Security experts are calling it the "largest bank robbery in human history." Getting all of the stolen crypto funds won't be easy.

The November 2026 midterm elections are just four days away. Candidates in key races — and President Trump — are making their closing arguments to voters.

Democratic nominee for US Senate seat in Michigan says Stevens, his primary rival, ‘seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago’

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James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in Texas, attacked his Republican opponent Ken Paxton for cancelling some of his final rallies before the midterm election.

“No one’s going to Ken Paxton’s rallies, so he’s canceling them and hoping Elon Musk will buy his seat for him,” Talarico wrote, referencing the donations Paxton has received from the world’s richest man.

Stephen Hubbard said that only when he was being taken from Moscow to St Petersburg did he believe he was ‘going somewhere’

In his first comments since recently being released from a Russian prison, a retired Michigan teacher said he only believed he would be freed when he got new clothes.

Stephen Hubbard, 74, remarked on Friday that he had heard many times previously that he would be released – but never really trusted what he was told, adopting a philosophy of “seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words”.

The automaker must now obtain express consent before collecting or sharing driver data.

Mary Peltola denies knowledge as party accused of recruiting spoiler candidate with same name as sitting Republican

• Alaska Senate race: what to know about Democrats’ alleged ballot-stacking effort

The top federal prosecutor in Alaska confirmed on Friday the existence of a criminal and a civil investigation into an alleged scheme by Democrats to confuse voters by recruiting a spoiler candidate on the ballot for US Senate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent, senator Dan Sullivan.

Speaking at a news conference in Anchorage on Friday, US attorney Michael Heyman cited reporting by the New York Times which suggested that the Senate campaign of Democrat Mary Peltola and national Democrats had, in his words, “orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy to recruit and prop up Daniel J Sullivan as a sham candidate”.

Presidents, civil rights leaders and America’s favorite humorists disagreed about plenty. On the importance of citizens showing up, their message was remarkably similar.

By George D. Rotsch, Publisher of Delaware LIVE

WILMINGTON, Del. — Americans have never needed much encouragement to complain about politics.

Will Rogers made a career out of it.

“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts,” the beloved humorist famously observed. The line, attributed to Rogers in a later Saturday Review quotation, still sounds surprisingly current.

But behind the jokes, arguments, campaign signs and partisan disagreements is a responsibility Americans across generations have repeatedly been reminded not to ignore:

Vote.

Not because everyone agrees.

Not because every voter loves every candidate.

And certainly not because politics suddenly becomes pleasant.

Americans vote because choosing the people who govern them is one of the fundamental privileges — and responsibilities — of citizenship.

The future is in voters’ hands

Dwight D. Eisenhower put it simply in 1949:

“The future of this Republic is in the hands of the American voter.”

Eisenhower, the general who commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II before becoming president, went further in that speech. Americans, he argued, should stop treating politics as something that belongs only to politicians and stop assuming one vote does not matter.

His point was straightforward: Self-government requires citizens to participate in governing themselves.

Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a similar warning during a 1944 radio address.

Roosevelt argued that Americans were unlikely to lose the right to vote because someone simply took it away. The greater danger, he said, was Americans surrendering its power by choosing not to use it.

That idea may be especially relevant in an era when political frustration sometimes becomes an excuse for staying home.

Not voting is also a choice.

It simply leaves the decision to everyone who does vote.

A powerful instrument

For millions of Americans, the right to vote was not always guaranteed in practice.

That history was central to President Lyndon B. Johnson when he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Johnson called the vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man” for confronting injustice.

His message was directed particularly toward Black Americans who had been systematically denied access to the ballot, but the broader lesson survives: A legal right acquires its political power only when citizens exercise it.

Martin Luther King Jr. made much the same argument during the civil rights movement, repeatedly linking voting with the ability of ordinary citizens to turn demands for change into political action.

The ballot is different from almost every other tool available to citizens.

You can complain about your taxes.

You can yell at the television.

You can argue with your neighbor.

You can post something online.

But voting is the moment when opinion becomes a decision.

A ‘crown jewel’

Republican President Ronald Reagan approached the question from another direction.

“The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties,” Reagan said while advocating an extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1981.

That sentiment helps demonstrate how deeply the principle crosses ideological lines.

Roosevelt was a Democrat.

Eisenhower and Reagan were Republicans.

Johnson was a Democrat.

King challenged leaders in both parties.

Yet all recognized essentially the same principle: The legitimacy of representative government ultimately rests with the people who choose it.

And there is something wonderfully American about that.

A president’s vote counts once.

A billionaire’s vote counts once.

The person standing beside you in line whose political opinions drive you absolutely crazy gets one, too.

So do you.

You don’t have to love politics

Perhaps one reason Americans sometimes tune out elections is that politics can feel exhausting.

The advertisements are relentless. The arguments are predictable. Candidates sometimes seem more interested in explaining why the other person is terrible than why they themselves deserve the job.

Will Rogers would probably have found plenty of material.

Another old political saying captures the problem neatly: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”

The phrase has long been attributed to critic George Jean Nathan, although research suggests its precise origin is uncertain, and versions of it were circulating by the 1920s.

The authorship matters less than the point.

Choosing not to participate does not remove politics from your life.

Elected officials will still make decisions about schools, roads, taxes, public safety, business regulations, energy, health care and countless other issues.

The only question is whether you participate in choosing them.

Your neighbor doesn’t have to be wrong

There is another reason to vote that sometimes gets overlooked.

Voting does not require believing that everyone who disagrees with you is ignorant, dishonest or dangerous.

In fact, the American system was built around the assumption that citizens would disagree.

Sometimes loudly.

An election gives Americans a peaceful way to settle those disagreements for the moment and then return later and reconsider the decision.

The winner governs.

The loser gets another opportunity.

Citizens continue arguing.

And the country continues.

That process is imperfect, frequently frustrating and occasionally messy.

It is also extraordinary.

The simplest argument

So why vote?

Roosevelt might say because a right unused can lose its meaning.

Eisenhower might say because the future of the republic belongs to the voter.

Johnson might remind us that the ballot can change society.

Reagan might call it one of our most precious liberties.

And Will Rogers would probably make us laugh about whichever candidates we elected.

Different generations. Different political philosophies. Different ways of saying essentially the same thing.

You don’t have to agree with your neighbor.

You don’t have to belong to a political party.

You don’t have to believe your candidate is perfect.

You don’t even have to enjoy politics.

Learn about the people asking to represent you. Make your own decision.

Then participate.

Because democracy ultimately depends on ordinary Americans deciding that their voice is worth using.

TO GO

What: Learn more about the history and importance of voting in America

Why it matters: Voting allows citizens to choose their representatives, hold government accountable and peacefully decide the direction of their communities and country.

Learn more: The Eisenhower Presidential Library, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library maintain speeches and historical materials documenting presidents’ views on voting, citizenship and representative government.

(The Center Square) – As colleges and universities scale back diversity, equity and inclusion programs amid federal funding pressure from the Trump administration, supporters of the cuts argue DEI has negatively affected academics and higher education.

ICE failed to record data on miscarriages suffered by immigrants in its custody between October 2025 and June 2026

US lawmakers are urgently demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) disclose how many pregnant immigrants have experienced miscarriages, stillbirths and pregnancy-related hospitalizations while in the its custody, after the agency admitted it lost count last year.

US representatives sent the request following a recent Guardian investigation revealing that the Trump administration is detaining a record number of pregnant women and teens, and at the same has lost track of how many suffered miscarriages.

In an opinion piece for 404 Media, Matthew Gault argues that Apple has entered its "slop era," abandoning its reputation for innovative hardware in favor of recycled ideas and questionable design choices. Here's an excerpt: My ears perked up when I heard Apple's new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it's releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it's borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected. The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO -- a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard. With Ternus at the helm, I feel there's a good chance Apple's best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it's declasse. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It's in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to "Think Different" is now releasing hardware that's just like everything else on the market.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once again, it is time for HPC Career Notes, our monthly feature that’s designed to keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the HPC community, including promotion, new company hires, and accolade. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!

Michael Garland and Nathan Bell

Nathan Bell (l) and Michael Garland

Nvidia’s Michael Garland and Google’s Nathan Bell were awarded the SC26 Test of Time Award for their SC09 presentation on sparse computing, which was based on their paper titled “Implementing Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Throughput-Oriented Processors.”

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication is an important operation in computational science, as it appears repeatedly in methods for solving large-scale linear systems and eigenvalue problems across scientific and engineering applications. However, sparse matrices remain a challenge for parallel hardware, such as GPUs.

Rather than treating all sparse matrices in the same way, Garland and Bell considered different sparsity patterns and the data formats best suited to them, which can reduce the execution and memory divergence caused by irregular matrix structures. Their results demonstrated that sparse computation can be mapped successfully onto GPU architectures. In their study, Garland and Bell showed that sparse matrices could be run with high levels of memory bandwidth utilization on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285.

Garland, who is currently is a senior director of programming research at Nvidia, will look back on the paper and the ensuing work in his SC26 presentation titled “Twenty Years of Sparsity on GPUs.”

Caira Anderson

Caira Anderson, a doctoral student in the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, has completed a three-month graduate fellowship practicum at the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division of Argonne National Laboratory studying computational methods and software for large-scale scientific simulation.

Caria Anderson

Anderson, who is a recipient of a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF), chose Argonne for her practicum because of its strength in applied mathematics, scientific computing, and HPC software

“MCS is a natural fit for my interests in numerical methods and scientific software,” Anderson said. ​“I was excited by the chance to learn how solver methods are developed, tested, and used in large-scale scientific computing applications.”

Anderson’s thesis work focuses on numerical methods for the linear ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) eigenvalue problem, which is used to study the stability of plasma equilibria in application areas such as fusion energy, per Gail Piper’s writeup on the Argonne site. During her practicum, Anderson studied the performance of a fully implicit Runge–Kutta (IRK) time-stepping method implemented in PETSc, Argonne’s suite of software for scientific computing.

While she focused on numerical methods and scientific computing, Anderson also has been exploring AI tools, such as Claude. “For this kind of work, AI can be useful as a coding and reasoning aid, but I feel it is still important to understand the mathematical formulation, verify the implementation and test the results carefully,” she said. ​“In my experience, AI tools are most useful when they support that process rather than replace it.”

Wei Jia Ong

Wei Jia Ong

Wei Jia Ong, a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), was named a 2026 recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Early Career Research Program award.

With support from the award, Ong will pursue an integrated approach to understanding the origins of p-nuclei, a type of stable nuclei with an excess of protons. “P-nuclei are extremely interesting because they cannot be made by neutron-capture reactions, which is how more than 99% of stable nuclei are made in stars,” she said, according to a story by LLNL’s Ashley Piccone on the LLNL website.

While scientists approximately understand the mechanisms behind neutron capture and the formation of neutron-rich isotopes, how and where p-nuclei are made is still a topic of contention.

The Early Career Research Program provides five-year awards to exceptional early-career researchers at U.S. academic institutions, National Laboratories, and Office of Science User Facilities to stimulate new research directions in mission critical areas supported by DOE’s Office of Science.

“Winning this award is an incredible honor, and I have to thank the vast number of colleagues who helped me develop the ideas and improve the proposal,” said Ong. “I can’t wait to see what we find!”

Michael McQuade, Matt Long, and Quan Nguyen

(l to r) Michael McQuade, Matt Long, and Quan Nguyen

HPC software developer Parallel Works made several personnel moves in the past month, including the promotions of Michael McQuade to VP of engineering, Matt Long to lead mission engineering, and Quan Nguyen to director of engineering.

As VP of engineering, McQuade will lead the continued development and advancement of Parallel Works Activate platform. McQuade has helped develop that product as director of engineering.

As director of mission engineering, Long will oversee the teams that deploy, operate, and support customer HPC and AI environments. He will focus on strengthening customer engagement, optimizing infrastructure performance and ensuring organizations can reliably execute demanding computational workloads.

Nguyen, meanwhile, will help to lead development of the Activate platform as the eirector of engineering. Previously, he served as engineering team lead.

“Most HPC and AI projects don’t stall because the hardware isn’t there,” said Matthew Shaxted, CEO of Parallel Works. “They stall because no one owns the integration, the tuning and unexpected failures. That’s what mission engineering is for, and it’s why we’re putting experienced leaders in charge of it.

“Michael, Matt and Quan have dedicated years to helping researchers and engineers overcome complex HPC and AI challenges with world-class solutions,” Shaxted continued. “These promotions position them to expand that impact, bringing their expertise and innovative approaches to an even broader range of customers.”

John McKillop

John McKillop

Storage software provider Hammerspace has appointed John McKillop, a sales executive with a quarter of a century experience in tech sales, to the position of vice president of Americas sales.

McKillop previously was the senior vice president of global sales and senior vice president of Americas sales at storage vendor Quantum. Prior to that, he was chief revenue officer at Openprise, where he helped helping enterprises optimize go-to-market operations through data orchestration, automation and AI.

“What attracted me to Hammerspace is the combination of differentiated technology, an exceptional team and the momentum already underway,” McKillop said. “The market opportunity is enormous, and Hammerspace is uniquely positioned to capture it. My focus is on accelerating that growth by scaling our sales organization, expanding our strategic partnerships and helping more customers realize the value of AI anywhere.”

“We’ve experienced phenomenal growth this year,” said Hammerspace is excited to bring McKillop on board, said Hammerspace’s Chief Business Officer Tony Asaro. “He has a great track record of success, scaling sales organizations and building the partnerships needed to turn market leadership into sustained revenue growth,” he said.

Wahid Bhimji and Shashank Subramanian

Shashank Subramanian (l) and Wahid Bhimji  

Wahid Bhimji and Shashank Subramanian, two members of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)’s Real-Time Synchrotron Imaging Analysis Team, have received the at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Director’s Awards for exceptional achievements in science.

Bhimji and Subramanian received the Director’s Award “for foundational work building the Advanced Light Source (ALS) imaging superfacility, culminating in the delivery of real-time, AI-driven analysis of microtomography experiments leveraging DOE’s high-performance networks and computing infrastructure,” LBNL said in a press release.

According to LBNL, the collaboration between ALS and NERSC has “dramatically accelerated” and improved the process where massive amounts of data captured at the ALS are analyzed at NERSC and returned to ALS researchers in near-real time. The lab says that its success could also pave the way for similar integration between experimental facilities and HPC resources underpinning the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission project, particularly its American Science Cloud initiative.

“It’s a great honor to receive this award; it’s the culmination of the work of many people across NERSC and ALS, over many years, to enable real-time HPC workflows for science,” said Bhimji. “These approaches now form the foundation of efforts in the American Science Cloud and Genesis Mission which could further enable transformative science in the coming years.”

Rekha Rao

Rekha Rao (center) receiving her award in Munich in July 2026

Sandia National Laboratories recently announced that Rehka Rao is the first employee to receive dual fellowships, including for the Society of Rheology and the International Association for Computational Mechanics.

She is the first Sandia employee to ever be elected a fellow of the IACM. She also served as the first female president of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, Sandia tells us in a press release.

Rao accepted her IACM fellowship at the World Congress on Computational Mechanics in Munich, Germany, which brought 5,000 researchers together from around the world in July. “Being the first Sandia fellow at IACM and getting international recognition was just really amazing,” Rao said. “Especially because this is not only for my service but also for my technical achievements.”

Rao will receive her fellowship recognition from the Society of Rheology in late October.

Rao discovered her passion for research and problem-solving during her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has spent her entire career at Sandia, having joined in 1990 with a doctorate in chemical engineering, specializing in computational fluid dynamics.

After starting out in nuclear waste disposal, she moved to engineering sciences. Much of her career has focused on deterrence work, including the B-61 nuclear bomb.

“Every time they build a new encapsulated part, they will run the models to make sure the molds fill well with minimal defects,” Rao said. “You have specific foam parts that need to be high-quality structural supports. We have developed multiphysics models to understand the fluid flow, solidification, and aging. Electronic components are encapsulated, so the foam must survive drop or bumps. These models help do that.”

Peter Shor

Peter Shor

Zapata Quantum has appointed Peter Shor and other notable scientists to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Shor is the MIT mathematician whose landmark 1994 algorithm, now known as Shor’s algorithm, showed how quantum computers could solve a major computational problem far faster than the best-known classical methods, helping launch the modern field of quantum computing.

“Quantum computers will only be as useful as the applications we run on them. As hardware matures toward fault tolerance, it’s critical that we discover and develop new algorithms to truly unlock the power of this new technology,” said Dr. Shor. “I’m excited about the work Zapata is doing in this area and look forward to helping guide those efforts.”

In addition to Dr. Shor, other distinguished scientists joining the SAB include Alexandru Paler, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University in Finland; Simon Devitt, Professor and Director of the Centre for Quantum Software and Information (QSI) at the University of Technology, Sydney; and Artur Izmaylov, Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Toronto.

“Dr. Shor’s work is the reason this entire field exists,” said Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum. “His discovery of quantum algorithmic advantage is the foundational proof point the industry has been built upon, and having his guidance regarding our scientific direction is strong validation of our approach.”

Mark Long

Mark Long

Supermicro appointed seasoned finance executive Mark Long as senior vice president and chief financial officer. Long will report directly to the computer maker’s CEO, Charles Liang.

Long has more than three decades of experience across the technology sector, including a stint at Western Digital, where he led financial management, investor relations and corporate strategy as CFO and chief strategy officer. He also served as co-founder and partner of Prime Impact Capital, a technology-focused investment firm. Long also was a senior vice president of strategy and corporate development at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

“I am honored to join Supermicro as it continues to build on its leadership in AI and high-performance infrastructure,” Long said. “Charles has built a remarkable company, and I look forward to partnering closely with him and the executive team to scale the business effectively and efficiently – strengthening our financial foundation while supporting continued innovation, growth, and long-term value creation for shareholders.”

Weikuan Yu

Weikuan Yu

Florida State University Professor of Computer Science Weikuan Yu will serve as a director within the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF program director for at least one year starting in Fall 2026.

In the role, Yu collaborate with researchers and other program directors to help manage NSF programs and oversee federal research investments related to his expertise in AI, powerful computing systems, large-scale data management and computing infrastructure.

Yu joined FSU’s Department of Computer Science in 2015 and has served as associate chair for research and held the Mainline Information Systems Endowed Professorship. He also led the Department of Computer Science as chair for three years.

“It’s a great honor to represent FSU at the national level and contribute to federal investments in advanced cyberinfrastructure and national AI research resources,” Yu said. “This opportunity comes at an especially exciting time, as AI is rapidly reshaping science, technology and society. The role gives me an opportunity to step back and look more broadly at where our research community is heading, particularly how national computing, AI and data infrastructure can enable scientific discovery and serve the larger research community.”

Terry Benzel

Terry Benzel

Terry Benzel was voted as IEEE Computer Society’s 2028 president, the group announced recently. Benzel is the managing director of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California and an IEEE Fellow recognized for leadership in cybersecurity experimentation.

A long-time IEEE CS volunteer, Benzel has contributed through conferences, publications, technical communities, governance, and strategic initiatives, the group says. In addition to being the society’s current vice president, she represents the society on the multi-society CLEAR (Community-Led Ethics for Accountability in Research) Task Force and leads the society’s Ethics and Integrity initiative. An IEEE Fellow, Benzel has received numerous IEEE CS honors, including the Golden Core Recognition, Outstanding Service Award, Outstanding Community Service Award, and Continuing Service Award.

Benzel garnered 2,539 votes, compared with 1,305 votes cast for Saurabh Bagchi, a professor at Purdue University, and chair of its computer engineering division whose research contributions lie in reliable and secure computing and co-founder of startup KeyByte LLC.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award Winners

Ernest Orlando Lawrence

The Department of Energy announced nine recipients of the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for their exceptional contributions to research and development supporting the department’s missions in science, energy, and national security. Ernest Orlando Lawrence was a Berkeley Lab scientist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cyclotron.

“From achieving fusion ignition to advancing critical materials and high-performance computing, these scientists and engineers are tackling some of our nation’s most complex challenges and translating groundbreaking research into real-world capabilities,” said  Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “Their work strengthens our nation’s energy security, drives American innovation, and ensures the United States remains at the forefront of scientific discovery.”

The winners include:

• Eric J. Schelter, University of Pennsylvania, in Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Sciences. Schelter was honored for “fundamental chemical studies of energy-critical metals leading to new methods for their selective and sustainable separations.”
• Patrick Chain, Los Alamos National Laboratory and New Mexico Consortium, in Biological and Environmental Sciences. Chain was honored for his “pioneering work in genomics and microbiome science, including discoveries of new bacterial-fungal interactions and revolutionizing the field by democratizing access to advanced bioinformatics tools.”
• Samuel W. Williams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Computer, Information, and Knowledge Sciences. Williams was honored for his “pioneering contributions in performance modeling, hardware/software design optimization, and novel computer architecture for high-performance computing, enabling modeling of complex computational solutions, and increasing analysis speed, simulation accuracy, and computational efficiency.”
• Thomas Epps, III, University of Delaware, in Condensed Matter and Materials Sciences. Epps was honored for his “fundamental contributions to chemistry and materials science with applications in the chemical upcycling of polymeric waste, generation of high-performance materials from biomass feedstocks, and development of membranes for lithium-ion battery technologies.”
• Gregg Beckham, National Laboratory of the Rockies and University of Colorado Boulder, in Energy Science and Innovation. Beckham was honored for his “transformative research in the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass and waste plastics via biology, chemistry, and engineering, yielding building blocks for sustainable fuels, chemicals, and materials.”
• Andrea L. Kritcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Fusion and Plasma Sciences. Kritcher was honored for her “exceptional design efforts leading to the first-ever achievement of fusion ignition in the Laboratory, which is of major scientific impact to institutional and national missions, the private sector, and fusion interests within academia.”
• Charles C. Polly, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, High Energy Physics – Polly was honored for his “exceptional scientific and technical contributions to low-energy precision measurements in particle physics, most notably leadership of the experimental measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with the Muon g-2 experiment.”
• Michael Reed, Nevada National Security Site, in National Security and Nonproliferation. Reed was honored for his “vital contributions to national and international nuclear emergency response through the Advanced Visualization & Integration of Data (AVID) software, which broke existing paradigms by simultaneously fusing all radiological data into a single interface connected seamlessly to world-wide expertise.”
• Lijuan Ruan, Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Nuclear Physics. Ruan was honored for her “outstanding leadership and ingenuity in the design, construction, and operation of novel detector systems in the STAR experiment, transforming dilepton final states into precision probes of heavy ion collisions.”

DOE will honor the recipients at a hybrid award ceremony in Washington, D.C., on November 13, 2026. The ceremony will be broadcast live online.

You can read last month’s Career Notes here.

The post October 2026 HPC Career News appeared first on HPCwire.

Javits Frimpong, 15, was being bullied at school before he was shot and killed in the Bronx on Thursday, his father says

A teenage boy from Ghana was chased down and fatally shot Thursday morning on his way to school in the Bronx.

The New York City police department (NYPD) received a report on Thursday morning about a shooting near Corona Park in the Bronx, a police spokesperson said on Friday. At about 9.24am, responding officers found Javits Frimpong, 15, with a gunshot wound to his stomach.

Hold on to your hoagies, because Tuesday, Nov. 3 is National Sandwich Day. A variety of restaurants are celebrating with a spread of upper-crust deals and discounts.Get a free Footlong at Subway, a free wrap at Potbelly or check with…

The top federal prosecutor in Alaska did not specify what crimes are being investigated by the Justice Department, saying he's "not making any assumptions on whether a crime has been committed or not."

(The Center Square) – U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Aaron Reitz and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are pushing back against a Harris County indictment of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

Samsung’s advertisement features a sliced green apple that rolls right along through the entire Galaxy Z Fold line.

Customers on T-Mobile One accounts could get a $25 gift card, a free 5G phone or credit toward a more expensive 5G phone.

European-trained runners completed a second successive clean sweep of the juvenile events on turf at a Keeneland Breeders’ Cup

OFF AND RUNNING IN THE BREEDERS’ CUP JUVENILE TURF SPRINT!

They are down at the start before the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint, Libertango remains a solid favourite at 2-1. And they’re loading now …

(The Center Square) – Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wants to know if the Environmental Protection Agency used taxpayer dollars to fund an environmental group’s work with Chinese government institutions.

You’ll get two Pokemon cards and one toy with each Happy Meal.

(The Center Square) – With just days before Tuesday's election, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has signed an executive directive to streamline how Angelenos search and apply for affordable housing.

Meta has reached an undisclosed settlement in another social media addiction lawsuit, avoiding a trial scheduled for next month and leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant. Engadget reports: The lawsuit was brought by an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi known as K.D.B who, according to Reuters, has "described staying awake for hours scrolling social media, losing focus in class and engaging in self-harm using methods shown in social media videos." Jury selection kicked off earlier this week in Los Angeles. On Friday, K.D.B's lawyer announced that she had reached a settlement with Meta after previously settling with TikTok and YouTube. "We remain committed to improving safety for kids on social media apps and holding tech companies accountable, and we are pleased to have brought this matter to a just resolution on behalf of our client," attorney Emily Jeffcott said in a statement. Now, Snap is the only remaining defendant in the case. CEO Evan Spiegel is expected to testify in the trial that could last several weeks. If he does take the stand, it will be the first time the Snap founder has appeared in a social media addiction trial. Snap previously settled in another high-profile case involving similar claims. A jury later ruled against Meta and YouTube in the trial and the two were ordered to pay $6 million in damages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robert Leider was appointed as the ATF's top attorney last year, shortly after former Attorney General Pam Bondi abruptly fired the agency's former chief, claiming without evidence that the bureau was "targeting gun owners."

One of the closing ads from Democrat James Talarico in the Texas Senate race says that Crystal Mason received a five-year prison sentence for illegal voting “because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color.” But there’s more to the story.

Although her vote ultimately did not count, Mason, a Black Texas resident, was convicted and sentenced by a state judge in March 2018 for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 general election. At the time, she was on supervised release following a felony conviction for tax fraud in 2011. That made her ineligible to vote under state law.

Her conviction and sentence came after Paxton, Talarico’s opponent and the state’s Republican attorney general, announced a voter fraud initiative in early 2018 involving “enforcement and education.”

However, the case against Mason, who was charged in February 2017, was investigated and prosecuted by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office — not Paxton’s office, as the ad may suggest to viewers. The judge didn’t provide an explanation for the five-year sentence.

The penalty for illegally voting in Texas, a second-degree felony, was up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Attempting to vote illegally, a different charge, is a state jail felony, punishable by up to two years in state jail.

Mason tells a shortened version of her story in the Talarico campaign ad encouraging Texans to vote. The ad has aired on television in Texas but has mostly run on digital and streaming platforms, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.

In the ad, Mason says she “didn’t do anything wrong” by casting the provisional ballot, which she correctly notes was “never counted.” Then Talarico says, “Crystal was sentenced to five years in prison because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color, putting politics before people.”

A transcript of the bench trial proceedings — which lasted one day — shows that local prosecutors representing the state did ask for a “stern sentence” for Mason “to send a message to illegal voters.” It’s not clear to what extent that, or Paxton’s efforts to combat voter fraud in the state, influenced the ruling by Republican State District Judge Ruben Gonzalez. No explanation was provided for the five-year sentence, according to the transcript.

In defense of the ad, the Talarico campaign pointed to news articles that said Mason was convicted amid a focus by Paxton on illegal voting. A March 2024 NPR article about Mason’s case said the “state’s election policing efforts have been led” by Paxton. Another article from the Texas Monthly in May 2024 said her conviction “came at a time” when Paxton “was spearheading an aggressive crackdown on voter fraud.” And a March 2018 Washington Post article said Mason’s attorney believed her sentence was a result of rhetoric about prosecuting voter fraud from Paxton’s office.

But, as we said, Paxton’s attorney general’s office did not prosecute the case against Mason. That was done by the district attorney’s office in Tarrant County, where Mason lived and submitted the ballot.

Mason said she went to vote in November 2016 not realizing she was ineligible due to being on supervised release after serving time in prison for tax fraud. But being on supervised release meant that her prison sentence wasn’t complete, and, therefore, she couldn’t vote under Texas law.

The HuffPost reported in July 2019 that when a poll worker, Jarrod Streibich, couldn’t find her name on the voter rolls, he told her she could complete a provisional ballot, which allows a person to vote while election officials determine if the ballot is able to be counted. 

Streibich, who was also Mason’s neighbor, told the HuffPost that after she finished the ballot and left the polling location, he remembered that she was a felon on supervised release and that her vote shouldn’t count. He reported what happened to a Republican election judge who then notified the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office. That office, led by the county’s district attorney at the time, Sharen Wilson, a Republican, investigated and brought charges against Mason in February 2017. That led to her being convicted a year later.

Mason ended up being sent back to prison for an additional 10 months for violating the terms of her supervised release. She was later released while her case went through a series of appeals that lasted years. Then, in March 2024, the Texas Second Court of Appeals overturned Mason’s conviction, ruling that there was evidence that Mason didn’t knowingly cast an illegal vote. The Court of Criminal Appeals let that ruling stand in September, when it dismissed the prosecution’s petition for review.

It is the case, as the ad suggests, that people of color were often the target of such prosecutions by the Texas attorney general’s office led by Paxton, according to a 2021 analysis done by the American Civil Liberties Union. 

The ACLU found that at least 72% of the election fraud cases brought by the state between 2015, when Paxton became attorney general, and 2021, targeted Black and Latino people. The report also said that 45% of the prosecutions targeted Black and Latino women.

But the analysis was based on prosecutions by Paxton and his office, which would not include the case against Mason.

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The post Talarico Ad Omits Details of Crystal Mason’s Illegal Voting Case appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Uno de cada siete estadounidenses confía en los chatbots de IA tanto como en un médico, según una nueva encuesta. La encuesta de 1.000 padres millennials y 1.000 estadounidenses exploró cómo usan la IA para cuidar su salud o la…

After a week of nonstop folding, we briefly turn the iPhone Duo’s display off to check out how the crease looks.

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Disappointing earnings reports from Alphabet, Amazon and Intel renewed fears on Friday that the AI trade could unravel.

"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom's Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build. Then he explained why that's a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark): "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that." While OpenAI does have some open-source models, its primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centers, so he's really defending the company's business model. OpenAI isn't exactly threatened by some laptops and gaming rigs just yet, but local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. Altman's talk suggests that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI's data centers rather than home computers, which also sparks enthusiast fears of not being able to own your own hardware or software, but rather rent an agent and a computer in the cloud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Hubbard was imprisoned in Russia for over four years until gaining release last week.

The Justice Department and a group of veterans faced off in court over the fate of the 250-foot arch that President Trump wants to build.

In the race for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, Democratic state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, D-West Des Moines, released a video attacking Republican U.S. Rep. Zach Nunn over his campaign donations.

“Nunn took thousands from Chinese companies and then voted to let them buy Iowa farmland,” Trone Garriott said in a video embedded in an Oct. 21 X  post.

Nunn has held the seat, which includes the Des Moines metro area, since 2023. 

When PolitiFact Iowa reached out to Trone Garriott’s campaign about the claim, a spokesperson provided a document that covered campaign contributions Nunn received from 2022 to 2026, which Trone Garriott’s campaign said came from Chinese-backed ventures. 

Trone Garriott has previously criticized Nunn’s involvement with China and his voting record on Chinese-owned farmland in the U.S.

In September 2023, Nunn voted against H.R. 4368, a bill that ultimately failed but included a section stating the agriculture secretary would be allowed to take “any action necessary” in an effort to prohibit the Communist Party of China – and other foreign countries – from purchasing agricultural land in the U.S. However, in May 2026, Nunn, alongside other House representatives, introduced H.R. 8700, a bill aimed at protecting U.S. farmland from being purchased by foreign entities near “sensitive sites.”

For this fact-check, we’re focusing on whether Nunn received thousands in campaign donations from Chinese companies. A Nunn spokesperson did not respond to PolitiFact Iowa’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The donations come from corporate political action committees tied to agriculture companies such as Syngenta and Smithfield Foods. Corporate PACs are funded by donations from employees, not directly by the corporation. Nunn has received thousands in contributions from those committees over his congressional career, including $2,500 during this re-election campaign.

Nunn has not directly received money from the corporations themselves, but rather from their affiliated PACs. 

Where the donations come from

Foreign companies can’t contribute directly to American elections. The donations came from the American subsidiaries of the companies, which do business in the U.S.

Federal Election Commission data shows Nunn’s campaign has taken $15,000 from the Syngenta Corporation Employee Political Action Committee since his 2022 congressional race. During the 2026 cycle, his campaign received $2,500 from the PAC affiliated with Syngenta, a global agriculture company that produces pesticides and seeds. It’s owned by Sinochem, a chemical company owned by the Chinese government.

Call to Service PAC, Nunn’s leadership PAC, also received $2,500 from the Syngenta corporate PAC in 2024. A leadership PAC is a separate committee run by a lawmaker mainly for making donations to other candidates, and it can’t pay for the lawmaker’s campaign expenses.

Frederick Boehmke, a University of Iowa political science professor, said though foreign companies or individuals from a non-U.S. country cannot directly contribute to campaigns, an employee of a U.S. business or subsidiary owned by a non-U.S. company is able to directly contribute to the PAC.

Syngenta did not respond to PolitiFact Iowa’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Even though the company started the PAC, it is funded by donations from employees, managers and other affiliated workers, and not the company itself, Boehmke said.

“Employees are often encouraged to contribute to the PAC and might feel some pressure to do so, but they are not allowed to be required to contribute to the PAC,” Boehmke said.

Boehmke said there is no collective limit on the amount of money a PAC can raise, but there is a cap on how much any one person can donate to a PAC, regardless of its classification.

In 2026, individual contributions to PACs, and PAC contributions to campaigns, are both capped at $5,000 for the whole election cycle.

Rabail Chandio, an Iowa State University assistant professor of economics, said in terms of foreign ownership, China’s footprint in the U.S. is “minimal and negligible.”

In 2023, Nunn’s campaign also received a $1,250 donation from the Smithfield Foods Inc. PAC, campaign finance records show. He hasn’t received any contribution from that PAC during this election cycle. Smithfield Foods, which is based in the U.S., is owned by Hong Kong-based WH Group, a publicly traded food corporation and the largest pork producer in the world.

Smithfield spokesperson Ray Atkinson said the company donates to candidates who “support sound agriculture and food production policy.”

“WH Group is not a Chinese state-owned enterprise and does not undertake any commercial activities on behalf of the Chinese government,” Atkinson said in his statement.

Our ruling

Trone Garriott said, “Nunn has taken tens of thousands of dollars from Chinese companies.”

Both the donations came from U.S. subsidiaries of Chinese companies, not from Chinese companies directly. Nunn has taken approximately $15,000 from a PAC operated by the U.S. arm of Chinese-owned Syngenta. A PAC operated by Smithfield Foods also contributed to Nunn’s campaign. 

Smithfield Foods, based in the U.S., is owned by a Hong Kong-based pork production corporation. 

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate this statement as Half True.

In the Alaska Senate race, the candidacy of retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. — not the incumbent Republican senator, Dan S. Sullivan — has been the subject of months of legal wrangling. But the issue took on increased national prominence this past week. 

At the behest of President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice took the unusual step on Oct. 22 of filing a preemptive lawsuit arguing that if Sen. Sullivan doesn’t win reelection, and if he loses to his Democratic opponent Mary Peltola by fewer votes than Daniel J. Sullivan gets, the state should “not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion.”

Then, on Oct. 28, the New York Times dropped a story saying it had uncovered evidence that “operatives aligned with Mary Peltola” helped to recruit Daniel J. Sullivan and others to run for the Senate seat in an attempt to siphon votes away from the incumbent Sullivan. The next day, in response to the Times story, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, ordered a criminal investigation to determine if any Alaska criminal laws were violated.

Trump, meanwhile, has weighed in, calling the issue “voter fraud at the highest level” and saying, “Peltola should resign from the race. I think she should be prosecuted criminally for what she did.”

On Oct. 29, Peltola denied she had any knowledge of or participation in recruiting another Dan Sullivan to run in the race.

“I just want to clear the air,” Peltola said. “I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters.”

With less than a week until Election Day, we’ll lay out the facts of what’s known so far, and the legal history leading up to this point.

The Primary Fight

Shortly after Daniel J. Sullivan officially declared his candidacy in late May, Sen. Dan Sullivan objected, saying that he was a sham candidate.

“His whole purpose of running is to confuse Alaskans,” Sen. Sullivan told CNN on June 7, to make Alaskan voters think, “that somehow he’s me, so they could rig the vote in favor of Mary Peltola.”

Acting on a complaint from the state GOP, Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, a Republican who supervises the state’s Division of Elections, announced on June 8 that the state had opened an investigation into the legitimacy of Daniel J. Sullivan’s campaign.

“I’m troubled by the allegation that you filed for office in coordination with another campaign with the intention of confusing Alaskan voters in a way that will benefit one candidate over another,” Dahlstrom wrote in a June 8 letter to Daniel J. Sullivan. “If true, it suggests that your declaration of candidacy, which was submitted under penalty of perjury, was not genuine and not properly filed.”

Daniel J. Sullivan responded in a letter to Dahlstrom two days later, saying the allegations were “entirely false.”

“I am running for U.S. Senate as a Republican under my lawfully given name,” Daniel J. Sullivan wrote. “It is a name and party affiliation that I share with my father and my grandfather. I am not a registered Democrat, and I have had no conversations whatsoever with the Peltola campaign about my candidacy. The law forbids your office from denying me access to the ballot just because Senator Sullivan and the NRSC [National Republican Senatorial Committee] would prefer I not be allowed to run. This investigation by your office – and coordination of it with the press – is an unprecedented affront to my rights as a candidate and the rights of Alaska voters to select their own representation in the U.S. Senate.”

On June 15, Carol Beecher, director of the state’s Division of Elections, released the division’s final determination that “the preponderance of evidence [did] not support” Daniel J. Sullivan’s eligibility to run for the Senate. Beecher said she concluded that his bid was not “an actual good-faith candidacy for the office of United States Senator, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead.” Beecher noted that Daniel J. Sullivan had “requested to be designated on the ballot as affiliated with the Republican Party” even though “[u]ntil two days before you filed your declaration of candidacy, you had never—according to the Division’s records—been affiliated with the Republican Party in Alaska.”

Daniel J. Sullivan appealed, and on June 27, Alaska Superior Court Judge Thomas A. Matthews overturned Beecher’s decision, saying that the Division of Election’s “decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot was based on a ‘good-faith’ requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska Statutes, or the implementing regulations adopted by the Division.”

The ruling to allow Daniel J. Sullivan to appear on the primary ballot was later affirmed by the state Supreme Court. During oral arguments, Alaska Public Media reported, the justices “repeatedly returned to the idea that the division could just differentiate the two candidates, with, for example, middle initials.”

Chief Justice Susan Carney said the Division of Elections had chosen “the most extreme remedy possible” when it removed him from the ballot.

And so Daniel J. Sullivan was among 16 candidates on the ballot for Alaska’s Aug. 18 primary. The top four voter-getters to move on to the general election, in order, were: Peltola, 49.54%; Sen. Dan. S. Sullivan, 41.4%; Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., 2.47%; and Gerald L. Heikes, 1.05%. (Another Democratic candidate was originally in the top four but dropped out of the race.)

Ranked Choice Voting

Alaska has nonpartisan primaries, meaning that the top four vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of political affiliation. The general elections are determined by ranked choice voting, which allows voters to rank their preferred candidates in order.

If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in the initial round, the last place finisher is eliminated, and votes on ballots cast for that candidate then go to the voter’s second choice, and so on, until one candidate crosses the 50% threshold.

The race, according to polling, is extraordinarily close, and the Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up.

The lawsuit filed by DOJ argues, “[T]here is a realistic chance that, even if a majority of Alaskans wish to vote for Senator Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan’s presence on the ballot will result in a victory for Peltola.”

The suit claims the election would be deemed “impacted by voter confusion” if Sen. Sullivan does not win the election but would have if all the votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were instead cast for Sen. Sullivan. In such an event, the lawsuit asks the federal court to prohibit the state from certifying the election results “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

Trump has criticized the state’s ranked choice voting as “crooked as can be” and said that without it, incumbent “Dan Sullivan would win easily.” But some election experts say that system could actually blunt the effect of a spoiler candidate.

“The scheme is much less impactful in Alaska than just about anywhere else,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in election law, told us via email. “If an Alaska voter ranks the wrong Dan Sullivan first, it’s not a big deal if she ranks the right Dan Sullivan second. In any state without [ranked choice voting], on the other hand, that voter would actually end up wasting her vote.”

The DOJ Lawsuit

The day after the DOJ filed its complaint, Trump confirmed the lawsuit was filed at his behest. “I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters.

The lawsuit alleges a violation of a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that concerns “protect[ing] the integrity of the electoral process.”

“Given the substantial likelihood that the inclusion of Daniel J. Sullivan will confuse or mislead voters looking to cast a vote for Senator Sullivan, and thus distort the will of Alaskan voters, there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity,” the lawsuit states.

Peltola told MS NOW that the way the names will be displayed on the ballot should alleviate any confusion. The lawsuit is “sending a message that Dan Sullivan does not believe that Alaskans are sophisticated ⁠enough to know ​exactly who they’re voting for,” she said.

Trump, however, opined that the ballot at least ought to say “Senator” Dan Sullivan “as opposed to ‘incumbent’ because a lot of people don’t know what ‘incumbent’ means.”

Here’s how the names will appear on the general election ballot on Nov. 3, per the Division of Elections:

Several election experts doubt the DOJ lawsuit will be victorious, though it could delay the process of certifying a winner.

In a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, Stephanopoulos, the Harvard law professor, said he thinks the complaint “has zero legal merit and is one of the weakest lawsuits that I can ever remember seeing.”

He noted that the DOJ invoked the National Voter Registration Act, “which is exclusively a law about voter registration. The lawsuit has nothing to do with voter registration. There’s no allegation that anybody is improperly registered in Alaska; there’s no claim that Alaska isn’t in compliance with the NVRA’s requirements for voter registration. Instead, the DOJ found a provision in the preamble to the NVRA that mentions ‘election integrity.’ … It’s preposterous to argue that this random snippet in the preamble somehow entitles the DOJ or anybody else to sue over concerns about election integrity.”

“There’s no relevant federal law. It’s exclusively a matter of state law whether to allow this or not,” Stephanopoulos wrote.

In a statement released in response to the DOJ lawsuit, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said, “The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alaska represents an unprecedented intervention by the federal government. This is purely a matter of state law, and the administration has absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when or how to certify the results of its Senate election. The DOJ attempting to intervene at this late stage is entirely against department policy, as there is no legitimate enforcement of federal law here, and it raises serious concerns about political interference.”

The New York Times Story

The Oct. 28 New York Times story, sourced to “interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign,” concluded that “not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.”

The story said a Peltola campaign staffer was tasked with finding as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible. The story also documented the involvement of a Midwestern political operative who met with a number of potential spoiler candidates to convince them to enter the race.

The story said that in addition to Daniel J. Sullivan, Gerald Heikes, another candidate who will appear on the ballot as a Republican, was recruited into the race.

“Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska,” the Times story said. “But this operation … reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.”

The Times story quoted Peltola’s former campaign manager, who was fired in August, saying that while Peltola was not directly involved in the scheme, she was “definitely aware.” (The former campaign manager later tried to retract her statements to the Times.) As we said, Peltola has denied any knowledge of or participation in recruiting another Dan Sullivan to run in the race. And the Peltola campaign and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee both told the Times they had no involvement in recruiting any candidates into the race either.

The DOJ has amended its complaint to include reporting in the Times’ story. In a post on X on Oct. 29, Dunleavy, the state’s governor, also cited the Times’ reporting, saying the story revealed “disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates … to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes.” Dunleavy said he had directed the Department of Public Safety “to investigate whether this scheme violated Alaska’s laws and whether criminal charges or civil action are warranted. The evidence will determine what happens next.”

According to the Election Rumor Research team at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, “Past elections have seen contestation over similarly named candidates — though often with the political parties reversed.” The blog post cited the 2024 example of two people named Bob Ferguson recruited by a conservative political activist to challenge the Democratic frontrunner, Bob Ferguson, in a Washington gubernatorial race. It also referenced a 2024 Utah gubernatorial race, a Republican primary, in which two other people with the last name Lyman joined Phil Lyman as write-in candidates.

“The practice of standing ‘ghost candidates’ is not illegal,” the researchers wrote. But there have been instances — such as in a Florida state Senate race in 2020 when improper payments were made to a “ghost” candidate’s campaign — when such schemes have run afoul of the law.

Ballot-stacking schemes are “unsavory,” Harvard’s Stephanopoulos told us, “but it’s not illegal (and it’s a familiar practice in past elections).”

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 Explaining the Case of the Two Dan Sullivans on Alaska’s Ballot appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Open-weight models let you run an AI chatbot on your own computer, even offline. Here’s how they work and what that means for your privacy.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer was charged with a felony for allegedly hitting a man with a vehicle earlier this month.

The Justice Department has charged five people in a crackdown on "ghost student" fraud, in which scammers allegedly use stolen identities and AI to enroll fake students in colleges, complete coursework, and collect federal student loan funds. Ars Technica reports: In a press release Thursday, the Department of Justice said it had uncovered a large-scale scheme relying partly on AI. The DOJ seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from "a network associated with Kenyan nationals" after data analysis helped flag likely fraudsters. Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division credited new fraud-detection measures implemented by the Trump administration for the arrests. He said that "this is the first international seizure of its kind in Kenya," while warning fraudsters that the crackdown has only just begun. [...] At a press conference, McDonald was joined by FBI and Department of Education officials to explain how the scheme works. It starts with bad actors purchasing personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans -- most frequently targeting high school graduates who never attended college and went straight into the workforce. Once they have that sensitive data, they fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) while seeking to enroll in universities and community colleges. If accepted, student aid is distributed first to schools to cover tuition and fees, but any leftover money is deposited into bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters. Dozens of Americans have opened bank accounts to act as money mules for fraudsters, the DOJ said. To keep money flowing, bad actors use AI to fill out applications, complete coursework, and even make it appear that a student is attending virtual sessions. "It looks like the ghost student is actually completing the class," McDonald said at the press conference. "Some even create the appearance of a fake student in an online classroom to trick schools into believing a real person is present. The goal is to keep the ghost student in school for as long as possible, semester after semester after semester." So far, the DOE has "identified over 830,000 potentially fraudulent federal student aid accounts created by using this PII of US citizens," officials said at the press conference. If all those accounts are ghost students, total losses come close to $130 million, the DOJ said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daniel J. Sullivan, the independent Alaska Senate candidate whose name is almost identical to the Republican incumbent, left his hometown of Petersburg earlier this week, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News.

Christina Bohannan, Democratic candidate for U.S. House in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, said President Donald Trump’s tariffs come with a $4,200 price tag for families. 

“These reckless tariffs are wreaking havoc on Iowa’s families, small businesses, and farmers — costing the average family $4,200 out of their pocket,” she said in a Des Moines Register candidate Q&A.

Bohannan criticized her Republican opponent, incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks, for voting in favor of the tariffs and called for them to be repealed. 

In an email statement to PolitiFact Iowa, Bohannan’s campaign cited two analyses from the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee, a standing economic policy advisory panel made up of members from both congressional chambers. 

Although the campaign’s number is based on plausible estimates of tariff costs, the $4,200 figure results from adding together two estimates that together cover two years and overlapping periods, and one of those estimates is a year-long projection based on one month of data. More credible estimates put 2026 per-household costs between $820 to $1,100, and give two-year estimates in the ballpark of $1,800 to $2,200.

The $4,200 figure includes projected costs

The Joint Economic Committee released analyses in February and in March. Both were issued after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the legal authority Trump cited in April 2025 when he first announced tariffs on nearly every nation.

The committee’s February report estimated that U.S. families had already paid $1,745 in tariff costs between February 2025 and January 2026.

A month later, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that replacement tariffs that the White House issued using different legal authority would leave tariff revenue “virtually unchanged,” the JEC committee’s Democrats issued an update projecting U.S. families would pay about $2,500 per household over the next year. 

Bohannan’s campaign reached its $4,200 number by adding $1,700 to $2,500.

But the $2,500 figure was a prediction premised on January’s tariff collections; it  assumed collections and the share of costs passed on to consumers would stay at January levels. 

Treasury records show monthly net collections later fell below January’s level.

The campaign’s calculation also counted January 2026 twice.

Tariff revenue fell after Supreme Court ruling

After the Supreme Court’ s February ruling that Trump did not use proper authority to impose tariffs, Trump announced a temporary 10% import surcharge under a different authority. The JEC Democrats’ report assumed the surcharge would leave tariff revenues unchanged.

As a result of the ruling, the federal government started refunding importers for the tariffs the government had improperly collected.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated the government owes approximately $166 billion, excluding interest, to affected importers and businesses. The JEC’s March report didn’t specify how those refunds would affect its estimates, and how they affect household costs depends in part on whether businesses pass the savings along to the consumers.  

Monthly customs-duty collections fell after the Supreme Court decision. According to September Treasury Department data, the federal government collected about $27.74 billion in gross customs duties in January 2026, compared with $22.16 billion in March. 

Tariff collections in September were about $25.27 billion, but the government also refunded $19.36 billion, which led to $5.91 billion in net tariff revenue. The figures show that net receipts did not remain at January’s level through the first nine months of the year.

Spread across U.S. households, net customs receipts fell from roughly $206 per household in January to $188 in September before subtracting refunds. 

What other estimates show

Other research groups estimate a smaller household tariff burden for 2026 than the roughly $2,500 projected by the JEC’s Democratic staff.

In an email interview, Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research think tank based in Washington, D.C., said her organization estimates an average household cost of $820 under current tariffs. 

Other estimates include: 

• Tax Policy Center: Its tariff tracker estimates an average annual burden of $920 per tax unit in 2026. The organization estimated that Trump’s initial tariffs, until they were struck down in February 2026, cost Americans about $1,250 per household (this stretches into early 2026, so it’s not an exact 2025 estimate).
• Tax Foundation: About $1,000 per household in 2025 and $820 in 2026 for a combined two-year estimate of roughly $1,820. 
• Yale University’s Budget Lab: Its analysis estimates an average annual household cost of about $1,100 in 2026 under current law. The report doesn’t provide a separate 2025 estimate.

“The groups differ slightly in methodology and in tariff policies analyzed, but the household estimates are in a tight, cohesive range,” she said. 

Even if we were to overlook those methodological differences, the organizations all produced two-year estimates somewhere between $1,800 and $2,200, far far less than the $4,200 Bohannan cited.

Not all tariff costs are passed directly to consumers, because businesses often absorb some through lower profits. Still, households can bear those costs indirectly. York said businesses that absorb tariff costs may cut back on wages, hiring or investments. A February analysis by Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers found U.S. businesses and consumers bore nearly 90% of the economic burden of the 2025 tariffs. 

The burden also varies by income. A separate Federal Reserve analysis found lower-income households bore a disproportionate burden of tariffs’ costs. 

Our ruling 

Bohannan said Trump’s tariffs are “costing the average family $4,200 out of their pocket.”

That number is misleading. Bohannan’s campaign arrived at that figure using numbers that cover two years — 2025 actual numbers and 2026 projected numbers. Her number also counts January 2026 collections twice.

The data also doesn’t account for post-Supreme Court ruling changes to the Trump tariff policies and assumes January’s tariff revenue and consumer cost assumptions would continue for the full year.

Other credible estimates put 2026 per-household costs at between $820 and $1,100, and two-year estimates between $1,800 and $2,200, far less than what she cited.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, filed to go public on the US stock market on 26 October. The company's filing statement contains a 92-page risk factor document in which it acknowledges the dangers that AI poses to society and human beings, and factors that could negatively affect Anthropic's business. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter for the Guardian, breaks down the document and explains why Anthropic's IPO could be a real test to the AI boom

• Anthropic files for potentially record-breaking stock market valuation in key test for AI industry

Authorities say army contractor James Thomas Ashbacher shared top-secret data online and stole night-vision goggles

The FBI has arrested a former North Carolina government contractor for allegedly leaking classified national defense information on social media.

James Thomas Ashbacher, 37, of Spring Lake, was taken into custody after charges that he shared top-secret safety data online, unlawfully stored national defense materials at his residence and stole night-vision equipment from the US army special operations command.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Justice Department's request for California to set aside disputed ballots​ received in the midterm election.

Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, state Rep. Angie Nixon, says GOP incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody has enriched herself by millions of dollars from trading stocks while in office.

“Ashley Moody is profiting off her position,” Nixon told Politico on Oct. 23. “That woman is trading stocks and she’s gotten richer by like $2 million dollars. She’s sitting on committees where she has the opportunity to get insider stock trading information.”

Moody has served in the Senate since January 2025 after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her to fill Marco Rubio’s seat after he became Secretary of State.

Financial disclosures required under the 2012 STOCK Act show Moody has actively traded stocks in industries such as healthcare, technology and energy. The records reflect she’s traded in the millions, but congressional financial data is incomplete, making it difficult to determine how much money she’s made from stocks alone.

Moody owned stocks before entering Congress and her last reported transaction took place in April 2025, when she had been a senator for three months. 

We contacted Nixon’s and Moody’s campaigns for comment but received no response.

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What do Moody’s financial disclosure documents show?

Moody has publicly supported the Stop Insider Trading Act and introduced the Restore Trust in Congress Act, two bills aimed at preventing insider trading by banning or restricting stock ownership and transactions for congressional members and their families.

All members are required to file disclosures listing most of their assets, debts and payments over a certain dollar amount. Members must also report certain assets held by their spouses. The disclosures don’t include the lawmakers’ primary residence, or vacation homes that don’t generate income. 

Before entering the U.S. Senate, Moody was Florida’s attorney general. Florida’s financial disclosure rules require state officials to report net worth, total dollar values of assets and primary income sources. 

As attorney general in 2022, Moody reported a net worth of $4.02 million. That grew to $4.42 million by the end of 2023 and she reported a similar net worth in her last filing on Jan. 21, 2025, the day she joined the Senate.

While Florida requires officials to disclose exact dollar amounts for personal wealth, federal rules require assets and investments be reported in broad, estimated ranges, such as $15,001 to $50,000 or $100,001 to $250,000. 

Moody had to submit a financial overview with similar broad ranges when she was sworn into the Senate. Early that year, she also submitted a few periodic transaction reports that congressional members must file when they buy, sell or exchange certain financial assets worth more than $1,000. And, on Aug. 13, 2026, Moody filed her annual Senate disclosure report that covers her 2025 income in broad ranges. 

Campaign finance experts told PolitiFact this last report is the one Nixon likely used to arrive at the $2 million figure.

Alex Baumgart, a researcher at Open Secrets, a nonpartisan clearinghouse for campaign finance data, said the annual report shows Moody made between $862,600 and $2.3 million in reportable income from sources related to investment trading.

If this was the metric Nixon used, she cited the high end of the range — $2 million — when she could have used the low end, $862,600.

“To get an idea of exactly how much profit was actually made from trading stocks, you’d have to compare the asset values from one end-of-year report to another,” Baumgart said. 

He called it a “very inexact science, because of both the vague ranges and conflicting reporting periods,” saying some of Moody’s reports overlap. 

Federal law also doesn’t require lawmakers to reveal the exact price or number of stock shares bought or sold.

For example, Moody reported selling Howmet Aerospace Inc. stock in February 2025 in the $50,001-$100,000 range. But the financial disclosures don’t show whether she bought it for less and made a profit or bought it for more and took a loss. The disclosure shows only the approximate size of the transaction.

Our ruling

Nixon said Moody “is trading stocks and she’s gotten richer” by $2 million. 

Congressional financial data shows only broad ranges of what investments are worth, not how much lawmakers originally paid for a stock or how much money they made, or lost, when selling.

This makes it difficult to determine how much lawmakers make from stock trading, and doubly so for Moody, who doesn’t have enough publicly available financial data to make credible comparisons.

If Nixon was using Moody’s 2025 annual report, she used the highest end of the range when she could have used the lowest. 

The statement has an element of truth because Moody’s financial disclosures show that she made money on stocks. But the statement ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

We rate it Mostly False.

RELATED: Dem ad says Iowa’s Rep. Ashley Hinson is $8 million richer after joining Congress. That’s misleading. 

Alliance for the Future, unveiled at Montreal summit and open to other countries, conceived for world ‘shaken by new storms’

Canada and Europe have announced a new alliance of like-minded nations to serve as both a “protective canopy under which our citizens can thrive” and a powerful hedge against the unpredictable nature of geopolitics, while welcoming other countries to join.

Speaking to reporters on Friday from Montreal, the prime minister, Mark Carney, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, called the new partnership the Alliance for the Future and said the “deepest possible partnership between Canada and the 27-member bloc had the potential to offer unprecedented stability and opportunity”.

What the AI race is a contest over, and why the cheapest capable model may win

In part 1 of this series, I looked at where the US and China stand after two decades of investment. This installment asks the question the public debate tends to skip: when people say “winning the AI race,” what does winning mean?

There Is No Single Finish Line

The AI race gets described as though there were one finish line: one model, one moment when someone crosses first and the outcome is settled. The United States and China are not running toward the same point. If China is racing toward nine o’clock and the US toward two o’clock, both can run as fast as they possibly can and still not compete for the same prize. The useful question is what each side is trying to get, and what happens to the rest of the world once they get it.

Five Things Being Contested

One of ASML’s DUV machines. Image courtesy of ASML.

Frontier model capability. This is the headline contest: which model scores highest on the hardest benchmarks. The US leads, narrowly. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index put the gap between the leading US and Chinese models on the Arena leaderboard at about 2.7% as of March. In mid-October, the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scored the best closed model at 58 and the best openly downloadable model at 46. The pattern is consistent: close on conversation, wider on hard reasoning and long autonomous tasks.

Chip manufacturing. The US holds a wide and, for now, structural lead: advanced chip fabrication sits in a small number of facilities the US and its allies control. Part of that lead is policy. The Institute for Progress estimates that with no H200 exports, the US would hold a 21 to 49 times advantage in AI compute produced in 2026, and that unrestricted exports of Nvidia‘s H200 could cut it to roughly 1.2 to 6.7 times. Commerce approved about 10 Chinese buyers in May, but Reuters reported no deliveries as Beijing steered its companies toward Huawei. That substitution is not one for one. Huawei’s Ascend 910C trails the H200 in computing power and memory bandwidth, and Epoch AI estimates Huawei’s 2026 output at about 880,000 H100-equivalents against about 23 million for Nvidia, under 4%. The tightest constraint is high-bandwidth memory, which China cannot yet make in volume. Huawei is pushing anyway. In September it pulled its Ascend 960DT forward to early 2027, a chip Bernstein estimates will roughly match the H200 with more than twice its interconnect bandwidth, and said a 256,000-card cluster is being deployed. How large the US lead stays depends on Washington’s export decisions and China’s memory production as much as on chip design.

Research volume and open-source distribution. China leads here, and this may be the contest that decides what the rest of the world runs on. Chinese models accounted for about 41% of downloads on Hugging Face over the past year, ahead of US models, and the summer brought a run of Chinese releases: Moonshot‘s Kimi K3, Alibaba‘s Qwen3.8, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, and models from Z.ai and Xiaomi. In October, Anthropic reported that Z.ai’s open-weight GLM-5.3 came close to its restricted Mythos Preview model on cyber-exploit tests, while NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation put it about four months behind the US frontier. DeepSeek and Huawei have also released open tools for programming Huawei’s chips, aimed at reducing dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA software.

A note on terms. An open-weight model publishes its trained parameters, called weights, so anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware, and modify it. Many people call these open-source models, though the training data and code usually stay private. A closed model, such as those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, can only be used through the company’s own service.

(gguy/Shutterstock)

The trade between the two is simple. Closed models are more capable, and open models are much cheaper. DeepSeek’s open-weight V4-Pro costs $0.66 per million input tokens and $1.98 per million output tokens off-peak (a token is about three-quarters of a word), against $5 and $25 for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and $5 and $30 for OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. That makes DeepSeek roughly 8 to 15 times cheaper. On SWE-bench Verified, a widely used test of fixing real software bugs, Opus 4.7 solves 87.6% of the problems; DeepSeek reports 80.6%, and an independent US government evaluation measured 74%. Put simply, the open model solves fewer of the hardest problems for about a tenth of the price.

Open models also reach what the best closed models could do only recently. Epoch AI puts the lag at about four months. So a buyer can pay a premium for the top of the range now, or give up some capability on the hardest tasks at a fraction of the cost and expect open models to reach today’s frontier within months. Many will take that trade for customer service, document processing, and routine coding, where the cheaper model already does the job. Open models are not only a Chinese story, either: hosting companies offer OpenAI’s open-weight gpt-oss-120b for well under a dollar per million tokens.

Capital. Stanford’s AI Index puts US AI investment in 2025 at about $286 billion against about $12 billion for China, roughly 23 times. China answers with state capital. Bloomberg reported in June that Beijing has drafted a five-year, roughly $295 billion plan for a national AI data-center grid, funded by state bonds, requiring at least 80%domestic technology and interconnected by 2028. That is about $59 billion a year, less than any one of the largest US cloud companies spends: Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet together are expected to spend about $800 billion on capital projects in 2026, according to research by Columbia Business School’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. The Chinese plan’s strength is coordination, bringing state debt, land, power allocation, and domestic chips together under one national grid.

Talent. This trend favors China and compounds over the longest horizon, which makes it the hardest to reverse quickly.

(miss.cabul/Shutterstock)

What the Summit Did and Did Not Settle

The most visible diplomacy of the fall was the Trump-Xi summit in Washington, which ended September 25. According to news reports of the readouts, it extended the trade truce to January 10, 2027, eased tariffs on about $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction, and opened a dialogue on AI risks with a channel for AI-related incidents. Rare-earth talks will continue, and advanced chips did not feature. The leaders are expected to meet again at APEC in November and the G20 in Miami in December. The diplomacy is moving on its own track, and the competition in chips, models, and power is moving faster.

So What Does Winning Mean?

If you get to nine o’clock and I get to two o’clock, and we both got there as fast as we could, what did either of us win? People who study this closely suggest there may be no single winner in the sense the phrase implies. The more plausible outcome is an asymmetric split. The US likely keeps its lead in frontier capability and chip manufacturing, while China leads in research volume, open-source distribution, and the compounding effect of a much larger talent base.

Asymmetric does not mean inconsequential. One framing among analysts is that if China wins, it will look like procurement and not like conquest. It will look like a government IT office in Jakarta, Lagos, or São Paulo choosing the system that is good enough, priced aggressively, translated into the local language, and bundled with financing and support, the way much of the world ended up on Chinese telecom infrastructure over the past decade. Infrastructure adoption rarely announces itself. It accumulates one procurement decision at a time until the alternative is gone.

The stake, then, is a slow decision made country by country and company by company over the next decade about whose infrastructure the world’s economy runs on. Infrastructure carries the values, incentives, and leverage of whoever built it. A government or company that depends on another nation’s AI stack has handed that nation influence that is very hard to take back.

The Hugging Face Development

That split may not hold as cleanly as it appears. On September 3, Nvidia announced it will acquire Hugging Face, the platform where developers find, share, and run open-source AI models, for $12.93 billion, its second-largest deal after a roughly $20 billion asset and licensing agreement with Groq in December 2025. Hugging Face reportedly brings in about $150 million a year, so the price reflects strategic position more than earnings. Nvidia expects to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval, and Jensen Huang has said Hugging Face will remain open to the entire AI ecosystem, with no requirement to use Nvidia compute.

If it closes, it complicates the argument that China leads distribution. A US company at the center of open-source hosting, alongside the best available compute, would put American industry on both ends of the market: the frontier tier, and the distribution rails the inexpensive, everywhere tier runs on. Regulators will weigh chips and distribution under one roof. Nvidia’s last deal of comparable size, the $40 billion Arm acquisition, was abandoned in 2022 after regulators in several countries challenged it. Nvidia’s own filing lists the risk that regulators could bar Chinese models from the site, which could push Chinese developers toward domestic platforms such as Alibaba’s ModelScope and split open-source distribution in two.

The Commodity-Hardware Precedent

An earlier era of high-performance computing offers a useful precedent, and we lived it. Enterprise IT and supercomputing treat a processor in opposite ways. In a corporate data center, one hardened HPE or Dell server may carry hundreds of jobs, so it is built for reliability: high availability, N+1 redundancy, disaster recovery. Once it is stable, the team posts guards around it and touches it only for security upgrades, hoping nothing breaks. In a supercomputer, one processor may be one of a thousand working on a single job. In the CPU-cluster era, we built those machines from racks of inexpensive commodity servers, nicknamed pizza boxes for their thin, stackable shape, in place of a few exquisitely engineered machines from HP, Dell, Cray, or SGI. Each node was a worker. With proper checkpointing, if one got tired and sat down, the others picked up its work, and if one won the lottery and left for good, we sent it to the graveyard without much regret. It had already earned its keep by getting us to answers faster.

HPE Cray system installed at Stony Brook University

That allowed a different strategy: build the most capable supercomputer possible for the money. A lower price for a set amount of performance meant we could scale larger and reach answers sooner on the same budget. Once a system was running and producing answers, we started again immediately, hunting the next bottleneck in the network, cache, memory, compute, or parallel storage. Find it, break the system, fix it, get more performance for the price, then break it again, without stopping. At Gulfstream, that loop showed up as faster and more accurate engineering answers and quicker production, in a business where the goal is to fly higher and faster than anyone else.

The GPU and AI-chip world may be heading toward the same logic, which is why price-performance may end up a more decisive metric than peak benchmark performance. Huang said in May that GPUs Nvidia sold four or five years ago are now rising in price, and in August he described A100s, first shipped in 2020, as mission-capable through 2029. If durability and secondary-market value make older, cheaper compute economical for a large share of workloads, the same logic applies with more force to compute that was cheaper from day one.

This is also where the hallucination question resolves. A model does not need to match the best frontier model on its hardest tasks to be good enough. Its error rate needs to fall below what the specific workflow can tolerate. For a first-pass literature review, customer-service routing, or routine coding, many non-frontier models clear that bar at a fraction of the cost. For a cancer-treatment protocol or a nuclear engineering calculation, the bar stays far higher, and narrowly scoped domain-specific AI has the advantage over any general-purpose model. An AI trained only on vetted, authoritative nuclear engineering literature will hallucinate far less on nuclear questions than one trained on the entire internet, because the good source material is all it has to draw from. In naval nuclear power, an operator does not act on a single gauge he cannot cross-check against a second, independent indication. AI used for high-stakes work needs the same discipline: knowing where every answer came from and how much that source can be trusted.

The contest between general frontier capability and narrow, high-integrity domain capability will likely shape the next phase more than any single benchmark. It points toward specialized, verifiable agents built on clean, authoritative data and coordinated by higher-level agents, each layer improving the reliability of the one below it. That compounding is why neither country can afford to fall far behind. Once a system built this way starts improving its own tools and training data, the gap between leader and follower grows.

Part 3 covers the fronts running just behind the frontier-model race, robotics and physical AI and cybersecurity, and the engineering answers to the water, noise, and land concerns driving opposition to data centers.

About the Author: Larry Patterson works where high-performance computing, AI, and energy meet. A former Navy reactor operator aboard USS Enterprise (CVN-65), he founded and led Gulfstream Aerospace’s Scientific Research and Innovation SuperComputing Center from 2005 to 2020, where power, cooling, and cloud strategy were daily decisions. He has   worked with the nuclear division of Continuum Dynamics. He is founder and CEO of HEAT Holdings, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business developing patent-pending ways to finance nuclear power and AI compute together, with every source of data behind each deal rated for quality.

Related Item:

The Race We’re Actually Running, Part 1: Twenty Years, Traded Places

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of HPCwire.

The post The Race We’re Actually Running, Part 2: Good Enough at a Fraction of the Price appeared first on HPCwire.

Two plaintiffs alleged that Meta and Snap designed their social media platforms to foster addictive behavior.

U.S. technology stocks plunged for a second consecutive day on Friday as investors grew increasingly concerned about the enormous cost of artificial intelligence development and whether those investments will pay off. The Nasdaq fell more than 3.5%, while Intel shares dropped as much as 30%, Reddit fell 26%, and Alphabet extended its losses after shedding more than $500 billion in market value Thursday. The BBC notes that Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively committed to spending $800.6 billion on AI in 2026. From the report: Chris Low, from investment management firm FHN Financial, said the bulk of what was happening in the stock market was in reaction to some of the biggest tech players such as Amazon and Google. He told Reuters the companies were "showing some pretty significant growing pains as they aggressively pursue the AI build-out." "The thinking is that these signs suggest that the entire sector is going to slow down." Kathleen Brookes, research director at trading firm XTB, said there have been many ups and downs in AI trade in recent months. "Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment in [third quarter] earnings," she said. "The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback, and companies like Alphabet and Intel are in the crosshairs." [...] Brookes noted that November is typically a strong month for stocks. "If we see AI stocks continue to struggle in the coming days, it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak, and investors will be looking for a new theme to drive markets," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miami-Dade officials drop charge of battery by strangulation against rapper due to ‘insufficient evidence’

Florida prosecutors on Thursday dropped a felony charge against rapper Rick Ross nearly a month after he was arrested in Miami Beach when a woman he was living with told police he hit her, court records said.

The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office filed paperwork on Thursday to drop a felony charge of battery by strangulation because of “insufficient evidence”. Ross, whose legal name is William Roberts II, still faces a misdemeanor charge of battery domestic violence.

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

Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough

A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month.

The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, fell by more than 1% Friday, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the same month. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down even further, more than 3%, also erasing hundreds of billions in value. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell less.

Agent Mario Alberto Morales charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon over incident in Houston

A federal immigration agent who drove into and seriously injured a Texas man on 10 October after a botched traffic stop was indicted Friday on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Mario Alberto Morales, 33, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), deliberately veered his SUV into Miguel Parra Hernandez, 48, causing multiple leg fractures and a hip injury, journalists at a news conference in Houston were told.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said she will conduct a formal inquiry into whether government officials engaged in misconduct.

(The Center Square) – Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has signed an ordinance prohibiting new oil and gas drilling throughout the city and establishing a 20-year timetable to phase out existing wells.

Hotel Mediterraneo Sorrento connects its guests with authentic Sorrento, helping them fully experience its culture, traditions, and way of life.

Two of four men on trial say they met couple via online ads and swinging website and had no idea wife had been drugged

Men accused of sexually assaulting a woman whose then husband drugged her for years and allowed her to be abused have described being invited to the couple’s home via online adverts and a swinging website.

One of those accused of assaulting Joanne Young, who has waived her legal right to anonymity, as she lay restrained and blindfolded said he was a young man “trying out things” and had no idea she was drugged.

In closing speech, prosecutor says six women had ‘bravely’ come forward after realising they were not alone

Six women who have been “haunted” by their encounters with Russell Brand came forward to give evidence against him with nothing to gain and no appetite for fame, a court has heard.

The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, said the women, who do not know one another, had not been compelled to make police complaints by the “magic force” of media reporting on Brand’s alleged misconduct.

Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey were back in federal court arguing that the Justice Department's latest attempt to prosecute him should be dismissed.

(The Center Square) - The U.S. Department of Justice and Colorado continue to battle over whether election observers can enter polling locations in Adams County.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: General Motors will pay $220 million to 36 states to settle allegations that it illegally sold private driving behavior and location information to data brokers. As part of the settlement, GM must get drivers' express consent before it collects or shares their driving and location data -- terms that are in line with separate agreements it previously reached with California and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This settlement does contain a new requirement that GM must have a third party assess the automaker's compliance with the privacy program it has put in place. The agreement announced Thursday settles a lawsuit brought by a coalition of attorneys general from 36 states that alleged GM had sold the information to data brokers, which in turn then sold it to insurance providers. "This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we ended in 2024, and reinforces steps we've taken to strengthen our privacy practices," GM said in an emailed statement. "Safer, more helpful and personalized experiences are enabled by connected vehicle data, and GM is committed to being clear about what information is used, how it's protected, and the choices customers have about what they share." The settlement comes more than two years after a New York Times report showed how GM and OnStar collected, used, and sold drivers' precise geolocation data and driving behavior to third parties, including data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk. The data was collected through GM's Smart Driver program, a free feature contained within its connected car apps that tracked and rated driving behaviors and seat belt use. Data brokers sold this information to insurance providers, which could affect customers' rates, the NYT reported at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Swinney and Rhun ap Iorwerth say devolving power further is up to Holyrood and Senedd – not Westminster

Scotland and Wales’s first ministers have told Andy Burnham that decisions on local devolution rest solely with their parliaments, in response to the prime minister’s push to extend English-style regional powers across the UK.

After Burnham held discussions in Glasgow with John Swinney and Rhun ap Iorwerth about localised employment and reindustrialisation powers, Downing Street characterised the talks as constructive.

Cryptocurrency theft is estimated to generate half of the country’s foreign currency income

North Korea plays by its own rules. The isolated, secretive and autocratic country is largely cut off from the world’s economic system – but when it comes to generating foreign earnings it relies on some of the world’s most sophisticated hacking.

Experts, such as TRM Labs, quickly attributed the extraordinary $6.3bn (£4.7bn) Binance cryptocurrency theft to TraderTraitor, an elite North Korean hacking unit that has also been known as the Lazarus Group. Though the link may not be proven yet, the pattern of behaviour is familiar.

Eljay Crisp-Carr, 20, spent five months behind bars before prosecutors asked to dismiss charges

Ohio prosecutors on Friday dropped charges against a man arrested in connection with the 6 June shooting at Toledo’s Old West End festival that injured 12 people.

Eljay Crisp-Carr, 20, had faced more than 50 felony charges stemming from the shooting, including 25 counts of attempted murder. He was released after spending about five months behind bars.

He tried to light a firework he thought was a dud before it exploded in his face.

CBS California Investigates took a closer look at how rates compare to other utilities in the region, and at the high salaries of dozens of executives.

The weekend’s marquee matchup sends top-ranked Salesianum (6-1) to face third-ranked Middletown (3-4) in a game that could reveal plenty about both teams heading toward the playoffs.  Image create on 10/30 using AI

No. 1 Salesianum faces Middletown, Smyrna looks to strengthen its championship credentials, and Sussex Central meets Caesar Rodney in a critical downstate showdown.

Delaware’s high school football season enters its final stretch this weekend, with several important matchups that could help determine district standings, playoff positioning and which teams are building momentum for a postseason run.

The spotlight will be on three games featuring some of the state’s highest-ranked programs: Salesianum at Middletown on Friday night, Sussex Central at Caesar Rodney on Friday and Smyrna at St. Georges Tech on Saturday morning.

According to MaxPreps’ Oct. 29 rankings, Salesianum and Smyrna hold the top two positions statewide, while Middletown remains No. 3 despite a challenging season. Caesar Rodney and Sussex Central are ranked 10th and 11th, respectively.

The weekend includes 13 varsity games Friday, Oct. 30, and nine more Saturday, Oct. 31.

Salesianum at Middletown: No. 1 Faces a Dangerous Rival

Friday, Oct. 30 | 7 p.m. | Middletown High School

The weekend’s marquee matchup sends top-ranked Salesianum (6-1) to face third-ranked Middletown (3-4) in a game that could reveal plenty about both teams heading toward the playoffs.

Salesianum has established itself as one of Delaware’s leading championship contenders, posting impressive victories over Smyrna, Hodgson Vo-Tech and Appoquinimink. The Sals defeated Appoquinimink 42-7 in their most recent outing.

Middletown’s record is deceptive. The Cavaliers have faced one of Delaware’s most demanding schedules, including games against several highly ranked opponents. Their losses include a narrow 21-19 setback against Sussex Central and a 32-21 defeat to Smyrna.

For Salesianum, a victory would further strengthen its standing as the state’s top-ranked team. For Middletown, upsetting the Sals would provide a signature victory and demonstrate that its difficult schedule has prepared the Cavaliers for postseason competition.

The question: Can Middletown turn its experience against elite competition into an upset of Delaware’s No. 1 team?

Smyrna at St. Georges Tech: Eagles Look to Maintain Momentum

Saturday, Oct. 31 | 11 a.m. | St. Georges Tech, Middletown

Second-ranked Smyrna (6-1) travels to St. Georges Tech (4-3) with an opportunity to continue its impressive season and solidify its position among Delaware’s top Class 3A contenders.

The Eagles have been one of the state’s strongest teams, with their only loss coming against Salesianum, 32-26. Smyrna has demonstrated its offensive strength throughout the season, including a commanding 40-7 victory over Caesar Rodney.

St. Georges Tech, ranked No. 14 statewide, has experienced a more uneven season but remains capable of challenging quality opponents.

The recent history between these programs adds intrigue. St. Georges defeated Smyrna twice in 2024 before the Eagles answered with a decisive 44-12 victory in 2025.

For Smyrna, the objective is maintaining momentum and avoiding a late-season setback. For St. Georges, a victory over the state’s second-ranked team would be a major accomplishment and provide a significant boost to its postseason outlook.

The question: Can St. Georges slow down Smyrna’s high-powered offense and produce one of the weekend’s biggest upsets?

Sussex Central at Caesar Rodney: Downstate Rivals Battle for Position

Friday, Oct. 30 | 7 p.m. | Caesar Rodney High School, Camden

Two evenly matched downstate programs meet Friday night when Sussex Central (5-2) travels to Caesar Rodney (5-2) in a contest with important implications for Class 3A District 2.

Caesar Rodney enters ranked No. 10 statewide, one position ahead of Sussex Central.

The Golden Knights are looking to rebound from a 19-7 loss to Cape Henlopen last weekend. Earlier this season, Sussex Central demonstrated its ability to defeat top competition with a 21-19 victory over Middletown.

Caesar Rodney has also established itself as a postseason contender but faces the challenge of slowing a Sussex Central team eager to regain its winning momentum.

With both programs carrying identical records, the outcome could have an important effect on district positioning and playoff prospects.

The question: Which downstate contender can gain the upper hand in a closely matched Class 3A showdown?

Other Games Worth Watching

Several additional contests deserve attention across the state.

Milford (4-3) travels to St. Mark’s (2-5) at 7 p.m. Friday, hoping to end a three-game losing streak. The Buccaneers opened the season with four consecutive victories but have struggled recently, including a 51-12 loss to Lake Forest last weekend.

Lake Forest (6-1), ranked sixth statewide, visits Laurel (3-4) at 7 p.m. Friday. The Spartans are seeking to extend their strong season as postseason competition approaches.

Hodgson Vo-Tech (2-6) travels to fourth-ranked Appoquinimink (4-3) at 7 p.m. Friday, while ninth-ranked Cape Henlopen (6-1) hosts Dover (2-5) at the same time.

Saturday also features fifth-ranked Howard (6-1) at Wilmington Friends (4-2), another matchup involving a highly ranked team seeking to strengthen its playoff position.

With the regular season winding down, every victory becomes increasingly important. This weekend’s results should help clarify which teams are ready to make a serious run at a Delaware state championship.

To Go Box

What: Delaware high school football, Oct. 30-31, 2026

Featured Friday games:

• Salesianum at Middletown — 7 p.m.
• Sussex Central at Caesar Rodney — 7 p.m.

Featured Saturday game:

• Smyrna at St. Georges Tech — 11 a.m.

Other Friday games:

• Newark Charter at Early College — 6 p.m.
• Washington at Seaford — 6 p.m.
• Sussex Tech at Indian River — 6 p.m.
• Milford at St. Mark’s — 7 p.m.
• Hodgson Vo-Tech at Appoquinimink — 7 p.m.
• Odessa at Polytech — 7 p.m.
• Delmar at Woodbridge — 7 p.m.
• Dover at Cape Henlopen — 7 p.m.
• Lake Forest at Laurel — 7 p.m.
• Delaware Military Academy at Red Lion Christian — 7:30 p.m.

Teenager Aleks Stasiukiewicz, from Hartlepool, lost his left eye in a tragic firework-related accident in November 2024. (University Hospitals Tees via SWNS)

We’re using our custom-made robot to open and close the iPhone Duo hundreds of thousands of times. Watch along and get your questions answered by CNET editors live.

(The Center Square) – With five days to go until the midterm elections, polling suggests Arizona’s Gov. Katie Hobbs will stick around for another four years.

Humanitarian convoy brings food and medicine to Russian-held city where people have suffered severe shortages

People living in the besieged Russian-held city of Oleshky in southern Ukraine were evacuated on Friday as part of a joint relief operation, the first of its kind in four years and eight months of war.

The city, which lies on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnipro River, opposite Kherson, has suffered months of serious food and medical shortages, leading to warnings of starvation for the few thousand people remaining there, including about 50 children.

By: John Sides

There’s a consensus on the House and more uncertainty about the Senate.

The post What 64 midterm election forecasts can tell us appeared first on Good Authority.

The other five are Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake.

Bluetooth-scanning apps like Zuckoff can tell you when a pair of smart glasses is nearby. Whether the glasses are recording is another question.

Under the UK's planned social media ban, more than 100,000 British teenagers aged 16 and 17 could initially be locked out of social media because they lack a passport or driving license that may be needed as a fallback for age verification. The Guardian reports: Ofcom, the UK's online watchdog, said about 150,000 16- to 17-year-olds do not own a passport or driving licence, which are likely to be needed to access age-restricted platforms. The Australia-style ban on under-16s accessing social media services, including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, is due to come into force next spring. The head of Ofcom, Melanie Dawes, said "motivated children" would seek to bypass the restrictions, as has happened in Australia. On Thursday, Ofcom published an assessment of age verification measures that could underpin the ban, outlining four "highly effective" methods: checking a person's official ID against a live selfie, a bank verifying an account holder's age, an official digital ID service like the Young Scot card, or estimating someone's age via a selfie. However, the watchdog said a form of official ID would probably be needed as a "backstop" for other methods, such as facial age estimation, which could be inaccurate by several years. Ofcom said a cohort of 16- to 17-year-olds could miss out as a result. "This means that people without a form of photo ID will likely need to take steps to obtain one to access age-restricted services," the regulator said. The report notes that more than nine out of 10 Britons over 16 have passports or driving licenses. "We should expect that motivated children will seek to bypass the restrictions -- just like alcohol laws can't completely eradicate underage drinking -- but there'll be ways for platforms to mitigate this risk," said Dawes. "This will be a huge cultural shift for our society, so it'll take time to adjust, and everyone will have a part to play."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo: Here are 10 events worth considering this weekend. Image created on 10/30 with AI.

From trick-or-treating and haunted attractions to live music, community walks and a major film festival, Delaware offers a full weekend of activities Oct. 30-Nov. 1.

DELAWARE — Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, giving Delaware residents a full weekend to enjoy fall festivals, community celebrations, outdoor activities and live entertainment.

From Wilmington’s Trolley Square to the beaches of Sussex County, events scheduled for Oct. 30 through Nov. 1 offer something for nearly every age and interest.

Families can spend Saturday collecting treats from Hockessin businesses, exploring Fifer Orchards or celebrating Halloween in Milford. Those looking to support a good cause can participate in Wilmington’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s or Milford’s Run for the Arts.

For evening entertainment, Frightland brings Halloween scares to Middletown, while singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega closes the weekend with a Sunday performance at The Queen in Wilmington.

Here are 10 events worth considering this weekend.

1. Walk to End Alzheimer’s — Wilmington

Hundreds of walkers, families and supporters are expected to gather along the Wilmington Riverfront for the annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s, supporting research, care and services for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers.

The morning includes a Promise Garden ceremony recognizing people affected by the disease, followed by a 2-mile community walk. Registration is free, although donations and fundraising are encouraged.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31. Registration at 8 a.m.; Promise Garden ceremony at 9 a.m.; walk at 9:15 a.m. Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, Rosa Parks Drive, Wilmington. Information and registration: Alzheimer’s Association.

2. Halloween in Hockessin: Candy Corn Trail — Hockessin

Hockessin businesses are turning Halloween into a townwide celebration, with 48 local shops, restaurants and organizations participating in a daytime trick-or-treat event.

Organized by the Hockessin Business Association, the Candy Corn Trail invites costumed children and their families to visit participating businesses throughout the community. Locations include Lantana Square, Valley Road, Old Lancaster Pike and Lancaster Pike.

The free event gives families an opportunity to enjoy Halloween while supporting neighborhood businesses.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Participating businesses throughout Hockessin. Information and participating-business map: Town Square Delaware LIVE.

3. Ladybug Dark Bloom Music Festival — Wilmington

Wilmington’s Trolley Square neighborhood will host the inaugural Ladybug Dark Bloom Music Festival, a free Halloween celebration combining live music, art and seasonal entertainment.

The all-ages event features women-led musical performances, local artists, vendors and a creative atmosphere inspired by autumn, Halloween and Día de los Muertos.

The afternoon festival offers a family-friendly alternative to traditional Halloween activities.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31, noon-6 p.m. Trolley Square, Wilmington. Free admission. Information: Town Square Delaware LIVE.

4. Run for the Arts 5K — Milford

Runners and walkers can combine fitness, Halloween fun and support for the arts during the ninth annual Run for the Arts 5K and 1-mile fun walk in downtown Milford.

Organized by the Mispillion Art League and Seashore Striders, the event benefits local arts programming, including exhibitions, classes and community events. Halloween costumes are encouraged.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31, 9 a.m., with race-day registration beginning at 7:30 a.m. Bicentennial Park, 206-218 NE Front St., Milford. Registration is $25 in advance through 10 p.m. Friday or $30 on race day. Information: RunSignup.

5. Fifer Orchards Fall Fest — Camden-Wyoming

Families looking for traditional fall activities can visit Fifer Orchards for pumpkins, apple picking, a corn maze and outdoor farm attractions.

The festival also features seasonal favorites such as apple cider, cider doughnuts, kettle corn and farm-fresh food. Saturday is the final Halloween-weekend opportunity to enjoy the festivities.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., with visitors exiting by 5 p.m. Fifer Orchards, 1919 Allabands Mill Road, Camden-Wyoming. Admission is $18 online or $24 at the gate; some activities cost extra. The festival is closed Sunday. Information: Fifer Orchards.

6. Frightland Haunted Attractions — Middletown

One of Delaware’s best-known Halloween attractions continues its season with haunted houses, a haunted hayride and other spooky experiences.

Frightland offers multiple themed attractions, including Zombie Town, and is geared toward visitors seeking a more intense Halloween experience. The haunted attraction remains open into early November, but Halloween night is likely to be a popular time to visit.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31, beginning at 6 p.m. Frightland, 309 Port Penn Road, Middletown. Saturday ticket booth hours and admission deadlines vary by schedule. Tickets are approximately $55 for Saturday admission. Information: Frightland.

7. Haunted Dover Lantern Tour — Dover

History and Halloween come together during the Haunted Dover Lantern Tour at First State Heritage Park.

Participants follow interpreters through the historic Dover Green while hearing stories of ghostly encounters, local legends and unexplained events connected to Delaware’s capital city.

The lantern-lit walking tour lasts approximately one hour and offers a different way to experience Dover’s historic district after dark.

TO GO: Friday, Oct. 30, 7:30-8:30 p.m. First State Heritage Park, 43 The Green, Dover. Tickets are $15 per person, and advance registration is required. For last-minute availability, call 302-739-9194. Information: Visit Central Delaware.

8. Milford Halloween Trick-or-Treat and Community Activities — Milford

Milford families have several opportunities to celebrate Halloween, including traditional neighborhood trick-or-treating and activities organized by local community groups.

The Carlisle Fire Company is hosting an open house during the day and a Truck or Treat event in the evening, featuring fire department vehicles and treats for children.

Milford’s official trick-or-treat hours are scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, giving families a designated time to visit participating homes.

TO GO: Saturday, Oct. 31. Carlisle Fire Company open house, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.; Truck or Treat, 6-8 p.m. Citywide trick-or-treating, 6-8 p.m. Locations throughout Milford. Information: City of Milford.

9. Rehoboth Beach International Film Festival — Lewes and Rehoboth Beach Area

Film lovers can begin a week of international cinema as the 28th annual Rehoboth Beach International Film Festival opens Sunday.

The festival, running Nov. 1-8, features 113 films representing more than 32 countries, including documentaries, international features, short films and special presentations.

Screenings take place at several venues in the Lewes area, and the festival offers opportunities to see films that may not receive wide commercial theatrical releases.

TO GO: Sunday, Nov. 1, through Sunday, Nov. 8. Screening times vary. Venues include Cinema Art Theater, 17701 Dartmouth Drive, Lewes, and other nearby locations. Individual tickets are $15 for members and $18 for general audiences. Information, showtimes and tickets: Rehoboth Beach Film Society.

10. Suzanne Vega at The Queen — Wilmington

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega closes the weekend with a Sunday evening concert at The Queen in downtown Wilmington.

Known for songs including “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” Vega will perform material spanning her career, along with songs from her 2025 album, “Flying With Angels.”

The performance features longtime guitarist Gerry Leonard and cellist Stephanie Winters.

TO GO: Sunday, Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m. The Queen, 500 N. Market St., Wilmington. Tickets and information: The Queen Wilmington.

Plan Your Weekend

With activities spread across New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties, Delaware residents have plenty of opportunities to enjoy the final weekend of October.

Many Saturday events are outdoors, and several offer free admission. Visitors should check event websites for last-minute schedule changes, ticket availability and weather-related updates before leaving home.

Whether the weekend plans involve raising money for a community cause, taking children trick-or-treating, exploring a haunted attraction or enjoying a night of music, Delaware’s Halloween weekend offers a range of ways to celebrate the season.

“Why do you wanna have a pep rally when people are hurting?”

That was the question Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III posed at a September food drive in South Dallas, where volunteers were collecting groceries for struggling families. Across town, Republicans were holding a midterm convention. Haynes, a longtime Baptist pastor and Democratic congressional nominee, was introducing James Talarico, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.

A month later, speaking at a Dallas megachurch, Talarico offered his own interpretation of Christian duty.

“I try to love my neighbor through public policy,” the Presbyterian seminarian told the congregation. “I’m trying to make my neighbor’s life easier, better, less stressful.”

Both men are making a deceptively simple argument in some of the staunchly staunch red-as-hell, Republican territory in America, one that might transcend the conventional wisdom about national campaigns and the millions poured into competing campaign war chests: When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?

Amid the big-ticket ad buys, fundraising appeals, and armies of political consultants, Talarico and Haynes are tapping into a political tradition that has long sustained communities across the South: showing up.

At Haynes’s Friendship-West Baptist Church, the ministry extends to legal services, immigration advocacy, counseling, economic justice, and food policy. It is an example of how churches often form the connective tissue of communities suffering under economic and political strain.

That strain is measurable. Texas is home to four of the nation’s 10 most financially distressed major cities, including Houston, which ranks second nationwide, according to a 2026 analysis. Feeding America estimates that nearly 1 in 5 Texans experienced food insecurity in 2024. Meanwhile, federal analysts project that changes to Medicaid eligibility enacted last year will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.5 million by 2034. 

While Democratic Party leaders publicly debate how to punish Donald Trump politically, allege corruption, or navigate the ideological divide between moderates and democratic socialists, a different argument is emerging from Southern pulpits.

The Underground Church

From Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel’s challenge to industrial exploitation, progressive religious institutions have helped drive some of America’s most consequential political transformations. Christian farmworker ministries supported migrant laborers before joining the United Farm Workers’ California grape boycotts in the 1960s. And while Black churches overwhelmingly led, sustained, and suffered the brunt of violence in the fight for equal civil rights in this country, a handful of white denominations joined them. 

Of course, churches also defended slavery, segregation, and exploitation. The blunt reality is that throughout American history, Christianity has always been political and has been used to justify a wide variety of competing political ends.

Related

Pete Hegseth’s Unholy War

But Republicans have deftly exploited the perception that they alone speak for American Christians. The Trump administration has readily embraced religious iconography, from evangelical leaders praying over the president in the Oval Office to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/pete-hegseths-christian-rhetoric-reignites-scrutiny-after-the-u-s-goes-to-war-with-iranfrequent invocations of the medieval Crusades.

There is no way around the fact that Republicans have built a formidable religious coalition, particularly among white evangelicals. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/party-identification-among-religious-groups-and-religiously-unaffiliated-voters/Last year, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found a majority of Republicans qualified as either Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers in 2025, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

But Republicans don’t have a monopoly on Christian voters. Pew Research Center polling this month found 73 percent of white evangelical Protestant registered voters preferred Republican House candidates, while 74 percent of Black Protestants and 59 percent of Hispanic Catholics preferred Democrats. None of that is particularly surprising on the surface.

Nor is this some newly discovered religious awakening. According to PRRI’s Census of American Religion, which was published in April, 57 percent of Democrats identified as Christian in 2025, a significant drop from 70 percent in 2013. The white Christian left isn’t necessarily growing, but it’s far from insignificant. Much of it has simply been politically overlooked.

It’s a perception the GOP has routinely capitalized on, often spending a great deal of their election campaigns attacking opponents on religious ground. 

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cravenly tarred his Democratic gubernatorial challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, as supporting “Sharia law,” citing an endorsement from a Muslim advocacy group’s political affiliate.

Perhaps ironically, Hinojosa is, and has been on the record, a Catholic — same as Abbott.

“My faith is my moral compass,” Hinojosa told the National Catholic Register in September. “It grounds me in purpose and gives me the courage to do what is right regardless of obstacles or consequences.”

Faith Without Works Is a Dead End

For those who have spent years watching their faith become synonymous with a politics they don’t recognize, frustration may finally be giving way to something else: a determination to be heard.

There are signs that this long-overlooked religious tradition is finding a more public voice. An August study by PRRI documented progressive Christians organizing against Christian nationalism in eight states, including Texas and Louisiana, channeling local meetings, religious discussions, and community networks into political action. Elsewhere, hundreds of members of the clergy have joined protests against immigration enforcement, and some have been trained in direct action and civil resistance. While the movement may not be growing in numbers, its willingness to challenge political power is increasingly visible.

Related

Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance

As retired Texas Rev. Kathleene Card, who has thrown her support behind Talarico, told the Houston Chronicle, “faith should influence how people respond to poverty, human rights, the environment, and the well-being of their community.”

Whether any of this will translate into winning on Tuesday is still an open question. An October Fox News poll put Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton at 49 percent apiece among likely voters, but newer polls show Talarico with a small lead. Abbott led Hinojosa by 5 percentage points in that Fox poll, and most polls in the race show the governor with a slim lead. 

No matter the result, the Texas campaigns offer a different, more nuanced way of understanding political persuasion. They also challenge a long-standing assumption among national Democrats: that their voters are a monolith, moved by the same issues, values, and appeals. 

Across rural America and the South, voters may be growing weary of manufactured arguments and hypothetical doomsday prophecies, with research showing that political advertising, as it stands, has little effect on changing minds at all.

There is something to be said for people willing to put boots on the ground, to do the work instead of endlessly debating how to begin and whether it matters, in the name of service. 

It’s a moral code not too dissimilar to a Western: When confronted with injustice, you stand for what’s right, even if you stand alone and are ridiculed for what you believe. It’s a mode of Christianity that harkens back to Abraham Lincoln (and maybe even John Brown.)

That might be a more enduring political proposition than many Democrats’ feigned, helpless aggrievance to the latest Republican spectacle. Campaigns come and go; so do their promises, if they existed in the first place. But the obligation to one’s neighbors remains.

The post The Rise of the Christian Left in Texas appeared first on The Intercept.

Oil giant comes under fire from climate campaigners, as its earnings reach $8.46bn while ‘innocent civilians suffer’

BP’s quarterly profits have been labelled “obscene” after they hit an 18-year high of $8.46bn (£6.3bn), as the war in the Middle East drove up oil and gas prices.

The energy company hailed a “banner quarter” on Friday, with its underlying ​replacement ⁠cost profit – a key measure of its income – almost quadrupling in the three months to the end of September, from $2.2bn in the same period ​a year ​ago. The jump meant BP’s quarterly profits hit their highest level since the $8.9bn recorded in 2008.

After a top Army general was fired this week, a Pentagon official said he had failed polygraph tests. Some attorneys say the disclosure could run afoul of privacy laws.

There are good reasons why you may not want to use a chatbot for your midterm election research.

Binance exchange says it will cover customer losses as it scrambles to freeze affected assets, with about $3bn located so far

• Q&A: How big a deal is the $6.3bn crypto heist?

• Tell us: have you been affected by the Binance hack?

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a record $6.3bn (£4.7bn) hack described as the biggest heist in history, with experts identifying North Korea as the likely culprit.

Binance said it would cover all customer losses as it froze $3bn of the affected assets.

Some experts express concern about ‘lack of transparency’ as agency removes warnings on three estrogen patches

Three more patches for treating menopause will no longer carry black-box warnings about cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and dementia, officials at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Friday.

The FDA did not convene an advisory committee and offered few details on the scientific basis for the decision in the press briefing. The news follows the removal of black-box warnings from six menopause treatments in February, as patients across the US struggle with shortages of the patches.

Food Bank of Delaware, Synergy Consultants, First Ascent Design and GGA Construction receive top honors, while retired VanDemark & Lynch President Stephan Lehm earns the prestigious Marvin S. Gilman Bowl for more than 50 years of leadership and community service.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Four Delaware organizations were celebrated for business excellence Thursday, Oct. 29, but one of the most memorable moments at the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce’s annual awards luncheon came when a longtime business leader received an unexpected honor.

Stephan “Steve” Lehm, retired president of VanDemark & Lynch, was surprised with the prestigious Marvin S. Gilman Bowl, recognizing more than five decades of contributions to Delaware’s business community and his commitment to philanthropy.

The presentation was part of the Chamber’s 28th annual Marvin S. Gilman Superstars in Business Awards luncheon at the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington.

The event also honored four organizations representing different sectors of Delaware’s economy: the Food Bank of Delaware, Synergy Consultants & Psychotherapy Practice, First Ascent Design and GGA Construction.

Each was recognized for business leadership, strong management practices and contributions to the communities they serve.

Lehm honored for a lifetime of leadership and service

For more than 50 years, Lehm has helped shape Delaware through his professional work in civil engineering and his commitment to community service.

As president of VanDemark & Lynch, a Delaware engineering firm, Lehm built a career connected to the state’s development and growth.

His contributions, however, have extended well beyond his professional responsibilities.

The Marvin S. Gilman Bowl, established in 2008, honors individuals who have made exceptional contributions to Delaware’s small-business and nonprofit communities.

Unlike the annual Superstars awards, the recipient of the Gilman Bowl is kept secret until the presentation, making Lehm’s recognition a surprise during Thursday’s luncheon.

“From civil engineering to philanthropy, Stephan Lehm’s work is everywhere in Delaware, even if most people never see his name on it,” said Brett Smith, Marvin S. Gilman’s grandson. “He has spent more than 50 years building this state and giving back to it, leading with the kind of quiet generosity my grandfather admired most.”

The award reflects the values associated with Gilman, a respected Delaware homebuilder whose business philosophy emphasized integrity, innovation and giving back to the community.

Lehm joins a distinguished group of previous recipients whose leadership has helped strengthen Delaware’s economy and nonprofit organizations.

Previous honorees include Charles S. McDowell in 2025, Lawrence J. DiSabatino in 2024, Pamela W. Cornforth in 2023 and Timothy U. Boulden in 2022.

The award recognizes individuals whose influence extends beyond their businesses and whose service has created lasting benefits for Delaware.

The Chamber’s announcement honoring Lehm provides additional information about the recognition.

Four organizations earn Superstar honors

The Chamber presented its 2026 Superstars in Business Awards to four organizations selected from different employee-size categories and the nonprofit sector.

Food Bank of Delaware: Fighting hunger and creating opportunity

The Food Bank of Delaware received the Superstar award in the nonprofit category for its statewide efforts to fight hunger while helping residents achieve greater financial stability.

Working with more than 600 community partners, the organization distributes millions of pounds of food annually to Delaware families and individuals facing food insecurity.

Its work extends beyond emergency food assistance through workforce development programs that provide job training and opportunities for economic independence.

The award recognizes the Food Bank’s combination of direct community assistance and long-term efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty.

Synergy Consultants: Making mental health services more accessible

Synergy Consultants & Psychotherapy Practice received the Superstar award for businesses with one to 10 employees.

The outpatient mental health practice provides therapy and support to individuals, couples and families dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, grief and significant life changes.

The organization also helps train future mental health professionals and participates in wellness and community outreach programs.

Its recognition demonstrates how smaller organizations can make important contributions to health care and the quality of life in Delaware communities.

First Ascent Design: Helping organizations grow

Wilmington-based First Ascent Design was honored in the category for businesses with 11 to 40 employees.

The digital marketing agency provides branding, website development, digital advertising, search engine optimization and content marketing services.

During its 11 years in business, First Ascent has worked with nearly 300 businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions.

Its work helps organizations strengthen their brands, reach customers and compete in an increasingly digital marketplace.

GGA Construction: Building Delaware’s future

GGA Construction received the Superstar award in the category for businesses with 41 to 150 employees.

With offices in Middletown and Rehoboth Beach, GGA specializes in commercial construction projects throughout Delaware and the surrounding region.

Its portfolio includes health care facilities, educational institutions, hotels, restaurants, senior living communities, multifamily housing and recreational facilities.

The company was recognized for its management practices, leadership and contributions to an industry that plays an important role in Delaware’s economic development.

Four more organizations recognized for excellence

In addition to the Superstar winners, the Chamber honored four organizations with Awards of Excellence for demonstrating notable performance and leadership.

The recipients were:

• Sunday Breakfast Mission — Nonprofit category, recognizing its work assisting people experiencing homelessness and other hardships.

• Integrity Nursing LLC — Businesses with one to 10 employees, recognizing its work in health care services.

• Delmarva Central Railroad — Businesses with 11 to 40 employees, recognizing its role in regional transportation and commerce.

• AKA Advisory — Businesses with 41 to 150 employees, recognizing its professional services and business leadership.

The additional awards highlight the diversity of Delaware’s small-business community, from health care and professional services to transportation and nonprofit assistance.

An award rooted in Delaware’s business heritage

Established in 1998, the Marvin S. Gilman Superstars in Business Awards honor the legacy of a respected Delaware entrepreneur who believed that successful businesses should combine sound management with ethical leadership and community involvement.

As president of Gilman Development Company, Marvin Gilman led one of Wilmington’s respected homebuilding firms.

The annual awards program recognizes businesses and nonprofit organizations that have operated for at least three consecutive years and have 150 or fewer employees.

In 2008, the Chamber’s Small Business Alliance expanded the program by establishing the Marvin S. Gilman Bowl to recognize individuals whose professional leadership and community involvement reflect Gilman’s principles.

Together, the awards celebrate both organizational achievement and individual contributions to Delaware’s business community.

Celebrating the people behind Delaware’s economy

The luncheon brought together organizations with different missions but a shared commitment to leadership and service.

For the Food Bank of Delaware, that mission is helping families overcome hunger and poverty. For Synergy Consultants, it is expanding access to mental health services. For First Ascent Design, it is helping businesses and nonprofits strengthen their presence in the marketplace. And for GGA Construction, it is building the facilities that support Delaware’s economic and community growth.

Lehm’s recognition added a personal dimension to those achievements.

His more than 50 years of professional contributions and philanthropy underscore a central message of the Superstars program: Business leadership can have an impact far beyond an organization’s daily operations.

Whether through creating jobs, providing essential services, developing infrastructure or supporting charitable causes, this year’s honorees demonstrate the many ways Delaware businesses and their leaders contribute to the First State.

To Go: Learn more about Superstars in Business

• What: Marvin S. Gilman Superstars in Business Awards, presented by the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce and its Small Business Alliance.
• When: The 28th annual awards luncheon was held Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026.
• Where: Chase Center on the Riverfront, Wilmington.
• Special honoree: Stephan “Steve” Lehm, retired president of VanDemark & Lynch, received the 2026 Marvin S. Gilman Bowl.
• 2027 applications: Expected to open in spring 2027. Eligible organizations must have operated for at least three consecutive years and have 150 or fewer employees.
• More information: Delaware State Chamber of Commerce Superstars in Business.
• Special award announcement: Chamber announcement honoring Stephan Lehm.

IOPC launches independent investigation after referral by Scotland Yard over 2019 letter about Thomas Markle

Scotland Yard faces an independent investigation into its failure in 2019 to pass claims alleging wrongdoing by Thomas Markle, the father of the Duchess of Sussex, to law enforcement agencies overseas.

The force had referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) over its handling of a letter written by Markle’s former wife, Roslyn Loveless. Markle, 82, is now facing claims of child sexual abuse in the Philippines, which he denies, and is under investigation by authorities there.

The Vatican said Pope Leo exercised his right as a U.S. citizen, submitting a mail-in ballot in his native Chicago ahead of the midterm elections next week.

Trump predicts the war with Iran is "going to end soon," without offering any details, as Qatari mediators return to Tehran to push for a deal.

A cyberattack on Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, was likely carried out by North Korea, according to a blockchain intelligence firm.

The editor of Russia's last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, says Vladimir Putin's government has "forced the editorial team to stop its work."

Reddit plans to require users to log in to browse the platform, ending its longstanding practice of allowing anonymous visitors to access posts and discussions. According to CEO Steve Huffman, a key reason behind the decision is to curb unauthorized scraping and automated traffic. "This is a big change for Reddit, where we've allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades," Huffman says. "And I don't know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it's a big change for me. But I've come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business." The Verge reports: There's no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you're logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren't logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in "select markets outside the US" in the "coming months," according to CEO Steve Huffman. "We'll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there." Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app's incognito mode. Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit's user experience and its ads business and is "more protective of Reddit data." The "vast majority" of unauthorized Reddit access happens "through our logged-out experiences," though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user's identity -- "Honestly, we don't want to know" -- just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver "more relevant ads."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Independent candidate Bill Hill is threatening to unseat Trump ally Nick Begich with a message of affordability

As Republicans fight to maintain their narrow majority in Congress, they face a unique challenge in Alaska – not from a Democrat, but from an independent commercial fisher and first-time candidate running to flip the state’s lone House seat.

Bill Hill, who is an Alaska Native and has worked in education and construction, has positioned himself as a working-class candidate who will fight to make life more affordable for people like himself and his family.

BPG Sports officially unveiled Sprinturf Performance Park on Thursday, Oct. 29, the new name for the former Kirkwood Sports Complex at 1220 River Road.

Newly renamed Sprinturf Performance Park combines state investment and BPG Sports management as Delaware looks to attract more regional and national tournaments

NEW CASTLE, Del. — For generations of Delaware soccer players and families, it has simply been Kirkwood.

Now, a $10 million investment is transforming the longtime youth sports complex south of New Castle into a centerpiece of Delaware’s growing effort to attract tournaments, athletes and sports-tourism dollars from across the region.

BPG Sports officially unveiled Sprinturf Performance Park on Thursday, Oct. 29, the new name for the former Kirkwood Sports Complex at 1220 River Road.

The 65-acre, county-owned complex has undergone significant improvements, including the conversion of four natural-grass fields to synthetic turf and the addition of lighting. The broader capital program also includes renovations to the facility’s indoor turf arena.

The complex now advertises five lighted synthetic-turf fields and seven natural-grass fields, providing space for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and other sports.

But the changes represent more than a facelift for a 34-year-old soccer complex.

They are also part of a larger effort by Delaware and private sports operators to turn the state’s athletic facilities into economic-development engines capable of bringing thousands of traveling athletes and their families to Delaware.

$4 million in state funding

Of the approximately $10 million investment at the Kirkwood property, $4 million came from Delaware’s Sports Tourism Investment Fund, according to reporting surrounding Thursday’s unveiling.

The fund was established to support capital projects that can attract sporting events and visitors to Delaware. State budgets have allocated $10 million annually to the Sports Tourism Capital Investment Fund in recent years.

Gov. Matt Meyer used Thursday’s event to argue that developing facilities on this scale requires cooperation between government and private operators.

“The reality is, with public funding alone, there’s no way we can do things like this across our county,” Meyer said at the event, according to WDEL. “It takes a strong, private partner.”

The state’s rationale is economic development.

Delaware tourism officials estimate that out-of-state visitors attending sporting events generated $231.4 million in spending at venues, hotels, restaurants and entertainment businesses, according to information presented at the unveiling.

The idea is straightforward: A weekend soccer, baseball or lacrosse tournament can bring hundreds or thousands of families into Delaware, many of whom need hotel rooms, meals, gasoline and entertainment during their stay.

BPG building a statewide sports network

The Kirkwood project also highlights the increasingly large role of Wilmington-based BPG Sports in Delaware’s youth and amateur sports business.

BPG Sports, an affiliate of the Buccini/Pollin Group, manages or operates a growing portfolio of sports facilities that includes Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington, DE Turf in Frederica, Sprinturf Performance Park, WSFS Bank Sportsplex, Sports at the Beach near Georgetown and the planned Delaware Indoor Track facility.

That makes the Kirkwood investment part of a broader statewide network rather than a standalone project.

BPG describes itself as a full-service sports management company involved in athletic facilities, clubs and sporting events. Its facilities stretch from New Castle County through Sussex County.

The Sprinturf agreement adds another component.

Sprinturf entered into a multiyear agreement with BPG Sports to become the naming-rights partner for the New Castle complex and the official turf partner across BPG Sports’ portfolio.

Stephen Cavalier, senior vice president and general manager of BPG Sports, said the company had previously used Sprinturf products and viewed the broader partnership as a way to maintain consistent standards across its facilities.

Kirkwood soccer remains

For families who have spent years playing recreational soccer at Kirkwood, perhaps the most important part of the announcement is what is not changing.

The Kirkwood recreational soccer program is expected to remain at the complex.

Cavalier said during the unveiling that the existing Kirkwood Soccer Complex recreational league will continue to have a home at the facility.

Cavalier also has personal ties to Kirkwood, having played youth soccer at the complex himself.

But youth sports have changed significantly since Kirkwood opened more than three decades ago.

Travel sports, rankings and increasingly large regional tournaments have created greater demand for facilities that can host multiple games regardless of weather and continue competition into the evening.

“It has moved into a more competitive format,” Cavalier said during Thursday’s event. “These large-scale events are really what drive tournaments, and rankings, and things like that. Having facilities like this, we can host them.”

Sprinturf says the New Castle facility attracts more than 1.5 million visitors annually and hosts 15 large-scale tournaments each year, in addition to recreational programs, travel clubs, adult leagues and school teams. Those attendance figures come from the company and have not been independently verified.

A new experience for families

Families returning to the complex will notice more than artificial turf.

Two former fields were removed to make room for expanded parking as the facility prepares for larger events.

Tournament parking also represents a change for users. BPG Sports has introduced paid parking through ParkMobile, with parking enforcement at the site during applicable events.

Those changes illustrate the balancing act facing the revamped facility: maintaining Kirkwood’s traditional role as a community sports complex while developing the infrastructure needed to compete for larger tournaments.

More sports-tourism investment coming

The strategy is unlikely to end at Kirkwood.

Delaware Tourism Director Jessica Welch said during Thursday’s event that officials are particularly interested in indoor sports facilities that can attract visitors during months when outdoor tournaments are less practical.

“We want people to come here in January, February, and March, in those off-season, shoulder-season months,” Welch said. “So the indoor facilities are the ones that we are looking at.”

That could make the Kirkwood transformation an early chapter in a much larger Delaware sports-tourism buildout.

For local soccer families, however, the change is more immediate.

The Kirkwood name may no longer be on the entrance, but soccer will continue to be played on River Road — now on a complex designed to bring considerably more of the sports world to Delaware.

To Go Box

• What: Sprinturf Performance Park at Kirkwood
• Where: 1220 River Road, New Castle, DE 19720
• Facility: 65-acre multisport complex with 12 outdoor fields and an indoor turf arena
• Sports: Soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and other field sports
• Formerly known as: Kirkwood Sports Complex
• More information: SprinturfPerformancePark.com

The medical equipment supplier's motorized beds can overheat and cause fires, regulators said in an urgent alert to consumers.

An ad airing in the New Hampshire Senate race tells viewers that Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas is “out for himself,” using cherry-picked figures to falsely claim that his net worth has skyrocketed while in office.

The ad also suggests that he voted for certain bills to benefit his husband, a former Amazon lobbyist who now works for Uber. But the ad misrepresents Pappas’ position on one of those measures, and omits key context on the others.

Pappas, who has served in the House since 2019, is running against Republican John E. Sununu, a former U.S. senator from one of the state’s most prominent political families. The Cook Political Report rates the race as leaning Democratic; it was a toss-up as early as last month.

The ad comes from the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The group has spent more than $700,000 on the ad since it began airing on broadcast and streaming platforms Oct. 24, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.

“What has Chris Pappas done for himself?” the ad’s narrator intones. “Married an Amazon lobbyist after backing bills Amazon lobbied on. His spouse got a fancy job at a big tech company that Pappas voted to make harder to sue. Now Pappas’s net worth is up by upwards of 1,000%.” 

The ad concludes by saying, “Chris Pappas: out for himself, not you.”

Pappas began dating Vann Bentley in spring 2019, his campaign told PolitiFact, and they married in 2023. Bentley was a registered lobbyist for Amazon before leaving the company later in 2019. He now works on privacy and cybersecurity policy for Uber and is no longer registered as a lobbyist. 

Nothing in the House’s ethics rules prohibits a lawmaker from dating or marrying a lobbyist, or requires a lawmaker to formally disclose such a relationship. However, if a lawmaker’s spouse works as a lobbyist, the spouse is prohibited from lobbying the lawmaker or the lawmaker’s staff. 

Pappas’ relationship with Bentley has been the subject of multiple Republican attack ads this cycle accusing him of conflicts of interest. Many of them, including the recent Senate Leadership Fund ad, display a headline from a conservative news outlet claiming Pappas “lied” about the relationship during a debate six years ago. 

PolitiFact looked into that claim and rated it “mostly false,” writing that the exchange at issue was “not a clear case of Pappas denying the relationship.” The Pappas campaign confirmed the relationship to the New Hampshire Union Leader the day after the debate.

We’ll examine several other claims the ad makes about Pappas’ voting record and wealth:

• The ad falsely claims Pappas’ net worth shot up by 1,000% while in office, a figure we could only replicate with misleading math. Financial disclosure forms show the increase in his net worth was much more modest, and mostly due to listing his husband’s assets on more recent disclosure forms.
  
• The ad misleadingly claims that Pappas “voted to make [it] harder to sue” his husband’s company, a reference to a provision that would limit liability for ride-hailing companies like Uber when passengers are assaulted or otherwise harmed by drivers. Pappas voted to advance a major transportation bill that included that provision — but he voted against the provision itself, and has called for it to be removed from the final bill.
  
• The ad cites seven bills that Pappas voted for in 2019 and that Amazon also lobbied on. This is missing important context. Four of the bills were must-pass spending or authorization bills, and the other three aligned with Pappas’ previously stated positions on issues.

We reached out to the Senate Leadership Fund with several questions about the ad, but haven’t heard back. 

Misleading Math

The Senate Leadership Fund ad claims Pappas got rich while in office, his net worth surging “by upwards of 1,000%.” On screen, it says his net worth went from “as low as” negative $669,974 in 2018 to over $6 million in 2025.

But the ad is distorting the numbers to create a false impression of Pappas’ finances.

Members of Congress report their assets and liabilities in ranges, not exact numbers. Pappas’ 2018 financial disclosure form lists assets totaling around $1.3 million to $6 million, with liabilities of about $900,000 to $2 million. His 2025 form lists assets worth about $1.8 million to $7.1 million, with liabilities of about $1 million to $2.2 million. 

In other words, a much more modest increase than the ad claims. And most of that increase reflects the fact that Pappas’ 2025 financial disclosure — unlike in 2018 — also lists his spouse’s assets, which include stock in Uber and Amazon and a 401(k). Without those, Pappas’ assets would have been worth about $1.4 million to $6.3 million in 2025, not far off from what he owned as a freshman lawmaker. 

Most of Pappas’ wealth, in both years, comes from the same asset: his part ownership of The Puritan Backroom, the well-known New Hampshire restaurant his family has run for decades, which he valued at $1 million to $5 million in both 2018 and 2025. The rest is a mix of bank accounts, real estate and retirement funds. 

So how does the ad manage to claim that Pappas went from nearly $700,000 in the red to a multimillionaire over the span of his time in Congress? There are no citations for the ad’s figures, but cherry-picking Pappas’ financial disclosure forms is the only way to get those numbers.

For 2018, subtracting the high-end estimate of his liabilities ($2 million) from the low-end estimate of his assets ($1,330,026) results in the ad’s figure of negative $669,974. For 2025, it’s the reverse: subtracting the low-end estimate of his liabilities ($1,015,006) from the high-end estimate of his assets ($7,095,000) is what produces the $6,079,994 figure seen in the ad.

The resulting figures are meaningless, of course. One could just as easily flip the math around and claim Pappas’ net worth fell by millions of dollars during his time in Congress.

Limiting Liability for Ride-Hailing Apps

The ad says Pappas’ “spouse got a fancy job at a big tech company that Pappas voted to make harder to sue,” referring to Uber. 

That attack is echoed in a separate ad from an affiliated group, One Nation, which focuses entirely on that vote. 

“Congressman Chris Pappas voted to advance legislation to strip sexual assault victims of the right to sue ride-hailing companies, and Congressman Pappas’s husband works for one of those same companies,” the One Nation ad’s narrator says. “Corrupt conflicts of interest shouldn’t influence public policy.”

But these attacks are misleading.

Uber is facing thousands of lawsuits from passengers accusing the company of negligence and seeking to hold it liable for alleged sexual assaults and sexual misconduct by drivers. 

In May, during markup of a major transportation-funding bill, Republican Rep. Vince Fong proposed an amendment that would shield ride-hailing apps from liability for harm caused by their drivers unless the company was “grossly negligent” — a higher standard than ordinary negligence — or committed a crime. 

The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure approved the amendment by a 35-30 vote, with nearly all Republicans voting yes and nearly all Democrats voting no. Pappas was among those voting no.

Pappas subsequently voted to advance the larger bill out of committee — as did nearly every other committee member, in a bipartisan vote of 62-2. The bill, known as the BUILD America 250 Act, contains hundreds of other provisions, including hundreds of billions of dollars for highways, bridges and other surface transportation projects over the next five years. 

Pappas has continued to call for the liability-shield amendment to be stripped from the final bill. In June, he was one of more than 100 Democratic lawmakers who signed a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson urging that the provision be removed from what the letter called a “critical” transportation bill.

“Survivors deserve the right to hold companies accountable when corporate failures contribute to preventable harm,” the letter states. Pappas signed on to a similar letter, which included a handful of Republicans, in July. The bill has not yet come up for a final vote in the House.

Asked about Pappas’ vote to advance the bill, his campaign told us the BUILD America 250 Act has broad bipartisan support and backing from a wide range of stakeholders.

The campaign also pointed to his vote in 2022 for the Stop Sexual Assault and Harassment in Transportation Act, which would have required ride-hailing companies and other passenger transportation carriers to develop formal policies around sexual assault and harassment, and report data on such incidents to the government.

We reached out to One Nation about its portrayal of the vote, and haven’t heard back.

Votes on Other Bills

The SLF PAC ad also accuses Pappas of “backing bills Amazon lobbied on” while his now-husband was still a lobbyist for the company. As support, it cites votes on seven bills from 2019. 

It’s true that Amazon lobbied on those bills. But the ad omits the full context of those measures. 

Two of the bills were the annual defense and intelligence authorization acts, sprawling pieces of legislation that set defense and intelligence policy and authorize the government’s activities in those areas every fiscal year. Another two were major appropriations acts providing funding for various government departments. 

Each of those bills runs to hundreds or thousands of pages, and includes numerous provisions unrelated to the specific issues Amazon was lobbying on. 

The other three votes cited in the ad aligned with Pappas’ previously stated views on the minimum wage, LGBTQ rights and immigration. 

One bill would have raised the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Pappas was on record supporting a higher minimum wage during his 2018 campaign for Congress, before he and Bentley began dating. 

Another, the Equality Act, would have barred discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Pappas, who would be the first openly gay man elected to the U.S. Senate, has advocated LGBTQ rights measures since his time as a state legislator two decades ago, and his 2018 platform specifically called for passing the Equality Act.

The third bill was the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would have removed per-country caps on employment-based visas. Those caps have led to large backlogs for immigrants from India and China. The measure had strong bipartisan backing, clearing the House on a 365-65 vote and the Senate by unanimous consent. (It never became law because the two chambers didn’t reconcile their versions in time.)

We couldn’t find any record of Pappas addressing that specific policy before his election to the House. But he spoke generally during the 2018 campaign about his support for comprehensive immigration reform, including “reforming the visa process” to bring in more seasonal workers. 

We asked Senate Leadership Fund if it had any evidence that Pappas’ votes were influenced by his partner’s position and didn’t get a response. Pappas’ campaign referred us to the PolitiFact article, which quotes a legal expert who said the circumstances would not have required Pappas to recuse himself from those votes.

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 NH Ad Distorts the Facts in Claiming Pappas Grew Rich in Office appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Independent outlet, whose former editor Dmitry Muratov won Nobel prize, cites intolerable pressure from authorities

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent media outlets, has announced it will permanently close next month. The newspaper, whose former editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, cited intolerable pressure, including being stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish.

“This is not just our own story; it is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed,” wrote its editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, on the newspaper’s website.

Guardian columnist, senior economics commentator and host of the new Radical Thinking podcast Aditya Chakrabortty is answering your questions on the big ideas around economics, society and democracy, and his new podcast

Send your questions to conversations@theguardian.com or join the discussion on Friday from 8am

thegreatfatsby asks: Do you think the fact that Gabriel Zucman, who is a recognised authority on wealth tax is given more respect, time and attention by the mainstream media than Gary Stevenson, who has worked eloquently and tirelessly to spread the debate about the terrible consequences of inequality and whose ideas and analysis are almost identical is because of our cultural fixation on class prejudice?

Aditya says: I’ve followed Gabriel Zucman (and Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty) for a long time, and find his work rigorous and thought provoking. I don’t always agree, but I appreciate their acceptance that taxes on wealth are part of the fight against ever-increasing inequality.

I think Gary Stevenson is eloquent and compelling and is fighting a good fight. His book tells a story very well. But I don’t accept the insistence on a ‘wealth tax’ (as opposed to taxes on wealth) as being the only way we fight everything from inequality to the far right. We have to look at workers’ rights, housing, public ownership, greater democracy in economics and politics as well.

In the age of algorithm, simple, strong messages cut through. But the truth is often more complex.

Aditya says: What a nice question, Marija. I try to read a lot and write a diary. Unfortunately, I have the handwriting of a GP so I can’t read old entries. The other thing is I try to shirk my mobile phone.

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

Peunte begins by paying tribute to all affected by the incident.

He says that “at present, evidence points to a failure within Adif’s command and control centre,” but adds that investigators are still looking “to clarify what exactly happened.” He says he still has confidence in the system.

Daniel Jones held on $3m bail after studio art chair Pipo Nguyen-Duy and Tran Thi Phong found dead at home

Oberlin College was shaken on Friday after an award-winning professor of photography who had worked at the Ohio liberal arts college for nearly 30 years was found shot and killed on Wednesday, officials said.

Pipo Nguyen-Duy, 64, and his wife, Tran Thi Phong, 56, were found shot to death in their home.

UPDATE 10/30/26: Binance has temporarily suspended customer withdrawals after suffering what investigators say is the biggest crypto hack in history. According to Binance CEO Yi He, the company estimates roughly $6.3 billion in funds were impacted, with roughly $3 billion in assets frozen on-chain so far. Rest assured, "your money is safe, and we're covering every loss," said co-CEO Richard Teng in a LinkedIn post. "This was a complex attack," said Teng. "The attacker also used a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and tracers, making it more difficult for us to trace." From a report: Teng said the incident was not carried out by one person. While the initial investigation indicated the involvement of a compromised laptop, further digging revealed additional points of breach. [...] Blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Elliptic have linked the theft to North Korean hackers, with TRM attributing it "with high confidence" to a group known as TraderTraitor, the same group responsible for last year's Bybit hack. Elliptic estimated Friday that about 44% of the stolen assets have been frozen, with stablecoins accounting for nearly all of those funds. The firm estimated that attackers still controlled over $3 billion in crypto that token issuers cannot directly freeze. The hackers appear to have compromised Binance's wallet-signing infrastructure, allowing them to authorize transactions that drained billions of dollars in cryptocurrency across multiple blockchains, according to the firms. Binance, in its preliminary stage, has conducted an investigation into the hack, which suggests the incident may have begun with a compromised engineer's laptop. The exchange added that it has found no evidence that wallet passwords were leaked. Below is the original story from yesterday, Oct. 29th. Binance is investigating a potential hack after more than $2 billion in crypto was drained from one of its wallets into a new external account, with Blockaid estimating nearly $3.3 billion was moved. "Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating," said Binance on X. "User funds are safe," said Binance founder CZ. "It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m). I don't manage Binance anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered." At around the same time, crypto-based prediction market Polymarket reported its own security incident that wiped out around $2.7 million in user funds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The prime minister has suggested that he wants a public debate on the UK’s partnership with the EU.

Downing Street has paid tribute to Patrick Stewart following the actor’s death. At the daily lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson gave a comment that was a bit more extensive than the usual No 10 contribution when a great British celebrity dies. The spokesperson said that was because Andy Burnham feels strongly about the importance of actors.

The spokesperson said:

The prime minister was very sad to hear of the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart.

As a former culture secretary he knows how much Britain’s greatest actors mean to the country, and Sir Patrick was one of the very best.

Just a reminder that when it comes to Wales, we are not comparing like with like. The term ‘region’ in an English context typically refers to an area covering between 1.5 and 3 million people. In Wales, regions cover much less dense areas. The Swansea Bay city region captures some 700,000 people, and similarly North Wales around 690,000 people. In Mid-Wales sheep outnumber people by 7:1. Only the Cardiff city region is comparable to English tiers, and even then at the lower end: around 1.5 million people.

Transposing an English mayoral worldview onto a very different political geography just doesn’t work. Wales may be a similar population size to the PM’s old manor but that’s where the parallel ends.

Andy Burnham talks about the regions of England and Wales interchangeably but the role the new prime minister champions for metro mayors is, in many respects, already performed by the Welsh government. Powers over skills, employment support, economic development, housing investment and major spending programmes sit at an all-Wales strategic level (covering a similar population size to Greater Manchester.)

His argument for England is that powers should flow from Westminster to city regions because they operate at an economically meaningful scale. Yet when the PM turns to Wales, he seems to suggest that powers already devolved to Cardiff Bay should be dispersed further down the system.

But notably he is not calling on his successor as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Bev Craig, to fragment the powers of the Greater Manchester combined authority and redistribute them amongst its ten constituent councils. On the contrary, the whole logic of the Greater Manchester model rests on concentrating strategic authority at a regional level.

Yet the implication of his comments is that Wales should move in the opposite direction.

The president cancelled the events in favor of tele-rallies, as Republicans face a fight to retain control of Congress

Donald Trump cancelled, and then promptly uncancelled, two in-person rallies in Kansas and Iowa this weekend as polls suggest US midterm election races in the previous Republican strongholds could go down to the wire.

On Thursday, just five days before election day, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced the president would no longer host the Kansas and Iowa rallies and instead participate in “a large number of tele-rallies”. The RNC claimed it felt it was in a “strong position” in Kansas and Iowa.

Bose’s $99 Noise Canceling Wired Earbuds have been hard to get after earning a CNET Editors’ Choice award.

The incident at Binance could be the biggest theft of any kind in history. We answer some key questions

• North Korean group blamed for $6.3bn crypto heist

• Tell us: have you been affected?

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a $6.3bn heist that, according to experts, is likely to be the work of North Korea.

This is not the first time a crypto market has been targeted by hackers, and the rogue state has a track record of this type of theft. Here we answer some key questions about what’s happened:

Donald Trump attacked the appearance of a Reuters reporter and called him 'disgusting' after the reporter asked a question about the president's cancellation of two upcoming campaign events. A day later, Trump rescheduled the canceled rallies in Kansas and Iowa.

• Trump lashes out at Reuters reporter who asked why he canceled rally in Kansas

Business is booming for two biggest US oil companies, with both benefiting from higher prices and record production

ExxonMobil and Chevron both reported better than expected quarterly results on Friday as the oil majors benefited from higher prices and record production.

The boon for oil companies has simultaneously been a major pain point for consumers, who say the higher cost of living, especially gas prices, will affect how they vote in the upcoming midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

Ahead of next week’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.

Trump has empowered his loyalists to try to transform the voting process. He launched an unprecedented — and largely unsuccessful — effort to find noncitizen voters. And he tried to restrict mail-in voting.

Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting.

1. The Trump administration has sought greater federal control over elections.

In April, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield reported on Trump’s efforts to “take over” the midterm elections, detailing how the administration has discarded or diminished endeavors across the federal government to protect the voting process or block foreign interference. Those efforts have included cutting staff on election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies and finding ways to exert greater federal control over voting. 

Our reporting led by Peter Elkind revealed that the Trump administration harnessed Homeland Security Investigations’ personnel, technology and legal authority to try to back up Trump’s unproven claim that illegal voting by noncitizens is tilting elections toward Democrats. Administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results. Our analysis of Justice Department data found, as of May, 41 alleged noncitizens were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. Earlier this month, CBS reported 156 people have been charged since the beginning of the second Trump administration.

As part of that effort, the Justice Department has demanded states turn over unredacted voter rolls, which contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Since September 2025, the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the confidential data. Wary of federal overreach, state officials — including some Republicans — have fought back, and so far every DOJ lawsuit that’s been decided by a federal judge has been dismissed. (The Trump administration has appealed most of its losses to federal appeals courts and has said it will consider taking its fight to the Supreme Court. A Justice Department spokesperson said its “attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith.”)

In a March executive order, Trump instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create new regulations for mail voting. The rules would have put the Postal Service in the unprecedented role of deciding whether to send or deny the delivery of voters’ mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court in September blocked the rules, at least until after November.

The Trump administration has said its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so. Spokespeople for the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

2. Trump has pushed out career officials — and is coordinating with a conservative grassroots organization to transform elections.

At least 75 nonpartisan career officials who’d held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety have been fired or left the government.

Two dozen Trump appointees — including many from the election-denial movement — have been hired. Ahead of the midterms, current and former government officials and election security experts have expressed concerns that once-fringe actors who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections are now in positions to control the narrative around the voting process. (A DHS spokesperson said it hires “experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”)

At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who leads Election Integrity Network, a grassroots conservative group focused on transforming America’s voting system. This month, Clark profiled Mitchell — and detailed how, despite not holding a formal role in the White House, she’s played a key role in shaping the Trump administration’s elections agenda. The White House has appointed her associates to help hunt for noncitizen voters and investigate accusations of voting fraud in 2020. (Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica, but wrote in an email: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”)

Mitchell, who played a role in helping Trump challenge his loss in the 2020 presidential election, has been leading efforts to pass state and federal iterations of the SAVE Act. The 2026 version of the bill, known as the SAVE America Act, would require voters nationwide to provide proof of citizenship to register and present a photo ID to vote, and would compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, but it has been blocked in the Senate. 

In July, Trump also pushed out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, a four-member board designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats that sets standards for state voting systems. (At the time, a White House official wouldn’t confirm the moves but said the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”)

3. Trump officials asked a cybersecurity agency to secretly acquire a voting machine — and hack it.

A few months into Trump’s second term, political appointees at DHS asked its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure a voting machine, hack it and report the findings so they could be given to the White House, two former administration officials with knowledge of the request told Clark and Andy Mannix.

CISA employees told the political appointees their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. (One of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the White House was to dismantle the agency’s election security work.)

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems. Since CISA became an agency in 2018, it has come to provide crucial support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

But some state election officials said CISA provided them with little help as they planned for the 2026 midterms. And other state authorities told Clark and Mannix that they no longer trusted the agency and feared it had been compromised by the Trump administration. (A DHS spokesperson told us in April the “claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”)

DHS did not respond to questions for our October investigation, but a DHS spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” A White House spokesperson declined an interview request but said, “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.” 

4. The White House floated an idea that would’ve shut down virtually all mail-in voting.

The White House initially proposed a change for the Postal Service that would’ve been even more disruptive than the rule the Supreme Court rejected in September.

As Fifield and Elkind reported, the Trump administration suggested all ballots be delivered through certified mail, meaning voters would need to be home to sign for delivery of their ballots. The Trump administration dropped this plan after the USPS said it would be too difficult to execute. It instead proceeded with the executive order that would’ve forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence.

The Supreme Court’s order in September means that voting by mail can proceed as planned for the midterms, with states left to decide the rules for mail-in ballots.

5. The Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have led to delays and more rejected ballots in rural areas.

Amid the increased attention on the Postal Service’s role in elections, a ProPublica analysis found that delays resulting from the agency’s cost-cutting measures in recent years have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas.

The Postal Service has consolidated processing of first-class mail into regional hubs, and the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from those processing plants. The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and pushed back postmarking, an official mark confirming an envelope has been received by the Postal Service.

Across five states where the best data was available — Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon — the delays during this year’s primary elections have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024.

Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts in place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout.

The post Trump Has Tried to Exert More Control Over Elections. Here Are the Key Findings From Our Reporting. appeared first on ProPublica.

A meteorite found in the Sahara Desert has been determined to be 4.1 billion years old and from Mars.

1.3.1-beta2 is out.

I’ve found the bug which I believe was causing that weird nosehunting on that small percentage of boards, it’s now fixed. Will try to make the stable ASAP.

Archaeologists uncover jewellery, cosmetics and coins in cabinet sealed since eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79

Fragments of personal objects, from makeup tools and a perfume bottle to coins and a child’s necklace, have been found tucked away in a wooden wardrobe sealed off for almost 2,000 years in the ruins of Pompeii.

The artifacts provide an intimate glimpse of daily life in the ancient Roman city before it was devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The wardrobe was discovered in a room of a home on Via dell’Abbondanza, which was one of the most bustling streets in Pompeii.

Simon Richardson knew headteacher Michael Mullins was under his 4×4 as he kept driving in Manchester, jury heard

A motorist who drove through give-way markings, collided with a cyclist and then dragged him, trapped under his car, for more than a mile has been found guilty of murder.

Simon Richardson, 35, crashed into headteacher Michael Mullins, 56, who was cycling home from work at Stretford grammar school, Greater Manchester, on the evening of 20 April. Mullins hit the bonnet and windscreen of Richardson’s Volvo XC90 and then went under the car, becoming entangled in the suspension.

It’s a bad week to own crypto.

The post Kansas Senator Sued Over Allegedly Illegal 18% Interest Charges on Patients’ Medical Debt appeared first on News Facts Network.

UK government guidance says we should be ready for the unexpected, but what’s actually helpful to have at home? We ask the specialists

• The best power banks – tested

How prepared are you for an emergency? Do you have a few extra tins of beans in the cupboard, or a full-on preppers’ kit in the cellar? While no one likes to think about worst-case scenarios, you can’t have failed to notice the growing noise around being sensibly, practically ready for floods, power cuts, cyber-attacks and other events.

The government launched its Be Ready campaign in October with guidance on how to prepare for emergencies, including a list of suggested items to have at home.

Ghost hunting has changed in recent years due to AI chatbots, and paranormal enthusiasts are concerned

Ghost hunting is a tech-heavy pursuit. When Amy Waine and Jarrad Cutting investigate haunted locations, they’re loaded up with software of their own design, such as an app that assigns signals from a phone’s sensors to different words in a database. In the age of ChatGPT, the ghost-hunting pair is probing the world of AI. They describe one of their latest inventions, an app called GhostTube Seer, as “the world’s first AI Ghost Hunting tool”.

In the hands of paranormal investigators, scientific tools like EMF meters (used to detect electromagnetic fields) are repurposed to identify changes and anomalies that they believe indicate supernatural activity. Seer is, in many ways, simply an expansion of that practice, another way to scan an empty room and believe that something may be there. The app, which requires a paid monthly subscription, has more than 1m downloads, according to its Google Play store listing.

But for others in the ghost hunting world, AI is an unwelcome presence. Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI-generated ghost stories and images of the supernatural have flooded online spaces, so much so that popular forums like the r/Nosleep subreddit, meant for scary stories, have implemented a strict policy against AI-generated material.

ALDEN GATES
Staff Reporter

Whether it’s waiting for a text that never comes, swiping on Tinder for another hookup or simply saving one more Jacob Elordi edit to your favorites folder, everyone chases a certain hunger for love. But recently, it seems the tendency to yearn, to desire, has become an emotion in which young adults are entirely too skeptical. 

Despite it being a sentiment so profound in our generation’s growth, we are told to stop longing for something impossible, as it distracts us from reality. Memes mock the tragedy of college love affairs, while parents tell us to save ourselves from unwanted disappointments. Teenagers’ most sincere emotions have become something embarrassing, as we fear the possibility of failure that comes with the desire for something we believe to be unattainable. 

Across various media, we have been shown how pining affects one’s view of love: Jo’s unread letter to Laurie in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” the unsung affection Celine and Jesse proved for one another in “Before Sunrise,” and even Marianne’s longing for Connell in Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.” 

The characters who let themselves feel and act on their desires in the first place were the ones most hurt by their own actions. This feeling lives at the center of every great, or not-so-great, love story. 

Love and heartbreak, however, are the roots of everything around us. Songs, prayers, stories and art all stem from the desire to understand and to love something near to us, so why not embrace it? 

The messy, embarrassing, clumsy parts of desire that we have come to hate within ourselves are some of the most natural and necessary repercussions of living life to its fullest. We have spent decades romanticizing people’s desire to love loudly and profoundly, but now, people seem to find ease in being alone rather than jeopardizing their pride. 

I have come to understand that this new wave of fearing emotional connection comes from our generation’s settling for the “automation” of relationships. A swipe right defines attraction, and a generic pickup line can solidify a date. The simplicity of the cycle is all too addicting and often leaves emotional ties on the back burner. 

When every defining part of someone is laid out on a table, the understanding of one another happens so suddenly that there is a disconnect in what is naturally supposed to build a relationship. It is almost like reading the last page of a book before even buying it.

When the intention behind love is filtered through systems that lack connection, we prioritize convenience over what is meant to be discovered. A “slow-burn,” if you will.  

The small revelations of getting to know someone and understanding their intentions through their identity are reduced to a series of automated decisions that we often do not think twice about. We lose the space where curiosity deepens our care and where the effort to understand is buried in a craving for ease. 

In the lack of space to learn, there is often a loss of motivation to build on a relationship’s depth as well. Imagination is lost because most advancements are transactional, and everything is defined as early as possible. However, where one another’s understanding ends, our imagination often begins, provoking invention and creative compassion. 

In response to this nuance, writer Sarah Ruhl recounts the love story of a doctor, Charles, as he falls in love with his patient, Ana. Their story echoes that of the eminent figure William Halsted, who invented gloves for Caroline Hampton after her hands were damaged through her work with antiseptics. 

Both men prove that desire has the ability to heal. The craving to help someone ignites love in the form of invention — an idea expressed by Charles professes in his love for Ana.  

“When I met Ana, I knew; I loved her to the point of invention,” Ruhl wrote in her play, “The Clean House.” 

Some may say we should learn a thing or two from Halsted, and even Charles, but I believe that inspiration is all we really need from their tales of love. When considered in its entirety, it becomes clear that yearning is necessary for much of what we crave in a relationship. 

Yearning brings love, and love brings invention, so what is life without a desire for such? A world, save the craving, might also be known as a world without tenderness, without actions exceeding necessity. No invention would be born with love in mind. There would be no art, no poetry. While it may be a world not entirely free of love, it redefines connection. A version of it that never fully comes to fruition because it never actually needs to. 

Alden Gates is a staff reporter at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at aldenrg@udel.edu.

An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a Wired article that explores the often-contentious process of nominating pages for deletion when their subjects fail to meet the encyclopedia's notability standards: What do you need to know -- need to know -- about Xavier Trudeau? The eldest son of former Canadian prime minister Justin, the teenage Trudeau has recently begun performing R&B under the mononym Xav. But, with all due respect to Xav, do those facts make him a person of note? Should you expect to be able to read about him on Wikipedia? What about Evanescence guitarist Tim McCord, or 2012 Yachtmaster of the Year Rainer Holtorff? All three have had a biography on Wikipedia; all three of those biographies were considered for deletion this year on the grounds that the subjects were not notable enough to warrant a biography at all. Every day, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Wikipedia biographies -- of child actors turned LA realtors, retired ambassadors, soccer players who have played less than 10 minutes of professional soccer -- are purged from the world's free encyclopedia. It's not as though Wikipedia, which hosts over 7 million articles in the English language, doesn't have the space. But Wikipedia has only so many volunteers to monitor its contents. To this day, Wikipedia editors are discovering hoaxes that have gone undetected for decades. The time it takes to verify the release dates of Xav's three singles is better spent -- the logic goes -- by asking whether the American Civil War officer Nathaniel Lyon really drank mustard during battle, as was claimed in his Wikipedia biography for 17 years. Wikipedia removed the mustard claim, not because it was proven wrong, but because there was no reliable evidence for it. "We're not really looking for what's true," Britta Gustafson, who has been editing Wikipedia since 2001, told me. "We're looking for what's verifiable." Wikipedia editors do not themselves decide that a person is not notable, only that there is a lack of reliable evidence to support the claim...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was an ambitious notion – now Californians will vote on a one-time 5% billionaire tax, and state’s super rich have pulled out all the stops in opposition

One year ago, the idea of a billionaire tax in California was still in its infancy.

It wasn’t yet one of the most contentious ballot measure fights in state history – pitting Democrats against Democrats, drawing national attention from political heavyweights, and netting hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley dollars to fight it. Back then, it was a bold and desperate answer to Donald Trump’s healthcare cuts.

Swedish climate academic says he has been ‘kept in the dark’ over Home Office decision to revoke his travel authorisation

The Swedish climate academic Andreas Malm has condemned a travel ban imposed on him by the UK government as a “drift into authoritarianism” amid criticism of the move.

Malm, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, said he had been “kept in the dark” by the UK’s immigration authorities over the reasons for his electronic travel authorisation (ETA) being revoked.

POLICE LOG – October 30, 2026

NEW CASTLE, DE — Delaware State Police have identified 30-year-old Elizabeth Ramirez Tellez of Wilmington as the woman who died following a two-vehicle crash Wednesday morning in New Castle.

The crash occurred October 28, 2026, at approximately 8:45 a.m. at the intersection of West Basin Road and Washington Avenue.

According to investigators, Ramirez Tellez was driving a Hyundai Elantra southbound on West Basin Road in the left-turn lane approaching Washington Avenue.

At the same time, a Chevrolet Tahoe driven by a 21-year-old man from New Castle was traveling northbound on West Basin Road in the right lane.

Police said both vehicles entered the intersection at the same time for reasons that remain under investigation.

The front of the Chevrolet Tahoe struck the passenger side of the Hyundai, causing the Hyundai to crash into a traffic signal pole.

Ramirez Tellez was transported to an area hospital, where she died from her injuries.

The driver of the Tahoe was also taken to an area hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

The roadway was closed for approximately four hours while investigators examined the crash scene and crews cleared the wreckage.

Delaware State Police have not released additional information about what caused the collision.

The Delaware State Police Troop 2 Collision Reconstruction Unit continues to investigate.

Anyone who witnessed the crash or has video footage of the collision is asked to contact Master Corporal R. Kunicki at 302-365-8417.

Information may also be provided through Delaware Crime Stoppers at 800-847-3333 or by sending a private Facebook message to Delaware State Police.

Activists call for people to make their anger known over poor public services including education and housing

• Europe live – latest updates

Street protests sweeping Europe are expected to spread to Germany and reignite in France on Saturday, with police mobilised to stop potential looting and rioting on the fringes of what organisers hope will be peaceful rallies.

Weeks of, at times violent, student demonstrations have rocked Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania and France, where activists on Halloween have again called for people to make their anger over the cost of living and deficient public services felt across the country.

Benjamin Netanyahu, facing a possible election ouster, has made a contentious claim that a foreign country meddled to boost voting by Israel's Arab minority.

Pike is recovering in isolation at the infirmary at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she's been held for decades.

Pike is facing death penalty for 1995 murder of classmate, despite surviving a botched execution last month

Christa Pike has marked a month since her failed execution by Tennessee and released a statement in which she laments the “incompetence” that has led to this moment, adding that despite ongoing healing she remains in constant physical pain and mental anguish.

In comments released by her legal team on Friday, the prisoner said that there had not been a moment since she was injected with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital that she had not been in pain. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said.

Pedro Sánchez vows to investigate crash that killed 69 people – and rebuild public confidence

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has admitted “trust in high-speed rail has been broken” after Wednesday’s train collision that killed at least 69 people, injured more than 100 and prompted a national debate on the safety of the country’s rail network.

Sánchez said Spain was “working tirelessly” to provide information as quickly as possible to the families of the victims – who include people from at least 23 different foreign countries – adding his government was committed to finding what had caused the country’s second deadly train collision this year.

Immigrants at Texas detention facility, protesting against harsh conditions, say they face threats of force-feeding

Members of Congress sent a scathing letter to federal immigration officials this week demanding answers about conditions inside a Texas immigration jail, as detained immigrants on a prolonged hunger strike claim officials are retaliating against them and threatening them with force-feeding.

A group of seven congressional Democrats sent the letter earlier this week to Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, and David Venturella, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director, protesting about the treatment of hunger strikers.

Brazilian media ridicule defeated candidate over ‘shameful’ absconsion to US and bizarre letter with wrong coat of arms

Flávio Bolsonaro had hoped that by Sunday night people would be calling him the next president of Brazil.

Instead, the far-right politician’s decision to flee to the US after losing the election and – for 58 minutes – to declare himself “Brazil’s true president-elect”, has made him a laughing stock, with Brazilian newspapers and commentators raining a barrage of scornful adjectives down on the conquered candidate.

Congress must act to ensure that families are able to heat their homes before the start of the season

Heating oil may be the clearest warning yet of how the war in Iran is deepening the US’s energy affordability crisis. Families who heat their homes with oil are facing bills that could be 50% higher this winter, adding nearly $900 to the cost of keeping their homes warm. These families were already struggling before the war began.

As the Guardian recently reported, research by my organization found that electricity shutoffs in 10 states had increased 28% over the past two years. Millions of Americans were already falling behind on their utility bills, forced to choose between paying for energy, food, medicine and rent. Now they face another round of increases in gasoline, electricity and home heating costs.

In the placid LA suburb of Burbank, residents spend months – and thousands of dollars – turning their homes into Disney-style attractions. Why does it go so hard for Halloween – and is it becoming too popular for its own good?

Every night, starting in mid-September, Diego Linares puts on a serial killer costume and stands in his front yard for three hours. The 40-year-old alternates outfits: some nights he’s Michael Myers, the masked murderer from the Halloween films. Other nights he’s Jason Voorhees, from the Friday the 13th franchise.

His family’s modest suburban yard in Burbank, California, has been transformed into a slasher movie set. Fake mist leaks out of the door of a cabin labeled “Crystal Lake”. Jack-o-lanterns, monsters, corpses and illuminated gravestones jostle for space across the ground. From the roof above the front door, a giant skeleton blinks its digital eyes.

Scraping copyrighted material from internet could ‘potentially’ amount to acquisition of property by government, Anne Twomey says

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Altering copyright law to allow AI companies to scrape music, books and journalism could trigger a constitutional breach, Coalition senators and the recording industry have warned, as they raise new fears it could open Australia to massive legal action and compensation claims from rights holders worldwide.

The attorney general’s department admitted it was “extremely alive” to the issue, and Australia’s leading constitutional expert, Anne Twomey, agreed there was “potentially” a concern – depending how legislation was drafted – that granting AI companies permission to scrape copyrighted material from the internet could amount to an acquisition of property by the government.

We’re folding Apple’s iPhone Duo over and over — 900 times an hour — to test the durability of its hinge.

Flight instructor, 22, and pilot, 38, among other fatalities after mid-air collision occurs near small airport

Three people have been killed after two helicopters collided in mid-air near a small airport in Oregon on Thursday, authorities have confirmed.

The Yamhill county sheriff’s office said on Thursday that it received reports at about 2.10pm local time about an aircraft incident involving two helicopters that had crashed south-east of McMinnville, near McMinnville municipal airport.

Many standard measures of economic health are strong, but voters in both parties are increasingly pessimistic.

A court has ordered Allegheny County’s first full reassessment since 2012. A finance scholar explains how assessed values and millage rates add up to your tax bill.

Most parents of young children today haven’t experienced the devastating childhood diseases that used to be common before vaccines were developed.

President Trump has overseen a steep decline in the number of women serving in senior U.S. diplomatic and national security posts, according to a new report by Democrats.

IISS study questions overreliance on American support and ‘overdependence on expensive, high-end systems’

Gulf states are going to have to reconfigure their trillion-dollar defences given the damage inflicted on their economies and the questionable continued value of US bases in the face of Iranian attack, according to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The report says that in the weeks before the 8 April ceasefire, 12 regional states, overwhelmingly in the Gulf, faced 4,670 Iranian one-way attack drones and more than 1,400 ballistic missiles. Nearly half were aimed at the United Arab Emirates. Although the vast majority were repelled, one estimate of the damage to energy infrastructure cited by the report is put as high as $58bn (£43bn).

• Green Bay RB claims gesture was an ode to gospel song

• Jacobs pleaded no contest to battery charges last month

Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs says he was paying homage to a gospel song rather than making light of his recent arrest when he briefly had his hands behind his back while celebrating a touchdown Thursday night.

This was Jacobs’s second game of the season after coming off the commissioner’s exempt list. He was placed on that list after charges were filed against him in August stemming from a May altercation with his then-girlfriend during which she said he threw her to the ground.

Campaigns are experimenting with AI texting to hear from more voters than before — and sometimes, to persuade them.

No one likes clunky TV interfaces or their activity being tracked, but using AI isn’t how to avoid it. There’s an easier way.

There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 in the Senate and 39 governorships up for grabs in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Jonathan Freedland is joined by Carrie Dann, of the Cook Political Report, to run through some of the races to watch before the final weekend of campaigning

Halloween planning gets tricky when the table needs more than candy. These 7 treats cover decorated cookies, spider eggs, pumpkin soup, scones, carrot hummus, and candy bark for a mix of sweet and hearty bites.The post 7 Halloween treats that…

Voters are feeling the pinch of Trump’s anti-climate agenda as energy costs rise, but a shakeup in Congress could shift things

If the polls can be believed, the US could see a blue wave in the midterms, giving Democrats a chance to take back the House and Senate, and gaining up to four governor’s seats.

These wins could give Democrats new power to resist Donald Trump’s anti-climate agenda, and to push forward climate policies at the state level. But if Republicans maintain power, it could further embolden Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda and leave intact his administration’s latitude to continue dismantling regulatory measures his critics say protect public health and the planet.

Halloween weekend crowds can make dinner out a hassle. These 17 copycat recipes bring familiar restaurant-style picks home, from chicken tenders and burgers to noodles, rice, pizza, and cheesy wraps.The post 17 copycat recipes for skipping the packed restaurants on…

Assassins killed Carlos Manzo in the city of Uruapan last November during Day of the Dead celebrations, in a case that ignited fury across Mexico.

Forums for discussion of feminist and LGBTQ+ views face growing intolerance from Chinese state, say experts

Beijing’s annual independent queer film festival has been cancelled after what is understood to have been a campaign of sustained harassment from authorities.

Beijing Queer film festival, which was due to begin on Friday in China’s capital, is one of the country’s oldest independent film festivals.

The MV Odyssey was billed as a continuous around-the-world cruise when it launched in October 2024. It ended abruptly in Cambodia.

Israel in deadlock: What next for a divided country? Audio sseth.drupal@c… 30 October 2026

In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss the outcome of Israel’s election.

Israel faces weeks of political horse-trading after the most pivotal election in the country’s history delivered no clear result. Neither victorious nor vanquished, Benjamin Netanyahu is still prime minister and lives to attempt another coalition negotiation – and perhaps launch further strikes on Iran to shore up his interim power. Arab parties have secured a record number of seats, but the question remains whether opposition Jewish parties will enter a coalition with them.

Will anyone do a deal with Netanyahu? What does it all mean in a deeply polarized society riven by settler violence, personality-centred politics and with a seemingly permanent security emergency?

To examine the election results and what they mean for Israel’s future, Bronwen Maddox is joined by The Economist’s Israel editor Anshel Pfeffer, plus Zizette Darkazally and Yossi Mekelberg from Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

Can Florida’s continuity trump the transfer portal? Will JuJu Watkins pick up where she left off? And who will survive an expanded March Madness? Our writers weigh in

Lots of stuff. The return of JuJu Watkins at USC after her 19-month injury layoff, the debut of Tyran Stokes at Kansas, the potential turnaround of the Big East on the men’s side, and the stacked ACC on the women’s side. Ella Brockway

Key contest between incumbent Republican Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson will gauge how voters feel about Trump 2.0 and rising costs

Christian LaMontagne has started slowing his lobster boat down.

The 27-year-old fisher spends longer on the water when out hauling traps in Casco Bay, but the trade-off helps him save fuel at a time when costs have surged. Before the US war with Iran began in late February, filling his tank cost about $350 a week. Now it’s doubled to nearly $700.

Parents are opting for a second shot of MMR vaccine sooner, which aligns with guidance in Germany, the UK and France

Measles cases are accelerating in the US, with twice as many confirmed cases as last year, and more parents are opting for earlier vaccination – especially with the second dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which can be given as soon as four weeks after the first.

Giving the second shot soon after the first aligns with what some other countries, such as Germany, the United Kingdom and France, recommend – and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also says it’s an option.

Dark comes early, and dinner still needs a plan. These 13 baked casserole recipes include breakfast bakes, beef and chicken mains, cheesy pasta, and vegetable sides, so you can choose a filling main or easy side.The post 13 baked casserole…

XREAL has launched the AURA, its first wired augmented reality glasses powered by Google's Android XR platform. They feature transparent Micro-OLED displays, a 70-degree field of view, Gemini AI integration, and a Snapdragon Reality Elite processor. TechPowerUp reports: The device is built around a simple idea: your apps, screens, entertainment, and AI assistant should be able to come with you wherever you go. On day-one, users have access to millions of familiar mobile apps and games from Google Play, alongside many experiences specifically for XR. Android XR brings familiar hand and voice inputs to AURA, while Gemini makes the experiences more natural and intuitive by working across what users see and do. With Wired Mirroring, users can plug a computer or handheld gaming console directly into XREAL AURA via USB-C and instantly turn it into a massive private spatial window. That means a laptop, handheld gaming device, or other compatible USB-C device can sit alongside native Android XR apps in a user's spatial workspace. Whether turning a plane seat into a private multi-monitor setup, watching a movie on a large virtual screen, or playing Android and console games in an immersive spatial environment, XREAL AURA is designed to make spatial computing practical, portable, and useful. [...] For work, AURA creates a portable multi-window workspace without requiring a physical monitor. Users can open Android XR apps, mirror a laptop, place windows in virtual space, and use Gemini to help understand or act on what is on screen. For entertainment, AURA becomes a private theater on demand. Users can access familiar streaming apps, expand content into a large virtual display, and use electrochromic dimming to create a more immersive viewing experience while remaining aware of their surroundings when needed. For play, AURA supports Android games and compatible mirrored gaming devices, enabling users to play on a large and immersive private display. The glasses are available to order today, with limited-time pricing starting at $1,099 for the 12GB RAM and 256GB storage model. Devices are expected to begin shipping in mid-November.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After improbable election victory, the unconventional grassroots movement says it will prioritise dismissal of corrupt officials

In Belgrade’s Pioneers Park, just across from the national assembly, a small crowd craned their necks to listen. One woman held aloft a placard reading “Love prevailed for the people and Serbia”. With a bouquet of media microphones in front of them, members of the Student List, the direct democracy movement that won an improbable but decisive victory in Sunday’s election, gathered under the trees.

Having spent days bathing in the euphoria of their unexpected triumph, the candidates’ focus was now clear: the cleaning up of the rotten institutions that had increasingly blighted the lives of Serbs over the 14 years of government by the populist leader Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive party (SNS). They called for the dismissal of many senior law enforcement officials, among them the chiefs of the criminal police, the paramilitary gendarmerie and an anti-terrorism unit.

Force says ‘inquiries ongoing’ into visit to royal estate in Scotland, when Ghislaine Maxwell was also present

Detectives are investigating time spent by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the king’s private estate in Scotland.

Police Scotland said it had received “information” and an investigation was at a “very early stage” into the time the disgraced royal spent with the late child sex offender at Balmoral.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has one of the smallest state legislatures in the nation, which gives each legislative seat an outsized significance. With the state’s legislature and governorship firmly under Democratic control for 20 years, voters will decide this year whether to give Democrats a new supermajority power. 

While there are 77 seats up for grabs in federal, state and county races in Tuesday’s general election, there are a handful of races that will draw outsized attention due to their close electorate, campaign spending or controversial candidates.

Democrats are aiming to protect their incumbents and flip at least one Republican seat in the state House of Representatives, which would give them a two-thirds supermajority that would allow them to amend the state Constitution without bipartisan support.

That fact has become a cause for Delaware Republicans as they look to protect their seats and find at least one flip of their own.

Every election cycle has its surprises, but these are the five statehouse races that we’ll be keeping a close eye on Tuesday night.

Senate District 15

Of the 11 State Senate races on ballots this year, there is really just one race that pundits in both parties are watching: District 15, which hugs the Maryland border from Cheswold to Harrington in Kent County.

That seat is open this year following the retirement of longtime Republican Sen. Dave Lawson, and the race to succeed him in the 21-member chamber has become the most expensive local race of the year.

Two newcomers, Democrat Nisha Lodhavia and Republican Emily Thompson, have raised or are supported by more than $200,000 in the campaign. 

The district’s voter registration split favors Republicans by more than 1,300 voters, and voters there overwhelmingly chose President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, but Democrats view the district as the only real potentially flippable Senate seat, and Lodhavia holds a roughly 2-1 fundraising advantage over Thompson in the race.

Both Lodhavia and Thompson said affordability, from housing costs to electricity bills and rising business costs, is the No. 1 issue they hear about from voters on the campaign trail. But beyond just hearing those concerns, each has tried to convince voters that they are better equipped to bring solutions.

Lodhavia pointed to her decades of community service experience — she currently serves on the University of Delaware Board of Trustees — as proof that she is a seasoned solver of complex problems. 

A self-described moderate, Lodhavia said she would not be afraid to reach across the aisle to search for bipartisanship. The problems facing the 15th District affect people across party affiliation, so the solutions should also come from a place of common ground, she said. 

When it comes to addressing affordability concerns, Thompson homed in on electricity costs, burdens on the district’s farmers and helping small businesses.

She said the state should focus on generating its own energy in order to bring down importing costs. To help out farmers plagued by rising operating costs, Thompson said she would support creating tax exemptions for certain agricultural structures. She also said she would oppose any fee increases proposed by the Department of Corporations in order ease the burden on small businesses.

House District 9

After years of trying to flip District 9 in the Middletown-Odessa-Townsend corridor, Democrats have perhaps their best odds yet after longtime incumbent Republican Rep. Kevin Hensley is retiring.

Hensley was among the last two Republican state legislators representing a New Castle County district and has held the seat for 12 years despite the area now giving Democrats a roughly 2-1 registration advantage.

The district also features two political newcomers in Democrat Ayanna Khan-Flowers and Republican Jamar Money. Outside fundraising has boosted the candidacy of Khan-Flowers, the founder of the Delaware Black Chamber of Commerce and winner of a three-way September primary, with $15,000.

On the campaign trail, Khan-Flowers said affordability is the top concern she’s heard from residents, from back-to-back school tax increases in the Appoquinimink School District to rising utility bills for residents on fixed incomes. Seniors have also raised concerns about healthcare access, with some having to travel out of state to see specialists, and others frustrated by poor planning around growth and increased traffic. 

Khan, who has lived in the district for 15 years, also added that parents want stronger educational resources, more special education support and better teacher retention. If elected, Khan said her priority would be increasing education resources, an issue she has already begun discussing with legislative leadership. 

“I’ve been a servant leader in this community long before my name was on the ballot, so you know this is what I do,” she said.

Her opponent, Middletown resident and longtime educator Jamar Money, echoed hearing many of the same concerns, especially about property taxes after the county’s reassessment and the school district’s increases. He also said roads and services haven’t kept up with the area’s growth.

Like Khan, Money named education as his first priority. But the former public school teacher, who now teaches college, said if he was elected his focus would be providing schools with more funding for teacher retention, so the district can remain competitive. He also wants to make sure classrooms are getting the most of the dollars that are already being allocated.   

“We’re not getting the return on investment as far as academic performance,” he said.

House District 20

The House seat in District 20 may be Republicans’ best shot of flipping a seat of their own and thwarting Democrats’ push for a supermajority.

That’s because the Lewes and Milton-area district has the narrowest Democratic registration advantage anywhere in the state with fewer than 1,000 voters. A Republican held the seat as recently as 2020, but redistricting helped to shift the voter advantage toward Democrats in the 2022 election.

Incumbent Rep. Alonna Berry won a special election last year by just 117 votes following the resignation of Stell Parker Selby, but she easily won a pitched primary election last month that will give her campaign momentum heading into Election Day.

Republican Gene Dvornick, the town manager for Georgetown, the Sussex County seat, brings a strong resume to the race and has raised enough funding to at least keep the race close into the dying days.

Both Berry and Dvornick said they have consistently heard concerns from voters about growth in the rapidly growing area, and a need for infrastructure to keep pace. 

Berry also said voters are focused on the challenges accessing healthcare in Sussex County, while Dvornick said residents want to ensure the amount of realty transfer tax – the tax a buyer pays when purchasing their home – generated in the 20th district is being reinvested by the state into local community, instead of being spent in New Castle County. 

Dvornick cited his “strong financial background” and 20 years spent balancing fiscal and infrastructure needs as Georgetown town manager as well-preparing him for elected office. 

Meanwhile, Berry said she has brought a practical approach to “expanding healthcare access, improving road safety, and advocating for accountability and smart growth,” over the past year, which she would continue if reelected. 

House District 22

The other New Castle County House seat held by a Republican that has bedeviled Democrats is District 22.

Rep. Mike Smith, a pro-business Republican with a reputation for constituent services, has bucked the nearly 1,900-Democratic voter advantage in the Pike Creek and Hockessin area for more than a decade.

He faces a challenge from Democratic newcomer Alex Green, a land surveyor and local volunteer, but perhaps his biggest challenge is questions about his own impending job. Earlier this month, the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce announced that it has selected Smith as its next president and CEO.

How Smith would manage representing more than 20,000 constituents and the needs of Delaware’s business community, which has long been among the most active lobbyists in Legislative Hall, remains to be seen.

Smith holds a campaign war chest of more than $80,000, along with outside support, that makes a Democratic flip a tall task though.

Green said the news of Smith’s new job, which he called a conflict of interest for the representative, took his grassroots campaign to new heights. He has attempted to leverage voters’ concerns about Smith’s impending chamber position through conversations when door-knocking as well as targeted advertising, he said. 

The cost of living has been top of mind for many voters, Green said. And it has been challenging, he said, to address some of those concerns with voters when the Democratic Party has long held statewide majorities. 

Instead, Green said he has worked to convince voters that issues key to his campaign, education and healthcare, are things that are worth paying for. 

As Smith rounds out what he said will be his final campaign for the statehouse, he said he has prioritized daily door-knocking and meaningful conversations with voters that have been key throughout his time in office.

He, too, said voters have told him that affordability is a top concern. He has leaned on the relationships he has built with constituents over the years, which have created a level of trust where voters know he will work for them and to address their concerns in Dover. 

House District 41

No race in Tuesday’s election may draw more attention than House District 41, but that is less about the political calculus and more about who is running.

The Sussex County seat that includes Millsboro, Dagsboro and Selbyville, left open by the retirement of Republican Rep. Rich Collins, features a match-up between former Republican Rep. John Atkins and Democratic newcomer Ryan Stuckey.

The district, which has a more than 2,500-Republican registration advantage, would typically be considered a longshot by Democrats, but Atkins’ nomination has spurred unforeseen interest in the race.

Atkins has a checkered past of domestic violence convictions, but he has said those incidents are safely in his past after he committed himself to his faith. However, Atkins’ candidacy has led some Republicans to pledge to vote for his opponent, a Democrat who supports gun rights and has put solving Sussex’s infrastructure woes at the top of his platform.

Stuckey is benefiting from roughly twice as much campaign fundraising and outside support in the last few weeks of the campaign, but the prospects of a flip in the deeply red district are still considered by many insiders to be a longshot.

Both Atkins and Stuckey said they are hearing from voters primarily about concerns with traffic and overdevelopment in the Millsboro area. 

Atkins said his opponent, Stuckey, has allowed more development in Dagsboro as a member of the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission, while he has “never stopped working for the people” since he represented the district in the early- to mid-2000s. 

Atkins added that he has the advantage of better name recognition, because of his previous tenure as a state representative, which would also allow him to be “ready on day one” in Dover. 

Stuckey, however, said he has been effective at “rewriting laws to control development” as a Planning Commissioner, and has stayed better focused on the local issues than Atkins, who he said is focused on national talking points, like gender politics and socialism. 

“I just try to stay focused on the issues,” he said. “At the end of the day, we all want the same things. We all want to know that the things we love about this place are going to stay that way.”

Atkins said his final campaign push is to continue knocking on doors, and trying “to turn Republicans and conservative Democrats and conservative Independents out.” Stuckey similarly said he is door-knocking and talking with voters at poll sites before Nov. 3. 

The post Five midterm races to watch in Delaware statehouse appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Voicing the main character in Black Tides Draga’s Wake led to me making the kinds of noises I haven’t made since my honeymoon but also one of my favourite moments as a father

“I listen to you on the radio and I keep hearing your voice in my head!”

Not a typical opening to a creative partnership, but that is how Greg Strangis introduced himself to me 16 months ago, when he asked me to come to his garage in the middle of nowhere and have a look at a game he was making called Black Tides Draga’s Wake.

Turkey has been hit by powerful thunderstorms and a fatal tornado this week with more heavy rain expected

Heavy rain and strong winds will continue to affect parts of south-eastern Europe and Turkey over the next few days, as an area of low pressure in the region has allowed for the formation of powerful thunderstorms. During a particularly intense thunderstorm in Antalya, a coastal city in the south-west of Turkey, the formation of a tornado resulted in the deaths of four construction workers on Tuesday. Authorities in Greece and Turkey have released severe rainfall and flooding warnings, as a further 100-150mm (nearly 4-6in) of rain is expected this week in central Greece and western parts of Turkey, with locally higher totals possible.

Travelling eastwards towards south Asia, strong winds and heavy rainfall have swept across the Indian regions of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh as Cyclone Arnab made landfall. With wind gusts in excess of 85mph (140km/h) and rainfall totals in some regions exceeding 200mm, the severe storm has prompted mass evacuations of more than 180,000 people, as well as widespread disruption to energy and transport infrastructure. The cyclone will weaken as it continues to traverse northwards over the coming days, though will continue to deliver heavy rain to parts of northern and central India as it does so.

What I’m Discussing Today

• Kareem’s Quote of the Day: How funny is Reagan’s joke about government incompetence when you need firefighters, safe medicine, or help feeding your family?

• Mary Peltola and the Case of the Two Dan Sullivans: Our ethical standards should survive an encounter with our own candidates.

• Quick Takes: RFK Jr. needs a vaccine for bigotry, the Kushners have something in common with Ilhan Omar, and JD Vance either has foot-in-mouth disease or a better sense of humor than we thought.

• Paris Blues, directed by Martin Ritt: With Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as jazz musicians, a score by Duke Ellington, and a cameo by Louis Armstrong, this film might have been made specifically for yours truly.

• Diahann Carroll, “Am I Blue?”: A star of Paris Blues proves she’s as good a singer as she is an actress, holding her own on a song owned by greats from Billie Holiday to Ray Charles.

  ---

Kareem’s Quote of the Day

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), 40th President of the United States

Perhaps the most underrated quality in a modern political candidate is a sense of humor. Bill Clinton had a folksy, Will Rogers-style delivery that reminded everyone of his humble background. George W. Bush connected with both staff and the press by giving them humorous nicknames. Barack Obama had no trouble setting aside his cerebral style to skewer the opposition with razor-sharp one-liners. Even Donald Trump, to the horror of his opponents, makes his followers laugh with profane and often offensive Don Rickles-style insult comedy.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was a bona fide movie star before he became president, and while he was best known for his performances in dramas like Knute Rockne, All American and Kings Row, he was also a gifted comic actor who managed to hold his own opposite a trained chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo. So it’s no surprise that Reagan could deliver a well-scripted joke, and today’s quote is one of his best. It’s built on the premise that government is well-meaning but incompetent, and I suppose there’s some truth to that. Given a large enough sample size, it’s inevitable that some government programs and employees that are supposed to make our lives easier end up making them worse.

But if your house is burning down, as mine once did, nothing is more valuable than a well-funded team of firefighters on the government payroll. If your home has been broken into, nothing is more reassuring than a police officer on your doorstep. Every day we count on the FDA to keep our food and medicine safe, and in the case of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, we’d be helpless without government agencies to deal with the fallout. All the people who make those departments run are “from the government.”

Larger programs cost more money, and they’re often the ones supporters of “small government” want to do away with. When President Trump turned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) loose in Washington, more than 20,000 people lost their jobs, and another 150,000 took buyouts or early retirement. That meant fewer people on the government payroll, but also fewer people to answer phones if you needed help from a federal agency and slower response times once you got through. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost contracts and grants totaling more than $16 billion, which will almost certainly have an impact on the long-term health of the American people. And USAID, which uses U.S. tax dollars to pay for food and health programs in low-income countries, had 83 percent of its programs eliminated, saving taxpayers $28 billion—at the cost of an estimated 14 million lives by 2030. President Trump calls low-income countries “shithole countries,” so it’s no surprise he doesn’t want to spend U.S. tax dollars saving them, but I’m not convinced the American people agree with him.

History shows us that tax dollars spent on our government programs are an investment in a better future for the country as a whole. Before Social Security and Medicare, old age meant cutting back on food and medicine for many American seniors. Today, those programs keep millions of elderly people above the poverty line and in good health. The polio vaccine, the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill, the eradication of smallpox, and the cleanup of rivers that could otherwise poison communities were all results of collective projects that wouldn’t have existed without a robust government.

The other assumption built into Reagan’s line is that private organizations or individuals will pick up the slack for a smaller government, and that industries will regulate themselves. But the private sector doesn’t always protect the vulnerable; it often has a financial incentive not to. Insurers deny claims, lenders target the desperate, and employers cut corners on safety when no one is watching. Government regulation exists because those harms are real, documented, and repeated. Fewer regulations mean greater profits for the rich and greater risks for the poor.

That’s why the ruling class loves Reagan’s line, because the richer you are, the less you need government. For the poor, a strong government can mean the difference between life and death. That’s the point New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani made when he was asked about Reagan’s joke: “It’s a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’” Reagan’s line may be funnier. But Mamdani’s has the ring of truth.

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Ex-energy secretary Ed Miliband’s agenda appears undermined as money is diverted from renewables to defence

Britain is unlikely to hit its targets on green heating after the cuts announced by John Healey this week, experts have warned, as critics of Ed Miliband claim the former energy secretary’s green agenda is being dismantled.

The chancellor unveiled more than £3bn worth of cuts to the energy department’s budget this week, much of which will pay for higher defence spending.

Housing secretary says Labour wants to reverse fortunes of towns plagued by boarded-up shops and rogue businesses

Angela Rayner has said voters will begin to see a difference in their high street before the next general election as Labour prioritises investment in struggling local communities.

The housing secretary said the government had made it a top priority before the country goes to the polls to begin turning around the fortunes of places blighted by boarded-up shops and rogue businesses.

Trump and Senator Dan Sullivan have put my home state on the chopping block. But Peltola understands Alaskans

Donald Trump’s trip to Alaska earlier this month was a real doozy.

Should I be surprised? The previous time he visited my home state, in August 2025, he ordered the US military to roll out a red carpet for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The two billionaire oligarchs chummed it up and posed for cameras, then talked about the war in Ukraine and achieved no formal ceasefire and no peace agreement.

We need neither ‘peace in our time’ nor ‘perpetual peace’ – but enough peace to keep civilization

To save the United Nations from the irrelevance in which it now wallows, the next secretary general will require the concerted backing of the few powers that govern the security council.

The paradox is that the great powers who created the institution in the 1940s and recently treat it with a cavalier cynicism are now the ones who need it most, as does the rest of the world.

It’s been a particularly brutal cycle for attack ads, but voters are responding with humanity. Plus: on the campaign trail with a Democrat in Kansas

• This was originally published in the Stakes 2026, a newsletter about the midterm elections. Sign up to get it in your inbox

There’s a campaign moment I can’t stop thinking about. It happened shortly after the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, released a shocking attack ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

In the ad, as many readers will know by now, Acton’s mother accuses her daughter of lying and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton, 60, says she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her. Acton says she last saw her mother at the courthouse, where her mother came to support her husband as her daughter testified against him.

Endorsement not always full-throated but party backing marks major turn after bitter split over nomination

Facing a barrage of extreme attacks from Donald Trump and his allies, the Democratic establishment is finally rallying around progressive Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s candidate in the closely watched US Senate election in Michigan. But the endorsement is not always full-throated, and often even omits his name.

At a rally in Port Huron on Sunday, the US president launched the latest in a wave of Islamophobic rants against El-Sayed, erroneously branding him a “jihadist” and “Muslim Brotherhood member” while invoking 9/11.

In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change. 

To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.

Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever. 

The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground. 

Tasked with wrangling roughly three dozen of those scientists toward consensus was Sally Benson, a geoscientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who was co-leading the report’s chapter on underground storage of carbon. After a quarter-century of studying how fluids and gases move beneath Earth’s surface, she was an unimpeachable authority on the subject. She was also a savvy and diplomatic leader, skilled at managing rooms full of big egos and big tempers. It was proving handy in a process that had at times devolved into unruly debate.  

The scientists had clashed for years over what the report should say, first at a meeting in Canada, then in Norway,  Australia and Brazil. The evidence was scant. Three large-scale experiments were underway, but only one — a Norwegian operation that captured carbon from a natural gas field and pumped it under the bed of the North Sea — had rigorously tested permanent storage. There, the injected CO2 astonished engineers when it floated 700 feet upward through a series of geologic formations. To their relief, it hit a ceiling of shale that kept it underground, and the project was deemed a success. But with so little to go on, the scientists warned in their first draft that any broad statement about leakage risk would be “almost meaningless.”

The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream. 

In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups.  Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco. 

The process that followed would make some of the chapter’s scientists uneasy. The IPCC’s procedures stated that reports should assess the existing research on a topic based on peer-reviewed literature and that exceptions must be reviewed and clearly cited. 

Bert Metz, one of the highest-ranking U.N. officials at the meeting, was pressing the group to come up with more definitive language about CCS’ potential. The report would be better if it could offer hard numbers, even where none existed in the literature: Precisely how many gigatons of storage capacity did the planet likely have? How long would a well-designed reservoir hold the CO2 injected into it? More than a year? A thousand years?

With so little evidence to work with, David Keith, a Canadian physicist, proposed a workaround: The authors could conduct an “expert elicitation,” taking an anonymous survey about what they expected the evidence to eventually show. 

At first, not everyone was willing to go along. Some scientists worried that making what amounted to educated guesses would mislead the public, they told Drilled and ProPublica. Benson and Metz, though, both argued that on such an important matter informed advice was better than nothing.

In the end, the group agreed to take the survey and to keep it off the record —  they would “burn it afterward,” Keith recounted, making no mention of it in the official report. When the meeting concluded, some of the scientists popped their bottles of cava in celebration.

“It’s not the hard science that you would prefer, obviously,” Metz would later tell Drilled and ProPublica. 

Five months later, the IPCC published its special report, which would help legitimize CCS for a generation.

The 431-page document portrayed CCS as a potential savior for the climate that could enable countries “to continue to include fossil fuels in their energy mix.” It stated that using CCS could lower the cost of stabilizing global CO2 concentrations by at least 30% and that if fully supported by policy, it could account for as much as 55% of the world’s efforts to limit climate change through this century.

It acknowledged that there were still gaps in research and experience with the technology — offering extensive detail deep within its pages about the challenges and uncertainties of piecing together separate but proven steps in the CCS process. But its summary stated that “there are no major technical or knowledge barriers” to storing captured CO2 underground. 

All of those assertions, however, rested on the critical determinations made by the scientists handling the storage chapter. 

Benson’s group wrote that the planet offered vast CO2 storage capacity. Storage sites that were well selected and well managed, they said, were likely to retain 99% of the carbon pumped into them for at least 1,000 years.

A Consequential Decision

The scientists’ conclusions that day in Spain have had profound, compounding consequences.

The special report has been cited in thousands of academic papers, in legislative testimony and in media coverage validating carbon capture and storage as a realistic solution to global warming.

When climate forecasters built models, their calculations assumed CCS would work. When governments and corporations began making so-called “net zero” pledges, promising to subtract as much CO2 from the atmosphere as they add, they assumed CCS would work. When policymakers gave energy companies billions of dollars in public funds to develop “clean coal,” they assumed CCS would work. 

These presumptions shifted the world’s discourse from how to limit carbon pollution to how to remove it from the atmosphere after the fact.

Enthusiasm for the technology has only grown. This spring, California embarked on one of the world’s largest carbon burial endeavors yet. While President Donald Trump eviscerated most programs addressing the climate, he has expanded subsidies for CCS. There are more than 100 applications for storage sites pending in the U.S. alone. U.N. analyses suggest that to achieve environmental goals, a CCS industry the size of the entire global oil production industry would have to be built by 2050. 

But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research. 

Later, the American Petroleum Institute would write in internal communications that the industry’s “license to operate” depended on companies lowering climate pollution, and CCS, it wrote, “enables the use of petroleum and natural gas by providing an opportunity to capture and/or offset emissions.” And at a 2023 prominent oil industry conference in Houston, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, would explain that a novel form of CCS that sucks carbon directly from the air “is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time.” 

For many university faculty, the rewards for studying the industry’s favored climate solution have been numerous, opening opportunities, funding papers and raising their profiles. Benson is a clear example. When the IPCC was awarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work, she and her co-authors were recognized among the scientists who contributed. When Stanford University sought a new director for its ExxonMobil-funded climate research center, it tapped her. When President Joe Biden prioritized climate policy, he brought Benson into the White House. 

Keith, the Canadian physicist, benefited from oil industry interest in a different way: He developed technology to capture CO2. Occidental Petroleum paid more than $1 billion to buy the company he founded.

There is no evidence that Benson, widely described by colleagues as scrupulous, skewed her scientific findings to suit the interests of her industry patrons, and Benson has described CCS’ flaws in her publications. 

However, in speeches, presentations and even congressional testimony, she has been a dogged champion of CCS technology, time and again describing it as safe and ready for large-scale deployment, despite having a ringside view to its many setbacks. 

She has frequently referenced the most affirmative statements from her group’s work in Oviedo as evidence. But the methodology Benson and her co-authors used to reach those conclusions 21 years ago has not been generally understood. When Drilled and ProPublica told prominent climate researchers about the expert elicitation process, several were disconcerted to learn that there was so little scientific basis for the report’s conclusion that 99% of CO2 was likely to remain underground. 

A survey, said Oliver Geden, a vice chair of the IPCC’s forthcoming climate assessment, was “an inappropriate way of assessing the literature.” 

Authors “are not supposed to do original research. They’re supposed to just collect what’s out there,” said Roger Cooke, who was a lead author on a subsequent IPCC report. Cooke said expert elicitation, done rigorously, can be valuable, but “just asking a bunch of experts to give their best guess is one of the worst things you can do.”

In a detailed written response, Benson said she did not believe that the survey undertaken in 2005 violated IPCC norms and said the group’s leadership was aware of the process. She disputed that the approach amounted to an informed guess and said that “there was an enormous amount of data” to draw on. The group was trying to agree on the best language to synthesize evidence detailed deeper in the report. She rejected the notion that her research or career were influenced by industry funding, writing that she has worked “tirelessly for 30 years on CCS and other climate solutions” in a sincere effort to combat an escalating planetary crisis. And, she offered, she views CCS as one valuable tool among many needed to address climate change. 

Keith said the goal of the expert elicitation was not to seek precision, but to provide a sense of the orders of magnitude of the capacity and risks, “because that’s what’s relevant to public policy.” He said even sites with problems haven’t leaked large amounts of CO2 and that the report’s broad statements “have stood the test of time.” The chapter authors’ confidence in CCS doesn’t suggest “that a bunch of us are tools of the fossil fuel industry.”

The IPCC declined to comment on specific questions about how the report came about. “We are not in a position to comment on individual recollections,” a spokesperson wrote about the expert elicitation. However, they said that the group’s process was in keeping with the organization’s procedures at the time and that it reflected contemporaneous understanding of the technology. The IPCC did not directly respond to the assertion that the authors conducted what amounts to new research during the writing process, and it did not provide requested records that would detail the scientists’ vote. “The IPCC’s role is to assess the full range of available scientific knowledge,” the statement said. Metz referred to the IPCC’s response. 

Chevron, Shell and Saudi Aramco did not respond to requests for comment. 

Drilled and ProPublica spoke with more than 100 experts on carbon capture, climate modeling and influence in academia, including a dozen people who attended the Oviedo meeting. We compiled records of geologic storage tests and surveyed an extensive body of peer-reviewed literature. This investigation is part of a broader examination into how fossil fuel industry funding of climate research has shaped climate policy, solutions and public understanding. It follows our report in June about a BP-funded program at Princeton University and the oil company’s role in crafting one of the program’s most influential climate papers. 

Since Benson and her co-authors met in Oviedo, weather catastrophes have multiplied, oceans have acidified and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has soared. In September, the U.N. released an urgent new report declaring that the race to avert disruptive warming has been all but lost. It concluded that “overshoot” — the notion that temperatures will rise above the world’s adopted goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — is now a certainty. 

Carbon capture and storage, it said, is one of the only ways to bring those temperatures back down.

Looking at a Failure and Calling It Triumph 

Just a few days before the meeting in Oviedo, BP put Benson and a handful of other scientists on a chartered flight from London to Algeria. Their destination: the world’s second major geologic carbon storage experiment, in the Sahara.

The British oil giant, along with the state-owned oil companies of Algeria and Norway, had begun to drill for gas at a new field named for a nearby oasis called In Salah. Most natural gas comes out of the ground as a cocktail of methane and CO2. The CO2 must be stripped out and is usually vented into the sky. But at In Salah, the companies saw an opportunity to try out a greener process — one that could become big business.

Earth’s crust is a layer cake of rock. Some layers, like sandstone, contain honeycombed pores capable of holding CO2, while others, like mudstone, can act as impermeable seals, trapping the buoyant gas underground. 

That layer cake is impossible to precisely chart from the surface, but engineers sent sound waves into the ground and interpreted what echoed up into rough maps. They learned their target sandstone reservoir sat below a 3,000-foot-thick brick of mudstone they believed would be impermeable. They also learned the sandstone was “tight” — less honeycombed than they had hoped — but still capable of holding gas. So they had begun to inject the CO2.

The plane landed on a sand-strewn strip circled by jeep tracks and rocky plateaus. A photograph shows Benson, medium height, her blond bob tucked beneath a hard hat, standing in the desert alongside a BP-funded physicist from Princeton named Robert Socolow and seven other men in front of a well that was pushing CO2 under the desert. In Salah had been operating for less than a year but seemed to be going smoothly. 

Afterward, Benson traveled to Oviedo to finish drafting the special report, which listed In Salah among key sites that “indicate that it is feasible to store CO2” underground at significant scale.

That assessment has not held up.

Energy companies had first begun pumping CO2 into the ground commercially in the 1970s, when they realized it would loosen up stubborn crude oil, sometimes doubling an oil field’s output. They called it “enhanced oil recovery,” and though they didn’t try to lock the CO2 in place, much of it seemed to stay underground.

The idea to use carbon injection as a climate fix came a few years later from an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who suggested disposing of carbon deep in the ocean or underground. In the 1980s Exxon tried, and gave up on, efforts to develop the idea. And it wasn’t until 1996 when the first large-scale CCS project — the operation in the North Sea — began.

In a recent interview inside her narrow, fluorescent-lit office at Stanford University’s earth sciences building, Benson said it was shortly after that that she first heard of CCS. A colleague at the Department of Energy had sent her a slide deck by Princeton’s Socolow about the technology. “I was like, ‘I think this is nuts,’” she told Drilled and ProPublica.

“I just couldn’t really picture it working at scale.” 

But, as both an idealist and a pragmatist, she was drawn to the potential for science to solve difficult environmental problems. She made a crude calculation of how much CO2 might fit beneath California and was surprised by the answer: a lot. At least in theory. And it changed her mind. 

As Benson became one of CCS’ leading experts and champions, she increasingly found herself in rooms full of oil industry veterans. In 2000, she helped establish a partnership between the Department of Energy and companies including Chevron, Texaco and BP. That program had a focused mission: make large-scale geological storage an operational reality by 2015.  

In 2002, Benson was asked to sit on the advisory council of a new BP and Ford Motor Co.-funded climate research center at Princeton University. At a summit there the following year, Benson expressed concern that focusing on leaks could undermine public support for CCS, according to meeting records and the account of another person in attendance. 

“Need to present optimistic estimates,” the minutes recapping her presentation say.

By 2007, Benson was helping to run her own industry-funded research center. A few years earlier, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, a thunderous voice of climate denial, had put up $100 million of the company’s money to fund climate and energy work at Stanford University. With another $125 million from three other companies, Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project became one of the best-funded climate research centers in America. 

The donation came with strings: ExxonMobil and the other sponsors had veto power over which research projects received funding.

Students and activists protested the funding structure, accusing ExxonMobil of retracing the path of tobacco companies, which paid for scientific work on obscure causes of cancer as a distraction from their culpability. 

Benson defended the arrangement ardently and often. ExxonMobil and the other sponsors approved every grant that Stanford recommended, never exercising their veto power, she said. Reporting by Drilled and ProPublica did not contradict that assertion. Benson also pointed to the fact that the program funded an array of research, including on renewable energy.  

In an interview and written response, Benson said researchers who take funding from oil companies are motivated not by corporate agendas, but by genuine interest in the work. The funding underwrites the inquiry, she said, not its conclusions. Where there’s “alignment,” she added, the industry support can be “amazingly catalytic and helpful.”

In response to a request for comment, Stanford University directed Drilled and ProPublica to former law school dean Paul Brest, who led a committee that reviewed energy research funding at the school. Brest said that faculty have a right to seek any funding they choose, so long as sponsors cannot direct the work.

Most important to Benson was that scientists and their students have the opportunity to research matters of great consequence. She has published more than 50 papers on geologic carbon storage since joining Stanford, most of them highly technical evaluations of CCS that reiterated its importance to reducing emissions, and many underwritten by ExxonMobil and other industry sources. “I don’t know anybody else,” she told Drilled and ProPublica, “who would eventually provide, you know, $225 million of funding” to study climate solutions.

But whether researchers intended to serve their funders’ agenda on CCS or not, some say the effect has been undeniable. “It seems like a credible solution because you have credible people at credible institutions working on it,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and an expert in corporate influence. 

Benson was still getting settled into her new job at Stanford when the project in Algeria ran into major problems. 

On a 118-degree day in 2007, In Salah’s inspectors heard CO2 whistling through the top of an abandoned oil well nearly a mile from the nearest injection site. Engineers had believed it would take years before the CO2 plume could spread so far underground, but the gas had cracked through the sandstone and found a new path.

To stop the leak, workers poured cement into the well, plugging it permanently. But soon a second problem arose: Satellite data revealed the desert floor above the injection sites had bulged. When project engineers again used sound waves and other tools to map the layers underground, they arrived at an alarming discovery: Pressurized CO2 had sent cracks a quarter of the way up through the 3000-foot-thick layer of mudstone. If it breached the rest, it could leach into the pan-Saharan aquifer, acidifying a source of drinking water millions of people depend on. 

BP and its partners eventually summoned Benson and the other science advisers to London. The dangerous gas, they could now see, was moving in ways they had predicted it could not. Nonetheless, the advisers suggested that injection proceed temporarily to see whether it could safely be done under lower pressure and with careful monitoring. 

But the Algerians had had enough. In 2011 BP and its partners stopped injection, and in 2012 they quietly scrapped the project. 

Benson would later describe In Salah as a technical failure but a triumph of detection. “It was monitored and people found a problem,” she told Drilled and ProPublica. 

“Then,” she added, they “learned from it.”

More Problems, More Dependence

As she did in Oviedo, Benson still maintains that the fundamental mechanics of CCS are well enough understood to know that it can work. 

As proof that geologic formations can handle high-pressure gas, she points to the natural gas industry, which injects large amounts of its product back underground for temporary storage. 

She also points to enhanced oil recovery. Over the last 40 years, American companies have injected 100 times more CO2 into drilling fields as a way to extract more oil than they have into what CCS industry insiders call “dedicated” CO2 storage reservoirs. There are few reports of accidents or leaks at these sites. 

Unlike dedicated CO2 storage, though, enhanced oil recovery is less likely to cause pressure to build up underground, because the CO2 pumped in fills space left by the oil that’s forced out. (These sites also can result in a net addition of CO2 in the atmosphere, since they wind up producing still more oil.) 

The record of the industry’s largest CCS sites — ones designed solely to help the climate — has been far more troubled.

Around the time In Salah shut down, the world’s third large project — a Norwegian site named Snøhvit several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle — also met critical obstacles. When injection began in 2008, engineers had calculated the site would have an 18-year capacity. But they had radically overestimated how much CO2 it could absorb and had to relocate the project after just three years.

In the U.S., a decadelong effort to build a “clean coal” power plant  outfitted with CCS proved impossible within a reasonable budget and was abandoned in 2015 — but not before the government had spent $378 million in taxpayer money. Benson was on the project’s advisory board for part of that time.

That year in Canada, Shell opened a $1 billion carbon capture and storage facility — also largely paid for by the country’s taxpayers — connected to open-pit oil sands mines. The industry routinely promises that plants like this one, called Quest, capture at least 90% of emissions. But at Quest, once the energy required for the capture process itself is accounted for, the capture rate instead has hovered around 68%, according to a report by the research group Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It has also caused hundreds of microearthquakes.

Shell did not respond to a request for comment.

As one carbon storage project struggled after another, Benson and other academic researchers continued to insist they could flourish. 

In a keynote speech at a 2018 conference in Sweden, Benson showed a slide with a map of CCS facilities across the world, most of which were enhanced oil recovery sites. Her map included In Salah, which had shuttered. And it included another project, in Australia, which had yet to open. “The operations have been very good at all of these projects. And they’ve gone well in terms of safety,” she said.

She also showed a slide pointing to the 2005 U.N. special report’s statement that an “appropriately selected,” well-managed reservoir would likely retain 99% of its carbon for more than 1,000 years. “This was an expression that if you find the right site, the CO2 should be permanently stored,” she said.

In a written response, she said she continues to cite the 21-year-old special report’s conclusions on leakage because “the methodology was sound then and remains so.” Benson said that she is careful to qualify her characterizations and show evidence in her presentations, and that during her presentation in Sweden she did so. She did not directly address the status of projects portrayed in her map.

When the Australian project, called Gorgon, did open the following year, it turned out to be the biggest CCS fiasco yet. Australia had allowed Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to drill a major new natural gas field there with the requirement that the companies buried at least 80% of the CO2 that came out of the ground with it. It was billed as the world’s largest CCS operation. 

Instead, it has been plagued by clogged injection wells and underground pressure spikes. In their operating year ending in 2025, the companies were able to inject just a quarter of the CO2 collected there. Since they vent the remainder, Gorgon, once billed as a model for climate solutions, became the largest single source of industrial carbon pollution on the continent.

“Like any pioneering endeavour, it takes time to optimise a new system to ensure it performs reliably over 40-plus years of operation,” a Chevron spokesperson wrote in an emailed response. “We realise that people refer to the challenges at Gorgon in an attempt to discredit CCS, however, as we have shown, we can capture and store greenhouse gas at scale.” Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to requests for comment.

An Idea Takes Root

While operators struggled to prove CCS could be viable, the world became dependent on it working. 

As soon as the IPCC published the 2005 report, climate modelers that help assess the most economic ways to limit global warming began folding CCS into their calculations.

They projected not only that CCS could stop billions of tons of emissions from reaching the sky, but that it could suck old carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. They adopted a theory that supposed vast fields of switchgrass or fast-growing willow could absorb carbon into their stalks and leaves, and when those plants were harvested and burned for electricity, their emissions, too, would be captured and buried. 

The modelers incorporated this subtractive approach so prodigiously that, on paper, they could reverse climate change. Global temperatures could overshoot targets in the short term, so long as enough carbon was eventually sucked back out of the air to bring those temperatures back down. 

World leaders embraced the wiggle room this theory provided them. When they signed the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, pledging to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, they counted on these so-called negative emissions among the key tools that could make it possible. In 2018, when the IPCC published a special report on how to reach that goal, 89 out of its 90 scenarios included using large-scale CCS. 

Now, in its latest report, the U.N. says that it is virtually impossible to still get to a 1.5 C future — or anything close — without removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are several ways to do that — reforestation and the use of minerals spread on fields to absorb carbon, for instance. But these methods are either small scale or even less proven than CCS. 

By 2015, the tantalizing idea of “negative emissions” was showing up in new, mainstream ways. “Net zero” pledges to one day offset carbon emissions began rolling in from most of the world’s nations, as well as cities like Omaha, Nebraska; the band Coldplay; ice cream chains; funeral homes; and even ExxonMobil.

But real-world CCS projects have not met the moment. 

To scale the technology as much as U.N. analyses suggest is needed to limit warming to 2 C would require not only a technological feat but almost unimaginable resources, Drilled and ProPublica found. Carbon dioxide injection would have to almost immediately increase by more than 400 times. That would require more than 2,000 new geological waste sites to be established — a new large-scale CCS project put into operation every four days, on average, for the next 25 years.

To move the CO2 to those sites would require 68,000 miles of specialized pipeline in the U.S. alone. Globally, at least 85 custom-built tankers would be needed to carry the high-pressure gas safely across oceans. Just four exist.

And if all of that were accomplished, the effort would come at an almost inconceivable cost: tens of trillions of dollars.

“Fuck, OK, It’s Harder Than We Thought” 

At Benson’s office at Stanford, in a building where rocks painstakingly collected from field sites fill cabinets in the halls, the Society of Petroleum Engineers hosts Friday socials — beer and snacks provided — and the adjacent courtyard is named after the oil company Arco. 

Inside, propped on a stack of boxes, is a framed copy of Biden’s keystone climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. On it, national climate adviser Ali Zaidi scrawled in blue sharpie, “Thank you, Sally, for helping truly transform our energy & climate future!” 

Benson returned to Stanford after a nearly two-year stint in Biden’s White House as the head of the energy division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she says she provided periodic scientific advice as the act was being pushed through Congress. One of the most ambitious climate policy efforts in history, it offered a large set of incentives for CCS, which the fossil fuel industry had lobbied for intensely.

But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution. 

In 2007, as ExxonMobil funded Benson’s center at Stanford, its former CEO Raymond told a room full of industry leaders that carbon storage might be considered “kind of the Holy Grail.” Executing it, though, would be “a whole different animal” than injecting carbon underground for enhanced oil recovery. “You can’t assume that’s going to happen. And the cost is going to be very, very significant.”

A 2011 internal slide deck from BP stated that while carbon storage would allow fossil fuels to remain the world’s dominant source of energy, “the pace of CCS development has been slow and the future pace remains uncertain.” And in a 2018 internal presentation, ExxonMobil predicted hardly any CCS would be deployed by 2050, even as it modeled that global CO2 emissions from energy production would continue to skyrocket. 

Yet the industry saw brand value in encouraging CCS anyway. An ExxonMobil document from 2021 describes a public relations campaign to persuade the political and financial “elites” to “believe ExxonMobil is committed to helping solve climate change,” in part by proving its efforts on CCS will “play an indispensable role” in a greener economy.  

For her part, Benson still has faith in the technology’s viability, despite the failures. “These are big projects, right? The idea that everything goes exactly according to plan, especially for these first-of-a-kind projects — it’s unrealistic.”

As proof that CCS is on the rise, she pointed to 77 operating CCS projects identified in a report by the industry group the Global CCS Institute and said that another report demonstrated a tenfold growth in CO2 injected underground since 2005.

When ProPublica and Drilled reviewed that same data, however, and excluded the enhanced oil recovery projects, we found just eight operating large-scale carbon burial projects on that list (10 using the group’s more recent data), and half the increase in annual injections that Benson stated. 

Experts interviewed for this story insisted — often in an anguished timbre — that CCS simply must work because decades of delay have foreclosed other paths to a stable climatic future. 

But just because the world now needs CCS to work doesn’t mean it can. 

“It’s always some issue,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “I think there’s been a lack of willingness for the community to say, ‘Fuck, OK, it’s harder than we thought.’”

The latest CCS effort got underway this spring, in California, when the oil company California Resources Corp. began injecting CO2 beneath the state’s Central Valley. 

California — long a vanguard of environmental policy — has embraced the technology. In 2021, as it was formulating a plan for how the state should reach its climate targets, the California Air Resources Board invited Benson to give a presentation on the role CCS could play. 

“The fraction of CO2 retained underground is likely to be very high,” she told the board, again pointing to the 2005 special report: “This study said 99% over 1,000 years.” 

The board set the ambitious goal of burying more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045, more than all the carbon that has ever been geologically stored around the world combined. Since it opened in May, the new project has injected just 7% of its advertised capacity, but California Resources Corp. is now seeking permits for eight more CCS projects across California, and other oil and gas companies have proposed four more, including two that Stanford is directly involved with.

California Resources Corp., in a written response, said the company is injecting the amount it had planned for early operations and will increase to capacity as the project develops. 

Could California truly be burying 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045? For the first time, in an interview, Benson was hesitant to commit. “I think it’s very challenging,” she said. “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of money, a lot of projects.” 

Asked a second time, she once again demurred. “Oh gosh. If we really set our mind to it. If we could wave a wand.”

The post How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy appeared first on ProPublica.

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Government corruption has emerged as a top issue in the upcoming US midterm elections, with an overwhelming majority of Americans saying US government officials use their public office for personal financial gain, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.

Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.

‘Even though economists warned that tariffs would be inflationary, Trump has enthusiastically embraced them’

Donald Trump successfully campaigned for his second term two years ago promising to reduce prices on day one, but ever since he returned to the White House, he has done little to fight inflation or reduce prices. Instead, some of his most important policy decisions – most notably his war against Iran and his tariff wars – have increased inflation instead of reducing it. This helps explain why more than one in five Americans who voted for Trump now disapprove of the job he’s doing.

Even though economists warned that tariffs would be inflationary, Trump has enthusiastically embraced them during his second term. Indeed, the “liberation day” tariffs he imposed soon after returning to office increased the price of hundreds of goods, including citrus fruits, steel, bananas, beef and auto parts. When the supreme court overturned those tariffs as illegal, Trump immediately imposed new 10% across-the-board tariffs that again helped push up prices (a lower court found those tariffs unlawful, too). Time and again, Trump has slapped on new tariffs even though they inherently push up prices because tariffs are a tax on imported goods. Little wonder that a Fox News poll this month found that 77% of Americans disapprove of how Trump has handled tariffs.

It’s a superlative achieved again and again: The current election cycle is the most expensive on record, according to AdImpact, likely to be surpassed only by the next one. North of $16 billion have been raised ahead of Tuesday’s looming elections, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Mega-donors this election season have overwhelmingly backed Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests.

Related

AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress.

The Intercept tracked how super PAC spending is flowing into the midterms and how growing public skepticism of special-interest money in politics is affecting campaign strategies. Hundreds of candidates are still taking donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, despite public sentiment turning against the pro-Israel lobby. 

“The data overall reveals that [AIPAC is] still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning,” Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett told The Intercept Briefing. “It is still quite meaningful money.”

Artificial intelligence super PACs have also poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle, most of it on just a few races in the primaries. The two leading AI super PAC networks, affiliated with OpenAI or Anthropic, dropped a whopping $50.7 million on the primaries, but are noticeably spending much less in the lead-up to the general election, $8.5 million — likely responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC has.

“The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. … The entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion,” said Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge. “One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is … candidates [trying] to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.”

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Hibbett and Sledge about the spending trends in the most expensive election cycle to date and unpack the intended impact.

“No matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests,” said Hibbett.

“They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election,” Sledge added. “The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.”

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

Transcript

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

On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls to cast their ballots in the most expensive election cycle ever in terms of campaign ad spending, even outpacing past presidential elections. That’s according to AdImpact. 

North of $16 billion has been raised this cycle, with ad spending in House and Senate races topping $4 billion. Billionaire Elon Musk has dumped hundreds of millions into races across the country, using his enormous personal wealth to sway the election in favor of Republicans. Musk, who has a home and multiple businesses in Texas, has taken a particular interest in the state’s Senate race between Republican candidate Ken Paxton and Democratic candidate James Talarico.

Most of the money from Musk and other donors has flowed not to candidates, but to powerful super PACs representing a variety of different special interests.  

That super PAC spending is the subject of my colleagues, Intercept politics reporter Matt Sledge and senior politics reporter Akela Lacy’s new project, tracking how money is flowing into the midterms. 

Maia Hibbett, managing editor for The Intercept, and Matt Sledge join me now to talk about the project and how big money is shaping the midterms. 

Matt, Maia, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing 

Maia Hibbett: Thanks for having us. 

Matt Sledge: Thank you for having us, Jessie. 

JW: Maia, I want to start with you. As a part of the super PAC project, The Intercept tracked how millions of dollars flow through the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

What did the reporting reveal about how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and affiliated groups like the United Democracy Project mask their influence in U.S. elections in a political landscape where AIPAC’s contributions and endorsements have become largely politically toxic? 

MH: The reporting showed that AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC UDP are a little bit weakened, but they’re still pretty dominant.

The narrative out of this midterm cycle, especially during the primaries, was largely focused on a few high-profile races that an AIPAC-backed candidate lost — and that was a huge shock. These big upsets were AIPAC or UDP or a related group that, we can talk about a little bit later, had poured money into, and then the candidate didn’t succeed.

But if you look at it in the aggregate, what the data overall reveals is that they’re still spending a ton of money on a lot of races, and more often than not, their candidates are still winning. It is still quite meaningful money. And even though AIPAC has been discussed as going underground, they are still directly invested in a lot of races.

JW: I want to get into AIPAC’s shifting strategy and their latest announcement on that. But first, Matt, I wanted to talk about your reporting. AI super PACs have poured tens of millions of dollars into this election cycle.

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What do we know about the people and companies behind these super PACs? This may seem obvious, but what are they hoping to gain with this level of spending? Are there specific examples of friendly legislation these varied interest groups are hoping their candidates will see through if they win?

MS: To answer your second question, I think it’s really more about setting the tone for future regulation at the federal level. You have two big super PAC networks. One is affiliated with OpenAI, and they broadly favor a laxer regulatory scheme for AI. Then there’s another network that’s affiliated with Anthropic that paints itself as supporting a stricter regulatory scheme.

Skeptics will point out that these networks are both backed by big AI companies. So at the end of the day, they’re probably going to favor regulation that is favorable to the AI companies. I get into this a little bit in my story, but, just in the last few months, there’s also been this constellation of other smaller groups that are sometimes backed by individual employees at these firms or just by people concerned about AI that are pushing for stricter regulatory regimes and aren’t as directly connected to one of the big companies.

JW: Matt, I’m curious about the impact on voters here. CNBC analysis from early October found that mega-donors this election season were overwhelmingly backing Republicans with contributions largely flowing from AI, crypto, and online gambling interests: “Fourteen of the 20 largest donors and donor groups this election cycle have exclusively or nearly exclusively backed GOP candidates or aligned groups.”

Matt, are we seeing voters become more receptive to Republicans as a result of all this ad spending? Is it working on the voter base? 

MS: It’s always hard to tease out the impact of an individual super PAC or industry, because you have to keep in mind that a lot of the time, if you’re a crypto super PAC, or an AI super PAC — or more recently, a prediction market super PAC — they are not running pro-crypto or pro-AI ads.

They are running ads that look very similar to everybody else’s. Often, they’re doing negative campaigning that campaigns don’t want to do themselves, and they have such vague names that they’re not associated with crypto or AI. So I do think ads have an impact on the races, but overall what we’re seeing in polls is that it’s not a great environment for Republicans.

So it may have served, just writ large, to potentially soften the blow to Republicans this time around. It does help them to have this many corporate allies, but it may still be overwhelmed by a blue tide. 

JW: That makes a lot of sense in terms of just, this is a bad environment for Republicans. They have a president who is unpopular. We have an economy that is not amazing right now. It makes a lot of sense that despite all this ad spending, the baseline of the election is not in favor of Republicans. 

Maia, I wanted to get back to something that you had said a little bit earlier about AIPAC and their shifting strategy. AIPAC recently announced that they would no longer officially endorse candidates or give money directly to campaigns.

Were we seeing an early signal of shifting strategies from AIPAC during the 2026 midterm elections? And what does this change actually mean for AIPAC’s influence on our elections?

MH: I’m so glad you asked, because we actually noted early in the 2026 cycle that AIPAC was starting to retreat and change its strategy. Our colleague Akela Lacy wrote a story in December 2025, and the headline was, “AIPAC is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.” I encourage anyone to go back and read that story because it was really prescient about what we would see in the cycle to come, which is that AIPAC used to do all of its spending behind closed doors.

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AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.

In 2022, it made a big splash when it started doing direct spending in that year’s midterms. The group had helped fund some anti-Bernie Sanders ads during the 2020 presidential campaign, but it was 2022 when it went all in, rather than routing its donations through other groups or through dark-money pathways, it just started giving contributions to candidates. 

After it spent so much money in that midterm cycle and in last cycle‘s 2024 races, and as public sentiment started to turn against the pro-Israel lobby’s interests and people became very critical of the U.S. support for genocide in Gaza, AIPAC started to essentially return to its roots.

I think this is really interesting because in the press it has been talked about as a very new strategy. But really, it’s more that AIPAC is returning to the way it used to do business. 

JW: Is that as effective as a strategy — the old model that they had? Should we expect that it’ll have just as much influence on elections as they did previously?

MH: It’s a good question. I don’t know how effective it will be as a strategy. There’s a lot more scrutiny on AIPAC now than there was a few years ago, and so it’s much more difficult for them to hide what they’re doing because there are journalists like us who are going to try to follow the money and say, maybe you gave to something that’s called Elect Chicago Women, but it’s actually from UDP, which is the super PAC for AIPAC.

I think in some cases, they can’t get away from the public perception that now exists. But on the other hand, there are many voters who might not really pay attention to the name of the PAC that sponsored the ad that they saw, and then go look it up and see where the money came from. So it remains to be seen how effective it will be.

JW: Not everyone is reading The Intercept before voting, as they should, but it’s fine.

Matt, I wanted to get back to you because there’s a lot happening with these big AI super PACs. You noticed in your reporting that, after spending a lot in the primaries in New York in particular, but in other places as well, the big AI super PACs have gone pretty much quiet in the general election.

Are AI super PACs responding to public backlash in the same way that AIPAC is? What have you observed in terms of why they’ve gone a little bit quieter? 

MS: In response to your question about backlash, I think the answer is yes.

They’re on this kind of accelerated timeline going through what AIPAC went through over the course of five years but essentially in five or six months. The polls are just so startling on the public’s transformation on AI and data centers over the last year. It’s just such a rapid change in public opinion, and the entire life cycle of these AI super PACs, which started about a year ago, has followed that evolution of the public’s opinion.

It’s just a dramatic decline in spending from the primaries to the generals — even though they still have money they can tap. Leading the Future, which is the OpenAI-aligned network, they started first, and then the Anthropic-aligned network, Public First, they started a few months later as a response to the Leading the Future network.

So it seems like, from what we’ve been able to tell, Leading the Future scaled back on spending as the general election came about, and Public First responded in turn and also scaled back its operations. That doesn’t mean they’re not spending anything, and we have seen a slight uptick in the final few days of this election when ads are probably just less effective than they would have been a couple weeks ago.

One really notable race is now South Carolina, where Leading the Future is helping prop up Sen. Darline Graham, who hasn’t been a great fundraiser on her own. So there’s actually still a world where AI plays a decisive role in this election in terms of control of the Senate.

If Darline Graham narrowly gets away with winning her race in South Carolina of all places, and that narrowly hands control of the Senate back to the Republicans, then you can still say that Leading the Future and the AI industry played a pretty important role in the general race.

JW: Just to be clear, you’re referring to Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, correct? 

MS: That’s correct. 

JW: Maia, speaking of Big Tech, you also edited a story from Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez looking at how tech leaders, including John Hering, are dumping millions into the LA city attorney race to block Marissa Roy, a DSA-backed candidate, from winning. What is going on here — why such an interest in a race most people are likely not paying any attention to?

MH: City attorneys are one of those jobs that, as you said, a lot of voters don’t pay attention to them. I think a lot of people in cities all over the country maybe couldn’t tell you who the top lawyer of whatever city they live in even is. But this is a job that is largely tasked with enforcing regulations and laws and making companies that might be based in that city or might operate in that city comply with them.

Marissa Roy, this DSA-backed candidate, is currently a deputy attorney general for the state of California, and she’s one of the people who helped the state prosecute this historic Meta settlement where Meta ended up having to pay $17 billion for harms to children using its technology.

We don’t know exactly why John Hering and other tech leaders, like the founders of Ring and Tinder and investors in Anthropic and SpaceX, are spending so heavily in this race, but you might be able to conclude that they’re interested in preventing a person who just helped carry out this huge settlement against Meta from becoming the city attorney of LA.

Some of them are funding a group that’s called Neighbors for John McKinney, which is backing the opponent in the race. John McKinney is the other candidate, and he is much less likely to win, but is propped up now by a lot of spending. They frame him as a tough-on-crime candidate; they say he’s going to restore order to LA, help clean it up is the idea.

Like Matt was saying, often these tech investments in races don’t actually foreground the interests of Big Tech, and they don’t say explicitly, “We want to stop this person from coming into office because we’re worried they’re going to regulate our industry.” Instead, they find a different issue and spend money on that.

It’s also worth noting that John Hering, his group, frames John McKinney as a lifelong Democrat and very anti-MAGA, is the language they use. But John Hering himself is a big ally of Elon Musk. He has been an eager investor in his companies. He said Musk was an “American hero” this year, and he has spent pretty heavily also to support Musk’s America PAC and the Trump campaign after previously spending on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Like many Silicon Valley types, he’s had an evolution. And although he lives in San Francisco, he also spent in favor of Spencer Pratt for LA mayor.

JW: Wow. Yeah, Big Tech has really come a long way from the ’08 years in terms of their relationship with Democrats and Republicans, and propping up Spencer Pratt.

Matt, I want to bring you in and get your perspective and kind of big picture. What has made this election cycle so popular for Big Tech? 

MS: When it comes to AI and crypto and the prediction markets, it’s knowing that the next few years are really going to be critical for them in terms of regulation. These are all fairly young industries, and the rules haven’t been set yet. The Trump administration is doing its best to set them, but Congress has not had a final word on any of those industries.

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They see a chance to shape the rules in a way that favors them, and they’re just using the old Washington playbook of spending a bunch of money on campaigns and a bunch of money on lobbyists to try to shape the rules in their favor.

JW: Is this just also a matter of them having more money to play with than they’ve had before? Is this something tech probably would have done years ago if they’d had this access to capital? Or is this really, like you said, just they’re aware that there is existential risks to their industry if they don’t?

MS: Tech for the last few decades has had a lot of money. It’s just been a huge part of the U.S. economy. But I think this move into more regulated spaces is maybe what’s newer.

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AI Almost Started a U.S.–China War — and No One Seems to Care

When Microsoft is creating an internet browser or a word processor, that creates potential antitrust issues, and they have to spend political money in that sense. But they’re not playing in the same kind of highly regulated financial spaces, and nobody ever thought that Clippy posed an existential risk to humanity. So we are moving into new territory when it comes to techs. 

JW: I miss Clippy. That is my one comment on that. 

I want to get both of you back in here. We’ve been talking about some of the biggest donors in American politics today, and a few special interest groups in particular who’ve obviously been experiencing public backlash — AIPAC, AI, and data centers.

What do you make of this new record-level spending in a midterm election in particular? We’ll obviously have more answers on this next week, but from what you’ve observed so far, is it having the intended impact on voters? Maia, let’s start with you. 

MH: I think to use the cop-out that we keep coming back to, we won’t really know if it worked with voters until after the results next week. But it’s clear in this midterm cycle and maybe this is a reminder of kind of a perpetual truth in, when it comes to money in politics, that these big spenders are always going to fund candidates on both sides of the aisle. Often election narratives and questions about special interests will really look to one party or the other and try to map this kind of spending onto partisan issues.

While some of that certainly happens, I think no matter which party gets control of either or both houses of Congress, there will be a lot of people elected next week who got there on the backs of Big Tech and special interests.

That is something that voters are more and more aware of and more and more frustrated by, and we did see a lot of rejection of that kind of big-money spending in the primaries. But ultimately, I don’t know how much that narrative has changed. 

JW: Matt, I know you’ve seen some specific examples of this impacting elections. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

MS: One of the things that’s been really interesting in the general election races is this race from candidates to paint themselves as the more pro-AI safety, pro-AI regulation candidate.

I’ve done some reporting in Michigan’s 7th [Congressional] District, where a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement is trying to unseat an incumbent Republican, and he has from the start really run on being an anti-data center candidate, campaigning with local activists in small towns of a few thousand people.

His Republican opponent is now also trying to paint himself as a data center skeptic — using different language, more language about local control than about big, bad companies. 

But there’s been such a backlash that we’ve seen some changing tactics from the big AI super PACs in the runoff. One has donated money to a nonprofit that’s more focused on building support for data centers. Good luck with that, I guess.

And then another, the Anthropic-aligned network, has essentially handed off money to a pro-Scott Wiener super PAC in California that already existed and already has funding from other tech leaders in the San Francisco area. But that donation has generated this whole fight between Scott Wiener and his opponent, Connie Chan, over who is the more pro-AI regulation candidate now. So it’s a lot of candidates fighting to be the more pro-regulation candidate.

Just thinking back to your question about the effect on voters, I think for the super PACs and for their funders, the impact on candidates may ultimately be more important, on elected officials. They’re backing a lot of people in safe seats who don’t really have a tight election. The goal may just be to buy themselves a few friends in Congress, because sometimes in Congress, it’s just as good to have a few people who can stop regulation as it is to have people who can shape and actually pass laws.

JW: That’s a good point. Speaking of the election, which we know is just days away, what are you two going to be following closely next week? Maia, I want to start with you.

MH: There’s obviously a lot to follow next week, and more races than we can keep track of. One I think that will be very interesting that I was thinking about in terms of AIPAC spending — when Matt just mentioned this thing about AI groups backing candidates who are not in close races — is, of course, the Senate race in Maine.

One of the interesting takeaways we found in this AIPAC project is that in the primaries when AIPAC was spending, as it does in, in various races, one of the top recipients of its money was Susan Collins — who at the time did not have a primary challenger, but it spent heavily to support her primary campaign.

So we’ll obviously watch the Collins–Jackson race in Maine. We have a reporter going there. Matt’s going to go to Michigan. We also have a reporter going to Texas to track some of the big Senate races. Depending on how the results look, I think we’ll pretty quickly be pivoting to accountability for, coverage for the people who are elected, who, maybe entered office vowing not to take corporate PAC money or not to take special-interest money, and to keep an eye on those now Congress members and see if they vote like it or if they continue to have that policy once they’ve been elected.

JW: And Matt, what are you following? 

MS: As Maia mentioned, I will be in Michigan. Super interested in that 7th District race that I mentioned between Will Lawrence and Tom Barrett. But then the race everybody’s going to be spinning and talking about for weeks probably: the Mike Rogers/Abdul El-Sayed race. It just is going to carry so much narrative heft going forward about what the voters were trying to say. 

Where are you going to be, Jessie? What are you going to be up to? 

JW: I will be in D.C., and I’ll be looking at what it means to have yet another election with the National Guard in town and essentially in an occupied city.

I’ll also be looking into what it would mean for the district to have a socialist mayor, Janeese Lewis George, who is almost certain to win on Tuesday, particularly when it comes to ICE and the Metropolitan Police Department’s collaboration with ICE. That’s going to be something I’m really keeping an eye on, not just on Election Day, but going forward to see if she can implement some of these really bold ideas that she’s proposing in a city that’s very constricted in what it can actually do because of federal law.

But that’s enough previewing from me. We’re going to leave it there. Maia, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. 

MH: Thanks again. 

MS: Thanks for having us. 

JW: And thank you for listening. Next week we’ll be back in your feed early with a special midterm election episode, so stay tuned.

That does it for this episode. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post How AIPAC and AI Spent Their Money This Midterm Election appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Tuesday to deny judges the power to temporarily postpone deportation cases. This means that certain Delawareans with ongoing immigration cases will now face a greater risk of receiving a deportation order on the day of their court hearing.

The brisk October morning air made Yami clutch her black coat and hold the green folder in her hand tightly. The immigration documents inside were far too important to lose.

It was still dark outside as she stepped into the car, uttering a quick prayer under her breath. 

“En el nombre de Dios y Madre santísima.” In the name of God and the holy mother.

Yami had just said goodbye to her teenage daughter, Lupita, and was heading to Philadelphia’s Immigration Court. 

There was a chance she could leave the courtroom later that morning with a deportation order — for both her and Lupita. 

Volunteer drivers from the local immigration advocacy organization Sussex Help signed up to chauffeur Yami to her court hearing. One volunteer attempted polite conversation, asking Yami how her last appointment had gone. 

“I mean good,” Yami said. “Well, good because they didn’t detain me or anything,” she added, chuckling half-heartedly.

This court appearance would be Yami’s second. Back in April, the judge had told her to return without Lupita at this next hearing. The judge had also told her to return with a lawyer, but Yami does not have one. 

Her experiences with lawyers throughout her family’s immigration journey have not been positive ones.

Yami first sought out legal help when her husband was detained in April 2025. That first lawyer, though, was a fraud. He scammed Yami and her husband out of $300. 

The couple’s second lawyer lost her husband’s immigration case, resulting in his deportation back to Nicaragua and a drained family bank account. 

“Rather than paying a large sum to a lawyer — an amount I don’t even have — I would prefer to leave it in the hands of God,” Yami said. “He is the best lawyer.”

The northern Delaware mother — who, along with her entire family, is being referred to using pseudonyms because of their ongoing deportation case — would hear one of two decisions in court that day: deportation orders for both her and Lupita, or permission to stay in the country. 

A family under supervision

Yami and a then-13-year-old Lupita came to the United States from Nicaragua in May 2024. 

“I want my little girl, my sweet girl, to study here and to learn,” Yami said. “Above all, I want her to learn English, because here she’ll be given the opportunity to study at a university or pursue a degree.”

In Delaware, Yami reunited with her husband, Concho, and her two older children who had come to the U.S. a few years before in search of work. 

Their home country faces not only economic hardship, but also political repression at the hands of President Daniel Ortega, largely considered to be a dictator. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan government officials earlier this year for their “ongoing abuses against the Nicaraguan people.” 

The family entered the U.S. during the era of former President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which provided immigrants from certain countries temporary legal status if they could prove a need for political asylum. But they chose not to seek out that legal pathway. 

The family had heard of other Nicaraguans who failed to claim asylum in the U.S., and were subsequently being persecuted for that choice back in their home country.

Instead, each family member obtained an Order of Release on Recognizance, which means they were permitted to stay in the country while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) determined if they were criminals, or could prove to a judge they qualified for a lawful stay.

Upon arrival, each family member also received an Alien Registration Number, which is an identification number assigned by the Department of Homeland Security to non-citizens. 

Every two months the family is visited by Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) officials, or private case managers hired by ICE to oversee them. The case managers confirm their current address, take photos of them and ask questions ranging from run-ins with law enforcement to whether there is food in the fridge. 

They have never had any troubles with the police, nor with their supervision appointments, Yami said. 

The family began to settle into their life in Delaware. 

They bought a mobile home. Concho found a job in construction. Lupita enrolled in school. Yami worked at a local Hispanic grocery store preparing tamales and tortas — Mexican dishes she learned to make. 

A shock deportation

One April morning last year, Concho dropped Yami off at work before heading to a construction site. 

But Yami never saw her husband again. 

Concho was detained by ICE officials. He was transferred to Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center and remained there for three months before ultimately being deported back to Nicaragua. 

Spotlight Delaware first spoke to Yami and her eldest daughter, Carito, in July 2025. The pair recounted their scramble to find a lawyer after learning Concho had been detained. 

Yami, filled with desperation, turned to Facebook.

“You must know, to get someone out — how should I put it?” Yami said, taking a long pause. “To get someone out of where they are, one will do anything.” 

She found Cristian Romero, a man claiming to be an immigration attorney with a New York City-based law firm called Álvarez Immigraciόn ABG. 

Spotlight Delaware reviewed Yami’s WhatsApp messages with Romero. Yami brought up her concerns that Concho had voluntarily signed a deportation order and grew doubtful over any lawyer’s ability to get around this, but Romero insisted it was no problem. 

She initially sent $300 via money order to a location in Queens, New York, as instructed by Romero, to an individual named Karold Andrea Agudelo Ayala.  

The day after, Romero began demanding more money, thousands of dollars more. He promised to have Concho back home that same day. But Yami did not have the money, and she had grown even more suspicious of Romero.

Distraught, Yami sent a final voice memo to Romero after he demanded even more money. 

“Please let me live my life in peace, and I will let you live yours in peace,” she said. 

When contacted by Spotlight Delaware, the alleged law firm denied any wrongdoing and asked for Yami’s personal information.

According to New York’s and Pennsylvania’s bar associations, neither Romero or Ayala are licensed to practice in their states.

Yami tried again. She paid $6,000 to a legitimate attorney who represented Concho in court. 

Carito watched her father’s court hearing virtually last year. The second lawyer told the judge about Concho’s clean criminal record despite his undocumented immigration status. Her father’s deportation was finalized that day. 

This, she said, made her lose faith in the legal system.

“Whether the judge is racist or a decent person, it really just comes down to that in the end,” Carito said. “It doesn’t come down to the lawyer.”

A mother’s day in court

It was just before 7 a.m. on Oct. 26, when Yami began the drive to Philadelphia. 

The green folder containing her immigration papers was safely tucked in between the side of her leg and the car’s center console.

As the sky opened up to reveal a fiery, bright red sun, Yami reflected on her morning walks to school in Nicaragua with Lupita.

The pair would see San Cristobal, the tallest volcano in Nicaragua, off in the distance. Yami recalled a line that her daughter would tell her day after day when they gazed at the geographic feat piercing into the sky.

“When she was very, very little, she used to say that she wanted to have wings and fly,” Yami remembered. 

Before Yami left for Philadelphia, she said Lupita attempted to reassure her mother that she would be coming back. 

“You’ll see, you’ll come by in the afternoon, after classes,” she recalled Lupita telling her. 

Just in case, Yami made sure Carito had Lupita’s passport in hand. She also left what could have been a final message to her youngest daughter. 

“I told her, ‘Listen, mija, you behave yourself — do you hear me? And help your sister,’” Yami said.  

She arrived early at the courthouse. Yami’s hearing was not scheduled until at least 9 a.m., but she arrived before the doors first opened at 8 a.m. Being late would have resulted in a marked absence and an order for deportation. 

After going through security, Yami was ushered into an elevator and waiting room. She spoke to another guard and a frazzled court clerk before ultimately arriving outside the correct courtroom.

Inside, the courtroom was no bigger than a high school classroom. It was just big enough for the judge, the clerk sitting at her side, tables for the defendants and a small public seating area. 

Most defendants, like Yami, did not have a lawyer. This has not been uncommon. 

Around 30 minutes went by before Yami was called up by Judge Mary Lee.

Yami grabbed her green folder and adjusted her sleeve. She peered out the courtroom windows and smoothed down her ponytail as she sat down beside six other people who were also there to defend their place in the U.S. 

After confirming Yami and Lupita’s information, Lee asked her about an attorney. 

“I couldn’t find one,” she said softly into the microphone. 

The judge asked if she wanted to represent herself, or if she would like more time to find a lawyer. 

“If you could give me more time, I would appreciate it,” Yami said, the court translator relating her Spanish back to Lee. 

The judge obliged. 

Yami would have one additional hearing. One more time to find a lawyer.

Moments later, Yami was handed documents proving she appeared before an immigration judge. She would have to show those papers to her deportation officer at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Application Support Center in Dover later that day. 

The hearing itself lasted around five minutes.

A small sliver of hope

Yami could not contain her smile as she called Carito and Concho. She was confused how the judge let her go, but relieved to be able to return to her children. 

Lee gave Yami until February 2027 to find a lawyer.

That will be her final hearing, where she will have to answer for the charges being brought against her and Lupita: being undocumented. 

Yami would try to call the list of lawyers provided by the judge who do free or low-cost work, she said. But her hopes of finding representation remain low. 

She still does not want to claim political asylum out of a fear that her family would face retribution back in Nicaragua. That decision has placed Yami in an uncertain path as she tries to find a way to stay here lawfully. 

Standing outside the courthouse, she slipped the judge’s list inside her green folder. For her daughter’s sake, she had to at least try. 

“Yes, I’m going to give it a try,” Yami said. “Because the truth is that I want the little girl to study here.”

The post After a ‘lawyer’ took her money, she now faces immigration hearings alone appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Homelessness and affordable housing have dominated the state and local conversations in Delaware in recent months. Georgetown was among the only localities to adopt a cottage housing ordinance last year as a strategy to tackle both issues, but recent steps by the town government are likely to reverse that. 

A nonprofit seeking to build a tiny home community within Georgetown has sued the municipality over its decision in July to impose a pause on the development of such housing.  

In a complaint filed last month, the nonprofit Springboard Delaware said the tiny home moratorium should not apply to its plans to build 122 cottages on a 14-acre property, near Sussex Academy. It argued that the application process had already begun — through meetings with state and local planning officials — well before the moratorium was adopted.

In response, a town attorney argued that the tiny home moratorium is applicable to Springboard Delaware’s plans because the organization had not formally submitted a site plan until September — after its July decision to impose the development pause. 

The lawsuit marks the latest turn in an ongoing battle between factions of residents in the Sussex County town advocating for competing approaches to homelessness and affordable housing.

It also comes less than a year after the town council voted to explicitly allow for the development of tiny homes on land zoned for urban residential use.

That tiny homes ordinance has since dominated the public conversation in Georgetown.

It has led to friction that has played out in the form of heated public comments at town council meetings, and calls for the ouster of the previous mayor posted on a prominent Facebook group.

Now, the lawsuit appears to be the first time the tensions have led to a legal claim for the town.

New council, new ideas

The previous town council, led by Mayor Bill West, overwhelmingly approved the cottage housing ordinance last December. 

It allowed for a cottage housing development to have up to 12 homes between 350 and 850 square feet on 1 acre of land, with additional open space and setback requirements within the design. 

Springboard Delaware, which already operated a pallet village transitional housing program in Georgetown, began discussions in January with state and local officials about plans to build cottage homes in line with the new ordinance. 

But in May, a new town council came into office with members who believed that the majority of residents did not want such projects.

Mayor Angela Townsend  and Councilman Michael Briggs even campaigned on a platform of repealing the tiny home ordinance. 

By July, the town council voted to pause the review of any tiny home project proposal. They also created a task force to explore repealing the cottage housing ordinance altogether.

That same month, Judson Malone, executive director of Springboard Delaware, said town leaders told him he would not be able to move forward with submitting a site plan for its project.

In response, Springboard Delaware filed its lawsuit on Sept. 11, alleging the town violated open meeting laws and town and state law.  

Malone and his attorney, Richard Forsten, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Georgetown’s town attorney, Stephani Ballard, also declined to comment. Townsend did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment. 

Amidst the pending litigation, the town council is moving forward with the process of repealing the cottage housing ordinance. The council on Monday considered a measure to strike the ordinance and is set to hold a final vote at its next meeting on Nov. 9. 

The town council has also recently interrogated Springboard Delaware’s existing operations.

During meetings in September and this month, the town council questioned whether Springboard Delaware’s pallet village is following rules outlined by the town and generating satisfactory outcomes to solve its homelessness problems. 

Councilman Penuel Barrett, who has led the council charge to examine the pallet village operations this fall, told Spotlight Delaware he “wants to see proven results, and we’re not getting it out of them.”

What’s in the lawsuit? 

Springboard Delaware’s plan involves the construction of 122 units of affordable housing, ranging from 400 to 950 square feet on a 14-acre parcel within town limits. The tiny homes are to be for individuals who “cannot otherwise afford to rent larger housing types and more traditional apartments,” according to the lawsuit. 

The organization’s initial complaint, filed by Forsten, states that Springboard Delaware had a predevelopment meeting with town officials on Jan. 6, during which the town “did not express any major concerns with the proposed development.” 

Then, Springboard Delaware submitted a preliminary plan to the town and to the state’s Preliminary Land Use Service (PLUS), to which the state Office of Planning responded on Sept. 4 “strongly supporting” the proposed project.

Springboard Delaware subsequently submitted its preliminary plan to the town planning department on Sept. 11, but the town refused to review it, citing the council’s July vote for a moratorium. 

The lawsuit further argues that the town violated open meeting laws multiple times, by taking action at July and August town council meetings on the ordinance when the meeting agenda only listed a “discussion” of the measure — and not a vote.  

The complaint calls for a Delaware Chancery Court judge to void the town council’s pause of cottage housing projects and allow Springboard Delaware to proceed with its plan. 

Ballard, the town attorney, wrote a response to the complaint on Oct. 12, arguing that Springboard had not formally begun the development process as of the July 13 vote because they had not submitted a site plan to the town, so the moratorium is applicable. 

Ballard also wrote in the town’s response that Springboard Delaware did not own the property they seek to build on until Sept. 9, and did not exist as a legally incorporated entity until Sept. 4. Therefore, the project could not have proceeded with the town’s approval process until well after the July pause went into effect, she argued. 

The town’s response also rejects Springboard Delaware’s argument that the town council voted on ordinance when the agenda only listed a discussion, writing that “the wording of the agenda speaks for itself and clearly put the public on notice of discussion of possible modifications to the current Code provisions.” 

Chancery Court judge David Hume has been assigned to the case. A preliminary hearing had not been scheduled as of Oct. 26. 

Ordinance repeal 

The new town council began publicly discussing a repeal of the ordinance at the July 13 meeting, where the group voted 4-1 to halt review of new development proposals and appoint a committee to consider repealing the ordinance. 

After a brief discussion of the ordinance amongst an ad hoc committee, the motion to repeal went back into the hands of the town Planning Commission in September.

The Planning Commission voted 3-2 against repealing the ordinance, posing questions around why the town is revisiting an ordinance it recently approved. Still, the council moved forward with a first reading of the repeal ordinance on Oct. 26, and a final vote scheduled in early November. 

The discussion has consistently drawn the same group of about a dozen residents in favor of repealing the ordinance and a couple of residents advocating for keeping the measure at every town council meeting since July. 

Residents in favor have cited arguments that Georgetown already has enough affordable housing and individuals living in the tiny homes will detract from the town’s quality of life. 

“These little houses are not going to be people from Georgetown that are going to live in them,” resident Wanda Burton said at the Oct. 26 meeting. “We’re going to get people from everywhere that do not care about this town.” 

Meanwhile, proponents say a cottage housing option is a reasonable way to address the affordable housing crisis in Sussex County.  

The ordinance repeal is likely to pass, as three of the five votes on council – Townsend, Briggs and Barrett – have publicly supported it in the past. 

Councilman Tony Neal has expressed opposition to repealing the ordinance, while Councilwoman Christina Diaz-Malone said she does not plan to vote due to a conflict of interest, because she is married to Judson Malone, the Springboard director. 

Barrett told Spotlight Delaware the town needs to “look deeper into some different things” before figuring out what affordable housing types might suit Georgetown. 

Diaz-Malone said she believes the town council is too focused on “rolling back any decisions made by the previous administration,” instead of really considering the best ways to address homelessness and housing needs in town. 

The vote outcome will not impact a 20-unit tiny housing project by Ocean View-based organization Little Living, which the town council approved this past February. 

The post Georgetown tiny home debate continues as pallet village owners sue town appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Oxygen, food and water supplies running low and massacres taking place, says Nabil Shamsan

The Houthis are trying to send the city of Taiz back to the stone age, the city’s governor said in a briefing designed to urge the international community to do more to lift the month-long siege.

Nabil Shamsan said massacres were taking place in Yemen’s third city, that oxygen and water supplies were running out and that rubbish was piling up in the streets due to landfill sites being either full or inaccessible.

Both US parties scramble to win young voters via influencer operations. The evidence doesn’t support their efforts

In tight races, any group that shifts a few points can be called decisive. In 2024, however, gen Z voters actually earned the spotlight.

Take Michigan, where Donald Trump won by about 1.4 points: he and Kamala Harris evenly split the youth vote, a 24-point collapse in the Democratic edge since 2020. If young voters made up just 15% of the state’s electorate, their swing toward the president would be worth roughly 3.6 points, larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory.

Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York

State and federal officials have ramped up scrutiny of online sports betting companies in recent weeks, launching inquiries, demanding information and, in one case, proposing a new rule that would limit when companies like DraftKings can pitch their users to bet more.

The moves — by gaming regulators, government lawyers and federal lawmakers — follow an investigation last month by ProPublica that tested the guardrails DraftKings and other sports betting companies have in place to protect users from spiraling out of control. That system is called responsible gaming, and executives say it’s integral to their companies’ long-term success.

The ProPublica article showed how DraftKings bestowed VIP status on a reporter who deliberately bet like a problem gambler. The report detailed the ways in which the app’s user design and promotions encouraged more betting — even after the reporter opted into responsible gaming tools designed to slow users down. A week earlier, The New York Times reported that DraftKings had used machine learning and artificial intelligence to target promotions to losing bettors.

Those articles were the focus of an Oct. 15 meeting of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, which, partly in response to the stories, tabled the renewal of DraftKings’ five-year license. Instead, the board granted the company a temporary four-month permit while investigators look into the issues raised in the reports as well as other paperwork concerns.

The board’s chair, Christopher Hebert, said the Times had raised some “very serious questions” and called ProPublica’s reporting “very troubling.”

While news stories “are not findings of regulatory violations,” Hebert said, “as regulators we have a responsibility to examine these matters that could affect the integrity of gaming operations and the protections of our citizens here in Louisiana.”

State health officials say the number of Louisianans believed to have a gambling disorder has risen in recent years amid the surge in popularity of online gambling and prediction market sites. One top official reported this summer that gambling addiction was among the health department’s “top three priorities.”

Paul Liberman, who co-founded DraftKings and serves as its president of operations, told the regulators: “We do not use artificial intelligence to target losing gamblers by any means.”

DraftKings previously told ProPublica that it proactively closes the accounts of suspected problem gamblers “all the time” but declined to provide specific figures. Yet when asked by a Louisiana board member for those same specifics, Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, said 175 accounts in the state had been shut down this year. She told the board she didn’t know how many total users DraftKings had in the Pelican State.

“We’re not physicians, we’re not clinicians and that’s not our role, but we certainly want to help people enjoy the service, the platform that we’re offering them,” Kalani told the board. “I know that we’re doing our job and that when we see something, we say something and we engage. I just can’t tell you if 175 is the right number. I wish it was zero.”

In a statement, a DraftKings spokesperson said: “As a legal, regulated operator, DraftKings values an open and ongoing dialogue with regulators and regular conversations and check-ins with regulators are normal course of business.”

In response to ProPublica’s original investigation, Kalani said DraftKings’ responsible gaming system — which consists largely of in-app messages about the company’s tools — “worked the way it was supposed to.” She cautioned against “drawing broad conclusions” from one user’s experience.

The day after the Louisiana meeting, regulators in Ohio proposed an amendment to the state’s sports gaming rule that would bar companies like DraftKings from sending direct ads or marketing to bettors for 48 hours after they’d opted into responsible gaming tools or updated their current settings.

The proposed amendment speaks directly to a finding in ProPublica’s reporting: After blowing nearly $4,500 betting on tennis in 24 hours, the reporter used such tools to limit the amount of time and money he could spend on the app. Just 30 minutes later, though, he received the first of four push notifications promoting new betting opportunities. It wasn’t until he opted into a far more restrictive tool, called a “cool-off,” that the notifications temporarily stopped.

Andromeda Morrison, the interim executive director of the Ohio Casino Control Commission, said that though her office had been working on its proposal for some time, ProPublica’s story illuminated the issue. “Hopefully this is something that is fairly easy for the industry to see as a common sense restriction to make sure those consumers are making good choices without those push notifications,” she said.

But Keith Whyte, a former director of the National Council on Problem Gambling who now consults for industry and nonprofit groups, said the proposed amendment could unintentionally disincentivize users from using tools like deposit limits. “I think the implication is that using a responsible gaming tool is a sign of a gambling problem,” he said. The measure faces a long rulemaking process, including more rounds of public hearings and comments.

Sports betting operators are also feeling the heat at the federal level.

Citing ProPublica’s reporting, three Democrats who have long called for industry reforms are now demanding more information from major sports betting and prediction market companies about how the businesses entice their customers.

The letters are signed by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, New York Rep. Paul Tonko and North Carolina Rep. Valerie Foushee. They asked the companies to answer a series of questions, including how many customers are enrolled in their VIP programs and how much revenue is generated by them.

“As repeated stories from exploited gamblers and media reports have vividly documented, VIP programs are driving the gambling industry’s most susceptible customers into debt and addiction through rewards tied to waging ever increasing amounts of money,” the lawmakers wrote.

DraftKings conferred VIP status on a ProPublica reporter after he lost close to $6,000 in three weeks on the app by chasing losses with long-shot bets, playing late into the night and firing risky wagers on fast action, like whether a major league baseball player will take a strike, a ball or connect for a hit — betting behavior that experts say are clear red flags of problem gambling.

In a statement, DraftKings said it would “respond accordingly once we have had a chance to review” the letter. Its biggest competitor, FanDuel, which has been trading letters with the lawmakers for months, wrote on Oct. 20 that the company was committed to responsible gaming and said “the VIP program is intended to provide enhanced service and encourage customers who chose to wager to use FanDuel rather than another platform.”

The companies are likely to face further scrutiny.

Read More

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

In New York, investigators for the state’s attorney general have contacted former DraftKings employees about issues raised in the Times’ story, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the probe and messages it had reviewed. A spokesperson for the office declined to comment.

That inquiry follows proposals earlier this month by state gaming officials that they say will strengthen New York’s own standards governing the use of artificial intelligence and responsible gaming guidelines.

Regulators in Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan have also said that they’re reviewing some of those same issues.

DraftKings, the spokesperson said, “does not market to customers based on indicators of potential problem gaming.”

Still, there are signs that yet more states may be interested in vetting those claims.

Jennifer Davenport, New Jersey’s attorney general, recently told the RG Journal, a publication that focuses on responsible gaming and industry matters, that “we are monitoring recent press reports alleging certain sports books are ignoring our consumer safeguards and chasing customers who are clearly exhibiting signs of problem betting.”

“Let them be warned, our office stands ready to take action against anyone who violates our gaming regulations and tries taking advantage of New Jerseyans and those who gamble here,” she said.

A spokesperson for Davenport declined to comment.

The post Federal and State Officials Ramp Up Scrutiny of DraftKings, Other Sports Betting Apps appeared first on ProPublica.

Millions of Americans gain an hour of sleep this weekend when the time change commonly known as daylight savings ends for 2026, meaning clocks "fall back."

Voters who backed the US president in the last election are saying they can’t vote for him today: ‘This is an abomination’

Outside the Ukrainian educational and cultural center in a quiet Pennsylvania suburb of Jenkintown, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a banner expressed unqualified gratitude: “Thank you USA for supporting Ukraine.”

Inside, however, the sentiment was altogether different. Irene Skulsky, a retired teacher in her late 70s, voiced indignation at Donald Trump’s sudden turn against her ancestral homeland, which she believed had come close to killing her son, Darko, and a desire to punish his fellow Republicans at next week’s midterm elections.

How long will elites stay loyal to Kim Jong Un?

A new way to deter Russia.

The collaboration will identify joint high-impact projects in biomedical research, innovative therapy development, and scientific acceleration

Oct. 30, 2026 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and AstraZeneca have signed a strategic collaboration agreement aimed at accelerating the application of supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and advanced data analytics in biomedical research, the development of innovative therapies, and clinical trials.

Credit: BSC

The agreement, signed by Mateo Valero, Director of BSC, and Dr. César Velasco, Enterprise Innovation Director, Madrid & Barcelona, at AstraZeneca, is part of the BSC Connects program, an initiative focused on bridging cutting-edge scientific knowledge with key industry challenges. Through this partnership, both organizations will identify joint high-impact projects to tackle complex health challenges using advanced technologies.

Through this collaboration, teams from the AstraZeneca Global Hub in Barcelona will work directly with BSC researchers, sharing expertise in artificial intelligence and computational sciences, and collaborating on the use of the center’s supercomputing infrastructure, including MareNostrum 5, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. Professionals from both entities will address health and research challenges by leveraging the scientific and technological talent of BSC and the AstraZeneca Hub to accelerate the development of new treatments in high-impact areas. In doing so, the AstraZeneca Global Hub in Barcelona continues to consolidate its presence locally and internationally, driving a wide range of impactful projects in collaboration with leading scientific and healthcare institutions.

AI and Supercomputing as Catalysts for Biomedical Research

This agreement with BSC will allow both organizations to work together to identify challenges across different teams within the AstraZeneca Hub in Barcelona and connect them with the BSC ecosystem. The collaboration will enable the analysis of highly complex data volumes and the execution of advanced simulations, expanding the boundaries of biomedical research where the intricacy of biological processes requires immense computational capacity. These capabilities will prove key in supporting decision-making and streamlining processes across the entire lifecycle, from early-stage research to operational planning and optimization.

Areas of collaboration include exploring quantum-enhanced AI and machine learning solutions to tackle complex challenges in biological modeling, predictive analytics, and R&D for rare diseases. Additionally, the partnership will explore advanced technologies to accelerate and improve clinical trial site selection and patient recruitment.

The program also promotes the exchange of knowledge and technologies between both institutions, focusing on cardiovascular health, respiratory diseases, oncology, and rare diseases, with the aim of establishing joint research lines with scientists from the BSC Life Sciences Department, led by Alfonso Valencia.

As Mateo Valero, Director of Barcelona Supercomputing Center, noted: “At BSC, we work to bring supercomputing and artificial intelligence from frontier research into real-world solutions that address society’s greatest challenges. This agreement with AstraZeneca, within the framework of BSC Connects, reinforces our commitment to knowledge transfer and technology development in service of industry challenges—in this case within the biomedical field—accelerating clinical trials and moving toward more precise, efficient medicine with a direct impact on human health.”

According to Dr. César Velasco, Enterprise Innovation Director, Madrid & Barcelona, at AstraZeneca: “At AstraZeneca, we believe in the power of talent and technology as key drivers of biomedical research. Supercomputing and artificial intelligence open a new horizon of possibilities to anticipate scenarios, shorten timelines, and broaden the scope of innovation from early stages through to clinical practice. This collaboration with Barcelona Supercomputing Center represents a decisive step in our commitment to driving a new generation of innovative treatments so that they reach more patients, faster”.

BSC Connects: Bringing BSC Knowledge Closer to Business

BSC Connects is BSC’s corporate immersion program designed to promote public-private partnerships and accelerate knowledge transfer between science and industry. The initiative enables companies and institutions to access BSC’s scientific expertise, technology, and supercomputing capabilities, offering specialized training, use-case development, collaboration opportunities in European projects, and strategic networking within its innovation community.

The program provides a structured approach ranging from the identification of technological challenges to the evaluation and optimization of results. It includes joint communication actions, the promotion of use cases, and participation in international events and forums, serving as a bridge between BSC’s scientific talent and the innovation ecosystem to facilitate high-impact strategic projects.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC and AstraZeneca Sign Agreement to Advance AI and Supercomputing Applied to Healthcare appeared first on HPCwire.

Always-on neuromorphic AI with on-chip learning comes to the world’s most popular single-board computer

LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., Oct. 30, 2026 — BrainChip Holdings Ltd., a global leader in ultra-low-power, fully digital, event-based neuromorphic AI, has launched the AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Development Kit. The kit pairs a Raspberry Pi 5 with BrainChip’s AKD1500 M.2 board, giving the millions of engineers, makers and product teams who already build on Raspberry Pi an off-the-shelf way to develop low-power, always-on AI applications – and a clear path to production on the same AKD1500 chip.

“As an American Tier 1 for physical AI, Hellbender looks for edge technologies that can move cleanly from prototype to production,” said Brian Beyer, CEO, Hellbender. “BrainChip’s AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 kit makes it easy for engineering teams to evaluate low-power, always-on AI on familiar hardware, and we see it as a promising option for the robotics and vision applications our customers are building.”

The Challenge: Always-on AI Strains Power, Privacy and the Path to Production

A growing class of edge devices – sensors, monitors, wearables, industrial equipment and smart home products – must listen, watch or measure continuously. Running AI on these devices with conventional processors means analyzing every frame and sample, whether anything has changed, which drains batteries and adds heat. Sending the data to the cloud instead adds latency, bandwidth cost and privacy risk. And once a model is deployed, teaching it something new typically means collecting data, retraining in the cloud and pushing an update.

Developers face a second hurdle: the hardware used to build a proof of concept is often not the hardware that ships. Moving from a prototype to a production design can mean re-porting models, re-validating performance and starting over on a new platform.

The Solution: Event-Based AI That Learns on the Device

AKD1500 uses BrainChip’s event-based, neuromorphic architecture to process only meaningful events rather than every piece of incoming data, making it well suited to power always-on workloads such as sensing, monitoring and detection. All processing happens on the device, so applications avoid the latency, bandwidth cost and privacy exposure of the cloud.

AKD1500 also supports on-chip learning, so models can learn new classes directly on the device without cloud retraining. A developer can teach a Raspberry Pi 5 application to recognize a new keyword, gesture or object in the field, and the data stays local.

“Raspberry Pi is where many edge AI products begin,” said Steve Brightfield, chief product officer, BrainChip. “This kit puts neuromorphic AI where developers already work and gives teams a fast, low-cost way to validate applications on streaming data.”

“Kit support will include Docker images that can be preloaded to simplify benchmarking and demos and that serve as a reference for custom neuromorphic application containers. Developers who already have a Raspberry Pi 5 with an M.2 HAT can add the production AKD1500 M.2 card and use the same software.”

From Prototype to Production on One Chip

The kit is off the shelf and quick to set up. Teams evaluate their application on Raspberry Pi 5, then design the same AKD1500 chip into their own product with a PCIe or SPI interface to suit their system without switching to new silicon. The kit joins the AKD1500 PCIe card and AKD1500 M.2 board in BrainChip’s family of AKD1500 development platforms, and teams can prototype on any of them.

For developers, the kit offers:

• A familiar platform: Build and test edge AI on Raspberry Pi 5 hardware and workflows developers already know.
• Always-on efficiency: Event-based processing handles continuous sensing workloads without processing every input.
• Local learning and privacy: Add new keywords, gestures or objects on the device, with no cloud retraining and no data leaving the device.
• Free tools and models: BrainChip’s MetaTF software tools and models are available at no charge through the BrainChip Developer Hub.
• One chip, prototype to product: The AKD1500 chip that runs on the kit is the same one teams design into production.

Availability

The AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Development Kit is available now through the BrainChip Shop. MetaTF software tools and models are available at no charge through the BrainChip Developer Hub.

About BrainChip Holdings Ltd.

BrainChip (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY) is the worldwide leader in edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida, uses neuromorphic principles to analyze only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unmatched efficiency, precision and energy economy. BrainChip’s Sequora is an efficient digital AI processor for GenAI and other large models using state-space architectures. BrainChip’s technology is deployed across industries including aerospace, defense, industrial IoT, healthcare, consumer devices, and wearables.

Source: BrainChip

The post BrainChip Launches AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Kit appeared first on HPCwire.

According to 404 Media, Proton CEO Andy Yen is aggressively pushing AI adoption while fostering what workers describe as a culture of fear that discourages raising security concerns or challenging leadership. The investigation is based on interviews with eight current and one former Proton employees, as well as internal Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company's CTO. Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan summarizes the findings: Engineers at Proton, which makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy- and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, and a password manager, are being pushed to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more." Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company. "The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now," one of the sources told 404 Media. Yen reportedly dismissed an employee's request for additional security testing before releasing new code, calling it "bullshit and loser thinking" and insisting that "only losers think like that." In a separate exchange over Proton's post-quantum encryption rollout, Yen criticized how the company communicated the feature's limitations and told employees that "perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn't matter if you don't win on perception." "The train is coming, get onboard or get crushed. Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age," Yen wrote to the security Slack channel. "I think by the end of this year most developers stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI will code and run, to validate AI written code that humans will no longer be able to review. This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In today’s newsletter: Benjamin Netanyahu has been left without a majority, now it is up to the coalition to find out whether the desire for change will prove to be a defining political moment

Good morning. It was described by many Israelis as the most consequential election in their country’s history. And, as the final votes were tallied, it has delivered a result that presents Israel with a significant dilemma.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition has lost its mandate while the opposition has a clear majority: but only if the Jewish Israeli opposition bloc, led by retired general Gadi Eisenkot, is prepared to make a governing pact with Palestinian Israeli parties, which have secured a historic result.

UK politics | John Healey has backed away from cutting the cost of welfare this parliament, amid dire warnings his first budget could lead to brutal spending cuts because of a £28bn shortfall in public finances.

Patrick Stewart | The acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, died at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, his longtime spokesperson said.

Environment | One of the most ambitious nature recovery projects ever undertaken in England can go ahead after campaigners announced they had raised £30m to buy an estate in Northumberland.

Europe | Spain began three days of mourning on Thursday for at least 69 people who died in a high-speed rail collision, as hospitals continued to treat dozens of injured passengers and train drivers went on strike to urge more investment in railway safety.

US news | The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation in California over claims that thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in the state, and has begun subpoenaing election officials.

With Election Day less than a week away, more than 44 million Americans have voted early, and candidates in closely watched midterm contests are making their final pitches.

Next month’s poll no longer the contest it was, as Pedro Sánchez finds himself forced to defend government’s safety record

One of the most dependable cliches of contemporary Spanish politics is that it never pays to bet against Pedro Sánchez. Time and time again – as leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) and as prime minister – Sánchez has shown an almost preternatural ability to profit from adversity, and to confound expectations and wrongfoot his opponents.

But next month’s snap general election, called by Sánchez after rightwing and far-right parties voted down the housing reforms his coalition government had announced in response to angry protests, may suddenly not be the contest it once was.

"I am not interested in tricking voters," Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola said, after operatives were accused of recruiting a person with the same name as Sen. Dan Sullivan.

Critics cite Lana Nusseibeh’s denial of accusations the UAE is fuelling Sudan war by supporting paramilitary RSF

Members of the Sudanese diaspora and international human rights monitors have denounced the candidature of an Emirati diplomat for the top job at the UN, citing her denial of accusations that the United Arab Emirates is fuelling the war in Sudan by supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The UAE nominated Lana Nusseibeh last week to replace the UN secretary general, António Guterres, as he finishes his second five-year term ⁠this year, upending a race that had become gridlocked.

There is no end in sight for the drivers of illegal mining, while police action appears ineffective

Cora Bailey has been encountering illegal miners ever since she first started treating injured animals in the townships around Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, in 1991. But as the price of gold has soared, so too has activity in the abandoned mine shafts that mark the area.

In late September, dozens of zama zamas – the name given to illegal miners in South Africa, meaning roughly “to take a chance” in Zulu – arrived to dig for gold across the dirt road from her charity, Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare).

As thousands of datacentres are constructed across Europe, the Guardian and Investigate Europe have uncovered disturbing evidence that some workers building them are exposed to dangerous conditions and living in fear of speaking out

Sandu* checked his watch. He was winding down the last 15 minutes of his shift at a vast Google datacentre site in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, in March, when the call came in. The 34-year-old electrical tester had already worked almost 10 hours, but says such last-minute jobs were normal: “I had no choice. People have been fired after saying no.”

The task was one Sandu had done many times before and involved a series of tests measuring the safety and integrity of the electrical wiring. A protective suit was locked away in an equipment room. The round trip would have added another 15 minutes to the job, he says, and people were waiting, so he decided not to retrieve the suit.

• Carolina Panthers 19-27 Green Bay Packers

• Packers WR has 113 receiving yards despite injury

Jordan Love threw three touchdown passes, Josh Jacobs scored twice and the Green Bay Packers withstood three turnovers to beat the Carolina Panthers 27-19 on Thursday night.

Love went 30 of 41 for 288 yards with touchdown passes to Tucker Kraft, Matthew Golden and Jacobs plus an interception. Although he rushed for only 39 yards on 21 carries against the NFL’s lowest-ranked run defense, Jacobs scored on a four-yard catch and one-yard run for the Packers (5-3).

The invasive species has increased in spread and numbers and is costing farmers millions of dollars

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An unpublished government report on feral deer shows Australia is failing in its efforts to stop the spread of what one advocate warns could become “Australia’s next feral pig”.

The five years from 2020-2025 over which the national feral deer action plan was assessed covers a period in which the famously elusive species has increasingly encroached upon major cities, leading to more frequent encounters – including a memorable occasion in which two men in various degrees of undress were fined after becoming lost in the bush when they were spooked by deer while nude sunbathing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Trading has resumed on Polymarket's flagship international platform after a hack that drained money from the wallets of some traders. A third-party vendor based in the United Kingdom was breached, not the prediction market's website itself. Law enforcement in the UK have been notified of the incident, the company said. Trading was initially paused while the company investigated for several hours. On X, prominent traders complained that they had lost money; Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps reported that around 700 users appear affected, with approximately $2.7 million stolen. Polymarket declined to comment when WIRED asked how many traders were impacted by the breach and how much money was lost, but said it will refund impacted traders. The hack did not impact users on Polymarket US, the company's newer platform for people within the United States. Polymarket runs two separate prediction markets; Polymarket US operates as a federally regulated financial exchange within the country, while the flagship Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based platform that is banned in the United States and a number of other countries. This is not the first time that Polymarket traders have experienced losses like this. "A nearly identical vendor-compromise attack hit the platform in June, draining close to $3 million from at least 11 user wallets through the same kind of injected frontend script," reports StartupFortune. Hours before Polymarket halted trading, more than $2 billion in cryptocurrency was drained from Binance wallets in just 40 minutes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Archive of Our Own, one of the world’s biggest fanfiction sites, went down hard as a response to a “security incident.”

The post Ramaswamy Falls 6 Points in Ohio Poll After Controversial Acton Attack Ad appeared first on News Facts Network.

The unprecedented number of empty seats at the fifth plenum – a symbol of expulsions – serve as a symbol for the scale of the purges under Xi Jinping

China expelled a record number of officials from the Chinese Communist party (CCP) as it concluded a major political gathering, which saw an unprecedented number of empty seats indicating the scale of the purges under Xi Jinping.

A record 33 members were expelled at this week’s fifth plenum, a gathering of top officials that takes place roughly once a year.

Three people were killed when two helicopters collided in midair Thursday afternoon in a community near Portland, Oregon, authorities said.

As many as 8 million people have been affected by food shortages, electricity blackouts and health clinic closures

Extreme drought driven by an historic El Niño is affecting as many as 8 million people in Papua New Guinea, causing a cascade of issues from shortages of food and water, to electricity scarcity and schooling disruption.

An influential coalition that includes churches, trade unions and business groups has said the Pacific nation is in the midst of a “national crisis”, but there appears to be “no coordinated plan to protect vulnerable communities from the worsening impacts of El Niño.”

Candidate for Ohio governor confirms campaign no longer airing ad that smeared rival and was defended by Trump

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

The ad prompted a wave of revulsion since Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter in 1978, when her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her daughter between the ages of 10 and 12.

With Google now injecting “sponsored” links directly into AI follow-up queries, traffic to online publishers will suffer even more.

Jillian Segal says perception of link between coverage of conflicts and hostility towards Jewish Australians ‘is itself a matter of public importance’

• George Newhouse: We must protect Jewish Australians without casting suspicion on legitimate concern for Palestinians

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The federal government’s antisemitism envoy has proposed an “external independent ombudsman” to monitor ABC and SBS coverage of the war in Gaza, and a requirement that all visa applicants be screened for “the risk of holding antisemitic views”.

In an updated plan released on Friday, Jillian Segal said Australia’s two public broadcasters should be subjected to greater oversight.

Celebrate the life of Patrick Stewart through his iconic roles in TV and movies.

Product safety regulators said the glass carafes can unexpectedly break if they are damaged or cracked, leading to burn injuries.

AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible. There is no LLM output included in the base system or main package repository (AlpineBSD AI policy).

↫ AlpineBSD’s website

AlpineBSD uses the NetBSD kernel, libc, and essential tools, and combines them with Alpine’s apk-tools package manager, busybox, and generlaly preferring GNU tools over their BSD equivalents. It uses the s6 init system, but the project intends to add OpenRC as an alternative. The project is in its very early stages, so don’t expect things like an installer; you’re on your own, basically.

The Nintendo Wii (and its related consoles) were already made to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT as well as Mac OS X, but now we can add another milestone to the list: classic Mac OS.

So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired the company, and the Wii’s Vegas (and its later revision Bollywood) and Wii U’s Latte are effectively straight successors) reached the desktop for the first time, most likely the first time since the CHRP clone era that someone outside of Apple brought up classic Mac OS on a new system to the desktop. Despite still being nowhere near ready for a public release, I want to talk about the challenges I faced with this project so far.

↫ Rairii at Virtuallyfun

Various versions of Mac OS boot to the desktop, including Mac OS 9.2.2, the last ever version, but there’s still a ton or work to be done before this is ready for release. Still, with Rairii amazing track record of porting all kinds of things to various PowerPC machines, including getting the PowerPC version of Windows NT to run on various PowerPC Macs, I have little doubt they’ll manager to get this to a releasable state.

I absolutely love this kind of work.

Patrick Stewart starred on stage and screen across his decadeslong acting career. He died at his home on Wednesday.

In Alaska's Senate race, voters will choose between four candidates, including GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan and a man with the same first and last name — a situation that has frustrated Republicans and drawn scrutiny for Democrat Mary Peltola.

After starting as a radio desk assistant in 1966, Linda Mason went on to become the first female producer of the "CBS Evening News" and held several other high-profile positions at CBS News.

I think it’s safe to say that Windows’ Modern Standby feature isn’t exactly free from issues. The biggest problem seems to be that it’s not very good at actually determining when to transition between regular sleep and hibernation, often leaving users with an empty battery as they open their laptop’s lid. Microsoft has now released an update to hopefully address this long-standing problem.

This update improves the adaptive hibernate policy to provide more instant-on resumes from Modern Standby while helping preserve battery life when the charge is low. Noticeable changes include less hibernation while the battery is above 80% and hibernating sooner when the battery is below 10%.

↫ KB5127936

Among other new features and changes this update brings are Cloud Rebuild, a way for devices to install Windows without needing a local image. Cloud Rebuild can be started form within an existing installation, remotely by administrators, or through the Windows Recovery Environment. Obviously, a working internet connection, wired or wireless, is required for this feature to work.

This is the same update that introduces CLAT, which we talked about yesterday, to smooth the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

The Justice Department has begun issuing a new wave of subpoenas stemming from an ongoing criminal investigation into Alaska's U.S. Senate race, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News.

The personal information of more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees was exposed by a hacker group.

Rising fertilizer and fuel costs, drought and low crop prices have pushed Kansas farms to the edge — scrambling farmers' loyalties in the Senate race between GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton.

Report calls for an effort to tackle harms in similar way to obesity and smoking, and stresses need to ‘offer boys something better’

The manosphere and online misogyny should be treated by the government as a public health issue, in the same way as obesity or smoking, experts have said.

Writing in the Lancet, the authors of a new report argue that a coordinated response is needed, involving governments, schools, health services and community organisations, similar to the public-health response to tobacco use and ultra-processed food.

(The Center Square) - The canal system that provides 36% of all water in Arizona is officially joining the state’s litigation against the Trump administration over Colorado River water cuts.

Security incident linked to performance-monitoring tool spurred platform to halt trading for about an hour

Polymarket temporarily halted trading on its international platform on Thursday because of a security incident that compromised a third-party provider, the company said.

Trading was paused for about an hour and resumed on Thursday afternoon. The company has promised to fully reimburse any affected traders.

Prime minister claims Arab Israeli parties used foreign backing to steal elections, in which his coalition lost its majority

Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of using smear tactics to cling to power, after he claimed that Arab Israeli parties had used foreign backing to “steal” Tuesday’s election, in which the prime minister’s coalition lost its parliamentary majority.

Netanyahu and his allies called on the internal security service, Shin Bet, to investigate alleged vote buying and other irregularities in Palestinian communities in Israel, supposedly funded by foreign money.

The Delaware Opioid Settlement Commission, led by Brad Owens (pictured), approved $12.75 million in grants to more than 40 anti-addiction organizations last week. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA — Salim Said, a major participant in Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in federal prison for helping steal roughly $44 million from a program intended to feed children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Said co-owned Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which prosecutors said falsely claimed to serve as many as 6,000 meals per day. FBI surveillance showed only about 40 people collecting food daily. A jury convicted Said in 2025 on 21 counts, including wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel also ordered Said to pay more than $44 million in restitution. Prosecutors said he used fraud proceeds to purchase a $1.2 million home, commercial real estate, luxury vehicles and other property. Said apologized at sentencing after previously denying wrongdoing at trial.

Republican lawmakers have sought to connect the scandal politically to Rep. Ilhan Omar because she held her 2018 primary victory celebration at Safari Restaurant and later sponsored pandemic-era legislation expanding access to federal meal programs. However, there is no evidence that Omar participated in, knew about or benefited from Said’s fraud, and she has not been charged in connection with Feeding Our Future.

The broader scheme involved more than $250 million in fraudulent claims and has produced dozens of convictions. Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock received nearly 42 years in prison earlier this year.

Sources:

• The Center Square – MBFC Rating

The post Salim Said Sentenced to 30 Years in Massive Minnesota Child-Nutrition Fraud appeared first on News Facts Network.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has sued Utah to defend its claimed exclusive authority over federally registered prediction markets, as the state files (PDF) 14 criminal charges against Kalshi and its co-founders for allegedly violating anti-gambling laws. The Verge reports: On Wednesday, Utah's Attorney General Derek Brown filed charges against Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, including 12 counts of online gambling promotion, a third-degree felony, one count of a pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony, and general gambling promotion, a Class A misdemeanor. The civil lawsuit calls Kalshi a "back-alley gambling den," and Attorney General Brown didn't mince words in a statement to Gizmodo. "Gambling is illegal in Utah, whether you place the bet, run the game, or promote it. Calling it a 'prediction market' doesn't change what it is, and being federally registered doesn't put a company above the law," said Brown. "A federal court has already ruled that Utah's gambling laws apply to Kalshi," continued Brown. "Kalshi kept taking bets from Utahns anyway. That is illegal, and we're putting a stop to it." [...] The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been jumping into action to protect Kalshi and Polymarket by filing lawsuits against any state that brings charges against the betting sites. President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., is a paid advisor to both companies. The CFTC announced Wednesday that it was suing the state of Utah as part of its "commitment to maintaining its exclusive jurisdiction over CFTC-registered prediction markets." The argument is that the feds alone should be regulating these sites. "Utah seeks to shut down prediction markets across a wide variety of markets," CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said in a statement. "Event contracts do not just serve hedging and investment purposes -- they also provide the public with information about the outcome of future events. Congress entrusted the CFTC to be the federal regulator with sole responsibility to oversee these markets," continued Selig. "As I've said before, the CFTC has the expertise and responsibility to defend its exclusive jurisdiction over commodity derivatives, and that's exactly what we'll do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research finds 55% of lawyers are using AI in legal practices, up from 37% last year, though efficiency gains aren’t as high as expected

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More than half of Victoria’s lawyers have reported using AI in their work, according to a new study, but just over a quarter say they have reduced fees as a result of efficiency gains.

They also say clients seeking advice from chatbots have added to their workload, forcing them to correct errors made by AI.

Researchers and students from over 30 universities and other organizations gathered at the ninth annual TACCSTER to share science, learn new tools, and connect

Oct. 29, 2026 — More than 200 scientists, researchers, and students from 30 universities, high schools, and industry around the state gathered at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for the ninth annual TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers (TACCSTER) in September, a record turnout.

Pictured is Zahra Seyedsharifi, a Ph.D. candidate in Ocean Engineering at UT Austin, presenting her poster on simulating rotating hydrofoil and propeller flows.

Attendees shared their latest research findings through keynotes, tutorials, lightning talks, and poster presentations, learned about new opportunities and updates at the center, and gave input to TACC leaders during a town hall meeting.

“TACC turned 25 in June of this year,” said TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione in his state-of-the-center address. “The world has changed several times in the way that we do computing, which continues to evolve.”

The nationwide-picture of TACC shows that since 2001, more than 130,000 U.S. researchers have used the center’s systems, where allocations are awarded across the nation through internal review and through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded ACCESS program.

Five scientists have won Nobel Prizes for work that drew on TACC systems. The most recent, Francis Halzen, received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, where TACC supercomputers helped researchers sharpen the instrument’s accuracy and detect “ghostly” neutrinos that rarely interact with matter.

What’s more, in FY 2025-2026 TACC users accounted for 55 percent of all NSF funding awarded to the UT System.

Frontera Sunsets, Horizon Dawns

For most of its service life, TACC’s Frontera supercomputer was the fastest academic supercomputer in the United States, powering the largest computational simulations for researchers across the country. Frontera was retired in October 2026, having surpassed eight million jobs.

“It’s hard to say goodbye to our venerable machine, Frontera. Frontera had over seven years of production life, which is the longest run on any TACC system,” Stanzione said.

Frontera was the first step in TACC’s winning proposal for the U.S. NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF), the nation’s premiere supercomputing resources for scientists not only in Texas but across our nation.

As TACC retires Frontera, its successor, Horizon, the centerpiece system of NSF LCCF has entered its first phase of early operations. Stanzione announced that the power infrastructure is complete, an exabyte-capacity storage system is in place, and the initial deployment of Horizon’s AI-focused hardware is underway.

Tsunami Storm Warnings

Invited speaker Stefan Henneking of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences outlined intriguing tsunami research with a scalable framework for linear time-invariant systems that was applied to a physics-based, data-driven digital twin for tsunami early warning in the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ). Henneking’s team won the Gordon Bell Prize for their tsunami twin work in November 2025, awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery.

“Thanks to TACC, we got early access to Horizon, where both our MFEM-based wave propagation solver and our FFTMatvec-based Bayesian inference code showed great full-system-scale performance,” Henneking said. “With Horizon entering full production soon, it’s going to be an exciting time for academic research in high performance computing in Texas.”

Top left: TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione gives the State of the Center address; Top right: Lars Koesterke of TACC gave a tutorial on getting started with the U.S. NSF LCCF Horizon supercomputer and its CPU-GPU architecture; Bottom left: Sneha Bhamidipaty of UT Austin presented a lightning talk on using TACC’s Tapis framework for predicting tumor growth and treatment response. Bhamidipaty is also one of the poster winners for TACCSTER26; Bottom right: Erik Ferlanti of TACC (left) assisted participants and co-presented a tutorial on building scientific dashboards.

Digital Oncology Twins

Digital twins—virtual representations of physical systems—merge with cancer tumor treatment response and TACC’s high performance computing resources in the research of Thomas Yankeelov, also of the Oden Institute.

“People have written equations for how tumors grow and respond to treatment for well over a century, but it’s really only been in the last couple of decades that we can marry it with data that can be measured in a clinical situation on a patient,” Yankeelov said.

His lab takes data from MRI scans to track tumor size, blood flow, and cell behavior prior to therapy. “Then very early in the course of therapy, we try to use those data sets to calibrate the model and then run the model forward in time to forecast or make a prediction of how the tumor is predicted to grow.”

“For example, calibrating the model for one patient takes 10 to 40 days per patient based on the size of the breast cancer tumor. We did this on TACC’s Lonestar6 system, and we got a 40x speedup. The key thing here is that we take the mathematical model and we can extend it very easily to account for radiation therapy.”

Clinical AI in Oncology

Jeanne Kowalski-Muegge of the Dell Medical School presented at TACCSTER on her lab’s efforts to build a new search strategy for potential cancer drugs using digital twins in precision medicine, tailored to a unique patient—with the goal of building expanded treatment options. Unfortunately, many cancer patients do not have an actionable, targeted, or clear path to therapy.

“The take home message is that precision medicine does not end when a genomic match is missing. Instead, we can search,” Kowalski-Muegge said.

Her team uses ASK-PACK (evidence layer integration) and Match Me Where (digital twinning) to define a search space. The Protein AI Companion Knowledge (PACK) and PACK Computational Retrieval Analytics (CRA) will ground the search to proteins because that’s the focus of the expanded search.

“We can then execute and scale this with our GENELINK and TACC and make the workflows secure, governed, and executable. So far, we’ve used approximately 15,000 node hours on Vista and Lonestar6, and we’re starting to benchmark with Horizon.”

Maya Ylagan, a data analyst with the Kowalski Lab, presented the poster and lightning talk “ourGeneLink: A Provider-Facing Data Fabric Intervention for Precision Oncology.” James Labyer of TACC’s Life Sciences Computing group, and a close collaborator of the Kowalski lab, presented the poster “Computational Agent for Clinical-Genomic Digital Twin Navigation.”

Quick Thinking

Chess fascinates Jose Rizo-Rey of UT Southwestern Medical Center, especially the furiously quick thinking of blitz chess. “I’ve played many chess games, and I always wonder how the brain works. How can you not only think a lot, but also think so quickly?”

His research focuses on understanding synaptic transmission, which is regulated by neurons that form compartments along their membranes through fusion. Rizo-Rey solves three dimensional structures at atomic resolution, using data from NMR spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and X-ray crystallography.

He has been running simulations with a vesicle, flat bilayer, and four SNARE protein complexes, which allow vesicles to fuse with their target membranes.

“Typically, we’d run a simulation of a 5.3 million-atom system on 64 CPU nodes of Frontera for 43 nanoseconds per day,” Rizo-Rey said. “But now with TACC’s Vista system, using just eight GPU nodes, I got almost the same speed. That required a lot of optimizations with GROMACS, with the help of people here at TACC.”

The key concept uncovered by simulation and analysis is the SNAREs act as a local detergent that catalyzes the mixing of hydrophobic interiors of the two membranes.

“This is what we call the local detergent model of membrane fusion,” Rizo-Rey said.

Poster Winners

David Katz
Toward Automated X-Ray Experiments: An Inspectable Language-Model Sub-Agent for Bragg Peak Centering
Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, The University of Texas at Austin

Sneha Bhamidipaty
A Web-based API for Predicting Tumor Growth and Treatment Response Using the TACC Tapis Framework
Department of Computer Science, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, UT Austin

Hyunje Yang
Multi-GPU Training of Geometry-Aware Neural Operators for Cross-Regional Storm Surge Prediction
Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (UT CAEE), UT Austin

Paul A. Navrátil Young Researcher Award Winners

Excellence in Presentation: Çınar Turhan
Deep Learning Artifact Correction in X-ray CT Images of Porous Rocks
Ph.D. student, Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering under the direction of Dr. Maša Prodanović, UT Austin

Excellence in Publication: Sreeram Venkat
Sensor Placement for Tsunami Early Warning via Large-Scale Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design
Ph.D. candidate, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences under the direction of Dr. Omar Ghattas, UT Austin

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post Texas Researchers Converge at TACC for Record-Setting Symposium appeared first on HPCwire.

The Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to California officials, escalating a dispute over allegations by the federal government that the state may have as many as 20,000 non-citizens registered to vote.

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to hire an additional 2,000 employees in fiscal year 2027 to help process an expected surge in benefits claims during the next several years.

(The Center Square) – Federal lawmakers are touting a 30-year prison sentence for Minnesota fraudster Salim Said as accountability for stealing $44 million from taxpayers.

One signed file installs and upgrades the cluster, and AI agents work with it within limits the operator sets

RENO, Nev., Oct. 29, 2026 — CIQ, the enterprise software company behind Rocky Linux, today introduced CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE), open source Kubernetes for the AI era. Kubernetes runs in production at 82% of organizations that use containers, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) calls it the de facto operating system for AI. Running it still means assembling about ten upstream projects that each release on their own schedule. SKE ships them as one signed file that installs, joins, and upgrades the cluster.

Built from an unmodified upstream source by the team behind Rocky Linux, Fuzzball, Warewulf, and Apptainer, CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) lets system administrators, developers, and platform engineers run Kubernetes next to their existing Linux, HPC, and GPU infrastructure.

AI raises the cost of that upkeep. Training and inference spread across many systems, and capacity grows and shrinks with demand. Two thirds of organizations that host generative AI models run some or all inference on Kubernetes, according to the CNCF January 2026 survey. Those clusters sit beside air-gapped sites, compliance rules, and general-purpose nodes, often across several Linux distributions. In a 2026 industry survey of 785 Kubernetes decision makers, 62% said complexity was slowing business initiatives, and 65% ran air-gapped clusters. Teams want speed without vendor lock-in or the cost of integrating every piece themselves.

A built-in MCP server lets AI agents work with the cluster under rules the operator sets. Its 37 tools come in read, write, and destructive tiers, and tools above the enabled tier are never registered. Kubernetes access controls still bound every call, and secrets stay off limits. An AGENTS.md file guides agent-driven installs, and the documentation is published in llms.txt format. Operators get a built-in web dashboard with pods, logs, and shell access.

The hard part of Kubernetes starts after the first install, when those projects drift apart. CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) pins and tests every component as a set. Rolling upgrades check node health at each step and roll back a node that fails. etcd snapshots run every 12 hours by default, and certificates renew before they expire. Every release is signed and ships a software bill of materials. What a team learns on its first SKE cluster carries to the tenth.

CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) is free and open source and runs a single cluster with an included web UI. CIQ Stratum Pro, the commercial version, manages every SKE cluster, from GPU clusters to the general fleet, through the same web interface under one sign-on. Stratum Pro adds an app catalog, an optional CIS hardening profile with a per-control check, and support from CIQ. Its fleet agent connects outbound only, so clusters need no inbound ports. Cluster API provisioning follows in a later release.

“Kubernetes has become the place AI runs, and the people running it still spend their weeks on upgrades and integration work. We built CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) so every cluster installs and upgrades the same way, and so the agents those teams put to work can only do what the operator allows,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, Apptainer, and Warewulf.

“Anyone who has stood up a cluster by hand knows the install sets the tone for everything after it, so we built CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) around getting that step right. Build something on your laptop that works, and the same binary runs it on a cloud VM. What is easy for you to set up is just as easy for your agents to deploy, prototype, and test with,” said Peter Nelson, Chief Technology Officer, CIQ.

CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) runs on any Enterprise Linux 9 or later distribution, so teams keep the operating system they already trust and avoid a vendor’s own node OS. That includes Rocky Linux, RLC Pro AI, and RLC Pro Hardened, on amd64 and arm64. It works alongside Warewulf Pro for node provisioning, Fuzzball for HPC and AI workflows, and Ascender Pro for automation, and each product also runs on its own.

Availability
CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE) is available now in technical preview, with general availability expected November 5. SKE is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. CIQ Stratum Pro is a commercial subscription, with pricing announced at general availability. Both versions download from CIQ Depot and the CIQ Portal, one binary per architecture, and documentation is public at docs.ciq.com. Visit CIQ at booth #326 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, November 9 to 12 in Salt Lake City.

Webinar

CIQ will host a live webinar, A new way to run Kubernetes: Meet CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE), on Thursday, November 5 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET. Chris Wolford, Director of Engineering at CIQ, and Brian Rieb, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at CIQ, will take one SKE cluster from a single download to a high availability install, join it to the CIQ Stratum Pro fleet manager, connect an AI agent through the built-in MCP server, and upgrade it to the next Kubernetes version. Register for the CIQ Stratum webinar here.

About CIQ

CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of Enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers secure, performant software infrastructure for the full range of modern workloads. Global enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers trust CIQ to run their most advanced workloads in production, from mission-critical environments to the systems behind major scientific and AI breakthroughs. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, the open source CIQ Stratum Kubernetes Engine, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing, with Apptainer Pro coming soon. Learn more at ciq.com.

Source: CIQ

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‘Spectral fingerprints’ of anyons point to path for quantum computing

Oct. 29, 2026 — Physicists have discovered a way to use light to detect the “spectral fingerprints” of anyons — exotic quasiparticles that emerge from the collective behavior of many electrons.

Physical Review Letters published the finding by theoretical physicists at Emory University. Their work offers a new tool for the study of anyons, which hold potential as fundamental building blocks for quantum computing.

Luiz Santos (left) and Tianhong Lu. Credit: Carol Clark.

“Using a particular frequency of light, we’ve developed a sensor that can pinpoint the location of an anyon in a material,” says Luiz Santos, professor of physics at Emory University and senior author of the study.

“The dream goal is the ability to manipulate anyons to achieve topological quantum computation,” says Tianhong Lu, first author of the paper and an Emory PhD candidate in physics. “Our theoretical work takes another step in that direction.”

‘Anything Goes’ Behavior

For nearly 100 years, it was believed that every electrical charge in the universe, whether on Earth or in the next galaxy, has the same magnitude of charge: protons have a full-positive electrical charge, for example, while electrons have a full-negative electrical charge.

“People thought that all charge excitations had to carry multiples of magnitude — in other words, the charges could not be split into fractional charges,” Santos explains.

During the 1980s, however, scientists discovered that — in two-dimensional systems — electron charges can fractionalize into quasiparticles that defy the standard rules of particles. These newly discovered phenomena were dubbed “anyons,” for their “anything goes” behavior.

One of the more interesting potential applications for anyons is to create qubits, or the bits of information needed for quantum computing.

A major challenge in developing quantum computing is that even the slightest disturbances — from the movement of air molecules or radiation from the sun — create disturbances that cause havoc at such a tiny scale.

“Anyons can hide themselves and avoid being perturbed by many environmental disturbances,” Santos says. “That makes them more stable than typical quantum materials.”

However, topological quantum computation —a system that relies on a particular class of anyons — remains in the theoretical realm.

Studying anyons to find ways to harness their power is incredibly challenging because they don’t exist as fundamental, isolated particles. Instead, they emerge as collective excitations of electrons.

A Quantum Dance

“It’s quantum choreography,” Santos says. “The electrons are dancing around, which creates ripples that carry anyons, or a fraction of the charges. You can think of the ripples like waves on the surface of water. Instead of water molecules moving around, billions of electrons are moving together.”

Physicists have observed this quantum dance under laboratory conditions. A strong magnetic field is applied to a two-dimensional electron gas which is cooled to an ultra-low temperature. That produces what is called the fractional quantum Hall effect — a quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations, or anyons.

Around three years ago, researchers discovered they could produce the effect without a strong magnetic field and under less extreme conditions. The challenge of pinpointing the location of the anyons, however, remained.

The Emory physicists showed how light can help.

Imagining a Model

In certain atomically thin semiconductor materials, electrons can pair with holes, or imperfections, to form excitons — neutral quasiparticles that interact strongly with light. The researchers predicted that when an exciton gets close enough to an anyon, it will bind to it to form a new composite object: an exciton-anyon state. This process, in turn, should emit a detectable shift in energy.

The challenge began on the blackboard as the physicists worked out potential ways to model their proposed system on a computer.

Many early physics breakthroughs relied on direct observation, giving rise to the apocryphal story of an apple falling onto Isaac Newton’s head, inspiring him to come up with gravitational theory.

In contrast, much of modern-day physics involves processes occurring in invisible, untouchable realms.

“You can feel an apple hitting your head but not an anyon,” Lu says.

Abstract thinking about physics, he adds, was the hardest, and most rewarding, part of the current paper.

“We had to do qualitative analyses to come up with trends for the binding energy and quantum entanglements involved,” Lu says.

After they came up with a model, they developed a simulation for it and, finally, analyzed the results.

“It’s interesting to enter your ideas into a computer and see that the results fit your prediction,” Lu says.

The researchers hope that experimentalists will now build on their work, providing real-world confirmation of their theory, to help move topological quantum computing yet another step closer to reality.

The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (Grant No: DE-SC0023327).

Source: Carol Clark, Emory

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Pentagon says it has referred leak case to justice department for criminal investigation

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has reportedly dismissed Lt Gen Brett Sylvia, a high-ranking army strategist serving on the Pentagon’s joint staff, following allegations that he disclosed classified information to the public.

The Pentagon announced on Thursday that it had referred an alleged information leak case for criminal investigation, maintaining that the removal of the senior general was essential “to protect sensitive information”, the Washington Post reported.

Binance is investigating a potential hack after more than $2 billion in crypto was drained from one of its wallets into a new external account, with Blockaid estimating nearly $3.3 billion was moved. "Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating," said Binance on X. "User funds are safe," said Binance founder CZ. "It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m). I don't manage Binance anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BSC has developed an application that provides data on wind and solar energy, as well as heating and cooling needs. It is now available through the Destination Earth portal

Oct. 29, 2026 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has developed an application that turns climate simulations into information the energy sector can use to plan ahead and make strategic decisions. The resulting energy indicators are now publicly available through the European Commission’s Destination Earth (DestinE) platform, helping users explore renewable energy resources and prepare for a changing climate.

Energy professionals, researchers, and decision-makers can explore how much wind and solar energy could be generated, when wind conditions could disrupt generation, and how temperatures affect heating and cooling needs.

Developed by BSC’s Earth Sciences Department, the Energy Indicators application addresses questions relevant to renewable energy producers, wind farm and electricity grid operators, and researchers: how much energy could be generated from wind and solar resources, when wind conditions could disrupt generation, and how changing temperatures could affect heating and cooling needs.

The application forms part of DestinE’s Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT), a system that uses computer simulations to recreate the Earth’s climate and explore how it could change over the coming decades. Developed by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) through a European consortium led by CSC – IT Center for Science, with BSC as one of the project partners, the Climate DT connects these simulations with practical tools that help different sectors assess climate impacts and plan adaptation measures.

“Our role is to turn climate simulations into information that energy stakeholders can use. With these indicators now available, users can explore what changing climate conditions could mean for renewable energy production and demand, and incorporate that information into their decision-making,” explains Francesc Roura-Adserias, a researcher at BSC’s Earth Sciences Department.

BSC’s application, the so-called Energy Indicators, uses the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer to calculate the energy data in real time, as the climate simulations are running. The published data cover the globe in 5 km squares, providing much higher resolution and, therefore, better geographical detail than many existing climate and energy datasets, which have resolutions of around 25 to 100 km.

The indicators cover the 1990-2049 period, spanning both recent decades and future climate under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise without strong mitigation. Future releases will include scenarios with lower and higher emissions.

For wind energy, the application provides information on wind speed variability, including how often winds are too weak to generate electricity or so high that turbines need to shut down for safety. It also estimates how much electricity could be produced by four distinct turbine classes. For solar energy, the tool estimates how much electricity solar panels could generate, while additional indicators describe how changing temperatures could influence heating and cooling needs.

The wind-energy indicators build on BSC-led research assessing how more detailed global climate simulations can help the energy sector understand future wind conditions. Published in Energy and Climate Change, the study compares these high-resolution simulations with a lower-resolution version of the same climate model. The researchers found that the more detailed simulations better represented average local wind conditions and extremes, particularly in coastal areas and regions with complex terrain, highlighting how these simulations can provide additional information to complement the climate data currently used in the energy sector.

“Wind energy assessments have traditionally relied heavily on historical climate data, often assuming that past conditions will remain the same in the future. Our study shows how global climate projections with resolutions of 5 to 10 km can complement these existing datasets, providing a more detailed picture of how wind resources could evolve over the coming decades,” says Aleksander Lacima-Nadolnik, BSC researcher and first author of the study.

Together, this information can help users compare renewable energy resources across locations, assess conditions that could affect generation, and explore changes in heating and cooling needs. The public release lets users incorporate the indicators into their own work, helping inform strategic decisions on energy infrastructure and climate adaptation.

Professionals and researchers working on climate and energy can access the data through the DestinE Platform and consult the Energy Indicators user guide to understand what each indicator measures and how to use it. For those working directly with the data, an example Jupyter notebook provides step-by-step code to download the indicators and create visualisations, offering a practical starting point for their own analyses.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC Turns Detailed Climate Simulations into Practical Tools for the Energy Sector appeared first on HPCwire.

Oct. 29, 2026 — QuantrolOx, University of Oxford spinout headquartered in Finland with offices in the UK, Netherlands, US and India, has raised €12 million in a Series A2 funding round led by IW Capital, with co-investment from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund. The round also includes participation from Voima Ventures, Serendipity Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Transpose Capital.

The investment will accelerate QuantrolOx’s commercial growth and international expansion, including its growing presence in North America following the opening of its first US office in Berkeley, California. The round brings QuantrolOx’s total funding to ~$31million or ~€28million.

As quantum computing moves towards industrial-scale development, two major challenges remain: automating increasingly complex quantum hardware and training the workforce needed to build and operate it.

QuantrolOx addresses both through three complementary products:

• Quantum EDGE: A hardware-agnostic measurement and automation platform that accelerates QPU development, characterization, calibration, and tuning.
• Quantum EDGE Academy: A practical quantum hardware training platform combining expert-developed courses with realistic simulated hardware.
• VIDYAQAR: An integrated, open-architecture superconducting quantum system for education, research, testing, and benchmarking.

Together, these products help research institutions and quantum hardware companies move from manual workflows towards scalable, automated quantum R&D while developing the engineering skills needed across the industry.

“Every industry is built on its tools and its people. QuantrolOx is building the foundations of the quantum industry: our tools industrialize quantum hardware and train the people to run it. With IW Capital and the EIC Fund behind us, we are setting the standards and accelerating the path to practical quantum computing,” said Vishal Chatrath, Co-founder and CEO, QuantrolOx

“Oxford physics, Finnish engineering and a CEO with a great commercialization track record is a rare combination,” said Charlie Lyon Carroll, Investment Director at IW Capital. “QuantrolOx has automated the slowest, most expert-dependent part of running a quantum computer, on any hardware. With research accelerating and governments investing massive amounts of capital to support it, that software only gets more valuable. We’re proud to be backing the team and look forward to helping them scale QuantrolOx into the control layer every quantum computer runs on.”

Expanding Across Europe, North America and Asia

Recent milestones include a five-year collaboration agreement with UC Berkeley to advance the industrialization of superconducting quantum computing, the opening of its Berkeley office, and the launch of Q-HUB@MAHE, at Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), India, where VIDYAQAR supports open-architecture quantum hardware development and hands on workforce training.

QuantrolOx also works with international research institutions and technology partners, including Rigetti, Bluefors,QuantWare, NQCC (UK), Qblox, AQSolotl and UC Berkeley.

The funding will scale Quantum EDGE deployments, expand Quantum EDGE Academy and grow the US team as the industry moves towards larger, more complex quantum systems requiring greater automation, interoperability, and skilled engineering talent.

About QuantrolOx

QuantrolOx is a University of Oxford spinout founded in 2021 and headquartered in Finland, with offices in the UK, Netherlands, US and India, developing software, systems, and training solutions for the quantum computing industry. Its products – Quantum EDGE, Quantum EDGE Academy, and VIDYAQAR – support quantum hardware automation, research, testing, and workforce development.

Through its hardware-agnostic approach and international partnerships, QuantrolOx helps universities, research institutions, and industry teams develop and operate scalable quantum systems. Learn more at www.quantrolox.com.

Source: QuantrolOx

The post QuantrolOx Raises €12M to Industrialize Quantum Hardware and Expand Globally appeared first on HPCwire.

(The Center Square) - The U.S. Department of Justice amended its lawsuit on Thursday over spoiler candidates in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race following public reports.

“Captain Picard stood for the best of us,” wrote William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk.

It’s now taken for granted that data centers across the U.S. are driving up electricity prices. As many Americans have soured on the energy-consuming facilities powering digital life and the AI boom, the issue has become central to the midterm elections.

Ad after political ad targets data centers, with many stating as fact that electricity prices have gone up as a result.

“No one asked for that data center to be built here, and no one here is getting a damn thing from it except higher electric bills,” one ad in Ohio, paid for by Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, says. 

Another ad in Texas, from Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, alleges that his Republican opponent’s support for data centers led to “skyrocketing utility bills.” 

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent airing ads that make claims about data centers and electricity prices this cycle, with heavy spending on races in states such as Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.

Recent surveys have found that a majority of Americans would not support a nearby data center, making opposition to the facilities a rare area of bipartisan agreement. The top reason to oppose data centers, according to one poll, is rising electricity prices.

At the same time, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright has repeatedly claimed that data centers have beneficial effects on electricity prices.

“The actual record of data centers coming on is they almost always are accompanied by a multiyear freeze in electricity prices. So, in real terms, a gradual decline in the cost of electricity,” he said on Sept. 17 at an event hosted by the conservative news outlet the Daily Caller. “These are a massive force to reduce the price of electricity and stop the price rises.”

Wright is correct that in principle, data centers could bring down prices. According to some analyses, that’s even happened in some places. But he fails to mention data, including from his own agency, that show that the opposite is also happening for many Americans.

At least for the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator serving more than 65 million people in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, prices have likely gone up as a result of data centers.

A July report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the DOE’s federal labs, and the economic consulting firm the Brattle Group, found that increased demand, or load growth, including from large data centers, contributed to “significant” price increases in the PJM region in 2025.

Still, the report makes the point that most of the observed price increases in the past few years are not due to data centers — and that overall, at least until 2025, increased load growth was associated with lower retail electricity prices.

Data centers have contributed to, but aren’t the only reason for, price increases in Ohio and other states in the Midwest. In Texas, where prices have risen only modestly, it is not entirely clear, experts told us, but large price increases would not be expected to occur in the same way in part because the state is rapidly deploying new low-cost wind and solar power.

As we’ll explain, whether data centers raise prices depends on multiple factors. It’s not a given that prices will rise if a data center moves in, but the risk is real — and price increases have already occurred in some places.

“Data centers can put either upward or downward pressure on electricity prices,” Jacquelyn Pless, an energy economist at the University of Toronto, told us. “It depends on how much it costs to serve the new demand, whether utilities can use existing infrastructure more efficiently, and who ultimately pays for any required investments.”

“Secretary Wright has been clear that energy subtraction policies, not data centers, have been responsible for rising electricity prices and that when states encourage energy addition policies, growing electricity demand (including with data centers) drives down electricity costs for American families,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us, placing blame on closures of coal and natural gas plants and renewable portfolio standards, policies that require a minimum amount of clean energy.

DOE also cited examples of data center agreements that have led to rate freezes, which appear on a White House webpage from July touting President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge. We’ll share what experts think of the pledge.

What the Data Show

If many Americans think that all of or even the bulk of their recent electricity price increases are due to data centers, that is a misconception.

“To date, except for in the PJM market, load growth and data centers in particular as a sub-sector of load growth, have not been a principal driver of price increases in electric markets around the country,” Douglas J. Arent, a global fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, told us.

According to the July LBNL report, national average retail electricity prices have risen 29% between 2019 and 2025, but that figure falls to just 3% when adjusted for inflation.

The reason for price increases varies, but Arent said the main drivers are fuel price increases, especially for natural gas, and the cost of replacing and updating grid infrastructure. Much of the U.S. grid is old and due for improvement, just as equipment and labor costs have soared with inflation, supply chain constraints and Trump’s tariffs.

“The politics has certainly grown much larger than the data and the facts on this one,” Arent said.

The LBNL report notes that at the state level, increased demand, in part from data centers, is associated with a decline in electricity prices in recent years, and that residential customers “may have benefited from load growth from 2019 to 2025 in some states.” At least through 2024, North Dakota, New Mexico and Nebraska each significantly grew their load while reducing inflation-adjusted prices.

Multiple other reports, many funded by industry groups, have similarly concluded that there isn’t evidence that data centers have pushed up average electricity prices, or that the price increase is negligible, although some note that data centers are helping to increase prices in the PJM market.

Researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit largely funded by electric utilities, posted an unpublished study in June that estimated that data centers “caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024,” or by 6% for a customer living in an area with average data center growth.

Several other analyses, however, have found that data centers have already raised average costs to a small degree.

Looking at the level of individual utilities rather than at state averages, a working paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, which Pless co-authored, found that between 2010 and 2024, data center entry increased retail electricity rates by 2.7%, with a higher average increase of 5.6% for customers of investor-owned utilities.

Pless said her findings “challenge blanket claims that data centers have not raised electricity prices, but they also don’t suggest that data centers are responsible for all recent increases in electricity bills.”

As we said, even some of the analyses that have not found data centers to have generally raised prices thus far have acknowledged that that could change or that there are important exceptions to the overall pattern.

The LBNL report, for example, cautions that for residential customers, it is less clear that high load growth is associated with lower prices, and that the apparent relationship may not hold into the future. The report also highlights the counterexample of PJM, in which data centers appear to have contributed to rising costs through the grid operator’s capacity market, which pays suppliers for the promise of electricity in the future.

Two separate economic consulting firms also listed PJM as an exception in which data centers did raise prices.

Sanya Carley, a faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and an electricity market researcher, told us that data centers “have significantly increased bills already” in the PJM region, adding, for example, at least $10 per month to bills in western Maryland and Ohio starting in mid-2025.

Some experts are also concerned that the existing data on prices is already a bit out of date.

“Studies that examine effects of data centers on prices in the past are largely irrelevant,” Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, told us in an email. “Today’s data centers use 10 to 100x more electricity than the previous generation of facilities. Some are even larger.”

“Everything’s moving so fast and the data actually just can’t keep up,” Carley said. “So I anticipate going forward that we will see much bigger impacts on electricity markets. It’s just that we don’t have the data at the present to fully track it.”

What Determines Whether Prices Rise or Fall

Multiple experts told us that there is no single answer about whether data centers raise prices.

Carley said a critical factor is whether a grid has extra electricity being produced. “If you’re in a grid that is heavily constrained and there isn’t much wiggle room and demand is growing really quickly, we will see data centers push up the price of electricity,” she explained. If, on the other hand, a grid already has extra capacity, data centers “can pay a greater share of the fixed cost of the grid, and thereby they can actually bring the price of electricity down.”

“Arguments that demand growth could increase or reduce system costs could both turn out to be correct,” authors with LBNL and the Brattle Group similarly wrote in commentary in the energy research journal Joule in June.

Paul Donohoo-Vallett, an independent energy consultant who previously worked at DOE, said that in certain places in the Great Plains in the recent past, data center growth “used up existing capacity that was being underutilitized,” driving down costs. 

“What this is not showing is what happens when you don’t have spare capacity,” he said, which is expected to increasingly occur in the future. “If you have to build a bunch of more stuff because you’re already at capacity — in that case, it really depends how the utilities and policymakers divvy up the cost for that.”

Arent noted that what’s happening in PJM now is unique and is being driven by “anticipated data center load, not real data center load.” Prices have shot up in the last year in part because of the operator’s forward-looking capacity market, which saw prices rise nearly 10-fold between mid-2024 and mid-2025.

The capacity market pays suppliers for their commitment to provide future electricity as a way to ensure the grid will have enough power generation in the coming years. High prices signal to industry that demand will be high and more power plants should be built. Once a year, PJM runs an auction to set this price after estimating how much demand will exist.

One problem is that the way PJM estimates future demand is flawed, John Quigley, a senior fellow at Penn’s Kleinman Center who has been following the PJM market, told us. “These capacity auctions are being driven by estimates of future demand, and it’s been proven that these estimates can be wildly overstated,” he said.

Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, concluded in a June 2025 report that data centers are “the primary reason” for high capacity market prices. Even with a cap now on the market’s price, ratepayers are set to spend an extra $7.3 billion in capacity market charges due to data centers this delivery year and $6.5 billion next year, according to Monitoring Analytics’ January report.

“It is really just a windfall to existing generators who aren’t doing anything different, and it’s just a tax paid by existing customers,” Donohoo-Vallett said, “who need to pay for generation that hasn’t been built yet and to meet demand that hasn’t shown up yet.”

Although capacity prices are many times higher than several years ago, it’s worth noting that household electricity bills have not increased by that same amount, since capacity prices in PJM account for only about 10% to 20% of a person’s electricity bill. The increase, however, can still be substantial, especially for lower-income households.

Carley said that capacity market increases between mid-2025 and mid-2026 added around $18 per month to the average home electricity bill in western Maryland and $16 per month in Ohio, with 63% of those increases estimated to be specifically due to data centers.

A Path Forward

The push now, from both political parties, is to find a way to ensure that data center companies pay for the extra infrastructure their facilities require so that everyday Americans don’t effectively subsidize the projects for big tech. Democrats, and to a lesser extent Republicans, increasingly support pauses or moratoriums on new data centers until rules can be hashed out.

Trump has been a staunch ally of data centers, but in March he issued his Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which called for companies to “agree to protect American consumers from price hikes” by building, bringing or buying their own power supplies and footing the bill for upgrades, among other promises.

In an Oct. 21 Truth Social post, Trump incorrectly said that data centers “are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid.”

They aren’t. The pledge is just that — voluntary. Some experts told us that the pledge was useful symbolically, but others saw little to no value to it.

“It’s nothing,” Donohoo-Vallett said. “It’s just a messaging document.”

“It was a PR stunt,” Quigley said.

“Compliance is not being monitored or enforced by anyone,” Harvard’s Peskoe said. “It’s a nice sentiment, but what matters are utility contracts and tariffs.” 

Tariffs in this context refer to the specialized rules and pricing structures that data centers would have to agree to before being connected to a grid. Some proposed ideas include having data centers pay upfront for infrastructure costs, requiring long-term minimum payments, exit fees if a developer pulls out, as well as the ability to reduce or cut power to a center when a grid is experiencing peak use.

Robin Millican, also with Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said on X in March that the pledge was “a useful signal,” but that it was “not a new idea” and that “some of the companies have already been doing what it calls for.”

“The real decisions will happen state by state, where regulators will determine how new infrastructure costs are allocated across customer classes. Tariffs for large loads, transmission upgrades, and cost recovery rules will ultimately be resolved PUC by PUC, not through voluntary commitments,” she wrote, referring to public utility commissions.

There is also the Ratepayer Protection Act, which passed the House with broad bipartisan support but has stalled in the Senate, where it was introduced by Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. 

As with the pledge, the legislation aims to make sure ratepayers are not left on the hook for any costs associated with data centers, but as written, it cannot require that. Rather, the bill requires state regulatory authorities to “consider” instituting such controls for facilities that demand 100 megawatts or more of power.

Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University, told us in an email that “the basic ideas are very reasonable as ways to reduce the likelihood that data centers will raise electric rates,” but he added that “implementation will really determine how much and/or if it will help.”

A more aggressive bill, known as the GRID Act, was introduced by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut in February, but it has not made it out of committee. A variety of other bills have also been introduced in Congress.

“Ultimately, the key question isn’t simply whether a data center promises to pay its own way,” Pless said, “but whether new rates and contracts actually ensure that existing customers aren’t left covering the costs.”

Kate Yandell contributed to this story.

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(The Center Square) – The Texas Attorney General's office has sued Harris County officials alleging they are using taxpayer money to run racially discriminatory “get out the vote” ads.

E-commerce company posts high cloud computing sales but gives a cautious sales forecast for the fourth quarter

Amazon offered a mixed picture of its financial health on Thursday in its quarterly earnings report.

The e-commerce company gave a cautious sales forecast for the current fourth quarter, which encompasses the critical holiday shopping period, after delivering fiscal third-quarter results that came in below Wall Street analysts’ expectations.

(The Center Square) – California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri has resigned, citing personal and family reasons.

An automated state-preparation routine and enhanced calibration protocol keep fidelity above the entanglement threshold at full scale, and cloud users now have access to the same system performance.

ESPOO, Finland, Oct. 29, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers today announced that its cloud-accessible IQM Emerald system has fully entangled all 54 qubits on the chip simultaneously, a result that shows the system’s computational quality holds up when every qubit is put to work at once. IQM’s cloud customers now have access to that same full-chip performance, so their computations can draw on the entire processor rather than a fraction of it.

IQM measured a fidelity of 0.515 at 40 qubits without readout error mitigation (REM) and 0.516 at the full 54 qubits with REM applied, both above the classical threshold of 0.500 that separates genuine entanglement from noise.

These results rank among the strongest reported for any commercially available quantum computer, giving customers access to state-of-the-art, high-quality processors. Until now, a user running a comparable demonstration on IQM Emerald could reliably use on the order of 30 qubits within a single algorithm. Studies on large quantum chips often use only a fraction of the available qubits, commonly 10 to 20, even when the hardware has many more. Emerald’s result shows the alternative: an entire processor working together on one computation.

“Entangling the entire chip means every qubit and every connection between them has to work correctly in the same circuit. Getting there came down to being smarter about how we prepare the state itself, choosing the gate order to keep idle time to a minimum,” said Craig Ciesla, CTO, IQM Quantum Computers. “Our current and prospective cloud customers now have the chance to benefit from the same tools and system performance that made this achievement possible.”

The demonstration used a Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state, a standard benchmark for large-scale entanglement, prepared across the entire IQM Emerald processor. The result was enabled by a smarter, automated routine for state preparation that selects the best two-qubit gates while weighing gate fidelity against qubit idle time, choosing both the qubits and the gate order to minimize idle time as the state is built. IQM measured a fidelity of 0.515 at 40 qubits without readout error mitigation (REM) and 0.516 at the full 54 qubits with REM applied, both above the classical threshold of 0.500 that separates genuine entanglement from noise.

The result builds on roughly a year of hardware and calibration work across IQM’s technical teams, including an updated calibration methodology, an improved gate set and continued deployment of error-reduction tools such as dynamical decoupling and qubit selection. These improvements led to an error rate reduction of up to 50% for quantum operations in the processor.

The automated state-preparation routine is part of IQM’s broader effort to automate the operation of quantum computers. This development, along with IQM’s AI-driven agentic calibration work, is part of a broader effort to automate the tuning of quantum systems.

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Quantum Computers (Nasdaq: IQMX) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum computers and cloud platform access to enterprises, 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 and headquartered in Finland, with major operations in Munich, IQM employs over 450 people and operates across Europe, Asia and North America. IQM is the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Stock Market.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM Reports Full-Chip Entanglement on 54-Qubit Quantum Processor appeared first on HPCwire.

Global investors, including Infinitum, Jericho Capital, QUDA Capital, Cisco Investments, and Worldline Capital, join the round alongside the National Growth Fund of Korea and Korean institutions.

SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 29, 2026 — FuriosaAI, an AI semiconductor company building sustainable, high-performance inference compute for data centers, today announced the completion of its $620 million (KRW 820 billion) Series D round, bringing its post-money valuation to approximately $2.9 billion.

The financing marks a major milestone as FuriosaAI scales global commercial deployments of its RNGD AI inference accelerator. FuriosaAI will use the new capital to expand RNGD production, strengthen its software ecosystem, and accelerate development of its third-generation AI accelerator.

International investors contributed a total of $110 million to the round, bringing deep expertise across AI semiconductors and computing infrastructure. U.S.-based Infinitum, an investment firm with extensive experience in the AI semiconductor sector, was the largest international investor in the round.

Singapore-based QUDA Capital Partners also joined the round. Its Founder and Managing Partner, Charlie Foo, previously held senior leadership roles at NVIDIA and Mellanox Technologies, including as Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific Enterprise Business. He currently serves as Principal Advisor to FuriosaAI.

Other international investors include Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi-based NeoFort Holding, and U.S.-based technology investment firms Jericho Capital and Worldline Capital.

South Korea’s National Growth Fund invested $280 million as the largest investor in the round, supporting the country’s initiatives to expand AI computing infrastructure and strengthen the Korean AI semiconductor ecosystem, while helping accelerate the round’s momentum.

Existing shareholders contributed $125 million in follow-on investments, reflecting continued confidence in FuriosaAI’s long-term growth prospects. Notably, the Korea Development Bank (KDB), one of FuriosaAI’s major existing shareholders, invested an additional $22 million in the round.

All three of FuriosaAI’s original seed investors, NAVER, DSC Investment, and KDB Capital, participated. DSC Investment, which first backed FuriosaAI in 2017, has participated in every financing round since the company’s seed stage. NAVER’s seed investment was made by NAVER D2SF, its early-stage investment arm, while this round’s investment was made by NAVER Ventures, NAVER’s Silicon Valley-based investment platform.

“We look for the moment a technology company moves from proving its technology to proving its business. FuriosaAI is at that point now, with its chip in volume production and in deployment with customers,” said Yong Jung Park, General Partner of NAVER Ventures. “As a Silicon Valley-based investor, helping the company grow in North America is where we can add the most value. We’re proud to back June and the team as they take Furiosa to the global stage.”

Nextrans and Kakao Investment also participated. Both firms became FuriosaAI shareholders in its Series C bridge round last year and increased their commitments as the company advanced mass production and global commercialization. The round also attracted new Korean institutional investors. The Export-Import Bank of Korea selected FuriosaAI for its first direct investment in a startup. Korea’s United Asset Management Company (UAMCO) committed $30 million, becoming the largest new domestic investor after the National Growth Fund, while Hanwha Asset Management also joined the round.

“This Series D financing marks an important milestone for FuriosaAI and reflects the confidence of investors around the world in our technology and ability to execute,” said June Paik, Co-Founder and CEO of FuriosaAI. “We are particularly encouraged by the participation of investors with deep expertise and experience in the global AI semiconductor and infrastructure industries.”

“We are entering a new phase of bringing our technology to the global AI infrastructure market at scale,” Paik added. “By accelerating the commercialization of RNGD and advancing the development of Gen 3, we aim to help shape the next generation of AI infrastructure.”

“Taking an advanced AI chip from design to volume production is an exceptionally difficult undertaking, and few companies have demonstrated the ability to do so successfully,” said John Yetimoglu, Chief Investment Officer with Infinitum. “FuriosaAI has gone further, securing production deployments with leading enterprises such as Samsung SDS and LG Group. This combination of technological innovation and commercial execution gives us strong conviction in FuriosaAI’s ability to scale RNGD globally and deliver on its ambitious Gen3 roadmap.”

FuriosaAI expects to produce 20,000 RNGD accelerators in 2026, with plans to more than double production to over 40,000 units in 2027, supporting our growing customer demand. LG Group is running its EXAONE deployments on RNGD, Upstage now uses RNGD to serve live search summarization for millions of users, and Samsung SDS launched its commercial NPU-as-a-service on RNGD in July.

About FuriosaAI

Founded in 2017, FuriosaAI is a South Korea–based semiconductor company developing high-performance, energy-efficient AI accelerators for data center inference. Leveraging its proprietary Tensor Contraction Processor (TCP) architecture, FuriosaAI designs and develops an integrated AI computing stack spanning silicon, compilers, software, and server systems, with a mission to make AI computing more sustainable and accessible.

FuriosaAI’s second-generation accelerator, RNGD, entered mass production in January 2026. Featuring high-bandwidth memory and a power-efficient architecture, RNGD delivers scalable AI inference within existing data center power and cooling constraints. The company is expanding commercial deployments with enterprise and cloud customers globally, while collaborating with Broadcom on its third-generation AI accelerator for hyperscale infrastructure.

Headquartered in Seoul, FuriosaAI has offices in the United States, Portugal, and Singapore.

Source: FuriosaAI

The post FuriosaAI Secures $620M Series D to Meet AI Inference Demand and Accelerate Next-Gen Silicon appeared first on HPCwire.

Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men actor died at his home after ‘a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia’

• Patrick Stewart – a life in pictures

• Patrick Stewart dies aged 86 – latest updates

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, has died. He was 86.

The Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men star died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, said Kelly Bush Novak, his longtime spokesperson, to the Hollywood Reporter.

(The Center Square) – Arizona GM owners may soon reap the benefits of a $220 million settlement over the illegal sale of their private driving behavior data.

ALEC ADER
Staff Reporter

UDance Dance Marathon is a Registered Student Organization (RSO) on campus that raises money for The Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation. Founded in Wilmington, Delaware by Joe and Chris McDonough, whose son passed away from leukemia, the foundation raises awareness and funds for childhood cancer. 

The RSO’s main event is a 12-hour dance marathon that happens in the spring. While it is just one day, it takes months of preparation to make the event happen. 

FTKraft Night, a Trabant Now event where students help make crafts that will decorate the Bob Carpenter Center for the UDance Dance Marathon, is part of that preparation.

The Event Operations committee works under the executive board to schedule UDance events. Like many other events, the committee helped execute the annual craft night.

Every year, Trabant University Center is filled with tables of students doing crafts on a Saturday night. Students usually make banners, color in decorations and cut out drawings. This year was no different. 

The return of FTKraft Night, held on Sept. 19, had a high turnout. Bianca LaFazia, a senior chemical engineering major, talked about the night as she decorated a banner. 

“It’s a lot of fun,” LaFazia said. “We were just talking about how the music and the vibe is really great right now.” 

Heillie Santana, a sophomore biology major, also shares this sentiment. 

“We’re out tonight because it’s a great opportunity to be part of UDance,” Santana said. “It’s nice to sit back, talk to some nice people and just color.” 

The event was mainly organized by Event Operations Director Jessica Shisko, a senior kinesiology major. Shisko leads a committee that deals with the logistical side of budgeting and planning UDance events. 

“It can be overwhelming at times, but I have a great support system within the board,” Shisko said. “My team is very supportive.” 

Shisko enjoys being a part of UDance’s executive board and finds pride in the work she does.

“The best part is the feeling of executing events that I could tell people are having fun at, especially the heroes, and seeing how they don’t want to leave,” Shisko said. “Just knowing all that, and we have a part in helping these families in such a hard time is also just so rewarding.” 

The B+ Foundation believes “that every child who has battled cancer, or is still in the fight, is a Hero — a B+ Hero.” The foundation and UDance strive to celebrate these children.

In addition to Shisko, many of the other members of the UDance executive board showed up to the event.

LaFazia serves as UDance’s campaign communication liaison and was previously on Event Operations with her friend, Katrina Levitz, a senior chemical engineering major. 

“Yeah, we’ve been in the industry a bit, so we know crafting very well,” LaFazia said. “I love doing the crafts for the events and day of. It feels like we’re closer to them the day of.” 

Most of the students on the executive board started in other committees. Digital Communications Director Emily Brown, a senior media communication major, was previously part of Freshman For The Kids (FFTK), and now works with social media chairs and graphic design chairs for graphics for its events, website and merch. 

“I think it’s just a great and super fun way to spend your Saturday night,” Brown said.

UDance’s executive board is led by Co-Executive Directors, Giana Ingrati, a senior English education major, and Anna Shovlin, a senior kinesiology major. 

Ingrati believes UDance is special due to having such a large community of the university’s athletics, RSOs and Greek life participate in the fundraising.

“Approximately, every $1,000 is a check that’s written to a family,” Ingrati said. “Parents have to stop working, obviously hospital bills are very, very high, so this money will help them pay any bills they have to pay, any hospital bills.”

Shovlin talked about how easy it was to get involved in UDance. Students can join organizations such as Dedicated Volunteers, which helps make crafts. Students can also get involved in media outreach, development or hospitality committees.

“My favorite is probably the Rave Run, but I love this event because it makes crafts for all of the fall events and some of the spring ones,” Levitz said. 

Rave Run was held on Oct. 13. The 5K on South Campus partners with Races2Run, giving participants official times. Ingrati and Shovlin also plugged the other fall events coming up: a Be Positive Halloween Party and a Be Positive Holiday Party.

Throughout the year, there are many other UDance events besides the main marathon. Many different committees contribute to them.

“We spend so much time talking about raising money and raising awareness,” Brown said. “But it also really does make a great community of people.” 

Slashdot readers Cpt_Kirks, eklektic, sconeu, and Vrallis share the unfortunate news of Patrick Stewart's passing. Longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said Stewart died Wednesday at the age of 86 at his home in Los Angeles following "a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia." "He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all," Bush Novak wrote. "We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace." The acclaimed British actor became a science-fiction icon as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Beyond those iconic roles, Stewart earned multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for performances in Moby Dick, The Lion in Winter, Extras, Hamlet, and Blunt Talk. He later returned to his most famous role in Star Trek: Picard.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CEO Jensen Huang may have been the target of Chinese espionage activity, The New York Times reports.

The Department of Homeland Security asked an Icelandic hosting company to take down data obtained through hack

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked ⁠an Icelandic hosting company on Thursday to take down or limit access to data related to thousands ⁠of agency personnel, saying ⁠the content ​put them at risk, according to the request posted online by hosting company FlokiNET.

The database “places more than ⁠40,000 identifiable individuals at risk of harassment, stalking and physical harm”, the request said.

Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign allegedly collaborated with party operatives to confuse voters in midterms

The US justice department on Thursday is reported to have issued subpoenas in response to a report that the Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign collaborated with party operatives to get a challenger with the same name as the Republican senator Dan Sullivan on the midterm ballot.

ABC News and the Associated Press reported the subpoenas, citing sources familiar with the matter. The federal investigation comes a day after the New York Times found that the effort to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan in the Senate race set to be decided on Tuesday was led by Peltola’s campaign, which had for months denied involvement.

On Election Day, the Supreme Court will consider the latest significant case involving the balance between religious freedom and anti-discrimination laws.

In a string of decisions in recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of religion-based discrimination claims. In 2022, the Court's conservative majority ruled that Maine couldn’t exclude religious schools from a high-school tuition program. Last year, the Court held that Maryland parents with religious objections had the right to pull their children out of elementary school classes using storybooks with LGBTQ characters.

Colorado has been on the losing side of a number of these cases beginning with a challenge from a baker who didn't want to make cakes for same-sex couples, despite the state's nondiscrimination law.

A new challenge could well extend the state’s losing streak. In St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, 25-581, Catholic preschools say they are being unconstitutionally excluded from Colorado’s program offering universal preschool for four-year-olds. The schools want to be able to turn away children because of their parents’ sexual orientation or gender identity, despite the program’s “equal opportunity” requirement.

Colorado voters approved universal pre-school for four-year-olds, known as UPK, in 2020. The program is open to all schools, public and private, including religious institutions. Among the standards for participation is a requirement that, to receive public funding, preschools “provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.”

In prior cases, the Court has held that states don’t have to include private schools in their programs. But once they do, religious institutions can't be excluded because doing so violates the First Amendment.

Two Catholic preschools, the Denver Archdiocese and parents have challenged the non-discrimination provision. Their lawyers told the Court in their main written brief that “it is undisputed that Colorado knowingly excluded Catholic preschools solely on account of their religious exercise. The resulting burden on Petitioners’ religious exercise is unsurprising.”

One Catholic preschool has closed, and parents have been denied more than $12,000 in tuition assistance “simply for choosing a Catholic education,” the lawyers claimed. “Colorado’s interference with Petitioners’ free exercise of religion ought to have been obvious.”

But a federal district court and the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the challenge. Colorado’s program “went to great effort to be welcoming and inclusive of faith-based preschools’ participation. The nondiscrimination requirement exists in harmony with the First Amendment and does not violate the Parish Preschools’ First Amendment rights,” Judge Richard Federico wrote for a unanimous Tenth Circuit panel that affirmed the district court’s ruling.

The Tenth Circuit said the program complied with the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, rejecting a First Amendment challenge and upholding a law that is facially neutral and generally applied.

The Supreme Court agreed in April to hear the case.

The Trump administration and 21 Republican-led states have lined up behind the Catholic challengers, while 18 Democratic-led states are siding with Colorado.

Colorado argues that the lower court rulings should be upheld. It stated the program “stands apart” from recent high court decisions because it welcomes participation by religious institutions and it does not seek to censor their teachings. “No surprise then that many religious preschools, including Catholic preschools, participate,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser wrote.

Last school year, more than 40,000 children were enrolled in UPK at more than 2,000 schools, according to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood. Forty faith-based schools with more than 900 students took part in the program in the 2023-24 school year, according to court documents.

Colorado disputes the challengers’ assertion that they’ve been excluded from the program. “Petitioners remain welcome to participate in UPK, subject to the same equal-opportunity requirements that apply to all other publicly funded preschools—public and private, secular and religious,” Weiser wrote.

The opposing briefs tangle over the reach of the Court’s 2022 decision in the Maine case.

The challengers contend the Catholic schools are being denied state money precisely because they are exercising their religious beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity, which they believe is a clear constitutional violation.

They also argue that the Colorado program should be subject to the most searching level of review by courts, strict scrutiny. Laws reviewed under strict scrutiny rarely survive.

The state says there is no discrimination based on religion; religious groups may and do participate in the program; and lower courts properly applied a lower form of review, rational basis, to uphold the program.

A decision is expected by early summer.

Mark Sherman is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. Sherman covered the Supreme Court for the Associated Press for 20 years, and he has previously written about the Justice Department, health care, and national politics.

Editor’s Note: Blog posts written by contributors reflect the analysis and opinions of the authors, and do not represent the opinions or positions of the National Constitution Center.

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Join LLNL at the premier HPC conference on November 15–20

Oct. 29, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is heading to the 38th annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26), Nov. 15–20, in Chicago.

Follow Computing at LLNL on LinkedIn and @Livermore_Comp on X with the hashtags #LLNLatSC and #SC26.

All times are listed in Central Standard Time.

Please see the Digital Experience page for information about which sessions will be available virtually. (BoF indicates Birds of a Feather.)

Sunday, Nov. 15

Monday, Nov. 16

Tuesday, Nov. 17

Wednesday, Nov. 18

Thursday, Nov. 19

Friday, Nov. 20

LLNL SC Committee Members

• Adam Bertsch – SCinet architecture
• Aniruddha Marathe – System software and cloud computing
• Barry Rountree – Performance measurement, modeling, & tools
• Brian Van Essen – HPC for machine learning
• Bronis de Supinski – ACM SRC posters; System software and cloud computing
• Chunhua Liao – Performance measurement, modeling, & tools
• Clea Marples – Community engagement chair; Digital experience
• Cody Balos – Applications
• Daniel Nichols – Tutorials
• David Boehme – Doctoral showcase; Performance measurement, modeling, & tools
• David Richards – SCinet fiber; Applications
• Edgar León – New volunteers chair
• Erik Draeger – Applications
• Hariharan Devarajan – Performance measurement, modeling, & tools
• Harshitha Menon – Early career program; Performance measurement, modeling, & tools
• Holly Auten – Communications deputy chair
• Jamie Lewis – Students@SC; SIGHPC immersion chair
• Jamie Van Randwyk – Steering committee; Special advisor on contractor performance; Families@SC chair
• Jeffrey Hittinger – Test of Time Award
• Kathryn Mohror – Conference deputy chair; Steering committee; Research posters
• Katrina Trujillo – SCinet contributor relations
• Kevin Sala Penades – BOFs
• Kristi Belcher – Early career program
• Loïc Pottier – Research posters
• Lori Diachin – Steering committee chair; Test of Time Award chair
• Michele Bianchini-Gunn – Local arrangements
• Nicole Marsaglia – Doctoral showcase
• Nikoli Dryden – HPC for machine learning vice chair
• Olga Pearce – System software and cloud computing
• Rigoberto Moreno – SCinet cluster
• Stephanie Brink – Doctoral showcase; Performance measurement, modeling, & tools; Workshops and symposiums
• Sunshine Balingit – SCinet network security
• Tal Ben-Nun – BOFs

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Outlines SC26 Program Spanning Exascale Computing, AI and Scientific Software appeared first on HPCwire.

‘This is voter fraud at the highest level,’ president tells rally crowd in South Carolina; Alaska governor orders inquiry into Peltola campaign amid Republican outcry

• Alaska governor orders investigation into Peltola’s Senate campaign

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

With days until the midterm elections, a new poll from CNN places Democrats well in the lead in key Senate races in Texas and Michigan, while projecting tighter contests in Kansas and Maine.

In Texas, the poll found 49% of likely voters would back James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, over Republican Ken Paxton, who netted just 43%.

With Social Security's main trust fund on course to be depleted in 2032, Congress will face mounting pressure to find remedies and avert benefit cuts.

The man who already pleaded guilty to more than 100 state criminal charges, including first-degree murder, for an attack on the Pearl Street Mall in June 2025, appeared in federal court on Thursday where he changed his plea to guilty on a dozen charges.

A tanker was also struck by a projectile in the strait on Thursday night.

Experts round on chancellor over ‘scattergun’ budget, saying he ducked big tax and spending decisions

John Healey has backed away from cutting the cost of welfare this parliament, amid dire warnings his first budget could lead to brutal spending cuts because of a £28bn shortfall in public finances.

Experts rounded on Healey’s steady-as-she-goes budget on Thursday, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying he had left himself a mountain to climb by ducking big tax and spending decisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset (source paywalled; alternative source), funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive. For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump's, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China. This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts. American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips. But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump's thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models. The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips. Nvidia said in a statement: "Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." Nvidia is "confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know." Customers like Megaspeed, the company that employed Ms. Huang, "receive ordinary business information -- not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets -- and zero information relevant to national security," the company added. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its "current leadership" takes the matter "extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations." It added that "outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Move comes as Philippines police investigate alleged child sexual abuse images reportedly found at Thomas Markle Sr’s former home

The Metropolitan police has referred itself to the police watchdog over potential errors in its handling of a 2019 letter warning of dangers to the security of the Duchess of Sussex posed by her father.

The letter made allegations about Thomas Markle, the father of Meghan, who is facing claims of child sexual abuse images offending linked to the Philippines, which he denies.

A 31-year-old Seattle woman turned to ChatGPT-4o when she became concerned about side effects from her medication.

"When you can't tell what's legitimate, you question everything," said one cybersecurity expert focused on political campaigns.

Former DOJ officials say Attorney General Todd Blanche's Justice Department has entered uncharted waters in ways that could influence politics.

US vice-president writes to top Iranian security official in sign Washington has not abandoned diplomacy

Hopes of averting a major new conflagration between Iran and the US soon after Tuesday’s midterm elections could rest on Iran’s response to a personal letter from the US vice-president, JD Vance, offering to restart diplomacy.

The letter, written after predominantly Qatari mediation, was sent to the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Mohsen Rezaei on Sunday. It requires Tehran to agree to make commitments on its nuclear programme at the start of a process that would lead to the opening of the strait of Hormuz within seven days in return for US sanctions relief.

Alta uses compressed pods with no plastic or aluminum. Here’s how the groundbreaking coffee system fared in testing.

(The Center Square) - A Colorado Supreme Court justice and another state appellate judge, both appearing on the Nov. 3 ballot, are facing criticism over a former official’s allegations of their failure to report a so-called "hush money" contract.

Tankers, tracked by Greenpeace, are first phase of Trump-Putin deal – but there is uncertainty over whether they will unload

Seven oil tankers carrying an estimated 288,000 tonnes of Russian diesel are now sailing towards the US, though it is uncertain if the vessels will be able to unload amid a political row about the legality of the shipments.

The transport, tracked by the pressure group Greenpeace, is the first phase of a contentious supply deal negotiated between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin earlier this month, reversing years of sanctions on Russia oil.

Yesterday, Google reported its Q3 results that showed searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search, even as overall search revenue grew 12% year over year to $63.25 billion. The news sent Alphabet shares plunging, with Bespoke Investment Group reporting that the stock is on track for its steepest post-earnings decline since the company went public in 2004. Yahoo Finance reports: At its low, Alphabet had lost $524 billion in stock market value, the second-biggest one-day loss ever for a US-listed company. Only Nvidia has lost more, about $593 billion on Jan. 27, 2025, the day China's DeepSeek rattled AI investors. Alphabet would need to close at about $274.75, down roughly 15%, to take Nvidia's record, by Yahoo Finance calculations. It has already blown past the $400 billion SpaceX lost on June 22, the previous No. 2. In dollars, it's Alphabet's worst day by far. Its previous worst was about $275 billion on July 23. It's also on track for the stock's steepest drop after an earnings report since the company went public, according to Bespoke Investment Group. The previous low was a slide of nearly 10% in July 2008. [...] US-listed stocks have shed $200 billion or more in a single session 18 times this year through Wednesday. That's up from 13 in all of 2025 and none before 2022, according to Yahoo Finance calculations from Bloomberg data. Alphabet alone has lost about $1.4 trillion since its record in May.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Dream win 80-69 to level best-of-seven series at 3-3

• First Game 7 in WNBA history set for Saturday night

• Ella Brockway’s minute-by-minute report of Game 6

The Atlanta Dream had no intention of letting a matinee become their curtain call.

Facing elimination at a lunchtime tipoff, the Dream overwhelmed the Golden State Valkyries 80-69 on Thursday afternoon to force a decisive seventh game in the WNBA finals, rediscovering their offensive touch just as their title hopes were threatening to slip away.

Several creative apps are already optimized to take advantage of the iPhone Duo’s many display configurations, with more to come.

Ministry of Justice figures show recalls rose 27% in year to June despite emergency measures to ease overcrowding

More people were recalled to jails in England and Wales in the first half of this year than were released, despite government efforts to reduce the prison population, according to figures released on Thursday.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data shows that 12,338 people were recalled to custody between the beginning of April and the end of June, while 12,278 people were released. It continues a trend set between January and March, when 13,193 people were returned to prison and 12,977 released.

Collaboration will combine engineering simulation, AI-assisted design, reduced-order modeling and physical testbed validation for advanced data center cooling and digital twins

SINGAPORE, Oct. 29, 2026 — Synopsys, Inc., the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, today announced that it has joined the Sustainable Tropical Data Center Testbed Phase 2.0 (STDCT 2.0) Consortium, led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and hosted by its College of Design and Engineering (CDE). The collaboration will bring together Synopsys engineering simulation and digital modeling capabilities, NUS CDE research expertise and STDCT 2.0’s physical testbed to support sustainable, AI-ready data center innovation in tropical environments.

Data centers in tropical climates face significant operational challenges due to high ambient temperatures and relative humidity levels, which can often exceed 24-32°C and 70-80% humidity. These conditions reduce the efficiency of conventional cooling systems and increase their energy requirements. As a result, cooling can account for up to 40% of a tropical data center’s total energy consumption, representing a substantially larger share of energy use than is typically required in cooler climates.

The growth of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing is increasing rack density, power demand and thermal loads across data center infrastructure. STDCT 2.0 provides a co-innovation environment where academia and industry can develop, test and demonstrate sustainable data center technologies under tropical operating conditions. Through this collaboration, Synopsys and NUS CDE plan to connect physics-based simulation, AI-assisted engineering and reduced-order modeling with experimental measurements from the testbed.

Brandon Wang, Strategic Management, Vice President, Technology Strategy & New Horizons, Synopsys, said, “At Synopsys, we look beyond today’s opportunities to the new horizons that can strengthen our technology long term. Through our Technology Intelligence Center, our team connects emerging technology shifts with Synopsys capabilities and leading research ecosystems to turn promising ideas into strategic opportunities. Our collaboration with STDCT 2.0 reflects that commitment by bringing our silicon-to-systems engineering capabilities into a real-world environment for sustainable AI infrastructure.”

Connecting Simulation, Reduced-Order Models and Testbed Validation

Synopsys and NUS CDE plan to collaborate across advanced liquid cooling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), multiphysics simulation, AI-assisted thermofluid design, reduced-order modeling (ROM) and digital twins. Initial research concepts include physics-based and AI-assisted design methods for two-phase direct-to-chip cooling of high-heat-flux AI accelerators, along with uncertainty-aware reduced-order digital twins for predictive thermal management of liquid-cooled AI systems.

The planned workflow will use high-fidelity simulation to explore thermal-fluid behavior and design options, followed by experimental validation within the STDCT 2.0 environment. Validated simulation results can then support the development of computationally efficient ROMs for digital twin integration, optimization and operational decision support. The collaboration also plans to create reusable workflows, case studies, validation methods and a flagship demonstration connecting design, simulation, ROM generation, digital twin integration and physical testing.

Padmesh Mandloi, Applications Engineering, Vice President Synopsys Simulation and Analysis APAC, Synopsys said, “Efficient AI infrastructure requires a clear understanding of interconnected multiscale and multiphysics behavior, from chips to data centers. By combining Ansys multiscale and multiphysics simulation, AI-assisted engineering and surrogate modeling with STDCT 2.0 test data, we can help researchers connect and exchange data across scales, validate designs, and develop scalable cooling and digital twin solutions.”

Building Industry Capability for Sustainable Tropical Data Centers

STDCT 2.0 brings together research institutions, data center operators and technology providers to advance energy efficiency, water efficiency, green energy, AI and future data centers, and green computing. Synopsys will contribute software access, technical expertise, training, project mentoring and learning resources within the agreed collaboration scope. The planned work will support research, technology validation, knowledge exchange and practitioner capability building.

Professor Lee Poh Seng, Programme Director, Sustainable Tropical Data Center Testbed, and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Design and Engineering at NUS, said, “STDCT 2.0 provides a co-innovation platform to move promising technologies from simulation to validation and towards real-world deployment in tropical data centers. By combining Synopsys’ multiphysics simulation, AI-assisted engineering and digital modelling capabilities with our physical testbed, we aim to develop validated, scalable cooling and digital twin solutions for increasingly dense, AI-ready infrastructure in Singapore and across the region.”

About the Sustainable Tropical Data Center Testbed

The Sustainable Tropical Data Center Testbed (STDCT) is a joint research initiative led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and hosted by its College of Design and Engineering, in collaboration with leading industry partners.