is developing fast fission power plants to deliver clean, reliable, affordable energy at global scale; establishing a domestic supply chain for critical isotopes; and advancing nuclear fuel recycling to convert used nuclear fuel into clean energy. Oklo was the first to receive a site use permit from the U.S. Department of Energy for a commercial advanced fission plant, was awarded fuel from Idaho National Laboratory, and submitted the first custom combined license application for an advanced reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Oklo is also developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Laboratories.

Source: Oklo

The post Oklo and Idaho National Laboratory to Employ AI-Enabled Reactor Design for Advanced Nuclear Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 12, 2026 — Applied Materials, Inc. has announced that Arizona State University (ASU), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Stanford University will join the company’s EPIC Center in Silicon Valley as inaugural research partners. Through close collaboration with Applied’s scientists and engineers, university teams will engage in high-velocity research programs across advanced materials, novel process and device technologies, and chip architecture inflections – leveraging the synergy of academia and industry to accelerate energy-efficient innovations for next-generation AI chips.

“The EPIC Center is designed to bring together the best minds from industry and academia in a high-velocity, manufacturing-relevant environment to dramatically accelerate the development and commercialization of next-generation semiconductor technologies that are foundational to AI computing,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “Welcoming ASU, RPI and Stanford as research partners at EPIC strengthens the U.S. lab-to-fab innovation pipeline and creates a powerful platform for developing future semiconductor talent.”

Research universities, which produce valuable ideas for future semiconductor materials and processes, benefit dramatically from access to leading-edge equipment and the ability to test whether new materials can be successfully integrated with others used by leading global manufacturers. Applied’s EPIC Center offers university researchers a rare opportunity to pursue manufacturing-relevant research in an industry-scale environment, enabling rapid iteration, faster validation, and smoother transition from discovery to deployment. Working alongside Applied scientists and engineers, academic teams gain access to cutting-edge equipment and process integration that can shave years off the traditional new materials development cycle. Building on decades of collaboration with top engineering schools, these new partnerships aim to advance high-velocity innovation while equipping students with the practical experience and systems-level perspective needed to strengthen the future semiconductor workforce.

“Applied Materials has a long history of working closely with the world’s top universities, and we are excited to take our collaborations to the next level with the EPIC Center,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. “We are thrilled to have ASU, RPI and Stanford as inaugural research partners at EPIC, and we look forward to bringing the best of industry and academia together in a shared environment to accelerate the discovery and commercialization of technology breakthroughs for the semiconductor industry.”

“With the largest engineering school in the country, ASU is driven by our commitment to be of service to industry and to create partnerships that accelerate defining breakthroughs for future semiconductor technology,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow. “We value our strong working relationship with Applied Materials and are excited to be among its inaugural university research partners of EPIC Center. Being a part of a high-velocity, high-creativity environment with the brightest minds in the industry builds upon the work we do with Applied Materials in our shared Materials-to-Fab Center at ASU, creating a seamless network for driving semiconductor excellence in America.”

“The EPIC Center gives our students and researchers the opportunity to move beyond traditional academic research and contribute directly to industry-scale innovation,” said Martin Schmidt, President of RPI. “Collaborating with Applied Materials and its ecosystem partners enables faster lab-to-fab breakthroughs in semiconductor materials, devices, and 3D integration, while preparing students with hands-on, manufacturing-relevant experience to contribute immediately and lead future advances in the industry. This builds upon our long history of working with many industry partners across the U.S. to drive materials development for the semiconductor industry.”

“The explosive growth of AI is pushing semiconductor technology researchers to discover new materials and invent new devices, demanding faster cycles of innovation and closer collaboration across the ecosystem,” said H.S. Philip Wong, Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and founding faculty co-director of the Stanford SystemX Alliance. “The EPIC Center enables our students and researchers to engage directly with industry-scale tools and experts, accelerating discovery while gaining the industry-relevant experience needed to lead future advances in semiconductor manufacturing.”

Applied’s new EPIC (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) Center in Silicon Valley represents the largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D. The center is designed from the ground up to dramatically reduce the time it takes to commercialize breakthrough technologies from early-stage research to full-scale manufacturing. The facility is on track to become operational in 2026.

More from HPCwire: Applied Materials and TSMC Partner at the EPIC Center to Accelerate AI Scaling

About Applied Materials

Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) is the leader in materials engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor and advanced display in the world. The technology we create is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation chips. At Applied, we push the boundaries of science and engineering to deliver material innovation that changes the world. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.

Source: Applied Materials

The post Applied Materials Announces ASU, RPI and Stanford to Join EPIC Center appeared first on HPCwire.

There are rumors of a foldable iPhone, but new designs aren't on most people's list of upgrade must-haves.

The EU plans to target "addictive design" features on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, including endless scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, and recommendation loops that can steer children toward harmful content. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said new regulation could arrive later this year, alongside an EU age-verification app meant to make child-safety rules easier to enforce. CNBC reports: "We are taking action against TikTok and its addictive design -- endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications. The same applies to Meta, because we believe Instagram and Facebook are failing to enforce their own minimum age of 13," Von der Leyen said. "We are investigating platforms that allow children to go down 'rabbit holes' of harmful content -- such as videos that promote eating disorders or self-harm," she added. The EU's executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the "highest privacy standards in the world," according to Von der Leyen. Member states will soon be able to integrate it into their digital wallets, and it can easily be enforced by online platforms. "No more excuses -- the technology for age-verification is available," the EU chief said. The EU Commission could have a legal proposal prepared as soon as the summer, as it awaits the advice and findings of its 'Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tepid cabinet support and a blunted No 10 operation are making it harder for the prime minister to face down critics

• UK politics: live updates

The last time Keir Starmer faced a threat to his leadership, his core team assembled in the cabinet room and persuaded ministers to fire off a succession of supportive tweets in an attempt to keep him in office. This time has been different.

As the number of MPs calling for the prime minister to resign has grown over the last 48 hours, much of the cabinet has remained quiet.

President posted more than 50 times in three hours, attacking on Obama, NY Times and supreme court

Donald Trump unleashed a late-night social media tirade against his political enemies, attacking predecessors including Barack Obama with false accusations and amplifying calls for his Democratic rivals to be prosecuted.

Just hours before a high-stakes trip to China for talks with Xi Jinping, the US president posted more than 50 times in a three-hour spree from Monday evening into the early hours of Tuesday. Posts included doctored images of himself on the $100 bill and demands that political opponents be arrested.

Albrecht Weinberg spent years teaching students about Nazi atrocities after being imprisoned at Auschwitz and Belsen

• Three Auschwitz survivors tell their stories

Albrecht Weinberg, who survived a series of Nazi concentration and death camps and lost most of his family in the Holocaust before returning to Germany in his 80s, has died.

Weinberg died in Leer, north-western Germany, weeks after his 101st birthday and the premiere of a film about his life, Es Ist Immer in Meinem Kopf (It Is Always in My Head).

SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2026 — Rescale today announced the launch of agentic digital engineering alongside significant platform advances in AI physics and compute economics, giving engineering and R&D organizations across aerospace, automotive, energy, life sciences, defense, semiconductor, and manufacturing a more complete environment for AI-first product development.

Engineering organizations face mounting pressure to bring better products to market faster, yet most R&D teams still operate with simulation, data, and AI tools that exist in disconnected silos. Rescale’s release addresses this gap directly, unifying those capabilities in a single platform built for the shift to AI-first engineering.

Rescale’s agentic digital engineering capabilities introduce simulation-native AI agents that automate critical workflows across the product development lifecycle, including input validation, troubleshooting, report generation, and hardware selection. Engineers maintain human-in-the-loop control while deploying prebuilt agents through an agent library, agent deployment framework, and workflow builder. Organizations deploying agentic digital engineering report significant reductions in simulation errors and elimination of wasted compute, with engineers spending less time on manual setup and troubleshooting across product development cycles.

Building on its early lead in AI-based simulation, Rescale has expanded its AI physics operating system into a complete end-to-end environment for turning simulation data into production-ready surrogate models. The platform now provides a unified path from data structuring through model training, validation, and deployment. By complementing traditional solvers with near real-time AI predictions trained on the customer’s own simulation data, engineering teams can explore an exponentially larger design space, evaluating thousands of potential iterations rather than being limited to a few dozen manual studies.

Surrogate models can also be deployed directly into third-party design tools, bringing AI-accelerated predictions into the environments engineers already use, including production manufacturing settings. Organizations using these enhanced capabilities have achieved a 1,000x increase in simulation speed and a 90% reduction in full-stack simulation costs, compressing studies that previously took months into days.

New compute economics capabilities give engineering and IT leaders granular controls to balance speed, throughput, and cost. Curated hardware configurations optimized for cost-performance, paired with policy controls, reduce computing spend and increase simulation utilization across teams, eliminating time spent on manual hardware benchmarking.

Daikin Industries, one of the world’s largest and most innovative HVAC and industrial manufacturers, is building toward an AI-first R&D ecosystem on the Rescale platform. After deploying Rescale for cloud CAE and data intelligence across R&D sites, Daikin significantly reduced manual simulation data-management efforts and is now advancing toward broader agentic digital engineering capabilities across its global R&D organization.

“We have a vision for what AI-driven CAE engineering excellence looks like as we advance our global R&D capabilities. What excites us about this moment is how directly Rescale’s new capabilities align with where we are headed. We are already seeing productivity gains today, with a roadmap that matches our ambition for what comes next,” said Satoru Takanezawa, Senior Engineer and Group Leader, Digital Engineering Group, Technology and Innovation Center, Daikin Industries.

“Engineering teams have spent decades building simulation expertise, but that knowledge has been trapped in disconnected tools, siloed data, and manual processes,” said Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale. “Today we are giving those teams a platform to turn their institutional knowledge into compounding intelligence through agentic digital engineering. Rescale’s platform integrates computational engineering, data intelligence, and AI into a single environment where every workflow builds on the last, continuously turning R&D expertise into organizational intelligence. This is just the beginning of what AI-first engineering can deliver, and we are just getting started.”

Rescale’s latest platform expansion is available now. For more information, visit https://rescale.com/lp/spring-26-release.

About Rescale

Rescale is the digital engineering platform built for the AI era. The Rescale platform integrates intelligent HPC, advanced modeling and simulation, agentic digital engineering, and AI physics to create compounding value that accelerates product development and empowers digital transformation. The Rescale platform delivers the world’s largest network of engineering and R&D applications, intelligent automation, and computing infrastructure to enterprises across aerospace, automotive, energy, life sciences, semiconductor, manufacturing, and the public sector. Rescale is backed by leading investors such as NVIDIA, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Samsung, Hitachi, University of Michigan, and others. Rescale has a global customer base that includes Applied Materials, General Motors Motorsports, Samsung, SLB, and the U.S. Department of Defense. For more information, visit https://rescale.com.

Source: Rescale

The post Rescale Introduces Agentic Digital Engineering to Accelerate AI-First Product Development appeared first on HPCwire.

If current precarious ceasefire between US and Iran ends, Emirates are more likely to be targeted by Tehran

The risk of some Gulf states becoming embroiled in a direct war with Iran has risen after it was reported the United Arab Emirates had secretly launched a major attack on Iran during the conflict.

In addition, Kuwait has said that at least four members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been captured trying to carry out “terrorist attacks” on the Kuwaiti-owned Bubiyan Island, the largest island in the Kuwaiti coastal chain.

Bond yields soar and pound falls against dollar as investors brace for potential Labour leadership change

• UK politics live – latest updates

Long-term UK borrowing costs soared to the highest level in almost three decades on Tuesday as fears about a change of Labour leadership triggered investor jitters and warnings of further bond market turmoil.

With investors worried about potential changes to Labour’s tax and spending plans, the yield – in effect the interest rate – on 30-year government bonds, or gilts, hit a high on Tuesday of 5.81%, a rise of 14 basis points and the highest since 1998.

Jamie Dimon says US banking giant could rethink Canary Wharf tower if a future Labour leader targets lenders

The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, has warned he could scrap plans to build a new £3bn UK headquarters in London if Keir Starmer is replaced by a new Labour prime minister who is hostile to banks.

JP Morgan revealed plans last November to build the tower in Canary Wharf, hours after lenders were spared tax hikes in Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget following strong lobbying by the banking sector.

Anil Kochhar hopes textile graduates of North Carolina State can leave with ‘greater freedom to pursue goals’

Anil Kochhar, a North Carolina State University donor, gave graduates of the school’s Wilson College of Textiles a lot more than just words of wisdom when he delivered their keynote commencement address recently.

The Indian American entrepreneur also announced that he would pay off any student loans taken out by the college’s graduating pupils during their senior year.

Despite a ceasefire that has been in effect for more than a month, the cost of the U.S. war with Iran keeps spiking higher, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

Related

After Afghanistan Disaster, the Pentagon Is on Track to Get Even More Money

Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Related

Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 12, 2026 — MinIO today announced MemKV, a context memory store that delivers microsecond context retrieval at petabyte scale for agentic AI inference workloads. MemKV joins AIStor as the second pillar of MinIO’s product portfolio, extending the company’s data foundation, which began with AIStor, into the memory tier where inference runs. The new MinIO MemKV product delivers persistent, shared context across GPU clusters at a scale that existing memory and storage tiers cannot.

As AI moves from answering simple questions to performing complex, multi-step tasks, the underlying systems must remember what they have already done. That memory is called context, and today it is routinely lost because the infrastructure closest to the GPU cannot hold enough of it. When context is lost, the GPU repeats work it has already completed. The result is a recompute tax: more time, more compute, more energy, and a higher cost for work the system has already completed.

Eliminate Context Loss. Maximize Token Throughput.

MemKV dramatically reduces the recompute tax for AI inference workloads. On representative benchmarks, MemKV delivered a substantial improvement in time-to-first-token at production concurrency. Furthermore, for a typical enterprise deployment with 128 GPUs and a 128K-token context length, MemKV increased GPU utilization from ~50% to over 90%, resulting in $2 million in annual compute savings.

“The industry has been papering over context loss for years because at small scale you may be able to absorb the recompute tax and move on. At the GPU density hyperscalers and neoclouds are building toward, that is no longer true. A GPU recomputing context it has already generated is burning power without return, and at a thousand GPUs that is not inefficiency, it is structural drag,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CEO, MinIO. “Yield economics at this scale demand something purpose-built for the inference data path. MemKV was designed for exactly this.”

Breaking the Speed-Scale Tradeoff Holding Agentic AI Back

Until now, AI infrastructure has forced a choice: high-speed memory tiers like GPU HBM and DRAM that deliver microsecond access but quickly hit capacity limits, or general-purpose storage systems that scale but introduce millisecond-level latency. Neither supports the long-context reasoning that agentic AI demands.

MemKV breaks that tradeoff. Designed to run on NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX architecture and with native support for NVIDIA Dynamo and NVIDIA NIXL. MemKV gives enterprises, cloud providers, and AI platforms a shared memory tier that combines microsecond responsiveness with petabyte-scale capacity. For the first time, an entire GPU cluster can access a common pool of context at speeds that keep pace with inference, rather than waiting on storage.

Purpose-Built for Inference at Scale

Designed exclusively for AI inference and built from the ground up for the G3.5 layer of the GPU memory hierarchy, MemKV delivers petabytes of shared context memory at SSD economics, replacing the cost and capacity constraints of GPU HBM and DRAM with a tier that scales independently of the compute cluster.

Unlike approaches that retrofit file-storage architectures into the inference data path. Data moves directly from NVMe to the AI data path via end-to-end RDMA transport, with no HTTP overhead, no file system translation, and no storage servers between the GPU and its context.

“The AI conversation has moved from raw model performance to token economics and the cost of operating AI at scale,” said Don Gentile, Analyst at HyperFRAME Research. “That is driving new focus on how systems retain and share context during inference. MinIO’s MemKV addresses a costly inefficiency: rerunning prior calculations when context cannot be shared across GPUs. Eliminating that friction improves utilization and lowers the cost of enterprise AI.”

The architecture incorporates how GPUs actually consume data at inference time:

• Native support for NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX: Runs directly within NVIDIA STX infrastructure as a single ARM64-native binary, embedded in the storage tier rather than deployed on separate x86 storage servers connected over the network.
• End-to-end RDMA transport: KV cache moves from GPU memory to NVMe over RDMA, bypassing file-system or object-storage protocols entirely.
• GPU-native block sizes: Operates in 2-16 MB blocks optimized for throughput-oriented GPU access patterns, not the 4 KB blocks designed for legacy storage workloads.
• Wire-speed fabric performance: Built for NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and PCIe Gen6, driving throughput to near wire speed across the physical fabric.

Availability

MinIO MemKV is available today. Click here for access.

About MinIO

MinIO is the data foundation for enterprise AI and analytics. Built for exascale performance and limitless scale, AIStor and MemKV cover every layer of the AI data stack from Objects to Tables to inference context, spanning the edge, core, and cloud. With widespread adoption across the Fortune 100 and 500, MinIO is redefining how organizations and government agencies store, manage, and mobilize their data in the AI era. MinIO is backed by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, and others.

Source: MinIO

The post MinIO Announces MemKV, Purpose-Built Context Memory Store for AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.

Despite a fifth of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's fellow Labour Party lawmakers calling on him to step down, he says he'll "get on with governing."

The overhaul -- including the biggest Google Maps update in a decade -- brings a full UI refresh and new Gemini capabilities to more than 250 million vehicles.

Google taps even further into AI with some truly useful new features on deck. Here's the latest from The Android Show.

The latest Android update gives Gemini more control over your apps and tasks. It could be the start of a wider shift in how we use our phones.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the $1.5 trillion the Pentagon is seeking is "admittedly a historic budget."

While Apple's MacBook Neo might have shocked the budget PC market, Googlebooks could take a bite out of the premium laptop competition.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: EBay on Tuesday rejected a $56 billion takeover bid from the much smaller GameStop over financing doubts, calling the proposal "neither credible nor attractive." EBay, which has roughly four times GameStop's market value, also underscored that its turnaround efforts under CEO Jamie Iannone have boosted growth, with its stock returning 201% since Iannone took the position six years ago. "We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive," eBay Chairman Paul Pressler said in a statement. "eBay's Board is confident the company, under its current management team, is well-positioned to continue to drive sustainable growth." He also pointed to concerns with GameStop's bid, including its financing, its impact on eBay's long-term growth and the leadership structure of a potentially combined company. Last week, GameStop's CEO Ryan Cohen delivered one of the most memorable CNBC interviews in recent memory... initially disinterested, then increasingly hostile, with little eye contact, few real answers to basic questions, and repeated robotic deflections to "check the website." It's worth a watch if you have a few extra minutes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech firm to expand AI capabilities of high-end devices with Gemini Intelligence and says new range of laptops on the way

Google has announced a range of features coming to Android phones this year, including a new Gemini Intelligence AI system and a tool to help users avoid distracting apps.

Revealed in a livestreamed “Android Show” event, the free upgrades are scheduled to arrive in waves over the next year for high-end new and old phones alike, including Samsung and Pixel devices. Google also revealed that a new lineup of laptops will arrive in the autumn.

The ‘meme stock’ company is remembered for Reddit traders sending its share price into orbit but its move on the auction site looks less likely to take off

• GameStop’s $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as ‘neither credible nor attractive’

“Neither credible nor attractive.” No, not a line from a junior minister’s resignation letter on Tuesday. It was eBay’s succinct appraisal of the bizarre $55.5bn (£41bn) takeover offer from video games retailer GameStop, an affair that offers light distraction from the sight of UK 10-year gilt yields at 5%-plus.

To recap: GameStop is the “meme stock” company that became famous a few years ago when amateur traders on a Reddit forum piled in furiously in an attempt to burn the short-sellers who were betting on the struggling retailer’s demise. Surprisingly, the Redditers succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The squeeze drove up GameStop’s share price hundredfold, inflicting hell on serious hedge funds and making the company’s chief executive, Ryan Cohen, an anti-establishment hero.

These are the best laptops my colleagues and I have tested and reviewed in recent months, from budget models to high-powered gaming systems and everything in between.

Candidates jostle to represent the second congressional district, and a Republican’s Senate seat looks ripe to flip

• US politics live – latest updates

Nebraska Democrats are bullish about Republican losses in the right-leaning Plains state – but their prospects depend on today’s Democratic primaries, which include accusations of planted candidates and inadvertently depriving Democrats of power.

A crowded Democratic primary in the state’s second congressional district, referred to as its “blue dot”, has focused around concerns that if a state senator wins, the Republican governor will replace him with a Republican who would help overturn Nebraska’s divided electoral college vote system.

Christian Schmidt, who is resigning post, says multi-ethnic nation may fall apart amid pressure from US and Russia

The UN high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has warned about the possible destruction of the multi-ethnic state after he was forced to resign in a policy clash with the US, seemingly complicated by the commercial interests of a firm linked to Donald Trump Jr that is seeking to make investments in the region.

The German Christian Democrat politician Christian Schmidt spoke at a scheduled meeting with the UN security council in New York on Tuesday, where he warned about the fragility of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has made clear he believes his post should be maintained, saying he will stay on until his successor is appointed.

Hack of online learning system caused chaos for students and faculty last week, delaying some final exams

The company that operates the online learning system Canvas said it struck a deal with hackers to delete the data they pilfered in a cyberattack that created chaos for students, many of them in the middle of finals.

Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said in an online post that it “reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident”.

A Texas couple is filing a lawsuit accusing the AI company of guiding their teenage son in using drugs, resulting in a fatal overdose.

The Senate has confirmed Kevin Warsh to the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, a crucial step in President Trump's push to make Warsh the central bank's leader, replacing Jerome Powell.

The inquiry came after the Guardian revealed Israel used company technology to support mass surveillance of Palestinian phone calls

The head of Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary will step down in the wake of an inquiry that has scrutinised its business dealings with the Israeli military.

Microsoft ordered the inquiry last year in response to a Guardian investigation revealing the military had used the company’s technology to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected Palestinian civilian phone calls on a mass scale.

University of Toronto researchers say cellphone data shows a major drop not only in Canadian tourists visiting the U.S., "but also in business-related travel."

A woman from Pennsylvania found a 3.09-carat white diamond at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas.

The automaker's new Ford Energy unit says it will build shipping-container-sized batteries for utilities, data centers and large industry customers in the US.

The operator of the Dali, a container ship that lost power and slammed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2024, killing six people, is facing federal charges.

The FCC has softened its ban on foreign-made consumer routers, allowing vendors to keep issuing broader software and firmware updates for devices already in use in the U.S. through at least January 2029. Dark Reading reports: Under the original FCC ruling, foreign manufacturers were permitted to provide only limited maintenance and security patches to US customers through March 2027. In a public note (PDF) on May 8, the FCC extended that deadline to at least January 2029 and also expanded the scope of permissible updates. The FCC will now allow foreign manufacturers to provide not just minor security fixes and changes, but also more major software and firmware updates that could affect router functionality, which previously required additional FCC review. The agency described the revisions as intended to ensure the continued safety of already deployed foreign-made consumer routers in the US. "The FCC likely issued this revision in response to the operational realities of network security and the slow pace of equipment replacement," says Jason Soroko, senior fellow at Sectigo. "Replacing millions of embedded devices across national infrastructure requires immense time and capital, and abandoning existing systems to a completely unpatched state would create an immediate vulnerability." "This waiver significantly alleviates the most pressing fears tied to the initial ban by preventing a sudden and dangerous security vacuum," added Soroko.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Shirah struck groomsman Terry Taylor Jr with SUV after they had an argument at wedding afterparty in 2024

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A man from Michigan has been ordered to spend at least 30 years imprisoned after killing his own groomsman on his wedding day.

James Shirah, 24, from Flint, was sentenced on Monday in Genesee county court for the death of his best friend, Terry Taylor Jr, who he ran over with a sport-utility vehicle during an argument on 30 August 2024.

The Justice Department defended itself after the Wall Street Journal revealed​ it has received subpoenas in connection with a leak investigation.

Appointment confirmed by plenary vote in Senedd after party ended 100 years of Labour rule in last week’s election

Rhun ap Iorwerth has been voted first minister of Wales after Plaid Cymru’s Senedd electoral victory ended 100 years of Labour hegemony and held off Reform UK.

Ap Iorwerth was confirmed after a plenary vote on Tuesday with the support of the 43 members of his party in the Senedd and the two Greens, while Welsh Labour and the sole Liberal Democrat in the Siambr, the debating chamber, abstained.

At least one person killed as Moscow launches drone strikes on energy facilities and apartments

European culture editor

It was meant to be the crowning moment of a seemingly never-ending success story: the 70th anniversary of the world’s biggest and ever-expanding live music event, held in a city steeped in history both dramatic and musical.

Trump’s treatment of US allies has weakened his negotiating position with Xi  Expert comment jon.wallace 12 May 2026

The president has alienated partners that once acted as force multipliers. But there are still opportunities to create a united front on common points of tension with Beijing.

President Donald Trump travels to Beijing this week with the US’s alliance structure under enormous strain. Washington has fewer partners at its side, and a weaker hand to play. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Alone, the US has leverage against Beijing, through controlling access to its advanced chips, sanctions on Chinese purchases of Iranian oil, and a consumer market Beijing can’t ignore. 

But Washington’s allies and partners provided strength that China has struggled to compete with – acting as force multipliers, aligning with the US on shared vulnerabilities.  

The Trump administration’s dismissal of such countries has created justified resentment. Many of America’s closest partners, buffeted by threats to NATO and tariffs, have concluded that US commitment may be a relic of the past. That is leading them to forge independent approaches to China, beginning with commercial ties. 

Beijing today benefits from greater economic connectivity with US partners and allies, fewer multilateral structures to bind its behaviour, and little political will on either side of the Atlantic to advance common projects.  

Yes, allied cohesion on China has always been aspirational, limited by different risk perceptions and economic pressures. But US and allied approaches have increasingly diverged since January 2025. And the current situation weakens the US negotiating position, even on President Trump’s ‘America First’ terms.

Greater alignment by the US with its traditional partners on China policy – covering issues like critical minerals, semiconductors, synthetic drugs and beyond – is still possible and of benefit to both Washington and allied capitals. It shouldn’t be cast aside. 

Beijing cashes in

Today, the floor has fallen out of the US alliance structure, as relations with partners and allies has deteriorated. 

The US has retreated from multilateral organizations, questioned the role of NATO, divided the G7 over tariffs, further hollowed out the WTO, launched UN-alternative structures like the Board of Peace, and gone to war with Iran. 

This has pushed allies to chart independent paths, leaving China to take advantage. While the US spent the winter focused on Venezuela, Greenland and Iran, Beijing focused on commercial diplomacy.  

In January, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung announced a ‘full scale restoration of ties’ between Seoul and Beijing, backed by new agreements on economic and trade cooperation, science and technology and the digital economy.

Two weeks later, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a comprehensive ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing covering energy, agriculture, and Chinese electric vehicles, amounting to CAD$3 billion in new export orders for Canada.  

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s subsequent visit netted £2.2 billion in export deals and around £2.3 billion in market access.  

In February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, though citing ‘difficult issues’ in trade relations, agreed to strengthen Germany’s ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ with Beijing through 17 bilateral cooperation agreements.  

Trump will also seek bilateral deals – on products like American soybeans and Boeing aircraft, on top of the NVIDIA chips he recently approved for sale to China, despite national security concerns.  

Benefits are therefore rapidly accruing to Beijing. If the US and its traditional allies cannot develop a collective bargaining strategy, grouping their economies along similar red lines, China will only extend its run.

DC’s demolition derby lays a few floorboards 

The floor of the US alliance structure cannot be rebuilt overnight, and its foundations were always imperfect. But two significant agreements indicate the Trump administration has realized that – in discrete instances – Trump’s ‘I alone can fix it’ instincts don’t work. 

Pax Silica, launched by the US in December 2025, aims to shore up silicon supply chains for semiconductor manufacturing and AI development. With 14 partners and counting, the initiative sees ‘allies and trusted partners’ like Australia, Finland, Greece, Japan, Norway, South Korea, and the UK align to reduce dependency on critical technology from China. Its viability will take time to evaluate, but this novel grouping addresses a common concern, and will only become more effective as it expands.

Meanwhile, to break dependencies on China’s critical minerals, the US launched the new Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), alongside co-chair Japan. They and 52 other partners now belong to a preferential trade-and-investment zone for critical minerals, guaranteeing price floors. 

Like Pax Silica, it’s still early days. And shifting White House attention risks limiting full implementation. But both are encouraging datapoints that the Trump administration is slowly realizing that American unilateralism undercuts American power in certain instances.   

New constructions, with or without a foreman

Washington, European capitals, and Indo-Pacific allies should build on such initiatives, identifying areas where working with allies is clearly to the advantage of all. 

This can take a few forms. First, groupings like Pax Silica and FORGE should be bolstered by renewed efforts to bring in new country signatories and investments. Strengthening these groups will both improve members’ hands with Xi and promise material benefits to all its participants.  

Establishing or reviving other groupings, for instance on synthetic drug interdiction, is another obvious area for close US cooperation with allies. Fentanyl is a continuing source of American overdose deaths, with the US claiming that many of the chemicals used in its production originate in China. 

But the Trump administration chose not to extend US leadership of a nearly 160 country coalition to counter production and distribution of illicit substances.   

Revitalizing this network should be a priority. Both Biden and Trump hammered Xi on fentanyl, and US overdose deaths have fallen since 2023, possibly due in part to US diplomacy. But without a wider grouping of concerned partners, success may be limited or short-lived. 

It is also crucial that trade talks by the US, Canada and Mexico starting in July are a success and deliver real constraints on China’s investments in North American manufacturing. Allowing internal divisions to prevent a protective arrangement would be an own goal and play into China’s strategy.

Rebuilding without Washington

Finally, US allies and partners must identify shared red lines for bilateral cooperation with China that will be upheld independent of Washington. Most countries have national China strategies, and all have identified red lines for bilateral cooperation. But internal limits are not the same as a shared approach. 

The logic of greater allied alignment remains sound even where US commitment is uncertain. If allies can establish common approaches on China policy in other areas, it may manage Washington’s frustration with their hedging. 

And finding agreement may also prove useful for the future: the US may become more cooperative on some issues after President Trump leaves office. And the US’s structural rivalry with China looks likely to endure through successive administrations for some time to come. 

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 12, 2026 — Photonic Inc., a global leader in distributed quantum computing, today announced the final close of over $200 million USD ($275 million CAD) in investment, giving the company a $2B USD ($2.7 billion CAD) post-money valuation. The round, led by Planet First Partners, a UK-based sustainable technology growth equity firm, brings total capital raised by Photonic to over $350 million USD ($475 million CAD). This round adds new investors Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Export Development Canada (EDC), Bell Ventures, Firgun Ventures, InBC Investment Corp. and existing investor Mubadala Capital.

The round’s first close, announced in January 2026, attracted strategic investors Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and TELUS, alongside returning investors British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) and Microsoft. The breadth of investors demonstrates strong support across Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East.

Photonic is accelerating the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing through its Entanglement First Architecture, a unique approach combining silicon-based qubits and native photonic connectivity that enables seamless scaling across existing global telecom infrastructure.

“This financing unites government, strategic partners, and international investors around a shared conviction: that commercial-scale quantum computing is within reach – and that its economic impact will be transformative,” said Don Mattrick, CEO, Photonic Inc. “We would particularly like to recognize the meaningful contributions from the Government of Canada via both BDC and EDC. Photonic is already delivering on commitments to customers, including as part of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program and Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. We will use this funding to continue to hit key milestones, grow our team, and deepen the partnerships that will take us there.”

“Distributed architectures will be an important way to scale quantum technology, and Photonic is an important partner in advancing that future,” said Zulfi Alam, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Quantum. “Their design allows quantum systems to operate over today’s fiber infrastructure, offering a practical and scalable path toward the large‑scale systems that transformative applications will demand. We’re pleased to continue our partnership as they take this next step.”

“We’re pleased to welcome Photonic to Bell Ventures’ portfolio to collaborate with Bell’s team on advancing sovereign, scalable quantum computing capabilities in Canada,” said Martin Cossette, Head of Bell Ventures. “This investment reflects our ongoing commitment to supporting home-grown innovation across the technology ecosystem.”

Evercore acted as sole placement agent to Photonic on the capital raise.

More from HPCwire: Photonic Raises $180M CAD to Accelerate Quantum Computing and Networking

About Photonic Inc.

Photonic Inc. is a leading quantum technology company developing commercial-scale quantum computers and quantum networks to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges in materials science, drug discovery, climate change, and security. The company’s approach unlocks performance at scale through unmatched distributed quantum computing capabilities. Photonic’s high-connectivity Entanglement First architecture leverages a unique qubit modality, optically-linked silicon spin qubits, to enable powerful computation, efficient error correction, and seamless integration with existing data center and telecom environments. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, with operations in the United States and United Kingdom, Photonic’s team of 160+ experts is advancing quantum technologies alongside leading investors, partners, and customers worldwide. Learn more at photonic.com.

Source: Photonic Inc.

The post Photonic Inc. Announces Final Close of $200M Funding Round at $2B Valuation appeared first on HPCwire.

Juliette Binoche joins 600 leading figures to warn against a ‘fascist takeover of the collective imagination’

More than 600 cinema figures have said the growing influence of the far right on French cinema production risks turning into a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination”.

In an open letter published in the newspaper Libération to coincide with the opening of the Cannes film festival, they said the billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s dominant position in French film production and distribution threatened the independence of the industry.

Workers told to be realistic about outcome of union talks as corporation aims to make savings with job cuts

BBC staff have been told their bosses will forgo a pay rise this year but fear the freeze will lead to a meagre increase for the rank and file, who have been urged to be realistic about the outcome of union negotiations.

Employees have been told that the corporation’s executive committee – its 12 highest-paid bosses including the director general, who were paid almost £5m in total last year – will have their pay frozen this year amid a £600m cost-cutting drive.

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Prices rose 3.8% over the last year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, highest jump since 2023

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US inflation jumped to 3.8% in April as the war in the Middle East continued to drive energy prices and everyday costs for Americans.

Prices rose 3.8% over the last year, according to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest jump since 2023.

Deborah Turness, who resigned last year, says traditional news in danger of being replaced by personality-led content

Broadcasters must urgently adapt to an existential threat from “creator journalism” that is causing audiences to shun traditional television news, the former boss of BBC News has said.

Deborah Turness, who resigned from the BBC alongside the then director general, Tim Davie, last year, said consumption was “collapsing” for traditional television news, which was facing “a profound moment of disruption”.

No wonder they are upset by the slogan ‘tax the rich’. Despite their wealth increasing 81% since 2020, they need our emotional support now more than ever

Won’t anyone think of the poor, poor, billionaires? Their endless money can buy them political power, but it can’t buy them love. Instead of being worshipped by the hoi polloi, titans of industry are denounced! Despised! Disrespected! Insert another D-word of your own!

Thankfully, class solidarity is strong among the super-rich. Steve Roth bravely brought attention to the plight of his fellow billionaires during a recent earnings call. “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ … spit out with anger and contempt by politicians … to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs,” the Vornado Realty Trust CEO said.

Supporters of PM say it shows he has majority backing after more than 80 MPs call on him to quit

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Who are the main threats to Starmer’s leadership?

More than 100 Labour MPs have signed a statement saying this is “no time for a leadership contest”, as Keir Starmer told his cabinet he would not stand down while a formal leadership contest had not been triggered.

The letter, coordinated by backbenchers, has been signed by 103 MPs, including parliamentary private secretaries. Organisers say it did not come from No 10, though MPs said it had been circulated by government whips.

The $117.5 million Xfinity settlement is open for claims. Here's how to file before the August 14 deadline.

Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. "This breakthrough addresses the 'cocktail party effect,' a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish between overlapping conversations in noisy settings," reports Neuroscience News. From the report: In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani's] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously. The system then automatically detected which conversation a patient was paying attention to and adjusted the volume in real time, turning up that conversation while quieting the other. For one volunteer, the experience of controlling the system with her brain was literally unbelievable. She accused the researchers of secretly adjusting the volumes. Others told stories about friends and family with hearing impairments who could benefit from such a technology. One person said: "It seems like science fiction." [...] The scientists developed real-time machine-learning algorithms that could examine the brainwaves and identify which conversation the patients were paying attention to. Once deployed, their system could rapidly deduce which conversation each listener was paying attention to and make it easier for them to hear it. This happened both when the researchers guided the subjects toward a particular conversation, and when the subjects chose freely, as would be necessary in a real-world conversation. "For this to work in real time, the system has to be very fast, accurate and stable for the experience to feel pleasant for the listener," Dr. Mesgarani said. The scientists found their new system correctly identified which conversation the volunteers paid attention to. This dramatically improved the intelligibility of the speech the volunteers focused on, reduced listening effort, and was consistently preferred by the volunteers when compared to conversations the system did not provide assistance with. One volunteer recalled her uncle, who had hearing problems. "Can you imagine if this technology existed in a world [where] ... he could access it? He might actually live a much more peaceful... life." The research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the midst of a court battle over whether to continue to allow access by mail to the medication abortion pill mifepristone, Republican lawmakers have claimed that 10% or more of women who take the drug have serious side effects. A 2025 report from an anti-abortion group that put forward the figure has been criticized by reproductive health researchers for methodological issues and a lack of transparency about its data source.

Peer-reviewed studies show a far lower rate of serious problems.

Republicans cited the statistic last week while discussing court rulings on medication abortion. The Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted access to mifepristone by mail on May 1, but the Supreme Court temporarily restored access on May 4 for a week. On May 11, the court extended its order through May 14.

“Mifepristone sends 1 in 10 women who use it to the emergency room with life threatening conditions,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote in a May 4 post on X, calling on Congress to ban the drug when used for abortion.

Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia in an X post that same day called the drug “extremely dangerous” while referring to a thread from a year prior that claimed “1 in 10 women had dangerous complications like sepsis or hemorrhaging,” based on an April 2025 report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion.

“Eleven percent of these women will have side effects so bad within the first 45 days that you can cause sepsis or internal bleeding, hemorrhage, things like that,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger from Tennessee said during a May 6 interview with Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council, a Christian think tank that also opposes abortion. Harshbarger shared a clip of the interview on X.

Harshbarger’s communications director, Max Mallhi, confirmed to us that Harshbarger was talking about the EPPC report. Hawley’s office did not reply to an email asking for the source of the senator’s similar statistic. 

The 2025 report, which was also cited by plaintiffs in the case now before the Supreme Court, claimed that 10.93% of women prescribed mifepristone abortions went on to have serious adverse events within 45 days, based on a review of health insurance claims data on more than 865,000 women from an undisclosed source. 

Adverse events are health issues that arise after using a drug, but they aren’t necessarily caused by the drug. Serious adverse events are those that are life-threatening or lead to hospitalization, permanent damage or death.

A May 6 amicus brief from 360 reproductive health researchers filed with the Supreme Court said that the EPPC report, which was not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was “riddled with methodological flaws that render its conclusions unreliable.” This conclusion echoed an August 2025 letter by an overlapping group of researchers.

The EPPC report authors “clearly misconstrued and used deceptive methods to erroneously inflate the rate of serious adverse events after an abortion,” Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author on both the 2025 letter and the amicus brief, told us last fall.

Mifepristone is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for medication abortion through week 10 of pregnancy and is given alongside another drug, misoprostol. During the pandemic, the FDA eased enforcement of requirements that the drug be dispensed in person and in 2023 formally allowed it to be prescribed via virtual telehealth appointments and sent by mail. That year, 63% of abortions in the U.S. were medication abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights. 

The case currently being considered by the Supreme Court was brought by the state of Louisiana, which said the FDA’s 2023 decision violated law on proper administrative procedures and was illegal under an 1873 anti-obscenity law. Louisiana claimed the FDA’s actions had injured the state in various ways, such as by interfering with its sovereign ability to ban abortion and costing it Medicaid dollars for treatment for those who had used the drug.

The May 6 amicus brief from reproductive health researchers said that EPPC had failed to disclose key information on where the claims data underlying the study came from or how it was analyzed. We explained before that it is standard when doing research using health insurance claims data to disclose these details, and that researchers experienced in using such data said they had not heard of a dataset that matched EPPC’s description.

“This fundamental lack of transparency precludes any independent verification or reproducibility—fatal deficiencies for any scientific analysis,” the reproductive health researchers wrote in the amicus brief.

In a Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC said that it had “entered into a confidentiality agreement with the particular vendor of the database that it is using, in order to protect the vendor from political backlash,” adding that “substantially similar databases are widely available.” The brief also said the report “was internally reviewed and adjudicated by a panel of board-certified obstetricians and gynecologists, who carefully evaluated the clinical classifications, coding, and outcome assessments to ensure medical accuracy and consistency.”

The EPPC report incorrectly counted situations in which someone needed further treatment to complete the abortion as serious adverse events, the reproductive researchers’ amicus brief said, and otherwise “inflated its serious adverse event figures.” For example, the researchers wrote, the EPPC report “inadequately” defined hemorrhage. “Because a successful medication abortion always involves bleeding, EPPC more likely than not misclassified cases of normal, expected bleeding as serious adverse events,” they continued.

Multiple other sources of data on the safety of mifepristone show a far lower rate of serious adverse events. The rate of serious adverse events shown on the drug’s label from the FDA is less than 0.5%, based on data from 10 clinical trials.

Mallhi, the spokesperson for Harshbarger, said the EPPC report’s strength was in using claims data instead.

“FDA’s current label claims are based largely on controlled clinical trials,” Mallhi said in an email. “This study uses real-world claims data, and that is precisely why it matters. When findings this significant emerge, they should be treated as a serious safety signal warranting transparency, full adverse-event reporting, and a thorough FDA review.”

However, published studies using real-world data have corroborated the low rate of serious adverse events reported on the FDA label. For example, one study of Medicaid claims data identified a serious adverse event rate of 0.23%.

(Mallhi went on to say that an FDA review “is especially urgent because, in 2016, the Obama FDA stopped requiring prescribers to report all serious adverse health events associated with chemical abortion pills, leaving deaths as the only adverse-event reporting requirement.” As we’ve written before, in 2016 the FDA relaxed extra reporting requirements for physicians for mifepristone. The standard reporting expected for FDA-approved drugs remained, such as having manufacturers report adverse events, Greer Donley, an abortion law expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told us.)

Studies of telehealth abortions have not found a safety difference when drugs are dispensed by mail versus in person. In deciding to allow mail access to mifepristone, the FDA consulted relevant peer-reviewed studies and reviews of FDA adverse events monitoring data from the period when in-person requirements were initially relaxed.

In contrast, the EPPC report was not able to shed light on the safety of medication abortion via mail specifically because it did not break down its data by mail versus in-person dispensing, the reproductive researchers who wrote the May 6 amicus brief said.

In its Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC referred to a new analysis the group performed, which compared serious adverse events before and after the in-person dispensing requirements were first relaxed in 2020. The analysis, also released in a March 10 fact sheet, claimed that serious adverse events rose from affecting 10.15% of users between 2017 and mid-2020 to 11.5% from mid-2020 through 2023. However, EPPC noted that the group lacked “firm data” on the proportion of prescriptions that were dispensed by mail.

The May 6 amicus brief from the reproductive health researchers said that few by-mail instances were likely included in EPPC’s insurance claims data, because during this period the “vast majority” of medication abortion prescriptions by telehealth were not covered by insurance. “Telehealth is likely not the cause of any such increase,” the researchers wrote.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Republicans Repeat Problematic Estimate of Medication Abortion Harms appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The RX300A and RX500A receivers sport 4k/120Hz compatibility and start at $400.

Decades-long campaign powered by patient perspectives results in switch from PCOS – a name that caused confusion and undue suffering – to PMOS

• What is PCOS, what are the symptoms and treatment, and why is it being renamed PMOS?
• ‘I still want to scream’: the loneliness and confusion of living with PMOS

After more than a decade of global consultation, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) – a condition that affects one in eight women – has been renamed.

The hormonal disorder, estimated to affect 170 million women worldwide, will now be known as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS).

A recent survey by the Alzheimer's Association found most adults think maintaining brain health is very important, but they don't know what steps to take. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)

A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the Canvas breach and threatened to leak data involving 275 million individuals if schools did not pay a ransom.

CBS News California Investigates found that accounts for companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash can be bought or rented online without needing to provide identification.

CBS News California Investigates found that accounts for companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash can be bought or rented online without needing to provide identification.

The former TV anchor’s tenure leading US global media agency ends after court ruled appointment unlawful

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Donald Trump has nominated Kari Lake, a longtime ally and former TV anchor who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor, to serve as the next US ambassador to Jamaica.

If confirmed by the Senate, it would end Lake’s tenure as the key official responsible for Voice of America (VOA), the global media organization created in 1942.

Employees are now whispering to AI voice dictation tools rather than clacking the keys. Will ‘voicepilling’ make everyone more productive – or just more annoying?

Name: Voicepilled.

Age: Reid Hoffman first declared himself “voicepilled” in the autumn of last year.

Tim Miller’s teen daughter disappeared in 1984, tied to a series of deaths in the Texas ‘killing fields’. After decades, he received a tip that unlocked everything

Tim Miller is good at finding missing people – or rather, their bodies. Four years ago, a stranger called him and left a rambling message claiming that he had important information about an unsolved murder case.

Miller, who lives in Texas and runs a non-profit search-and-recovery organization called EquuSearch, did not treat the message as a high priority. The caller sounded as if he might have been drunk or on drugs. Although tips are vital to EquuSearch’s work, the tip line brings a certain number of hoaxes, cranks and innuendo. Some of the people who leave messages, Miller told me, “probably ought to get their medication checked”.

South Florida fires that burnt through 45 sq km (11,000 acres) of land over the weekend spread on Monday as emergency crews worked to contain them.

Florida Forest Service said 'the growing fires were producing smoky conditions with reduced visibility'. No serious injuries or property damage have been reported.

Dry conditions have led to wildfires in other parts the country, including fires that destroyed dozens of homes in southern Georgia last month

National broadcaster RTÉ accused of antisemitism for decision to screen satirical 1996 Eurovision episode in boycott of contest

It is considered one of the funniest episodes of a beloved sitcom, but the Father Ted storyline about Eurovision has been dragged into the row over Israel’s participation in this week’s song contest.

Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, which is boycotting the competition in protest against Israel’s inclusion, will instead broadcast the 1996 episode A Song for Europe, in which the characters Father Ted and Father Dougal perform their song My Lovely Horse and earn nul points.

• Former world champion stopped Paul in December fight

• Injuries from bout are still being monitored by doctors

Jake Paul has admitted the broken jaw he suffered during his loss to Anthony Joshua in December may have ended his boxing career.

The YouTuber turned boxer was stopped during December’s fight after a brutal shot from former world champion Joshua. Paul said the injury is still being monitored five months later.

PARIS, May 12, 2026 – This evening, over a hundred high-level representatives from French and German industry, policy, start-up and investment sectors will gather for a reception hosted by the German Ambassador to France, His Excellency Mr. Stefan Steinlein, with the support of the French Embassy in Germany. This event reflects the growing importance of quantum technologies for Europe’s technological and industrial sovereignty, building on the French-German agenda agreed in August 2025. France and Germany are home to some of the world’s leading players in this field.

At the heart of this dialogue lies a clear ambition: to strengthen ties and coordination between French and German industry, policymaking, funding, innovation and research. By connecting key players across borders and across the value chain, the initiative aims to help Europe accelerate the development and adoption of sovereign, competitive and market-ready quantum technologies.

With the same spirit, on the margins of today’s event, a group of leading industry and research organizations will sign a Joint Declaration of Intent to strengthen cooperation in quantum technologies and support the development of a competitive European quantum ecosystem.

Signed by CEA, Fraunhofer, CNRS, Inria, Le Lab Quantique, Quandela, QUTAC and the European Champions Alliance, this Declaration of Intent solidifies the stakeholders’ commitment to deepening and accelerating exchanges, partnerships and synergies.

Their cooperation will focus on four objectives:

• The development of use cases for the industry and end-users of quantum technologies.
• Benchmarking and the development of credible and scalable pathways for the adoption of quantum technologies in Europe.
• The facilitation of multi-stakeholder dialogues among industry, policymaking, funding, innovation and research, with a focus on accelerating deployment.
• The promotion and dissemination of success stories demonstrating the industrial development and commercial use of quantum technologies.

The signatories also reaffirm their commitment to an open and collaborative approach, inviting additional stakeholders to join and contribute to these efforts.

About CEA

The CEA is a public research organization whose mission is to contribute to the scientific, technological and industrial sovereignty of France and Europe in four key areas: low-carbon energy, digital technology, future medicine, and defense and security, by drawing on excellence in fundamental research. For more information: www.cea.fr.

About CNRS

A major player in basic research worldwide, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist enables it to bring together all of the scientific disciplines in order to shed light on and understand the challenges of today’s world, in connection with public and socio-economic stakeholders. Together, the different sciences contribute to sustainable progress that benefits society as a whole.

About European Champions Alliance

The European Champion Alliance (ECA) promotes European technology, European values and works to strengthen through a conscious business-related interdependence between European companies and all participants of the European economic ecosystem. To achieve this goal, the ECA builds bridges between national ecosystems, SMEs, companies, start-ups and other supporters of the tech ecosystem in Europe. The ECA harnesses the power of smart collaboration and accelerate the growth of Europe’s digital champions.

About Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, headquartered in Germany, is the world’s leading applied research organization. With its focus on developing key technologies that are vital for the future and enabling the commercial exploitation of this work by business and industry, Fraunhofer plays a central role in the innovation process. As a pioneer and catalyst for ground-breaking developments and scientific excellence, Fraunhofer helps shape society now and in the future. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft currently operates more than 70 institutes and research institutions throughout Germany.

About Inria

Inria, the French national institute for research in digital science and technology, supports the French government in national research and innovation strategies in the digital field, acting as Digital Programs Agency. Inria leads over 300 research and innovation projects with its 3,500 scientists, engineers, and support staff, in partnership with universities and the digital ecosystem (businesses, entrepreneurs, and public stakeholders). Together, we explore strategic fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, cloud technologies, digital transformation in healthcare, digital twins, and digital technologies for defense. We develop practical solutions such as software, tech startups, partnerships with national companies, and cutting-edge training programs. Our goal is to drive scientific, technological, and industrial excellence to ensure France’s digital sovereignty.

About Le Lab Quantique

Le Lab Quantique is a French not-for-profit organization created in 2018 to support the emergence of the global quantum ecosystem, gathering more than 50 members and partners and organizing more than 20 workshops per year. Its mission is to foster the emergence of talent capable of addressing the major challenges of quantum physics, while also guiding the development of entrepreneurial and industrial projects towards the market launch of new products and services.

About Quandela

Quandela is a global leader in quantum computing, designing, building, and delivering cutting-edge quantum solutions for research and industry. Its offerings include the most energy-efficient quantum computers for data centers, full-stack quantum computing solutions accessible via the cloud, and algorithm access services for academic and industrial customers. Following a pragmatic, step-by-step roadmap, Quandela has been deploying industrial-grade systems since 2023 while developing future generations of fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of scaling through the integration of thousands of photonic components. Quandela is committed to making quantum computing accessible to all in order to address the most complex industrial and societal challenges. Learn more at: https://www.quandela.com.

About QUTAC

QUTAC (Quantum Technology & Application Consortium) is a consortium of internationally active German companies from various sectors and potential users of quantum computing technology. It intends to promote the politically desired digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe and to establish an economically successful, independent ecosystem of quantum computing technology in Germany and for Europe. To this end, the members of the consortium want to identify, develop, test and make available use cases for quantum computing technology both for their own sectors and across sectors. Learn more at www.qutac.de.

Source: Quandela

The post French and German Partners Strengthen Cooperation on Quantum Tech appeared first on HPCwire.

ESPOO, Finland, May 12, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers today launched HPC Integration Service, a turnkey solution that enables its IQM Radiance quantum computers to operate as a Slurm node inside high-performance computing (HPC) environment.

Credit: IQM

Using this widely adopted HPC workflow, IQM aims at accelerating adoption of hybrid quantum-classical computing across enterprises and research institutions. Slurm is the open-source workload manager used by most of the world’s leading supercomputing centers for its scalability and flexibility.

The integration service makes quantum a scheduled resource alongside central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), removing the integration work that has slowed adoption.

In addition, the service is built on IQM´s Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI), an open-source standardization layer that simplifies the vendor-specific software interfaces that have fragmented quantum integration to date.

The new HPC Integration Service has been demonstrated in a paper on arXiv co-authored with researchers at the Munich Quantum Software Company (MQSC) and is already running in production at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany, where IQM has installed four quantum computers.

“We have been hearing about an integration bottleneck from HPC customers for years,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers. “HPC integration is important work and by removing the complexity, end-users can focus on running quantum workloads instead on spending time on programming new routines. This is what production quantum means to us. Quantum you own, operate, and build value on. Real infrastructure inside real environments, doing real work.”

Quantum computers have been deployed at customer sites for several years, but once installed, most of them have operated next to the HPC software stack rather than inside them. Every deployment required custom integration work that the next deployment could not reuse. The new HPC Integration Service unifies the software stack, allowing customers to focus on use-case execution.

The HPC Integration Service closes the gap by enabling users to submit quantum jobs through the same interface and scheduler they use for CPUs and GPUs. Researchers can run benchmarks across systems using tools they already know, while system teams keep their existing operating model.

“Our vision has always been the seamless integration of quantum computing into existing HPC environments, where users can run applications without concern for the underlying hardware. The Quantum Device Management Interface, as part of the Munich Quantum Software Stack, is a key step toward this goal. We are proud to see innovations developed within Munich Quantum Valley now being adopted by IQM as a key player in the quantum world to enable hybrid quantum-HPC workloads in real environments,” said Prof Dieter Kranzlmüller, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre.

IQM has on-premises systems operating at four of the world’s top 10 supercomputing centres and has sold more quantum systems than any other manufacturer. The company’s ambition is to be the foundation that customers build their quantum capability on.

In February, IQM announced plans to go public through a business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ). Following the close of the transaction, the company is expected to list on a major U.S. stock exchange, with a dual listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange under consideration.

More from HPCwire

• IQM Announces Business Combination to Take Quantum Computing Company Public
• IQM Quantum Computers Delivers 20-Qubit System to TOYO in 1st Enterprise Deployment in Japan
• IQM Announces 1st US Quantum Technology Center in the University of Maryland’s Discovery District
• IQM Secures €50M Financing to Accelerate Global Growth

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Quantum Computers is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM has announced its plans to become the first publicly listed European quantum company on a major U.S. stock exchange by merging with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ); with a dual listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange also under consideration.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM Launches HPC Integration Service to Accelerate Hybrid Quantum-HPC Adoption appeared first on HPCwire.

Online marketplace takes into account uncertainty around US video game retailer’s financing proposal

The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as “neither credible nor attractive”.

Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal.

A Guardian show trying to make sense of it all

Award-winning journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman serve as co-hosts of the Guardian’s US video podcast

Kai Wright is a Peabody award-winning host, editor, and writer whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity. He previously hosted WNYC’s Notes From America with Kai Wright, a live call-in show that aired on public radio stations around the country. Kai has also led several acclaimed limited-run podcasts for WNYC Studios, including Blindspot Season 3: The Plague in the Shadows, which documents the early years of the Aids epidemic in the US; Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice, honored with an Alfred I duPont-Columbia University award; and The United States of Anxiety, which chronicled the rise of the Maga movement and its impact on our political culture over four seasons of original reporting. Kai is the author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, as well as two surveys of Black American history, and a contributor to the best-selling collection Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.

A Guardian show trying to make sense of it all

Award-winning journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman serve as co-hosts of the Guardian’s new US video podcast

Stateside with Kai and Carter is the Guardian’s flagship video podcast in the US. Hosted by Peabody award-winning host and journalist Kai Wright and Emmy-nominated Guardian journalist and author Carter Sherman, the show is a conversation-driven series designed to help audiences better understand the news and the forces shaping our world.

With new episodes three times a week, the show brings the Guardian’s global perspective and unique lens on America to life through lively conversations spanning politics, civil rights, the climate crisis, gender and reproductive freedom, corporate power, resistance movements, and the media during this critical moment in history. We also make room for the Guardian’s lighter obsessions, including culture, wellness and soccer. The show features newsmakers, journalists, and other cultural voices.

Seventh body found near railroad tracks thought to be connected to what authorities call ‘potential human smuggling event’

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Federal agents are investigating the deaths of at least six people thought to be immigrants found inside a shipping container at a Union Pacific rail yard near the border with Mexico in Laredo, Texas, on Sunday as a “potential human smuggling event”.

Officials reportedly have also said the death of a seventh person whose body was found near railroad tracks outside San Antonio, Texas – 150 miles (241km) to the north – may be connected to the case.

Guardian staff contributed reporting

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen had argued that his company's retail locations would help eBay build a "national network."

Google's virtual Android event is kicking off in just a few hours, one week before I/O 2026, where the company is expected to spotlight Android, Gemini and its broader AI push.

Spotify 20: Party of the Year lets you share listening stats from the day you joined, even if it was 20 years ago.

Ken Paxton accuses streamer of designing addictive platform and falsely representing data collection practices

Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Netflix has for years falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data, when it actually tracked and sold viewers’ habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, making billions of dollars a year.

A deal is taking shape for the U.S. and Ukraine to jointly develop and build weapons that have been at the forefront of the wars in both Ukraine and Iran.

Health officials have identified at least 11 confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus tied to an outbreak on the M/V Hondius cruise ship.

Iran warns any new U.S. attacks will bring a "bad result," as President Trump acknowledges the ceasefire is faltering and violence flares in Lebanon.

Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, the justices have dismantled Americans’ voices. The only solution is at the ballot box

Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.

The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.

Photoshop has a lot of AI tools. These are the best ones for beginners and anyone who is AI curious.

Delivering much information about the scale of what’s coming, documentary also follows Gawdat’s campaign to get the programs with empathy

Another day, another warning about AI; vis-a-vis the reality we all know, this has roughly the same reassuring effect as a plane fuselage ripping off mid-flight. Starting off with familiar criticisms, such as putting the world out of work and handing over power to tech barons, Alex Holmes and Lina Zilinskaite’s film blasts an concentrated stream of AI concerns in its 83-minute runtime. By the time it is talking about current efforts to create computers out of human brain cells, potentially integrable into our own craniums, and implying this might be a good thing, it is (ironically) hard to know how to process all of this.

The Cassandra at the film’s centre is Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X, now a touring cautionary voice trying to get the world to listen about the perils of AI. Once overseeing advanced projects for the tech giants, his biggest moonshot lies ahead: to introduce a moral dimension into a tech race that looks increasingly like the frenzied season finale of late capitalism. He talks about feeling parental pride in watching Google’s AI-driven robotic arms learn to grasp objects, as children do. And he feels that humanity’s capacity for benevolence is exactly the training resource needed by neural networks in order to prevent the technology ushering in catastrophe.

Samhsa said funding cannot be used to purchase or distribute fentanyl test strips or other drug test kits

The Trump administration’s decision to restrict use of federal funds for fentanyl test strips, in what officials described as a “clear shift away from harm reduction”, could have fatal consequences, experts and critics have warned.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa) issued an open letter in April ordering an end to the use of its funding for all substance testing strips, including fentanyl, xylazine and medetomidine, the latest novel street drug to wreak havoc across the US.

Letter follows a Guardian investigation into irregular ways the Trump administration was transporting detainees. Plus, top World Cup tickets to retail at almost $33,000

Good morning.

A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.

By how much have deportation flights increased under Donald Trump? The number of ICE flights during 2025 has surged by 84% compared with 2024, according to monitoring by human rights groups.