Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: "We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum. That would still require huge further advances as such a device would require millions of qubits - the current chip, Alam said, has 12. Assessing the firm's claims are difficult because it does not release the full details of what it has discovered publicly, citing commercial confidentiality. Microsoft has spent 20 years pursuing an approach to quantum computing known as "topological." The firm's approach to this is based on exploiting the properties of a so-called quasi-particle, which had existed only in theory, since it was first predicted in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. To do this it had to exploit a novel state of matter - different from the three familiar states of liquid, solid or gas. Paul Stevenson, a physics professor at the University of Surrey, said the tech giant's timeline sounded plausible - if its research lived up to its claims. "Microsoft appears to have made a leap in their attempt to produce viable topological qubits," he said. "If they succeed, they will leap from being a player with no production quantum computer, to being a serious player in the race to make the next generation of fault-tolerant machines."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hearing in New York state case over shooting of healthcare executive sealed at short notice ‘at request of the defense’
Luigi Mangione’s New York state case in the killing of the healthcare executive Brian Thompson descended into secrecy on Wednesday when Judge Gregory Carro held sealed proceedings despite press objections.
Mangione’s state trial for allegedly shooting dead Thompson on a Manhattan Street in late 2024 is scheduled for 8 September. Mangione also faces a federal trial in relation to Thompson’s killing. The murder triggered an intense manhunt but also prompted an outpouring of public rage against the practices of the for-profit US healthcare industry.
Continue reading...‘President and administration was aware there would be consequences to action,’ says secretary of state as he says consequences of Iran having a nuclear weapon ‘would be worse’
Iowa voters cast their ballots in yesterday’s heated primaries, setting up for months of fervent campaigning ahead of the November midterms in contests that could determine the balance of power in Congress.
A red state that the GOP has dominated for the past decade, Democrats believe they can be competitive in three of its four House races, its Senate election, and the contest to replace Kim Reynolds, the retiring Republican governor.
Continue reading...US and Iran exchange more strikes across Gulf region, jeopardising efforts to secure a new ceasefire
Kuwait’s military said Iranian strikes that hit a terminal at its international airport killed at least one person and wounded 63, as well as causing significant damage in the first deadly attack on the Gulf since a ceasefire on 8 April came into place.
The attack came as the US and Iran exchanged fresh missile and drone strikes, further jeopardising efforts to secure a new ceasefire agreement between Washington and Tehran.
Continue reading...Veteran journalist says executives pushed unverified claims and gave politicians a say in interviews
The longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who was fired by CBS News on Tuesday after clashing with the network’s new management, issued a public statement accusing the network’s new executives of silencing employees and claiming they instructed him “to inject falsehoods and bias” into his reporting.
“‘60’ has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories,” Pelley wrote in the lengthy statement he shared on social media on Wednesday morning.
Continue reading...Reform leader jeered in parliament as he is urged to condemn violence
Zia Yusuf, the Reform UK home affairs spokesperson, told Sky News this morning that he thought the treatment of Henry Nowak did justify his party’s claim that two-tier policing operates in the country. He said:
Having watched that footage [of Nowak’s arrest] … it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is a demonstrable example of structural two-tier policing that is embedded in Hampshire police force and forces across the country.
People can go to Hampshire police’s website and read their race action plan that was brought about under a Tory government.
We understand and appreciate as police officers that we are accountable for our actions. What we ask, however, is that those actions are judged through fair and transparent processes. In this case, that process is already underway with the IOPC conducting their independent investigation.
What we, as a society, cannot accept is the violent scenes we saw in Southampton last night.
I know that since the release of the body-worn video footage from the night of Henry Nowak’s murder, there is a desire for answers and accountability but that must be done in the right way and not used as an excuse to threaten and intimidate my officers and bring violence to our streets causing fear and harm to those living and working in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
Continue reading...Senate Republicans are preparing to move forward with a package to fund the Department of Homeland Security's immigration agencies as soon as Wednesday.
Wondering if an unpaid nursing home bill will impact your Social Security check? Here's what federal law allows.
Israeli PM gives interview to CNBC as Trump confirms heated phone call between the pair over attacks on Lebanon
The Kuwaiti defence ministry said it intercepted 13 ballistic missiles and 17 drones launched by Iran today.
A drone and missile attack on Kuwait’s international airport killed one person, which Kuwaiti authorities identified as an Indian national. It is the first reported death in a Gulf state since the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire in April.
Continue reading...PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox; Yacht Club Games
This brilliant adventure creates a whole world from one character with a unique ability
You could mistake Mina the Hollower for something found on the liquid-crystal display of a Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium. Like the pocketable Zelda and Pokémon games of the time, it presents a kind of snow-globe reality that you peer into from above, relying on imagination to decipher each two-colour clump of pixels into a tree, or a skeleton, or a cloaked mouse wielding a hammer twice her size.
This is Mina, our hero: she jumps, she moves at a clip, and she can delve downward into the soil or floorboards, tunnelling underfoot for a moment or two before popping back up, like an inflatable forcibly submerged in a swimming pool. This is her signature move, perfectly elastic in sensation – the way the released button springs back against your thumb! – and in application. The burrow-jump is an excavation tool, unearthing any treasure you happen to dig through, and a navigational one, used to hop over gaps, reach high-up spots and nose into tiny hidden spaces, where more treasure almost invariably awaits.
Continue reading...Christi Hill and male police officer misidentified in Vickrum Digwa case on AI platforms including Grok
A former police officer has been forced to flee to a safe space after she was falsely accused online of being involved in the Henry Nowak murder.
Christi Hill, who served as a police constable for 12 years, has criticised social media and AI platforms, including Elon Musk’s Grok, for spreading the false claim that she was one of the officers who arrested Nowak as he lay dying after being stabbed by Vickrum Digwa.
Continue reading...Have we reached a point where AI agents can reliably function as scientific collaborators? Can they go one step further and work as autonomous scientists?
Stevens is an Associate Laboratory Director for the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) Directorate at ANL and a Distinguished Fellow at the laboratory. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.
At his TPC26 keynote, he outlined how he used large-scale experiments involving scientific paper replication and model benchmarking to better understand what it would take to accelerate scientific discovery using autonomous AI agents.
Stevens not only wanted to measure the model performance, but also gauge the practical requirements of deploying AI agents at scale. This includes testing the coordination mechanisms and the resources needed to support increasingly complex scientific workflows.
Rick Stevens Keynote at TPC26
One of the most ambitious parts of his experiment was teaching AI agents how to replicate scientific papers. While reproducing existing research may sound less exciting than making new discoveries, Stevens argued that replication provides a practical way to measure both the capabilities and limitations of today’s AI systems.
“The basic goal here is to hand the paper to the agent and tell it to do everything it can to replicate the paper. So read the paper, build a table of what the principal ideas were, the principal tools, the hypotheses, the assumptions, and then do a parallel implementation.”
“And this was this is pretty interesting to see how this fails, how it works and how it fails, but it’s also a basic building block of doing science, right? And we’re trying to collect information on the throughput and resources needed to do this and what kind of resources are needed.”
The project now includes approximately 100 papers and requires agents to understand scientific methods, identify the necessary tools and datasets, and reproduce published findings. Along the way, the agents are generating new research questions and helping Stevens estimate what it might take to eventually scale AI driven science beyond replication and toward original discovery.
One of the most important findings from the project was that AI agents proved capable of reproducing a meaningful portion of scientific work. Stevens’ experiment evaluated each replication attempt using measures such as coverage and agreement with the original results. Across the papers evaluated so far, agents achieved average scores of roughly 7.5 for coverage and 8 for agreement. More than half scored above 8 on both measures.
Performance varied significantly depending on the type of research. Mathematical papers, theoretical derivations, and studies built around open source software and accessible datasets generally produced the strongest results. In some cases, agents were even able to improve upon published findings by achieving lower error rates than those reported in the original work.
Stevens said the strongest predictor of successful replication was whether authors made their code publicly available.
The project also revealed important limitations. Agents struggled when papers relied on proprietary software and inaccessible datasets. They also did not do well with poorly documented methods or physical experiments.
Stevens observed that many scientific papers contain tacit assumptions that are never explicitly documented, making them difficult to reproduce accurately.
Despite those challenges, the results were encouraging enough to push the project beyond simple replication. The agents are now generating follow up research questions from the papers they analyze and laying the groundwork for future experiments focused on original scientific discovery.
The results also allowed Stevens to begin estimating the resources required to scale AI driven scientific workflows. What started as an experiment in paper replication quickly evolved into a broader effort to understand the infrastructure needed to support large numbers of scientific agents.
“That’s really interesting because it allows us to project the resource requirements that we’re gaining from the replication project into, if you wanted to accelerate science to new and open problems, how much resource might be needed.”
The project was also used to estimate what it would take to scale agent based science further. Replicating 1,000 scientific papers in 10 days would require hundreds of parallel agents, roughly 200,000 GPU hours, millions of CPU hours and hundreds of terabytes of storage. He described the exercise as a way to understand the infrastructure requirements for future AI driven scientific discovery.
Stevens said the team is using replication as a baseline to estimate the effort required for original research. Early results suggest that pursuing new discoveries may require 10 to 30 times more resources than reproducing existing work – depending on the complexity of the problem.
If replication is the first step toward autonomous discovery, Stevens’ project offers an early glimpse into both the promise and the hurdles of building AI systems capable of accelerating science.
The post Can AI Agents Replicate Science? Argonne’s Rick Stevens Puts Them to the Test appeared first on HPCwire.
Non-binding agreement to start building vehicles in 2027 would safeguard jobs at UK’s largest car factory
Nissan has agreed to look at building cars in northern England for Chinese manufacturer Chery, in a move that would secure jobs at the UK’s largest car factory.
The Japanese carmaker on Wednesday said it had signed a non-binding agreement and that discussions were ongoing over contract manufacturing by Nissan for Chery, which is part-owned by the Chinese state.
Continue reading...An independent company called Supernatural Health is making a new app. It sounds like good news for Supernatural fans like me.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Phone by Google wants to combat the "growing threat of impersonation scams" and protect Android users against "sophisticated, AI-powered deepfake attacks" with fake call detection. [...] Fake call detection requires that both parties are on Android and use the Phone by Google app, while Google Messages and Google Contacts also have to be installed. When a contact calls, their phone "sends a silent confirmation signal in real time to your device to verify the call is legitimate and truly coming from the contact's device." This digital handshake uses end-to-end encrypted RCS (Rich Communication Services). If you're being scammed by an impersonator, your phone will notice that the "initial confirmation signal will be missing," and ping the contact's real device to double-check. If their real device says, "I'm not making a call right now," you'll get a warning on your screen advising you to hang up immediately. This feature will be available globally on Android 12+ phones starting with Pixel devices this month. Fake call detection is enabled by default but can be turned off at any time. Google says itâ(TM)s "possible for other apps and device manufacturers to adopt this technology" given the RCS underpinnings. You can learn more about fake call detection in Google's blog post.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Donald Trump recently celebrated what he called an "extremely good" medical examination.
In a May 31 Truth Social post, Trump wrote:
"The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good. Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’ Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row. All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it! President DONALD J. TRUMP"
We’ll have to take Trump’s word for it that he scored a 30 out of 30 on the test, which medical experts believe — based on Trump’s own descriptions — is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. (When we asked the White House whether that was the test Trump took, a spokesperson did not dispute it.) Trump reportedly also took the test in 2018 and twice in 2025.
But medical experts said Trump inaccurately described the test as measuring intelligence. Instead, it aims to detect signs of cognitive impairment; if the score is low enough, then further testing is recommended.
"The test measures cognition," including attention, concentration, language, memory, abstract thinking and calculation skills, said Ziad Nasreddine, a Quebec-based neurologist who created the 10-minute Montreal Cognitive Assessment in 2005. "Cognitive function is correlated with IQ. But the test was not designed to detect the genius level of cognitive performance. It's meant to reassure that cognitive functions are normal."
Patients might have to read a list of words and recall them; repeat a list of numbers forward and backward; subtract a one-digit number repeatedly starting from 100; repeat a sentence; draw comparisons between two objects; and know the time of day and their location.
Trump garnered attention in 2020 when he told Fox News, "It's like you'll go: Person, woman, man, camera, TV. So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?' So I said, ‘Yeah. So it's person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ ‘Okay, that's very good. If you get it in order, you get extra points.’" (Nasreddine has said that the test has never included that series of words, nor another example Trump has cited involving a giraffe, tiger and whale.)
Scores from 26 to 30 are considered normal. Scores below 26 are considered to reflect some form of cognitive impairment, with the degree of impairment increasing as the score drops.
This is not the first time Trump has boasted about having high scores on the test. He mentioned it in several speeches and interviews earlier this year. In December 2025, after he said he took the test for the third time, Trump posted, "I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all."
Neither Nasreddine nor Ishani Ganguli, a Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine and a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said they would describe the test as "high difficulty," as Trump did.
"A 30/30 score would suggest normal cognitive function, meaning no evidence of cognitive impairment or dementia," Ganguli said.
Neither expert offered specific data on whether a 30 out of 30 is "very rare," but from their own experience, the frequency of a 30-point score is somewhere between "relatively uncommon," as Nasreddine estimated, and "somewhat common," as Ganguli said.
"It has to be sufficiently hard to detect early-stage cognitive disorders, and not too hard to decrease the risk of false positives," Nasreddine said.
Trump said his cognitive test results showed he has "extreme intelligence."
Medical experts have said Trump is describing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is designed to detect cognitive impairment, not intelligence. A 30 out of 30 score shows that a patient has normal cognitive function, not high intelligence.
We rate the statement False.
The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene early Wednesday morning, the Bakersfield Police Department said.
WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O. The payoff was practical: because the operations went through the shell, the same confirmation prompts, progress dialogs, and Recycle Bin behavior you got from Windows Explorer came along for free.
↫ Code Naked
Code Naked – their alias, not mine – recently dug these old executables and code back up, and published them on GitHub. Back then, though, there were no centralised distribution platforms, so they just uploaded them to various download and shareware websites and kept track of the download tickers. Very neat little tools, and fun to have them immortalised.
Partnership paves the way to pair AI-enabled semiconductor design with GF’s U.S. manufacturing platform to bridge the gap from research to prototype for next-generation computing initiatives
MALTA, N.Y., June 3, 2026 — GlobalFoundries today announced a strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, the department’s initiative to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence and advanced computing.
Through the agreement, GF will open its U.S. manufacturing platform and design enablement resources to Genesis Mission researchers — giving the nation’s National Laboratories, universities, industry partners and startups a direct path from AI-enabled chip design to working prototype silicon. GF Labs, the company’s frontier research and development organization, will lead collaboration with the Genesis Mission.
Progress in AI and advanced computing depends on more than algorithms and ideas; it depends on the ability to turn them into devices. As a semiconductor manufacturing engine accelerating America’s technology leadership, GF brings the manufacturing capacity and design enablement that connect three communities — the National Labs, universities and industry — around a shared path from concept to silicon.
“American science is generating extraordinary ideas in AI and advanced computing. What’s been missing is the bridge from lab to fab,” said Tom Caulfield, executive chairman of GlobalFoundries. “By bringing our U.S. manufacturing platform, our PDKs and our multi-project wafer program to the Genesis Mission, we can give researchers a real path from concept to working silicon — and help the National Labs, universities and industry pull in the same direction.”
Areas of Collaboration
Working through GF Labs, the partnership contemplates cooperation in several areas of mutual interest, including:
About the Genesis Mission
The Genesis Mission is a U.S. Department of Energy initiative, led by the Under Secretary for Science, to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence and advanced computing. Industry partners contribute technical expertise, capabilities and infrastructure to advance the mission’s objectives in partnership with the national laboratories and the academic research community.
About GF
GlobalFoundries (GF) is a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, enabling AI at scale from the cloud to the physical world. Through deep partnerships with customers, GF delivers differentiated, power-efficient and high-performance solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, data center, smart mobile devices, internet of things and other high-growth markets. With global manufacturing operations across the U.S., Europe and Asia, GF is a trusted and holistic technology partner for customers around the world. GF’s talented, global team remains focused every day on security, longevity and sustainability.
Source: GF
The post GlobalFoundries Joins DOE’s Genesis Mission as Industry Partner appeared first on HPCwire.
BOULDER, Colo., June 3, 2026 — Atom Computing today announced the industry’s first full demonstration of quantum error correction using a toric code. The results show that the company’s neutral-atom system reduces errors as larger numbers of qubits are used in computations, placing Atom Computing among only two companies that have demonstrated many rounds of sustained quantum error correction and marking the first time this has been achieved using neutral atoms. It represents a strong validation of Atom’s approach and positions the company at the forefront of the race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.
“This is a historic moment for quantum computing,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder of Atom Computing. “Today, we have shown that practical quantum error correction can be achieved with our neutral-atom technology. This is the clearest demonstration yet that neutral atoms are highly competitive with superconducting systems and other approaches for building scalable logical qubits. We’ve reached this milestone faster and with greater capital efficiency than larger players in the industry, and we’re excited to build on this progress and share more results later this year.”
Quantum error correction is essential to unlocking the full potential of quantum computing. Quantum systems are sensitive to noise and errors, which must be detected and corrected repeatedly across many rounds of operations to ensure reliable results. A key requirement for effective error correction is that the error rates of logical qubits decrease as the system scales up. Atom Computing’s results demonstrate that its neutral-atom systems meet this requirement, accelerating the path to utility-scale quantum computing.
Atom Computing’s unique architecture and proprietary technologies were critical to achieving these results. For example, its ability to dynamically rearrange qubits enables all-to-all connectivity, removing the constraints of fixed hardware layouts found in other modalities. The system’s zoned architecture supports highly parallelized operations enabling faster overall computation, and Atom’s nuclear-spin qubits exhibit record-breaking coherence times, which are essential for running deep, complex algorithms. Together, these features enable fast algorithm execution and greater flexibility in algorithm design, crucial to achieving this milestone in neutral atom computing.
“This looks like exciting progress toward fault-tolerance for neutral-atom quantum computers — specifically, in repeatedly refreshing the atoms in a way that preserves the logical information. Congratulations to Atom Computing on its accomplishment,” said Dr. Scott Aaronson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of its Quantum Information Center.
The technical achievement directly supports Atom Computing’s expanding commercial footprint. Last year, the company sold the world’s first commercial quantum computer with logical qubits to QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative funded by EIFO and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Currently being installed in partnership with Microsoft, the on-premises quantum system, Magne, is paving the way for advanced regional collaborations.
“Demonstrations like this of increased fidelities through quantum error correction are important proof points that we’re on the right trajectory toward utility‑scale quantum systems,” said Dr. Matthias Troyer, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Quantum. “Microsoft is proud to partner with Atom Computing to bring even greater capability to QuNorth and the Nordic quantum ecosystem through Magne.”
With this milestone, the company’s participation in stage B of the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative and having recently signed a Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $100 million of funding, Atom Computing continues to push the boundaries of quantum technology, bringing reliable, utility-scale quantum computing closer to reality.
Learn more about the research here.
About Atom Computing
Atom Computing is developing large-scale quantum computers to enable companies and researchers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Utilizing highly scalable arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms, the company has developed systems with over 1,000 qubits, featuring advanced capabilities towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Atom Computing’s on-premises systems provide customers with new computational tools and logical qubit capabilities to address increasingly complex applications and to grow their quantum ecosystem.
Source: Atom Computing
The post Atom Computing Reports Neutral-Atom Quantum Error Correction Milestone Using Toric Code appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 3, 2026 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the intent to launch the Tokenomics Foundation, a new foundation that will focus on establishing open industry standards, benchmarks, and best practices for the economics of AI infrastructure. The Tokenomics Foundation will operate in close partnership with the FinOps Foundation, extending the discipline of variable technology spend into the era of token-based AI.
“As enterprises move generative and agentic AI workloads from pilot to production, tokens have become the new unit of technology spend,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. “Measuring and benchmarking token efficiency across different models and vendors is critical to how organizations make business decisions, but until now, there was no neutral home to develop the standards needed to measure token economics transparently across the entire supply chain. The Tokenomics Foundation provides that neutral home, ensuring these standards remain open and community-driven.”
The Tokenomics Foundation arrives at a defining moment for the global technology economy. While per-token costs fell heavily during 2023-2025 they have leveled off – and new model token prices are rising – making AI the largest and fastest-growing line item on enterprise technology budgets. Research from Goldman Sachs shows global token usage is to multiply 24x between 2026 and 2030 to 120 quadrillion tokens per month.
Industry analysts now forecast more than $1 trillion in AI infrastructure investment through 2027, the largest concentrated capital buildout in the history of computing, with the inference market alone projected to expand from approximately $106 billion in 2025 to $255 billion by 2030.
“Token costs and efficiency have become a CEO-level concern, not an engineering footnote” said J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation. “But naming the problem isn’t solving it. The Tokenomics Foundation gives the industry a neutral home to define the standards, the specifications, and the discipline that will determine how much companies benefit from the inference era. In the same way FinOps created a shared discipline for cloud spend, Tokenomics will do it specifically for AI and related token costs.”
The Foundation will serve both sides of the AI economy: the buyer side, made up of enterprises operating at scale that need transparent, vendor-neutral standards for the economics of AI token consumption, and the supplier side, including frontier model providers, NeoClouds, and the broader token factory supply chain.
The Tokenomics Foundation Governing Board will help set industry direction and deploy funds to support the project. A Technical Committee will develop open specifications, benchmarks, and frameworks, and the Foundation will jointly fund and support the FOCUS (focus.finops.org) specification’s expansion into token based spending models.
Organizations who have expressed initial support for the Tokenomics Foundation include Accenture, Booking.com, Flexera, Google Cloud, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow.
To learn more about the Foundation, visit TokenEconomics.com. Attend FinOps X on June 8-10, 2026 in San Diego for the latest announcements from the Tokenomics Foundation, including the technical roadmap, initial working groups, upcoming conferences, and partnerships.
About the Tokenomics Foundation
The Tokenomics Foundation, a Linux Foundation program focused on the best practices and standards for managing the production, consumption and monetization of tokens to generate business outcomes and AI value.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Source: Linux Foundation
The post Linux Foundation Launches Tokenomics Foundation to Standardize AI Infrastructure Economics appeared first on HPCwire.
Bank apologises after IT update caused problems with Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland apps
Lloyds Banking Group has apologised after thousands of its customers were unable to make payments or send money due to another IT glitch.
According to Downdetector, a website that lets people track real-time service issues and outages, customers started noticing problems shortly after 11am on Wednesday, with issues affecting many of the group’s brands: Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows and MBNA.
Continue reading...Steve Hilton, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer have emerged as the leading contenders to advance to November's general election, according to early counts.
Joint bank accounts are convenient, but they may also create Social Security benefit risks that retirees overlook.
CBS News projects that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass will advance to the November election, while her opponents, Councilmember Nithya Raman and political newcomer Spencer Pratt, compete for the final spot.
CARLSBAD, Calif. and LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 3, 2026 — MaxLinear, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance storage accelerator SoCs, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) today announced a collaboration to enable hardware-accelerated OpenZFS File System storage for large scale, high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and MaxLinear have jointly developed a hardware-accelerated OpenZFS storage architecture designed to improve performance and storage capacity for next-generation NVMe flash-based storage infrastructure.
“Los Alamos’ Direct I/O support and Z.I.A. (ZFS Interface for Accelerators) work were developed to accelerate performance for the ZFS-using community,” said Gary Grider, Senior Director for Computing Technologies at the Laboratory. “In this collaboration, MaxLinear demonstrated hardware-offloaded ZFS operations with reported speedups of approximately 39x for writes and 7x for reads. These results illustrate the potential for accelerator-based approaches to reduce host CPU involvement while maintaining the data-protection benefits associated with ZFS.”
“Los Alamos National Laboratory has been at the forefront of advancing storage architectures for high-performance computing,” said Vikas Choudhary, Executive Vice President of Connectivity & Storage at MaxLinear. “By enabling hardware-accelerated ZFS with Panther Storage Accelerators, we deliver deep data compression, data protection services, and multi-hundred gigabit scalability—while preserving the data integrity guarantees that ZFS is known for.”
LANL has decades of experience in operating ZFS at scale and has led to the development of key filesystem extensions, including Direct I/O support and ZIA (ZFS Interface for Accelerators)—a structured framework for introducing hardware acceleration into the ZFS data path without modifying core filesystem semantics.
MaxLinear contributes the Panther family of Storage Accelerator SoCs and Storage Software Development Kits, providing high throughput, low latency execution of ZFS data path services using a domain-specific high-performance SoC architecture. Panther provides deep data compression, encryption, deduplication, and data protection services executed inline in hardware, delivering high throughput and low latency while significantly reducing host CPU overhead.
Through this collaboration, Panther is integrated with ZFS as a Data Processing Unit Services Module (DPUSM) provider, enabling inline hardware acceleration of selected CPU‑intensive operations such as data compression and checksum generation to increase storage capacity, improve file I/O performance, and reduce host CPU utilization. This combined hardware‑software approach preserves ZFS ordering, consistency, and data integrity guarantees while enabling efficient compute offload and scalable acceleration.
This collaboration integrates LANL’s advancement in Direct I/O and ZIA framework with MaxLinear’s Panther Storage Accelerator.
Key capabilities include:
For more information on MaxLinear’s Panther Storage Accelerator, visit https://www.maxlinear.com/panther.
About MaxLinear, Inc.
MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) is a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market applications. MaxLinear is headquartered in Carlsbad, California. For more information, please visit https://www.maxlinear.com.
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center with priorities set by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) and key national strategy guidance. We execute work across all of DOE’s missions: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. Scientific and engineering capabilities developed through LANL’s stockpile research are part of what makes DOE and NNSA a science, technology, and engineering powerhouse for the nation.
Source: MaxLinear
The post MaxLinear and LANL Jointly Advance High-Performance File System Acceleration for HPC Storage appeared first on HPCwire.
Democrats say appointment of Bill Pulte could doom bipartisan agreement to renew section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Donald Trump’s appointment of a close political ally with no intelligence experience to lead the nation’s spy agencies has thrown last-ditch efforts to renew a critical surveillance program into doubt.
Bill Pulte, currently head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), major Republican donor and heir to a home construction fortune, was tapped by Trump to serve as acting director of national intelligence days after Tulsi Gabbard departed the role.
Continue reading...The first heatwaves of the season reveal how ill-prepared governments across the continent are to protect people from increasingly dangerous temperatures
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Meteorological summer has begun, ushered in with scorching heat that struck before spring was up. Although western Europe is now mostly free from last week’s heat dome – which shattered temperature records for May in the UK and Ireland – it is already bracing for yet another sweltering summer. Oppressive days, restless nights and furious fires are brewing. On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organisation warned us all to prepare for the imminent return of the warming weather pattern El Niño.
Scientists have not worked out how many people died during this latest bout of hot weather, but one environmental epidemiologist’s early modelling pegged it at 250 extra deaths in the UK alone on the weekend before temperatures peaked. The full death toll is likely to be particularly high because the heat struck before people had properly adjusted their behaviour to stay safe in the heat.
Continue reading...Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their “AI” overviews and related slopsearch results.
With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover). Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features. This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features. This work builds on our long history of designing tools, like snippet controls and Google-Extended, that give websites more choice.
↫ Mrinalini Loew at Google’s The Keyword blog
While it’s nice of Google to offer such an opt-out to website owners, their claim that opting out won’t effect your regular search ranking rings hollow to me. I simply just do not trust Google in any way, shape, or form to not weaponise their “AI” against anyone who doesn’t want to be sucked up, regurgitated, and spat out in one of their slopsearch tools. On top of that, regular Google Search is dead anyway, so even if they keep their promise, it’s moot because Google users are going to be force-fed the slopsearch tools instead of the regular Google Search.
I honestly have no idea how much traffic OSNews gets from Google at this point, and while I can look it up, I just don’t really care, and think it’s probably not that much. I could opt us out, but the real problem is that such an opt-out won’t stop Google’s slopbots – or anyone else’s slopbots – from taking our writing and training their “AI” tools on it, so what’s the point of going through the effort?
I doubt Google is relevant enough for us.
Fewer than one in 10 SEW customers satisfied with firm’s handling of supply crisis, which left tens of thousands without water
South East Water failed to adequately communicate with customers during outages last winter that left tens of thousands of people without water, a report has concluded.
Fewer than one in 10 SEW customers were satisfied with how the company handled the water supply crisis that stretched across parts of Kent and Sussex last winter, the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) said. The independent body’s report found communication was the company’s greatest failing.
Continue reading...Satya Nadella's keynote on Tuesday was chock-full of AI and computing. This is the biggest news, live from San Francisco.
Faculty who support Palestinian rights are applying for compensation, claiming they faced harassment as Jews for their positions
When Columbia University reached a settlement with the Trump administration last year, the deal included a $21m fund to compensate Jewish employees for an allegedly hostile work environment due to heated protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
This week, as the window to file claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission came to a close, several Jewish faculty members filed claims to say they had experienced harassment as Jews on campus – but probably not on grounds Trump’s EEOC intended.
Continue reading...VANCOUVER, British Columbia, AUSTIN, Texas and SCANDIANO, Italy, June 3, 2026 — Inspire Semiconductor Holdings Inc. will be exhibiting at the annual RISC-V Europe Summit in Bologna Italy from June 8-12, 2026. In conjunction with strategic partner E4 Computer Engineering, the company will share more details on its upcoming Thunderbird “supercomputer cluster-on-a-chip” accelerated computing platform.
InspireSemi and E4 Computer Engineering have been collaborating to bring leading-edge HPC-AI technologies based on the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) to the European market. The combined focus has been on optimizing workload performance while delivering best-in-class energy efficiency and the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
InspireSemi and E4 have worked side-by-side for the last four years to refine the specs of the all-CPU Thunderbird compute accelerator. Each Thunderbird chip has 1,536 64-bit CPU cores, all supporting the double precision math that most HPC applications require (i.e.- native FP64). These are InspireSemi-designed high performance, low power, superscalar RISC-V CPU cores, all interconnected by an innovative, patent-pending, low latency on-chip network fabric. Thunderbird was designed from the beginning to support an open software stack, including the ability to run Linux, Zephyr RTOS, and support the OpenMP offload model.
Initial deployments planned for Q4 2026 will be Thunderbird PCIe server-class add-in cards with 4 devices, delivering a remarkable 6,144 CPU cores each. That is the equivalent of an entire rack of x86 servers, greatly reducing cost, power, cooling, complexity, and points of failure.
E4 has been preparing for Thunderbird PCIe server-class add-in cards at the system-level targeting their innovative servers designed to scale to the needs of compute-demanding HPC & AI customers. E4 is planning to integrate Thunderbird in its product line and deliver Thunderbird-powered servers and is a strategic InspireSemi go to market partner.
In addition to delivering on this, the companies will continue to collaborate on their mutual roadmaps to continue to deliver on the best HPC-AI solution, including future mixed-precision workloads.
About InspireSemi
InspireSemi provides revolutionary high-performance, energy-efficient accelerated computing solutions for High-Performance Computing (HPC), AI, graph analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads. The Thunderbird I ‘supercomputer-cluster-on-a-chip’ is a disruptive, next-generation datacenter accelerator designed to address multiple underserved and diversified industries, including financial services, computer-aided engineering, energy, climate modeling, cybersecurity, and life sciences & drug discovery. Based on the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture, InspireSemi’s solutions set new standards of performance, energy efficiency, and ease of programming. InspireSemi is headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Source: InspireSemi
The post InspireSemi and E4 Showcase Thunderbird RISC-V Accelerator for HPC and AI at RISC-V Europe appeared first on HPCwire.
Hisense has released the RGB Mini-LED UR8, which promises brighter colors than before.
DfE plans to withdraw funding for assistive software, saying it is now rarely needed due to ‘widely available free tools’
Disability campaigners have called on the government to halt plans to cut funding for specialist tech support for tens of thousands of disabled students in England.
Almost 10,000 people have signed a petition opposing Department for Education (DfE) proposals to withdraw funding for specialist assistive software available as part of the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA).
Continue reading...You can tap into several new features while watching the tournament.
Early results show Steve Hilton, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer emerging in front, with many ballots to be counted
The high-stakes gubernatorial race in California remained too close to call on Wednesday morning, with early results showing a tight contest in the crowded race.
With many ballots still left to be counted, three candidates emerged at the top: the Republican Steve Hilton and the Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer. Hilton was leading the field, with 28%, trailed closely by Becerra.
Continue reading...Two-time Grammy winner was best known for songs from Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin
Peabo Bryson, the R&B singer best known as the voice behind the Oscar-winning Disney film duets Beauty and the Beast with Celine Dion, and A Whole New World with Regina Belle from Aladdin, has died. He was 75.
His family said in a statement that Bryson, who won two Grammy awards, died on Tuesday, days after having a stroke.
Continue reading...Incumbent comes out on top in primary election – but with less than 50% of votes – and will take on challenger in November
Karen Bass has come out ahead in Tuesday’s heated primary for Los Angeles mayor, but with less than 50% of the vote she will have to defend her seat in November’s general election.
Bass will face either Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, or city council member Nithya Raman, in November. As of Wednesday morning, with more than 60% of votes counted, Pratt had secured 30% of the vote, Raman had won 22%.
Continue reading...The director defends investment in and use of AI-generated storyboards, saying the immediacy of communicating his vision to cast and crew is ‘creatively freeing’
Martin Scorsese’s announcement that he has invested in an AI company and uses the technology to create storyboards has triggered a backlash from fellow members of the film industry.
The New York Times reported that Scorsese had been appointed in 2025 as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, a German-based venture that specialises in text-to-image generative AI.
Continue reading...  | Wanted the rails in pink so I gave the OG white a paintjob. My roommate was kind enough to add some graphics while I wrestled the lifesavers on the rim (honestly such hard work, I hate that part). Put everything back together and now it's time to explore again. Edit: I also applied some protective foilcover over the rails. Those where designed for cars and I don't think they'll hold up. But the process was very manageable and I'll probably try a MTB product next. [link] [comments] |
More than 5,300 years ago, Oetzi the Iceman was strolling through the Alps on the border of Austria and Italy when he was killed by an arrow in the back.
With peace talks stalled, the U.S. and Iran traded strikes in one of the most intense bouts since the increasingly tenuous ceasefire between the two countries began in April.
Prosecutors seek to try 17-year-old as adult after animals injured at major barrel racing event
A teenage girl who allegedly stabbed three show horses at a weekend rodeo in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a “crazy, obsessed stalker” who waited in a darkened barn to commit the attacks, the owner of one of the animals has said.
The Nevada city’s police department arrested a 17-year-old female on Saturday for the incidents at the National Barrel Horse Association’s supershow, a competition for the sport’s top riders at the South Point equestrian arena on the Las Vegas strip.
Continue reading...The search giant also plans to give publishers more information about the ways their content shows up in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Commentary: With Siri expected to take the spotlight, where does WatchOS 27 fit in? Here's everything we're expecting, hoping for and firmly opposed to.
Commentary: Glasses, camera-enabled AirPods, a pendant and perhaps major Apple Watch updates all need a Gemini-powered AI revamp that isn't here yet. WWDC should be where that journey begins.
New Linux Foundation and first open-source metadata server advances parallel file system design with an elastic architecture for AI and HPC storage at scale
MANCHESTER, England, June 3, 2026 — PEAK:AIO, a leader in high-performance storage for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced Lattice, the industry’s first open-source pNFS metadata server. Developed through a long-term engineering collaboration between PEAK:AIO and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lattice introduces a new distributed metadata architecture designed to eliminate one of the most persistent constraints in large-scale AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
The announcement comes as AI infrastructure demands reshape the storage market. AI workloads, including training large models, running inference at scale and serving agentic AI applications, require ultrafast, parallel access to massive datasets continuously and reliably. GPU compute has scaled dramatically, but the storage layer feeding it, and particularly the metadata architecture coordinating it, has not kept pace. Average GPU utilization across 23,000 production clusters is 5%, not because the hardware is inadequate, but because the software feeding it cannot keep up. The metadata bottleneck in parallel storage systems has become a critical constraint on AI workload performance.
Lattice resolves this architectural limitation. Built as a Linux-based, user-space pNFS metadata server designed for scale, modularity and distributed coordination. Open-source, community-supported and launched under the Linux Foundation, Lattice separates the metadata control plane into four distinct layers: Protocol State Plane, Lattice Core, MD Catalog Authority and Data Server Control Plane. This architecture makes metadata services truly elastic for the first time, allowing them to spin up dynamically on commodity hardware whenever and wherever needed, from a single server to more than 1,000 metadata servers.
The announcement will be formally presented at the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology – MSST 2026 in Santa Clara, California. Lattice is being launched in collaboration with the Linux Foundation as an open-source project intended to accelerate community innovation around scalable AI and HPC storage infrastructure.
“PNFS-Lattice is unique in that it is an open-source, user-space, scalable PNFS metadata server, from the ground up, by leveraging the concept of separating the PNFS metadata service from the Metadata Store (catalog),” said Gary Grider, HPC Division Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Since the service is separate from the persistent metadata and it runs in user space, it is well poised to be an ephemeral service that could be resized on the fly. Further, since it is open-source and user space, it lowers the bar for community participation, encouraging more innovation driven by AI, HPC, and other community needs.”
Performance testing conducted during the collaboration demonstrated gains from 70 GB/s to 400 GB/s. On existing production hardware at LANL, standard Linux NFS configurations delivered between 3 GB/s and 7 GB/s throughput, while the pNFS Lattice architecture achieved 40 GB/s on identical servers. Additional testing conducted with a Tier 1 technical university demonstrated metadata-heavy workload improvements exceeding 300% compared with conventional approaches.
Performance work is continuing to push new boundaries, but even at this early stage, Lattice is showing the scale of the breakthrough. In standard metadata benchmarks such as MDtest, early testing has demonstrated up to a 10x improvement over standard Linux KNFSD, while Lattice’s advanced features have delivered more than 300% improvement in traditionally difficult metadata-heavy workloads. When combined with its elastic, ephemeral metadata scaling model, where metadata services can be added dynamically as demand grows, Lattice moves beyond the limits of conventional high-performance data designs and creates a new foundation for metadata performance, resilience and scale in open pNFS and parallel file system design.
“AI infrastructure markets are approaching an inflection point where scaling compute alone no longer delivers any meaningful efficiency gains,” said Roger Cummings, President and CEO of PEAK:AIO. “Our collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory was built around the idea that if AI infrastructure is to scale efficiently, metadata must become elastic, distributed and open. Lattice represents that transition, and we’re excited to build it with the Linux and HPC communities beside us.”
Additionally, PEAK:AIO will also offer PEAK:AIO pNFS, a commercially supported superset of Lattice, for organizations that want enterprise SLAs and a full feature set without managing the open-source stack directly. This model mirrors the relationship between Lustre and its commercial distributions, while maintaining a fully open standards-based foundation.
“The key innovation behind Lattice is that it breaks apart what has traditionally been locked inside a single metadata server into four distinct layers: the Protocol State Plane, the Lattice Core, the MD Catalog Authority, and the Data Server Control Plane,” said Mark Klarzynski, CSO and Co-Founder of PEAK:AIO. “That separation unlocks intelligent scale in a way traditional storage architectures were never designed to support. Metadata and data services can now become distributed, elastic participants that scale, fail over and adapt around the workload, rather than remaining fixed appliances or static MDS pairs. This is a fundamental step forward for pNFS and parallel file system design for ultra-high-performance storage, allowing metadata to move beyond the limitations that have constrained scale-out storage for decades.”
About PEAK:AIO
PEAK:AIO is a Manchester UK-based software-defined AI storage company. Its platform delivers high-performance AI storage from a single server to exabytes on any industry-standard hardware. PEAK:AIO is deployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Liverpool, University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub, and Zoological Society of London. Learn more at https://peakaio.com.
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multi-program, federally funded research and development center for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Laboratory’s priority roles are serving as a nuclear weapons design agency and a nuclear weapons production agency; addressing nuclear threats; and performing national security science, technology, and engineering.
Source: PEAK:AIO
The post PEAK:AIO and LANL Advance AI Storage with Open-Source Lattice Metadata Server appeared first on HPCwire.
DAEJEON, South Korea, June 3, 2026 — Qunova Computing, a pioneering maker of software for quantum computing, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with JHPC-quantum (Japan High-Performance Computing), a landmark Japanese national computing initiative funded by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The agreement designates Qunova as an official participant in the JHPC-quantum Test User Program, following a formal selection process that evaluated proposals based on scientific merit, technical feasibility, and the promise of hybrid quantum-HPC applications.
The agreement grants Qunova no-cost access to the JHPC-quantum hybrid platform, combining the supercomputer Fugaku with an IBM Quantum System Two, representing one of the world’s most powerful integrated quantum-classical computing environments. Just 21 organizations have been selected for the program, and Qunova is one of only two non-Japanese organizations participating, reflecting international confidence in its advanced quantum chemistry expertise, especially related to materials science.
“It is a true privilege to be included in JHPC-quantum alongside many of Japan’s most distinguished research institutions and prominent corporations,” said Kevin Rhee, CEO of Qunova Computing. “The fact that Qunova is one of just two non-Japanese organizations participating in this program speaks volumes about the power and maturity of our HI-VQE algorithm. Japan has assembled some of the finest minds in quantum and high-performance computing under this initiative, and our inclusion reflects the confidence those institutions have in our hybrid approach to tackling some of the most complex problems in chemistry. This partnership gives us access to world-class infrastructure and positions us at the forefront of the global effort to achieve industrial quantum advantage.”
JHPC-quantum is now midway through its five-year R&D mandate running from November 2023 through October 2028. Partners are now integrating multiple supercomputers and quantum computers, including simulators. Upon completion, the platform is designed to support commercial deployment of hybrid quantum applications. For Qunova, the MoU opens direct access to Japan’s growing ecosystem of industrial quantum end users and accelerates the company’s path to demonstrating and commercializing industrial quantum advantage in real-world chemistry applications.
Led by RIKEN and SoftBank, the project’s mission is to build and operate an integrated national computing infrastructure that connects supercomputers and quantum computers through advanced system software. The program’s 21 participating organizations, piloted by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, span multiple industries such as materials science, drug discovery, logistics, finance, manufacturing, and natural sciences.
Qunova is the global leader in developing hybrid quantum-classical algorithms that combine the strengths of conventional supercomputers with the unique capabilities of quantum processors to solve computationally intractable problems in chemistry and materials science. Under the MoU, the company will apply its proprietary HI-VQE (Handover Iterative Variational Quantum Eigensolver) algorithm to some of quantum chemistry’s most demanding open problems. One such problem is the iron-sulfur cluster, a benchmark with major implications for both materials science and drug discovery, and a key test case for demonstrating industrial quantum advantage.
The JHPC-quantum platform includes a superconducting quantum computer installed in Kobe (IBM Quantum System Two “IBM Kobe”) and a trapped-ion quantum computer in Wako (Quantinuum “Reimei”), making it one of the most comprehensive hybrid quantum-HPC environments in existence.
More from HPCwire: SoftBank and RIKEN Move Japan’s Quantum-Supercomputer Project into Test-User Phase
About Qunova Computing
Founded in 2021, Qunova Computing builds algorithms designed to bring quantum advantage to early adopters of quantum computing. These algorithms have been tested with leading quantum hardware companies and research institutes around the world, and results indicate Qunova can deliver a quantum advantage for users, even using Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum computers. By using a hybrid approach and algorithms which provide a high level of accuracy, the company is unlocking the tremendous potential of quantum computing for industrial users, reducing the large number of trials required to develop new materials with specific properties. This will allow users to significantly reduce the time and expense related to industrial R&D processes, enabling them to bring new products to market more quickly and at a lower cost. For additional insight into our groundbreaking work, please visit qunovacomputing.com.
Source: Qunova Computing
The post Qunova Tapped as One of Two International Participants in Japan’s JHPC-quantum Project appeared first on HPCwire.
Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra lead the field as votes continue to be counted
The key race for California governor remained deadlocked as vote counting continued across the US on Wednesday morning following primary elections to decide who would run in several critical districts in the US House and Senate in November, in a midterm year expected to favor Democrats.
In California, it was the Republican Steve Hilton, a former UK political operative and Fox News host, who had the most votes, with roughly half of the ballots counted for governor. For the Democrats it was Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary, who led the field after a tumultuous campaign. The California system is such that the two candidates who receive the most votes then face off in the general election, no matter which party they are from. Many Democrats in the state held on to their ballots until the last minute, so the early results were expected to favor Republicans.
Continue reading...Plumes of thick black smoke rose over St. Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin's hometown, as the Kremlin welcomed international guests for an event often described as Russia's Davos.
Petrol station attack in Calabria throws spotlight on widespread exploitation of foreign farm labourers
The exploitation of farm workers in Italy has come under the spotlight again after four men – three Afghans and one from Pakistan – were allegedly burned alive in a car at a petrol station in Calabria.
The attack was captured by a surveillance camera at the garage in Amendolara, close to Cosenza. Two Pakistani nationals have been arrested on charges of aggravated murder, according to public prosecutor Alessandro D’Alessio.
Continue reading...Funding to help accelerate OQC’s U.S. expansion as the company scales quantum infrastructure for enterprise and government customers
NEW YORK, June 3, 2026 — Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) today announced the close of a $350 million Series C financing, the largest Series C round completed by a quantum computing company globally.
The financing marks a major milestone for OQC and for the quantum computing sector, as investor attention shifts from long-term research toward commercial deployment, infrastructure scale and enterprise adoption. The round positions OQC among the best-capitalized private quantum computing companies in the world and provides the company with significant new capital to accelerate its expansion in the United States and other priority global markets.
The round, led by Bullhound Capital, includes a mix of strategic, institutional and venture investors, including Chevron, the British Business Bank and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), alongside other leading international venture capital firms.
Founded in the United Kingdom, OQC builds superconducting quantum computers designed for real-world enterprise and government use. The company has developed a global deployment model focused on bringing quantum computing into secure, commercial infrastructure environments, including data centers and cloud-connected platforms.
Expanding OQC’s U.S. presence is a central part of its next phase of growth. The company plans to expand its commercial and operational footprint in the United States, where demand for advanced computing infrastructure is increasing across financial services, security, defense, AI and advanced manufacturing. Its current installation in New York City and expansion in the American market places OQC closer to major enterprise customers, investors, infrastructure partners and technology ecosystems that play a central role in quantum adoption.
The new funding will support OQC’s next stage of growth, including the development of next-generation quantum systems in their roadmap, additional infrastructure deployments, expanded U.S. commercial operations and deeper engagement with enterprise, government and technology partners.
“Raising the largest quantum Series C globally is a clear statement of intent,” said Gerald Mullally, CEO of OQC. “OQC was founded in the U.K., but the opportunity ahead of us is global and the United States is central to that opportunity. We are building quantum computing infrastructure where customers need it: close to the data, networks and enterprise systems that power the global economy. This financing gives us the capital to accelerate our U.S. expansion, deepen our technology leadership and scale OQC into one of the defining companies in the quantum era.”
The financing comes amid intensifying competition among the United States, Europe and Asia to lead in quantum technologies, a sector increasingly viewed as strategically important to economic competitiveness, national security and long-term technology leadership.
About OQC
OQC develops and operates quantum computers designed for enterprise, government and research applications. Founded in the United Kingdom, OQC builds superconducting quantum systems and deploys quantum infrastructure across global markets, with a growing presence in the United States, Europe and Asia. OQC is focused on making quantum computing accessible through secure, scalable infrastructure capable of supporting real-world use cases across industries including financial services, security, energy and advanced manufacturing.
Source: Oxford Quantum Circuits
The post Oxford Quantum Circuits Raises $350M to Expand Enterprise Quantum Computing Footprint appeared first on HPCwire.
US president says ‘I think he will’ when asked if the acting attorney general would take on a permanent role
Donald Trump said he believed he would make acting attorney general Todd Blanche permanent as the top US law enforcement officer.
Asked in an interview broadcast Wednesday on Pod Force One if Blanche would be US attorney general, Trump said: “I think he will.”
Continue reading...Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday advanced San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan and state Sen. Scott Wiener in the race to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California's 11th Congressional District, CBS News projects.
After Trump insisted talks with Iran were "going on continuously," Iran fired a deadly missile and drone salvo at Kuwait, claiming retaliation for new U.S. strikes.
As younger generations spend less time on screens, Polaroid's Go Generation 3 lets you capture moments in real time, offline.
We want to know what you really think about your TV.
In Winooski, Vermont, where more than a third of children are English learners, a school superintendent is taking a stand to protect immigrant students
On an April morning at Winooki high school, the day started with a writing prompt: Do you feel safe in school? Why or why not?
The students – whose families hail from across the globe and speak Arabic, Nepali, Spanish, Somali and more – wrote their responses before reading them aloud.
Continue reading...Celebrate the occasion by scoping out one of these treadmills.
Got an older family member or friend with a smartphone? Anyone 55 and older can save money by choosing from these special plans.
Commentary: Android foldables are everywhere, but Apple's is still nowhere to be seen. That might be a problem.
Mixed picture emerges from races across the US, as Trump’s pick fails in Iowa. Plus: Jill Biden speaks about her husband’s decision to drop out of the 2024 election
Good morning. It has been an evening of drama as crucial election results have unfolded – or not – across the US.
In California, the crucial race for governor remains too close to call. With mountains of ballots left to count, the Republican Steve Hilton was leading the field with the Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer following. A quirk of the state’s political system means the top two candidates face off in the general election regardless of which party they belong to.
Where else were primary elections held? In many other states. Many eyes were on Iowa, where Josh Turek, backed by millions in outside spending, clinched the state’s Democratic primary, defeating the state senator Zach Wahls, who had pitched himself as an anti-establishment outsider. On the Republican side, Randy Feenstra’s second-place finish in the gubernatorial race ended Donald Trump’s perfect endorsement streak, which had held strong since March.
When will we know the full results? Voting experts say it could take weeks to finalize the tightest races.
What was Pelley said to have done? In an email, the newly appointed executive editor, Nick Bilton, claimed Pelley had “hijacked my first meeting … to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt”. In a message to staff he said that after repeated, failed attempts to find common ground over the weekend, “we have parted ways with Scott Pelley”.
Continue reading...Protesters angry over the murder of Henry Nowak and the way he was treated by officers after being fatally stabbed clashed violently with British police.
CBS News has fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and former "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley one day after he had a tense and confrontational exchange with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton.
Many of the Democrats who won their primaries are new to the national political scene – here are the names to know
A host of Democrats, many new to the national political scene, won their primaries on Tuesday, from a navy veteran in New Jersey, to a Paralympian in Iowa, to an auto shop owner in California.
The candidates were running in all types of races – toss-up districts, safe seats expected to stay in Democratic hands, and red states that, however, seem more in play for the left than ever in a midterm elections year that is expected to broadly favor the Democrats. Here are some names to know.
Continue reading...Starmer says information will be shared as soon as possible as emergency services attend scene in Sourton Down, near Okehampton
A Royal Navy helicopter has crashed into a field in Devon, police have said.
Emergency services are at the scene of the incident at Sourton Down, near Okehampton. Several road closures are in place around the A386 and A30 Sourton Cross slip and services area.
Continue reading...The PS5 era has been in some ways disappointing for Sony – on Tuesday, the company revealed a slate of games they hope will change that
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PlayStation’s future has looked a little uncertain these past few years. Although the PS5 has sold well and been very profitable, the brand is far from the runaway market leader it was in the PS2 days. Earlier this week, Game File dug into Sony’s most recent earnings reports to illustrate how PlayStation has been selling fewer and fewer of its own flagship games since a peak during the pandemic. About 54.1m copies of games either developed or published by Sony were sold in the 2018 financial year; in 2025, it sold 32.1m.
Sony has put out some great homegrown games since the PS5 was released in 2020, from Astro Bot to Ghost of Yōtei, but it has also had some expensive and very public failures and cancellations; PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who retired in 2024, placed big bets on live-service games and only a few panned out (hello, Helldivers). Sony also seems to have rolled back on releasing its single-player PS5 games on PC after a polite interval of time, suggesting it wants to preserve what advantage and exclusivity it has.
Continue reading...Home Office barred Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker on grounds their visit was ‘not conducive to the public good’
Two leftwing US political commentators who were banned from entering the UK will still speak at the Oxford Union via livestream.
The Home Office told Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker their presence in the UK was “not conducive to the public good” when they attempted to come to London to attend this week’s SXSW London event.
Continue reading...Iowa GOP Senate candidate Rep. Ashley Hinson acknowledged the U.S.-Iran conflict could become a "political liability" if it stretches beyond the next few weeks, according to audio obtained by CBS News.
A Virginia man is suing Amazon over Ring's "Familiar Faces" feature, alleging the technology violates people's privacy.
Commentary: Apple's next iPhone could learn a lot from these powerhouse Android camera phones.
While the technology is set to play a growing role in modern warfare, there remains an unresolved ethical challenge
Should the AI-powered drones of the future have a licence to kill? The question is becoming ever more pressing as governments and the defence industry acknowledge that drone systems will play an increasingly crucial role in future warfare.
With drones being deployed in huge numbers in the Ukraine war and AI being used to assist bombing missions in the Iran conflict, there is an expectation among some observers that weapons will have to operate with increased operational autonomy, which means they will need something approximating a moral framework.
Continue reading...New proposal quietly published last week would amount to ‘devastating blow’ for science, experts warn
A set of sweeping policy changes unveiled by the White House would leave officials appointed by Donald Trump vetting every public grant issued to universities and nongovernmental organizations on the basis of their fidelity to “American values”, as defined by the president, triggering widespread concern.
All federal grants approved by Trump’s political appointees must “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities”, according to a lengthy proposal published by the office of management and budget (OMB).
Continue reading...The 25th edition of the film and media festival opens on Wednesday, showcasing more than 100 world premiere documentaries and narrative features, as well as short films, live music, podcasts and conversations with leading entertainment figures.
fjo3 shares a report from Defense One: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn't just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory. This isn't yet captured in headlines -- for example, about last weekend's barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine -- but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted. Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine's favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics. In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory -- even take it back. Some are fully controlled by humans, like supply robots and medical-evacuation vehicles. But an increasing number are controlled in at least some aspects by dozens of AI products, from guidance packages on aerial drones to decision aids at the highest levels. [...] Just as important as the tech are the new tactics. Given unusual latitude to experiment, Ukrainian fighters began to develop robot-forward infantry concepts, like combined-arms attacks by airborne and ground systems, "more than a year ago. Right now, we're massively starting to implement this," said Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the coordinating body on domestic and international security, in an interview. Ukraine and its partners are also steaming ahead on new concepts for highly autonomous defenses against Russian drones, combining ISR sensors and AI to detect and identify enemy drones in less time and with more certainty. "All of the systems are being linked with each other and with people" to create a distributed network with interceptor drones at various locations to be activated when needed, Aloian said. "One day we will have only like 10 guys who are just going to be responsible for approving interception. And it will automatically go direct to the target." The human operators will be dispersed as well. "Everything can be controlled from Kyiv, Lviv, from cities in other countries," he said. "It's not what happened to Ukraine" (referencing Russia's barrage of Shahed drones) that "should scare us in Europe," said Swarmer CEO Serhii Kupriienko. It's how quickly Ukraine's "middling" military evolved to counter Russia's invasion. "We are behind by literally 10 years or 20 years" in some defense-technology areas, such as satellite imagery, Kupriienko said, and yet his country has climbed a capability curve that just two years ago seemed insurmountable. So could others, he said. "The answer is always AI solutions and integrating the AI into even the daily routine work within the bureaucracy," he said. "We have evolved since 2022, the industry has and our defense has as well. Right now we are able to provide not only [large quantities of drone] assets but everything what is needed to build out the ecosystem," including parts and production, training, modification, etc. Aloian said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With corrupt police on the streets and shopkeepers forced to pay gangs, president has vowed to tackle crime that now affects all parts of society
It was about 11pm and Luis* was about to get into an Uber to go home when the police car pulled up. One of the officers frisked him and produced two plastic bags with what looked like drugs: one contained some sort of powder, the other little crystals. Luis had never seen them before.
Luis, who asked not to use his real name for fear of reprisals, insisted that the drugs weren’t his, but the officers didn’t seem to care. They shoved him into the back of the police truck and drove into the night.
Continue reading...Peabo Bryson, a two-time Grammy-winning singer and songwriter known for Disney movie hits "Beauty and the Beast" and "A Whole New World," has died at age 75.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is not running for reelection, and Democrats have been increasingly bullish about their chances of flipping the seat in recent months.
Exclusive: Research showing Andy Burnham holding slim lead finds honesty in politicians and immigration also rank as important
Voters in Makerfield rank the cost of living, declining high streets and public services as among the most important issues locally, with many also disillusioned by the political system and distrustful of politicians, according to new research.
The findings come from a focus group, shared exclusively with the Guardian, which was commissioned by 38 Degrees and carried out by JL Partners. The fieldwork took place roughly two weeks ahead of the byelection on 18 June, when the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, is hoping to see off a challenge from Reform UK.
Continue reading...The killings took place in the restive Bajo Aguan region of Honduras where rival gangs have fought over control of palm farms and drug trafficking routes.
Proposal for 10-12.5% levies, to also include EU, Taiwan and Australia, would allow US president to skirt court-imposed limits
Donald Trump has threatened tariffs of between 10% and 12.5% on 60 trading partners including the UK, the EU and Australia over alleged forced labour failures, in the latest attempt to revive his signature trade policy.
The EU immediately hit back, saying it expected the US to respect the tariff deal it entered into last July and arguing that stealth tariffs breached the spirit of that agreement.
Continue reading...With rivals racing to market to raise ‘eye-popping sums’, the spotlight is now on the AI sector’s one-time ‘poster child’
A year is a long time in AI. Just 12 months ago, Sam Altman was predicting his company OpenAI would build a super intelligence and fundamentally remake society. Now the boss of the ChatGPT developer is walking back those ideas after failing to make money from ads and erotic chatbots.
Meanwhile, rivals are storming ahead with plans to expand and go public on the stock market, in what is widely expected to be a season of record-setting initial public offerings (IPOs).
Continue reading...Businessman and self-described outsider Toby Doeden will advance to a runoff for the GOP nomination for South Dakota governor, CBS News has projected, after a competitive and frequently contentious primary.
MAHA-aligned Republican Zach Lahn will face Democrat Rob Sand in this year's race for Iowa governor, setting up what could be an unusually competitive contest in a red-leaning state.
Commentary: What wicked smart genre mashup blends the sensibilities of Stephen King, Parks and Recreation and Jaws? Widow's Bay is the answer, and now's the perfect time to catch up.
New Jersey police must not deny streamers press freedoms
The line of New Jersey state police blocked every exit on the street. Clear plastic riot shields covered helmet to knee.
A few dozen people were stuck inside their formation, known as a kettle. Some were protesters defying a curfew order, which was intended to quell demonstrations at a nearby ICE detention facility. But most appeared to be journalists who were just there to do their job.
Continue reading...According to chief economic adviser Kevin Hassett, living in the world’s richest superpower and witnessing food, electricity and housing become luxury items is a good thing
God, I love paying high prices at the supermarket, don’t you? I walk outside with a bag of basics that cost approximately 500% more than they did a few years ago and it makes me feel so optimistic about life. What a wonderful thing to live in the US – the world’s richest superpower – and witness food, electricity and housing become luxury items.
Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, knows what I mean. On Sunday Hassett went on Fox News to inform the US public that high prices are good, actually. Trust him – he’s an economist. Yes, it’s true that last month the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index dropped to its lowest point since the survey began in 1952 and Americans are feeling grim about the economy. But as Hassett explained, “The Michigan survey no longer has anything to do with the economy … it’s just a place where Democrats get to register how angry they are at President Trump.”
Continue reading...Anthony Odiong was sentenced to life in prison for sex crimes against his congregants in Texas
A Louisiana church where a Roman Catholic priest served as pastor before being recently convicted in Texas of criminal clergy sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison has been criticized by his victims and their supporters for soliciting prayers on his behalf in a parochial bulletin published after his guilty verdict – which neglected to mention the survivors.
One of the two women whom Anthony Odiong was convicted of assaulting in Waco, Texas – identified in court proceedings as Mary Doe – issued a statement on Tuesday encouraging St Anthony of Padua’s community in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana, to pray for his victims, too.
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No state has taken over as many local public school districts as Texas. Just since 2020, the Texas Education Agency has installed its own hand-picked leaders in eight districts. Four of those came this spring. At least another 10 are at risk of takeover, including, as of last week, the Austin Independent School District.
And to lead some of these districts, Texas is turning to a cadre of officials with ties to Mike Miles, the man the education agency chose in 2023 to oversee the Houston school district, the state’s largest. Miles is also a close ally of Mike Morath, Texas’ powerful education commissioner.
Already, at least two of these new district leaders have started to adopt policies similar to the contentious reforms Miles has pursued in Houston. He has touted improved test scores under his charge. Houston ISD had no F-rated campuses and fewer D-rated campuses in the state’s latest ratings compared with previous years. But Miles has also sparked widespread protests in response to the district’s rigid adherence to scripted lessons and repetitive testing, the firing of principals and teachers, mass school closures, and the conversion of schools into charters.
Miles did not respond to requests for comment from the Texas Observer. Houston ISD officials, in a statement to the Observer, said the district did not achieve better ratings by maintaining the status quo but “made difficult decisions” to improve academic performance, noting the majority of its campuses are now rated A or B.
These school districts whose new leaders have connections to Miles should prepare for “upheaval and chaos,” warned an elected Houston school board member.
“If anything doesn’t align with improving test scores, it will be taken away,” said Maria Benzon, who was elected in November to the Houston ISD board but is not permitted to serve under the ongoing state takeover. Under Miles, for example, Houston ISD eliminated librarian positions and turned some libraries into what Benzon called “detention centers,” because they are being used, in part, for students with behavioral issues. Morath, the TEA commissioner, has said the centers are used for more than just punishment.
Texas law allows the TEA to take control of districts with multiple failing school ratings or governance issues and to replace their superintendent and elected boards.
The recent takeovers include Beaumont, Lake Worth and Connally independent school districts, whose new superintendents worked under Miles when he was superintendent in Dallas ISD; two of them also worked for him in Houston. In Fort Worth ISD, one of the state’s largest districts, the new state-appointed superintendent chose Daniel Soliz as his second-in-command, another person who worked under Miles in Houston ISD. Soliz did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
At least two of the state’s new superintendent appointees — Sandi Massey, who now helms Beaumont ISD in southeast Texas, and Ena Meyers, TEA’s appointee for Lake Worth ISD, a small district near Fort Worth — also worked for the controversial Colorado-based charter network Third Future Schools, which Miles led prior to becoming superintendent in Houston. In April, the Observer revealed that Miles had an ongoing $120,000 annual consulting contract with the charter network, an arrangement that likely violated a new statewide ban on public school administrators’ moonlighting. After questions from the news organization, Miles canceled the contract. The district said Miles “remains fully focused on leading Houston ISD and delivering results for students.”
Third Future’s charter network is expanding around the state as districts turn campuses over to the nonprofit’s Texas subsidiary, often as a means to delay possible state takeover. The nonprofit did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.
School district takeovers often involve layoffs, school closures and an increase in charter schools, as has happened in Houston, said Domingo Morel, an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University, who found Texas has had more district takeovers than any other state since 1989.
What’s unique to Texas, Morel said, is that the low bar required to take control has led to more takeovers. Since 2015, five consecutive failing state ratings at just one school can trigger a takeover, as occurred in Houston, which has 273 campuses.
Texas has also made it harder for districts to appeal these seizures. The Legislature passed a law in 2021 that barred districts from using public funds to challenge the education commissioner’s “final and unappealable” decision to take them over. The threshold that defines a failing school was also lowered. Then, in 2025, the state passed another law restricting districts from using public funds to sue the state when challenging its accountability ratings.
The state “is the player, the referee, the coach, the scorekeeper,” when it comes to rating schools and deciding when to seize control, said Steven Nelson, an associate professor of education policy and leadership at the University of Nevada who’s been studying school takeovers for more than a decade. He said he suspects the TEA-appointed leaders connected to Miles will also focus on standardized testing, which will result in “a narrow curriculum when all is said and done.”
The acceleration of takeovers, and the state’s increasingly stringent rating system, comes just as Texas rolls out a school voucher program that will, in most cases, award parents $10,000 in state funds to send their children to private schools. State accountability standards do not apply to private schools, where students don’t have to take the standardized tests required in Texas public schools.
TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky said the agency does not expect the four school districts that have recently been taken over to adopt the same reforms that Miles implemented in Houston. “During an intervention, state law requires the agency to appoint a new superintendent and a board of managers. All other staffing and operational decisions are made locally by the district,” Kobersky said.
But last August, Morath told lawmakers other districts “should be copying the changes that we see in Houston.”
Massey, the new superintendent in Beaumont, has also cited the changes in Houston ISD as a blueprint.
“The model that we are implementing here is a very similar model to Houston. And why? Because of the success that Houston has had,” Massey said at a May 21 board meeting, referring to her time working with Miles at Houston ISD, where he selected her to be chief of schools.
Under Massey, the newly appointed board of managers voted at their first meeting to temporarily suspend a number of policies related to governance and hiring practices, including employees’ rights to present grievances to the board and principals’ ability to approve new hires without district permission. Board of managers member Jeff Wheeler said at the meeting, “We are requesting that they be suspended until the board can move, can more fully evaluate our local policies.”
The board has taken other steps that mirror what happened in Houston after the takeover there: On May 14, the district announced it was cutting 34 positions that support student mental health, and on May 21, it announced a high school would close.
Massey did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment about whether she’s following the Houston playbook. Jackie Simien, a spokesperson for Beaumont ISD said, “Massey has worked alongside successful educational leaders with demonstrated results in improving systems, instruction, and student performance.”
Benzon, the elected Houston ISD board member, said Miles is sidelining parent and teacher voices in her district, and they are leaving in droves as a result. “They are trying to escape the New Education System and Miles’ bad policies,” Benzon added, referring to a program Miles transplanted from his former charter school network that is characterized by scripted lessons and repetitive testing. The Houston Chronicle reported the district “is losing students at an accelerated pace” under the takeover, spurring the district to shutter 12 schools ahead of the next school year.
In its statement to the Observer, Houston ISD cited a survey of families reporting a “favorable perception” of the district and said it retained many exemplary teachers.
Nelson and Morel said they believe the ultimate objective of any takeover is to disenfranchise local communities. Black and Hispanic students make up the majority of the population at all four of the districts now headed by Miles’ associates.
“It all begins at the school board level to then completely disempower the community,” Morel said.
On April 23, Houston ISD moved to fire a veteran teacher and president of the Houston Education Association teachers union after she protested requirements to comply with Miles’ New Education System.
Meyers, the new Lake Worth superintendent who at the time was Houston ISD’s deputy chief of strategic initiatives, testified in favor of the teacher’s termination.
“We do not allow our staff to make decisions about curriculum in a New Education System school or in Houston ISD,” Meyers said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “If they are not following expectations, we would not allow them to stay in HISD as an employee.”
Since taking over in Lake Worth, Meyers and the board of managers have temporarily suspended board policies related to governance procedures, hiring and employee assignments and schedules, similar to what Massey and her board did in Beaumont.
In response to the Observer’s inquiries about replicating Houston ISD’s reforms in her new role, Meyers wrote in an email that “Lake Worth ISD is very different from Houston ISD. We are a district of five schools serving a much smaller community, so our approach must reflect the unique needs of our students, staff, and families.”
Her email continued, “I believe educators should learn from successful practices wherever they exist.”
As in Beaumont and Lake Worth, the takeover in Fort Worth ISD has been characterized by swift changes. After less than a month under the new leadership, the 68,000-student district has suspended local board governance and hiring policies and has cut dozens of staff positions, including those supporting English-language learners.
Parent organizer Zach Leonard said a new instructional model Fort Worth ISD is rolling out in 19 schools, called “Elevate,” is essentially the same as what Miles has done in Houston, an assertion district spokesperson Tierney Tinnin refuted.
Leonard, along with other parents with his organization, notes the similarities between the programs: “scripted slide-by-slide lessons, rigid timed instruction, and ‘demonstrations of learning’ reduced to data points.”
“This isn’t education reform,” Leonard said, referring to Miles’ model of learning being transported to Fort Worth. “It’s a franchise being handed to our children without a vote.”
The post Texas State Takeover of Local School Districts Expands, Raising Concerns appeared first on ProPublica.
Smart locks are powerful, connected and help keep you safer. We tested models to find the best.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Dover City Council’s decision to fire City Manager Dave Hugg earlier this spring revealed messy disagreements between city officials. Now, Hugg’s decision to file a discrimination complaint could add costly layers of litigation to the saga in a city that is already stretched thin financially.
Former Dover City Manager Dave Hugg filed an age-based employment discrimination complaint against the city this spring in the midst of his contentious removal from the city’s top administrative position, marking his first step toward suing over his firing.
Hugg, 83, submitted the complaint to both the state Department of Labor’s office of anti-discrimination and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a city official with knowledge of the situation told Spotlight Delaware.
Once investigators conclude their inquiry into Hugg’s complaint, the former city manager will then be required to file a lawsuit against the city – regardless of whether investigators uphold his complaint.
Hugg originally accused Delaware’s capital city in mid-March of discrimination and wrongfully placing him on administrative leave under both state law – the Discrimination in Employment Act – and the federal Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Daily State News first reported on June 2.
He then amended the complaint to wrongful termination based on age-based discrimination following a public hearing and subsequent vote by the Dover City Council to remove him in mid-April, the city official said.
Hugg and his attorney, Anthony Delcollo, did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
Hugg’s complaint, and the lawsuit that will follow, could represent yet another costly hurdle for the city of Dover, which recently had to raise property taxes to close a $7 million budget shortfall heading into the 2027 fiscal year.
The city has faced one controversy after another over the past year, including an attempt by the Dover Police Department to oust its chief, continued acrimony among city council members over a panhandling ordinance, and attempts to shut down one of the city’s few homeless shelters.
Dover City Attorney Dan Griffith confirmed the municipality had received the EEOC complaint.
He also said the city hired Keri Morris-Johnston, an attorney with the law firm Marshall Dennehey, to represent the city against Hugg’s complaint. Morris-Johnston declined Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
Hugg and Delcollo did not explicitly mention the EEOC complaint during the mid-April public hearing in which Hugg was formally fired.
However, during his testimony before the city council, Hugg suggested his age was the reason city council members wanted him gone.
“In writing, they really had no firm reasons, but it was very clear that they wanted me out,” Hugg said. “And the only thing I could think of was, ‘Dave, you’re old. It’s time for you to go.’”
Spotlight Delaware first reported the Dover City Council unanimously voted to place Hugg on leave in mid-March as a first step toward firing him.
Hugg, who spent 14 years as Smyrna’s town manager before coming to the city of Dover to work in the planning department in 2017, had been serving as the city manager since 2022.
The Dover City Charter requires the city manager to be given a public hearing, if they desire, and a written statement of reasons for their removal before city council can take a final vote on firing them.
Hugg accepted the option of a public hearing – the first time the city had held one of its kind, city leaders said at the time.
At the April 14 meeting, Delcollo, Hugg’s attorney, conducted an hours-long, trial-like presentation to make the case that the former city manager should keep the job.
Delcollo’s primary argument for Hugg to remain city manager included that the letter city council members wrote explaining the reasons for his removal lacked specific details or concrete evidence of the errors they alleged Hugg had committed.
He also tried to refute claims that Hugg had fostered a hostile work environment. He brought up a number of witnesses to testify to the former city manager’s character, including Mayor Robin Christiansen, state Rep. Bill Bush (D-Dover) and Kent County Levy Court President Joanne Masten.
Hugg said during the hearing he was called into a meeting in early February with City Council President Fred Neil, and Council Members Andre Boggerty and Gerald Rocha, in which they told him he could either retire, resign, or be fired.
“It’s pretty obvious to me that there was an effort being made to push me out the door, get me to leave and claim it was my decision,” he said.
City council members largely did not react to Delcollo and Hugg’s argument laid during the hearing, but ultimately voted to fire Hugg.
One exception was Neil, who said before casting his vote to fire Hugg that Neil himself is 92, so “age was not a factor.”
When asked about their reaction to Hugg’s discrimination complaint, city council members stood by their decision to fire the former city manager.
Christiansen, however, said he has concerns about the city council’s handling of the situation, and the “financial repercussions” for the city.
Councilman David Anderson said the city handled Hugg’s removal in the best way possible under the circumstances.
“My only reaction is that I think it’s unfortunate, and I think the city’s position will prevail,” he added.
Councilwoman Julia Pillsbury similarly said she believes it was time for Hugg to step down from the position, and “the time had come” for Assistant City Manager Sharon Duca – now the acting city manager – to take over.
Pillsbury added that Hugg accused her, specifically, of age-based discrimination when she told him in the past that Duca should take over as city manager. But she said her criticism of Hugg was purely about making way for another qualified candidate, and not a reflection of his age.
Duca has been serving as the acting city manager since Hugg was first placed on leave in March. The city posted a job listing for the city manager position on its website in April, but has since taken the posting down.
Christiansen, who testified on Hugg’s behalf during his public hearing, told Spotlight Delaware that city council members should have done a better job of discussing their concerns constructively with Hugg, instead of moving to a public hearing and removing him so quickly.
“I have great concerns about the liability that the city’s going to have in this matter,” Christiansen said. “Our budget is not in the greatest shape that it should be, so I think there was perhaps another way to handle this.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
The post Fired Dover city manager files discrimination complaint, first step toward lawsuit appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
In survey of more than 300 fired probationary employees, 95% reported continuing mental health effects
US federal workers laid off by the Trump administration said they are experiencing mental health effects, including PTSD-like symptoms, from losing their jobs, according to a new survey.
More than 300 fired probationary employees were surveyed, with 95% reporting ongoing mental health effects, according to 27UNIHTED, a network of former National Institute of Health (NIH) employees. Nearly half said they are experiencing PTSD-like symptoms, and a quarter are taking new medications to manage symptoms.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Although Delaware’s homeless population has grown in recent years, the availability of resources and affordable housing has not. Last week, lawmakers included in a state budget a new initiative that would pay for 50 families with school-age children to move out of motels or shelters, and into rental housing.
Lawmakers on Delaware’s powerful Joint Finance Committee included an $800,000 line item into the state’s supplemental budget last week that would pay for homeless Delaware families with school-aged children to move into stable housing.
The introduction of the item – pushed by Rep. Kim Williams (D-Stanton) – followed an announcement last month from Delaware budget forecasters that the state would collect nearly $200 million more in revenue during the next fiscal year than previously estimated.
It also follows news from earlier this spring that Williams could face a primary election challenge from progressive Will Imbrie-Moore, whose platform calls for increases in affordable housing spending. Imbrie-Moore launched his candidacy in March, but has not yet officially filed as a candidate.
Williams said she decided to push the initiative forward after the nonprofit Action for Delaware’s Children reached out to her.
“These children and families often do not have a strong voice in the legislature, and we need to help them be that voice,” Williams said last month.
The newly budgeted housing money would help 50 Delaware families move out of shelters and motels and into rental housing. Lawmakers will pass the state’s operating, capital and supplemental budgets later this month.
More than 4,400 children in Delaware experienced homelessness during the 2022-23 school year, according to data from the Delaware Department of Education.
For Karen Eller, who teaches at the Maurice Pritchett Academy in Wilmington, the money is much needed today. During a press conference announcing the funding last month, she said Delaware teachers have seen an increase in homeless students in their schools.
The funding proposal, which would focus on housing support rather than shelter access, “helps to ensure students have a bed of their own at night to sleep in, so they no longer have to come to school hungry and exhausted to our classrooms,” she said.
Delaware’s State Rental Assistance Program currently provides housing vouchers for families who have been referred by state agencies, such as the state’s Department of Health and Social Services or the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth, and their Families.
The Delaware State Housing Authority (DSHA) also offers housing subsidies to eligible low-income families in Kent and Sussex counties. The New Castle County Housing Authority also administers a federally funded housing choice voucher program.
Still, advocates say those programs do not provide enough homes to meet the growing size of the state’s homeless population.
Eller – who advocates for homeless families, in addition to teaching – noted that motel stays often split up larger families because they have to stay in multiple rooms.
New Castle County Community Services’ General Manager Carrie Casey also works with the county’s voucher program. During the May press conference, she said the county’s voucher program waiting list has been closed for four years.
“We have 8,000 people on the waiting list, so we need these tools, we need these subsidies,” Casey said during the event.
Families will not need referrals from state agencies under the new program. Instead, school districts and individual schools can make referrals to the Delaware State Housing Authority.
The state’s housing authority will also establish a set of criteria for voucher eligibility, such as a requirement that the head of the family have a job, or be actively seeking work or actively training for work.
Ellers noted that the budget item will not solve “the whole problem” but called it a “big step forward” for Delaware families experiencing homelessness.
The vouchers will be good for one year.
The post Delaware budgets new dollars for homeless families appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
If you want to monitor your distance, calories burned, heart rate, sleep or stress, these fitness trackers have got you covered.
A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son.
ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,” wrote the group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii as well as Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado and Mike Levin of California.
Last year, the Pentagon announced the loan to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup, about three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took a stake of undisclosed size in the rare-earth magnet company.
Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to lend to the firm was made by Peter Navarro, who serves as the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and is a friend of Trump Jr.’s.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly told ProPublica.
After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it.
“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.
In their letter, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the lawmakers asked a series of questions about Navarro’s involvement in the deal, including whether he intervened at someone else’s direction, if the president was aware or involved, and who Navarro communicated with at the Pentagon.
They also asked more broadly about whether White House officials have communicated with federal agency officials about other companies linked to the Trump family.
“The American public — and service members that are in harm’s way — expect that the DoD contracting process is fair, unbiased, and competitive to ensure that only the best companies, providing only the best products, receive taxpayer dollars,” the lawmakers wrote.
Navarro, who served as trade adviser in the president’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.
Asked to respond to the lawmakers’ allegations and ProPublica’s reporting, Navarro in a text message wrote “Staggering level of hyperbole. More fake news” but did not elaborate. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Navarro did not respond to questions from ProPublica sent to him directly before the initial article was published. But in a post on X afterward, he called the story “fake news on steroids.”
Vulcan has not commented. A White House spokesperson had said in a statement that the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people,” adding, “The President’s entire team, including Senior Counselor Navarro and officials at the Department of War, is working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said last week that the president’s son does not discuss companies he has invested in with federal government officials and did not speak to Navarro about Vulcan. He “has no knowledge about how this deal came together,” the spokesperson said. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, said it also played no role in Vulcan getting the loan and did not learn about the deal before it was public.
“No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.”
The loan was part of the Pentagon’s effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. It represented a big win for Vulcan and its investors. Estimates of the company’s valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced.
The deal is one of many actions by the administration of President Donald Trump that have helped companies in which his family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represented the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency was directly linked to White House intervention.
A number of other lawmakers also criticized the Vulcan deal following ProPublica’s investigation.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, called it “corruption to the highest degree,” alleging on X: “They are looting this country. Dismantling it, selling it for parts, and lining their own pockets.”
Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for a congressional investigation. “It’s just nonstop corruption from this White House, and Republicans in Congress are content to twiddle their thumbs and look right in the other direction,” she posted on X. “Congress should be investigating and putting a stop to this kind of crooked self-dealing—not enabling it.”
The post Lawmakers Demand Answers After the White House Initiated a $620M Loan to a Firm Tied to Donald Trump Jr. appeared first on ProPublica.
Trade minister says Australia has ‘robust, comprehensive and world-leading legislation addressing forced labour and modern slavery’
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Australia is among dozens of countries facing a 12.5% trade tariff from the Trump administration for allegedly failing to prevent imports of goods made by slave labour.
The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, listed Australia among 54 economies that “failed to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor” following an investigation into their practices.
Continue reading...Energy and military sites targeted as guests gather for economic forum where Putin is due to speak on Friday
Ukrainian drones hit energy and military sites in St Petersburg early on Wednesday hours before international guests gathered for the city’s flagship economic forum, in a blow to Vladimir Putin.
Several long-range drones crashed into oil storage facilities after Russian air defences tried unsuccessfully to shoot them down. There were loud explosions and black smoke rose high above the city from the blazing oil terminal.
Continue reading...Global cooperation on nuclear disarmament looks even further away Expert comment jon.wallace
The Iran war inhibited progress at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. But so did P5 countries’ resistance to talking seriously about disarmament.
The 2026 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference concluded on 22 May without a consensus outcome document. It is the third time in a row that states parties have failed to agree on a review of the treaty’s implementation and progress, or to set out a plan to support and strengthen the treaty’s implementation. However, this failure was different from the last.
In 2022, it was Russia alone that blocked agreement, following its invasion of Ukraine. This year, multiple countries were prepared to hinder progress. The fractures ran across the ‘P5’ – the UN Security Council permanent members, all of whom are classed as ‘nuclear-weapon’ states and are the only countries permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the treaty. (Other nuclear armed countries are not parties to the treaty).
But what happened in New York was not a targeted disruption. It was the latest sign of a non-proliferation system under strain in an increasingly dysfunctional environment.
The primary cause of failure was the Iran conflict. Countries could not agree on adding a paragraph addressing Iran’s non-compliance with its NPT obligations and stating that Iran could never acquire nuclear weapons. That remained bracketed in the final draft outcome document, meaning consensus had not been reached.
Conference President Đỗ Hùng Việt, whose management of an extraordinarily difficult process deserves credit, chose not to force states into a public confrontation on the issue. When he asked the conference to adopt at least a procedural consensus on strengthening the review process, Russia, China, and Iran blocked that too.
Even if Iran had not been the breaking point, something else might have been. Other fault lines were close to the surface: Russia pushed for the deletion of text on North Korea’s weapons programme, prompting South Korean objections. Disputes over language on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, still under Russian occupation, remained unresolved.
A pattern is emerging, where review conferences become a forum for airing regional and bilateral grievances. That reflects a broader shift in how the major nuclear powers approach multilateral institutions.
When powerful states believe that their security interests are better served by bilateral leverage than by collective frameworks, consensus-based multilateral processes become difficult to sustain.
The failure to agree a final document obscured another serious problem. Even the draft that was on the table represented a significant weakening of prior commitments.
New START, a US–Russia nuclear arms control agreement, expired in February with nothing to replace it. That leaves the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals without any agreed limits for the first time in over fifty years.
China’s nuclear build-up is accelerating. The US has threatened to resume nuclear testing and has accused both Russia and China of conducting tests. France has announced an expansion of its nuclear programme.
In this environment, the five recognized nuclear weapon states arrived in New York and set about forcing the removal of language calling on them to begin negotiations on disarmament – or even to pursue discussions urgently.
Nuclear weapons states removed even more mild requests from the outcome document – for more transparency and accountability on their part. The final draft vaguely called for constructive dialogue that might facilitate future progress. Many non-nuclear weapons states will interpret this as a signal – that beyond ensuring other countries do not acquire nuclear weapons, the P5 are no longer committed to the wider NPT regime.
The grand bargain at the heart of the NPT – that non-nuclear states forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for progress on disarmament by the P5 – is under severe strain, and the cracks are showing.
There were still meaningful signals from the wider membership. Countries pushed back against weakened disarmament language. There was strong opposition to any resumption of nuclear testing, with many states defending the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The fact that so many non-nuclear states remained engaged and vocal matters. But collective engagement can only do so much if the P5 are not listening.
The next NPT Review Conference is in 2031. The risk is that the underlying conditions deteriorate further during the intervening five years, proliferation pressures mount, and the case for investing political capital in the NPT becomes progressively harder to make.
Avoiding that outcome requires a practical assessment of what went wrong and what can be done differently.
An important lesson is that review conferences cannot be the primary forum for adjudicating active crises. When countries demand that a consensus-based multilateral process takes sides on contentious regional issues like the wars in Iran or Ukraine, deadlock is almost guaranteed.
An alternative is possible. In the leadup to the 1985 Review Conference, nuclear arsenals were almost at their Cold War height, Israel had destroyed a safeguarded nuclear reactor in Iraq, and there were serious non-proliferation concerns relating to several non-parties (such as South Africa and Brazil).
In this unsecure environment, the United States and Soviet Union famously set their differences aside and focused on strengthening the system by cooperating to reach consensus, rather than weaponizing it. That was a long time ago, but it is a reminder that cooperative behaviour during times of high geopolitical tension is possible.
The P5 need to strengthen engagement with one another on nuclear risk reduction through the ongoing ‘P5 process’ – a diplomatic forum between the countries. Dialogue has stalled in recent years. But this is a crucial route for progress on even modest confidence-building measures on doctrine, on new technologies, and on crisis communication.
The P5 demonstrating a willingness to engage in good faith, and treating the NPT as worth preserving, would itself send a signal. Seriously engaging with transparency and accountability initiatives put forward during the review conference would be a good start and is relatively low pressure and low-hanging fruit in terms of compliance.
Flat-top grills and griddles can do things most standard grated grills can't. I asked an expert if going flat lives up to the hype.
Son of deposed shah forced to distance himself from once-dreaded Savak as some of his ‘fascistic’ supporters glorify it
For decades, the Savak was seen as the most hated symbol of repression that kept Iran’s last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in power – and a main driving force behind the revolutionary fervor that toppled him in 1979.
Now the deposed monarch’s son, Reza Pahlavi, has been forced to distance himself from the once-dreaded security agency after some of his most vociferous supporters glorified it as the defining emblem in their drive to install him on the throne in a royal restoration.
Continue reading...Will New York end their long wait for a title? Our contributors pick the winner, key players and dark horses before the season’s grand finale tips off
Where to even begin? Victor Wembanyama, the brightest young star in the NBA, appears on the biggest stage imaginable (in this galaxy, at least ... I’m not sure how big the stages are where he comes from), while one of the most storied franchises in American sports has its return to relevance cemented. And, maybe most importantly of all, The Garden, baby! CDL
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On any given night, thousands of people sleep on the streets in Portland, Oregon. They seek shelter in tents, bushes and overpasses in a city that has struggled with one of the worst housing crises in the country.
Portland, like many cities, has raced to increase its supply of affordable housing by turning to a federal program that’s existed since the 1980s: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It provides up to $15 billion worth of tax credits a year nationally to help developers build apartments. Portland supplemented the federal construction money with local dollars, creating incentives that were hard to turn down.
But to meet the affordability requirements, all the developers needed to do in most cases was put rents within reach of someone earning 60% of median income, an earnings threshold that equates to about $75,000 annually for a family of four. It turns out that this amount of rent is now close to what the typical Portland landlord charges without any subsidy.
The result of the federal tax credit has been a glut of apartments costing renters on the order of about $1,400 a month for a one-bedroom. That’s a manageable outlay for a family making $75,000 but nearly half the monthly income of someone who earns $35,000 at the local minimum wage.
Nearly 2,000 of Portland’s subsidized units sat vacant and unused at last count, as The Oregonian and Willamette Week have reported. The same situation has repeated from Seattle to the San Francisco Bay Area to Denver.
Economists and other academic researchers have been warning for decades that this was precisely the sort of problem that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit was likely to create.
Studies have concluded that the program, which currently supports nine out of every 10 subsidized units built in America, is an expensive and ineffective way to house people who can’t afford it. Researchers have said it doesn’t subsidize housing deeply enough to reach truly low-income renters, so it produces housing in markets and at income levels that already have a surplus instead of filling a shortage.
Independent researchers have found little evidence it’s expanded the overall housing supply beyond what the market would have produced without it. Its complexity has birthed an industry of affordable-housing-focused developers, investors, lawyers and accounting specialists who profit off the tax credit. Between 1991 and 2024, a dozen studies concluded that many more people could benefit if the money were spent on rental vouchers, which let consumers, rather than the government, decide which landlords get tax subsidies. Estimates went as high as twice the impact for the dollar.
“The evidence is telling us this program is lacking its reason to exist,” said Kirk McClure, an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas and a leading critic of the tax credit. “We should reform the program to make it work better.”
McClure and others have brought their concerns to Congress. He recommended diverting the money into rental vouchers for tenants, or else changing the tax credit’s rules to reward only developers who build units in genuinely short supply: those affordable to people at the very bottom of the income ladder.
The ideas never went anywhere. Instead, money for the tax credit has grown at a much faster rate than rental assistance vouchers since 2000, data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Treasury shows. Rock-solid support from industries that benefit from the tax credit and both parties in Congress has made it the linchpin of U.S. housing policy.
“The program leverages housing market forces, entrepreneurial innovation and private accountability to increase housing supply,” former HUD Secretary Ben Carson told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2025.
Among the tax credit’s other prominent backers are two Northwest Democrats on the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Cantwell has introduced bills to increase funding for the existing tax credit, and Wyden has proposed expanding the target of the credits to benefit not just low-income families, but also middle-income households — the opposite of what McClure says needs to happen.
Both Wyden and Cantwell say Congress should hold more hearings to ensure the program is run efficiently, but they also defended it in written statements to Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica.
“There isn’t any silver bullet to the housing crisis in Oregon and around the country,” Wyden’s statement said, “but the low-income housing tax credit has been the most successful federal housing construction program on the books for decades and is the only housing program Republicans haven’t tried to gut.”
Indeed, President Donald Trump has sought to cut housing programs such as rent assistance. But as part of his spending package last year, Congress approved the biggest expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit in decades.
“That’s a mistake,” McClure said.
It won’t alleviate homelessness or the housing shortage for people at the lowest incomes, he said. It will just create more buildings that compete with the market and with one another for the same pool of renters.
McClure recounted seeing a brand-new affordable housing complex near his home in Kansas not long ago with a sign enticing tenants of another government-backed complex down the street, promoting newer units at the same price.
“So the taxpayers of the United States subsidized the creation of this new property to help bankrupt another federally subsidized property,” he said. “That is stupidity 101. We have got to be better stewards of the American taxpayer’s dollar.”
Oregon’s affordable housing production has skyrocketed in recent years. So have rents and homelessness.
Over the past decade, Oregon lawmakers doubled funding for the state’s affordable housing tax credit and started offering low-interest and deferred loans for construction.
Voters in the Portland area, meanwhile, passed housing bonds totaling more than $900 million. Developers can use that money to secure federal housing tax credits. The state went from building about 1,800 affordable units a year pre-pandemic to nearly 5,000 last year.
Industries that benefit from the tax credit say it’s the engine that makes that kind of building boom possible.
The Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, representing lenders, developers and others in the industry, has called the program “the most effective tool we have to meet the affordable housing needs in rural, suburban, and urban areas.”
Jennifer Schwartz, director of tax and housing advocacy for the National Council of State Housing Agencies, which advocates for the tax credit and other housing programs administered by states, said the housing market by itself won’t produce a big enough supply of housing within reach for low-income renters. That goes for even those who receive federal rent vouchers, she said.
“It costs too much to build housing to turn around and rent it to households who are low-income households,” Schwartz said, “unless you have some sort of incentive like the housing credit.”
But in Portland, all that new construction hasn’t made a dent in the city’s affordability crisis. A report from the Portland Housing Bureau in 2025 found that rent and home sale prices were growing faster than incomes, even as the city’s vacancy rate was also rising.
The vacancy rate was roughly 7.6% as of May, according to Aaron Kirk Douglas, director of market intelligence at the Portland-based brokerage HFO Investment Real Estate. Vacancies are even higher for ostensibly affordable units: 11%, leaving nearly 2,000 units unused. Housing industry experts consider 5% vacancy to be a baseline for ordinary turnover.
The time it takes to verify that a tenant’s income meets the tax credit’s requirements and prep units for move-in played a role in the struggle to fill vacant units built with the federal subsidy. But housing advocates say the biggest barrier is price.
The gap between market-rate rents and affordable housing rents has shrunk, and not just in Portland.
By one industry estimate, in more than a dozen U.S. cities at least 40% of affordable housing was competing with market-rate buildings rates in 2025.
In the Portland suburb of Gresham, federal rules cap a two-bedroom apartment built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit at $1,675 a month. Zillow puts the equivalent market-rate apartment at $1,525.
Operators of a new $53.8 million development in northeast Portland, built with the tax credit and the local housing bond, had trouble filling studio and one-bedroom apartments whose affordable rents were near market rate. They began offering a month of free rent for new tenants, according to a March report from the committee that oversees the region’s housing bond.
Affordable housing providers, which in Portland are predominantly nonprofit organizations, are also increasing their marketing budgets to attract renters away from market-rate buildings.
“The idea that we’re competing with the market would have been unfathomable a few years ago,” said Margaret Salazar, CEO of Reach Community Development Corporation, one of Portland’s largest affordable housing providers.
Salazar, who led Oregon’s state housing agency during the COVID-19 pandemic and later worked as a regional director for HUD, is a longtime proponent of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. But she said the people who can afford to rent apartments the tax credit has produced would rather move into a market-rate apartment for similar money and with fewer rules and restrictions.
“It’s becoming a slimmer and slimmer slice of residents” that Reach can serve, she said. “Suddenly we’re competing for this little slice of people.”
Meanwhile, a substantial group of Portland-area residents remain priced out.
HUD data shows more than 90,000 households in Multnomah County earn less than the 60% of median income that a family would typically need to afford a federally subsidized unit. (The precise number of families who can’t afford “affordable” units is unclear because it depends on variations in household size, actual rent levels and other subsidies that might reduce rents further.)
Salazar said that right now Reach can rent to people at lower income levels only if it can find additional subsidies such as housing vouchers — and funding for vouchers is so limited that only 1 in 4 people who qualify are able to get them.
Despite the convergence of rent levels in market-rate and subsidized housing, supporters of the tax credit say it remains valuable because the units it subsidizes are constrained from raising rents faster than incomes — and there’s no guarantee market-rate rents will remain at this level in the future.
But Steve Rudman, who ran the local housing authority in the Portland area for more than a decade, said the fact that the tax credit is now delivering market-rate housing rather than housing for the poorest households raises an existential question for the federal program.
“What is this thing really doing?” Rudman said. “What is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit?”
Criticism of the federal construction credit has been a near constant since it began.
In the Reagan era, housing experts began to worry rents would become unaffordable amid deep cuts to housing programs and the drafting of the Tax Reform Act, which eliminated several tax shelters for real estate.
McClure, an economist for the city of Boston at the time, worked with others to design a tax credit that would reward affordable housing production.
“It was meant to be a three-year stopgap until we came up with something better,” he said.
The idea was to incorporate low-income housing into market-rate housing construction that was already taking place. Developers could receive a tax credit if they capped rents for a certain portion of the apartments in their building, and they could continue to rent the rest at any amount they chose.
McClure crafted letters for Boston’s mayor to send Congress in support of the idea. His analysis helped decide the subsidy amount. Developers could offset 70% of the cost of new builds or 30% of the cost of a rehab. Congress signed off in 1986.
Almost immediately, the program diverged from the outcomes McClure had envisioned.
He and other drafters of the tax credit had thought developers would use it to offer deep discounts on a small number of units, allowing them to charge market rate on the rest. But developers found it more profitable to subsidize 100% of their units at the smallest allowable discount, a rent affordable to households at 60% of median income.
In 1992, as lawmakers considered making the 6-year-old Low-Income Housing Tax Credit permanent, an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office declared the program “unlikely to substantially increase the supply of affordable housing” and “more suited to the needs of investors than poor renters.”
For one, the tax credits cost a lot to administer, congressional economists said. They also pointed to evidence that subsidized housing production dampened market-rate construction.
Congress was preparing to give developers $3 billion through the tax credit as of 1992. Putting that money into housing vouchers instead, the CBO concluded, would help 550,000 households, more than twice as many as would benefit from the construction tax credit. The numbers echoed findings from an earlier HUD evaluation of tax credits vs. vouchers.
Congress made the tax credit permanent a year later.
As time wore on, McClure’s emerging doubts about a program he originally expected to be temporary only deepened.
When the Fannie Mae Foundation hired him in 1997 to analyze how the tax credit was doing, he concluded it was a “very inefficient subsidy delivery mechanism” that didn’t produce as much housing as it should have.
Other studies came to similar conclusions as McClure, HUD and the Congressional Budget Office. At least five found the tax credit does little to increase the overall housing supply.
The Government Accountability Office noted problems with the program in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, finding it lacked basic oversight to show the federal funds worked as intended. A 2017 investigation by NPR and Frontline documented numerous examples of waste and fraud, including one developer pocketing tax credits without building the required housing.
“Given the available evidence on program performance, we should certainly not expand the tax credit program,” Edgar Olsen, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2017 article for the American Enterprise Institute. “The existing evidence argues for terminating it.”
There are some critics within Congress. Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a bill to kill the program last year, calling it a “cash grab for developers and banks.” But the bill went nowhere.
Olsen, like McClure, remains adamant today about what he considers the tax program’s uselessness. In a recent interview, he told OPB and ProPublica that he’s urged policymakers, in academic articles and in testimony, to re-examine whether the program has any value at all.
“How often do they talk to people like me or like Kirk McClure? The answer is almost never,” Olsen said. “What they hear from are people who represent the financial interest of the industry, and so they want more money to be spent on this.”
The post A Low-Income Housing Program Is Pouring Billions Into Housing Many People Can’t Afford appeared first on ProPublica.
Come January, pregnancy care physician billing codes will change from a bundled system to an à la carte one.
Records show that Trump's first administration opted not to save DMs in its library archives, raising questions about compliance with the Presidential Records Act.
Even for nonbelievers like me, the pope has become a reassuring – and all too rare – voice of moral clarity
Do you remember the early 2000s, when Silicon Valley buzzed with idealism and tech bros told us they were going to save the world? “Don’t be evil” was Google’s unofficial motto; its 2004 IPO prospectus declared that doing “good things for the world” was more important than “short term gains”. Mark Zuckerberg similarly wrote in Facebook’s 2012 IPO letter that the social network was “built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected”.
As was obvious to anyone paying attention, this was all performative bullshit. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about that period of time – which came to a definitive end in 2018, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. By and large, billionaires and CEOs still cared what the hoi polloi thought of them. They were self-aware enough to realize that, even with all their billions, there’s a lot more of us than there are of them.
Continue reading...Watchdog makes ruling on search summaries after publishers complain about drop in click-through traffic and revenue
Online publishers and news organisations are now able to block their content from appearing in Google’s AI summaries in UK search results, the British competition watchdog has announced.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the new requirement would “put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google”.
Continue reading...  | Hey guys! I’m looking to sale my GT S that I had since March this year. I never have time to ride as much as I would like so I only have 9 miles one it. It comes with the Full Send bundle and original box. I’m located in the Northern Virginia area for a local meetup or could ship it if that’s preferred. Asking $2500 plus shipping and comes with everything below. - Hyper charger [link] [comments] |
The economy was slowing even before the Middle East conflict and interest rate hikes started to bite, while the boom in datacentres was a rare bright spot
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The economy slowed sharply in early 2026 and Australians’ living standards are once again going backwards.
At the risk of upsetting the treasurer by “talking down the economy”, as he put it, there wasn’t all that much to love in the latest national accounts.
Continue reading...With many votes still to be counted in California and little certainty in most of Tuesday’s closest-watched primary elections, one early pattern is taking shape: Progressive candidates for Congress across the state are failing to top their more moderate Democratic opponents.
In the race for Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat in San Francisco, the YIMBY state Sen. Scott Wiener secured a comfortable victory with more than 40 percent of the vote, according to The Associated Press, which made the early call. Local politician Connie Chan earned the second spot, leaving Saikat Chakrabarti, a prominent figure in national progressive politics, off the general election ballot in November.
In Los Angeles, AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez easily won a spot on the November ballot, according to a call from the AP. Despite the election-day revelation of a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Gomez fended off a challenge from the progressive insurgent Angela Gonzales-Torres by a wide margin. Results are still coming in, but Gonzales-Torres appears likely to face off against Gomez again in the general election thanks to California’s “jungle primary” system, in which the top two candidates move on to a runoff.
Meanwhile in Sacramento, longtime establishment Democrat Rep. Doris Matsui is currently leading progressive City Councilmember Mai Vang, though that race remains too close to call.
In these three solidly blue districts, each race has been viewed as part of a wider battle for control between a Democratic establishment seen as faltering in the face of the second Trump administration and a progressive wing that has grown in influence in the decade since the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — and argues the establishment strategy gave rise to Trump in the first place.
Chakrabarti, Gonzales-Torres, and Vang all had the backing of Justice Democrats, a group that supports progressive challengers in primary elections and helped elect members of the Squad in Congress. Earlier in the evening, Justice Democrats notched a victory when Dr. Adam Hamawy, a former combat surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and faced a barrage of attacks that often peddled in Islamophobic tropes, comfortably beat a crowded field of Democrats in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.
Justice Democrats had hoped to elevate Chakrabarti, one of its co-founders, to Congress. After earning his fortune at the tech firm Stripe, the centimillionaire worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and became chief of staff to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Chakrabarti grew to become an influential activist in progressive politics, but he was often a divisive figure, known for riling Democrats online and antagonizing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who he hoped to succeed. Pelosi, who won her last reelection with 82 percent of the vote in her district, ultimately endorsed Chan, a San Francisco Board of Supervisors member. When The AP called the race for Chan, she held a lead of 13 percent over Chakrabarti.
Chakrabarti, Chan, and Wiener all jockeyed to be seen as the progressive in the race: All three campaigns call for Medicare for All, the overturning of Citizens United, and abolishing or defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet differing views on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and wealth taxes on billionaires, which Wiener and some of his richest tech-and-development-friendly backers oppose, became notable wedge issues.
While Wiener and Chan have come to embrace placing conditions on offensive weapons to Israel, Chakrabarti advocated for a total arms embargo on the country. Wiener’s previous support for pro-Israel bills in the state legislature and his earlier opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza drew intense scrutiny during the race, and anti-genocide and anti-Zionist protesters at times disrupted his events on the campaign trail.
The weekend before the primary election, the race was jolted with final-hour reporting from Drop Site News that revealed the pro-Israel lobby giant, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, had been funneling money into a super PAC supporting Chan. Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights, suggesting a degree of collusion between Chan and AIPAC.
Chan, in turn, rejected Chakrabarti’s claims as “absurd and laughable.” She restated her campaign pledge against accepting AIPAC donations and her advocacy for Palestinian rights.
In Los Angeles, Gonzales-Torres, a community organizer, also made her opposition to the pro-Israel lobby and Israel’s genocide in Gaza a major part of her platform against Gomez. Despite the incumbent’s earlier vows that he would try to rid his fundraising of corporate backers in favor of grassroots support, Gomez’s previous two reelection bids in the 34th Congressional District have been fueled by special interest groups, such as the cryptocurrency industry and AIPAC and DMFI.
AIPAC has continued to support Gomez in the current election cycle, pouring nearly $150,000 into his 2026 run, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Gomez has consistently voted to send military aid to Israel.
The race was rocked after CNN reported Tuesday that Gomez was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of sexual misconduct against Gomez. The news came months after the New York Post alleged Gomez, who is married, was spotted kissing the staffer of another member of Congress in 2023 at a party hosted by then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Swalwell resigned from Congress and ended a California gubernatorial campaign earlier this spring after reporters unearthed allegations of sexual assault from a former staffer, as well as accusations of sexual misconduct from other women, which he denies.
Gonzales-Torres had previously called into question Gomez’s close relationship to Swalwell and asked whether Gomez, who backed Swalwell’s campaign for governor, had knowledge of the incidents at the time. On Tuesday, she wrote on X that if Gomez “has nothing to hide, he should have no concern. But if there was any criminal behavior that he witnessed, participated in, or helped conceal, we will find out and we will help ensure accountability and justice.”
Gomez, in a statement to CNN, admitted to “personal mistakes outside my marriage that have caused real pain to my wife and family,” but insisted he did not break the law or House ethics rules.
Gomez has thrice fended off another progressive challenger, attorney David Kim, who in 2020 trailed by 6 percentage points in the November general election and came only 3 points from winning in the 2022 general election. Gonzales-Torres, who had previously volunteered for Kim’s campaign, believes her campaign can build on that success and defeat Gomez.
In California’s 7th Congressional District, Vang is facing off against a powerful Democratic family. Matsui has held her House seat since 2005, winning after the death of her husband, Bob Matsui, who had represented Sacramento in Congress since 1979.
Vang’s campaign criticized Matsui’s acceptance of corporate donations and painted Matsui as out-of-touch with a transforming Democratic voter base. Vang championed policies that have animated the left, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Green New Deal. At the time of publication, Vang is in a tight battle with a pro-Trump Republican candidate, Zachariah Wooden, a student at California State University, Sacramento.
Many primaries across the state, such as the Matsui–Vang contest, remain too close to call, with huge numbers of votes left to count and final positions far from settled. That includes the race for California governor, where moderate Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican commentator Steve Hilton are neck-and-neck, with billionaire Tom Steyer, around whom progressives had coalesced, trailing in third at the time of publication. In the LA mayor’s race, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass secured her spot in a November runoff, with reality TV personality Spencer Pratt leading Nithya Raman, a progressive councilmember.
Other progressive candidates led their races on Tuesday, including Jane Kim, who is running for the state’s insurance commissioner with the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders. In Los Angeles, city attorney candidate Marissa Roy, who drew support from the city’s progressive base, is ahead of the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who caught heat for defending LAPD’s brutal tactics against protesters and for deciding not to charge members of a Zionist mob that attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment.
This is a developing story and will continue to be updated.
The post Establishment Dems Stave Off the Left in Key California Congressional Primaries appeared first on The Intercept.
Prospects for a U.S.-Iran deal appear to be dimming as the war between Israel and Hezbollah grinds on despite Trump saying they agreed to stop fighting.
GRENOBLE, France, June 3, 2026 — Quobly, a French quantum computing company, today announced the closing of a €115 million Series A financing to accelerate the industrialization of its silicon-based quantum computers and bring its first commercial product to market by the end of 2026.
The round is led by Bpifrance, SEALSQ and STMicroelectronics, with participation from the European Innovation Council (EIC), Blast, ALIAD (Air Liquide Venture Capital) and existing investor Innovacom, bringing together leading industrial, sovereign and deeptech investors. Existing shareholders also include the CEA, CNRS, Quantonation and Supernova Invest. Long-time investor Bpifrance is participating through the Deep Tech 2030 fund, managed on behalf of the French government as part of the France 2030 initiative.
This financing will support continued R&D, industrialization efforts and international commercial expansion. Quobly, bringing semiconductor-grade manufacturing and industrialization to quantum computing, plans to deploy its first commercial quantum computer through the cloud by the end of 2026 under its Alloy product line.
From Technology Validation to Commercial Deployment at Scale
This Series A marks a key step in Quobly’s roadmap to industrial-scale quantum computing, transitioning from early validation to the production of its first commercial systems.
Alloy Pioneer, the first computer in Quobly’s Alloy product line, is designed for early adopters in high-performance computing and research environments. The system will be accessible through the cloud in 2026, before deployment within HPC infrastructures in 2027.
Quobly’s quantum computers are designed to integrate into existing HPC and data-center infrastructures, with a compatible footprint, power supply and utility requirements, enabling straightforward deployment. Alloy Pioneer is accessible through Alloy Forge, Quobly’s quantum application development environment, enabling users to develop and validate applications under realistic hardware constraints.
The company will in particular:
These efforts will be supported by the continued expansion of Quobly’s hardware, control electronics and software stack, in line with its system-level co-design approach.
This Series A follows Quobly’s €19 million seed phase (2023-2025), during which the company demonstrated the feasibility of developing silicon qubits within semiconductor manufacturing processes, and established a system-level architecture integrating device, control and software layers.
Scaling Quantum Computing Through Semiconductor Manufacturing
Quobly’s approach is based on the use of FD-SOI technology on 300 mm wafers, leveraging established semiconductor manufacturing processes to address key challenges in scalability, yield and reproducibility. The company develops silicon qubits designed for dense integration and compatibility with industrial fabrication standards.
As part of this strategy, Quobly leverages semiconductor-grade capabilities across the broader semiconductor ecosystem through strategic partnerships with industrial leaders including STMicroelectronics, Air Liquide, Soitec and Orano. These collaborations accelerate the transfer of Quobly’s quantum technologies into advanced manufacturing environments and support the industrial integration of process control, materials engineering, cryogenics and yield optimization from the earliest stages of deployment.
This industrial-first approach sets Quobly apart by prioritizing manufacturability and technology-system co-development.
“This financing marks a transition from technology validation to industrial execution,” said Maud Vinet, Quobly CEO and co-founder. “Over the past two years, we have demonstrated that silicon qubits can be developed within semiconductor manufacturing processes and integrated into a system architecture. With this Series A, we are accelerating the deployment of our first commercial systems and building a quantum computing platform designed to integrate into existing computing infrastructures. Our objective is to make quantum computing deployable, scalable and usable within real industrial environments.”
Advisors
Financial advisors to Quobly were Avolta and Rochefort & Associés. Legal advisors to Quobly were Goodwin and Kelten. Legal advisors to investors included Bignon Lebray, Jones Day and Rimon Law. Financial advisory support was provided by Forvis Mazars. Bank financing partners included BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Caisse d’Epargne Rhône-Alpes and Société Générale.
About Quobly
Quobly is a quantum computing company developing silicon-based quantum computers using proven semiconductor manufacturing processes. Founded in 2022 in Grenoble, France, the company is focused on making quantum computing scalable, manufacturable and deployable to grow the quantum computing market. The company has strategic partnerships within the semiconductor industry (STMicroelectronics, Air Liquide, Soitec and Orano) to accelerate the industrialization of its silicon quantum chips in advanced semiconductor manufacturing environments. With 100+ collaborators, Quobly is headquartered in Grenoble, France, with offices in Singapore and Canada.
Source: Quobly
The post Quobly Raises €115M Series A to Industrialize Silicon Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
Policy forum lays out ‘prolonged disruption’ scenario in which world’s GDP falls to 2.1% this year from 3.4% in 2025
If the Middle East conflict drags on into next year it would hit global growth hard, driving some economies into recession and causing energy shortages, according to forecasts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In its latest Economic Outlook, the Paris-based club of industrialised countries lays out a “prolonged disruption” scenario, in which there is no agreement between the US and Iran until 2027.
Continue reading...The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Science Foundation's $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 deep-sea instruments used to monitor ocean currents, marine ecosystems, carbon absorption, heat waves, fisheries, coastal flooding, and climate change. The NSF said it would send ships in June to begin the removal of the instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. The New York Times reports: The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it "the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems." When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028. Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water's surface down thousands of feet. The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money. To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists. Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Trump administration has unveiled proposed tariffs of 10% or more on dozens of countries accused of failing to crack down on forced labor, including some of the U.S.'s largest trading partners.
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Voters in Maine won’t head to the polls until next week, but the state’s primary election has been shaken up by recent news about Senate hopeful Graham Platner.
According to information his wife shared with his campaign last year, Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women during his marriage, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported, and which the Guardian has confirmed.
Graham Platner met on Tuesday with Democratic leaders in Washington DC as the embattled Maine Senate candidate contends with yet another revelation threatening his campaign, which is at the center of his party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.
Platner did not respond to questions from reporters and quickly entered a waiting car as he exited the meeting, which stretched for more than an hour and a half at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). A spokesperson for the DSCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Continue reading...Disgraced former congressman said to have put bet on whether he would be at Trump’s State of the Union speech
Federal authorities are investigating whether George Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman from New York, engaged in insider trading by betting on a prediction market on his own attendance to the State of the Union address, multiple news outlets reported on Tuesday.
Santos allegedly placed a bet on Kalshi, a popular online prediction market, over whether he would be in attendance at Trump’s State of the Union address in February, according to NPR, which first reported on the investigation citing anonymous sources.
Continue reading...Perplexity is shifting how some sensitive AI data is stored, balancing processing between local silicon and cloud servers.
With the constant risk of being recorded, many young people are afraid of showing enthusiasm – let alone doing something so potentially embarrassing as dancing in public. Is there a way to set themselves free?
In a video posted to TikTok, where Katie Whitney has 2.5 million followers, she says to camera, bluntly: “This video is for Cynthia Erivo. If you’re not Cynthia Erivo … you can keep on scrolling.” Her demeanour then shifts, her voice becomes softer; more the way a person might talk to their puppy: “Hi Cynthia. Hi baby. Hey baby. How are you?” It’s toe-curling – or, in modern parlance, cringe – to watch. “I feel traumatised,” says one commenter. Others post photos of a stunned-looking Erivo and imagine: “What if the Wicked star were to actually watch this video?” Cringe!
Now 25, but having started making this kind of content – “weird skits” – at 20, Whitney is part of what is known online as CringeTok, a subsection of the internet that deals in content designed to make your toes curl. It’s in many ways a reaction to a fear of being “cringe”, which is seeping into all parts of life – from social media to classrooms to the workplace.
Continue reading...It should have taken years, but Ash Koosha made a drama about Iran’s anti-government protests in weeks – and now it’s the first AI-made movie to screen at a major film festival. It could transform indie film-making, claims the director
Next week a breakthrough 75-minute drama about the brutal crackdown in Iran on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. “I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Dreams of Violets is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance in an alleyway. How on earth has Koosha managed to pull together a drama about the killings in less than six months?
The answer, it turns out, is by using artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI-generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearances, using people he has known in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he says. “Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.”
Continue reading...Why Putin can’t end the conflict.
How a remade Islamic Republic will reshape the Middle East.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 3.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed "Project Solara," is Microsoft's bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing -- using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software, and off-the-shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively. [...] The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its Build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud. GeekWire got a behind-the-scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform: - A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud. - A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees. Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high-tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health-care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit, log vitals, and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built-in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp, and made a suggestion: add some plants. The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way or isn't practical to use. [...] In the coming months, companies including AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, and Target are expected to begin pilots of devices based on the reference designs. The operating system is the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, an enterprise version of Android that Microsoft developed for devices including Teams meeting-room hardware. The company says it chose MDEP over Windows deliberately, to run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect: patch and over-the-air updates, device integrity, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Entra ID sign-in. While the project is still in the early stages, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged the team to show it at Build sooner than the company would normally show its work in public. "That underscores just how competitive and fast-moving the AI world is right now, but it also illustrates the pace that the new technologies are enabling," reports GeekWire. The report notes that the business model for the platform still needs to be worked out. The devices run on Microsoft's Azure cloud, but beyond that, "the economics are still taking shape." Qualcomm and MediaTek have been chosen as the first chip partners. "The badge runs on a new Qualcomm wearable chip; the desk hub runs on MediaTek IoT silicon," reports GeekWire. "Both are off-the-shelf, not custom, which is central to how Microsoft plans to keep devices cheap and fast to build."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hertl scores winner as Vegas steal Game 1 road win
Hurricanes squander early two-goal lead in Raleigh
Knights move three wins from second Stanley Cup
Tomas Hertl scored to break a third-period deadlock and give the Vegas Golden Knights a 5-4 victory over the Carolina Hurricanes in the opener of the Stanley Cup Final on Tuesday in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Shea Theodore scored once in a three-point performance for the Golden Knights in the comeback win. Brett Howden tallied once and added an assist, and Ivan Barbashev and William Karlsson added singles.
Continue reading...  | Howdy! I love my Pint dearly and I am sad to part with it, but since graduating college I've switched to a bicycle. It's in good condition, but has the cosmetic scuffs of a well loved board. The battery may not last quite as long as a new board but I haven't tested that. Bought new in 2021. Comes with the Pint, the included charger, a fast charger, the fender, as well as the original fender plate. Still have the original box and happy to ship but if you're in LA or Socal local pickup is also an option. Asking $700 plus shipping, or best offer. (Also so sorry if this kind of post isn't allowed in this sub) [link] [comments] |
The superseding indictment does not contain any new charges or name new defendants from the original version, which was returned in April.
The Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a House map that is more favorable to Republicans, despite a lower court finding that the plan intentionally discriminated against Black voters.
South Korea’s Kospi stock market has hit record highs thanks to AI, but experts urge caution over boom-bust cycles and a heavy reliance on two chipmakers
South Korea has leapfrogged India to become the world’s sixth largest share market, leaving equity markets in the UK, Germany and France trailing in its dust. But despite the runaway success, some are raising concerns that the Kospi index is too dependent on two freshly minted trillion-dollar chipmaking companies.
Chip company SK Hynix last week claimed a seat in Asia’s trillion-dollar company club, alongside South Korean compatriot Samsung Electronics and Taiwan’s TSMC. Explosive demand for chips used in AI has propelled the trio past the valuation threshold.
Continue reading...Bohannan has lost to the Republican incumbent twice, but narrowed the margin to 799 votes in the 2024 election.
Move comes after meeting in which Pelley said network chief Bari Weiss was ‘murdering’ news show
Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known and respected journalists in broadcast journalism, has been fired by CBS News after clashing with network brass over last week’s severe round of cuts at 60 Minutes, the show he has worked on since 2004, the Guardian confirmed.
While changes were long expected at 60 Minutes, CBS News management shocked staffers last week by firing the network’s executive producer, executive editor and two correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, without giving a specific reason for their terminations.
Continue reading...A former U.S. Army combat surgeon with backing from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, streamer Hasan Piker, and an anti-AIPAC super PAC won a New Jersey primary on Tuesday despite last-minute negative attacks.
Adam Hamawy beat a crowded field of Democrats in the state’s 12th Congressional District. The winner of the primary is expected to coast to victory over Republican Gregg Mele in the November general election.
His victory came despite a flurry of right-wing media reports that sought to tarnish the progressive candidate as an Islamic extremist because of his 1995 trial testimony for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks.
Hamawy said he was being targeted with outdated “tropes” as a Muslim in politics. His campaign, which was supercharged by an ad campaign from the independent super PAC American Priorities, demonstrated the growing influence of pro-Palestine donors in contested Democratic primaries.
Hamawy stood out among the 13 candidates in the race vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman because of his compelling backstory and the large ad spend on his behalf by American Priorities, the super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence in Democratic politics.
Working as a combat surgeon in Iraq in 2004, Hamawy helped save the life of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, which led to the loss of both her legs. In 2024, he also went to Gaza to provide medical aid to Palestinians wounded by Israeli forces and was temporarily trapped there after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing. When the crossing was reopened, Hamawy was among a small group who refused to leave on demands that more medical workers be let in.
Pointing to his experience as a physician, Hamawy staked out policy positions that included support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and opposing military aid to Israel. He drew endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement, in addition to Ocasio-Cortez.
In a joint statement, two progressive, pro-Palestine groups hailed Hamawy’s win. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project and Justice Democrats said they spent a combined $200,000 in support of his campaign.
“Voters were drawn to Dr. Hamawy’s candidacy because he knows firsthand the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza like few do — having worked to save the lives of Palestinian children under bombardment and unimaginable conditions,” the groups wrote. “His experience is necessary in Congress now more than ever, as too many of the people meant to represent us continue to look the other way while our tax dollars fund injustices here and abroad.”
Trailing Hamawy was East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, a centrist with the backing of his county party who ran as a pro-Israel candidate.
Hamawy competed for the progressive vote against Sue Altman, a longtime activist in New Jersey who served until recently as the state director for Democratic Sen. Andy Kim. Her endorsements included former Sen. Bill Bradley and the New Jersey Working Families Party, which she previously led from 2019 to 2023. She ran far behind Hamawy.
Hamawy’s win was a notable accomplishment for American Priorities, which only launched in February. The group’s first major pick, Nida Allam, fell just short of toppling incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina. It had better luck in Pennsylvania, where progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb won his district’s Democratic primary last month.
Hamawy’s campaign represented an even bigger test for American Priorities, since he was a first-time politician with a relatively low profile before launching his campaign. The group said at the end of April that it was planning to spend $2 million to boost Hamawy.
Hamawy was polling at only 5 percent of the electorate in a March 30–April 1 poll sponsored by his campaign. By the first week of May, however, the outside support helped power him to first place, with 19 percent support compared to Altman’s 12 percent, according to another poll sponsored by his campaign.
The wide-open nature of the primary and large number of undecided voters helped make it hard to gauge who had the edge. Further complicating matters was a surge of negative press focusing on the brief testimony Hamawy, then 26, gave at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, commonly known as the “The Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of planning terror attacks.
Hamawy said he had known Abdel-Rahman as a leader in the Egyptian community in New Jersey and condemned extremism of all stripes. He noted his own long service for the U.S. military as well as his experience as a first responder during the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now,” Hamawy told the New Jersey Monitor. “These are not serious arguments, and they’re getting old.”
This developing story has been updated.
The post Adam Hamawy, Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza, Poised to Become Pro-Palestine Rep. From New Jersey appeared first on The Intercept.
Context: haven’t used my Pint X in about a year, decided to take it out again today and it rode fine, just zipped around my neighborhood and hit some of the trails behind the houses and buildings
All of a sudden my board starts doing the buzz and the bar went red, and I got a notification from my onewheel app saying that “it needed more juice”, but when I actually checked the battery level it was still at 50%
I hope the battery hasn’t gone bad because they’re so expensive to replace, but I don’t know what else to do
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 3, No. 618.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 3 No. 822.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 3, No. 1,088.
From God of War: Laufey to Wolverine, Sony's biggest reveals pointed to a shift in priorities.
According to an official familiar with the investigation, new digital forensic evidence appears to undercut Brian Hooker's account of his wife's disappearance, although they did not specify how.
About a month after ejecting during the friendly-fire incident, the pilot was on a mission over Iran when his jet was hit by a surface-to-air missile, prompting a daring rescue operation.
A former professional MMA fighter from Chicago came to the rescue when an unruly passenger tried to open a Frontier Airlines door mid-flight on Sunday while the plane was headed to O'Hare International Airport.
The New Jersey congressman last voted on March 5.
Enables hyperscalers to scale with high-bandwidth, low-latency, power-efficient optical connectivity
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 2, 2026 — Ayar Labs today announced it has joined the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem, and making its products optically and electrically compatible with NVIDIA optical and SerDes technologies. This allows hyperscalers and system innovators to build optically-connected AI infrastructure around NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion platform and partner ecosystem.
As AI factories scale to larger GPU counts and increasingly heterogeneous architectures, data movement and power are turning into critical bottlenecks. System designers must rethink how compute elements are connected, how bandwidth scales over distance, and how power is allocated across the rack.
Ayar Labs’ CPO solution is designed to address scaling limits by bringing high-bandwidth, low-latency, power-efficient connectivity to NVLink Fusion architectures, helping customers expand design headroom as bandwidth requirements grow and electrical constraints tighten. By putting optics where it matters most, Ayar Labs’ CPO enables flexible system architectures and efficient AI scaling beyond the limits of copper.
“AI infrastructure is being co-designed from the ground up, and customers need more options to scale performance efficiently as bandwidth continues to rise,” said Mark Wade, CEO at Ayar Labs. “By joining the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem, we’re introducing co-packaged optics as a foundational building block for customers deploying heterogeneous compute in NVIDIA AI factories.”
“NVLink Fusion, combined with Ayar Labs’ CPO technology, gives customers more options to build heterogeneous AI factories,” said Ashish Karandikar, Vice President at NVIDIA. “By expanding the NVLink Fusion ecosystem with Ayar Labs’ optical connectivity, innovators can scale bandwidth and bring heterogeneous AI infrastructure to market faster.”
The collaboration is designed to help customers deploy heterogeneous compute, including custom silicon, within NVIDIA rack-scale platforms while preserving NVLink-based architecture investments. NVLink Fusion provides a path for integrating custom CPUs and XPUs into NVIDIA’s rack-scale architecture and ecosystem, enabling customers to move faster from system concept to deployment at scale.
Ayar Labs’ CPO solutions complement NVIDIA’s broader AI factory stack by pairing NVLink Fusion with NVIDIA’s end-to-end networking platform. Together, these technologies support next-generation AI factories as they scale within and across racks, where bandwidth density, latency, and power efficiency directly impact utilization and total cost of ownership.
Ayar Labs will work with customers and ecosystem partners to align CPO integration with NVLink Fusion deployments, including system architecture, validation requirements, and platform timelines.
Today’s announcement builds on Ayar Labs’ successful close of its $500M Series E funding, which included participation from NVIDIA.
More from HPCwire: Ayar Labs Closes $500M Series E, Accelerates Volume Production of Co-Packaged Optics
About Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is transforming AI infrastructure with the industry’s first proven co-packaged optics (CPO) solution manufactured in partnership with the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystem. By unlocking performance gains and reducing workload costs in power-constrained environments, Ayar Labs’ optical engines are key to enabling next-generation AI scale-up. Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs is funded by domestic and international venture capital firms, as well as strategic investors including AMD, Applied Ventures, MediaTek, NVIDIA, and VentureTech Alliance. For more information, visit www.ayarlabs.com.
Source: Ayar Labs
The post Ayar Labs Joins NVIDIA NVLink Fusion Ecosystem to Bring Co-Packaged Optics to AI Factories appeared first on HPCwire.
American military forces carried out strikes on Iranian targets after attempted Iranian drone and missile attacks, U.S. Central Command said Tuesday, in the latest clash.
I’ve had my one wheel Pint X for a few days now, and put around 15 miles on it now. I’m still getting comfortable riding, I still have simple stop on.
But I’ve been riding and I can’t seem to surpass 7MPH. Idk if I’m scared of nose diving or what it is, but I can’t pass 7 for the life of me.
Also, how soon do you think I should disable simple stop? It’s very odd using no simple stop but don’t want to create any bad habits.
Any tips or things I need to know while still a noob?
Genesis Mission started about six months ago as a United States-based effort to accelerate AI for science and engineering in the US. However, the effort has turned global in recent months as the country’s allies have signed onto the ambitious plan. The shift toward international cooperation and away from individual sovereignty was palpable at the TPC 26 meeting taking place this week in Baltimore.
The Department of Energy allocated more than $320 million to the Genesis Mission since it launched the effort in late November. Hundreds of researchers at dozens of national labs, universities, and other institutions have submitted applications to pursue research in manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, as well as energy-related topics like advanced nuclear, fusion, and grid modernization projects. Some of these Genesis Mission projects could also lead to time on one of the new DOE supercomputers that are expected to start coming online this month.
There is an undeniable American flavor to Genesis Mission and its plan to achieve “energy dominance” in the United States. But at the same time, the DOE is welcoming other countries to participate in the program, and some of them are jumping at the chance.
Satoshi Matsuoka speaking at TPC26
One of them is Satoshi Matsuoka, the Japanese computer scientist and the head of the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS). During a presentation June 1 at TPC26, Matsuoka said Japan needs to join the Genesis Mission if for no other reason than to get access to more computing power.
“We’re in serious shortage in terms of GPUs,” said Matsuoka, who calculated that the country would need about 30,000 GPUs, or six or seven additional exascale supercomputers, to provide suitable HPC for AI resources for about 3 million scientists on the island country of 123 million people.
“We have to go well beyond the fragmented sovereign AI efforts,” said the member of the HPCwire 35 Legends list. “We need to share the resources. We need to share the models. We need to share the software. We need to share the data.”
Many other countries around the world are pursuing AI sovereignty, showing their distrust of the American cloud and AI giants, many of which now have–or soon will have–market capitalizations in excess of $1 trillion. Matsuoka wants none of it.
“This idea again of a single country trying to do everything by itself is a very inefficient,” he continued. “So we have to sell a community like this [TPC], where we have to get together and to really come to the idea that sovereignty is not so much about a single country. Sovereignty is achieved by unifying cultures of multiple countries in order to achieve this so-called global commons.”
Matsuoka has a supporter in DOE Underscretary for Science Darío Gil, who is heading up the Genesis Mission. During a panel discussion on Monday, Gil applauded the notion that science can be done for science’s sake, and that humans’ innate curiosity is a worthwhile endeavor to support with the AI-for-science effort.
But Gil also took issue with the idea that taxpayers in the United States or Japan should be banking on scientists making serendipitous discoveries using the AI-for-science apparatus that improve their security, health, and well-being.
(Credit: DOE)
“I love the aspect of serendipity,” Gil said. “But $1 trillion a year is not just the story of serendipity. We have built an enormously complex and sophisticated R&D ecosystem in our countries, [including] Japan. But the story is the same in the United States. What possibilities do we have to outcompete innovation in China if it is just a numbers game? On average, we will end up being what, a third or a fourth as productive?”
The best path forward to achieve broad, population-improving results with AI-accelerated science and engineering is through making targeted investments, Gil said. In addition to aiming high and working hard to hit the target, Gil lauded international cooperation as a mechanism to achieving the big goals.
“Unless we have a shared vision as to where we’re going and what kind of scientific infrastructure we need to build, and how are we going to work with one another so that it’s interoperable, then it’s going to be very hard to execute,” Gil said. “How many times have we all witnessed partnership between country A and country B gets announced as an MOU, somebody sits behind a stage and you sign something and it’s like, great, scientists are going to get together and like, what happens?
“There’s a big difference between that and saying, we’re going to build infrastructure together. We’re going to interoperate, we’re going to do this together at scale, and we share a vision,” Gil said. “So I think if, in this moment, we’re not able to agree that AI is going to transform science, what is so obvious next item in the agenda that we’re all going to work together on? By no means am I saying that this should be the only national and international effort in which we should collaborate. But if we cannot agree on this one, what’s so easy on the other ones?”
The post Why International Cooperation Is Critical to Achieving Genesis Mission’s Goals appeared first on HPCwire.
Members of Jalisco New Generation cartel used fake retail store in San Diego as a front for trafficking drugs
Federal prosecutors have charged four suspects with trafficking more than one ton of cocaine for the Jalisco New Generation cartel using a fake retail store in San Diego as a front for a sophisticated tunnel that ran across the border to Tijuana, Mexico.
The defendants include two Mexican nationals and two Americans charged with conspiring to traffic drugs across the US-Mexico border. The suspects, who range in age from 18 to 32, all face sentences that could land them in prison for life. One of them, Gregorio Epifanio Hernandez Lopez, also faces the charge of “constructing, financing or using unauthorized tunnels”.
Continue reading..."We are not moving forward with the fund. Period," Blanche told House lawmakers.
Economists at the New York Federal Reserve say they've identified the main reason some recent college grads are having trouble landing a job.
Faye is having her own adventure without Kratos.
NHS bosses giving evidence to public accounts committee admit current position is unacceptable
GPs in England are so “overloaded” that they cannot help older people who are at risk of falling in what NHS bosses accept is an unacceptable failure of care, the House of Commons’ public accounts committee has said.
Pressure on GPs’ time has intensified as a result of the government’s decision to give patients online access to their services, according to a report by the influential cross-party group of MPs.
Continue reading...Bank of England says updated imagery will celebrate native wildlife while bolstering anti-counterfeit features
Puffins, dolphins and bumblebees are among the wildlife that could feature on new banknotes in the UK as the Bank of England announces its shortlist.
There has been controversy over the decision, with figures including Nigel Farage criticising the Bank for, he claimed, wanting to replace Winston Churchill with a beaver. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said it was “a silly thing to do”, and Reform UK’s Farage called it “absolutely crackers”. In the end, no beaver appeared on the shortlist. Mammal options include bottlenose dolphins and red foxes.
Continue reading...A new Leiden Declaration, endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and published on June 2, 2026, warns that AI could undermine mathematics by flooding the field with plausible but flawed proofs, weakening attribution, shifting incentives, and giving tech companies too much influence over research priorities. "Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work," said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. "The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space." Ars Technica reports: The Leiden Declaration, which has already drawn hundreds of signatories, warns that recent AI developments are threatening "characteristic values" of mathematical research, "often in ways that disproportionately affect students and early-career mathematicians, and hence the long term future of the discipline." First, it points out how AI models can "produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs." Such developments put reviewers under increasing pressure and are "jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof," the declaration warns. "Inaccurate AI-generated drafts are cheap to produce, and there is a risk of cluttering the literature with claimed results that are simply wrong," said Leslie Ann Goldberg, head of computer science at the University of Oxford, in a statement. "Once that happens, the errors are likely to propagate as new results are built on faulty foundations." Second, the declaration highlights how "models trained on published works frequently return outputs that do not properly cite the human works they synthesize," while also pointing out that many current AI models were trained on data obtained through "exploiting licenses and access arrangements" or "simply violating copyright protections." Third, the declaration describes how the use of AI "may become incentivized for its own sake, disrupting our mechanisms for hiring, funding and recognition" while leaving out researchers who lack access or are "unwilling to use technologies controlled by organizations whose values they do not share." Fourth, the declaration warns against mathematics research "communicated through informal channels such as press releases or blog posts, often without any research paper or other disclosure of information necessary for scientific evaluation." Such communication strategies can lead to "oversimplification" in media reporting that overemphasizes AI tools' significance at the expense of prior human contributions, and "misleadingly uses specific mathematical tasks as metrics for the general reasoning capacities of commercial products." Fifth, the declaration describes "increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research" as threatening the "autonomy of mathematics," especially as university budgets are under pressure and researchers may feel greater professional incentive to collaborate with technology companies on "asymmetric terms." This also raises the risk that mathematics research questions amenable to AI-driven techniques may be prioritized. What can mathematicians do about this? The Leiden Declaration urges them to treat AI as a tool, not a substitute for human responsibility. Individual mathematicians should disclose AI use, remain accountable for the correctness of their work, continue crediting human authors, and use AI tools only when they align with the declaration's values. It also warns that mathematics can be applied to "warfare, oppression, mass surveillance, and the undermining of democracy," so mathematicians should weigh the ethics of tech-industry partnerships carefully. Professional organizations are encouraged to develop AI-use guidelines for publication and review, protect researchers from having their work used as training data without consent, support peer-reviewed publishing, and "actively prepare to become involved if major mathematical results are claimed using unconventional means." For policymakers, the recommendations are blunt: "protect the rights of authors," "regulate the artificial intelligence industry," and "invest in public computational infrastructure." The declaration also urges people to "don't believe the hype," warning that tech companies have "a strong commercial incentive... to overstate the capabilities of their products."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Democratic candidate already cites PTSD for racist, sexist, homophobic online posts and has covered up Nazi tattoo
Graham Platner met on Tuesday with Democratic leaders in Washington DC as the embattled Maine Senate candidate contends with yet another revelation threatening his campaign, which is at the center of his party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.
Platner did not respond to questions from reporters and quickly entered a waiting car as he exited the meeting, which stretched for more than an hour and a half at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). A spokesperson for the DSCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Continue reading...The order, intended to review artificial intelligence models that could pose risks to the US, is strictly voluntary.
Alarm after Elias Irizarry is hired to position in office that manages highly classified military operations
The Pentagon has appointed a rioter convicted for his role in 6 January, 2021 insurrection to a sensitive national security role dealing with counterterrorism, overriding insiders’ concerns about his past record.
Elias Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in connection with the storming of the US Capitol, has been appointed to a position in the US Department of Defense’s special operations and low intensity conflict office which manages highly classified military operations, causing alarm among Pentagon officials.
Continue reading...Ocean Observatories Initiative, $368m network that has provided crucial climate data, latest victim of Trump cuts
The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.
In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability and marine biodiversity.
Continue reading...Patients with knee arthritis who took medications for at least three years at reduced risk of needing surgery
Taking weight-loss drugs for at least three years could prevent thousands of knee replacements a year, research suggests.
Globally, more than 500 million people have osteoarthritis. Knee arthritis is the most common form, affecting about 14 million people in the US and more than 5 million in the UK. Many will require knee surgery. In the UK more than 120,000 knee replacements are carried out every year.
Continue reading...Wolverine is going to be a lot of bloody fun.
 | Are there any other big tires for 6in hubs out there that will fit on the XL or does TFL have any plans? [link] [comments] |
@puzz360 Ws looking great! How are you finding the new ride style?
June 2, 2026 — Microsoft today unveiled Majorana 2, its newest topological quantum chip featuring a next-generation materials stack and qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than their predecessors. With this progress, the team now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half.
Majorana 2’s new features include a new materials stack enabling a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability over the prior generation of qubits, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute. Credit: Microsoft.
By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios.
For instance, the new chip’s qubits can maintain their quantum state 1,000 times longer than the first generation, enabling more reliable computation. While other common approaches measure a qubit’s “lifetime” in microseconds, Majorana 2 offers a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting as long as one minute. That improvement is roughly comparable to inventing a phone battery that instead of dying in a day could last for nearly three years on a single charge.
This exceptional reliability, fast speed (one microsecond operations) and small qubit size (1/100th of a millimeter) have put the team on a path to achieve a scalable quantum computer that is commercially valuable by 2029. Such a machine could tackle intractable problems in global health, food supply, sustainability, energy production and more, the company said.
“We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value,” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”
Now, others searching for scientific or engineering breakthroughs can leverage the same agentic AI expertise that Microsoft’s own quantum team is using in its Majorana program.
The company also announced today the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, its comprehensive platform for organizations to embrace Frontier R&D. This combines specialized AI agents for scientific research and development, a Discovery Engine that drives research and reasoning workflows, plus enterprise-level security, governance and transparency.
Microsoft also introduced in early preview a Microsoft Discovery app with core capabilities that individuals can download for free and run locally on their computers with a GitHub Copilot account, lowering the barrier to entry for advanced AI-driven research.
Microsoft Discovery allows researchers to deploy autonomous agent teams, guided by human expertise, that can reason over large amounts of knowledge, generate hypotheses, optimize experiments, validate theories and learn in a continuous loop. Built-in controls help ensure that the research remains aligned with priorities, security and compliance standards, and safety requirements.
“In the year since we launched, we’ve seen customers light up use cases across critical industries like life sciences, chemicals and materials, energy, manufacturing and consumer goods,” said Aseem Datar, corporate vice president, product innovation for Microsoft Discovery. “With companies like Syensqo developing next-generation fluids for semiconductor manufacturing, the opportunities for impact are vast.”
The quantum team’s own scientists and engineers have been using the agentic AI capabilities in Microsoft Discovery to manage workflows, automate measurements, optimize fabrication, pinpoint previously unnoticed flaws and propose new solutions.
“Agentic AI has permeated almost everything we do—it’s just become kind of a very natural part of our workflow,” Nayak said.
“The agents can really accelerate things as much or as little as you want. It can be as little as pulling information together and summarizing it, or it can go further down the road of synthesizing it more or generating an interesting hypothesis. I think that’s extremely powerful right now.”
Agentic AI Can Help Find New Materials
Majorana 1, introduced just last year, was revolutionary because it employed a topological superconductor, a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter that allows for more stable quantum computing. To improve on the original proof of concept, the team revisited the materials stack.
The original Majorana superconductor used aluminum, but Majorana 2 uses lead, which is commonly used to shield people and equipment from radiation in hospitals and industrial settings. In a quantum computer, a lead superconductor helps shield fragile qubits from cosmic disturbances that can make them unstable—but it took years to figure out how to overcome other tradeoffs. “That was actually a fairly large change, and it led to big, big improvements in device quality,” Nayak said.
While this line of materials research began long before the advent of agentic AI, the team used it to help manage the manufacturing of the new device, and Microsoft Discovery is being used more extensively for future Majorana materials work.
Critical parts of the Majorana quantum devices are designed atom by atom. To keep each atom in its correct spot, another material, an impurity, may be added to the crystalline structure. But adding too much or in the wrong way disturbs it, so it’s a difficult balance to strike, said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft.
“Finding the exact recipe, the right amount to put to get the desired energy structure, requires a lot of experimentation in the old world order. In the new world order, through simulations, you can see where the highly probable target is. And then with that knowledge, you ideally only have to experiment once,” he said.
Agentic AI Can Analyze Information at Scale
The quantum computing project has many moving parts—software, architecture, design, the materials stack, fabrication processes, measurements and so on. A change in one area has ramifications that may require compensating elsewhere. AI agents help the team keep track of such complex, interrelated connections, Nayak said.
The quantum project also has huge quantities of data—nearly two decades’ worth, in many different formats. Before AI, the data was stuck in silos. “As you run AI agents on this data, they’re able to essentially resynthesize and make correlations that we as humans cannot see because no single individual has that much vision across that much data,” Alam said.
In addition, the quantum team is spread across multiple countries, with very different specialties, such as physics, mechanical engineering and process engineering. It’s impossible for any one person to be expert in everything. It’s a common problem in interdisciplinary scientific research, which is why Microsoft’s quantum team created an AI agent for organizing and analyzing information and making it easier for others to find.
“The AI is able to synthesize knowledge from all these different disciplines,” Alam said, saving everyone the time and hassle of interviewing the specialists or of reading up on another subject. The agentic AI can “parallel process so much information in super short time to give you a recommendation,” he said. The AI only offers guidance; it doesn’t decide. “It’s always ‘scientist in the loop’.”
Agentic AI Can Speed Experiments
Creating a topological state requires setting hundreds of parameters. Then measurement, which is the key to performing quantum computations, can start. When done by a person, these processes each take weeks. In fact, measurement is so difficult and time consuming that the team had tried to automate it a few years ago using earlier forms of machine learning, but it wasn’t possible, Alam said.
Using agentic capabilities available in Microsoft Discovery, the team was able to create an AI agent specialized for this job, which cut the cycle time by orders of magnitude, he said.
AI’s pattern-recognition abilities helped with the difficult task of measuring what state the qubit is in and detecting whether there’s an even or odd number of billions of electrons on a semiconductor wire. AI agents run the process automatically and continuously, building a 3D map of the conditions that a single scientist would never be able to do in the same way, Alam said.
“Using agentic AI to automate the measurements was a game changer,” he said. “It goes through some math and starts saying, ‘Hey, where do I find the lowest point where everything sort of works?’ And it can do all these voltage adjustments in parallel, which a human cannot do. The way our minds work, we are more linear.”
Agentic AI Can Quiet the Noise
Data isn’t information—it needs to be filtered, analyzed and put into context to have meaning. For example, the team developed an AI agent that was able to combine physics, device and institutional knowledge to filter raw data from the quantum team’s fabrication process and sniff out an uncalibrated temperature sensor reading that was throwing things off.
Alam compares the process to the AI summary of a Teams call, which skips over friendly banter to list the three or four key points. “That’s exactly what the AI is doing on a grander scale when science is involved,” he said.
Microsoft Discovery was built as a platform that pairs AI with the scientific method, and many of the agentic AI tools that the quantum team is using are transferable and relevant to scientific exploration in other domains.
This fundamentally new type of Frontier R&D lets a scientist “be the anchor point and look at many, many different disciplines all at the same time with a very high fidelity and be able to draw correlations from that,” Alam said. “It is the essence of what every single high-performance, cutting-edge team wants to do.”
Source: Catherine Bolgar, Microsoft
The post Microsoft Unveils Majorana 2 Quantum Chip, Targets Commercial-Scale Quantum Computing by 2029 appeared first on HPCwire.
Blanche confirms fund set up to compensate president’s allies will not go ahead after fierce backlash and court setbacks
In six months, Adam Hamawy has gone from a political nobody to, deemed by most measures, the frontrunner in a crowded race, endorsed by prominent progressive and Democratic figures including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Tammy Duckworth.
His work history has driven him to call for Medicare for All, advocating for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel, and the abolition of ICE – and to say openly he cannot support the Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
CALIFORNIA: Vote today for Steve Hilton for Governor. He will work with me and the Federal Government, the money will flow because I have confidence in him (but not any of the others!), and we will MAKE CALIFORNIA GREAT AGAIN. Steve Hilton will NEVER let you down. VOTE NOW!
Continue reading...Meta has since fixed the exploit, but it's yet another example of AI doing it worse than humans.
Experts say deluge of last-minute absentee ballots and notoriously slow system could delay results in tightest races
California’s primary elections, including its fiercely fought gubernatorial contest, will be at the mercy of a notoriously slow vote-counting system after the polls close on Tuesday, and it could be days or even weeks before the outcomes of the tightest races become clear.
Voting experts expect the state’s 58 county elections offices to be deluged with last-minute absentee ballots, as they have been in the last few election cycles, and spend weeks undertaking a painstaking ballot-by-ballot verification process.
Continue reading...After Alyssa Burkett was murdered in broad daylight in Carrollton, Texas, Andrew Beard, the father of her child, became a suspect. Investigators would eventually discover a twisted murder plot they say was orchestrated by his fiancée, Holly Elkins.
The European Parliament is replacing Google with French search engine Qwant as the default on in-house computers, citing digital sovereignty and privacy concerns. Politico reports: As of Thursday June 4, "Qwant will replace Google as default search engine on European Parliament computers," officials told lawmakers in an email seen by POLITICO. The change is being made "in line with the Parliament's commitment to digital sovereignty and the protection of users' personal data." The search-engine switch comes as Brussels doubles down on its push for âoetech sovereignty.â The European Commission will on Wednesday unveil its long-awaited tech sovereignty package aimed at reducing dependence on foreign technology providers and boosting European alternatives. The email described Qwant as a "privacy-focused European search engine" designed to avoid tracking users or collecting personal data. Founded in 2013, Qwant markets itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google. Searches conducted through the address bar in Firefox and Edge browsers will automatically be routed through Qwant, although lawmakers will remain free to use competing search engines or change their default settings.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"It will be a very long, multi-month to multi-year process for things to fully normalize," GasBuddy's Patrick De Haan said.
Harry Potter fans can earn a badge for listening to the whole wizarding world book series on Audible.
Demonstration follows family’s plea for death not to be used to create division
Hundreds of people gathered outside a Southampton police station to protest against the murder of Henry Nowak and dozens clashed with police close to the home of his killer, Vickrum Digwa.
The far-right activist Tommy Robinson was among speakers who addressed the crowd outside Southampton central police station at the “Justice for Henry Nowak” protest.
Continue reading...The hit summer reality show returns to screens today.
Russia's FSB claims foreign intelligence services compromised smartphones belonging to senior Russian officials, allegedly turning them into surveillance devices capable of stealing data, recording conversations, and activating microphones or cameras. "This software is used to steal existing data, eavesdrop on ongoing conversations, and conduct covert acoustic and video monitoring of the environment near electronic devices, all aimed at obtaining sensitive information," the FSB said. The Register reports: The agency said it had opened a criminal investigation into illegal access to computer information and the distribution of malicious software. It did not identify the alleged intelligence service responsible, disclose how many officials were affected, name the malware involved, or provide any technical indicators that would allow independent verification of the claims. As things stand, the FSB has revealed the accusation but not the proof.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
However, Todd Blanche said the IRS will still be prohibited from auditing Donald Trump, his family and related entities
The federal government is abandoning an effort to create a $1.8bn secretive fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies, but is maintaining an agreement that prohibits the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from auditing Trump, his family and related entities, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday.
“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche said during a House appropriations committee hearing on Tuesday. “The reasons for the fund is something that President Trump talked about for a long time, which is the fact that there were a lot of people in this country who had their government weaponized against them. The reasons for the fund, I think, remain as important as they were before, but we are not moving forward with the fund.”
Continue reading...New York police are investigating a bizarre mystery involving groups of people emerging from the city’s manholes in recent weeks. Video recorded on 29 May shows seven people climb through a manhole at the intersection of Bedford Avenue and Lynch Street in Brooklyn.
“The NYPD, to make sure there was not a threat to the public, sent their highly trained Emergency Services Unit officers into the sewer system to make sure nothing nefarious had been left behind by the individuals – nothing was found,” the New York City police department told NBC in a statement on 1 June
Continue reading...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 2, 2026 — Alphabet Inc. has announced equity offerings totaling $80 billion, in expected aggregate amount, as part of its plan to fund investments in its world-class AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand.
Credit: Shutterstock
These offerings consist of:
Private Placement
In addition, Alphabet has reached an agreement to sell $10 billion of stock to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in a private placement, comprised of $5 billion in Class A Common Stock at a price of $351.81 per share and $5 billion in Class C Capital Stock at a price of $348.20 per share.
This investment by Berkshire Hathaway adds to the position it has built since Q3 2025.
Use of Proceeds
Alphabet intends to use the net proceeds from the concurrent underwritten public offerings and the concurrent private placement for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute. A portion of the net proceeds from the depositary share offerings, specifically, will be used to pay the cost of the related capped call transactions described below. Alphabet intends to use the net proceeds from the ATM program primarily to facilitate, for a period of time, an administrative change to how it meets tax obligations associated with vesting of employee equity awards. The company expects approximately $30 billion of ATM program proceeds will be used to meet these 2026 calendar year tax obligations. Any additional proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes.
Investing in a Balanced Way
AI is driving an expansionary moment for Alphabet. The company is experiencing strong demand for its AI solutions and services from enterprises and consumers, at levels that are exceeding the company’s available supply. By scaling its investments, the company seeks to expand its foundational infrastructure to support the significant growth opportunity ahead.
During its Q1 2026 earnings call, Alphabet announced that its 2026 capital expenditures are expected to be $180-$190 billion, and that it expects 2027 capital expenditures to significantly increase compared to 2026.
This equity offering is part of Alphabet’s plan to fund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet. Alphabet’s other sources of funding include:
Alphabet’s AI Momentum
Alphabet’s planned investments will support its business momentum, including:
Underwritten Offerings
The $30 billion aggregate underwritten offerings consist of a total of $15 billion of Class A Common Stock and Class C Capital Stock, split evenly between the two classes, and a total of $15 billion of two series of depositary shares, split evenly between the two series. Each series of depositary shares will represent interests in a newly issued series of mandatory convertible preferred stock, and each series of mandatory convertible preferred stock will be mandatorily convertible after approximately three years into a variable number of shares of Class A Common Stock or Class C Capital Stock, depending on the series, based on the applicable conversion rate.
Alphabet expects to grant to the underwriters of the Class A Common Stock and Class C Capital Stock offerings 30-day over-allotment options to purchase up to an aggregate total of $2.25 billion of additional shares, split evenly between Class A Common Stock and Class C Capital Stock. Alphabet also expects to grant the underwriters of its depositary share offerings over-allotment options to purchase up to an aggregate total of $2.25 billion of additional depositary shares, split evenly between the two series, within a 13-day period beginning on, and including, the date Alphabet first issues the depositary shares.
Each of the proposed underwritten offerings, including the size and terms, is subject to market conditions and other factors. The underwritten depositary share offerings are not conditioned upon the underwritten stock offering or any sales under the ATM program, and the underwritten stock offering is not conditioned upon the underwritten depositary share offerings or any sales under the ATM program.
ATM Program
In addition to these underwritten offerings, Alphabet has entered into an equity distribution agreement with Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC as managers in connection with a newly established ATM program, pursuant to which Alphabet may sell, from time to time through or to the manager, Class A Common Stock and Class C Capital Stock, up to a maximum aggregate offering amount of $40 billion. Such sales are not expected to commence until the third quarter of 2026, subject to market conditions and other factors. Sales under the ATM program are not conditioned upon the underwritten offerings.
The ATM program is intended primarily to facilitate, for a period of time, an administrative change in how Alphabet meets tax obligations associated with employee equity grants. This approach will mimic a “sell to cover” model: upon vesting of restricted stock units, shares will still be delivered to employees net of taxes, and the company will use corporate cash to settle taxes on behalf of employees. The company intends to issue stock for equivalent proceeds through its ATM program.
Terms of Depositary Shares and Underlying Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock
Each depositary share of each series that is offered in the public underwritten offering and the concurrent private placement will represent a 1/20th interest in a share of the corresponding series of preferred stock. The preferred stock is expected to have a liquidation preference of $1,000 per share. Holders of the depositary shares will be entitled to a proportional fractional interest in the rights and preferences of the preferred stock of the corresponding series, including conversion, dividend, liquidation and voting rights, subject to the provisions of the applicable deposit agreement.
Unless earlier converted, each share of preferred stock will automatically convert, for settlement on or about May 15, 2029, into a variable number of shares of Class A Common Stock or Class C Capital Stock, depending on the series, based on the applicable conversion rate, and each depositary share will automatically convert into a number of shares of Class A Common Stock or Class C Capital Stock, depending on the series, equal to a proportionate fractional interest in such shares. The dividend rate, conversion terms and other terms of each series of preferred stock will be determined at the time of pricing of the offerings. Currently, there is no public market for the depositary shares or the preferred stock of either series. Alphabet intends to apply to list each series of the depositary shares on The Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbols “GOOGM” and “GOOGN.”
Underwriters
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC are acting as joint book-running managers for the underwritten offerings.
Placement Agent
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC is acting as placement agent in relation to the private placement.
Capped Call Transactions
For more on Capped Call Transactions, see the full announcement here.
About Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet is a collection of companies, the largest of which is Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in September 1998 and the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Billions of people use its wide range of popular products and platforms each day, like Search, Ads, Chrome, Cloud, YouTube and Android.
Source: Alphabet Inc.
The post Alphabet Announces $80B Capital Raise, Including $10B Berkshire Hathaway Investment appeared first on HPCwire.
Even the best Wi-Fi routers struggle to travel through walls and floors. A mesh system uses multiple routers in tandem to create a seamless network throughout your entire home.
Prime minister echoes family’s plea that case should not be used to target communities
Politicians and community leaders have called for calm amid fears that the populist right is using the murder of Henry Nowak by a Sikh man to whip up racist resentment against minority ethnic Britons.
After Nigel Farage called for the public to respond with “pure, cold rage”, Keir Starmer condemned the Reform UK leader, saying Nowak’s family had explicitly asked that the case not be used to target particular communities.
Continue reading...Are there any options for battery replacement that don’t cost $500
Prosecutors have accused Cole Allen of attempting to assassinate the president when he allegedly attacked the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 25.
Russian missile, drone strikes kill at least 22 people across Ukraine, authorities say, after President Zelenskyy warned Moscow was planning a "massive new strike."
Voters in Maine expressed dismay at the latest revelations to engulf the campaign of Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner but few said the news would change their vote.
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires," reports the Consumer Rights Wiki. "After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would 'continue to function.' The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined 'reduced functionality mode,' in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the 'continue to function' clause was removed." Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 3, No. 1,810.
Why Should Delaware Care?
For decades, elected officials have tried to build a medical school in Delaware, with often little success. But a recent influx of federal cash has paved the way for the state to open its own medical training program as it faces healthcare provider shortages. With that medical school on the way, the whole state’s healthcare ecosystem is poised to get a piece of the pie, with one major exclusion.
Delaware officials announced Tuesday that the state’s first medical school, funded by hundreds of millions of federal dollars meant to bolster rural healthcare, will be run by Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University.
Jefferson beat out three other bidders – the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), Puerto Rico-based Ponce Health Sciences University and consulting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers – to win the medical school contract.
Jefferson’s plans include collaborating with almost all of Delaware’s higher education and healthcare institutions to bring a medical school to fruition — with one glaring exclusion: ChristianaCare.
The state’s largest healthcare system had initially attached itself to PCOM’s failed bid to run the Delaware medical school. It remains unclear, however, if the hospital system – which has an existing partnership with Jefferson – will join in on the new venture at a later date.
Gov. Matt Meyer said during a press conference the medical school will “initially” be located at the University of Delaware’s main campus in Newark, and students in the first cohort who commit to practicing in rural Delaware will receive a free medical education.
Dr. Said Ibrahim, dean of Jefferson’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College, said the college will now seek out accreditation for the Delaware campus through the Liaison Committee on Medical Education program, which vets programs leading to medical degrees. He added the new medical school would place rural health at the core of its curriculum.
“More importantly, it will create a stronger, more durable pipeline of physicians who are trained in Delaware, who are connected to Delaware, and committed to serving Delaware’s communities,” Ibrahim said.
Officials aims to open applications for the first cohort of students in early 2027. Accepted students would then begin classes in the summer of 2028.
Tuesday’s announcement marks a historic moment for Delaware, as the state’s first medical school is a project that has eluded leaders for decades.
As part of Jefferson’s announcement, officials said the new medical school would work with a dozen Delaware education and healthcare institutions like the University of Delaware, Delaware State University, Bayhealth and Beebe Healthcare, among others.
Susan Aldridge, the president of Thomas Jefferson University, said this “consortium” of higher education groups and healthcare providers would work with Jefferson to provide its medical education and place students in clinical rotations.
Notably sidelined in that list is ChristianaCare, which already has an agreement with Jefferson where third- and fourth-year students work for the healthcare giant.
When asked about ChristianaCare’s absence from the new consortium, she said the hospital is more than welcome to join. She did not answer whether an invitation was extended or if the hospital declined to be a part of the group.
“We have an inclusive approach to the medical school and to the consortium that we have established here, so if Christiana chooses to join the consortium, they’ll be more than welcome,” Aldridge said.
Christen Linke Young, secretary for the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, said ChristianaCare was attached to PCOM’s bid.
Since the state selected Jefferson, there was “no universe” where it would have been involved in Tuesday’s announcement, she added. Still, Young said the door is wide open for the hospital to be a part of the consortium.
“I think we have no reason to think that they won’t be a part of the process,” Young said.
While Jefferson and state officials signaled their willingness to have ChristianaCare as part of the program, the hospital struck a more defiant tone in a statement to Spotlight Delaware on Tuesday afternoon.
In a joint response from PCOM and ChristianaCare, the two said while they respect the state’s decision, they are disappointed not to be “part of the solution to create Delaware’s medical school.”
The two also said the success of the medical school is not just tied to the higher education institution, but also a “true and committed partnership with its clinical partners.”
“The path forward raises genuine questions about whether the school’s goals can be fully realized without ChristianaCare’s meaningful participation in its clinical training mission,” the statement said.
The state announced in November it would fund 15 programs with money from the Rural Health Transformation Program. The federal program was created to court Republican senators hesitant to support more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid, which could disproportionately impact rural communities and their healthcare facilities.
In February, Meyer’s office released an initial batch of requests for potential vendors to carry out programs that will be funded by the federal grant aimed at improving rural health across the country. Some of those bid requests included funding the new medical school, creating a “Food is Medicine” program, as well as operating rural health hubs in Sussex and Kent counties.
It came weeks after the state received its first award from the federal government totaling more than $157 million. The full RHTP award amount for the state remains unclear, but Delaware will receive at least $500 million from the multi-year program.
In plans submitted to the federal government, Delaware budgeted more than $100 million to run its medical school for five years. But Neil Hockstein, chair of the Delaware Health Care Commission, said the signed contract allows Jefferson to run the school for $78 million.
Asked how the state is required to spend the remaining funds, he said Delaware is allowed to reallocate those funds to any of the other 14 programs.
Hockstein added the state intends to spread those leftover funds across multiple different programs instead of reallocating them to just one initiative.
Additionally, Hockstein said when the federal money runs out for the medical school, it would be “self-sustaining without an influx of state dollars.” Still, he said he hopes the state’s philanthropic ventures would help to support the medical school’s future.
“Anything we can do to partner with our philanthropic organizations to make this one of the most cost-effective medical educations, so it doesn’t burden students and families, would be an amazing opportunity to ensure that we attract the best talent,” he said.
When Gov. Matt Meyer outlined a $1 billion proposal last November to expand rural healthcare access, building a medical school in the First State was a pillar of his plan.
He said the state would seek out competitive bids from universities to ultimately operate Delaware’s first medical school. But a signed agreement from October indicated Delaware was already in talks with Thomas Jefferson University, home to one of Philadelphia’s premier medical schools.
University and Delaware leaders, including Meyer, signed the non-binding agreement two weeks prior to the governor’s announcement that the state hoped to build a medical school.
The agreement, called a memorandum of understanding, was not publicly available prior to the state’s announcement.
In the October agreement, Jefferson said it hopes the partnership will improve access and quality of healthcare in Kent and Sussex counties. The agreement also says the university hopes to build a branch campus of its Sidney Kimmel Medical College somewhere in the state.
“The goal of this collaboration is to establish a phased approach leading to the creation of a four-year medical school in Delaware,” the agreement said.
The agreement, dated Oct. 29, 2025, said Delaware will “provide all necessary and appropriate financial resources for the development, implementation, and sustainability of the branch campus.”
Additionally, the agreement says Delaware will lead development and planning of the school in tandem with other universities and hospital systems.
Jefferson already has a sizable footprint in Delaware’s medical education landscape with clinical and educational relationships with ChristianaCare, Beebe Healthcare and Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington through the Delaware Institute of Medical Education and Research, a program that has connected Delaware medical students with Jefferson and PCOM to receive educations largely in Philadelphia for decades.
At the press conference on Tuesday, Meyer said as the state put together its application for the rural health funds, it had to show the federal government the medical school was more than just an idea. So, it sought out a university to sign onto a non-binding agreement, something he said had “had absolutely no bearing” on the competitive bidding process.
David Lenihan, CEO of Tiber Health, the parent company for Puerto Rican-based Ponce Health Sciences University, said he was disappointed to have not been selected but that he hopes there’s a part for the university to play in the future.
“While we would have liked to win, we’re happy that someone’s going to carry the ball forward, and Thomas Jefferson is obviously a great university,” he said.
The post Thomas Jefferson University picked to run Delaware’s first medical school appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
MALTA, N.Y., June 2, 2026 — GlobalFoundries (GF) today announced the completion of its previously-announced acquisition of Synopsys’ ARC Processor IP Solutions business. Combined with MIPS, by GF, the acquisition establishes GF as a technology partner offering customers a software-to-silicon capability purpose built for Physical AI. Synopsys retains and continues to expand its broad portfolio of interface and foundation IP, while GF assumes ownership and stewardship of the ARC processor IP business. MIPS combined with ARC brings together RISC-V processor IP, software tools, custom design and advanced manufacturing into a single offering, while also expanding GF’s engineering depth with world-class processor and AI talent to accelerate innovation.
“Physical AI is driving tighter integration of compute, software and process technology and customers need a partner who can support them across all three together,” said Sameer Wasson, CEO of MIPS, by GF. “With MIPS and ARC united, GF delivers the software, IP and custom silicon capabilities our customers need to build differentiated, application-specific solutions across automotive, industrial robotics and embedded systems, enabling us to operate as a holistic technology partner and engage throughout the design cycle.”
Agentic AI is rapidly extending beyond the data center into the physical world, driving new physical AI and autonomous platforms across automotive radar and advanced driver-assistance systems to industrial robotics, smart factories and the next generation of IoT devices. These systems must now sense, think, act and communicate in real time under tight power and latency constraints, making differentiated silicon spanning compute, AI acceleration, sensing and connectivity, critical to performance and adoption.
“As automotive and industrial systems become increasingly real-time and AI-driven, we need a technology partner that can bring together standards-based IP and optimized silicon design at scale, with the supply resilience our industry now requires,” said Thomas Schneid, VP of Automotive Software and Ecosystem, Infineon. “GlobalFoundries’ combination of MIPS and ARC processor IP with its manufacturing scale provides companies strong end-to-end foundation to build differentiated, power-efficient solutions for next-generation intelligent systems.”
With the transaction complete, the ARC processor IP business becomes part of GF’s expanding Physical AI portfolio within MIPS. Together, MIPS and ARC form a world-class RISC-V processor IP suite spanning high-performance, mid-range and ultra-low-power compute and AI cores, backed by more than 150 patents and a global ecosystem of over 300 IP customers. The acquired portfolio also includes the application-specific instruction set (ASIP) processor tools, ASIP Designer and ASIP Programmer, empowering customers to design and program custom processors tailored to their specific workloads. Paired with GF’s design enablement, custom silicon capabilities, advanced software tools and global manufacturing footprint, customers gain a single partner from architecture to silicon, enabling early engagement, differentiated product development and faster time-to-market.
GF is working closely with Synopsys to ensure a smooth transition for employees, customers and partners. For more information about MIPS ARC processor solutions, visit mips.com/arc.
About GF
GlobalFoundries (GF) is a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, enabling AI at scale from the cloud to the physical world. Through deep partnerships with customers, GF delivers differentiated, power-efficient and high-performance solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, data center, smart mobile devices, internet of things and other high-growth markets. With global manufacturing operations across the U.S., Europe and Asia, GF is a trusted and holistic technology partner for customers around the world. GF’s talented, global team remains focused every day on security, longevity and sustainability. For more information, visit gf.com.
Source: GlobalFoundries
The post GlobalFoundries Completes Acquisition of Synopsys’ Processor IP Solutions Business appeared first on HPCwire.
A flesh-eating New World screwworm was recently detected in Mexico just 25 miles from the United States border, according to the USDA.
Tom Kean has been out with health issue since March. Democrats are sharpening their knives for general election
On the day Donald Trump endorsed him as a tireless advocate for New Jersey’s seventh district, the representative Tom Kean Jr was, as he has been since early March, nowhere to be found.
Kean, a New Jersey Republican, was last seen when he cast a House floor vote on 5 March, and he is running unopposed in Tuesday’s Republican primary. The Democratic race in his district, meanwhile, has attracted multiple candidates and ample fundraising.
Continue reading...Travel experts say to be prepared for potential disruptions as countries implement the new Entry/Exit System now in place across the EU and other countries.
Damage to Blue Origin's lone launch pad in the wake of last week's spectacular explosion was not as severe as initially feared, the company said.
Find relief from back pain and muscle tension with picks our contributors love, like slip-on shoes and thick cushions
Seven essential gadgets to live with when you have back pain, from grabbers to lap desks
Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things
In another world, pressing play on a “heal overnight manifestation” video or taking a nice hot bath would be enough to relieve our tech necks and tense muscles. Instead, we usually need real, everyday support.
At the Filter, we’ve tested a lot of gadgets to soothe our own achy bodies: eight seat cushions, 18 massage guns and countless products for sleep aid. Below we’ve selected six practical items from our coverage that may help ease your aches and pains.
Continue reading...In the first of a new series of dispatches, fans in US, Mexico and Canada tell us that they want visitors to have a good time but are angry about ticket prices, Fifa’s priorities and a lack of long-term thinking from politicians
The 2026 World Cup features 104 matches in 16 cities across Canada, Mexico and the USA, from Vancouver to Mexico City and San Francisco to Boston. Before, throughout and after the tournament we’ll be hearing from fans in those cities about their experiences – some shared and some different – in our “My World Cup” series. Here some of our correspondents share their first thoughts.
Continue reading...Microsoft has unveiled Scout, an experimental always-on AI "autopilot" agent for Microsoft 365 that can operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, calendars, contacts, browsers, and external apps via MCP. "Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time," said Omar Shahine, a Microsoft veteran who recently announced he is leading a new team to bring OpenClaw-based personal assistants to Microsoft 365 apps. Computerworld reports: Shahine said Scout can reduce mundane tasks that office workers face, such as coordinating and scheduling meeting times with colleagues, or blocking times in a user's calendar based on upcoming work commitments. "It can also spot risks, like stalled decisions, so you can address them before they become blockers," he said. It's available as an "experimental release" to customers of the company's Frontier program, Microsoft said, and will require Intune policy configuration and "opt-in attestation." [...] It's not clear whether Scout will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions or charged separately. Microsoft did not immediately provide additional details about pricing.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There are multiple ways to earn a big return on your $40,000 now (and one specific one that savers should avoid).
US claims world’s 10th-biggest economy engages in ‘unreasonable’ trade practices that ‘restrict US commerce’
The Trump administration proposed 25% tariffs on imports from Brazil, charging that the world’s 10th-biggest economy engages in trade practices that are “unreasonable’’ and that “burden or restrict US commerce”.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he received the decision “with indignation”. The Brazil president also blamed the decision by the US administration on his rival in October’s elections, Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator who visited Washington last week. The senator is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, once nicknamed “the Trump of the Tropics” by his allies.
Continue reading...Need a private student loan? These lenders offer smart perks, flexible terms and standout borrower benefits.
Bill Pulte, who does not have any national intelligence experience, is nicknamed ‘Little Trump’ among some
Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence has set off alarm bells in Washington, as a staunch Trump loyalist with little government experience who has shown an eagerness to retaliate against the president’s political rivals will now sit atop the US intelligence apparatus.
Pulte, whose grandfather started PulteGroup, a major residential homebuilder, had no government experience before Trump appointed him to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), an under-the-radar regulator that oversees the government lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Shortly after arriving at the agency, he began to gut it, firing sizable chunks of the boards of both and appointing himself as chair. Pulte had no government experience before being appointed to the role and does not have national intelligence experience.
Continue reading...Politicians’ statements reflect difficulty facing pro-Israel Democrats as voter support for country falls
Several prominent New York Democrats who participated in the city’s annual Israel Day parade on Sunday have condemned the participation of Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right Israeli finance minister and a leading figure in the Israeli settler movement, in the event.
Smotrich was among several Israeli lawmakers and cabinet officials who marched in the parade on Sunday. His appearance marked his first trip to the US in more than a year, and came less than month after he said the international criminal court (ICC) was seeking an arrest warrant against him.
Continue reading...DENVER, June 2, 2026 — QStar Technologies today announced integration between QStar Network Migrator and the BeeGFS parallel file system, enabling organizations to reduce primary storage costs through intelligent policy-based archiving for HPC, AI, analytics and research environments.
BeeGFS is a high-performance parallel file system widely used in HPC, AI, analytics and large-scale research applications that require fast, scalable access to shared data. QStar Network Migrator is an enterprise-class hierarchical storage management (HSM) solution that automates the migration of infrequently accessed files using policy-based data management to lower-cost archive storage, including tape, cloud and object storage platforms.
The integration uses the BeeGFS Data Management API (DMAPI) to provide QStar Network Migrator with direct access to file metadata without requiring traditional file system scans, significantly reducing scan times and minimizing performance impact on primary storage systems.
Organizations can define migration policies using metadata attributes such as last access time, file ownership, group membership, size or file type. Files may be copied or migrated transparently while maintaining user access through lightweight links or stubs to one or more NFS archive destinations.
These archive destinations are commonly managed by QStar Archive Manager, which provides NFS-based archive gateways with intelligent caching and support for tape libraries, cloud platforms and object storage systems. Replication options allow organizations to protect archived data across multiple tape libraries or combinations of tape, cloud and object storage for enhanced resilience and long-term retention.
As AI, analytics and HPC environments continue to generate unprecedented volumes of data, organizations are increasingly seeking scalable solutions that balance high-performance storage with cost-efficient long-term retention.
“BeeGFS delivers exceptional performance for demanding HPC and AI workloads, and QStar extends that value with intelligent lifecycle management for inactive data,” said Riccardo Finotti, CEO of QStar Technologies. “Together, we help organizations optimize storage infrastructure, reduce costs and implement scalable long-term archive strategies.”
“Modern HPC and AI infrastructures require storage solutions that can scale efficiently while supporting diverse data management strategies,” said Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ. “The integration with QStar gives BeeGFS customers greater flexibility to manage long-term data growth while maintaining the performance and scalability required for active workloads.”
QStar Technologies will feature its intelligent archiving software at ISC2026 in Booth B20, June 23 – 25, in Hamburg, Germany. The BeeGFS parallel file system will be featured at the Fraunhofer ITWM Booth L40.
About QStar Technologies
QStar is the leading global provider of enterprise-class archive and data management software solutions. Our software virtualizes any archive technology behind a file system or S3-compatible interface, making the entire archive appear as one or more NAS disks or cloud buckets. Archived data is easily accessible and secure for years to come.
About BeeGFS
BeeGFS is one of the leading parallel cluster file systems, developed with a strong focus on performance and designed for very easy installation and management. If I/O-intensive workloads are your problem, BeeGFS is the solution. For more information, visit www.beegfs.io.
Source: QStar
The post QStar Integrates with BeeGFS to Reduce Storage Costs Through Intelligent Archiving appeared first on HPCwire.
Anthony Odiong faced up to life in prison for exploiting his spiritual authority as a clergyman for sex with his congregants
A Roman Catholic priest who was convicted recently of criminal clergy sexual assault in Texas has been sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Anthony Odiong, 57, received the punishment from a jury at a state courthouse in Waco on Tuesday after some witnesses described his sexually inappropriate behavior going back more than a decade. Character witnesses on behalf of Odiong, meanwhile, advocated for him to get probation, saying he could follow such an arrangement’s rules – such as living near Waco and not committing additional crimes – despite feloniously breaking his priestly vows of chastity.
Continue reading...Google's Pixel Watch 5, expected to be released later this year, was reportedly lost at sea before it was returned to the owner.
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Chip to Rackscale AI Solutions Delivered to Customers with the Help of Strategic Industry Partners
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 2, 2026 — Today at Computex 2026, Intel unveiled new innovations that address customers’ chip-to-systems-level AI needs with solutions tailored to address their specific industry challenges, including:
New rackscale AI infrastructure: Intel announced rackscale AI infrastructure for customers interested in scaling their inference and agentic workloads based on Intel Xeon processors and SambaNova SN-50 Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs).“For more than five decades, Intel, its ecosystem partners, and Taiwan have brought the world the foundational technologies for the PC, Internet, and now AI eras,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. “Today, with the rise of inference, agentic, and physical AI, Intel is poised to bring the world new innovations from the chip to systems level that promise to transform industry and society for the better. We are proud to join all our partners in building great products that will delight customers and bring the power of AI to more people as we create a brighter future together.”
Rackscale AI Infrastructure for Inference and Agentic Workloads
As the training of AI models has matured, and more AI applications have moved into production, the industry has witnessed an exponential rise in the demand for cost-effective and power-efficient AI inference. With the emergence of agentic AI, the growing demand for AI inference is changing the balance of power in the data center, returning the CPU to a position of prominence.
According to Creative Strategies CEO and principal analyst Ben Bajarin, while “the training-era world looked closer to a one-CPU-per-four-GPU relation in AI deployments, agentic inference changes that relationship to roughly a one-CPU-to-one-GPU (or less) ratio.”
Seeking to capitalize on this trend at a systems level, Intel, SambaNova, and Foxconn today announced their intent to build rackscale AI infrastructure for data center, hyperscale, and intelligence center deployments—built on Intel Xeon processors.
The companies are demonstrating production-ready racks that combine Intel Xeon processors with SambaNova SN-50 RDUs, which together are designed to deliver high performance AI inference with improved cost and power efficiency. As part of the collaboration, Foxconn will provide system integration capabilities for the new rackscale AI infrastructure. Foxconn also plans to manufacture a CPU-dense variant of the rackscale infrastructure for workloads that do not require additional acceleration, including cost-optimized inference, data processing, and hybrid AI.
Agentic Cloud Offering for Fully Disaggregated Inference
Vector Core Compute, a new purpose-built enterprise inference cloud formed by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, unveiled fully disaggregated inference. Running onstage at Computex, Intel, SambaNova, Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital showcased the first real-world demonstration of a disaggregated inference system, using Intel Xeon 6 processors for orchestration and execution, SambaNova SN40 RDUs for decode, and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs for prefill—operating from a Vector Core Compute data center in Los Angeles, California.
Together.ai is the first commercial customer running workloads on Vector Core Compute’s agentic cloud, which delivered the fastest enterprise inference on the MiniMax 2.5 model of any architecture to date. Vista Equity Partners has secured early access to the company’s high-quality, low-cost inference solutions for its 90+ portfolio companies which serve more than 2.5 million enterprise customers and 750 million users worldwide.
Industry Specific Solutions Based on Intel Processors and Purpose-built Silicon
It is often stated that AI is transforming every industry. It is also true that the computing needs of specific industries vary widely due to differences in their business environments, processes, workflows, and customers.
Today, Intel announced several strategic partnerships designed to co-develop industry-specific vertical solutions based on Intel processors and purpose-built silicon, including:
Intel Xeon 6+ Processors for Next Generation Data Centers
Extending this week’s announcements from data centers and racks down to chip-level innovations, Intel announced the availability of Intel Xeon 6+ processors, which provide greater performance density, power efficiency, and operational scale for cloud-native, agentic AI, and network-intensive workloads.
Built on Intel 18A—its first use in a data center CPU—Xeon 6+ is engineered for sustained performance under real-world power constraints—addressing the orchestration, concurrency, and data movement demands of emerging agentic AI.
Xeon 6+ can be configured for AI rackscale infrastructure purpose-built for hosting agents at maximum density. For example, a single liquid-cooled rack can deliver 36,864 cores using 32U of compute space, which provides the highest agent density available (at approximately 100-kilowatt rack power compute).
Optimized for environments where watts per rack, throughput per core, and latency predictability are critical, Xeon 6+ emphasizes scale-out performance—making room for new AI workloads without requiring disruptive data center redesign.
Series 3 Scale and Momentum
Core Ultra Series 3, built on Intel 18A, continues to experience strong customer uptake for a platform that now powers more than 325 consumer and commercial PC designs. Leveraging the same advanced IP as Ultra, the recently launched Core processors are enabling a new class of thin, sleek, powerful, and efficient PCs at affordable price points. Series 3 also pushes into the growing market of handheld gaming with the new Intel Arc G-series processors, which will be available starting this month. The expansion of the Series 3 processor family is being accelerated by increased 18A yields and strong customer and partner engagement.
Beyond the PC, Intel has powered edge devices in manufacturing, robotics, retail, and smart cities for decades. For the first time, the latest Series 3 IP scaling in the PC ecosystem will deploy in parallel to thousands of edge customers globally. Over 130 customers have already chosen Series 3 to power edge AI and robotics designs.
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) designs and manufactures advanced semiconductors that connect and power the modern world. Every day, our engineers create new technologies that enhance and shape the future of computing to enable new possibilities for every customer we serve. Learn more at intel.com.
Source: Intel
The post Intel Announces New AI Innovations at Computex appeared first on HPCwire.
Prime minister under pressure to show his campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have brought results as he faces elections with his political survival at risk
If there is to be a peace deal between the United States and Iran, it will have to go through a familiar obstacle: Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s military operations in Lebanon have become a sticking point in the talks for a potential opening of the strait of Hormuz – once again testing the volatile alliance between Donald Trump and Netanyahu.
This time, the Israeli prime minister is under exceptional pressure to show that his campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have brought results as he faces elections with his political survival at risk.
Continue reading...Trump, who was swiftly evacuated from April gala after incident, confirmed his attendance at summer event
The White House correspondents’ dinner will be rescheduled for 24 July after the Washington event was abruptly cancelled this spring following a shooting.
Donald Trump, who was swiftly evacuated from the gala after the incident on 25 April, has pledged to attend a rescheduled event.
Continue reading...People from town of potential site for US citizens exposed to Ebola say it puts them at risk in country with no known cases
People from a town in central Kenya where the US wants to set up an Ebola quarantine facility for its citizens have strongly criticised the plan, saying they fear it will expose them to the virus and that it is indicative of double standards on the part of the US.
“Everybody should be quarantined in their home country. We shouldn’t allow foreigners to bring us diseases,” said Charles Mathenge, a taxi driver who lives near Laikipia Air Base, the proposed site in Nanyuki, 120 miles from the capital, Nairobi. “Kenya is our country, and we should be careful with it.”
Continue reading...Warplanes carry out dozens of airstrikes and Israeli army issues evacuation warning for city of Nabatiyeh
Israeli warplanes have launched dozens of strikes across southern Lebanon despite a new agreement supposedly brokered by Donald Trump aiming to bolster the tattered ceasefire in Lebanon.
The US president said on Monday that he had stopped an imminent Israeli strike on Beirut and that he had spoken to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and representatives of Hezbollah and both agreed that “all shooting will stop”.
Continue reading...RA’ANANA, Israel, June 2, 2026 — DriveNets, a leader in large-scale networking solutions, has announced it has completed a $410 million Series D financing round, reaching $1 billion total capital raised. With more than $1B in secured business and having been cash-flow positive since 2025, the company will use the additional funding to scale inventory to support its growing AI fabric pipeline and expand its Heterogeneous AI infrastructure solutions. The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management. New investors, AMD and Red Dot Capital, joined alongside existing investors Pitango and D1 Capital Partners.
Since the company’s founding ten years ago, DriveNets’ Network Cloud has become the network of record for the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Built on the same engineering foundation, DriveNets’ Ethernet-based AI fabric supports large-scale AI infrastructures built by foundation labs, hyperscalers, NeoClouds, and large enterprises. The company is now working with leading AI vendors such as AMD, Broadcom, and others to tighten the integration between networking and compute in multi-vendor AI environments, maximizing cluster performance and GPU utilization to substantially improve token economics. It is also partnering with Dell, Supermicro, and other systems partners on go-to-market activities.
“This financing round marks a pivotal step in scaling our company to meet the surging demand for large-scale AI infrastructure,” said Ido Susan, CEO and Co-Founder of DriveNets. “The most expensive idle asset in the world right now is a GPU waiting on the network. We’re applying a decade of high-performance networking expertise to enable our customers to achieve higher utilization, reduce cost per workload, and scale their AI operations efficiently — on any AI accelerator they choose.”
“AI infrastructure is entering a new era of open, integrated systems where compute, networking, and software scale together,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AI at AMD. “Our support of DriveNets’ Series D reflects a shared commitment to scaling AI workloads efficiently with AMD Instinct accelerators and DriveNets’ high-performance fabric on open infrastructure, advancing open, standards-based AI data centers.”
Addressing the Most Expensive Idle Asset Problem – a GPU Waiting on the Network
DriveNets’ AI fabric solutions are based on standard Ethernet and support scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across architectures, along with front-end and storage connectivity for large-scale AI clusters. They address two fundamental constraints in AI infrastructures today: large GPU clusters operating below peak efficiency due to network bottlenecks and reliability challenges, and slow cluster bring-up time (‘idle Capex’), especially in multi-vendor environments.
DriveNets’ high-performance AI Fabric eliminates networking bottlenecks by performing end-to-end networking optimizations across the entire AI stack, including collective communication libraries, transport protocols, NICs, the network fabric, and system-level orchestration. Some of these optimizations are developed in collaboration with leading AI accelerator vendors, such as the recently published validated reference architecture for AMD-DriveNets-based clusters that maximizes GPU utilization, reduces cost-per-token, and enables rapid deployment and efficient end-to-end scaling.
“As AI systems reach unprecedented scale, the performance of the underlying network fabric has become a primary driver of AI economics,” said Charlie Kawwas, President, Semiconductor Solutions Group, Broadcom. “Broadcom’s AI semiconductor and Ethernet switching solutions, combined with DriveNets’ high-performance fabric, deliver the scale and efficiency that modern AI workloads demand. This collaboration reflects how open Ethernet is becoming the foundation of the next-generation AI data center.”
“AI networking is on track to surpass $200 billion by the end of the decade, driven by the shift from single-vendor stacks to multi-vendor and later heterogeneous AI infrastructures. DriveNets enters this phase with a strong combination — tier-one service provider reliability, validated AMD reference design, and the inventory position to deliver into a supply-constrained market. That positions the company well as open Ethernet becomes the foundation of next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst, 650 Group.
DriveNets – a Foundational Player in Heterogeneous AI
The recent AI infrastructure spending shift from training to inference is expected to drive the adoption of Heterogeneous AI architectures that bring infrastructure costs down and optimize power utilization.
Heterogeneous AI architecture uses multiple AI accelerators from multiple vendors within the same cluster, each best for a different stage or task within the AI training or inference process. The compute resources in the cluster are orchestrated to provide the best overall performance and power utilization, to reduce cost per million tokens and maximize tokens per watt.
DriveNets’ AI fabric is uniquely positioned to support Heterogeneous multi-vendor AI environments due to its ability to perform full-stack optimization for any AI accelerator in the cluster, maximizing the performance and utilization of the entire cluster.
“Every shift in compute produces a new networking giant. Cisco wired the internet. Arista wired the cloud. NVIDIA wired single-vendor AI. DriveNets is wiring what comes next: Heterogeneous AI,” said Adam Fisher, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is why BVP led DriveNets’ $410M Series D, an existing portfolio company we’ve backed since its Series A.”
About DriveNets
DriveNets is a leader in large-scale networking solutions for AI infrastructure and service providers. The company’s disaggregated networking architecture transforms the economics of large-scale infrastructures while maximizing performance, utilization, and operational efficiency. Its high-performance AI fabric maximizes GPU utilization and accelerates deployments by optimizing the AI stack end-to-end, resulting in higher tokens-per-second and lower cost-per-token. DriveNets’ solutions power production networks for global tier-1 operators like AT&T and Comcast, and scale multi-vendor AI infrastructures at foundation model labs, NeoClouds, and enterprises. Learn more at https://www.drivenets.com.
Source: DriveNets
The post DriveNets Raises $410M Series D to Scale Ethernet AI Fabric and Heterogeneous AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
ICC’s decision comes amid growing concerns the team is being influenced by members of a notorious gang in India
Cricket’s international governing body has suspended Canada over what it described as “serious breaches of its membership obligations”, dealing the latest blow to an organization that critics say has become a “laughing stock” within the sport.
The suspension also comes amid growing concerns that one of Canada’s fastest-growing sports is being influenced by members of a notorious gang that operates with impunity from an Indian prison cell.
Continue reading...With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE’s history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE. Of course, this change won’t make it to people’s computers until 6.8 actually releases, but as far the code goes, the X11 session is gone. Once 6.8 is actually released, you will only be able to log into a Wayland KDE session.
This won’t affect KDE applications running in other X11 desktop environments, and of course, X11 applications will keep working in KDE as well thanks to XWayland. It’s also important to note that this won’t affect anyone sticking to older versions of KDE Plasma; it’s not like X11 session support will be yanked retroactively. From here on out, a lot of X11 code will be removed from KDE, and developers will be able to focus on just one code path, instead of accommodating the lowest common denominator in X11.
Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors.
↫ David Edmundson
The transition from legacy X11 to Wayland has been a long, painful journey, but I’m glad we’re finally reaching the destination. If you’re still having issues with KDE on Wayland, be sure you’re using an up-to-date distribution – not an LTS one – and see how that goes for you.
The student loan rulebook is being rewritten, and making a few quick moves now could spare you a costly surprise.
Google's latest features are designed to bring an added layer of safety and personalization to your phone.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order asking artificial intelligence companies to provide models to the federal government to assess their capabilities ahead of a full release. The order asks companies, on a voluntary basis, to participate in a benchmarking process to assess a model's "advanced cyber capabilities" and determine whether it should be considered a "covered frontier model." It then asks for access to those models up to 30 days before the companies plan to release them more broadly, and enables the government to help select the "trusted partners" that will receive early access. "Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models," the order said. Trump signed the order in private, just weeks after he postponed a signing ceremony with prominent tech CEOs because he "didn't like certain aspects of it," he told reporters at the time. [...] Trump's AI order outlines several timeframes to develop directives and other guidance, specifically calling on the Department of Defense to prioritize the cyber defense of its information systems.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A mortgage interest rate lock before the June Federal Reserve meeting starts may make sense for borrowers. Here's why.
Updates to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA span accelerated computing, networking, storage, enterprise software, digital twins and robotics, giving enterprises a unified infrastructure foundation for agentic AI at scale
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 2, 2026 — Dell Technologies has announced updates to the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, adding Dell PowerEdge servers built with NVIDIA Vera CPUs to the industry’s broadest AI infrastructure portfolio.
Credit: Shutterstock
AI has evolved from generating content to performing work. As organizations deploy AI agents that reason, plan, use tools and execute complex workflows, infrastructure requirements are growing. These server platforms give enterprises a single, validated path to building and operating agentic AI at scale.
Bringing NVIDIA Vera CPUs to Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA
The Dell PowerEdge R9822 and M9822 servers bring NVIDIA Vera CPUs to a broad range of deployments. The air-cooled, expandable 3U PowerEdge R9822 addresses use cases ranging from agentic sandboxes and analytics to general-purpose CPU infrastructure in any standard data center environment. The 100% direct liquid-cooled PowerEdge M9822 also uses the Vera CPU, enabling dense compute for agentic AI and HPC workloads that demand maximum performance and efficiency at scale.
Together, Dell and NVIDIA Power AI
NVIDIA Vera CPUs join Dell’s lineup of NVIDIA technologies that are already working to serve enterprises, including:
“As AI moves from experimentation to impact, every organization faces the same challenge. Move fast or fall behind,” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer, Dell Technologies. “Together with NVIDIA, we’re helping customers turn data into AI fuel and build infrastructure they control, with the security, governance and efficiency they need. The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA makes it easier to go from pilot to production.”
“Agentic AI is becoming the operating system of every enterprise,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Vera is the CPU built for the age of agents. Together with the Dell AI Factory and Dell’s unmatched enterprise scale and global reach, we are bringing NVIDIA Vera Rubin—the next generation of AI infrastructure—to organizations everywhere.”
Availability
Dell PowerEdge M9822 and R9822 will be globally available in September.
About Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. Dell offers customers one of the industry’s broadest technology and services portfolios for the AI era.
Source: Dell Technologies
The post Dell Adds NVIDIA Vera CPUs to AI Factory Portfolio for Agentic AI and HPC appeared first on HPCwire.
It looks like it'll be a hit for students.
Former US first lady says she has sat ‘at every powerful table’ and not met a single white man with such doubts
White men do not have to worry about impostor syndrome, according to Michelle Obama, who said she had sat “at every powerful table there is” and not found one who admitted feeling such self-doubt.
The former US first lady told SXSW London that she wanted to “demystify” what it was like to sit in elite meetings, which she said were often populated by people from diverse backgrounds who felt like outsiders.
Continue reading...As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak
The full horror of Henry Nowak’s last moments was only just sinking in on the morning after the release of police footage showing him pleading for help when Reform UK served notice that its leader would be making an “emergency address”.
Appearing via a live stream from a location with fields in the background, Nigel Farage paid tribute to the “extraordinarily dignified” response of the Nowak family, before wading in with remarks of his own.
Continue reading...Helen Spree, 63, headed prison watchdog and was said to have become besotted with killer Dylan Westall, 35
A corrupt prison watchdog boss who billed herself “the prisoners’ Deliveroo” has been jailed for five years after admitting sending sexual messages to a killer inmate and smuggling drugs.
Helen Spree, 63, was the head of the independent monitoring board (IMB) for HMP Liverpool when she engaged in illicit chats with prisoners over a 20-month period. Spree was said to have become besotted with Dylan Westall, 35, who was serving a life sentence for manslaughter for shooting a teenager in the head.
Continue reading...Please drive responsibly when Mario Kart World music is blasting through your car.
Investigation follows circulation of videos showing groups climbing out of sewer systems across the city at night
New York police are investigating a bizarre mystery involving groups of people emerging from the city’s manholes in recent weeks.
The investigation follows the circulation of multiple social media videos showing people climbing out of sewer systems across the city, all in the middle of the night.
Continue reading...The US president seeks to curb Israel’s intensified offensive as he looks for an exit from war with Iran, but turmoil in the Middle East will not easily be ended
“Let’s see how long that lasts,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday night, addressing his attempts to de-escalate in Lebanon following Israel’s intensified military campaign. Within hours, Israeli drone strikes had killed eight people in the south, including a father and his two children, and damaged a hospital. Hezbollah continued launching rockets and drones.
Anxious to escape the illegal war that he launched on Iran, and with Tehran threatening to suspend peace talks over the Israeli offensive, the US president reined in Benjamin Netanyahu – for now – in what was described as an expletive-laden phone call. Mr Trump’s post, despite its unusual admission of doubt, still oversold the agreement. He claimed that Hezbollah and Israel had agreed to “stop all shooting”. Lebanon’s presidency suggested a more limited deal: Israel would not strike Beirut’s southern suburbs if Hezbollah did not launch attacks against Israel.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...The secretary of state is testifying publicly to Congress for the first time since the war began, as the regional conflict worsens and lawmakers’ patience runs thin.
Witness B said in police interview that she pretended to be asleep when allegedly abused as a child
A jury in Northern Ireland has heard details of the alleged rape of a child by the former Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader Jeffrey Donaldson.
A police interview with the complainant was played to Newry crown court in Northern Ireland on Tuesday on the sixth day of the former MP’s trial for alleged sex offences.
Continue reading...Many TV broadcasts are only 720p. Some TVs are 8K. There's talk of even greater resolutions. Here's what you need to know.
FOSTER CITY, Calif., June 2, 2026 – ZutaCore, a leader in waterless, direct-to-chip, two-phase liquid cooling, today announced its $100 million Series C funding round. The round includes investment from Mitsubishi Electric, Carrier Ventures, and Samsung Electronics (via its CVC arm, Samsung Ventures), alongside additional investors.
The funding supports global commercialization expansion as ZutaCore scales to meet rapidly growing bookings and deployments driven by surging demand for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. It will also advance, R&D to address the evolving thermal requirements of next-generation chip architectures – driving innovation in in-package thermal management enabling seamless two-phase integration with existing air and single-phase systems, and supporting megawatt-class deployments. ZutaCore’s waterless two-phase cooling platform is designed to support next-generation AI and HPC processors exceeding 4,000 watts, enabling higher compute density and sustained performance at scale
This milestone reflects strong market confidence in ZutaCore’s technology and vision, fueling continued global expansion, product innovation, and large-scale customer adoption.
ZutaCore has achieved more than 75 deployments worldwide, across the Americas, Europe and Asia, demonstrating the growing adoption of two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling in production environments.
The company continues to collaborate with leading global partners to deliver advanced thermal management solutions, helping remove critical roadblocks in next-generation chip roadmaps and accelerate time to market.
Scaling Leadership to Match Market Demand
To support its accelerating global momentum, ZutaCore is expanding its leadership team and international presence—recruiting top talent and building the infrastructure needed to enable worldwide deployments, strategic partnerships, and deep technical collaborations with leading industry players. To support this growth, ZutaCore has expanded its executive team with four key strategic hires:
These leaders join Erez Freibach, Chairman and CEO, Brian Lillie, President and Chief Revenue Officer, My Truong, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Susan Mor, Chief of Staff – forming a seasoned leadership team focused on scaling execution and delivering next-generation cooling infrastructure to hyperscalers, neoclouds, data center operators, and other demanding enterprise compute environments.
A Year Of Landmark Innovations and Accelerating Growth
With AI workloads surging and data center power densities climbing into the multi-megawatt range, operators require scalable, energy-efficient solutions that can handle extreme heat loads at scale. Waterless two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling has become a critical enabler of this shift, positioning ZutaCore at the forefront of this transformation.
To support this transition, ZutaCore established a 2MW End-of-Row emulation platform at its facility in Israel. This platform replicates real-world thermal and facility interactions without relying on production IT equipment, enabling validation of performance, stability, and integration requirements at multi-megawatt scale while significantly reducing deployment risk for customers.
In parallel, ZutaCore continues to introduce highly innovative solutions, including its OmniTherm cold plate, which enables waterless two-phase cooling for the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition in a single-slot PCIe form factor, supporting full-power operation in standard enterprise and AI cloud server environments.
ZutaCore continues to advance its platform to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of AI-driven data centers.
Erez Freibach, Chairman and CEO of ZutaCore, said: “$100M of funding reflects strong validation from leading global partners and growing demand for our technology. AI is fundamentally reshaping data center infrastructure, and traditional approaches are no longer sufficient. With our expanding leadership team and continued innovation, we are well positioned to support the next generation of high-performance, sustainable data centers.”
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC is serving as exclusive placement agent to ZutaCore in connection with its Series C capital raise.
About ZutaCore
ZutaCore’s waterless two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling delivers unrivaled performance, eliminates water risk, and cuts energy use in half. Proven at scale in the world’s most demanding data centers, it is the clear choice for AI, cloud, and enterprise leaders. Learn more at www.zutacore.com.
Source: ZutaCore
The post ZutaCore Raises $100M Series C to Scale Waterless Cooling for AI and HPC Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.
Under new rules, tech companies will be asked to share AI models with government for review before public release
Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a voluntary framework for the federal government to vet powerful new AI models before they are released. Tuesday’s highly anticipated order represents an attempt by the president to tighten his grip on cybersecurity and national security threats posed by AI, tacking against his earlier deregulatory stance. But the voluntary nature of the framework shows that, while Trump has toed a more cautious line on AI than when he first took office last year, he is still reluctant to impose regulations on the tech industry.
Under the new guidelines, tech companies would be asked to share their AI models with the government for a voluntary review, up to 30 days before a public release. The Trump administration says doing so will allow them to improve national security, particularly with regards to cybersecurity.
Continue reading...If your phone can't recharge after a deep battery drain, this update is for you.
June 2, 2026 — The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has announced four new calls to accelerate quantum technologies, enhancing Europe’s capabilities in navigation, computing and standardization.
Grand Challenge on Quantum Sensors for Inertial Navigation
Through this call, HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-NGC-04, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking aims to advance the development of quantum-enabled navigation systems for use in GNSS-denied or contested environments. The action will be implemented in a two-phase competitive structure, supported by Horizon Europe and in close collaboration with the European Investment Bank.
In Phase 1, proposals are expected to establish a comprehensive technical and financial roadmap demonstrating the potential of the proposed quantum inertial navigation system while delivering evidence-based design and benchmarking packages. Proposals should target systems that are already sufficiently mature and include analyses of investor-readiness and supply-chain sovereignty. Over the course of Phase 1, projects will be given the opportunity to liaise with EIB advisory services to prepare and strengthen their financial viability plans preparing for potential investments from the EIB in Phase 2. Following full due diligence successful projects will qualify to receive convertible loans from the EIB in two separate installments during Phase 2.
The total indicative budget available for this call is EUR 2 Million, funded under the Horizon Europe program. The expected duration of the Grand Challenge is 6 months. The call opens today, June 2, 2026, with a submission deadline of January 14, 2027 at 17:00 CET (Brussels time).
Relevant details and information concerning this call are available on this dedicated call page.
Large-Scale Photonic Quantum Computing Platform Technologies
The action, HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-PQC-06, aims at establishing a strategic European initiative to develop scalable, modular, and interoperable photonic quantum computing platforms.
Proposals are expected to address and provide credible solutions to at least two major technical roadblocks, currently limiting progress in photonic quantum computing.
The first roadblock is the lack of deterministic, high-efficiency photonic entanglement and loss-tolerant architectures suitable for fault-tolerant scaling.
The second is the absence of a standardized, integrated control stack combining photonic hardware, firmware and system software with reliable benchmarking across platforms.
It is expected that by 2028, the selected project will demonstrate a photonic NISQ processor with ≥ 100 photonic qubits and by 2030 to deliver a full-stack, high-connectivity photonic quantum computer with modular scalability.
Proposals are expected to be led by a startup with demonstrated expertise in photonic quantum computing. The startup should collaborate with relevant academic, industrial, research and technology partners to ensure both technological depth and market orientation. The consortium should also include at least one major end-user whose operational requirements will guide the platform design and whose infrastructure will host the field demonstration of the project’s results.
The total indicative budget available for this call is EUR 10 Million, funded under the Horizon Europe program. The expected project duration is three years. The call opens today, June 2, 2026, with a submission deadline of January 26, 2027 at 17:00 CET (Brussels time).
More details and relevant documents concerning this call are available on this dedicated call page.
Standards for Quantum Technologies
Through this action, HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-STAND-05, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking aims to support and accelerate the development and adoption of European and international standards for quantum technologies. This will enhance interoperability, quality and reliability assurance, and trust in quantum systems.
It will strengthen Europe’s leadership in the global quantum standardisation landscape and ensure that European industrial and research priorities are well represented and integrated into emerging standards.
Expected outcomes from the call include the delivery of concrete, EU-relevant pre-normative standards and technical specifications across quantum computing, communication and sensing.
The selected proposal will help promoting cross-sectoral interoperability through standardized interfaces, control protocols and benchmarking methodologies, reducing market fragmentation and technical barriers.
By doing so, it should also create practical support tools such as user guidelines, training modules and best practices to accelerate the uptake and implementation of quantum standards.
The total indicative budget available for this call is EUR 1 Million, funded under the Horizon Europe program. The expected project duration is three years. The call opens today, June 2, 2026, with a submission deadline of January 19, 2027 at 17:00 CET (Brussels time).
Further details on this call can be found on this dedicated call page.
Quantum Machine Learning
The action, HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2026-QML-07, for Quantum Machine Learning, aims to advance research at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, with the objective of unlocking new capabilities for data processing, optimization, and modeling.
By combining quantum processors with classical HPC systems, hybrid approaches are expected to address computational bottlenecks while maintaining scalability and robustness.
Proposals for this call should contribute to the development, validation, and demonstration of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) methods, including novel quantum, quantum-inspired, or hybrid algorithms, performance benchmarking, and noise-aware strategies.
Particular emphasis is placed on scalable solutions capable of handling large and complex datasets, as well as on the development of quantum-native learning models that can demonstrate clear advantages over classical approaches.
The total indicative budget available for this call is EUR 6 Million, funded under the Horizon Europe program. The expected project duration is four years. The call opens today, June 2, 2026, with a submission deadline of January 28, 2027 at 17:00 CET (Brussels time).
Consult relevant details of this call on the dedicated call page.
Source: EuroHPC JU
The post EuroHPC Launches 4 New Calls to Boost Quantum Innovation and Standardization in Europe appeared first on HPCwire.
ARMONK, N.Y., June 2, 2026 — IBM has announced plans to invest more than $10 billion in quantum computing over the next five years. The investment will span research and development, capital expenditure, manufacturing scaling, ecosystem partnerships, and M&A. Together, these areas are designed to accelerate IBM’s quantum roadmap beyond delivering the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029, and advance quantum leadership anchored in the United States.
Credit: IBM
It builds on the broadest quantum foundation in the industry, including the largest fleet of quantum computers across the globe, the most widely used quantum software, and a client and partner network of more than 340 organizations running real workloads today. This investment funds the next stage of that foundation, carrying IBM’s lead from today’s commercial quantum computers towards fault-tolerant scale systems.
“The quantum era is no longer ahead of us, it has started. Our clients, partners and users around the world are tapping into IBM quantum computers to do work that was impossible a few years ago,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman & CEO, IBM. “The pace of discovery with quantum computers is accelerating rapidly and this investment powers our ability to deliver the next generation of quantum hardware, software, and manufacturing.”
IBM’s Quantum Leadership Today
This investment reinforces IBM’s mission to bring useful quantum computing to the world and builds on the most advanced quantum program in the industry:
More from HPCwire: Commerce Takes Portfolio Approach with $2B Quantum Investment Initiative
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge in their industries. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
Source: IBM
The post IBM Unveils $10B Quantum Investment Plan to Scale Hardware, Software and Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.
Four people were arrested and charged with trafficking more than $45 million in cocaine through the 2,000-foot-long tunnel complete with reinforced walls, ventilation and a rail system.
Durvalumab shows promising results in trial led by London-based Institute of Cancer Research
Doctors are hailing a drug that spares bladder cancer patients “life-changing” surgery and stops tumours coming back.
Bladder cancer is the ninth most common cancer in the world. Advanced or aggressive forms are often treated with surgery to remove the entire bladder, with patients left having to find alternative ways to pass urine for the rest of their life.
Continue reading...A suite of web APIs built for AI agents that helps them scour the web faster for search results is already being used by Copilot, ChatGPT and "many others."
Longtime Slashdot reader Matt_Bennett shares a blog post from Adafruit: Adafruit received at 10:38 p.m. ET on May 22, 2026 a letter from former FBI chief of staff, Jonathan F. Lenzner, and partner at Fenwick & West LLP, counsel for Flux, demanding, among other things, that Adafruit refrain from publishing an article addressing what the letter characterizes as false and potentially defamatory claims about Flux, including statements about Flux's intellectual property, commercial traction and user base. The letter further asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Adafruit accessed only information that Flux's own systems made publicly available through a server misconfiguration. Adafruit's reporting concerns a matter of public security interest and was conducted in the ordinary course of responsible disclosure. Although Adafruit vigorously rejects the assertions made in Flux's May 22, 2026 demand letter, we have temporarily stopped publishing on the Adafruit blog while we consider our response and next steps. We will update the community as appropriate. For context, Adafruit is a major open-source hardware company and electronics retailer known for its maker-focused boards, components, tutorials, and community publishing. Flux.ai is relevant because it is building an AI-assisted circuit-board design platform aimed at changing how engineers create and collaborate on PCB designs. "Adafruit probably did a review of AI PCB tools," writes HN user karmicthreat. "I've used Flux.ai before; it was a pretty bad experience. After about 50-100$ in tokens a couple of times, I couldn't get more than a couple of simple components on the schematic. And not in sensible positions..." Redditor AlexTaradox adds: "Nothing was published as far as I know. I assume they did review of AI tools and likely contacted flux with some preliminary results, but flux saw where it is going and decided to block them from publishing any results. Flux is garbage and they obviously know it, but they need to hold for some time until some other scam acquires them. Doing anything with them is just asking to be screwed..." Further discussions are taking place on Reddit and Hacker News.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Secretary of state appears before Congress and repeats Trump administration’s claims that a deal is within reach
Iran has agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear program that it had refused to discuss even a month ago, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has claimed, even as Tehran announced it was halting peace talks and moving to fully close the strait of Hormuz.
Appearing before the Senate foreign relations committee for the first time since the Trump administration launched the war against Iran – which was pitched as a short, weeks-long war, in February – Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s claims that a deal was within reach.
Continue reading...Moscow has intensified aerial bombing of Ukrainian cities as its battlefield advances have stalled.
The order asks AI companies to share previews of powerful new models with the government before they are released to the public.
The US secretary of state added that Iran must also commit to specific negotiations on the disposition of highly-engaged uranium.
Israel’s weapons exports has reached an all-time high for a fifth year running, according to the country’s defence ministry.
In a statement, it said: “Israel’s all-time defence export record has been broken for the fifth consecutive year, with $19.2bn in 2025 – a nearly 30% surge compared to the previous year, more than doubling in five years and quadrupling in a decade.”
Continue reading...A fugitive who lived for more than 40 years under the stolen identity of a University of Arkansas graduate has pleaded guilty to fraud, among other charges.
Federal jury convicts the securities analyst and trader, who could face a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison
A federal jury in California has convicted short seller Andrew Left of securities fraud.
Left, who was a securities analyst, trader and guest commentator on television channels including CNBC and Fox Business, was charged in July 2024 with one count of engaging in a securities fraud scheme, 17 counts of securities fraud and one count of making false statements to federal investigators. As a short seller, Left would make money betting that stocks would fall.
Continue reading...The United States is feeding Pentagon propaganda to internet users in Latin American countries using a new AI-laden content mill, an investigation by The Intercept has found.
La Tilde quietly began development early this year and appears to still be a work in progress, pitching itself as a modern media brand for Latin American audiences with articles published in both Spanish and English. Its name references the accent mark emphasizing vowels in Spanish; “news with an accent” is the site’s catchphrase.
“The tilde is not an ornament. It is a millennial arrow designed to provide direction, save space, and turn up the volume,” a narrator states in a promotional video for the site bearing telltale signs it was AI-generated, such as a newspaper whose sloppily rendered headline reads “SO THEE HOUTIERRER TO TO GHAHOBATEE,” followed by imagery of two medieval monks. “That is why we place the accent on what matters. From the regional pulse and your well-being, to the big ideas and the global context.”
So far, La Tilde’s coverage amounts to an unusual blend of personal finance tips (“Why instant payments matter so much for your business and your wallet”) and articles extolling the value of U.S. military operations in Latin America (“Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro and set a new standard for precision and coordination”).
Its article on the U.S. abduction of the Venezuelan president praises the mission in Trumpian prose, calling it “The Perfect Operation – Coordination, Timing and Precision at an Unprecedented Scale,” and “a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before.” Citing “information obtained exclusively by La Tilde,” it describes the operation’s tactical brilliance, flawless execution, and incredibly precise coordination of military assets in the air and on the ground.
If this reads like Pentagon a press release, that’s because it is. An explanation for its glowing coverage of the U.S. military can be found after clicking a small link tucked at the bottom of the site. “La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government,” its About page reads.
This easily missed disclosure language is identical to two other Pentagon-sponsored propaganda sites recently revealed by The Intercept.
Targeting audiences, foreign or domestic, with state-run information campaigns remains a politically sensitive topic, and a token disclosure that La Tilde is a U.S.-funded platform allows the American government to say it technically informed readers about the actual source of the information.
According to a defense official familiar with U.S. information operations, La Tilde is operated as a military messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which executes special forces missions throughout South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. When asked about SOCSOUTH’s role behind La Tilde, spokesperson Trevor Wild replied with the text of the site’s About page noting that it’s a government operation, but declined to comment further.
U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which is broadly responsible for coordinating military assets in the countries La Tilde targets, denied involvement. SOUTHCOM “does not fund, operate, or have any official association with La Tilde,” according to spokesperson Steven McLoud, who did not respond to further questions.
Unlike most news websites, La Tilde carries no bylines, masthead, or mention of actual staff of any kind. Although the site claims it employs “dozens of freelance reporters and content creators,” at least some of the site appears to have been generated by a large language model. Running articles through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines (though such tools are known to deliver false positives).
Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, told The Intercept he was struck by site’s shoddiness, describing it as “AI all the way down.”
Despite the low quality of AI-generated articles, this approach could help the Pentagon spin up propaganda efforts faster than in the past. “If you can generate new content and even news fronts at the flip of a switch, your influence operations can shift target and focus much more quickly,” Brooking said. “That seems to be the thinking behind recent AI-powered Russian and Chinese networks, for instance.”
An analysis of subdomains hosted on LaTilde.co reveals the site plans to launch bespoke versions for readers in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.
Some pro-U.S. content is clearly tailored to these national audiences. An article filed to the site’s “In Good Hands” section highlights the benefits of U.S.–Panamanian joint jungle warfare training exercises, regaling readers with how “temperatures and heart rates climb at the Cristóbal Colón Naval Air Base as Panamanian security forces push forward through the ‘Green Mile,’ the demanding final test of the Combined Jungle Operations Course.” Such joint initiatives are, according to La Tilde, a bulwark against China’s efforts to engage in similar joint exercises in Latin America. Rather than engage with “Beijing’s predatory practices,” the article suggests countries should follow Panama’s lead and “seek training opportunities closer to home or with longstanding partners such as the United States.”
The article makes no mention of the controversy surrounding PANAMAX, a joint military exercise between SOUTHCOM and the Panamanian forces that has sparked increased protest on the grounds it violates national sovereignty. Permanent U.S. military installations in Panama were shuttered in 1999 as part of a 1977 treaty between the two countries; Panamanian opposition parties decried the reestablishment of an American military presence under the guise of joint exercises as a “camouflaged invasion.” Participants in the 2025 PANAMAX exercise La Tilde is pushing include the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training institute whose graduates included thousands of Latin American death squad gunmen and dictator Manuel Noriega.
The importance of military and intelligence-sharing compacts with the U.S. is a recurring theme. “Far from weakening sovereignty, this kind of cooperation can strengthen it,” one article says.
Other stories from La Tilde argue the American side of Latin American controversies, similarly downplaying issues of national sovereignty. One piece describes how the U.S. abduction of Maduro “has reawakened a long-contained hope among millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country.” Another alleges Ecuador is a nexus of the international cocaine trade, echoing claims the Trump administration has used to expand Operation Southern Spear, SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean airstrike campaign that has killed more than 200 civilians to date.
It’s unclear who exactly is operating the site on a day-to-day basis. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology. Renée DiResta, who co-authored a 2022 report on online propaganda efforts backed by U.S. Central Command, told The Intercept that the TRWI successor websites share a common Google Ads identifier code owned by General Dynamics, according to a recent comprehensive analysis of the network she conducted. La Tilde also runs a legal disclosure with identical language as those sites.
General Dynamics did not respond to multiple requests for comment about La Tilde.
Halcyon Group International, another information warfare contractor that operates Diálogo Américas, a similar pseudo-news site backed by the Pentagon, told The Intercept it was not involved with La Tilde.
Design of the La Tilde website was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm. Multiple files hosted on the site created by the AI image-generation service Midjourney contain the word “Antpack” in their name. The Intercept signed up for a user account on La Tilde, part of planned functionality that will let readers comment and save articles for later. Once registered, The Intercept was able to view comments left on a non-public version of the site used by its developers, who posted under names corresponding to LinkedIn profiles of Antpack employees. Antpack did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
U.S. Special Operations has a long record of leading the American internet propaganda efforts, ranging from high-tech efforts to less-sophisticated projects like phony online newsrooms. SOCOM has since 2018 operated the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center, which coordinates information warfare and online psychological operations.
The Intercept reported in 2023 that SOCOM was working on acquiring state-of-the-art “deepfake” video fabrication technologies to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” according to procurement documents. La Tilde appears to be using low-effort AI tools rather than anything cutting-edge. Art accompanying its stories often includes portion of the prompt used to quickly generate the image in the file name, and shows mixed results, such as a rendering of the White House portico missing several of its columns or a diploma with garbled text. Photographs illustrating pro-SOUTHCOM messaging, however, are drawn from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, an official Pentagon media library.
“The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the U.S. attack on Venezuela,” Brooking said. “This is how you build these sorts of networks. But the content is lazy, the AI is bad, and the required disclosures make the whole thing a farce.”
The post The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.
A musical concert series has become a point of political contention, with performers dropping out of the series.
As a longtime allergy sufferer, these are the products I've been counting on to stop my allergy symptoms in their tracks.
Six states are holding primary contests on Tuesday, including California and Iowa.
President Trump on Tuesday announced he's tapping housing official Bill Pulte to serve as the acting director of national intelligence to replace Tulsi Gabbard.
New EU battery rules taking effect early next year are pushing tech makers toward user-replaceable batteries in products like headphones, e-readers, handheld consoles, laptops, and possibly earbuds. But carve-outs for smartphones and tablets may mean replaceable batteries won't necessarily return to phones in the way many users remember. The Verge's Dominic Preston reports: Since the upcoming law doesn't actually come into force until February 18th, 2027, companies still have plenty of time to get their ducks in a row. Still, it's likely that before then we'll see more and more manufacturers launch products with user-replaceable batteries, across audio, e-readers, gaming handhelds, and more. Only time will tell whether most of those products are EU only, or whether the new European laws shape the nature of tech worldwide. It's likely that some product categories will move slower than others. Tech companies will have breathed a sigh of relief that wearables look likely to be exempt, but if wireless earbuds aren't carved out as well then there may be a scramble to adapt the miniature designs for easy replaceability. "The in-ear form factor demands extreme miniaturization, to fit the driver, antenna, processor, microphones and battery," notes a recent report from consultants Futuresource, going on to suggest that meeting the requirements will make earbuds both bigger and more expensive to manufacture. There also remains uncertainty about how some elements of the law will be interpreted. The law requires that user repairs be possible using "commercially available tools," which are "tools available on the market to all end-users." Right to Repair Europe's Alberico points out that this is a broad definition, likely to include a lot of tools not found in most houses, so there will likely be nothing to stop manufacturers requiring the sorts of less common screws that require dedicated electronics tool kits. There's also no strict definition of the "reasonable" price that manufacturers are required to set for spare parts. "That will likely take time -- and possibly litigation -- to clarify in practice," Alberico says. "But without fair access to affordable spare parts, repair will struggle to become the simplest and most attractive option for consumers." The big disappointment is that the separate phone and tablet legislation means we won't see any real changes there, so long as manufacturers make their batteries and devices durable. "This creates a false tradeoff between durability and repairability," Alberico says. "Robust, waterproof devices should not have to come at the expense of user-replaceable batteries. While the ecodesign legislation requirements meant an improvement in battery durability and replaceability, at Right to Repair Europe we'll continue to advocate for all products to be designed with user-replaceable batteries." Whether the EU will listen remains to be seen. Otherwise, the main product people seem to want to replace the battery in may remain one of the only ones where they can't.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My husband gifted me Beats Studio Pro over-the-ear headphones instead of Apple's. I'm not mad about it.
Mirra Andreeva routed Sorana Cirstea, Marta Kostyuk overpowered Elina Svitolina and Alexander Zverev saw off Rafael Jodar, all three winners moving into the last four
A majestic, mature performance from Andreeva, locked-in from the start and ruthless to the end, a forehand winner to the corner securing the win. She’s into her second grand slam semi and will face the winner of our next match between Svitolina and Kostyuk.
Cirstea knows the jig is bust, going for everything because what else can she do. But an error hands over 15-30 and a backhand winner down the line raises two match points.
Continue reading...Home secretary says officer wrongly linked to case had to relocate after footage emerged of victim being handcuffed while dying
BBC Scotland has more details of the Peter Murrell hearing this morning on its live blog. And, on its live blog, Sky News has pictures of some of the items purchased by Murrell with stolen SNP funds.
Andy Burnham will not call an early election if he becomes prime minister after the Makerfield byelection, a spokesperson for the Greater Manchester mayor has said.
Continue reading...Former health secretary described as ‘hysterical’ about the issue by Peter Mandelson in messages disclosed this week
Wes Streeting has said he felt he was “hitting up against a brick wall” when he tried to raise concerns about Gaza in government, after private messages from Peter Mandelson were disclosed where he was accused of being “hysterical” about the issue.
Among a huge release of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US, WhatsApp messages showed Mandelson being highly critical of Streeting to Pat McFadden, another cabinet minister.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
In a landmark moment, gold has overtaken US government bonds as the world’s top reserve asset, according to calculations from the European Central Bank.
The ECB says that gold made up 27% of total official foreign reserves at the end of 2025, ahead of US Treasuries (22% of reserves) and the euro (15%).
Forces of fragmentation are becoming more pronounced. Geopolitical tensions continue to drive strong central bank demand for gold.
In nominal terms, the gold price surged by around 60% and 30% in 2025 and 2024 respectively, which mechanically increases the share of gold in total official foreign reserves.
Correcting for such valuation effects by using the gold price at the end of 2023, the share of the euro (16%) remains at par with the share of gold (16%), while the share of US Treasuries continues to be markedly higher (26%).
Continue reading...Avon and Somerset police’s contact with Jo Shaw and ex-partner to be scrutinised after pair died in explosion on 3 May
The death of a woman killed after her former partner forced his way into a house in Bristol with explosives is to be investigated by the police watchdog.
Jo Shaw, 35, sustained fatal injuries in the blast in the Frenchay area of the city on 3 May. Her former partner, Ryan Kelly, 41, was also killed in the explosion.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif. and TAIPEI, June 2, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. today announced a new class of AI-centric solutions featuring Arm AGI CPUs. The increasing compute demands of modern agentic AI require a new class of rack-scale infrastructure that maximizes compute performance within the power envelopes and physical footprints of enterprise data centers. Supermicro’s new solutions are built to support the rapid growth of agentic AI, delivering performance, efficiency, and density that maximizes the economics of rack-scale deployments backed by Supermicro’s, end-to-end DCBBS capabilities reduce time-to-online.
Supermicro’s New Rack Scale AI Solutions
“Supermicro continues to lead the industry when it comes to deploying new and innovative rack-scale solutions that maximize performance and efficiency,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Our DCBBS technology stack delivers end-to-end data center solutions of any size, which combined with the new density and efficient performance optimized Arm AGI CPU microarchitecture, helps enterprises realize significant TCO savings on their agentic AI infrastructure investments.”
“Agentic AI is driving a fundamental shift in infrastructure requirements, where efficiency, scalability, and orchestration performance are becoming just as critical as raw compute,” said Mohamed Awad, Executive Vice President, Cloud AI Business Unit, Arm. “By combining Arm AGI CPUs with Supermicro’s rack-scale system expertise, we’re enabling infrastructure designed to deliver higher AI throughput, maximum compute density, and improved data center economics at scale.”
Supermicro’s new computing platforms consist of air-cooled dual-socket 2U compute-optimized and 5U GPU-optimized rackmount servers, as well as a liquid-cooled multi-node solution designed specifically for rack-scale agentic AI deployments. Combining Supermicro’s proven modular, high-density architectures with the energy-efficient Arm Neoverse CSS V3-based CPUs enables scalable, flexible infrastructure that maximizes performance-per-watt and dramatically lowers energy demand to accelerate AI adoption across modern data centers.
When deployed in Supermicro solutions, the Arm AGI CPU can deliver over 2x performance per rack compared to traditional architectures and help enterprises save up to $10 billion in CAPEX per Gigawatt of AI data center capacity based on Arm’s estimates. Building on Supermicro’s industry-leading rack density and performance-per-watt, these solutions help ensure maximum utilization of data center space and power resources.
Arm AGI CPU boasts a dense 136-core microarchitecture purpose built for performance, minimizing legacy overhead and completing more work per cycle for sustained, unthrottled performance. 6GB/s memory bandwidth per core and latency-optimized memory access support linear scaling, while expanded memory capacity and flexible I/O provides energy-efficient, scalable agentic AI infrastructure to orchestrate thousands of parallel tasks across distributed infrastructure.
With over 6,000 cores in a single air-cooled rack, enterprises can efficiently deploy numerous dedicated systems for a high volume of agentic AI tasks.
The Supermicro lineup of Arm-based servers includes five models:
2U Hyper Server – Optimized for agentic AI, Cloud, and memory-intensive workloads
5U GPU Server – GPU-dense configuration for AI training and inference
2U4N Liquid-Cooled Server – For OCP ORV3 environment
2U Hyper-E Server – Single-socket edge-optimized architecture with front I/O
1U 4N in an OCP ORW rack – Massive Compute Density
Supermicro continues to lead the industry with its comprehensive portfolio of AI infrastructure solutions, enabling organizations worldwide to deploy scalable, efficient, and environmentally responsible AI data centers.
The latest rack-scale solutions will be on display at the Supermicro booth at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1, 4F, N0602, offering attendees a first-hand look at their design and capabilities.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Debuts Arm-Based Rack-Scale Platforms for Agentic AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Angry phone call took place after Iran said it would suspend talks with US over Israel’s Lebanon campaign, Axios reports
Donald Trump angrily confronted Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s threats to resume airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, according to a report.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the US president shouted at the Israeli prime minister during the phone call on Monday, according to Axios, a US website that has frequently published reports on high-level conversations between the two leaders.
Continue reading...  | Hi all! Looking for advice. Had a nosedive on my board last Friday. Thankfully only bumps, scraped, and sore ribs, but ok! About to hop back on and noticed this Crack under the front of the board. How bad is this, and what is the name of the cover piece to replace? Thanks all! [link] [comments] |
A court judgment can open the door to more than collection calls, so it's important to know what may be at risk.
‘Completely unnecessary’ hybrid cans are not easily recycled or accepted by container refund schemes, and are already banned in WA
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A single-use plastic and metal drinking vessel dubbed a “franken-can” has been given the dubious honour of the nation’s worst plastic packaging.
The plastic-metal hybrid can, which is not accepted by container refund schemes or easily recycled – has won the inaugural Unpackit award for Australia’s worst packaging.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service. As that new pricing model goes into effect today, many GitHub Copilot users are reporting some extreme sticker shock as they realize just how quickly their previous "normal" usage is burning through their newly limited monthly allotment of AI credits. Across social media and forums, many Copilot users are sharing personal statistics showing how just a few hours of AI usage can now account for a large chunk of their new monthly subscription caps. For some users, it reportedly took less than a day to use up a month's usage quota. That's a big change from previous months, when GitHub Copilot subscribers were allocated a certain number of "requests" and "premium requests" based on their payment tier. GitHub said that the old system meant that "a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session [could] cost the user the same amount," forcing Copilot itself to "absorb much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage." [...] Indeed, some Copilot users have been sharing estimates from GitHub's own tool showing that their previous monthly usage would rack up bills in the thousands of dollars under the new pricing plan. Under GitHub's new usage-based pricing system, paid Copilot subscriptions instead grant users a certain number of AI "credits" each month, with one credit corresponding to $0.01 of usage. Subscribers also get bonus credits depending on their subscription level: the $10/month Pro plan includes 1,500 credits ($15 worth); the $39 Pro+ plan includes 7,000 credits ($70 worth); and the $100/month Copilot Max plan includes 20,000 credits ($200 worth). The precise number of Copilot credits used by a given prompt is determined by the number of input and output tokens used and the rates charged by the underlying large language model. That means pricing is highly dependent not just on the type of request but on the specific model that a user chooses. One million output tokens from OpenAI's GPT-5.4 nano would run just $1.25 on GitHub Copilot, but that same level of output would run $30 on the frontier GPT-5.5 model (Copilot users who rely on "Auto" mode to pick the most appropriate available model for any request should be extremely careful, as some users report it can switch to expensive models for extremely simple queries).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers observed unavailable female dolphins – those that were older, or with calves – did not show the same avoidant behaviour
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Female dolphins identify males by their unique calls and keep track of their past behaviour, choosing to avoid the most aggressive males during mating season, new research suggests.
Bottlenose dolphin society is complex, and male and female dolphins often know each other for decades, said Prof Stephanie King, an expert in animal behaviour at the University of Bristol.
Continue reading...US president says head of Federal Housing Finance Agency will serve as acting director days after Gabbard exits role
Donald Trump has tapped a close ally to serve as the country’s top intelligence official, days after Tulsi Gabbard announced her exit from the role.
The US president said that Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and heir to a home construction company fortune, will serve as acting director of national intelligence.
Continue reading...PRINCETON, N.J. and ESPOO, Finland, June 2, 2026 — IQM Finland Oy, a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company, today announced an additional PIPE commitment from Ilmarinen in connection with the previously announced business combination between IQM and RAAQ. Ilmarinen’s new commitment comes alongside commitments from other leading institutional investors in the previously announced $134 million PIPE.
Credit: IQM
The incremental PIPE provides additional funding on top of the previously announced $134 million in PIPE financing proceeds to be used to accelerate IQM’s technology and commercial development towards fault-tolerant quantum computing, further advancing its position as a leading provider of quantum computers.
Headquartered in Finland, IQM plans to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market in the U.S. and its ordinary shares on the Helsinki stock exchange in connection with the completion of this transaction. Ahead of the listing, investment exposure to IQM is available to the public by investing in its special purpose acquisition company partner, Real Asset Acquisition Corp.
IQM is a quantum computing company that builds full stack, open-architecture quantum computers that can be deployed on-premise or accessed via the cloud. IQM operates a vertically integrated business model, boasting a unique combination of proprietary infrastructure from their own chip design tool and software developer platform, to a quantum chip fab, assembly line and data center, allowing the company to accelerate its innovation cycles, deliver best-in-class quantum computing to its customers and enabling the quantum ecosystem to grow.
Jan Goetz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, IQM, said: “We’re pleased to see such strong investor demand, particularly with the addition of Ilmarinen. This upsized commitment from one of Finland’s largest private earnings-related pension insurance companies underscores confidence in our technology roadmap and the progress we’re making with our Production Quantum – a model where our customers own the system, operate it, and grow with it. This commitment signals that the market recognizes our product readiness and the real value we’re delivering to customers tackling some of the world’s most complex problems.”
Peter Ort, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Real Asset Acquisition Corp, said: “We reopened the PIPE because the demand is there from institutional investors who recognize what IQM has built — operational quantum computers, active customer deployments, and a commercial foundation that most of the quantum sector has yet to achieve. This capital positions us to scale aggressively into that lead.”
The securities being sold in the PIPE financing have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or applicable state securities laws and accordingly may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration with the SEC or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act and such applicable state securities laws.
This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the securities, nor shall there be any sale of the securities being offered in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.
More from HPCwire: IQM and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. Announce Public Filing of Form F-4 Registration Statement
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Finland Oy (IQM Quantum Computers) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum computers and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, national laboratories and enterprises worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM has filed an F-4 registration statement to the SEC with the intention to become the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Global Exchange in the U.S by merging with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ).
About Real Asset Acquisition Corp.
Based in Princeton, NJ, Real Asset Acquisition Corp. is a Nasdaq-listed (Nasdaq: RAAQ) special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The RAAQ team includes seasoned quantum computing experts with deep technical and industry experience.
Source: IQM Quantum Computers
The post IQM Secures Additional PIPE Investment to Advance Fault-Tolerant Quantum Roadmap appeared first on HPCwire.
Mathew Lawrence and Mark McVitie, previously seen as favouring Burnham and Streeting respectively, say change of direction is needed
Two of Labour’s leading policy figures, who put forward “manifestos” for Andy Burnham and a centrist grouping, are to join forces to help forge new ideas for a future government.
The authors of the two essays – which have previously been described as competing visions for a Burnham- or Wes Streeting-led government – said Labour urgently required a serious intellectual debate about its direction rather than simply a change of personality.
Continue reading...Police say four found dead in a home in Muscatine and two were shot elsewhere in apparent ‘domestic-related dispute’
A mass shooting in Iowa on Monday, in which six people were killed by a man who then took his own life, is being investigated as a so-called “family annihilation” in which the murderer and victims are closely related.
Police in Muscatine, about 50 miles (80km) south-east of Cedar Rapids, said 52-year-old Ryan Willis McFarland fatally shot four people at a home in the city, then killed himself on a riverfront trail as officers spoke to him.
Continue reading...The collection once belonged to the noble Beaufort-Spontin family, who were suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis.
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
Look, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, “almost too stupid to be true” of them all.
↫ Sid at 0xsid.com
…it’s “AI” isn’t it?
All the attacker needs to kick this off is your account username. Then, they hop on a VPN or proxy close to your city so Instagram’s security algorithms don’t suspect a thing. (You can quite easily get this from your public profile or “About” section or a hundred other ways.) Once it looks like the request is coming from the correct region, they tell the Meta support AI that the account is hacked and ask it to send the verification codes to an arbitrary email address they control.
↫ Sid at 0xsid.com
It’s “AI”.
Yes, all that you need to do to gain control over big, massively popular Instagram accounts is ask Facebook’s “AI” to send the verification codes to whatever email address you desire. That’s it. There’s no other steps, no other checks, no other verification. And the worst part is that this isn’t even a hack; this is “AI” working entirely as intended.
And these tools are now coding the Linux kernel, LLVM, systemd, PulseAudio, rsync, your browser, and so much more. What could possibly go wrong?
State attorneys general argue $1bn deal to terminate major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York is unlawful
Six states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.
In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1bn in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.
Continue reading...Can AI help science move faster without sacrificing openness and collaboration? How to measure ROI in AI for science? What are some of the most effective strategies for collaboration among national and regional initiatives? Those questions were at the center of a discussion at the TPC26 panel featuring senior representatives from some of the world’s leading research and computing organizations.
The session brought together Dario Gil of the Department of Energy, Katie Antypas of the National Science Foundation, Rick Stevens of Argonne National Laboratory, Satoshi Matsuoka of RIKEN, and Per Oster of IT Center for Science. Debra Goldfarb from AWS served as the moderator.
Over the course of the discussion, panelists explored how AI is changing the economics of scientific research. This includes the growing importance of international partnerships and the challenges of balancing collaboration with national interests. They also debated how governments and research organizations should measure the impact of billions of dollars in scientific infrastructure investments as AI becomes increasingly central to scientific discovery.
TPC26 panelists discuss the challenges and opportunities of applying AI to scientific research at scale.
Measuring AI’s impact on scientific research and discovery was one of the first themes to emerge during the discussion. While publications and scientific breakthroughs remain central indicators of success, the panel argued that they no longer provide a complete picture of the value created by large research programs.
As public investments in AI and advanced computing continue to grow, governments increasingly want to understand how those programs contribute to innovation and socio-economic competitiveness. However, the challenge is that those outcomes often take years to materialize.
That task may become even harder as AI spreads across education and industry. The broader the technology’s influence becomes, the more difficult it may be to quantify its impact using traditional measures.
The conversation then shifted from measuring scientific impact to actually improving it. The speakers argued that AI’s greatest contribution to science may not be any single breakthrough – but its ability to make researchers more productive and help them solve complex problems faster.
(Digineer Station/Shutterstock)
That theme was also clear in discussions about national competitiveness.
As populations age and research talent becomes increasingly scarce in some countries, simply adding more scientists to the workforce may no longer be enough to maintain innovation. AI could help researchers accomplish more with existing resources.
Productivity gains emerged as one of the most important benchmarks for evaluating the technology’s long-term impact. However, how to measure the true impact?
The panel suggested that success in AI for science should ultimately be measured by whether AI allows scientific challenges to be solved faster, at lower cost, with higher quality results, or other meaningful outcomes.
The discussion naturally evolved from productivity to collaboration. While AI may help researchers accomplish more with existing resources, panelists argued that many of the most important scientific challenges will still require countries to work together.
Participants also highlighted several factors driving the need for greater international collaboration. This includes the growing cost of AI infrastructure, the increasing complexity of scientific research, and the need for specialized expertise across multiple disciplines. These factors are making international collaboration less of an option and more of a necessity.
(Shutterstock AI Image)
Some of the examples discussed during the session included European initiatives, such as the EuroHPC, designed to coordinate investments across national programs while maintaining close ties to local research communities.
The conversation also focused on partnerships between the U.S., Europe, and Japan. The panelists admitted that competition remains an important driver of innovation. However, they argued that future success will depend on the ability to share expertise and build research capabilities together. They highlighted a key element for this to happen – alignment of priorities.
The speakers emphasized that meaningful collaboration requires more than state-level agreements and formal partnerships. It requires a more open system – one with shared infrastructure and interoperable systems.
When asked about how they see the landscape changing by 2030, the panelists shared that they envision a future where AI is far more deeply embedded in scientific research. And the only way that will happen is with broader access to advanced computing resources and stronger global partnerships.
A key theme with the panel was that AI has the potential to transform the way science is conducted, and in many ways it already is. However, measuring and improving the impact of AI and international collaboration will become even more important as the technology scales.
The post TPC26 Panel Explores AI’s Impact on Science, Productivity and Global Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
While 330 Ebola infections are confirmed in central Africa and huge challenges remain, hundreds more suspected cases "have been cleared out," the WHO says.
All England Club to confirm prize fund details on 11 June
Year-long dispute over increased pay at grand slams
The world’s leading players told Wimbledon officials that they expect a substantial increase in prize money at this year’s championships at a meeting at Roland Garros on Monday.
The All England Club is due to confirm details of this year’s prize fund at a press conference on 11 June, with the players calling for a bigger rise than the 7% increase last year as part of their push for the grand slam events to match the 22% of tournament revenue paid by the men’s Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association.
Continue reading...Prime Day lands earlier than ever this year. Here's everything you need to know before the chaos starts.
Government says it would prefer workers to be guaranteed between eight and 20 hours a week based on regular hours
Ministers are facing criticism from unions and employers after laying out details of plans for a guaranteed regular working week as part of a ban on zero-hours contracts.
Under rules poised to come into force next year, employers will have to offer staff, including agency workers, a contract that guarantees a minimum number of hours each week based on their regular working hours.
Continue reading...It can't match the performance of the original Tab S10, but it makes up for it with a lower price, solid features and a long battery life.
If Tom Steyer wins, that could send positive shock waves through the Democratic party
The next governor of deep-blue California will almost certainly be a Democrat. But what kind of Democrat?
The establishment favorite for overseeing the world’s fourth-largest economy, Xavier Becerra, has trod a traditional path. As governor, based on past performance, he would keep his party and the state on the rutted road of corporate-friendly liberalism.
Continue reading...I've tested a variety of tablets in various sizes and price classes to find the top options available.
At 160g, the $600 Motorola Edge might not weigh down your pocket at all. But it does skimp in a notable place.
WWDC could see Apple lean on VisionOS to push ideas it hasn't yet solved. It's time to break out of the immersive video shell.
These 12 new Smart Play-enabled Lego sets will be essential for Pokemon fans of any age -- but the kids will especially love battle mode.
I played the new Switch 2 remake for a little while and it's a pretty fantastic do-over.
Practice begun in 2012 under ex-governor Schwarzenegger could see two Republicans advance to general election
As Californians cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, voters can select any candidate among the long list of gubernatorial hopefuls, regardless of which party they have registered under.
The system was put in place under former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supported the open primary, or “jungle primary”, as a way to create more competition in races that Democrats won year after year. Schwarzenegger, who left office in 2011, was the last Republican elected to statewide office in California.
Continue reading...Medical professionals are entering the political arena as funding cuts, layoffs and RFK Jr’s vaccine skepticism spur them to action
When Abdul El-Sayed walked into Detroit’s health department in 2015, he found about 85 employees crammed into the back of a municipal parking building. The city had recently gone bankrupt and the 185-year-old institution was placed under state emergency management. His job was to rebuild it from practically nothing.
Within a year and a half, El-Sayed, who has a medical degree and PhD in public health, said he expanded the department to 220 staff members, opened a new headquarters and launched efforts that still define his reputation: free glasses for low-income schoolchildren; a legal fight that forced an energy company to invest $10m to improve air quality; lead testing in every school, daycare and Head Start facility in the city; and a peer mentor program for newly pregnant moms to address a surge in infant and maternal mortality.
Continue reading...There's a fresh way to browse book-inspired movies and shows on the streaming service.
The court extended for seven days its order stopping the opening of the U.S. field hospital. It also directed the Kenyan government to detail its deal with the U.S.
The U.S. and British militaries say one American soldier and one British soldier died during a training exercise in Iraq.
Markets take note as world’s biggest equity fundraiser bids to garner more money than three biggest-ever IPOs combined
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has said it plans to raise up to $80bn (£59bn) in equity to fund its vast artificial intelligence infrastructure investments, raising further questions over the economics of the AI boom.
The move, the largest equity fundraising ever according to analysts, includes a $10bn share sale to the US investment group Berkshire Hathaway, which was led until last year by Warren Buffett.
Continue reading...Knicks attempting to win their first title since 1973
NYC mayor is a keen fan of city’s sports teams
Zohran Mamdani’s relentless quest to corner the youth vote has continued with the news that New York’s mayor has repealed bedtime for the city’s children during the hometown Knicks’ NBA finals run.
The Knicks are in the finals for the first time since 1999, and the series against the San Antonio Spurs starts on Wednesday.
Continue reading...From India and Africa to Europe, countries not yet in the AI supply chain risk mass job losses, losing the tax revenue needed to deal with the tech’s fallout
The San Francisco Bay Area is in the midst of an AI frenzy that makes the California gold rush of the mid-19th century look like a scavenger hunt. Top programmers and developers are being offered compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to switch firms, while young engineers lucky enough to have joined leading AI startups early are contemplating retirement before age 35.
Driving up the Bayshore Freeway from San Francisco International airport into the city, you pass hyper-specific billboards advertising obscure AI applications seemingly aimed at absurdly niche audiences. How can that possibly be profitable? The answer is that in a city crawling with startups, getting the right software product in front of a founder whose company could soon be worth billions of dollars is far more lucrative than using billboard space to sell burgers or laundry detergent.
Continue reading...Tehran suspended ceasefire negotiations because of Israel’s escalating military attacks in Lebanon and U.S. strikes, an Iranian official told The Post.
Critics from both sides and legal scholars say ‘slush fund’ is scheme that will help January 6 rioters
A legal and political firestorm is growing over the $1.776bn “anti-weaponization” fund Donald Trump’s justice department has launched to pay alleged victims of “lawfare”, but that ex-DoJ officials and legal experts call “corrupt” and a “slush fund” for Maga allies that benefits the president.
Congressional critics from both parties and legal scholars have attacked the fund as an opaque scheme that will improperly help January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom said they intend to apply for grants, while echoing Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden’s administration was “weaponized” against them.
Continue reading...The Northlake Police Department issued a warning about a new scam at gas stations that is low tech, but effective.
I’m not sure any other first world nation would have this problem. Keir Starmer’s promise of growth, growth, growth appears to have shrivelled
We are in the TL;DR days of Keir Starmer’s government. The latest Mandelson files stimulate nothing so much as an old and now immortally memed response to an online screed: “I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.” In any case, to save you the bother, I can report that there are only two hideously iconic moments in the latest files. The first, obviously, is Pat McFadden’s already viral verdict on Labour’s endlessly self-preserving and vision-free backbenchers – and perhaps those much closer to the heart of government: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’” Yowch. New Liam Byrne note just dropped.
But the second is a much, much bigger problem than even that. The second might be the deadliest, most emblematic thing in the entire files dump. It is no more than 10 words but when I read it yesterday afternoon, I slumped back in my chair struck by the absolute state-of-the-nation of it. I thought: that’s it. That is literally the whole of where we are as a country, and the whole scale of the task of how on earth we get out of it. It is both staggeringly shocking and wholly predictable. I’m not doing a trigger warning or anything, but I will say it comes in the section of emails about Trump wanting to be gifted one replica ministerial red box during the state visit last year. Anyway, here goes: “the manufacturer gave a lead time of 8-10 weeks”.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Just days away from the opener, the tournament has yet to feel fully real for fans and even some players
Organizationally speaking, the 2026 World Cup began on 13 June 2018, when then-Fifa general secretary Fatma Samoura sternly instructed the delegates to cast their vote in a cavernous conference hall in Moscow.
Yet mere days away from the tournament’s kickoff in Mexico City, it doesn’t really feel like the thing is here yet. At least, not in the United States. And not in New York, the host city for the final.
Continue reading...The immigrants’ courage is matched only by the severity of their limited options. Ultimately, the pressure for change will have to come from the outside
At Delaney Hall, an ICE detention camp for captured immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, operated privately by the for-profit contractor Geo Group, the food is spoiled, and sometimes has maggots. Those who are imprisoned there, who have not been convicted of any crime, are forced to work for about $1 a day.
Conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary; there is only limited and inadequate medical care. Those inside say that they are being beaten and pepper-sprayed; the DHS has denied allegations of mistreatment, but the Geo group issued a statement last week admitting to at least one instance of “physical altercation” that included “limited use of chemical agents”.
Continue reading...Change backed by labor department would expose workers to greater financial risk, letter shared with Guardian says
Congressional Democrats are strongly opposing a US Department of Labor proposal that would allow 401(k) investments to include cryptocurrency, private credit and private equity assets, arguing the change will expose workers to riskier and more complex investments.
In a letter shared exclusively with the Guardian, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and House education and workforce committee ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia, argued the rule would expose an estimated $14.2tn of 401(k) retirement savings to volatile assets and would probably not withstand a challenge in court.
Continue reading...Companies aim to explore advanced industrial engineering and design applications leveraging Quantinuum’s high-fidelity quantum computing platform
TOKYO, June 2, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, announced today that it has signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, a recognized global leader in the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of electrical and electronic equipment and systems, to establish a framework for a strategic partnership aiming at accelerating the development of quantum computing applications for advanced industrial engineering and design.
The agreement creates a foundation for the companies to jointly identify high-impact industrial use cases and explore quantum and hybrid quantum-classical approaches for next-generation engineering workflows. Expected initial areas of focus include computer-aided engineering (CAE), such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and broader simulation and design applications utilizing logical qubit operations on Quantinuum’s quantum platform.
“We are pleased to begin this collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric as we work toward meaningful quantum utility to industrial engineering,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum. “By combining Quantinuum’s leading quantum computing capabilities with Mitsubishi Electric’s deep engineering expertise, we aim to address some of the world’s most complex design and simulation challenges.”
Under the envisaged partnership, Quantinuum would provide Mitsubishi Electric with access to its high-fidelity trapped-ion quantum systems and expert consultation on quantum algorithm development. Mitsubishi Electric would contribute domain expertise in electromagnetic field analysis, structural analysis, and thermal fluid simulation across a wide range of industrial applications such as factory automation, energy and public utilities, air conditioning, and building systems.
“We are delighted to initiate discussions with Quantinuum to advance a strategic quantum computing partnership under this MOU,” said Mikio Takabayashi, Senior General Manager, Information Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric. “By integrating manufacturing expertise with digital insights, we aim to evaluate the feasibility and potential applications of quantum technologies in industrial engineering, while generating new ideas and exploring use cases that have the potential to contribute to society and the environment.”
The MOU reflects a shared recognition that near-term engagement with quantum computing may create long-term strategic advantages as the technology continues its advance toward commercial adoption. The companies believe that organizations that act early will be better positioned to help shape use cases, build proprietary expertise and secure intellectual property rights, and help secure access to emerging quantum infrastructure and amid growing demand.
Through the MOU, the companies will evaluate opportunities for future collaboration that have the potential to accelerate technological innovation and create sustained value for global industry.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.[1] Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.
The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team hold PhDs or Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore.
For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
About Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Guided by its corporate philosophy, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) places sustainability at the core of its operations and values stakeholder trust—encompassing society, customers, shareholders and employees. In pursuing profitability, capital efficiency and growth, Mitsubishi Electric works closely alongside customers to develop value-added solutions that address today’s complex challenges while enhancing the company’s sustainable corporate value. Founded in 1921, Mitsubishi Electric has over a century of experience in delivering reliable, high-quality products and solutions. With over 200 group companies and approximately 150,000 employees worldwide, the company is a recognized global leader in manufacturing, marketing and selling electrical and electronic equipment and systems across a broad range of sectors, including public utility systems, energy systems, defense and space systems, factory automation systems, automotive equipment, building systems, air conditioning systems & home products, digital innovations, and semiconductor & devices. Mitsubishi Electric recorded consolidated revenue of 5,894.7 billion yen (U.S.$ 36.8 billion) in the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2026. For more information, please visit www.MitsubishiElectric.com.
Source: Quantinuum
The post Quantinuum Signs MOU with Mitsubishi Electric to Launch Strategic Quantum Computing Partnership appeared first on HPCwire.
Officials say law will improve migration management by allowing more deportations of undocumented people
EU politicians have promised to increase deportations of undocumented migrants, under a new law that critics say mimics elements of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown.
Finalising a key element of an overhauled EU asylum and migration system, politicians have agreed a regulation that will enable national authorities to raid people’s homes to enforce deportation orders.
Continue reading...TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 2, 2026 — NVIDIA has announced the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, the first open humanoid robot reference design built on NVIDIA Jetson Thor and the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open development platform.
Credit: Shutterstock
The reference design helps democratize frontier humanoid robotics research by providing access to advanced hardware and an open software stack without requiring proprietary platforms.
As demand for general-purpose humanoids accelerates, researchers still face a fragmented process spanning hardware integration, data collection, simulation, training, evaluation and deployment.
The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot unifies development by bringing a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot and Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands (the “body”), with NVIDIA Jetson Thor-powered onboard compute and Isaac GR00T software and workflows (the “brain”) into a single integrated reference design, helping research teams move faster from robot bring-up to skill development and real-world validation.
With NVIDIA’s compute and open software stack at the center, the reference design gives research teams a more unified, secure foundation for advancing humanoid robotics.
“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence.”
A State-of-the-Art Humanoid Robot for Physical AI Development
The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot is a state-of-the-art platform that brings the key building blocks for frontier humanoid research into one system, pairing a human-scale robot body with dexterous manipulation, sensing, control and onboard AI compute.
The reference design features:
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Provides a Full-Stack Platform for Humanoid Development
The NVIDIA software stack provides the development environment for simulation, training, evaluation and deployment, while researchers retain control of their robot data, training data, telemetry and logs.
The Isaac GR00T platform includes:
Its modular design lets robotics teams use the full platform or integrate selected capabilities into existing development pipelines, helping them scale humanoid development without rebuilding the same infrastructure for each robot or task.
The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T developer platform will also support the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, extending the same development approach to a robot widely used by researchers and humanoid developers across leading institutions.
Accelerating the Robotics Research Ecosystem
Leading research institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory will use this humanoid robot reference design to advance frontier humanoid robotics research.
“Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines,” said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Robot gives our students and collaborators an open humanoid reference design with dexterous hands, onboard AI compute and the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T development platform for creating, comparing and sharing robot behaviors on physical hardware.”
“ETH Zurich’s robotics research aims to advance machines that can move, perceive and manipulate reliably in the real world,” said Marco Hutter, professor at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference design gives our teams a state-of-the-art humanoid platform for collecting data, testing algorithms and validating robot behaviors with the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T development platform.”
“To make progress toward general-purpose robots, researchers need platforms that are both capable and broadly accessible,” said Deepak Pathak, cofounder and CEO of Skild AI. “A reference design lets more researchers participate in frontier humanoid research and move from ideas to experiments faster. This helps push the whole robotics research ecosystem forward.”
“At Ai2, our mission is to accelerate robotics through open science,” said Dieter Fox, senior research director at Ai2 and professor at the University of Washington. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Robot, built on NVIDIA’s open technologies, provides our researchers with the hardware and software components necessary to continue our work in broadly competent robotics.”
“Advancing robotics research for real-world problems requires humanoids that can move, interact and manipulate with precision in dynamic environments,” said Michael Yip, professor at UC San Diego and director of the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. “An integrated platform that connects robot hardware, data capture, policy learning and physical evaluation can help researchers accelerate loco-manipulation research and develop more useful real-world systems.”
NVIDIA Research will also use this reference design to advance Isaac GR00T open models, frameworks and hardware.
Availability
The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot will be available from Unitree in late 2026.
The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference workflow for Unitree G1 is expected to be available soon on GitHub and Hugging Face for robot developers.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Announces NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot for Academic Research appeared first on HPCwire.
Tennessee Republicans eliminated the state’s one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district after the supreme court gutted part of the Voting Rights Act
From the bridge on Poplar Avenue, above the railroad tracks that cut through the Memphis neighborhood of Binghampton, you can’t see the rupture at the heart of the city. You can’t see the people living rough under the bridge, either.
Days after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act, rendering ineffective a part that prevented radical discrimination, Tennessee Republicans redrew the state’s congressional maps last month – and eliminated its one Democratic, Black-majority congressional district.
Continue reading...There is little sign of clarity in the closing stretch of a campaign season for governor, Congress and LA mayor
Californians are frustrated and underwhelmed as they head to the polls to cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, where voters will eliminate all but two candidates in the volatile race for governor, the messy battle for Los Angeles mayor and a series of high-stakes congressional contests.
In the marquee race to succeed term-limited Democratic governor Gavin Newsom a trio of new surveys shows Democrat Xavier Becerra pulling slightly ahead as progressive Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton scrap for the second-place spot to advance in the state’s nonpartisan primary. Meanwhile, voters in Los Angeles remain divided over whether to stand by embattled mayor Karen Bass or to elevate her challengers.
Continue reading...A record 13 people were killed by bears in Japan last year, and there has been a jump in sightings as the animals emerge hungry from hibernation.
Senior independent director to handle process again after Albert Manifold’s shock departure last week
BP has backed Amanda Blanc to lead its search for a new chair for a second time, shrugging off investor concerns over her role at the company after the shock departure of its chair last week.
Some shareholders have voiced concerns over Blanc, the senior independent director at the British oil company, running the process again after Albert Manifold’s short stint as chair.
Continue reading...The environmental activist is gathering community concerns on AI data centers across the US.
Qayyum Balogun chased and attacked after gig ended in Grafton Street area following clash between rival groups, police say
A brawl in the heart of Dublin’s tourism district led to a nightclub promoter being chased and stabbed to death.
It happened at about 3am on Monday after a gig ended in the Grafton Street area of the city centre that is popular with tourists.
Continue reading...For 25 years, the Knicks have given just enough hope to keep me from walking away. Four wins from watching an NBA title with my father, I know why I stayed
The New York Knicks are four wins from hallelujah. I’ve been waiting for this since 2002. I was baptized in blown leads. Never, not once, considered leaving. This type of immolation requires explanation.
The Knicks have not won an NBA championship since 1973. Maybe I’m bad luck, or maybe losing is what shaped me.
Continue reading...Revealed: AIEF, a charitable affiliate of pro-Israel lobby Aipac, has spent millions on travel for lawmakers from both parties, even as voters’ support for Israel plummets
Dozens of members of Congress and Capitol Hill staffers have enjoyed lavish gifted travel to Israel funded by an Aipac affiliate since 7 October 2023, amid Israel’s expanding wars on its neighbors and despite plummeting levels of support among Americans for the country’s policies, a Guardian analysis has found.
Congressional ethics filings and other public records show the trips, led by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), revolved around one-sided briefings on Middle East politics and Israeli domestic and foreign policy. Lawmakers and their staffers from both parties met Israeli officials, military contractors and civil society figures, including Benjamin Netanyahu and advocates for the annexation of the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from Jerusalem.
Continue reading...Google has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 32 million sterile male mosquitoes in California and Florida over two years. The effort is part of the company's Debug program, which uses Wolbachia-infected males to reduce populations of disease-spreading Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Google cites a similar approach in Singapore that helped suppress mosquito populations and reduce dengue cases. The Guardian reports: As part of its successful "Debug" program, Google is tapping into its tech expertise to raise an army of sterile male mosquitoes to lower the number of illness-spreading bugs. Mosquitoes -- the world's deadliest animal -- kill more people than any other creature in the world every year by spreading lethal diseases such as dengue, West Nile virus, Zika, chikungunya and malaria. A notice (PDF) from the federal register shows the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reviewing Google's request to release up to 16 million mosquitoes annually, in Florida and California, over the span of two years. The EPA will decide whether to greenlight Google's request for an experimental use permit after a public comment period, which ends on 5 June. Male mosquitoes don't bite or carry disease. One of the main approaches Google is testing involves rearing male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria, called wolbachia, which stops them from having offspring with wild female mosquitoes. When an infected male tries to mate with a wild female, her eggs won't hatch; Google explains in a blog post: "the population gets smaller with each generation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Spokesperson claims Trump administration has ‘the most transparent war department in history’ despite ban on journalists using Pentagon facility. Also, more than 1,000 Marilyn Monroes descend on Palm Springs
Good morning.
In another apparent affront to press freedom from the Trump administration, journalists may no longer enter the Pentagon’s press office, which has been designated as a classified space.
How have the media reacted? After the defense department announced sweeping restrictions in October, many longtime reporters refused to agree and began turning over their press passes. The department then announced a “next generation of the Pentagon press corps” featuring 60 journalists from far-right outlets. The New York Times sued the Pentagon over those policies, which designated journalists as “security risks”, and a federal judge found in the Times’s favor in March.
What is making the fund controversial? The terms of the fund do not require the disclosure of how much is paid to whom. Chuck Schumer, the US Senate minority leader, said: “Trump’s nearly $2bn Maga slush fund is his most brazen act of self-dealing yet and one of the most corrupt schemes ever launched by a president.”
Continue reading...With concerns about PFAS at an all-time high, glass and ceramic air fryer baskets have become popular. Does that mean a nonstick basket will make you sick? Here's what you need to know.
A team of archaeologists at the iconic cathedral is digging straight down and back in time, to Roman Paris 2,000 years ago.
Attorney general to look at 21-year minimum term as Hampshire police and crime commissioner calls for review of religious knife laws
The attorney general’s office is considering whether the sentence given to a man jailed for murdering Henry Nowak should be reviewed, as the killer’s family apologised to the teenager’s relatives and the Sikh community.
Vickrum Digwa, 23, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.
Continue reading...Authorities in Iowa are investigating the fatal shootings of six people they believe were killed by a relative who took his own life when confronted by police.
At least 18 killed, dozens injured and others trapped under collapsed buildings after attacks on five Ukrainian cities
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked Donald Trump to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine after a devastating Russian attack killed at least 18 people and injured dozens more.
Russia launched 73 missiles and 656 drones at Ukraine overnight, according to the air force, including eight hypersonic Tsirkon missiles. The main targets were Kyiv, the central cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, and the eastern cities of Poltava and Kharkiv.
Continue reading...Kareem’s Daily Quote: Joan Didion, because third time’s the charm
Wemby: Everybody’s rooting for him, including me
Branding the White House: Why the Freedom 250 was never just a bad concert
Losing the Public: Who has lower approval ratings than the president?
Leverage Over Protection: How to survive the next solar event
What I’m Watching: Rafa
Jukebox Playlist: The Impossible Dream
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." - Joan Didion
I’ve been on a Joan Didion kick lately. You may’ve noticed. I find her essays not just well written and prescient, but strangely comforting, a favorite professor giving you her best take on a tough subject. She dropped that line at the very beginning of her book of essays entitled The White Album, and honestly, it’s been sitting in the back of my mind and refusing to budge for many years now.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” sounds romantic. More skeptically, it sounds like some pithy thought written in cursive on a canvas tote bag. A bedtime story your grandparents read; some wild cinematic ride; or those crazy, inspiring narratives that push us to chase our most improbable dreams.
But Didion wasn’t being romantic. The context of her work, the late 1960s and ‘70s, was a time when American culture was unraveling at the seams with political assassinations, cults, mass murders, Vietnam. And Didion was pointing out something darker than fairy tales. She was talking about survival.
Our universe can feel chaotic, occasionally terrifying. “Bad things happen to good people.” Tragedies hit us out of the blue on an otherwise mundane Tuesday morning. And because our human brains are hardwired to seek order, when face to face with a muddled middle or a shaky end, we panic.
So what do we do to keep from losing our minds? We invent a script. We look at messy life events and stitch them together into a neat little story with a visible through-line. We trot out that misused biblical quote that everything happens for a reason because the opposite is—as Vizzini would say in The Princess Bride—“inconceivable.”
We see this play out on a massive scale in our modern world every day, especially in how we consume the news and interact on social media. Take politics. (Please.) When a major event happens, no one looks at the raw data anymore so as to give us the most unbiased information possible. Instead, we get media spin. One side exults in a glorious return to law and order, while the other warns about a terrifying slide into authoritarianism.
We choose whatever story makes us feel the most safe and secure, then we cling to it like a life raft. Doesn’t matter if it’s 100% true. What matters is that it gives us a sense of control. It allows us to wake up in the morning, put our shoes on, and step out into a world that could otherwise feel completely overwhelming.
I think about this a lot when looking at how we handle personal grief or massive life changes. When relationships fall apart or a career path goes wonky, the pain is sharpest before we’ve “uncovered” the narrative, figured out the plot. Once we finally have our story—“that job rejection was actually a blessing in disguise, as it forced me to move to my favorite country in the world, Guam!”—the pain starts to dull. We’ve successfully packaged the chaos into a tale that makes sense, if not to everyone, at least to us.
There’s real danger here, though. Sometimes, we get so deeply entrenched in those invented stories that we ignore the reality staring us in the face. We stay in terrible situations because we’re in love with the story we came up with. Governments make disastrous foreign policy choices because they’re blinded by the story of their own noble cause. Then, when the raw facts finally break through our illusions, it can feel like the entire world is collapsing. But really, it’s just that our story could no longer bear the weight of truth.
Ultimately, telling stories isn’t bad or good; it’s just human. We need our narratives, our myths, our personal histories, the identities we’ve cobbled together with spit and sweat. Those identities are the scaffolding that keeps our sanity intact.
But scaffolding isn’t the actual building.
So, go ahead and lean on the stories that get you through the night, as long as you’re brave enough to look at the unedited truth by the time the sun starts to rise.
Congratulations to Victor Wembanyama, who led the San Antonio Spurs to victory over the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in a thrilling seven-game series to reach his first NBA Finals. I got to meet Wemby before his rookie season in 2023, during the NBA Summer League, and it was clear he was a remarkably intelligent and humble young man who had the world at his feet—so long as he stayed healthy. That’s always the challenge in the modern NBA, especially when you’re more than seven feet tall. The exponential stress placed on a big man’s body is something I know a little bit about, and one of my proudest achievements in the league was playing in 1560 games over the course of 20 seasons, an average of 78 of a possible 82 games a year. Just suiting up and stepping on the court every day is one of the biggest tests any player faces.
Wemby managed 71 games his rookie year and was the unanimous choice as the league’s Rookie of the Year. But his second season he had to be shut down after 46 games due to deep-vein thrombosis in the right shoulder. This season he played a solid 64 games, was a unanimous choice as Defensive Player of the Year, and now his Spurs are the overwhelming favorite to win their first NBA title since Tim Duncan retired. He’s doing all the right things, including spending part of last summer at a Shaolin Temple retreat in China, learning kung fu to control his center of gravity and resist the external forces of his fellow big men. He also studied meditation to focus his mind and master his concentration, essential elements of greatness in the NBA. I spent time studying Jeet Kune Do, starting when I was at UCLA almost 60 years ago, and it helped me improve my balance, speed, and reaction time. One of my teachers was the great Bruce Lee, with whom I co-starred in his final movie, Game of Death.
I’m beyond excited to see how Wemby does when the Spurs take on the New York Knicks, who are looking for their first title in more than 50 years, beginning tomorrow night. The oddsmakers have them as 2-1 favorites, and I tend to agree—so long as Wemby stays healthy, that is.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t send a shoutout to the tennis GOAT, Serena Williams, who announced her comeback Monday morning. Her first tournament in four years will be next week at the Queen’s Club in London, where she’ll be playing doubles with 19-year-old Victoria Mboko in preparation for a presumed run at Wimbledon. Serena is 44, but if anyone can conquer the tennis world at that age, she can. You know I’ll be rooting her on!
Chloe Bailey's new Peacock original thriller Strung is giving us all the creeps.
Peacock has the titles that'll make your movie night pop.
Kara Meredith can tell you the exact day her life turned upside down: Aug. 23, 2025.
She was at her home in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, caring for her 5-week-old son, when one of her daughters ran to tell her there was water all over the bathroom floor. Her husband, Mitch Meredith, wasn’t worried — until he saw the dark liquid bubbling up around the base of the bathtub. Mitch and his relatives worked all night trying to contain it. It was near dawn when his uncle said, “This is oil.”
The United States is the largest oil and gas producer in the world. All of that drilling produces hundreds of billions of gallons of toxic wastewater each year. For decades, energy companies have disposed of that briny fluid by shooting it back underground using high-pressure injection wells. But across Oklahoma, the fluid is spreading uncontrollably belowground, blasting out of old, unplugged wells, polluting land and contaminating drinking water.
In a new documentary from The Frontier and ProPublica, reporter Nick Bowlin investigates a scourge of oil field wastewater seeping into the lives of Oklahomans, about half of whom live within a mile of an oil and gas operation.
His reporting takes him to the headquarters of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency tasked with regulating oil and gas. The agency told Bowlin that it is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.” But as Bowlin continues to dig, he discovers he is far from the first one to raise the alarm about what’s happening in Oklahoma.
Watch the documentary here.
We’ve reported on oil and gas pollution contaminating drinking water, killing cattle and damaging property. We need your help to show how this affects people across the state.
The post Toxic Ground: How Oil Field Pollution Is Threatening Oklahoma appeared first on ProPublica.
Tons of recent releases, from blockbusters to independent films, are all streaming free this month.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Despite living close to farmland, students throughout Delaware often do not know how their fruit and vegetables actually get to their plates. A school gardening program that works with more than 60 schools throughout the state allows students to gain first-hand knowledge about where their food comes from and the work it takes to grow it.
On a humid afternoon in May, five Beacon Middle School students spent part of their afternoon racing back and forth through the school’s kitchen alongside the soft hum of salad spinners and running faucets.
The students were not rushing to turn in assignments, or even to wash dishes. Instead, they were cleaning and preparing spinach, carrots, snap peas, and rainbow chard. The veggies, grown in the school’s garden, would later be eaten during lunch.
“I think you’re having too much fun over there,” seventh-grade science teacher Jacqueline Kisiel told her Cape Henlopen School District students over the chatter.
Kisiel oversees her class’s participation with Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit organization, funded in part with state and federal dollars. The organization partners with more than 60 Delaware schools to build and maintain school gardens.
For the students participating in the program, the gardening work serves as more than an excuse to play in the dirt. It offers lessons about science and nutrition that helps students understand where their food comes from.
In recent months, Kisiel’s students have planted and harvested enough vegetables to feed their entire seventh-grade class.
For some students, like seventh grader Braxton, gardening work provides the opportunity to take on a leadership role with his classmates.
Kisiel assigned Braxton the role of the class’s “water boy.” He’s taken on the responsibility with enthusiasm. He reminds Kisiel when the plants need to be watered. He also guides classmates when it is their turn with the hose, letting them know when the veggies have had enough.
But his favorite part is seeing how much the plants have grown.
“Not everybody got to come out here to see how big they got through the process,” Braxton said.
When a school first connects with Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids, the first step is to determine how they will fund the garden, as not every school can fully support the program itself, Executive Director Lydia Sarson said.
Sometimes the nonprofit works with donors, funders, and granters to bring gardens to Delaware’s schools.
After the money portion is determined and a partnership between a school and an organization is established, Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids’ staff will visit the school to work with groundskeepers to help build the garden and order seeds.
Sarson said students can start planting seeds as soon as the garden is built.
The organization also has program coordinators who help schools with first-time gardens and train teachers to eventually run the garden themselves.
All of that work costs a lot of money.
And around the time that the Beacon students’ plants were sprouting from seeds, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids nearly $300,000 through a farm-to-school grant.
It was the organization’s third award from the federal program.
Sarson said the funds will allow her nonprofit to expand program coordinator training and programmatic support.
“We want to make sure that they are as ready for the teacher training for the garden support as possible,” Sarson said.
Although Booker T. Washington Elementary is less than 5 miles from a prominent Kent County farm, most students have never actually seen a farm before, school nurse Megan Holdridge said.
“So here, at least they’re able to see this is how it goes – farm to table,” she said.
Holdridge is not alone in her belief that students should know where their food comes from. Monica Dickens, a paraprofessional at the South Dover Elementary School, told Spotlight Delaware that many of her students believe fruits and vegetables come from grocery stores, not farms.
Dickens said when students see vegetables like lettuce growing, they ask her if it is “really really lettuce?”
The Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids program model is typically made for elementary schools serving students in kindergarten and fifth grade. Each of the grades has certain gardening tasks, with younger students taking on easier roles, such as planting, and older students participating in harvesting and composting.
Still, Sarson said the Healthy Foods for Healthy Kids program can be adapted to fit in schools that primarily focus on younger students.
At East Dover Early Childhood Center, which serves preschoolers and kindergarteners, the 5- and 6-year-olds are the garden leaders. Although their younger classmates are in charge of preparing the soil, the kindergarteners are studying the plants and writing down their own observations.
Toward the end of their observation day, the kindergarteners gather around their teacher Amy Stewart, and discuss what they saw in the garden.
“Are you guys going to be ready to harvest sometime soon?” Stewart asked the students. “Do you think they need a little bit more time?”
The students chant back that the plants do need more time before they can be plucked from the garden and used for their school lunches.
The kindergarteners turn in their papers with their plant observations and line up to return to the classroom.
There will be more time to harvest as the plants continue to grow.
The post Farm to table: Delaware students learn about planting, harvesting through school gardens appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The growing homelessness crisis – and how best to address it – has spurred particularly heated debates across the state over the last year. But inconsistencies when completing this year’s annual homeless population point-in-time count have raised questions about the true size of Delaware’s homeless population. Those questions could lead to policy roadblocks for lawmakers seeking to address the growing crisis.
An inconsistency in the counting methods for this past winter’s annual homelessness survey leaves Delawareans without a conclusive way to compare the current number of unhoused people in the state to that of previous years.
The annual Point-In-Time (PIT) Count – an attempt to tally up all the homeless people in the state on one winter night – normally includes data for both people staying inside shelters and those sleeping outside. This year’s Delaware PIT count, however, only counted sheltered individuals.
The count also normally occurs in January, but a severe winter storm when the survey was originally scheduled forced organizers to push the date back to late February.
A representative from the Housing Alliance of Delaware, the organization coordinating the annual count, said she “can’t remember exactly” why the organization did not count people outside. There was a blizzard warning days before the rescheduled count, which made traveling around the state to deliver supplies and prepare for the survey much more difficult, the representative said.
“It was like, ‘Oh my god, this just isn’t meant to be this year, we just need to let it go,’” Rachel Stucker, director of the Housing Alliance of Delaware, said of rescheduling and weather-related obstacles.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that each state complete a PIT count every January, but the count of individuals living outside only needs to be administered bi-annually. So Delaware is still in compliance with federal guidelines despite having missed the unsheltered count this year, Stucker said.
Despite the Housing Alliance’s data snafu, this year’s PIT count comes amid a period of amplified controversy over the state of homelessness in Delaware. Elected officials and residents alike, from Wilmington to Georgetown, have spent the past year debating the state’s homelessness crisis and the most effective ways to combat it.
Outdoor homeless encampments in Wilmington and Georgetown have drawn particular attention over the past year, but it is unclear whether the actual number of people in those encampments has increased.
And experts say the implications of this year’s missing numbers mean that specific trends about homelessness in 2026 remain hairy. Lawmakers also will be forced to make policy decisions based on outdated information.
Steve Metraux, a University of Delaware professor who studies homelessness, said he will not try to interpret the 2026 numbers, or use them to assess whether residents’ notion that homelessness is increasing in Delaware is true.
“You really can’t use it to say homelessness went up or homelessness went down, or different things like that,” Metraux told Spotlight Delaware.
The number of homeless people staying in shelters across the state recorded in the 2026 PIT count – 1,378 – decreased slightly from last year’s 1,418 counted shelter inhabitants. Notably, when the PIT was completed this year on Feb. 25 and 26, temperatures had begun to rise after a frigid January, reaching highs in the 50s, according to Accuweather.
While not counted this year, the number of unsheltered individuals has hovered between 150 to 250 people in recent years.
Last year’s PIT count was the highest on record since the survey began in 2008, excluding the COVID pandemic.
The count is often criticized as random and unrepresentative of the true number of homeless people, but is also considered the primary means of tracking homelessness across the country each year.
In addition to capturing the raw number of sheltered homeless individuals in Delaware, the PIT count collects demographic data about the individuals included in the survey.
These data points, such as age, gender, race and veteran status, remained fairly consistent from the 2025 count to this year.
Some of the more striking demographic takeaways from the 2026 count, Stucker said, include that 41% of adults surveyed reported having a disability and roughly half of respondents were either under 18 or over 55 years old, which is higher than previous years.
Black people tend to experience homelessness at disproportionately high rates in Delaware, according to the PIT count – they represented 65.5% of surveyed individuals, but just 24% of the state’s population.
Metraux, the UD professor, helps conduct the PIT count every year. But he also is open about some of the survey’s shortcomings and the difficulty in locating homeless people in wooded or remote areas. Metraux also said he does not draw specific conclusions about the demographic breakdowns from the PIT count because of the flaws in its methodology.
He will, however, compare “general trends” from the survey with other homelessness studies to assess their accuracy.
The distribution of the homeless population among Delaware’s three counties shifted slightly southward from New Castle County this year.
The percentage of homeless people counted in New Castle County decreased from 61% last year to 55% this year, while Kent and Sussex County saw slight increases from 17% to 20%, and 23% to 25%, respectively.
It is unclear how much of these percentage shifts can be attributed to the absence of the unsheltered count this year.
A look at the specific types of shelters shows there are far more year-round beds available in New Castle County, whereas most of the beds in Kent and Sussex counties are seasonal or overflow beds that are only an option during the cold weather.
In response to claims from Wilmington Mayor John Carney that other cities – most commonly Philadelphia – are sending homeless people to Delaware, the PIT count organizers added a question this year about where unhoused individuals in Wilmington are from.
The results, Metraux said, “pretty much debunked” Carney’s assertion that Philadelphia is sending homeless people on buses to Wilmington.
Of the 182 people surveyed at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, an overnight shelter in downtown Wilmington near the Christina Park encampment, only four people said they were homeless in Philadelphia before coming to Wilmington.
Forty-five percent of the individuals said they grew up in Wilmington, and another 24% reported becoming homeless after moving to Wilmington.
About one-third of the people said they moved to Wilmington while already experiencing homelessness – among that group, the majority moved from somewhere else in New Castle County or the southern part of the state.
“Even with the limitations of the data, it was still pretty unequivocal – homelessness in Wilmington is a problem that originated in Wilmington,” Metraux said.
When asked about the PIT count indications that few homeless people are coming from Philadelphia, a spokesperson for Carney’s office defended his stance.
“This data only captures a portion of the unhoused community in Wilmington and is particularly likely to focus on a more localized population,” Caroline Klinger, the spokesperson, said.
Klinger added that people at a shelter, like the Sunday Breakfast Mission, are more likely to have been in Wilmington long enough to be connected to emergency housing as opposed to individuals who have just arrived in the city and may still be living unsheltered – and thus were not included in the count.
The PIT count this year only asked the question about where people are from in Wilmington, but organizers said they would like to extend it across the state next year.
A survey conducted last fall by Metraux and Judson Malone, the director of Springboard Delaware – a homelessness service provider in Georgetown – suggested similarly that the majority of unhoused people in the Sussex County seat were from Georgetown or another location in southern Delaware.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
The post Delaware homeless count snafu muddles true population size appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Former frontbencher launches most significant internal criticism of $368bn Aukus deal since ALP national conference in 2023
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Australia needs a backup plan for the Aukus submarine agreement, Labor MP Ed Husic has warned, arguing sluggish US production and the “transactional nature” of the Trump administration have put the multibillion-dollar defence deal at risk.
The defence minister, Richard Marles, this week agreed to US requests for Australia to accept three second-hand Virginia-class nuclear submarines, rather than a combination of new and old vessels.
Continue reading...Social Democrat stays on for third consecutive term as PM and will outline key policies by the end of Tuesday
Denmark’s new government is preparing to formally present its political programme after Mette Frederiksen negotiated a third consecutive term as prime minister, this time at the head of a four-party, left-leaning minority coalition.
Announced late on Monday, the agreement between Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, the Social Liberals, the Green Left and the centrist Moderates ended two months of uncertainty after March elections in which 12 parties won seats in parliament.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 2, No. 617.
My bacon routine got a serious upgrade when I started making it in this versatile kitchen appliance.
Last May, as President Donald Trump settled into his second term, the Justice Department walked away from federal efforts to reform troubled police departments across the country.
Officials announced their decision to not only drop lawsuits against two cities for unconstitutional policing but also retract findings of abuse in a half dozen other places.
Some of those jurisdictions celebrated the news. But not Louisville, Kentucky, a blue city in a red state whose elected leaders used the occasion to make their own announcement.
After the federal withdrawal, Mayor Craig Greenberg said Louisville would be “moving ahead rapidly” with reforms to its police department, which had been found to have a pattern of unconstitutional policing. In fact, the city would be adopting a version of the reform agreement Louisville had previously negotiated with the Biden administration and hiring an outside monitor to oversee its progress.
“I made a promise to our community,” the mayor said, “and we are keeping that promise.”
There was much to do. In 2023, federal investigators had found that the city’s police routinely discriminated against Black residents, inappropriately used police dogs against people, and failed to properly respond to people facing mental health challenges.
The mayor said the local reform plan would allow city leaders to correct these problems and accomplish key goals, perhaps even faster than he outlined.
But police records obtained by ProPublica show just how entrenched the issues were. Two years after the DOJ revealed its initial findings, while the Greenberg administration was charting its path to reform in early 2025, officers were still engaging in the problematic policing practices called out by federal investigators, according to the records. Most notably, police officials were failing to thoroughly review officers’ use of force.
Today, one year into the city’s reform effort, community leaders and civil rights advocates say the results have been mixed.
For example, the city has expanded a pilot program to direct some mental health calls away from police and send them instead to mental health specialists. Yet a panel created to review the department’s mental health practices overall only met for the first time in March, almost a year after it was announced, and it isn’t scheduled to issue recommendations for another year.
“What we do as a city, we make things look good on paper, but then in the application of it, it plays out so differently,” said Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Louisville city council member and a candidate for mayor looking to unseat Greenberg later this year. “And what plays out on the ground in day-to-day interactions is different.”
Underscoring the stakes for Louisville residents is the March fatal shooting of a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall, who was experiencing a mental health crisis when police gunned her down in her own apartment.
Experts in mental health told ProPublica that the incident is emblematic of practices flagged by the Justice Department more than three years ago. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Paul Humphrey, however, said the department should not be judged by one shooting given that it responded to 3,200 mental health calls last year and “only about eight resulted in any injury to anyone.” The incident is still under investigation.
In the aftermath of the killing, Greenberg’s office is exploring ways to pair mental health professionals with police in such situations — an idea that, critics note, was explicitly recommended in 2023 by the Justice Department. Today, the city sends either mental health professionals or police to calls, but does not have them respond together on critical incidents, including when a weapon is present.
Greenberg declined multiple requests for interviews, but his press secretary, Matt Mudd, defended the reform work, which he said was now being overseen by an independent monitor. “The Louisville Metro Police Department is in a much better place than it was three years ago,” he told ProPublica in an email. “That work is ongoing, and we are partnering closely with the community to ensure progress continues.”
Humphrey, the police chief, noted that police reform can often take years to achieve under federal oversight. By comparison, Humphrey told ProPublica, “I think we’re going at a really good clip.”
Today, the city stands as a test case for how effectively a community can implement police reform without a court order and the accountability that comes with federal intervention.
“There’s no enforceability by law,” said Ed Harness, Louisville’s first-ever inspector general. He is charged with investigating misconduct in the police department. “Now whether reform can happen voluntarily, with compliance and supervision by elected leaders, kind of is the question that will be answered in Louisville.”
Policing in Louisville has been under a national microscope since March 2020, when plainclothes officers broke down the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment serving a no-knock search warrant. Her boyfriend thought they were robbers and fired a single shot at them. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was killed as police returned fire. Her case, along with that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, helped spark a national reckoning over race and policing, and attracted the scrutiny of the Justice Department.
In 2023, just months after Greenberg took office, the DOJ published a scathing report on the police department’s pattern of misconduct and constitutional violations. By December 2024, the city and the DOJ announced the details of a court agreement, known as a consent decree, that would set requirements for improvements and be overseen by an outside monitor and a judge. Greenberg touted the city’s commitment to “aggressively implement police reform.”
In the following months, however, the questionable police behavior continued. Police records first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and later by ProPublica through a public records request detail nearly 50 use-of-force incidents from December 2024 through April 2025. In more than half of them, officers engaged in actions that the Justice Department had noted in 2023 were either violations of people’s rights, like using choke holds and allowing police dogs to continue biting people who no longer posed a threat, or otherwise needed improvement, like how supervisors reviewed such incidents.
In one case, a suspect spit on an officer, who then performed a “takedown” of the man while he was already in handcuffs. In another, multiple witnesses said an officer put his knee on a man’s back while he lay on the ground, a tactic that has been widely condemned since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck in 2020. In both those instances, as well as others, the department’s internal review unit found the uses of force to be appropriate. According to the records, the review unit failed to discuss alternative approaches or completely review all uses of force by the officers involved.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director for the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said her team requested the records in Louisville and six other jurisdictions to assess whether they corrected the problems flagged by the DOJ in its investigations.
In Louisville, she said her organization expected oversight to be extra diligent given the DOJ’s criticism of what it called “biased” internal investigations.
“We were troubled by a review process that seemed more concerned with protecting the agency from liability than with protecting the public from further abuse,” she said.
The Louisville police department did not respond to ProPublica’s inquiry about the records and the use-of-force review process.
Last May, just five months after the consent decree was signed, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, announced the department was dropping the case against Louisville, ending what she called the “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”
The same day, Greenberg unveiled his administration’s reform plan, dubbed the Community Commitment, and pledged to hire an independent monitor to oversee the police department’s progress. The document carried over much of the federal reform plan, but civil rights advocates and community leaders noticed it differed in key ways. Most notably, it had no mechanism for enforcement in the event of a disagreement between the monitor and the police department. Under a federal consent decree, a federal judge makes the final decisions on such disputes and can force departments to implement corrective actions. Louisville’s plan simply calls for the parties to have continued talks.
That makes the policy initiative vulnerable to the vagaries of politics or local budgeting, critics say.
“That’s the biggest risk here, that it will just prove to be too difficult, too expensive, not politically advantageous for this or subsequent administrations to continue this effort,” said Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law who spent years investigating police misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “That is one advantage that consent decrees offer, that they have the oversight and threat of a federal judge, who can make contempt findings if people are not doing what they said they would do. You don’t have that here.”
Because of that, several community leaders want to enshrine key parts of the agreement in local law. “We need an ordinance that makes sure the reforms from the consent decree are done regardless of administration,” said Kungu Njuguna, a lifelong resident of Louisville and a policy strategist for the Kentucky ACLU.
Ericka Seward, a community activist who has been campaigning for police accountability since Taylor’s killing in 2020, said the current reform plan requires residents to trust the police to make change — a difficult task, she said, given the department’s history of discriminatory policing.
Seward, who is Black, said she watched officers manhandle her 21-year-old son in the parking lot of his apartment complex in 2022. He had called her during a traffic stop for what police said was erratic driving, and she drove to the location. After patting him down, officers were about to let him go with a warning when he argued that the stop was dubious and told the officers he would be complaining to members of the department’s leadership who his mother knew through her work as an activist, Seward said. The officers then physically pulled him back to their car and told him they were now going to issue him tickets, she said. Her son was cited for careless driving and failure to signal.
“It was scary to me, it was scary to him,” Seward said. “Because we know what they’re capable of.”
Seward filed a complaint with the city inspector general’s office. According to its report, the lead officer defended his actions, telling investigators that, because Seward’s son was accusing him of not having a valid reason for the stop, he “became concerned and wanted to document the stop to show that he did have probable cause.”
While Harness’ office found no wrongdoing on that count, it did note that the officer couldn’t say how fast Seward’s son was driving. It also found that the department did not have a policy prohibiting retaliation and recommended that one be adopted, according to records. The department has since done so, though that too has drawn criticism from Harness’ office, which said its recommendation was “largely ignored.” The revised policy only applies to retaliation after a complaint has been filed, the inspector general’s report said, meaning it does not cover retaliatory policing in response to “citizens’ words, actions or demeanor.”
In its 2023 investigation, the Justice Department found that Louisville police officers had “threatened and retaliated against civilian complainants.” It also found that Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be cited by police for minor violations — part of a pattern of discriminatory policing that investigators said often led to unnecessary and tense interactions between police and the public, sometimes resulting in arrest. The DOJ noted racial disparities in enforcement for loitering, littering and having dark window tinting.
The federal consent decree dictated that those kinds of offenses receive warnings unless an officer could articulate why that approach was “insufficient” to deal with the issue. That change, however, is not in the city’s reform plan.
Humphrey said that leaders determined the measure wasn’t in the best interest of the city or its officers. He also said police are trained on how to best determine the right course of action on those low-level infractions.
The city did incorporate into its plan many of the DOJ’s recommendations for handling people with mental health issues. Such incidents made up nearly a quarter of the use-of-force cases investigators reviewed, according to the federal report, “and a large share of those incidents involved at least one unreasonable use of force.”
The city’s plan included a number of measures, starting with the formation of a behavioral health council to review incidents and recommend changes to policies and practices with the goal of “reducing the number of police encounters with people with behavioral health disabilities involving unnecessary use of force and reducing the severity of the force when force is required.”
The council, however, didn’t have its first meeting until March — about 10 months after the mayor’s announcement. Police officials told ProPublica that city leaders decided to first hire the independent monitor and develop an implementation plan before putting the behavioral council to work.
Four days after the group had its first meeting, Louisville police responded to a 911 call about Katelyn Hall, the 28-year-old woman in mental health crisis. She had locked herself in the bathroom and, according to her roommate, had cut her wrists and ingested cleaning fluids, and was behaving erratically. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had previously attempted suicide.
Within 13 minutes of their arrival, police shot and killed her.
“No one wants to see an outcome like this,” Humphrey said in early April during a press conference. “We have already begun to use this incident to work on improving how we handle these situations. We owe that to everyone involved and to the city.”
But mental health and law enforcement experts who reviewed police body camera footage of the incident told ProPublica that officers demonstrated some of the same problematic behaviors first identified by the Justice Department more than three years ago.
The federal investigators found Louisville officers “frequently fail to give people experiencing crisis time or space” and “do not engage in verbal de-escalation for enough time to be successful.” In fact, officers often made the situation more tense and confrontational, which would lead to “increased safety risks to themselves and the person in crisis and increased the likelihood of the use of force.”
In Hall’s case, the officers started out asking questions like, “What’s going on?” and, “Can you talk to me?” while Hall screamed at them to let her die.
Police spent about six minutes talking with her before a member of the Emergency Medical Services unit, worried that Hall had cut her wrists, suggested forcing the door open. The team spent the next three minutes breaking the door’s lock and popping one of its hinges, during which time the officers pushed themselves against the door attempting to get into the bathroom.
Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called it a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, but stressed that the six minutes of discussion wasn’t enough time and the police should have considered alternatives to forcing the door open.
For example, Hall’s mother, Rebecca, was on scene and identified herself to first responders, assuming they would ask her to help talk with her daughter. They never did.
Mariela Ruiz-Angel, the director of alternative response initiatives for Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, said Hall’s mother could have been a “game changer.”
“We’ve used that tactic multiple times to try to find the loved one that makes the most sense, to be like, ‘Hey, I’m here, Mama’s here,’” she said.
At one point, an officer tells Hall, “I want you to live,” and that her friends and family are worried about her.
The responders designated which officers would use their hands, a Taser and a firearm in preparation for Hall’s exit from the locked room. But Gandarilla-Javier, who spent more than 10 years as a New York Police Department officer and teaches classes on trauma-informed policing and crisis intervention, told ProPublica that the plan overheard on the video needed to be more detailed, with an explicit discussion about how to safely subdue Hall if she were to advance on them.
When Hall ultimately opened the door and walked toward the officers, she was holding a broken piece of toilet. Within five seconds, she was shot by two officers, including the one who minutes before had told her he wanted her to live. Had the officers planned better, the outcome may have been different, Gandarilla-Javier said.
Louisville Metro Police Deputy Chief Emily McKinley told reporters in April that “each encounter poses a unique and often chaotic challenge,” and that in the Hall case, “If you look at the porcelain, I think it could be an extremely lethal situation” for the officers. Asked whether officers could have instead tackled Hall, she declined to answer, saying such questions would be part of the investigation into the shooting.
Hall’s mother said police could have done more.
“My daughter deserved more than eight minutes of their time,” Rebecca Hall said through tears in an interview. “She needed kindness and she needed somebody back there” to let her know that they cared. Hall continued: “She didn’t get that in that moment. I know she definitely didn’t need bullets. … She just needed help.”
Mental health advocates like Khalilah Collins have been pushing for years for the department to allow mental health professionals to lead the response to such calls. In fact, she was part of a group of professionals who, at the city’s request, researched alternative responses in 2021. The study was part of the reforms that the city pledged to undertake in a lawsuit settlement after Taylor’s killing, but a nonpolice response failed to win the support of city leaders and wasn’t adopted.
“We refuse to build what we need for people,” Collins said. “We don’t want the police there. The police don’t want to be there. They’re not trained to be there, but we refuse to do anything else.”
To be sure, the department did create a program to divert some calls to mental health professionals, but that did not happen in this case because police determined Hall was “armed with glass.” Louisville police policy dictates that if a weapon is present, mental health professionals cannot respond to the calls.
In the wake of Hall’s death, though, Greenberg and Humphrey say they are now exploring whether police and mental health professionals should be allowed to respond together. According to Mudd, the mayor’s spokesperson, one option being discussed involves using “new technology, like cameras, to add behavioral health providers to situations that require their expertise without potentially sacrificing their safety.”
When ProPublica asked Mudd if there was a timeline for making a decision, he said only that the city and the police department were “moving with urgency.”
The post After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform, This City Stepped In. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall. appeared first on ProPublica.
European officials say Moscow's escalating aggression is a result of increasing difficulties that Russia is facing militarily and economically.
Trump and Republicans are not interested in combating fraud and corruption. They are interested in ransacking the public good for their own profit
Donald Trump called me “crooked as hell” as he spread lies about the fraud that occurred in Minnesota. Any keen observer will recognize the pattern of inciting hostility against me and the Somali community whenever his own failures and corruption catches up to him. He routinely reaches for the same tired playbook of lies, racism and deflection.
This is not a new strategy. Lyndon B Johnson once said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” This is exactly what Trump’s doing: demonizing Black and brown people so that we pay less attention to him picking our pockets in broad daylight. He uses fraud as a political cudgel while protecting his donor base and enriching himself.
Continue reading...Texas Children’s Hospital agreed to create the clinic and to ban “sex-rejecting” procedures as part of a legal settlement with the state. A copy obtained by The Post details how the clinic must be run.
Nick Thomas-Symonds defends ‘embarrassing’ Whatsapp messages between Pat McFadden and Mandelson
Labour MPs are not looking to raise taxes to fund more benefits, the Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds has said.
In messages between the work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, and Peter Mandelson released on Monday, McFadden wrote: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’ They’re asking the wrong questions.”
Continue reading...Mackenzie Swift entered the River Don in Mexborough on Saturday evening and failed to emerge
A body has been found in the search for an 11-year-old boy who went missing after entering the River Don in South Yorkshire on Saturday.
Mackenzie Swift entered the river in Mexborough at around 8pm and failed to emerge, prompting a police search.
Continue reading...Emily Thornberry criticises Israel’s ‘staggering’ sense of impunity and rebukes Donald Trump for abandoning Gaza
The UK government has let down Palestinian people and failed to make it economically impossible for Israel to continue to act with impunity in the West Bank and Gaza, the Labour chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Emily Thornberry, has said.
She accused her own government of lacking ambition and wringing its hands on the Palestinian crisis, and she chastised Donald Trump for declaring a ceasefire in Gaza and then walking away, leaving Gazans to live in rubble.
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Continue reading...TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 2, 2026 — MSI is showcasing a comprehensive portfolio of AI and data center infrastructure platforms at COMPUTEX 2026 (Booth #J0605a), with liquid-cooled infrastructure at the center as increasing compute density drives greater thermal demands across modern data centers. The lineup spans liquid-cooled ORv3 rack-scale architectures for high-density AI infrastructure, NVIDIA MGX platforms for scalable AI training and inference, DGX Station desktop AI supercomputer for local AI development, and DC-MHS multi-node and enterprise server platforms for modular cloud and enterprise deployments.
Liquid-Cooled ORv3 Rack, 6U NVIDIA MGX Rack, NVIDIA DGX Station
“Scaling AI infrastructure now requires a balance between compute performance, thermal efficiency, and deployment flexibility,” said Danny Hsu, General Manager of MSI’s Enterprise Platform Solutions. “MSI’s AI platform portfolio is designed to support AI deployment from rack-scale infrastructure to local AI development.”
Liquid-Cooled and Air-Cooled Rack Architectures
MSI expands its infrastructure portfolio with OCP ORv3 liquid-cooled and standard EIA air-cooled rack architectures for modern data centers. The ORv3 platform targets high-density AI and cloud infrastructure, while the EIA architecture supports standardized deployment within existing enterprise environments.
The 21″ 44OU ORv3 Liquid-Cooled Rack Architecture supports up to 100kW deployments with an integrated Liquid-to-Liquid Coolant Distribution Unit (L2L CDU). Configured with 28x 1OU2N Open Compute multi-node systems, the wider 21″ ORv3 design enables higher compute density, efficient liquid cooling, and 48V busbar power distribution for large-scale AI infrastructure.
The 19″ 48RU EIA Air-Cooled Rack Architecture supports standardized deployment within existing data center environments. Configured with 16x 2U2N multi-node systems, the platform enables scalable cloud and enterprise infrastructure integration within standard EIA racks, with both AMD EPYC 9005 and Intel Xeon 6 platform options for deployment flexibility.
NVIDIA MGX AI Servers and NVIDIA DGX Station
MSI’s NVIDIA-based AI infrastructure portfolio spans both GPU-accelerated AI servers and desktop AI supercomputing platforms. Built on NVIDIA MGX architecture, the AI server portfolio supports scalable AI training, inference, and HPC deployments across air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations. Built on NVIDIA DGX Station architecture, the desktop platform delivers data-center-class AI computing for local development, fine-tuning, and inference workloads.
The NVIDIA MGX server portfolio includes 2U, 4U, and 6U GPU platforms designed for AI training, inference, HPC, and data-intensive workloads. Supporting NVIDIA H200 NVL, NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000, and NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, these systems provide scalable GPU configurations across modern AI infrastructure environments, while extending MSI’s collaboration within the NVIDIA MGX ecosystem toward next-generation Vera Rubin rack-scale platforms.
The XpertStation WS300 on NVIDIA DGX Station architecture is a desktop AI supercomputer designed for AI development, fine-tuning, inference, and data-intensive workflows with Windows support for local AI application and agent development. Powered by the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip, the platform supports up to 748GB coherent memory and 7.1TB/s HBM3e bandwidth for high-speed CPU-GPU communication and large AI model processing. Dual 400GbE networking via NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNICs and liquid-cooled thermal design further enable data-center-class AI computing within a compact deskside form factor.
DC-MHS Open Compute and Core Compute Multi-Node Platforms
MSI offers both 21″ Open Compute and 19″ Core Compute multi-node platforms for hyperscale and cloud data centers. Built on DC-MHS architecture, these systems enable modular platform integration, scalable infrastructure deployment, and simplified platform transition across modern compute environments.
The 21″ Open Compute portfolio includes air-cooled and liquid-cooled 1OU2N, 2OU2N, and 2OU4N platforms optimized for high-density AI and cloud infrastructure with 48Vdc busbar power distribution.
The 19″ Core Compute portfolio spans 2U2N and 2U4N platforms for enterprise and cloud infrastructure deployment within standard 19″ EIA rack environments.
Enterprise Platforms Across DC-MHS and Standard Architectures
MSI’s enterprise platform portfolio spans DC-MHS enterprise servers, modular HPMs, and standard enterprise motherboards for cloud and enterprise infrastructure deployment. The portfolio includes GPU-ready server platforms, modular DC-MHS platform integration, and standard server motherboards designed for flexible deployment across enterprise and workstation environments.
DC-MHS Enterprise Servers:
DC-MHS HPMs and Standard Enterprise Motherboards:
Supporting M-DNO Type-2, M-DNO Type-4, and M-FLW form factors, the DC-MHS HPM portfolio provides modular DC-MHS platform integration, while standard server motherboards support mainstream enterprise and workstation platforms.
Learn more about MSI’s Enterprise Platform Solutions here.
Source: MSI
The post MSI Highlights Liquid-Cooled AI Infrastructure and NVIDIA Platforms at COMPUTEX 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
South African police confirm two deaths of Mozambicans in Mossel Bay as anti-immigration violence sweeps country
Mozambique said five of its nationals were killed in “xenophobic attacks” in South Africa at the weekend and efforts were under way on Tuesday to repatriate hundreds of others.
However, the South African police confirmed only that two Mozambicans had died in violence in the southern coastal town of Mossel Bay, the first killings to be officially linked to a wave of anti-migrant protests sweeping the country.
Continue reading...Texas is adding another large solar project as ERCOT electricity demand rises. According to Electrek, Vesper Energy has secured $236 million in financing for its 201 MW Nazareth Solar farm in Swisher County, which will be capable of generating enough electricity for about 53,000 homes. The project is expected to begin construction in June 2026 and come online in fall 2027. From the report: Nazareth Solar will sit on more than 2,400 acres of private land and generate enough electricity to power around 53,000 homes annually. The project will neighbor Vesper's Hornet Solar (pictured above), another large solar farm the company developed. ERCOT faces growing demand from population growth, industrial expansion, and power-hungry data centers. And despite political attacks on renewables, solar continues getting built in this red state because it's one of the fastest and cheapest ways to add new electricity to the grid. Vesper says the project will bring new tax revenue to local schools, infrastructure, and emergency services, along with construction jobs and long-term operations roles. Participating landowners are also expected to receive long-term lease income from the solar farm.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It could be the puff of steam from a manhole or a horse wandering into view – whatever the ‘moment’, the iconic US photographer has always had a camera in hand to capture it
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: Its software is used from health services to militaries. But controversies and criticism of the $375bn company are leading some to ask if Palantir is too powerful
Good morning. The Peter Mandelson story keeps unfolding. Peter Walker explains here what is in the latest release of documents, and Henry Dyer takes a look at the key papers missing from the latest disclosures. Today we are covering another major story: Palantir.
Few companies attract controversy more than Palantir. Since the pandemic, the US data analytics company has grown voraciously, using its AI-driven software to make sense of intractable datasets for customers around the world. For the NHS, it analyses patient records; for the US military, it’s focused on targets in Iran. Palantir’s products are widely used, with the business now worth $375bn.
UK politics | Peter Mandelson was receiving sensitive security briefings about the Foreign Office’s work, and was in discussions with the head of MI6, before he had completed the developed vetting process, documents reveal.
Ukraine | Russian air raids on major Ukrainian centres including Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv killed at least five people and wounded dozens by early morning on Tuesday, authorities said.
Environment | More than a million jobs, higher wages, nearly half a trillion pounds in investment in the pipeline – the UK’s green economy is powering ahead, according to research by the country’s leading business organisation.
US news | Donald Trump is reconsidering whether to keep pressing for a $1.8bn fund to compensate his allies, a person familiar with his thinking said, as the justice department paused the program to comply with a court order.
UK news | Sir Alan Bates has said that the schemes set up to compensate post office operators over the Horizon IT scandal have been an “utter disaster” and that the government should not be involved in running them.
Continue reading...I’ve heard of these and want to do a mod but have no idea how nor do I think I have the time. Are there people who will do these mods for commission. I have a one wheel XR
Was riding last night and the board just randomly turned off. Not going fast or calling for heavy power, just dropped. Anyways, after the tumble i tried to turn my board back on and got nothing😭. Got it home, tore it down, and see the blue and green light come on but the ubox nrf, and can port are not getting power. Reinstalled 6.06 fw, still nothing. If i plug directly into the blutooth or rgb board they communicate and allow changes. Reinstalled all packages, footpad sensor is working, motor sensor is working, but still cant get it to turn on without being connected usb. Im assuming so sort of spike might have reset most settings but cant get it to work. Anyone have this issue? When i turned on the board getting home, refloat was showing a 300 percent charge state, after doing the motor calibration that was corrected. The issue is i cant get the bluetooth module to wake up with the ubox , and the can network is not working, local connections only. No visible damage too the power board or the main ubox board. No burning smell, hot spots observed. Any help would be appriciated. Thanks
New PM Péter Magyar calls policy a sign of ‘social justice’ after years of political loyalty being rewarded with economic opportunity
In a dimly lit television studio, one of Hungary’s richest men is on the verge of tears. It is early May, weeks after the general election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, and the advertising mogul Gyula Balásy has an announcement to make.
Balásy tells the interviewer that he has just surrendered his businesses to the state, along with a chunk of his private savings. He has even brought along a notarised deed – a legal document setting out the change of ownership.
Continue reading...Looking to VESC my XR that has a bad BMS, but not finding good info about placing a US-bound order from Spintend in the PRC. Basically planning to buy a Ubox even if requires a good amount of DIY, all in the hopes of keeping costs in check.
For those of you that have ordered Uboxes and shipped to the US—can you share the % paid in tariffs, the brokers fee, and any other costs that would not apply to buying locally in the US?
Tehran’s new strategic calculus.
The stark choice between occupation and disarmament.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 2.
The pace of scientific discovery is rapidly increasing thanks to AI and its capability to not only analyze data in real time but to suggest improvements to experiments as they’re running, the Energy Department’s Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil said during a keynote address at the TPC26 conference today in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We’re no longer analyzing just the results. We’re increasingly shaping today’s experiments as they unfold,” Gil said. “In the past, a scientist would run an experiment, collect data, and analyze it later. Now the analysis happens as the experiment runs. Models interpret data in real time. They identify signals, adjust parameters, and guide the next step before the first one is even complete. So instead of running one experiment and learning later, we’re running many iterations inside a single session.”
(Credit: DOE)
For example, it used to take researchers at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory days or weeks to interpret the results of experiments. But now, thanks to the power of AI, researchers at the Stanford University-managed can interpret the data immediately after the subatomic particles are smashed on the two mile course, the DOE undersecretary said.
“Particle physicists and material science workflows now incorporate AI-driven analysis and control at scales and speeds that were out of reach only a few years ago, enabling immediate decisions in its ultra-fast experimental environment,” Gil told his GTC26 audience, gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for three-and-a-half days of education, tutorials, and keynotes.
Another AI success story comes out of Brookhaven National Laboratory, where human scientists over the course of 50 years painstakingly assembled a protein data bank using the best methods technology had to offer. Ultimately, the database reached 200,000 protein structures at the New York lab. But when AI techniques and technologies were applied, the number increased considerably.
Energy Department’s Undersecretary of Science Darío Gil speaks at TPC26 on June 1, 2026 (Credit: Michael Asirvadem)
“Modern AI systems expanded that number to more than 200 million structures in just a few years,” Gil told members of the Trillion Parameter Consortium. “So the lesson is clear: AI does not replace the scientific infrastructure or the human expertise that created and curated underlying experiments and data. It amplifies both.”
Similar stories are coming out of other scientific areas, including fusion energy research, where AI is able to predict the behavior of plasma states, and material science, where AI models can predict the properties of novel materials even before a single molecule is laid down in the lab.
With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and other AI foundation models, we’re currently in the midst of a major shift in how science gets done. The DOE’s Genesis Mission, which President Trump launched in late November, is the federal government engine designed to funnel funding, manpower, and resources into AI for science, and capitalizing on the breakthroughs it develops to help the United States and its allies develop scientifically, economically, and militarily.
“We seek to double the productivity and impact of America’s trillion-dollar-a-year R&D engine within a decade,” said Gil, who was the head of IBM Research before joining the DOE in the fall of 2024. “Achieving that goal requires urgency and a new way of operating. Genesis connects discovery and deployment from the beginning. It builds a bridge between public and private industry so that breakthroughs move at the speed and scale that is required, and that model is already underway.”
The deadline for phase 1 and phase 2 Genesis Mission funding applications recently passed, with more than 270 submissions accepted across academia, industry, and the research community, Gil said. That was more than two times the number of applications for any DOE program in the department’s history, he said. The investment will pay off, the Undersecretary said.
“Much as the microscope transformed medicine and the rocket carried America to the moon, this platform will fundamentally change how science and engineering are conducted, once complete,” Gil said. “It will be the most complex and powerful scientific instrument ever built. It will deliver dramatically faster results, with 10 to 100x acceleration across many components of science and engineering domains, while enhancing also security through AI-enabled solutions and advanced threat mitigation for high consequence missions.”
The Genesis Mission spans all 17 DOE labs, 38 industry partners that have signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs), and numerous international partners. In Japan, Riken-CSS has joined the Genesis Mission, while the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) is participating in Europe. Ultimately, the Genesis Mission is designed to strengthen the defense of the United States, but the highest rewards in AI for science will come when the U.S.’s partners take up the mantle and participate in the program.
“The United States is committed to leading, but the architecture is intended to connect with partners who share a commitment to secure responsible and high integrity scientific progress,” Gil said. “The opportunity is not coordination for its own sake, but co-development, building shared systems, shared challenges, and shared acceleration of discovery.”
The Genesis Mission is not aspirational, Gil said. It is operational now in June 2026, and it’s expanding every day, with increasing levels of engagement across the country and the world. The Trillion Parameter Consortium and its TPC26 meeting is but one example of the types of projects that the Genesis Mission is backing and which will ultimately bring rewards through better AI-driven science.
“We are at an inflection point,” Gil said. “For the first time, advances in AI computing and quantum science and scientific infrastructure are converging into a unified transformation in how this discovery happens. The question is not going to be whether this transformation will occur. It already is. The question is whether we will move fast enough with sufficient coordination to shape it.”
The post AI Rapidly Accelerating Pace of Scientific Discovery, DOE’s Darío Gil Says at TPC26 appeared first on HPCwire.
"It's not anything to do with politics. I don't know why they're turning it into politics," Vanilla Ice said of the Freedom 250 concerts planned in Washington, D.C.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates. But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work. An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely. Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers. The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads -- those under the age of 29 -- rose 20% after the pandemic, while unemployment among older college grads fell slightly. The study compares unemployment rates pre-pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, with unemployment rates after the pandemic, from 2022 to 2024. Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees." Regardless of the cause, the New York Fed report warns that a high unemployment rate among young college grads is concerning. "Early-career experiences can have lasting consequences," the researchers write. "Research finds that individuals who began looking for jobs in slacker labor markets tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression relative to comparable peers who began their job search in better market conditions." Further reading: Why Is the US Job Market So Tough, Especially for Recent College Grads?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This blog is now closed. See our full report: Trump says Hezbollah and Israel have agreed to ‘stop all shooting’
The exchange of strikes between the US and Iran reflects the fragility of the current ceasefire, which has seen repeated violations even as American and Iranian officials try to negotiate a deal to extend it.
Iran has maintained its chokehold on the strait of Hormuz, disrupting global energy supplies as a fifth of all oil and natural gas traded once passed through the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. The US continues to enforce its own blockade on the strait, as it pressures Tehran to reach an agreement.
Continue reading...Lively’s legal team are suing her It Ends with Us co-star for legal fees and damages, reigniting a years-long court battle
Attorneys for US actor Blake Likely were back in front of a New York judge on Monday to demand legal fees and damages from It Ends with Us co-star Justin Baldoni, after a settlement was reached last month in their years-long legal battle.
The 38-year-old actor’s legal team argued that the defamation lawsuit brought against her by Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer Studios, was a retaliatory move prohibited by California law.
Continue reading...Going to check out three one wheels this weekend. It’s a far drive and I think the price may be too high. They have 1 xr with 952 miles 1 pint 1300 miles and 1 pint 152 miles. They keep saying lots of extras but looks like they just changed a fender or two and some bumpers. Also xr hyper charger , pint fast charger , pint regular charger. Is this worth 2k or is that too much I’m thinking 1500-1600.
Democrats decry president’s ‘most brazen act of self-dealing yet’ and vow to challenge fund in Congress
Donald Trump may be reconsidering whether to keep pressing for a $1.8bn fund to compensate his allies, multiple news outlets reported on Monday. Other reports indicated only that the justice department paused the program to comply with a court order.
Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund has faced legal setbacks since it was announced two weeks ago. The idea has also faced a mounting political backlash from Republicans concerned by a lack of oversight and the possibility of payouts to participants in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Continue reading...Chikei Rick Chow, 61, shot Cyrus Carmack-Belton in the back after chasing him from his convenience store in Columbia. He maintained he acted to defend his son.
Tehran says Israel’s operation in Lebanon is violation of existing ceasefire with US, throwing wrench in planned peace talks – key US politics stories from Monday 1 June
Peace talks planned between the US and Iran are in limbo yet again, sparked by the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said “unequivocal violation of the ceasefire on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts” and the US and Israel would be held responsible. A news agency aligned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Tehran was suspending its participation in talks designed to end the blockade of the strait of Hormuz.
Continue reading...  | um. What happened to my bms? Currently recharging to 90. Gonna see what happens now. [link] [comments] |
New feature will allow iPhone users to divide the check at dinner with a large group and generate payment requests, Bloomberg reports.
Revocation of access is newest attempt by Trump’s defense department to restrict reporting on military affairs
Journalists may no longer enter the Pentagon’s press office, which has been designated as a classified space amid growing moves to restrict press access to the defense department.
“This is the most transparent war department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that,” Jose Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, said in a social media post. “The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility.”
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 2, No. 1,809.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 2, No. 1,087.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 2 No. 821.
Florida has become the first state to sue OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.
Jing Sheng Dong, a 48-year-old tour bus driver from Staten Island, New York, faces three additional felony counts in connection with the deaths.
Former Shelby County police officer Karson Hyder has been charged with one count of assault inflicting serious injury after video appeared to show him repeatedly punching a woman.
The EV charging network is ditching its top-up model in favor of pay-per-session billing, a change that should make occasional charging a lot less complicated.
 | My first ever onewheel finally arrived today and I just wanted to post a picture. It’s nothing special but I got a pint s as a graduation gift and I can’t wait to ride more. I knew these things got beat up but I’m amazed at how fast they do. If anyone’s got some tips for new riders they’re appreciated, riding this thing is tough. [link] [comments] |
Fans of the Hollywood icon set a new world record as 1,034 people descended on the California desert town to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday. It was the largest ever gathering of people dressed as Marilyn Monroe
Continue reading...The Claude developer is one of a trio of tech firms expected to go public this year, alongside SpaceX and OpenAI.
Party could struggle to push ratings as strategy increasingly focuses on views held by minority of voters, research finds
Reform UK is becoming increasingly reliant on socially conservative views for political support, and therefore could struggle to push its poll ratings much higher, a large-scale research project led by the leading psephologist John Curtice has found.
A study of Nigel Farage’s party carried out as part of the British Social Attitudes report found that while Reform supporters were disproportionately more likely to be unhappy with politicians and public services, recent recruits had seemingly more robust attitudes in areas such as diversity and welfare.
Continue reading...Net zero industry accounts for more than a million jobs and benefits whole country, according to CBI Economics
More than a million jobs, higher wages, nearly half a trillion pounds in investment in the pipeline – the UK’s green economy is powering ahead, according to research by the country’s leading business organisation.
The net zero economy, which is worth more than £100bn a year, benefits all of the UK, according to the CBI Economics analysis commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, despite critics who want to abolish the UK’s net zero targets.
Continue reading...Twenty years after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay's Stockholm data center and seized its servers, the site remains online. In fact, the 2006 crackdown arguably made it more famous, helping turn it into "one of the most resilient and iconic websites on the internet," reports TorrentFreak. From the report: On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site's servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government. As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn't quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target. At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the 'incriminating evidence', although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay. As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site. When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay. In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik's decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days. The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for. Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site "The Police Bay," complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes. Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Teachers associated with CNTE union were marching toward Zócalo for salary raises and reversal of pension laws
Riot police fired teargas at teachers who were marching toward Mexico City’s historic Zócalo plaza, just days before the square is expected to host the 2026 World Cup “Fan Fest”. The incident is the second time police have clashed with teachers in the past week, and more conflict is likely as Mexico City prepares to hold the opening game of the Fifa World Cup on 11 June.
“This event will have to be suspended,” Filiberto Frausto, a union leader, told AFP, which witnessed police firing teargas on 1 June. “A cause like ours should be far above – it’s far more important than a little bit of distraction and fun.”
Continue reading...Ohio-based slider chain introduces Southwest Veggie Slider permanently after customer feedback for meatless option
Vegetarians have a new reason to celebrate: White Castle has added a permanent meat-free option to its menu.
On Monday, the Columbus, Ohio-based slider chain announced the launch of the Southwest Veggie Slider, featuring a crispy brown rice crust and a smoky chipotle- and barbecue-inspired veggie patty made with sweet potatoes, black beans, corn, red bell peppers, onions and carrots.
Continue reading...Microsoft's developer conference is almost upon us. We anticipate a lot of AI.
A descendant of Betsy Ross is donating her sewing table to her house in Philadelphia and taking a historic journey of his own this summer.
Dozens reportedly arrested for defying curfew at Delaney Hall in Newark amid hunger and labor strikes at facility
On Monday afternoon, over an hour south of Newark, a few dozen protesters outside the New Jersey state legislature in Trenton condemned Democratic governor Mikie Sherrill’s decision to send in the state police to Delaney Hall, the Newark immigration detention center that has seen more than a week of chaotic and often violent clashes.
Across the street, two people silently held a giant “NO CONCENTRATION CAMPS” sign. Members of local chapters from Indivisible, a national movement behind the No Kings protests, held handmade posters reading “Gov Sherrill, stop lying about Delaney Hall” and “NJ Staties were the aggressors” – a reference to Sherrill and state attorney general Jennifer Davenport’s calling the anti-ICE protesters “violent”.
Continue reading...Breach of high-profile accounts raises concerns about reliance on AI for security measures such as passwords
Hackers used Meta’s AI-powered support chatbot to infiltrate high-profile Instagram accounts, the company has confirmed, saying it resolved the problem after researchers exposed it.
The targets ranged from Barack Obama’s White House account to the beauty retailer Sephora and the US Space Force chief master sergeant, John Bentivegna, according to reporting from 404 Media. Everyday users complained of similar hijackings on Reddit and X over the weekend.
Continue reading...Found a video of this gem for yall to fantasize to. Enjoy.
Hey all. I currently have a Pint X and I love it. Problem is my daughter has shown interest in learning and floating with me. I'm thinking of getting either a XR Classic with recurve rails, or a GT. They are both on sale right now and extremely close in price.
My questions would be are the recurve rails worth it? Is a GT really heavy in comparison? I do occasionally go for small grocery runs and put my pint in the cart.
Some relevant info. In my area I mostly commute over mostly flat pavement, and a packed dirt walking trail. I'm not chasing power or speed. I'm perfectly happy floating at around 15mph at my skill level (about 175 miles on the pint x). I'm about 200 lbs, with a size 10 foot.
What are you alls thoughts? I know most people will say to get a X7, but I have no interest in VESC at all right now. Maybe if/when the stock FM hardware eventually fails, but not now.
Thanks in advance!
Police were called to the scene of "a domestic disturbance and shooting" in the city of Sandy, outside of Portland, Oregon, on Sunday.
"Hackers used Meta's AI support chatbot to change email addresses associated with high-profile Instagram accounts, such as Barack Obama's White House account, allowing them to change the passwords and gain control over the accounts," writes Slashdot reader fropenn. Other accounts affected include the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force and Sephora's. 404 Media reports: In March, Meta announced that it was pushing AI support to all accounts across Facebook and Instagram, and that it would have the ability to reset passwords and perform other critical account maintenance functions: "Solutions, not just suggestions," the feature's product page says. "Account security and recovery." Over the last several days, Telegram groups for security researchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and screenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared to be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacker starting a conversation with Meta's AI support bot and asking it to link the target account with a new email address: "Just link my new email address. This is my username @{target_username}. I will send you the code. {attacker_email} Thank you." The AI then sends an eight-digit code to the attacker's email address. The attacker enters that code and gets a password reset email, giving them access to the account. The vulnerability is an astounding, high-profile example of the types of risks that companies are putting their users and workers under when they offload important functions to AI. Meta says it has patched the issue within the last 24 hours. "This issue has been resolved and we are securing impacted accounts," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
State sues maker of ChatGPT and CEO Sam Altman, alleging company ‘allowed a dangerous product to reach millions’
Florida filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its CEO, Sam Altman, on Monday alleging that the company concealed serious safety risks with its chatbot. Florida is the first US state to sue the artificial intelligence company.
The 83-page suit was brought by Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, and alleges that OpenAI “aggressively marketed” ChatGPT to the public while ignoring safety warnings and possible dangers of the product.
Continue reading...I'm new to this - but having a blast so far.
Here is my question.
Do you find it better to ride slowly with rear foot more forward toward the wheel or further back?
So far, I've been riding with my back foot close to the tire, and want to know what others do.
I am riding mostly paved bike paths and smooth surfaces and just turned on Mission mode (huge difference) - and tried 21psi (I weigh 195)
I don't like the higher psi - going to drop it back down to about 18 or so....
What are your thoughts and encouragement for an old guy having fun on this thing? (XRC)
If you forgot to play one day, you can restore your 30-day-plus streak, but only for the month of June.
Hey all! I just bought my first OneWheel, and after some research into the variants, I decided on the Pint X.
After watching a lot of reviews I noticed the multi-terrain on the X is great and checks all my boxes, but i don't really see a lot of people riding on grass / rough like you would see on a golf course. Mainly just dirt trails. Can anyone give me some insight on how it'll ride on grass? anything I should be warry of like wet grass or dips?
Thanks in advance!
edit: sorry for typo in title :P
London mayor says Soho Society’s decision to challenge all new licensing applications is ‘bad’ for city
Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, has suggested he will overrule a residents’ society that has vowed to challenge all new applications for pubs and restaurants in Soho.
The Guardian revealed last week that the Soho Society, a residents’ group established in 1972 aimed at “preserving the character of Soho”, voted for a new licensing mandate, meaning it will challenge all new applications for bars and restaurants in the area, including renewals of existing licences.
Continue reading...Robert Garcia became the lead contender in Tuesday’s primaries for congressional district 42 after redistricting
The conservative California community of Huntington Beach, known for banning the Pride flag from city property and fighting the state over pandemic and housing policy, could soon be represented by a gay, Democratic congressman.
Robert Garcia, an incumbent two-term Democratic LGBTQ+ congressman, immigrant and Donald Trump critic, is considered the leading contender in Tuesday’s primary race for the US House seat. Thanks to a successful restricting effort that redrew California’s voting maps to favor Democrats, Huntington Beach is now part of Garcia’s congressional district 42.
Continue reading...The appeal of a sunrise alarm clock is that it wakes you up gently.
Florida's attorney general has sued (PDF) OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company prioritized growth and market value over user safety and failed to adequately warn about risks tied to ChatGPT. The lawsuit, the first by a U.S. state over OpenAI safety concerns, is separate from a criminal investigation the state opened into OpenAI in April. Variety reports: In the 83-page complaint filed in Florida circuit court, the state claimed OpenAI's rise was backed by "a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI's market value at unacceptable costs." The state wants to hold Altman "personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms' conduct." [...] Throughout the complaint, filed in the state's circuit court of the 10th judicial circuit, the State of Florida claimed OpenAI's "careless introduction" of ChatGPT had led to an increase in murders and suicides. The suit alleged Florida's minors have "become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight." It cited instances in the past year of the alleged use of ChatGPT to plan a mass shooting at Florida State University in April 2025 and the murders of two graduate students at the University of South Florida in April. "This litany of harms is driven by Defendants' insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT," the state wrote in the complaint. Florida accused OpenAI of four counts of deceptive and unfair trade practices, two counts of negligence, two counts of violating product liability laws, one count of fraudulent misrepresentation and another count of causing a public nuisance. It is seeking civil penalties and court orders demanding OpenAI restrict the data it collects from minors and that it stop "continuing to misrepresent or fail to warn of the risks of ChatGPT." "People are getting hurt, parents are getting deceived and they need to pay for it by opening up their checkbooks and changing the program to ensure there are parental controls," Uthmeimer said at a press conference Monday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Move reunites wideout with coach Mike Vrabel
Brown had grown frustrated in Philadelphia
Eagles receive two draft picks in exchange
The Philadelphia Eagles traded wide receiver AJ Brown to the New England Patriots on Monday.
Both teams announced the deal. The Eagles said they will receive a first-round pick in 2028 and a fifth-round pick in 2027 in exchange for the three-time Pro Bowl selection.
Continue reading...Documents also reveal internal Labour criticism of Keir Starmer in embarrassing detail
Peter Mandelson was receiving sensitive security briefings about the Foreign Office’s work, and was in discussions with the head of MI6, before he had completed the developed vetting process, newly released documents reveal.
Declassified emails show the ambassador designate and Richard Moore, the former chief of MI6 – a role known as “C” – had agreed to meet in early January 2025 before Mandelson went to Washington.
Continue reading...Last summer, Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens started getting messages from people in his state about plans for a major datacenter in their community. When Berens dug in, he was shocked to discover the impact the datacenter would have on local residents. So he responded with comedy. The video he posted online about the datacenter went viral, and Berens has been on the frontlines of the fight against datacenters ever since. Carter Sherman speaks to Berens about how he is using his comedy as a tool for activism
Continue reading...Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI -- the second one this year -- alleges the AI-maker put profits over people.
Engineered from the ground up for AI factories, the NVIDIA DSX platform defines how next-generation infrastructure is designed, built and operated — driving lowest token cost and accelerating time to first production across NVIDIA chips, systems, software, facilities and partner technologies.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA has announced the NVIDIA DSX platform, which gives infrastructure builders a complete playbook to create AI factories.
Credit: NVIDIA
NVIDIA DSX brings together open source, modular software libraries, application programming interfaces, reference designs, NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms and partner technologies into a common, codesigned platform for AI factory design, deployment and operations.
NVIDIA is the only company that builds the full AI factory. By aligning every layer of the stack across compute, software, facilities and partner technologies, DSX provides infrastructure builders with a proven framework to design, deploy and operate AI factories at scale.
The integrated platform accelerates deployment, improves operational reliability and resiliency at scale and enables a broad ecosystem of solutions designed to turn every megawatt into more intelligence at the lowest token cost.
“We’re not just shipping chips — we’re giving every infrastructure builder a complete playbook to build AI factories,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With the DSX platform, you can simulate the entire factory before you spend a dollar, validate performance before a single rack is installed and operate with the kind of reliability that production AI demands.”
DSX Platform Elements
DSX now spans the full stack, from silicon and systems to infrastructure software, facilities and partner technologies. The latest additions to the platform include new open source software:
DSX MaxLPS and DSX OS join an existing set of features under the DSX platform:
Growing DSX Ecosystem
NVIDIA is partnering with industry-leading Taiwan system manufacturers to expand the DSX ecosystem, supporting the buildout of AI factories with extreme codesign at their core.
NVIDIA cloud partners CoreWeave, Crusoe, Firmus, IREN, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale and Yotta Data Services are deploying core components of the DSX platform stack — DSX Sim, DSX MaxLPS and DSX OS — to reduce risk, improve GPU utilization and bring AI cloud capacity online faster.
Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro together with ASUS, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, Pegatron, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Wistron and Wiwynn are building NVIDIA DSX-ready systems and contributing simulation-ready assets that enable customers to deploy complete, full-stack AI factory solutions at global scale.
Within the ecosystem, model-based systems engineering serves as the bridge between rack design to facility deployment, for an AI infrastructure optimized for token performance per megawatt. Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) and Pegatron are working with Dassault Systèmes to create a live AI factory digital twin configurator to automate rack-to-facility design with increased quality and reduced workload. The adoption of DSX Sim by system manufacturers expands the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint ecosystem, deepening integration with software partners Cadence, PTC and Siemens.
DSX Flex is powering a commercial, multi-megawatt pilot with Emerald AI and Silicon Valley Power to demonstrate grid-responsive AI factories that can dynamically adjust power consumption in response to utility signals while protecting AI workload performance, helping safeguard grid reliability and affordability for customers while unlocking additional power capacity to support AI growth.
Partners are adopting various DSX OS software components for lifecycle management, multi-tenancy, security, health automation, resilience and platform services. Ecosystem partners adopting DSX OS components include Aible, BeyondAI, Bhashini, DCAI, Mirantis, OpenNebula Systems, Rafay, Red Hat, Sarvam, Simplismart, Spectro Cloud, Supermicro, vCluster and Vultr.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA DSX Gives Infrastructure Builders the Playbook for AI Factories appeared first on HPCwire.
Exclusive: Mukund Krisha says he will fight allegations and is proud of his record at the staff association
The former head of the Police Federation of England and Wales who was arrested on suspicion of corruption has told the Guardian he is confident he will be “entirely exonerated” and is “proud” of his record at the organisation.
Mukund Krishna, who was the chief executive of the staff association, is facing claims of financial wrongdoing and had his contract terminated on Sunday.
Continue reading...Workers who go at least five years without a promotion or meaningful raise can miss out on thousands of dollars in earnings, researchers found.
New York mayor refused to attend as other Democrats drew rebukes for marching with Israel’s far-right finance minister
As they have done for decades, prominent members of the Democratic party establishment marched on Sunday in New York City’s annual Israel Day parade. Perhaps more noteworthy, however, was who was missing.
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, refused to attend, citing his opposition to the Israeli government, which he has accused of committing genocide in Gaza.
Continue reading...A divided federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration's policy banning transgender individuals from serving in the military is likely unconstitutional.
According to air traffic control audio, security came to inspect the aircraft after someone named their Bluetooth device a "certain four-letter word."
The Justice Department said it will stop work on the $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund following a district judge's decision temporarily blocking the program.
The Iranians' latest move in the war came in response to what it considers U.S. and Israeli ceasefire violations.
A video shows a worker going up to the facade of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which now also bears the name of President Donald J. Trump. The worker removes the "J."
Onlookers below cheer and applaud. Then, the rest of Trump’s name comes down.
That May 31 video gained more than 725,000 views on X, and it was shared on other social media platforms. "Trump's name permanently ripped off the Kennedy Center - is the ultimate humiliation of @realDonaldTrump," the X caption read.
The video does not show a real event; it was generated with artificial intelligence.
On May 29, a federal judge ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center facade. The judge gave the Kennedy Center two weeks to remove Trump’s name from the center’s branding, but the center said it would appeal. On the same day as the judge’s ruling, Trump said in a Truth Social post that he will work with Congress to transfer the facility "back to them."
The Associated Press distributed photos dated June 1 showing the building still bears Trump’s name.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is seen, June 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP)
The fake video was initially uploaded by TikTok and Instagram user @cabracabaret, who labeled the video as AI-generated.
Some frames from the video showed signs of AI, including missing letters from "Kennedy" and "Center," and what appeared to be a misspelled version of "Donald."
Social media users shared another video and multiple images generated with AI depicting workers taking down Trump’s name.
But there is no real video showing workers removing the president’s name from the Kennedy Center. We rate this claim False.
The tagline likely hints at an iOS 27 reveal, following leaks that showcased a Siri-focused update with glowing UI elements.
Anthropic says it has confidentially filed an IPO prospectus with the SEC, "setting up a potentially historic share sale for investors ready to jump into artificial intelligence," reports CNBC. The move puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI's expected filing and follows explosive reported growth, a massive new valuation, major infrastructure deals, and ongoing tensions with the Pentagon over its models. From the report: "This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," Anthropic said in a statement on Monday. "The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors." Submitting a confidential prospectus doesn't lock Anthropic into a certain timeframe for going public. Its official prospectus just has to land in the hands of investors at least 15 days before the company begins a roadshow. [...] The company has experienced explosive growth this year, announcing in May that its revenue run rate has ballooned to $47 billion, up from $10 billion in annual revenue last year. Last week, it closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, topping OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in late March.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Emails and WhatsApp messages reveal string of exchanges with ministers when he was president of Global Counsel
Peter Mandelson, as president of his then advisory firm Global Counsel, lobbied hard for ministers to attend his events and to meet his firm’s staff in the months following Labour’s general election win, newly released documents reveal.
Emails and WhatsApp exchanges show how active the Labour peer was in the wake of the election to work his contacts within government to the potential advantage of both his company and his then campaign to be chancellor of Oxford University.
Continue reading...You can now set an AI-free search experience as your default in Firefox and Chrome.
Argonne researchers lead engagement in how AI is reshaping scientific discovery at Trillion Parameter Consortium conference.
June 1, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will play a leading role in this year’s meeting of the Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC), to be held in Baltimore, Maryland, from May 31 to June 3. This community-driven, open initiative will bring together several hundred researchers, practitioners, educators and vendors to share expertise, tools and workflows in AI and high-performance computing — with the aim of encouraging collaborations, establishing best practices and harnessing AI potential for transforming scientific discovery and engineering. Argonne is participating in this year’s events through plenary addresses, panel discussions and tutorials.
Collaborating Across Institutions
Currently, TPC has more than 100 participating member organizations representing over800 active participants. These organizations span national laboratories, tech companies and universities globally. Members work together to build and optimize massive-scale AI models for critical fields. Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne, will open the TPC26 plenary sessions by moderating a panel on “Strategies for International Collaboration Among National and Regional Initiatives.” Joining the panel discussion will be leaders from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and RIKEN. Later in the week Arvind Ramanathan, a computational biologist in Argonne’s Data Science and Learning division,will participate in another panel discussion with leaders from industry and RIKEN on “Reports from the Field: TPC Collaborations.”
Building Autonomous Agents
Autonomous AI agents are transforming how scientists work. While generative AI can answer queries and respond to human prompts, agentic AI is proactive, offering the potential to carry out tasks autonomously. Rick Stevens will present a keynote address on “Agentic Science and the Genesis Mission” — a major initiative by DOE to transform American science and innovation through the power of AI. Ian Foster, director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning division, will give a presentation on “Scaling from Parameters to Processes: Why Agents Matter for Trillion-Parameter AI.” And Franck Cappello, Argonne senior computer Scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science division, will discuss “AI-Based Scientific Hypothesis Generation.”
Exploring the Frontier
Frontier models mark the extreme cutting edge of AI research. Trained on massive amounts of data, they serve as testing ground for advanced reasoning. Agentic systems use frontier models to handle complex reasoning and planning tasks. Valerie Taylor, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne, will discuss“Emerging Scientific Drivers for Frontier AI.” These drivers come from diverse disciplines — for example, materials science, Earth systems and cosmology — and require that the frontier models follow constraints specific to their individual fields.
Putting Skills into Practice
TPC emphasizes designing, building and — ultimately — utilizing AI. Argonne staff will lead two hands-on tutorials at TPC26 intended to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Four MCS scientists — Franck Cappello, Sandeep Madireddy, Neil Getty and Robert Underwood — will focus on best practices for evaluating AI model reasoning skills for science applications. Ian Foster will co-present a tutorial introducing participants to the design, deployment, and management of scalable agentic systems for scientific discovery. The tutorial will include a presentation of Academy, a Python-based middleware platform built to support agentic workflows across heterogeneous research environments.
Want to learn more? See all of Argonne’s TPC26 talks here.
About Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Source: ANL
The post Argonne: Driving the Future of AI in Science at TPC26 appeared first on HPCwire.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced that TSMC is using NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI to advance semiconductor design and manufacturing.
As chips move to more advanced nodes, bringing them from design to high-volume production has become one of the world’s most complex computing challenges. Computational lithography, transistor simulation, process control and wafer inspection now require massive-scale simulation and real-time optimization, and AI systems that can provide support across physics, images and other applications.
Credit: NVIDIA
TSMC is using NVIDIA technologies to accelerate this transformation, applying accelerated computing and AI across the semiconductor design and manufacturing lifecycle to improve turnaround time, energy efficiency, yield and operational productivity in advanced fabs.
“NVIDIA and TSMC have worked together for nearly three decades to push the limits of computing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “TSMC is bringing NVIDIA AI and accelerated computing into the fab itself, tackling some of the world’s most complex design and manufacturing challenges with simulation, optimization and AI to improve speed, efficiency and yield for the next generation of chips.”
“TSMC and NVIDIA have built a long-standing partnership rooted in advancing the technologies that make the next generation of computing possible,” said C.C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC. “By using NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI across fab operations optimization, lithography, process control and inspection, TSMC is strengthening our technology leadership and manufacturing excellence to support our customers’ future products and success.”
TSMC Accelerates Processes With NVIDIA CUDA-X Libraries and AI
Advanced semiconductor design and manufacturing require massive computational workloads and highly coordinated fab operations, spanning chip-design transfer, transistor modeling, process control and fab productivity.
TSMC is using NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries and AI models to accelerate these workloads on NVIDIA GPUs:
TSMC Advances Defect Inspection With NVIDIA Metropolis and AI Models
As chips become more advanced, even the smallest defects can affect quality and yield, making faster and more accurate inspection essential to semiconductor design and manufacturing.
TSMC is using the NVIDIA Metropolis platform and NVIDIA TAO Toolkit to improve advanced defect classification. Using vision AI, TSMC has improved detection of defects at nanometer scale.
These capabilities help TSMC improve quality inspection while reducing the need for repeated labeling and retraining as process conditions, inspection tools and defect types change.
TSMC Taps NVIDIA Omniverse to Build FabTwin
Advanced semiconductor fabs are among the most complex fabs ever built, requiring precise coordination across tools, materials, robots, humans and facility systems.
TSMC is exploring NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to build FabTwin, a virtual fab environment for evaluating process tool layouts and related simulation workflows. By testing design scenarios digitally before physical implementation, TSMC can compare complex configurations more flexibly and identify potential constraints earlier. This virtual-first approach vastly improves planning efficiency and accelerates critical decision-making before any physical or capital commitments are made.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA and TSMC Bring AI into Fabs to Advance Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.
A $50,000 deposit will grow differently in a short-term CD than it will in a money market account, especially now.
Split decision deals blow to Trump administration’s anti-diversity agenda, calling the ban ‘arbitrary, and based on animus’
Transgender troops can remain in the US military, but the armed services can continue to block their enlistment, an appeals court ruled on Monday in a split decision with potentially significant consequences for the Trump administration’s anti-diversity agenda.
The divided, majority opinion by a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for Washington DC is expected to be challenged by the government. And the case is ultimately likely to reach the US supreme court.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif. and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. has introduced Data Center Building Block Solutions (DCBBS) Blueprints based on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 and the NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 platforms. The Blueprints are designed for gigawatt-scale AI data center deployment, starting from building blocks of a single 1,152-GPU scalable unit that can be multiplied to virtually any size.
DCBBS Blueprints
Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprints include the design and delivery of an end-to-end total solution with a dedicated team of experts covering the full deployment lifecycle. DCBBS provide the necessary compute, storage, networking, advanced liquid cooling, power distribution, and site infrastructure, accelerating time-to-online for large-scale liquid-cooled AI Factories.
“The NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform sets a new standard for AI factory performance, and our DCBBS Blueprints give customers a proven, end-to-end path to build at any scale — from 5MW to 1GW,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “We have delivered some of the earliest and largest liquid-cooled AI factories, and that experience is built into every Blueprint — so our customers can move from design to fully operational faster than ever before.”
Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprints address the challenges of the practical implementation behind the most advanced AI infrastructure in the world. The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform vastly improves AI Factory performance density, doubling speeds across multiple computing domains. NVIDIA’s latest reference architecture precisely defines what an ideal 1,152-GPU scalable unit should contain —a Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprint defines the steps to achieve deployment success, with a proven track record for deploying the world’s largest liquid-cooled AI factories featuring over 100,000 GPUs.
For more information on DCBBS, visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/dcbbs.
Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprint Addresses the Reality of AI Factory Implementation
Customers planning AI factory buildouts or retrofits start from a fixed constraint: available power. DCBBS Blueprints for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 features a balanced bill-of-materials for a given power envelope, ranging from 5MW to 1GW, and provides the right ratio of cooling capacity, power delivery, compute nodes, management nodes, high-performance storage nodes, context memory storage platform nodes, and networking to ensure optimal performance due to bottlenecks such as network oversubscription, power capacity limitations, thermal throttling or other encumbrances.
The Blueprints cover the full end-to-end sequence that Supermicro has successfully used to complete large-scale AI projects at record-breaking speeds:
Supermicro’s DCBBS Blueprints Align with the Reference Architecture for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform has the potential for transformative generational performance improvements but requires a repeatable and dependable approach to deploy successfully. Supermicro ensures alignment with the latest NVIDIA reference architecture, giving customers confidence that their deployment aligns with the NVIDIA Cloud Partner ecosystem.
The scalable units at the heart of the Supermicro DCBBS Blueprints provide 1,152 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs with 331TB of HBM4 GPU memory. The Vera Rubin generation doubles GPU memory bandwidth, GPU-to-GPU NVLink bandwidth, and per-GPU networking bandwidth compared to NVIDIA Blackwell, providing the architectural foundation for training and inference of frontier AI models with multiple trillions of parameters.
2x context memory storage platform racks streamlined to handle the needs of long-context inference, agentic working memory, and retrieval workloads.
For more information visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/accelerators/nvidia/vera-rubin.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first to market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are transforming into a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, and switch systems, software, and services while delivering advanced high-volume motherboard, power, and chassis products. Supermicro’s solutions are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-cooled, free-air cooling, or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Introduces DCBBS Blueprints for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 and NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 appeared first on HPCwire.
Melissa Casias was employed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory when she went missing last year, her niece said.
The changes will affect how much students and their parents can borrow, as well as their repayment options.
About 20 students report anonymous late-night phone calls from men who ‘intimidated, demeaned and belittled’ them
The University of Manchester has launched an investigation after about 20 female medical students complained of receiving anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night from male callers who intimidated and sexually harassed them.
The calls have been going on for at least three years, according to Charlotte Buttercase, a final-year medical student and one of those targeted.
Continue reading...A 2-year CD can result in a sizable return on your savings, but that's not the only benefit to know right now.
Dozens of former news staffers press David Ellison to commit to fair coverage in wake of major firings on the show
Several dozen veterans of CBS News – including many former 60 Minutes employees – signed a letter to the Paramount Skydance CEO, David Ellison, on Monday, pressing him to commit to the show’s editorial independence four days after network management fired several top staffers and correspondents.
On Thursday, the CBS News editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, and president, Tom Cibrowski, ousted the show’s executive producer, executive editor and two prominent correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. Both Alfonsi and Vega released blistering statements alleging that the show’s editorial independence had been compromised for political purposes.
Continue reading...Late physicist turned issue of when to stop searching for a better place to eat into mathematical problem
When it comes to exploring a new city, it can be tricky to know when to stop searching for a different restaurant to try every night, or to visit the first place you love on repeat.
Now researchers have found that the late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman devised a mathematical equation that can tackle the conundrum – at least when the range of options is known – and they believe the approach is similar to tactics people use intuitively.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Anthropic has extended an invitation to the European Commission granting the EU's cyber agency access to its powerful AI hacking tool Mythos, according to a Commission official familiar with the process. The AI firm made the formal invitation after a meeting with the Commission in San Francisco last Thursday, the official said, adding the EU now has to put in place a mechanism to access the model with proper security safeguards. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a statement the Commission has had "several productive meetings with Anthropic" and "welcome[d] the latest developments on potential future access." [...] "This latest development is of utmost importance to get a clear picture on the potential risks," Regnier said, adding: "Let's not forget that Mythos is not one off, a new wave of powerful models are coming to the market." An ENISA official said the agency does not have active access now but is working to implement it. The Commission is working on a formal action plan to respond to powerful AI hacking tools. It has indicated it wants to release it before the summer break, according to an industry official. Anthropic's Mythos was unveiled in early April and triggered fears that it could enable large-scale attacks with its ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities. "European authorities for weeks were shut off from accessing the cutting-edge cybersecurity AI tech, leading to urgent calls by European politicians and government officials to gain access," notes Politico. "Cyber officials also called for Europe to build its own version."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Declaration comes after Iran had pulled out of peace talks in protest at Israeli offensive in Lebanon
Donald Trump has said Hezbollah and Israel have agreed to mutual de-escalation and to scale back fighting, seemingly averting an Israeli strike on Beirut and the potential collapse of ceasefire talks with Iran.
The US president said in a social media post that he spoke to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and representatives of Hezbollah and both agreed that “all shooting will stop”.
Continue reading...I Knew It, I Knew You is written with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff and marks a return to Swift’s country roots
After days of speculation online, Taylor Swift has announced the release of a new original song for Toy Story 5.
Titled I Knew It, I Knew You, the single will be released on 5 June, with CD singles available for preorder on Swift’s website. Three variants will be available, each containing different versions of the song: a piano version, an acoustic version and the original.
Continue reading...In today's uncertain economic terrain, seniors may benefit from adding the protection these insurance types offer.
The filing sets up Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI chatbot, to sell its shares to the public.
Documents were published to reveal what ministers knew about his links to Epstein, but instead exposed government rifts
Peter Mandelson wrote to David Lammy on 18 November 2024, making a simple promise to the foreign secretary: “If you were minded to appoint me [as ambassador to Washington],” he said, “I would make sure you never regret it.”
Since then, senior government figures, including Lammy and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, have had reason to look back at that appointment with almost nothing but regret.
Continue reading...PALO ALTO, Calif., June 1, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. today announced a new gate-model roadmap designed to accelerate the development of commercial, fault-tolerant quantum computing. Targeting 100 logical qubits capable of successfully performing over one million operations by 2032, the roadmap combines D-Wave’s expertise in high-coherence dual-rail qubits and quantum error correction, with its proven ability to engineer, scale and commercialize superconducting quantum systems.
“The industry has spent years talking about fault tolerance. We believe D-Wave has a highly differentiated and credible path to achieving it,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “Our superconducting dual-rail architecture is a fundamentally different approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing that we expect will position D-Wave not only to compete, but also to redefine how quickly the technology becomes commercial.”
D-Wave believes the future of commercial gate-model quantum computing will be defined not by raw physical qubit counts alone, but by the ability to reliably execute large-scale computations for real-world applications. While much of the industry focuses on scaling physical qubits, D-Wave is pursuing a differentiated approach centered on reducing errors at the hardware level. Its dual-rail qubit architecture embeds error detection directly into the qubits, making errors detectable during computation at the single-qubit level. In contrast to many other gate-model hardware modalities that cannot detect qubit errors, D-Wave’s dual-rail qubits are designed to identify approximately 90% of errors as they occur to dramatically lower the number of physical qubits required to perform error correction. D-Wave has also demonstrated, with error detection, 99.9% two-qubit fidelities, meaning physical errors occur only about once in every 1,000 operations.
The roadmap, which will be shared in detail at D-Wave’s first-ever Investor Day today, outlines a progression of technical milestones designed to improve qubit fidelity, advance large-scale computations and support the development of commercially useful quantum applications. Key roadmap milestones include:
D-Wave’s roadmap is built on superconducting technology, which can run quantum error correction cycles 100 to 1000 times faster than neutral atom or trapped ion systems. In addition, the Company views Lambda as a key metric that should be used to measure progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Lambda is a measure of how rapidly a quantum computer’s errors are reduced as more error-correction capability is added. Today, the broader quantum computing industry has demonstrated Lambda values around 2, meaning each increment in error correction reduces errors by about half. D-Wave’s roadmap is targeting a Lambda of 10, a major leap the Company expects will reduce errors far more quickly, by a factor of 10 for each increment in error correction, making it possible to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing with significantly fewer physical qubits.
Combined with D-Wave’s proprietary on-chip cryogenic control technology, proven superconducting systems expertise and production-ready quantum cloud infrastructure, the Company believes its dual-rail gate-model roadmap presents a fast, efficient, and achievable path to commercial gate-model quantum computing. With more than 15 years of experience designing and building superconducting quantum computing systems, D-Wave has successfully delivered six generations of annealing quantum computers, culminating in its award winning Advantage2 system. As the only provider of annealing and gate-model technologies, D-Wave is uniquely positioned to participate in the full addressable quantum computing market.
Learn more about D-Wave’s gate-model roadmap and technology here.
About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. It is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the first and only to offer dual-platform quantum computing products and services, spanning both annealing and gate-model quantum computing technologies. D-Wave’s mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum today through enterprise-grade systems available on-premises and via its Leap quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors trust D-Wave to address complex computational challenges using quantum computing. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how D-Wave is shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.
Source: D-Wave
The post D-Wave Unveils Gate-Model Roadmap Targeting 100 Logical Qubits by 2032 appeared first on HPCwire.
Financial stakes of AI race rise as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are slated to go public this year
Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market, the company announced on Monday. The AI firm makes the Claude chatbot, popular with software engineers and other business clients, and has seen a meteoric rise this year.
The company did not disclose the valuation it will target on the stock market, nor did it make public other terms of the offering. The startup announced on Thursday that it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. Anthropic was valued at $380bn in February.
Continue reading...Two-time Defensive Player of the Year lands in LA
Swap sends LB Jared Verse, draft picks to Cleveland
The Cleveland Browns traded star edge rusher Myles Garrett to the Los Angeles Rams for linebacker Jared Verse and three draft picks in a blockbuster deal on Monday.
Garrett, 30, is a two-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year and seven-time Pro Bowl selection. Since the Browns selected him with the No 1 pick in the 2017 draft, he has emerged as one of the league’s best defensive players. He has the most sacks (125.5), pressures (413) and tackles for loss (149) of any player in that span. In 2025, he set the single-season sacks record with 23.
Continue reading...The US president’s war of choice has accomplished nothing and cost the world greatly
Donald Trump claims to have mastered the Art of the Deal, but he has just given us a master class in negotiating incompetence. I would love to see an Iranian government that no longer represses its people, menaces its neighbors, or can build a nuclear weapon. Trump has set back all of these efforts. His cabinet of sycophants offered little resistance as he naively bombed first and faced reality later.
Trump is reviewing and tinkering with a proposed memorandum of understanding (MOU) drafted by American and Iranian diplomats with the aid of Pakistan and Qatar. It would continue the current ceasefire for 60 days while a more permanent peace accord is negotiated. The precise contours of this preliminary agreement are not known, but its gist seems clear – and is a profound embarrassment for Trump. His unprovoked war of choice has accomplished all of nothing. A new approach is urgently needed.
Continue reading...Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a look at what's new in June.
Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR: A United Airlines flight traveling from Newark, New Jersey, to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, was forced to make a U-turn and return to Newark after more than four hours in the air due to a security concern. According to passenger reports and air traffic control audio, the disruption was caused by a personal Bluetooth speaker -- reportedly belonging to a teenager -- that had been named "BOMB." Upon returning to Newark, passengers were evacuated so that security details could inspect the entire aircraft and cargo area. The flight was ultimately cleared, reboarded, and arrived at its destination in Spain approximately nine and a half hours behind schedule. Multiple posts on social media from self-identified passengers indicate that the problem was a Bluetooth device on board the plane. One post referenced in-flight announcements with "lots of comments like 'this little joke is ruining it for everyone.'" Audio from air traffic control sheds a little more light on the situation: "There's a security detail out there, someone had a Bluetooth speaker and they named it a certain four-letter word," another voice responded. "So they have to inspect the whole aircraft including the cargo area [and] passengers have to evacuate."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Remains of Los Alamos employee Melissa Casias found alongside handgun in case that stirred online speculation
Authorities in New Mexico have identified human remains which they recently discovered as those of a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) employee who had been missing for more than a year.
In a statement released over the weekend, state police said the remains belonged to Melissa Casias, a 53-year-old resident of Taos, New Mexico, who was last seen walking eastbound along a state highway on 26 June 2025.
Continue reading...Vickrum Digwa, 23, who fatally stabbed Henry Nowak, 18, to serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole
A man with a “weapon obsession” has been jailed for life for murdering a university student with a “large Sikh dagger” that he claimed to be carrying for religious reasons.
Vickrum Digwa, 23, who stabbed 18-year-old Henry Nowak five times, will serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.
Continue reading...You’re a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days.
I’ve got some bad news.
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires. After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would “continue to function.” The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined “reduced functionality mode,” in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft’s site; the “continue to function” clause was removed.
↫ Consumer Rights Wiki
Microsoft’s advice to the users they’re stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it’s not because the software industry is a clown show.
Proprietary software is unethical.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA DGX Station for Windows, the world’s most powerful deskside AI supercomputer designed to build, run and connect always-on AI agents to Windows applications and workflows, capable of running frontier AI models of up to 1 trillion parameters locally.
Credit: NVIDIA
Historically, heavy-duty enterprise AI workloads — training, fine-tuning, large-scale inference and multi-agent development — have required powerful AI systems in the data center that run on Linux, while the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies use Windows for everyday productivity, creative, design and engineering applications.
Building on the NVIDIA DGX Station system design, DGX Station for Windows bridges this gap as the first deskside AI supercomputer to bring NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell-class AI infrastructure directly into the Windows ecosystem — providing the compute needed to build, run and connect powerful AI agents to the applications and infrastructure Windows users already harness.
“As enterprises scale AI agents across their organizations, they need AI infrastructure that can connect directly to the applications and workflows that power their business,” said Chris Marriott, vice president of enterprise platforms at NVIDIA. “DGX Station delivers supercomputing-class AI directly into Windows, where millions already design, engineer, research and create every day.”
“For decades, Microsoft and NVIDIA have partnered to advance the most powerful computing platforms in the world,” said Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president of Windows + Devices at Microsoft. “Today, we’re taking that collaboration to the next level, scaling the full power of Windows from thin-and-light PCs to data-center-class workstations with DGX Station powered by GB300. This unlocks a new class of AI performance on Windows, the platform enterprises trust for security, manageability and compatibility.”
Introducing DGX Station for Windows
The DGX Station state-of-the-art design is powered by the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip, connecting a powerful NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU to a high-performance 72-core NVIDIA Grace CPU via the NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect for best-in-class system communication and performance.
It features up to 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaflops of FP4 performance, and can be paired with an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation GPU for frontier AI compute with ray-traced visualization and simulation.
In addition, DGX Station for Windows features the NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, optimized to supercharge hyperscale AI computing workloads. With support for networking at up to 800Gb/s, the ConnectX-8 SuperNIC enables extremely fast network data transfers for AI workloads and high-speed connectivity of multiple DGX Station systems for even larger workloads.
A Window into the World of Always-On AI Agents
Enterprise AI is evolving from simple chatbot interactions to agentic inference that operate continuously, reason in real time and connect directly to enterprise applications and workflows.
Developed in collaboration with Microsoft, DGX Station for Windows serves as dedicated agent infrastructure — enabling enterprises to build and run agents with frontier intelligence locally, supporting AI models of up to 1 trillion parameters. DGX Station can also run agents at scale, with hundreds of agents executing on tasks simultaneously.
Powerful AI agents can be built and connected to 3D design and engineering applications, giving developers, designers and engineers intelligent assistants that understand their tools and processes to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate productivity.
For enterprise IT teams, DGX Station for Windows brings a secure, managed platform to GB300 deployments — extending the same Windows security, compliance and fleet management infrastructure organizations already rely on. AI agents deploy and operate within this managed environment, governed through familiar Microsoft tools.
Linux workloads get the same level of manageability support through Windows Subsystem for Linux. Enterprise-grade features — including deployment and system updates — help organizations maintain security, compliance and operational readiness across their fleets.
NVIDIA and Microsoft’s collaboration to deliver agents in the Windows experience extends from frontier to personal agents with NVIDIA RTX Spark — bringing the full spectrum of NVIDIA AI to slim laptops and small desktop PCs.
Secure Agent Development and Deployment with NVIDIA OpenShell
Autonomous agents need to be developed and deployed in a secure runtime that governs how they act, how they operate tools and how they interact with the rest of the system. DGX Station is an ideal platform for Windows users to build and run always-on, autonomous agents locally and securely before scaling to data center AI factories.
NVIDIA OpenShell is an open source, secure-by-design runtime for autonomous agents. Building on the new Windows security and containment primitives, it creates an individual, isolated sandbox for each agent and separates application-layer operations from infrastructure-layer policy enforcement.
This means security and privacy policies are out of the agent’s reach and applied at the system level. Instead of relying on behavioral system prompts, OpenShell uses the new Windows security and containment primitives with the aim to enforce constraints on the environment the agent runs in, so it cannot override policies, or leak credentials or private data.
DGX Station for Windows Workflows
DGX Station for Windows is built for the full spectrum of enterprise AI workflows — from autonomous agent deployment and frontier model development to high-throughput inference, data science and physical AI, all with the full Microsoft and Windows enterprise manageability stack.
DGX Station for Windows can serve as a dedicated AI supercomputer for a single developer or a shared local compute node for entire teams — with workloads scaling seamlessly to GB300 in the data center or cloud.
Global Ecosystem and Availability
DGX Station for Windows is expected to be available from ASUS, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, HP, MSI and Supermicro, coming in Q4 this year.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA DGX Station for Windows Puts a Trillion-Parameter AI Supercomputer on Every Enterprise Desk appeared first on HPCwire.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — DDN today announced new advancements to its AI data intelligence platform designed to help enterprises deploy agentic AI faster, strengthen governance and security, reduce operational complexity, and maximize GPU efficiency across enterprise-scale AI factories. The innovations deliver real-time observability, policy-based control, secure multi-tenant isolation, and AI-native data orchestration optimized for large-scale training, inference, and autonomous AI workloads, helping organizations move AI initiatives from pilot to production with improved performance and ROI.
The announcement aligns with new AI infrastructure innovations being introduced at GTC Taipei, including NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX architecture and NVIDIA DOCA security framework, designed to provide inline security, memory observability, and policy-based protection for AI-native storage and agentic AI workloads operating at enterprise scale.
As enterprises transition from experimental generative AI deployments to production-scale agentic AI systems, infrastructure requirements are rapidly evolving. Autonomous AI agents continuously retrieve, generate, reason over, and act on enterprise data in real time—creating new demands for governance, security, performance isolation, and operational efficiency across the AI data pipeline.
DDN powers some of the world’s largest AI factories, sovereign AI deployments, hyperscalers, and enterprise AI environments supporting millions of GPUs globally. The company’s AI data intelligence platform, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI, helps organizations operationalize secure AI factories by combining high-performance data orchestration, governance, multi-tenant isolation, and real-time AI data services optimized for training, inference, vector databases, RAG pipelines, and autonomous AI environments. The platform is designed to align with NVIDIA DOCA’s agentless, inline security model while improving GPU utilization, reducing infrastructure bottlenecks, and accelerating enterprise AI deployment timelines.
“Enterprises are under enormous pressure to move AI from experimentation to production while controlling costs, governance risks, and operational complexity,” said Alex Bouzari, Co-Founder and CEO at DDN. “AI factories are becoming autonomous production environments where business outcomes depend on secure, real-time access to data. DDN helps organizations deploy agentic AI faster, maximize GPU efficiency, strengthen governance, and improve the economic return of their AI investments.”
“As enterprises move autonomous AI from pilot to production, a new class of secure, high-performance data infrastructure is essential to manage the massive, real-time demands of agentic workloads,” said Jason Hardy, vice president of storage technology, NVIDIA. “Combining NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX architecture and NVIDIA DOCA security frameworks with DDN’s AI-native data intelligence platform enables enterprises to operationalize secure, scalable AI factories for training and inference at scale.”
NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX architecture, featuring NVIDIA DOCA Argus, DOCA Vault, and DOCA Flow, introduces a modular AI-native storage framework designed to support the performance, scalability, memory observability, zero trust controls, and security requirements of enterprise AI factories. The platform combines accelerated computing, networking, and inline security enforcement to create a secure-by-design AI infrastructure for agentic AI environments.
DDN’s platform helps enterprises:
The announcement also reflects a broader industry shift toward infrastructure-level AI security, where policy enforcement and protection operate directly within the AI data path rather than relying solely on traditional host-based defenses. NVIDIA DOCA frameworks introduced with Vera BlueField-4 STX enable inline enforcement, runtime visibility, inference protection, and AI-native data governance across distributed AI environments.
“Agentic AI fundamentally changes the operational and security requirements of enterprise infrastructure,” said Sven Oehme, CTO at DDN. “Organizations need infrastructure capable of governing and protecting AI data in real time without introducing performance bottlenecks. DDN’s platform is engineered to help customers scale secure AI factories efficiently while preserving ultra-low latency, maximizing GPU utilization, and reducing the operational burden of deploying enterprise AI at scale.”
About DDN
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across millions of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns.
Source: DDN
The post DDN Unveils AI Data Intelligence Advances to Accelerate Secure Agentic AI Deployment appeared first on HPCwire.
A lower mortgage rate may be closer than you think — but only if you know where to look.
SEOUL, Korea, June 1, 2026 — Samsung Electronics, a global leader in advanced memory technology, has begun shipping the industry’s first 12-layer HBM4E samples to major global customers, further strengthening its leadership in the next-generation HBM market.
Samsung’s 12-layer HBM4E. Credit: Samsung
Following the industry’s first mass production and commercial shipment of its industry-leading HBM4 earlier this year, Samsung now extends its HBM roadmap with the introduction of HBM4E samples, addressing the rapidly evolving demands of AI computing and hyperscale infrastructure.
“Following the successful mass production of HBM4, Samsung has once again demonstrated its distinct technological edge with HBM4E,” said Sang Joon Hwang, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Development at Samsung Electronics. “Through our advanced manufacturing capabilities and preemptive infrastructure investments, we will continue to drive the growth of the global AI memory market.”
Samsung’s HBM4E delivers a stable pin speed of 14 gigabits-per-second (Gbps), with performance scalable up to 16Gbps to support increasingly intensive data processing requirements. This represents more than a 20% increase over its HBM4, while delivering memory bandwidth of up to 3.6 terabytes-per-second (TB/s) per stack, helping maximize computing performance for large language models (LLMs) and next-generation AI systems.
Samsung’s 12-layer HBM4E is offered in a 48-gigabyte (GB) capacity, representing more than a 30% increase over the previous generation, with plans to expand the lineup to include 32GB (8-layer) and 64GB (16-layer) configurations in accordance with customer requirements.
The HBM4E sets itself apart by taking full advantage of Samsung’s comprehensive semiconductor capabilities and leveraging the same leading-edge technologies refined through the company’s HBM4 production experience. This includes the industry’s most advanced 6th-generation 10-nanometer (nm)-class DRAM process (1c) and Samsung Foundry’s 4nm logic base die, allowing the HBM4E to secure enhanced process stability and manufacturability.
Design and process optimization across both memory and logic architectures of Samsung’s HBM4E also improves performance, power efficiency and yield.
In particular, advanced low-power design technologies and optimized packaging structures improved energy efficiency by 16% and thermal resistance characteristics by more than 14% compared to the previous generation. These enhancements also enable more effective heat dissipation, allowing prolonged reliability and lower energy consumption in next-generation data centers with intensive workloads.
Samsung plans to begin mass production for HBM4E aligned with customer schedules, following initial sample shipments and optimization.
Feedback from global customers on Samsung’s HBM4, introduced in February, have been highly positive, especially for its performance and energy efficiency. The HBM4 was the first in the industry to enter mass production and has successfully set the bar for the industry with speeds of 11.7Gbps in its system in package (SiP) tests.
As stable supply of Samsung’s HBM4 continues to grow, the company’s latest HBM4E using the same combination of core and base die is anticipated to enter mass production to further accelerate innovation in next-generation AI systems. With its comprehensive portfolio spanning memory, foundry, logic design and advanced packaging, Samsung will continue to ensure a stable semiconductor supply for the booming AI market.
About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Samsung inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, digital signage, smartphones, wearables, tablets, home appliances and network systems, as well as memory, system LSI and foundry. Samsung is also advancing medical imaging technologies, HVAC solutions and robotics, while creating innovative automotive and audio products through Harman. With its SmartThings ecosystem, open collaboration with partners, and integration of AI across its portfolio, Samsung delivers a seamless and intelligent connected experience.
Source: Samsung Electronics
The post Samsung Electronics Begins Shipment of Industry-First HBM4E Samples appeared first on HPCwire.
Tehran says it holds Israel and US responsible, while Trump says ‘going silent’ on negotiations ‘would be very good’
Iran has indicated it will suspend peace talks with the US in protest against Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, threatening the collapse of negotiations with Washington as the two sides skirmished amid a faltering ceasefire.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said: “The ceasefire between Iran and the US is unequivocally a ceasefire on all fronts, including in Lebanon. Its violation on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts. The US and Israel are responsible for the consequences of any violation.”
Continue reading...The Canadian fourth seed and the former Wimbledon runner-up both won through in straight sets but Madison Keys was defeated by Diana Shnaider
Potapova, having lost five games in a row, makes advantage on the Kalinskaya serve, a pair of backhands, one cross then another down the line, seizing the break to trail 4-6 1-0. Neither player is really at it here, meaning the match is there for whichever of them can stay composed.
On Chatrier, Svajda is improving, surviving to break points for lead 2-1 in set two, having lost the first 6-2. If he can attack Cobolli’s second serve and backhand, he might yet make an impression in this match.
Continue reading...LIVINGSTON, N.J., June 1, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced its bring up of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave Cloud. Leveraging its purpose-built software and engineering solutions, CoreWeave is the first AI cloud provider to bring up Vera Rubin, extending the CoreWeave platform’s support for NVIDIA hardware. The milestone achievement includes the completion of rigorous system-level validation for the entire rack scale architecture.
Agentic AI is reshaping infrastructure requirements. As models reach a trillion parameters, context windows extend to millions of tokens, and persistent reasoning sessions become standard, inference performance has emerged as the defining constraint on how quickly AI companies can operate and grow.
NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 — featuring 72 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Vera CPUs per rack, connected via a 260 TB/s NVIDIA NVLink 6th-generation fabric — delivers up to 10× better inference per watt, up to one-fourth fewer GPUs, and one-tenth the cost per million tokens compared to NVIDIA Blackwell. With Vera Rubin, CoreWeave will deliver better results for customers.
“Our research depends on infrastructure that’s both powerful and reliable, and CoreWeave has delivered on this as we’ve scaled across NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell,” said Craig Falls, head of Quantitative Research at Jane Street. “Their ability to deliver highly performant clusters with full cluster observability and a support team that engages deeply on hard problems gives us the confidence to partner with them on Vera Rubin. We are excited about the efficiency gains at rack scale translating into faster training runs and shorter iteration cycles for our researchers.”
Purpose-Built Infrastructure for Rack-Scale AI, Powered by CoreWeave Mission Control
To allow customer to take better advantage of Vera Rubin at production scale, CoreWeave developed a new set of purpose-built innovations:
“The agentic era demands a fundamentally different approach to infrastructure, one that keeps pace with workloads that reason continuously, scale unpredictably, and operate in production around the clock,” said Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of Product & Engineering at CoreWeave. “What separates infrastructure that performs in a lab from infrastructure that performs in production is the depth of engineering underneath it. With patent-pending innovations like Valvey and Racky, CoreWeave has done the full-stack orchestration work to enable Vera Rubin to perform the way it was designed to, not just in a lab, but at production scale for the world’s most demanding AI teams.”
“Vera Rubin is the most capable AI platform NVIDIA has ever built,” said Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing (HPC) at NVIDIA. “CoreWeave has consistently been at the frontier of deploying each new generation of NVIDIA architecture at scale, and their full-stack, end-to-end approach to Vera Rubin, from cooling to orchestration, is how the world’s most ambitious AI teams will push the next AI frontier.”
Built on a Foundation of Deep Technical Partnerships
Bringing a rack-scale platform like Vera Rubin NVL72 to production requires tight collaboration across the entire infrastructure stack. CoreWeave’s ecosystem of technology partners is central to how Vera Rubin reaches customers at speed and scale. Dell Technologies provided the architectural backbone for the platform through its high-performance PowerEdge XE9812 servers. The bring up also features Micron 7600 SSDs, delivering improved energy efficiency through one of the first liquid-cooled NVMe storage solutions deployed at rack-scale.
“Dell Technologies and CoreWeave share a commitment to delivering innovation that performs at the frontier of what AI demands,” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive at Dell Technologies. “The PowerEdge XE9812 was engineered for exactly this kind of density and precision. Working with CoreWeave to bring up the first NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is a direct validation of what enterprise-grade hardware can do when it’s paired with the right operational expertise.”
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.
Source: CoreWeave
The post CoreWeave Completes Industry-First Bring-Up and Validation of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 appeared first on HPCwire.
Castlelake’s move raises questions over valuation and ownership rules as well as whether Stelios Haji-Ioannou could throw a spanner in the works
A share price gain of only 10% on a possible takeover approach is a meek reaction. If the stock market truly believed that Castlelake, a US investment fund, stood a decent chance of buying easyJet, you would expect the target’s stock to fly significantly higher. Scepticism is the right stance until at least three factors become clearer.
First, would the two sides even be vaguely in the same landing zone on valuation? EasyJet’s description of Castlelake’s timing as “highly opportunistic” was boilerplate rhetoric (all bids are opportunistic to a degree) but in this case it is clearly possible that all European airlines’ prospects could be brighter within a couple of months.
Continue reading...Angry residents, who said their lives were in danger, set fires and clashed with police as they protested the facility intended to treat Americans.
A Utah judge denied a request from the suspect accused of killing Charlie Kirk to restrict access to parts of his July preliminary hearing.
Federal agencies disrupted the attack but were direct about what comes next. These five router security steps are the responsibility of individual owners.
Aikido Security says more than 30 official @redhat-cloud-services npm packages were compromised with a credential-stealing worm called "Miasma," a variant resembling the open-sourced Mini Shai-Hulud supply-chain malware. "The packages were published via GitHub Actions OIDC, indicating the CI/CD pipeline was compromised rather than an npm token," the report says. "If you have installed any affected package versions since June 1, 2026, treat all CI secrets, cloud credentials, SSH keys, and npm tokens as compromised and rotate them immediately." From the report: Each compromised package declares a preinstall script in its package.json that executes node index.js automatically on every npm install, before any application code runs and before the developer has any indication something is wrong. The index.js file is 4.2 MB payload hidden behind multiple layers of obfuscation. As with previous Mini Shai-Hulud attacks, the payload performs a broad credential sweep across cloud providers, CI/CD environments, and developer tooling. On the CI side it targets GitHub Actions secrets including GITHUB_TOKEN and ACTIONS_RUNTIME_TOKEN. For cloud credentials it collects AWS access keys and session tokens, GCP application default credentials and service account key files, and Azure service principal credentials and managed identity tokens. It also sweeps for HashiCorp Vault tokens, Kubernetes service account tokens and kubeconfig files, npm and PyPI publish tokens, SSH private keys, Docker registry credentials, GPG keys, and any .env files it can find across the filesystem.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pelley reportedly rebuked CBS ousting show’s executive producer, executive editor and two top correspondents
Scott Pelley, a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent, called out CBS News management in a heated meeting on Monday morning, attacking the network’s decision on Thursday to fire the show’s executive producer, executive editor, and two fellow correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, as part of a broader overhaul of the show, sources tell the Guardian.
During a meeting of the show’s staff and Nick Bilton, its newly appointed executive producer, along with the CBS News managing editor Charles Forelle, Pelley took direct aim at Bari Weiss, the network’s controversial editor-in-chief.
Continue reading...Attorney general Keith Ellison says gesture at convention was an ‘act of profound cruelty’ to George Floyd’s family
The Minnesota Republican party’s decision to hold a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has angered the state’s attorney general – who was the lead prosecutor in the case.
Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said Saturday’s gesture at the state Republicans’ annual convention in Duluth was “an act of profound cruelty” to Floyd’s family and “disrespectful” to Minnesota’s law enforcement personnel.
Continue reading...Left-wing streamers Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker say Britain's government has denied them entry over their criticism of Israel.
Saudi–UAE tensions: Implications for the regional order 10 June 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Online
Experts discuss divergences in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s strategic outlooks and how the relationship will continue to shape the region.
In this webinar, a panel of experts examine how recent developments underscore broader divergences in regional outlook that had been developing between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh in recent years. Panellists discuss how the war has influenced Saudi and Emirati strategy, and how the relationship will continue to shape Gulf dynamics and the wider regional order.In the final days of 2025, tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), once key partners in the Yemen coalition, became more visible as differences over the conflict’s endgame resurfaced, and the UAE announced a full withdrawal from Yemen. Two months later, the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. The war has further stressed the UAE-Saudi relationship and highlighted divergences over their long-term strategies.
The UAE has taken a stronger stance against Iran, aligning more closely with US and Israeli positions than with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. In April, the UAE withdrew from OPEC, further reflecting divergences between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh’s strategy and vision.
In this webinar, a panel of experts examine how recent developments underscore broader divergences in regional outlook that has been developing between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh in recent years. Panellists discuss how the war has influenced Saudi and Emirati strategy, and how the relationship will continue to shape Gulf dynamics and the wider regional order.
An Iranian woman who now lives in the U.S. spoke with CBS News as the war with Iran entered its fourth month.
Peters, a conspiracy theorist convicted after 2020 election, served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence
Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by Donald Trump, was released from prison on Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.
Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado corrections department. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old.
Continue reading...Ahead of the World Cup, Spain's star winger Lamine Yamal teases unreleased Beats headphones in an Instagram post.
Dell has introduced a redesigned $699 XPS 13 aimed squarely at Apple's budget MacBook Neo, offering a premium aluminum design, touch display, backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 7, 512GB of base storage, and various other configuration options. Dell's machine costs more than Apple's entry model but tries to justify the difference with lighter weight, better display specs, and upgrade paths Apple doesn't offer. "The XPS 13 begins at $699 -- students can purchase it for $599 -- while the MacBook Neo costs $599 and drops to $499 for education buyers," notes Bloomberg. From the report: Dell's product allows for more configuration, with up to 32GB of memory compared with the Neo's nonupgradeable 8GB of unified memory. Its display can also produce a wider spectrum of colors and supports refresh rates up to 120 hertz, while Apple reserves its best screens for the pricier MacBook Pro line. The inclusion of a backlit keyboard should allow for easier typing in dark conditions. Dell has also tossed in other nice-to-have upgrades over the Neo like more robust Wi-Fi 7 wireless networking. As for battery life, Dell is touting "up to 17 hours of streaming" versus a comparable 16 hours on the Neo. Still, the XPS comes with compromises of its own: Unlike the Neo, there's no built-in headphone jack, which means owners will need to rely on its quad-speaker audio system, use Bluetooth earbuds or plug a headphone adapter into one of the two USB-C ports. You can learn more via Dell.com.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Michael Grade dismisses impartiality concerns, saying rightwing channel faces same rules as BBC, Sky and ITN
Michael Grade, the recently departed chair of Britain’s media watchdog, has accused broadcasters of being “embarrassed” by GB News because it covers the “agenda of the majority”.
Grade, who has recently retaken the Conservative whip in the House of Lords after stepping down from Ofcom, said he was now able to give his real view on the rightwing broadcaster, which has faced repeated accusations of partial and misleading coverage.
Continue reading...Conquering of Beaufort Castle for first time in 26 years brings back memories of occupation of south
When Hussain Alawieh used to take tourists to Beaufort Castle, they would marvel at the view. The ancient hilltop fort, captured nearly 1,000 years earlier by Crusaders, still offered the same sweeping panoramic views of south Lebanon and the Litani River that empires fought over for a millennia.
On Sunday, the view from the castle was obscured by white phosphorus smoke, the toxic incendiary munition providing a smoke screen for advancing Israeli soldiers. Out of the fog rose an Israeli flag, and the castle, for the first time in 26 years, was once again conquered.
Continue reading...For law enforcement investigating fraud cases, the hard part can be following the money to figure out where the tax dollars have gone.
Peter Mandelson’s unfiltered remarks to cabinet officials are made public in hundreds of pages of documents relating to his appointment as US ambassador
At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said the release of the Mandelson files today would be “an unprecedented piece of government transparency”.
He said that party political material would be included, despite precedent suggesting it should be included, and that some material had to be declassified to allow it to be published.
The broad scope of the [humble address motion – see 9.26am] has required the discovery, assessment, analysis and preparation of thousands of individual documents and messages.
This is a task that has involved every government department.
Yeah, I have changed what I would say. I wouldn’t say that phrase any more.
And I think that, you know, over the last few years, I think a lot of us, myself included, have thought about this question in quite some detail.
Continue reading...A mistaken bank account levy could have bigger financial consequences than you think. Here's how to fix the issue.
U.S. officials sought help from Russia during President Trump's first term to secure the release of journalist Austin Tice, according to Robert O'Brien.
News that the 666 to Hel was back has spread quickly across Polish social media accounts, and beyond.
Before you count on that overtime money, make sure you understand the wage garnishment rules tied to it.
Powell says central bank has been facing ‘stress test’ under Trump, as supreme court weighs decision on Fed governor that president tried to fire
Jerome Powell, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, has warned that a single act of political interference in monetary policy could permanently destroy public trust in the central bank.
As Donald Trump’s administration continues to test the Fed’s longstanding independence, Powell said in a speech on Sunday night that the institution was in the midst of a “stress test”.
Continue reading...The PlayStation ecosystem continues to grow.
Miami-Dade county officials agreed to pay HRP Group more than double the price for land on Fisher Island to protect fuel depot used by the cruise industry
A three-way tug-of-war erupted in recent months over ownership of a property on Fisher Island – one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States – that sits in Biscayne Bay opposite the skyline of downtown Miami. When TransMontaigne Partners, a Denver-based global energy company, put the parcel on the market in May 2024, interest ran high because that land represented the last remaining piece of real estate available for development on the island.
The eventual winner of the bidding war was a Chicago-based developer called the HRP Group, which purchased the property for $180m in late September last year. The developer then announced ambitious plans to build condominium towers on the property at an estimated cost of $2bn.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Authorities in the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised more than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center. The action, announced Thursday, came about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorities. The host infrastructure was located in the Netherlands. "The police then seized several botnet servers from a hosting provider for investigation," the NCSC said. "The botnet was taken offline by the provider because it was used for criminal purposes." According to a report Thursday by the NL Times, the botnet was linked to ASOCKS, a Russia-based company that provides residential proxy services. These services cater to people and organizations who want to obscure their locations or identities by proxying their Internet traffic through third-party devices. Proxy services are often used for illicit or unethical purposes such as performing DDoS attacks, running botnet command-and-control servers, operating phishing operations, and scraping website content. [...] It's unclear how the 17 million devices controlled by the botnet taken down by the Dutch police came to be that way.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Focus on casino operator is sharp departure from media for Diller as markets remain volatile
Media mogul Barry Diller’s People Inc said on Monday it had proposed to buy MGM Resorts, valuing the casino operator at more than $18bn.
The offer comes just weeks after Diller, the digital media company’s chair, told shareholders in a 28 April letter that People would sharpen its focus on its MGM stake, calling the stock “wildly undervalued”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Former Labor minister will lead the community-based investigation and report in October
Peter Garrett on why Australians deserve the truth about Aukus – Full Story podcast
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Former environment minister Peter Garrett will lead an independent inquiry into the Aukus defence pact, launched by a group of Labor veterans and public figures concerned proper scrutiny has never been applied to the $368bn defence plan.
Garrett, the Midnight Oil frontman and longtime environmental campaigner, will be the lead commissioner on the five-month community-based investigation, being launched on Tuesday.
Continue reading...British house prices fell 0.6% in May, leaving them 1.7% higher than a year earlier, Nationwide reports
Eurozone factories were hit by the biggest jump in input costs in four years last month.
The Iran war drove up the cost of raw materials and intermediate goods, according to the latest poll of purchasing managers at European manufacturers.
Although euro area manufacturers reported an expansion for a fourth successive month in May, the sector is showing signs of struggling under the weight of rising prices and supply disruptions emanating from the war in the Middle East.
“A key development in May was yet another surge in energy and raw material prices, causing the largest monthly jump in firms’ costs for four years. The incidence of supply chain delays has meanwhile risen to the highest since the pandemic supply squeeze of 2022, adding further upward pressure to prices.
“Global turmoil is taking a toll on the property market. House prices fell between April and May and are up just 1.7% in a year. It’s a valuable reminder that property investments aren’t always safe as houses.
“The Nationwide House Price Index only provides a partial picture of the market, but it’s particularly timely, because it looks at prices at the point of mortgage approvals – months ahead of the completion data we get from the Office for National Statistics.
Continue reading...Calls the event ‘perfect place’ for her return to court
Williams will play doubles with Victoria Mboko
Serena Williams, one of the greatest athletes of all time, has announced her return to professional tennis next week at Queen’s Club.
The 44-year-old will return to competition with a wildcard into the doubles draw in the WTA 500 event in west London. She has not competed since the US Open in 2022, where she described her departure from the sport as “evolving away” from tennis rather than retirement. However, Williams remained on the retired players’ list until last year.
Continue reading...Success of far-right presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, suggests some voters are ‘fed up with politics’
The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella and the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda have just under three weeks to compete for the roughly 3.6m votes that did not go to either of them in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election.
That is no insignificant number, given that De la Espriella’s lead over Cepeda amounted to little more than 670,000 votes – 43.7% to 40.9%.
Continue reading...Criticisms revealed in major release of files relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to US
Peter Mandelson exchanged WhatsApp messages with a senior cabinet minister criticising Keir Starmer’s lack of “verve” and tendency to buckle under pressure, suggesting the prime minister should behave in a more “Trumpian” fashion.
The former US ambassador said Number 10 was “beleaguered and bereft” and that the public were “crying out for leadership”.
Continue reading...Americans speaking out against artificial intelligence data centers on social media are falling under police surveillance, a confidential law enforcement bulletin obtained by The Intercept reveals.
A fusion center in Philadelphia combed through spicy internet comments from AI critics and concluded there is a growing risk of physical violence against data centers from “domestic violent extremists,” ranging from white supremacists to anarchists.
“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center wrote in a December alert.
The fusion center distributed its warning, marked “for official use only,” through the national fusion center network of state, local, and federal police agencies.
Like many of the reports produced by fusion centers, the bulletin points to news reports and social media posts, but cites little in the way of tangible threats. It acknowledges “a lack of specific information on plans to target AI data centers in the Philadelphia area,” but warns law enforcement that three planned data center facilities in the region could become targets of future protests.
Some of the anti-AI posts included in the document reflect hyperbolic anti-AI rhetoric that is widespread across social media, including an unnamed internet user who “indicated a desire to ‘burn down’ data centers.” Other examples of potentially terroristic posts included references to a fictional anti-robot movement in the science fiction novel “Dune” and a Facebook meme.
The fusion center, housed inside the Philadelphia Police Department, warned that “disruptive First Amendment activity” is an “indicator” of risk from “Domestic Violent Extremists,” an expansive term favored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Fusion centers, which sprouted up across the country after the September 11, 2001, attacks, have long been criticized for doing little to thwart actual terror plots and too much to subject lawful protesters to suspicion and surveillance. They have previously warned local cops about the supposed threat from Black Lives Matter protesters and Keystone XL to Line 3 pipeline opponents.
Pennsylvania has its own history of counterterror agencies targeting advocacy groups. In 2010, then-Gov. Ed Rendell apologized for the state Department of Homeland Security contracting with a private firm to produce fearmongering reports on groups including anti-fracking activists.
When it came to the recent data center activist report, longtime Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Paul Hetznecker said he was troubled by the fusion center’s association of AI skeptics with terrorists.
“Those are legitimate, popular political concerns that are raised by local communities.”
“Those are legitimate, popular political concerns that are raised by local communities,” Hetznecker said. “This particular report from [the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center] reflects a very dangerous attempt to characterize that protected First Amendment activity — activity which is fundamental to our democracy — as something other, something more dangerous, a breeding ground for something more sinister.”
In response to questions emailed to the Philadelphia Police Department and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a spokesperson responded with a statement asserting that the center “recognizes and respects the rights of individuals to lawfully express opinions, engage in peaceful advocacy, and participate in protected First Amendment activities.”
“Fusion centers exist to help stakeholders understand emerging threats and hazards that could impact public safety, critical infrastructure, major events, government facilities, businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Sgt. Eric Gripp, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department. “These assessments cover a wide range of topics and are designed to provide situational awareness, not to characterize lawful activity or constitutionally protected speech as criminal conduct.”
The Intercept obtained the Philadelphia report as part of a larger cache of such documents from local fusion centers. It adds to growing evidence that counterterror officials are putting data center skeptics under a microscope. Last week, Wired magazine reported on other notices from local intelligence agencies warning about “anti-tech extremism.” Journalists Ken Klippenstein and Dan Boguslaw also reported on a document from the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau warning of the potential for anti-data center violence.
The reports are tied to a genuine upswell in popular pushback against data centers. The opposition extends well beyond the mishmash of far-right and far-left groups identified in the Philadelphia fusion center’s report. Seven out of 10 Americans oppose having data centers as neighbors, a recent Gallup poll found.
The fusion center report frames the outcry as a potential first step toward violence, telling local police with jurisdiction over the roughly 16 data centers near Philadelphia that they should be aware of angry online posts.
The report warns about posts on an “anti-capitalist blog that remains popular amongst local anarchist extremist collectives.”
Under a title urging “Butlerian Jihad Against AI” — a reference to a book in the Dune science-fantasy series about humans revolting against their intelligent computer overlords — a post on the Philly Anti-Capitalist blog said “only we can decide to smash the screens that are brainwashing us into submission. The time is now, the day is here, ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!”
The post was unattributed, did not include targets for attack, and included a cartoonish sketch of an old-fashioned computer struck by arrows. Nevertheless, local intelligence analysts appeared to take the threat seriously.
The bulletin also ticked off other signs of anti-data center furor. There was a meme post on shared on a local Facebook account with text reading: “I cannot escape the feeling that I am morally obligated to sabotage AI data center infrastructure.” Commenters on the post had discussed a proposed Amazon data center near Berwick, Pennsylvania, as a “potential target,” according to the report. The Intercept was able to find other versions of this meme posted to Facebook and Instagram unrelated to the targeting of specific, physical data centers.
The fusion center bulletin also said that white supremacists and members of the dark online subculture dubbed “nihilistic violent extremism” by the FBI had agitated online against data centers.
The document also mentioned a DHS report highlighting a thread on an online image board where users discussed using magnets, explosives, or even — in an idea that reflected a sci-fi movie trope — an electromagnetic pulse weapon to take out data centers.
The fusion center analysts appeared to take seriously other rhetoric proposing dramatic attacks. “In addition to general anti-AI data center rhetoric, online users have recently discussed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for carrying out attacks varying from simple swatting and hoax threats to property damage, arson, and even the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) material,” the report said.
“That appears to be an effort by law enforcement to hype up the threat where there may be no threat at all.”
Hetznecker, the civil rights lawyer, said the idea of a nuclear threat raised concerns for him about the quality of the fusion center’s sources and its conclusions.
“That appears to be an effort by law enforcement to hype up the threat where there may be no threat at all,” he said. “To increase scrutiny on First Amendment activities by lumping in those activities with the most extreme, possible scenarios one could imagine that have no factual basis.”
The Philadelphia fusion center report specifically warned authorities of the likelihood that new local data centers could be the target of protest.
“There is potential for significant pushback to the three newly proposed AI data centers in the Philadelphia area. Indicators of an increased threat in the short term may consist of more disruptive First Amendment activity in opposition to AI data centers, small acts of vandalism, online calls for action to boycott and or protest local AI data centers in the Philadelphia area, and extensive criticism of higher utility bills resulting from AI data centers,” the report said.
The mention of boycotts, criticism, and other activities protected by the First Amendment raised red flags for Hetznecker.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see heightened law enforcement scrutiny on legitimate expressions of AI data center concerns, and I hope that would not chill the appropriate dialogue that needs to occur on the impact of data centers on local communities,” he said.
Update: June 1, 2026, 11:01 a.m. ET
The article was updated with a statement from the Philadelphia Police Department received after publication.
The post Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI appeared first on The Intercept.
Hi guys, if anyone here had a similar issue? It’s hard to keep balanced for long above 20km/h, too wobbly..I have to slow down or risk falling off at higher speed! It’s impossible to reach top speed! .. I tried the wiki suggestion and inflated the tire to a maximum for 24h .. but i did not work.. should I change the tire or is there another way to fix it?
Diller said that MGM's properties, such as the Bellagio in Las Vegas, can't be easily replaced by AI.
AI can help accelerate scientific discovery, but setting up and running a foundation model is not a simple task. Thanks to the work of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, scientists affiliated with DOE National Labs and the Genesis Mission can now tap into a new AI inference service running on ALCF supercomputers.
Dubbed the ALCF Inference Service, the new service enables DOE scientists to interact with dozens of open foundation models in batch and interactive modes. This includes Google’s Gemma series, Meta’s LLaMA models, and OpenAI’s GPT-OSS family, as well as domain-specific foundation models, computer vision models and in-house models developed at Argonne, like AuroraGPT.
The ALCF Inference Service runs on Sophia (left) and Metis (Source: ALCF)
The AI inference service spans two ALCF supercomputers, Sophia and Metis. Sophia is a Nvidia DGX-based system with eight A100 GPUs and 3.9 petaflops of FP64 performance, while Metis is a SambaNova SN40L cluster with more than 1,000 AI accelerators spread across 16 nodes rated at 637.5 teraFLOPS of BF16 performance.
According to ALCF Director Michael Papka, the new AI inference service is available on a first-come, first-served basis. As long as the users are registered and have appropriate credentials, they can utilize the service as part of their work.
“There are people doing science on it now,” Papka said. “What we really see is the scientific community building this into their workflows.”
The inference service will span roughly 35 AI models, with about 10 of them loaded at any given time. If a user requests a model that is not active there, they can make a request and the model will enter a queue to get spun up.
For instance, a scientist may integrate AI into their traditional HPC simulations by asking an LLM to analyze data from the simulation. Based on the results of that analysis, the scientist may make changes to the simulation and then test them. This is the type of iterative feedback loop that hopefully will accelerate the scientific process and lead to new discoveries.
ALCF Inference Service has been available for DOE scientists for a while, and it has already generated about 26 billion tokens for about 450 users, according to Papka. The early tests have been promising, and ANL has yet to implement any kind of throttling to prevent users from overwhelming the system.
Papka is curious to see how the system will respond once the load increases and users start to really test what it can do. “I want to have problems,” he said. “I want people coming back and saying, ‘Okay, we’re not seeing what we need, but…’ and that’s why we’re pushing it out there as far as we are.”
As context windows get bigger, scientists are able to keep more information in the LLM’s memory, and do more useful work with it. A challenge arises when an AI inference service tries to accommodate large context windows for a large number of concurrent users. At some point, the memory available to maintain context in state for so many users runs out, and the service begins to degrade. ALCF has not encountered that point yet, but it likely will at some point. This is all part of the process of exploring how these AI for science systems can be built.
“I’ve actually been using the service and gotten to points where it has become slow, and I know a lot of people are hammering on it,” Papka said. “But then that just tells me we need more resources and it makes for a good conversation with the program office.”
The ALCF Inference Service is based on the FIRST framework (Source: 2025 ALCF paper)
Dealing with large a large number of concurrent users is no trivial task, but it’s something that the National Labs will need to address if it’s going to provide the sort of “dial tone” service for AI inference that the large commercial AI providers can deliver. The ALCF Inference Service is based on a 2025 paper by ANL scientists and University of Chicago professors on a product dubbed Federated Inference Resource Scheduling Toolkit, or FIRST.
FIRST consists of three main components, including an Inference Gateway API (based on OpenAI’s API) to process user requests; Globus Compute to execute tasks on HPC resources; and Model Serving Tools to efficiently perform the LLM inference. “The framework addresses the growing demand for private, secure, and scalable AI inference in scientific workflows, allowing researchers to generate billions of tokens daily on-premises without relying on commercial cloud infrastructure,” the paper’s authors write.
Managing access to HPC resources is no trivial matter. The lab deals with high traffic on the ALCF Inference Service by shifting workloads to different Nvidia GPUs and SambaNova XPUs, so there may be periods where some models are not accessible. Papka said the ALCF is looking forward to exploiting some of the new capabilities that newer Nvidia hardware will bring to the table, such as with the new Minerva and Tara supercomputers that ALCF is expecting.
“When Minerva comes, we will actually leverage some of Nvidia’s newest software infrastructure,” Papka said. “We’re trying to hide that from our users such that they will still continue to interact in the same way they do with all the resources, but leverage some of what Nvidia has been doing to give us better performance and capability.”
The AI inference service isn’t open just to ALCF users, but any users across 12 DOE Labs as part of the Genesis Mission projects, including the American Science Cloud (AmSc) and Transformational AI Models Consortium (ModCon), Papka said.
“What we’ve been slowly doing with DOE as part of the Genesis Mission is opening this up to the ModCon team, so researchers that are part of ModCon can say ‘We want to use this’ and then they just get added to a list where we’re leveraging Globus authentication,” Papka said. “They authenticate to their local Globus accounts, so they don’t necessarily need an ALCF account.”
ALCF Director Michael Papka
This opens the door for researchers from Brookhaven National Lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and other labs to get access to the ALCF chat interface as well as the API, Papka said. When they register using their DOE accounts, they get tokens to use on the new inference service.
Those tokens are good for a length of time, which means that people don’t need to continually re-log-in to the system, Papka said. That’s a little different than how commercial AI services work, he said.
“We want to be very responsive to scientists. Their asks are likely to be different than what maybe the commercial vendors will be pursuing,” Papka said. “As an HPC facility, allowing for these long running tokens is something different and that’s how we’ve adapted to this new workflow.”
Scientists may have a mix of batch and interactive workloads with different runtime expectations, so managing these workloads for a large number of users across finite resources will be a challenge. For instance, when a user needs to call an AI model in the middle of a long-running simulation on traditional HPC resources, the scientist doesn’t necessarily want to wait in a queue for the AI resource while the simulation is still running, Papka said. “We’re thinking a lot about how we become much more service oriented,” he said.
For more information, you can see the ALCF user guide or watch the webinar, “Deploying Inference Services at ALCF.”
The post New AI Inference Service Now Ready for Science at Argonne appeared first on HPCwire.
Record-breaking box office for Backrooms and Obsession has opened the door for twentysomething YouTube creators as the industry rethinks what audiences want
At this time last year, the idea of a wide-release feature film-maker cutting their teeth on YouTube was, if not unheard of, certainly still a niche origin story. Siblings Michael and Danny Philippou had just released Bring Her Back, the follow-up to their surprise horror hit Talk to Me, to pretty-good reviews and OK box office; clearly they would continue to work, but the slightly diminished returns didn’t predict a YouTube explosion. Nor did the outright lousiness of Shelby Oaks, from longtime YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, when it premiered in theaters later in 2025. Generous horror-festival buzz died down as more people actually laid eyes on the movie; Stuckmann was an obvious enthusiast, and some saw promise in his first effort, but a clumsy found-footage pastiche without much emotional sense didn’t seem like the next big thing, either.
But in 2026, something has shifted. In January, YouTuber Markiplier self-released his adaptation of the video game Iron Lung to theaters, and it outgrossed any number of big-studio titles. Then Curry Barker, whose comedy sketches have been a YouTube fixture, unveiled his feature debut Obsession. The film, made for under a million dollars, has become the box office phenomenon of the summer so far, managing a virtually unheard-of feat when its second and third weekends actually outgrossed its first. Obsession is sharing multiplex space with Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who previously brought the spooky internet meme to life in a series of YouTube shorts. Despite being set in a series of purgatorial, sparsely furnished, fluorescent-lit “liminal spaces”, it was the top movie at the North American box office this weekend, poised to become the biggest-grossing movie from distributor A24 in a matter of days. Backrooms also opened to bigger numbers than any number of starrier or bigger-brand 2026 titles like Wuthering Heights, Scream 7, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or the last Pixar movie. That makes three YouTube-trained film-makers who have presided over some of this year’s biggest and/or most surprising hits. With them have come countless social media posts about how YouTube, not film school, provides the real training tomorrow’s directors need.
Continue reading...A TIAA-Stanford University survey found that fewer people can correctly answer questions involving basic financial concepts. See how you fare.
Met says non-fatal stabbings took place after most of the crowds had dispersed on Sunday evening
Six people were stabbed after Arsenal’s Premier League victory parade in north London on Sunday, police have said.
The Metropolitan police said the stabbings took place in the evening after most of the crowds had dispersed. Twenty-four people were arrested.
Continue reading...From Google co-founder Brin spending $82m to fight a billionaire tax to Google and Meta funding a joint Super Pac, Silicon Valley is engaged in an existential fight for its political power at home
Tech billionaires have shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the 2 June primary election in California, in an unrivaled attempt to influence who gets to run the state that Silicon Valley calls home.
The industry has used a cover-all-bases approach, funding candidates and ballot measures big and small, contributing to what looks to be the most expensive primary season in California history. The goal, experts say, is to gain both political and regulatory leverage that will perpetuate dominance in business.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent $82m since January, more than any other donor, to fight a billionaire tax that’s up for a vote on the November ballot.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan has received more donations than any other candidate, including from top executives at Google, Amazon, Snap, LinkedIn, Reddit and Palantir.
Crypto mogul Chris Larsen has funded three Super Pacs with $26m to sway campaigns across California, including giving $1m to back a primary candidate for state insurance commissioner.
Google and Meta have collectively funded a Super Pac with $10m to back assembly and senate candidates in local district races across the state.
Silicon Valley money is flowing toward city primaries as well as state-level ones, with tech-backed Pacs sponsoring voter guides suggesting how to vote on local tax measures.
Continue reading...A New York state oversight board raised ethics concerns about a trip by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli to Israel that a local pro-Israel Jewish group sponsored.
The revelation comes amid renewed scrutiny of DiNapoli’s spending spree on Israel Bonds, a financial instrument that directly funds the state of Israel. DiNapoli, the administrator of New York pension funds, is facing his first primary fight in 18 years as comptroller, and the branded, non-tradeable assets have become an issue in the race.
The trip was paid for by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which has a financial relationship to Israel Bonds, the organization that issues Israeli government debt securities in the U.S.
According to an itinerary of the trip, DiNapoli was slated to meet with Israel Bonds staffers.
In a February 2, 2024, letter to the comptroller, the New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government approved reimbursement for DiNapoli by the JCRC, but raised concerns that the sponsored trip could create an appearance of potential improper influence.
The ethics commission informed DiNapoli that several commissioners raised concerns “the proposed reimbursement could give reasonable basis for the impression that a person could improperly influence you,” according to the letter, which was obtained through a public records request and shared exclusively with The Intercept.
DiNapoli has been an enthusiastic backer of investing New York pension and investment funds in Israel Bonds. Amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, efforts by the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel have gained steam — including campaigns urging divestment from Israeli bonds. DiNapoli tilted in the opposite direction, including a $20 million New York pension fund investment in Israel bonds in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
According to an itinerary of the trip drafted by JCRC and obtained by the group Jewish Voice for Peace New York, DiNapoli was slated to meet with Israel Bonds staffers. In 2024, according to its website, JCRC received financial backing from Israel Bonds — which Jewish Voice for Peace organizers said could hint at a potential improper influence. The Israel Bonds donation was for a float in the 2024 Israel Day parade organized by the JCRC, a spokesperson for the group said. DiNapoli regularly attends the rally, including in 2024.
On Sunday, DiNapoli and other state and local electeds marched in the parade again, joined by an array of extremist Israeli political figures including Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister and a far-right champion of illegal settlements.
“By participating in trips organized and paid for by an organization that receives institutional donations and is closely and publicly aligned with Israel Bonds, while simultaneously promoting his office’s ongoing investments in Israel Bonds, Comptroller DiNapoli engaged in a foreign policy function far outside his statutory mandate as a fiduciary to millions of pensioners and public employees,” Lisa Mulleneaux, a researcher with JVP’s “Break the Bonds” campaign, wrote in an October complaint to the ethics commission.
“This represents a serious violation of his ethical obligation under §74(3)(f) to avoid any impression that his official duties can be swayed by outside groups,” Mulleneaux wrote. “At minimum, it undermines public trust in the independence of the Comptroller’s office and the integrity of the state’s investment decisions.”
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DiNapoli pointed to the ethics commission’s ultimate approval of the JCRC reimbursement and said his office was unaware of any ethics complaint filed in relation to the trip. (The New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government declined to comment.)
In his 18 years as comptroller — and particularly in the months and years following October 7 and the launch of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — DiNapoli has turned the state’s pension fund into one of the largest holders of Israel Bonds nationwide. Since the February 2024 trip, Dinapoli has invested $120 million of the state’s common retirement fund in the instruments, bringing the total investment of state pension funds in Israel Bonds to $332.5 million.
“Officials like Comptroller DiNapoli are responsible for the safeguarding of pension funds through strategic investing that prioritizes the needs of public sector workers and retirees,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. “Instead, Comptroller DiNapoli is investing the NY pension in Israel Bonds — unrestricted loans to the Israeli military and government used for every aspect of violence against Palestinians.”
DiNapoli’s fervent support for Israel Bonds have become a talking point in his primary race, with challengers Raj Goyle and Drew Warshaw both pledging to divest from investments in Israel should they take office.
Running from DiNapoli’s left, Goyle’s and Warshaw’s positions are in line with former New York City comptroller and current House candidate Brad Lander, who chose not to buy new Israel Bonds while overseeing the city’s pension fund.
For the most vocal critics, the moral argument against public investment in Israel Bonds is paramount. Becky Silber, a New York state employee and member of Jewish Voice for Peace told The Intercept that she was horrified to learn in 2024 that her hard-earned retirement funds were being used to send money to the state of Israel.
“When I became aware that my pension fund was being used to fund Israel, I was gutted.”
“When I became aware that my pension fund was being used to fund Israel, I was gutted, honestly,” Silber told The Intercept. “I was horrified watching the news coming out of Gaza. I was checking every purchase in the grocery store to make sure that my money wasn’t funding it. And so to learn that hundreds of millions of dollars of my pension fund were being sent to Israel with no guardrails on how it was spent, that was devastating.”
Critics of the investments also point to a fiscally responsible argument against the bonds. Unlike traditional foreign-debt assets, Israel Bonds cannot be sold on a secondary market and instead must be held until they mature. That makes them a potentially unsound bet, especially considering the rapid decline of Israel’s credit rating in recent years.
“It is hard to justify this as financial prudence or an effective strategy for diversification, especially when many other comparable investments are less risky; more transparent; and more liquid,” said Kaycee Wimbish, a Kingston, New York, resident active with the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “These utterly disproportionate investments reveal a hidden political agenda.”
The post New York Comptroller’s Trip to Israel Raised Ethical Concerns, State Commission Said appeared first on The Intercept.
Launching in the UK this month, this new pint-sized console revives the motion-controlled video game boom of the 00s – with better, safer tech
For a wonderful moment in the noughties, video games became a truly universal pursuit. As I witnessed my controller-phobic aunt swing a Wii remote and nail a tennis serve, while my great-grandmother furrowed her brow over sudoku puzzles on her Nintendo DS, it seemed my long-derided hobby had finally gone mainstream. The Nintendo Wii flew off the shelves, inspiring a wave of competitors such as the Xbox Kinect camera that encouraged people to play games by moving their bodies. But the tide turned: outside of still-niche VR gaming and the odd controller-waggler on the Switch, motion-controlled gaming has barely been seen for more than a decade.
Now, 20 years later, a new console is aiming to get the whole family flailing in front of the TV once again: the Nex Playground. Launching in the UK later this month, the first thing that struck me about this family-friendly device is just how tiny it is. The size of two and a half Rubik’s Cubes taped together, this impressively unintrusive device swaps cumbersome controllers for camera-controlled minigames, putting you and your family directly in the game. Using a wide-angle lens and AI-powered tracking tech, the Nex Playground offers over 50 games that track players’ bodies as they leap, flail and dance about the living room. It’s not hard to see the appeal.
Continue reading...Instagram users started reporting issues with the social media app on Monday morning. Here's what we know so far.
It was an open secret that NVIDIA was working on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip for laptops and desktops, and today at Computex 2026 the company unveiled what it’s been working on. It’s surely a beast, and unsurprisingly, it’s lathered in “AI” buzzwords.
At full strength, this chip offers up to 20 Arm CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That powerful CPU and GPU, connected over NVLink C2C, and the large memory pool give AI agents and 120-billion-parameter models plenty of power and space for long-running tasks with context lengths stretching to a million tokens, according to Nvidia.
RTX Spark will power high-end laptops from partners including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and MSI — and notably, a new Surface Ultra laptop from Microsoft. Nvidia says it’s worked with those partners to create “the most extraordinary laptops [they’ve] ever built,” with tandem OLED G-Sync displays, “all-day” battery life, premium aluminum chassis with large glass touchpads.
↫ Jeffrey Kampman at Tom’s Hardware
I couldn’t care less about the “AI” nonsense, but the chip itself seems like an absolute monster for laptops and mini PCs. With that much power and a solid NVIDIA GPU, these are also great for gaming and creative tasks, making them feel like the first true competition in the PC space to Apple’s M series of chips. They’re planned for late 2026, and tellingly, there’s no pricing information just yet.
Congress is returning from recess to resume work on funding immigration agencies, following a GOP revolt over the Trump administration's "anti-weaponization" fund.
My favorite metonymic technology term is “cron job”: even though
cronmay not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like acronand quacks like acron. As Patrick McKenzie likes to point out, cron jobs are one of the most eminently useful computing primitives. They offer utility that’s almost immediately obvious for plenty of use cases that almost everybody has: do this every day; do that once a month.And yet. You probably shouldn’t use literal
↫ Tyler Langloiscron(or its more modern cousins) for scheduled tasks! In 2026 there are more modern options available, and my favorite is the humble systemd timer. I love systemd timers. If you don’t love them yet, maybe I can show you the reasons why you should love them, too.
These are just timers. They are not consuming your computer or taking over the open source world. They do not phone home to Red Hat. These are just timers.
A teen girl has been arrested and charged for allegedly stabbing three horses during a racing event in Las Vegas, police said.
Casting shifts to EU talent as paperwork delays and visa limits make hiring British crews less viable
From blacklists for UK passport holders to being asked to work illegally while on holiday, the plethora of extra costs and red tape thrown up post-Brexit are restricting opportunities for British actors seeking work in the EU.
Mainland Europe has always been a springboard for those in the creative industries, from gaining crucial first credits on a TV, film or theatre production to building a marketable resume and paying the bills while attempting to make it big in the UK or US.
Continue reading...The neighborhood that makes America’s clothes has been buffeted by ICE raids and post-Covid problems – but leaders say hope is on the horizon
Downtown Los Angeles’s fashion district, the largest apparel manufacturing hub in the United States, is a neighborhood in freefall. While 83% of clothing cut and sewn in the United States is made here, the district has suffered in recent years as visitation and sales have plummeted.
“I went from making $2,000 a day to making now $500, sometimes $700,” said Fernando Carmona, who owns the women’s dress store AP Design by Rocca. He added that rent for his store was $8,250 a month.
Continue reading...According to a personal trainer, you should stop doing these things with your rowing machine if you want to get the most out of it.
Claims have circulated on social media that fingerprints can be pulled from photos featuring peace signs, but experts say the risk to the average person is low.
Still, the glasses are regarded by company leadership as a top priority, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes.
ive got a pint but w hardware v 7325 and firmware hydrus 5200, im i cooked or is there someway i can downgrade my pint to remove the haptic buzz?
appart from that is there any upgrades that are a no brainer or worth considering like battery, bms or motor worth considering?
New advocates and the future of international human rights 15 June 2026 — 16:00 TO 17:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House and Online
As governments and multilateral institutions retreat, a new generation of advocates is reshaping the debate and proposing reform.
As governments and multilateral institutions retreat, a new generation of advocates is reshaping the debate and proposing reform.As governments and multilateral institutions retreat from human rights leadership, new actors are stepping forward. Opening with remarks from Binaifer Nowrojee, President of the Open Society Foundations, this event explores who is defending human dignity today, how they are reshaping practice, and what this shift means for the future of international human rights frameworks.
This event will discuss:
AI water usage requires governments to rethink their approach to water Expert comment thilton.drupal
From the local impact of data centres to risks in the global supply chain, water use for AI threatens to exacerbate existing stress on water resources.
Recent months have seen a growing backlash against AI technologies as they develop and are deployed at scale. Water use in data centres and the stress that use is putting on local water resources has been part of this backlash. A recent survey found that most Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their area than a data centre.
Globally, communities are now facing competition over their water from AI-driven data centre operations. Many of these communities were already feeling the effects of longstanding water management challenges exacerbated by climate impacts.
As countries including the UK embrace the rapid build out of AI infrastructure, governments and companies must ensure that water use is managed sustainably and transparently or risk further backlash against AI on a wider scale.
The connections between AI and water are wide-ranging, spanning from local impacts that are intertwined with national politics through to geopolitical risks related to water use in global supply chains.
Most visibly at the local level, technology companies that are building and operating large-scale digital infrastructure platforms are facing scrutiny on how they use water, especially in some of the world’s driest areas. Data centre water use is closely connected to the enormous electricity consumption required for computation. That energy use generates heat that must be dissipated, and evaporative water cooling systems are currently a common way to do that.
Despite major water use efficiency improvements and more waterless innovations being deployed in data centres, AI’s rapid growth means that data centres are still becoming a fast-growing driver of water demand.
In the UK, although data centres currently account for a very small proportion of water demand, there are reported plans to build around 100 new centres by the early 2030s. These are expected to become a significant new source of demand.
The UK government has positioned AI as central to its growth plans, pledging £68 billion in investment since January 2025 and designating five AI Growth Zones. This embrace of AI implies an assessment that water allocated to grow the digital economy will, over time, lead to a higher tax revenue and stronger growth.
The government is also planning to build the first new reservoirs in 30 years to keep up with increased demand. But despite these well-meaning plans, there are still concerns over water: 84 per cent of proposed UK data centres are planned in areas that are projected to be water stressed by 2040.
How much water is used for AI, and the extent to which water for AI should be prioritized over uses in other sectors, is a complicated issue and subject to debate. AI is evolving rapidly; it is difficult to quantify exactly how much water it consumes for different purposes, such as using a chatbot or processing a prompt. Simply quantifying water in data centres and then comparing that figure to water use in another sector, such as agriculture, fails to capture the full scope of the footprint.
Local considerations on AI water use are also connected to geopolitical risks and impacts further down the supply chain. Governments should take these into account when calculating the impact of AI water use.
A data centre might look like an isolated piece of industrial infrastructure in a local community, but the servers inside it connect it to global mining and manufacturing supply chains. These servers rely on complex components such as high-powered semiconductor chips, which are tied to global supply chains that have their own intense water impacts.
Taiwan produces over 90 per cent of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Semiconductor manufacturing is water-intensive, due to the high consumption of ultrapure water (UPW) required to maintain extreme purity levels in manufacturing processes.
But Taiwan’s hydrological balance relies on seasonal typhoons to replenish groundwater, and climate change has made typhoons less predictable, increasing the risk of drought. This water-based risk is compounded by other geopolitical risks such as shifting tariff policies and the potential of military conflict with China, leaving the global supply chain vulnerable to shocks that should be factored into water-related strategic decision making.
Given that water is a shared resource, and any water challenges are essentially shared across society, collective action from governments, investors and companies – in collaboration with communities – is necessary. System-wide improvements are needed.
Some technology companies are already taking circularity solutions seriously, and are scaling advanced cooling technologies. Water recycling in data centres has been implemented in some places such as the Netherlands, where closed loop systems are starting to be put into use.
These solutions are encouraging and will go a long way. But they will not fully address the fundamental water challenges that are currently inherent in scaling AI. Governments committed to the digital economy will need to fund broader solutions, which means greater investment in public water services.
They will also need to scale those solutions that support good stewardship of water. These include developing practical actions to protect shared water resources, including equitable access to public water services that prioritize domestic water use and more vulnerable water users.
The regulation, described in internal documents obtained by CBS News, would be the latest effort by President Trump's White House to tighten access to the U.S. asylum system.
Protesters and New Jersey State Police clashed again Sunday night near Delaney Hall, despite a 9 p.m. curfew imposed by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
New rules were driven by high numbers of asylum seekers from “safe countries” and the fatigue of voters after waves of migration, European officials say.
The roots of AI in rightwing ideology is examined in Valerie Veatch’s enjoyable doc, including an array of colourful, often crazed, figures
Director Valerie Veatch made her name with documentaries such as Love Child (about an online gaming-addicted couple whose child died of malnutrition) and Me at the Zoo (about American vlogger Cara Cunningham), films that explore the intersection of real-world subcultures and internet communities. Her latest continues in this vein, although its self-set remit is a bit broader, more urgent and germane to everyone right now: the pursuit of artificial intelligence, its dark history in eugenics and highly debatable utility today (despite the stock-market bubble pushing the value of a half-dozen companies towards the stratosphere).
The thrust of the film is largely polemic, guiding the viewer towards AI-sceptical conclusions one persuasive soundbite at a time. Nevertheless, it also serves as a very useful, straightforward primer on AI history, touching on a dazzling array of colourful, often crazed figures, including Victorian British eugenicist Francis Galton, Silicon Valley founding father and overt racist William Shockley and current-day jillionaire jerk Elon Musk. Sadly, the film is not so up-to-date that it covers Musk and former friend-turned-foe Sam Altman’s recent courtroom brawl, but that doesn’t detract from the thrust of Veatch and her interviewees’ arguments.
Continue reading...Most families have little saved for retirement – and face unfair shame for it. It’s time to cut the bootstrap rhetoric
What does it cost to age with dignity?
It’s an urgent question as the youngest baby boomers approach 65 and their adult children prepare to take on their care.
Day programs. Day programs for elders, like those for kids, are a fantastic community resource. Publicly funded transportation can take elders to a center designed with their joy and capacity in mind. My dad went to one such program and it was a balm; he sang karaoke, he saw the on-staff nurse when needed, and I was able to get some work done without him joining my Zoom calls. What’s more, according to recent estimates, the median day program costs $100 a day v about $200 for assisted living and more than $200 for in-home care. Day programs, vastly underfunded in most states, are a great way to keep elders ageing in place, prevent loneliness, and make sure family caregivers don’t burn out or have to quit their jobs.
Worker-owned home healthcare. There’s a care workforce shortage for good reason; too many of these jobs aren’t good jobs. One small but growing part of the home healthcare market consists of worker-owned cooperatives, where professional caregivers are the leaders of their own organizations – setting hourly rates, vacation and sick leave policies, and training approaches. These organizations are shown to have far better worker retention than traditional care companies and, of course, it’s a boon to family caregivers to know that the person taking care of their loved one feels empowered and will stick around.
Public long-term care insurance. Washington is the first state in the country to create public long-term care for its full-time workers, WACares. By contributing a small amount (0.58%) from wages to the fund, Washingtonians earn a long-term care benefit (up to $36,500) for when they need it. This could be a test case for other states that want to be humane places for people to age.
Courtney E Martin has a weekly newsletter called Examined Family. Her most recent book is Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School
Continue reading...The Trump administration may be deporting the US citizen infants born to unaccompanied girls formerly held at the San Benito facility
Representative Maxine Dexter has a lot of questions. Why were all of the pregnant, unaccompanied minors in the US rounded up and sent to San Benito, a tiny town on the Texas border with Mexico? Are they given appropriate medical care, given their high-risk conditions and Texas’s abortion ban? And most importantly: where are the girls – and their infants – now?
Dexter, a Democratic congresswoman from Oregon and a former critical care physician – one of the few doctors now serving in Congress – detailed these questions in an 8 May letter to refugee and health officials after visiting the San Benito facility and, she said, being blocked from speaking with any of the children. She still hasn’t gotten answers.
Continue reading...VPNs are already pretty handy privacy tools, but Surfshark has shown that a little network ingenuity can unlock innovative features that you won't find from other VPN providers.
Family were enjoying a waterside barbecue in Bochum before members ended up in jeopardy in river
A cyclist has been praised for having “stepped in decisively” and rescuing four members of a family who nearly drowned in the Ruhr River in Germany during a waterside barbecue that almost ended in tragedy.
The family of eight had set themselves up on the riverbank in the western city of Bochum, the local fire brigade reported, but the gathering took a panicked turn when one woman got too close to the water’s edge and toppled down into the current, police told local media.
Continue reading...Community groups say some fear they could lose homes, jobs and access to healthcare if the new law is ratified by President John Dramani Mahama
Ghana’s LGBTQ community is living in fear after the country’s parliament approved a sweeping bill that criminalises the promotion of LGBTQ+ activities and identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, rights groups have warned.
The legislation, which was passed on Friday, mandates prison sentences of three to 10 years.
Continue reading...Rampant Bull needed a makeover after wear and tear from tourists, but refurbishment ‘castrated’ it, critics say
The restoration of a floor mosaic in Milan called the Rampant Bull has been mocked after the works appear to have erased a crucial anatomical detail – its testicles.
The 19th-century mosaic in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade needed a makeover because a small crater had formed in the tiny pink tiles featuring the bull’s testicles, due to the constant stream of tourists performing a heel-spinning gesture.
Continue reading...Latest figures show the company’s delivery performance has worsened compared with the previous year
The postal regulator has launched an investigation into Royal Mail for once again missing its annual delivery targets, with almost a quarter of first-class mail arriving late.
The company, which has been fined £37m since 2023 for routinely failing to meet delivery targets set by Ofcom, revealed on Friday that 24.3% of first-class mail failed to arrive on time in the year to the end of March.
Continue reading..."The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC," reports Axios. Nvidia's CEO unveiled a new ARM-based "N1X processor made alongside Microsoft," reports CNBC, that "will be incorporated into a new RTX Spark superchip, debuting in the fall on a fresh line of Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI." More details from Engadget: It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD's Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a "superchip" meant to give both laptops and small desktops fast AI and graphics performance... The company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and that it has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it's similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power draw. RTX Spark also has an NPU that's fast enough to be part of Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it's mainly touting the tensor cores as part of the chip's Blackwell GPU for AI performance. RTX Spark's GPU can directly draw on the chip's large pool of unified memory, which can span from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W... NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang positions RTX Spark as a complete reinvention of the PC, eventually turning them more into devices meant for AI agents than manual human input... NVIDIA has been working together with Microsoft for "several years" while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives... In a blog post provided to media, Microsoft head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company optimized Windows 11's workload profile scheduling for the RTX Spark. "Whether you're checking your email or running an agent locally to debug code, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and efficiency out of your CPU," he wrote.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President Macron says ship subject to sanctions and posts video of operation that took place with UK support
A suspected Russian oil tanker has been detained in the Atlantic, France has announced, in the latest seizure aimed at combatting Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels contravening international sanctions.
The Tagor was detained on Sunday morning in international waters more than 400 nautical miles (740km) west of Brittany with the help of the UK and other partners, said the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Continue reading...Sergiño Dest scored the US’s opener on Sunday thanks a collection of little actions from his teammates
The US men’s national team has undergone considerable change from one window to the next throughout Mauricio Pochettino’s tenure. And it makes some sense; the Argentinian had plenty of first-hand assessments to conduct, limiting the core group’s ability to iron out patterns of play and forge partnerships.
Still, amid all that turnover, Antonee Robinson and Sergiño Dest were expected to remain the first-choice options at full-back (or wing-back, depending on the system) for the 2026 World Cup. Both had been essential in the 2022 cycle, after all, and continued to fare well when healthy for their club teams (Fulham for Robinson, and PSV Eindhoven for Dest). That “when healthy” caveat has worked overtime throughout Pochettino’s 19 months in charge, though, with Dest suffering a torn ACL just before the 2024 Copa América and Robinson missing for much of last fall due to knee issues.
Continue reading...Firm says its RTX Spark PC chip for Microsoft Windows will let AI agents replace the mouse and keyboard
A new front has opened up in the battle for dominance in AI chips, as Nvidia said its latest development could replace the mouse and keyboard in how people use computers.
The $5tn (£3.7tn) US semiconductor company has launched a “superchip” that puts AI capabilities into laptops and desktop computers, a move that will pit it against Intel, Apple, Qualcomm and AMD.
Continue reading...Workers who voted for Trump and Republicans in recent elections are now being hit with offshoring and the impacts of tariffs – but can Democrats sway them?
Brenda Davis, a retiree who worked at Ford in Ohio for more than 20 years, was dismayed to learn that a new Buick she bought from General Motors was manufactured entirely in China. Foreign vehicles are strongly discouraged from parking lots at autoworkers’ facilities, as they serve as a reminder of the ongoing threat outsourcing poses to their livelihoods.
Morgan Hughes, who currently works at the General Motors assembly plant in Springfield, Ohio, is worried about the impact tariffs have had on her plant’s dwindling workload and its recent sale to a different owner, as concerns over a plant closure have loomed over the factory for years.
Continue reading...US says it struck Iranian military sites at the weekend, as Iran targets an airbase used by the US to attack southern Iran
Good morning, Martin Belam here. I will be popping into your inbox writing First Thing regularly for the next little while. Here are today’s main stories …
Is this the end of the ceasefire, then? The US and Iran have sporadically exchanged strikes since their ceasefire took effect in early April, as negotiations aimed at a more durable agreement drag on. A similar exchange occurred last Thursday. The war launched by the US and Israel on 28 February has killed thousands of people – mainly in Iran and Lebanon – and caused global economic pain by pushing up energy prices.
What was Comey accused of? Comey, who was indicted in North Carolina in April, faces up to 10 years in prison for a photo of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” Prosecutors allege the post constituted a threat against Donald Trump, the 47th US president. Comey denies the allegation.
Continue reading...Rwanda had sued UK government over alleged breach of agreement, after scheme scrapped by Labour on first day in office
The UK will not have to pay the Rwandan government millions of pounds over a failed migrant deportation scheme set up by Boris Johnson’s administration, an international court has ruled.
The east African nation had sued the current UK government for more than £100m, claiming it was owed after a breach of an agreement.
Continue reading...A suspected shell left over from World War II exploded under a house, killing five people and wounding nearly 20, police said Monday.
Lawyer and Trump admirer has risen rapidly in the polls and will face Iván Cepeda in election runoff in three weeks
A far-right lawyer and Donald Trump admirer will go head-to-head against leftwing senator Iván Cepeda in the race to be Colombia’s next president after he won a surprise victory in the first round of voting.
With 100% of ballots counted, the outsider Abelardo de la Espriella secured 43.7% of the vote – just over 10.3m votes – compared with 40.9% (about 9.6m votes) for Cepeda, a philosopher and human rights activist who has served as a senator since 2014 and is backed by the current leftwing president, Gustavo Petro.
Continue reading...Girl, 13, pulled from River Wharfe on Sunday and boy, 11, remains missing from River Don as hot spell comes to an end
A 13-year-old girl has died after getting into difficulty in a river as the water-related death toll reached at least 15 in the recent UK heatwave. Emergency services continue to search for a boy who went missing in a river two days ago.
The girl was pulled from the River Wharfe in Burnsall, near Skipton, North Yorkshire, on Sunday evening. She was airlifted to hospital where she was pronounced dead, North Yorkshire police said.
Continue reading...Children of those on care worker visas, who came legally before rule change, told to leave even if parents can stay
Children as young as five who are living legally in the UK are being told by the Home Office they must leave the country even if their parents have been given permission to remain.
The Guardian has seen five letters sent to children by the Home Office telling them they must leave the UK. A sixth letter has been sent to a woman who is six months pregnant and lives in the UK with her husband, telling her she must leave him and return to her country. The children have parents on care worker visas, which until March 2024 had allowed them to bring partners or children with them to the UK.
Continue reading...James Talarico got the opponent he – and the Democratic party – wanted, but flipping Texas blue means winning blue-collar voters, not blue-blooded donors
Texas could become the hottest battleground state in the country, if the results of both Republican and Democratic primaries are anything to go by.
Democrat James Talarico, a progressive Presbyterian seminarian, will face off against Trump’s favored candidate, the scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton. The matchup has liberals salivating. Paxton, dogged by corruption charges, impeachment hearings and an affair that left his marriage in tatters, is considered by some in his own party as “the worst possible top-of-the-ticket” candidate. Meanwhile, Talarico, a fresh-faced, clean-cut millennial, who quotes scripture to justify his progressive beliefs, seems like the perfect foil, at least according to Democratic party leaders.
Continue reading...Physical and mental health aren’t easily separated, especially at our age. And the president is showing many concerning signs
I do not wish Trump ill. While he hasn’t shown a shred of compassion for anyone other than himself, this doesn’t justify any of us lacking compassion for him.
It’s also in the interest of the US and the world that he be physically and mentally able to discharge the duties of his office.
Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. … I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! … Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK
Continue reading...As Trump’s approval ratings dip and gas prices rise, Democrats see an opening with Rob Sand
Rob Sand, the best-known Democrat in Iowa, appears on podcasts to discuss his love of hunting, begins rallies by having the audience sing America the Beautiful and has a tendency to criticize the country’s two-party political system.
Now, Sand is running to lead a state that Republicans have come to dominate under Donald Trump, and Democrats believe his candidacy for governor could be the breakthrough needed to win key Iowa offices in the November midterm elections.
Continue reading...More than 120 groups issued warning to 10 million visitors about ‘serious rights violations’ under Trump
With the Fifa World Cup just two weeks away, immigrant rights advocates in the 11 US host cities are mobilizing to protect fans and residents from immigration enforcement activities this summer.
In Los Angeles, a labor union representing more than 2,000 hospitality workers at SoFi Stadium is threatening to strike if agents do not stay away from the venue, which is expected to draw about 70,000 fans per match.
Continue reading...Riding an e-scooter for quick errands and everyday trips can save you money on gas, but is it enough to make a difference? We show you how to do the math.
Also coming this June: the latest from Tyler Perry, the Tony Awards and much more.
Why Should Delaware Care?
With the upcoming closure of Wilmington’s only sanctioned homeless encampment, advocates are asking where unhoused people will live after its shutdown. City officials are currently considering sponsoring a pallet village initiative to be built by Springboard Delaware, but the plan is already facing pushback from communities.
A proposal to build a village of tiny homes for homeless people in Wilmington is running into early resistance from residents of Southbridge and the Eastside, two neighborhoods being considered as potential sites.
Mayor John Carney’s office is currently in talks with the Springboard Delaware — an organization that operates pallet-style shelter villages — about a plan to bring the tiny homes to Delaware’s largest city at a cost of about $1.5 million.
The project could provide housing assistance to Wilmington’s growing homeless population, but neighborhood opposition to the project could complicate its prospects.
During a Southbridge Civic Association meeting last month, Springboard Delaware Executive Director Judson Malone presented the idea of building tiny homes in the area. Residents in attendance promptly rejected the proposal.
They argued that their community is already lacking public resources. They also expressed a fear that a pallet village could cause loitering, panhandling, and safety risks to spill into the neighborhood.
“At the end of the day, we are the most underserved community in the city of Wilmington. And then you want to bring the most underserved people into the most underserved community,” one Southbridge resident said during the meeting.
The debate comes as tensions in Wilmington remain high over the Carney administration’s handling of homelessness, especially with a June 15 eviction date approaching for residents living in the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment at Christina Park.
Homeless advocates are unsure where encampment residents who haven’t found housing by that date will go.
The mayor’s office has said camping in public spaces will be prohibited,
The move to consider the tiny homes also follows more than a decade of Southbridge residents voicing opposition to planned developments in their neighborhood, including a failed proposal to build a cattle housing facility, and another to build a slag production plant. Several residents also pushed back in recent years to the state’s plan to transform the site of the Elbert Palmer school into new housing.
In 2024, Springboard Delaware changed its name from Springboard Collaborative, according to a report from the Cape Gazette.
That same year it also had faced a funding shortfall that jeopardized operations at its Georgetown pallet village.
Despite the difficulties, the nonprofit continued and last year named as its board chair Tom Ogden who previously served in Wilmington city government under then-Mayor Mike Purzycki.
Throughout the time, Springboard operated what it calls a ‘navigation center’ in Georgetown, providing 40 tiny homes and services to those who are homeless.
Each home has electricity, a microwave, and a minifridge. Those living in the village also have access to showers, restrooms, laundry, and meals. The case management services include counseling to help people find jobs, healthcare, and permanent housing.
The average stay, according to Springboard’s website, is around four months. About 40% of the individuals living in the pallet village have transitioned to permanent housing, the website also states.
Malone asserts that the pallet village in Georgetown “is the most peaceful community you can go into,” saying there have been no overdose deaths there since it opened.
‘So we know it works, but we also know it’s hard to get your arms around when there’s a community like this,” Malone said.
Carney spokeswoman Caroline Klinger said the city has been in conversations with Springboard Delaware for more than a year, but discussions picked up after plans to build a pallet village in Dover didn’t work out.
During last week’s civic association meeting in Southbridge, Malone noted that city officials and Springboard Delaware were considering two locations.
One is on Garasches Lane, a small street lined by industrial land in Southbridge. The other is across the street from Christina Park, where a private property owner offered their land as a potential location.
Klinger said Garasches Lane is a potential site because it’s already overseen by the city, has the necessary space for a tiny home village, and could be set up in a time frame that would give Springboard Delaware the ability to use federal COVID relief dollars before they expire at the end of the year.
“Our biggest challenges have always been determining how to support operating costs and identifying a site,” Klinger said.
Malone said the Wilmington project would cost about $1.5 million alone to set up the 40 tiny homes. He said the nonprofit would look at to the state for funding, which could include COVID dollars.
ARPA Database
Delaware has received more than $100 million under the federal American Rescue Plan Act. Wilmington hopes to tap some of the remaining funds to serve its homeless population. To see how Delaware has spent the funding to date, click below.
Klinger also said the plan will only move forward if the state takes on funding for the operating costs of transitional services, and approves an appropriation of COVID dollars to build the pallet village.
Without both pieces in place, the proposal remains uncertain, she said.
In addition to resident opposition in Southbridge, some members of the City Council have expressed objections to using a site across from Christina Park near the Eastside neighborhood as an option, Klinger said.
City Councilwoman Zanthia Oliver, who represents the Eastside, told Spotlight Delaware she is against the project being in her district, stating it would be too close to homeowners.
“I’m against it, because it’s between two underserved communities that already have challenges. It works downstate because they have so much farmland,” she said.
Oliver said the city should instead use a vacant building for a shelter, suggesting the Gibraltar estate. In recent years, taxpayers had invested $3 million into renovating Gibraltar, which currently sits empty.
Despite such pushback, city officials said conversations will continue.
“The voices of the surrounding neighborhoods are the mayor’s main priority as we continue exploring a tiny homes option,” Klinger said.
The post Wilmington residents push back against pallet village proposal for homeless appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Thousands of Delaware residents rely on SEPTA’s Wilmington/Newark train line to get to Philadelphia. A small town near Wilmington is weighing whether to build the fifth station in the state less than a year after the transit agency fell into financial turmoil.
A yearslong effort to bring passenger rail service back to Newport is once again under consideration with Delaware officials seeking public input about a proposed station that planners say could ease traffic in the state.
Representatives from Delaware’s public transit agency DART held a public workshop last week to gather community feedback on a conceptual plan for bringing a train station back to Newport.
The early-stage plan call for a station at the intersection of James and Water streets, next to the Interstate 95 overpass. It would have about 100 parking spots, improved sidewalks and a bike lane under the James Street overpass.
The proposal is the latest in years of regional planners studying the idea of building a Newport train station.
It also comes at a pivotal time for transit in the state. While Delaware has invested heavily in train stations over the past decade — including a $90 million facility in Claymont — the regional transit authority SEPTA threatened last year to cut its commuter rail service to Delaware altogether, amid a financial crisis.
Gov. Matt Meyer’s office said last fall that Delaware plans to continue relying on SEPTA for rail service to Philadelphia. The state currently contributes about $10 million annually to support the service.
Today, there’s about a “50-50” chance that the Newport station ultimately is built, DART executive Albert Loyola said.
He said there is public support for the proposal, but noted the Delaware Department of Transportation would have to choose to fund it as part of a “very competitive” capital improvement plan.
While dollars for construction are uncommitted, DelDOT has set aside money for a comprehensive report analyzing potential designs and costs to build the station.
The report is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.
Get Involved
DART is seeking public input on the Newport Train Station Study, to determine what kind of support it might have. To participate, email the authors below or call 1-855-925-2801.
Ultimately, if the plan moves forward, Loyola said Delawareans would have more options for travel across the state’s busy northern corridor.
“In [Interstate] 95, there’s always a lot of traffic. This would be another alternative, and it’ll be an affordable alternative,” Loyola said.
The recently-built commuter rail station in Claymont cost taxpayers about $90 million, which was $50 million over the initial estimate. The Claymont station included a parking garage and a large parking lot. Currents plan for the Newport station include only a small surface parking lot.
Loyola said the transit agency will hold an open house sometime in July to gather more public input on the plans.
The handful of residents who attended Tuesday’s public workshop said they supported the project.
Among those was Dave Tiberi, owner of a local security company, who said the station could bring new people to Newport.
“They’re going to see firsthand that it’s a beautiful town and it’s safe. It’s got a lot of the features that people look for,” Tiberi said.
Initial estimates show the station could have a daily weekday ridership between 85 and 225 people, increasing ridership for the Wilmington/Newark line.
Those numbers could change if SEPTA adds more frequent service to Newark, which it is considering, Loyola said. They are unlikely to change if Maryland’s transit agency extends rail service into Delaware from Baltimore. The agency’s long-range plan anticipates MARC trains stopping at Newark and Wilmington, but not the other Delaware stations.
State Sen. Elizabeth Lockman (D-West Wilmington), who also attended Tuesday’s public workshop, said Newport has become a positive example of a town encouraging alternate forms of transportation.
Lockman said it is “hard to say” whether her colleagues in the state legislature would help fund the project without knowing its cost.
But she said there is a general consensus that the state needs better public transportation.
“I think all of us see the benefits of that, and we wish maybe we’d done more of that in recent decades. But, you know, there’s no better time than the present to start reorienting,” Lockman said.
The post Transit officials again consider a commuter rail station in Newport appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Backrooms stunned industry observers by taking $81m in its first weekend, a record for studio A24
Kane Parsons has become the youngest film-maker to open a film at number one at the North American box office for his directing debut Backrooms.
Parsons, 20, is seven years younger than the previous record holder, Josh Trank, who was 27 when his debut Chronicle recorded a $22m opening in 2011. Backrooms stunned industry observers by taking $81m in its first weekend in North America – which was also a record for its studio, A24.
Continue reading...TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — Intel today announced a series of data center advancements, including new Intel Xeon 6+ processors, an expanded 800 Series Ethernet portfolio featuring the Intel Ethernet E835 controllers and network adapters, and continued progress on its AI accelerator roadmap, including updates on Crescent Island. Together, these developments highlight a clear industry shift: as AI becomes more agentic, the CPU is re‑emerging at the center of modern AI infrastructure.
An enlarged section of an Intel Xeon 6+ silicon wafer. Credit: Intel Corporation.
With Xeon serving as the control plane, Intel is taking a systems‑level approach to performance and efficiency at scale —delivering platforms designed for increasingly agentic AI workloads, where orchestration, data movement, and sustained inference are critical across data center and network environments.
“AI doesn’t scale as a collection of parts—it scales as a coordinated system,” said Kevork Kechichan, executive vice president and general manager of Intel Data Center Group. “As AI becomes more agentic, the constraints shift to orchestration, concurrency, and data movement. That shift reinforces a core reality: the CPU remains the control plane for the modern AI infrastructure. With Xeon 6+ and Ethernet E835, we’re tightly coupling compute and networking to reduce bottlenecks and enable efficient, secure scaling of real‑world agentic workflows.”
Introducing Intel Xeon 6+ Processors
Intel Xeon 6+ processors extend the Xeon 6 family with a focus on performance density, power efficiency, and operational scale for cloud‑native, agentic AI‑driven, and network‑intensive workloads. Built on Intel 18A —its first use in a data center CPU— Xeon 6+ is engineered for sustained performance under real‑world power constraints—addressing orchestration, concurrency and data movement demands of emerging agentic AI.
Optimized for environments where watts per rack, throughput per core, and latency predictability are critical, Xeon 6+ emphasizes scale‑out performance — making room for new AI workloads without requiring disruptive data center redesigns.
Key highlights include:
Intel Xeon 6+ processors are already being tested within telecom network infrastructures and configured into data center systems with platforms available across the ecosystem. These include servers, networking and integrated solutions from and used by ASUS, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, GIGABYTE, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro – and others developing on Xeon 6+ today.
This growing portfolio reflects Intel’s systems‑first approach—delivering deployable, available‑now infrastructure for running, scaling, and orchestrating increasingly agentic AI workloads on x86. Paired with complementary Xeon platforms optimized for both high‑density throughput and single‑thread performance, Intel’s customers and partners can balance efficiency and responsiveness by distributing workloads across a proven, broad, mature hardware and software ecosystem.
Intel Ethernet E835: High-Efficiency Networking for Next-Gen Infrastructure
As AI, cloud, and distributed workloads continue to scale, networking has become a critical determinant of overall infrastructure performance and efficiency. The Intel Ethernet E835 controllers and network adapters are designed to deliver performant, power-efficient connectivity for modern data center, enterprise, edge, and AI environments.
The Intel Ethernet E835 provides the scalability and efficiency required for next-generation infrastructure while maintaining industry-leading performance-per-watt. Designed for dense, virtualized deployments, the E835 helps reduce energy consumption and operational costs without compromising throughput or reliability.
Key highlights include:
With broad support from industry leaders—including Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro—the Intel Ethernet E835 provides an efficient and manageable networking fabric. From AI training to enterprise cloud services, the E835 delivers the scalability, reliability and high-efficiency features required for the next generation of networking.
Pricing and availability vary by configuration, with recommended pricing on intel.com/ethernet.
More Performance for SMB Entry Servers
Intel also announced the general availability of a new 12‑core option in the Intel Xeon 6300 processor family for entry servers that raises the platform ceiling beyond 8 cores for the first time. The added core count provides greater compute power and flexibility for growing SMB workloads—without requiring a platform change.
Available today through major OEMs, the Xeon 6300 12‑core processor is drop‑in compatible with existing entry server designs, enabling fast, cost‑effective upgrades.
Crescent Island: Building Momentum in AI Inference
To meet the growing demands for agentic AI—memory capacity, bandwidth and efficiency are emerging as critical differentiators alongside performance. Purpose-built to address these needs, Intel’s next-generation data center GPU, code-named Crescent Island, built on the Xe 3P architecture extends the proven Xe architecture delivering enhanced efficiency and performance-per-watt while maintaining broad software compatibility for modern AI workloads.
Equipped with LPDDR5x memory, Intel’s Crescent Island delivers up to 480 GB capacity to efficiently handle large, token-intensive workloads while reducing total cost of ownership. Its power efficient 350W air‑cooled PCIe design enables highly efficient scaling for agentic AI with strong performance-per-watt.
Leveraging a multi-generational Xe install base, Intel’s Crescent Island is designed for next generation AI workloads with support for a wide range of datatypes and microscaling formats, from native FP4/MXFP4 to FP64, including expanded support for advanced AI operations and improved memory and scalability.
Intel’s open programmable AI software stack supports a heterogeneous compute platform designed to reduce friction and enable AI deployment at scale by providing out-of-the-box model support with an upstream-first approach. Built on the same Xe architecture foundation, Intel’s Arc Pro Series provides an ideal development platform allowing developers to build, validate and optimize workloads on familiar hardware and seamlessly deploy on Crescent Island with forward and backward compatibility.
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better.
Source: Intel
The post Intel Expands Data Center Stack with Xeon 6+, 200GbE Ethernet and Crescent Island Updates appeared first on HPCwire.
For years the NBA has wondered what would happen if it had a giant who could do everything. The San Antonio Spurs star has given us an answer
The NBA season began with serious questions about Victor Wembanyama’s ability to last the distance in the playoffs. Could this brilliant ectomorph, a blend of rare height and even rarer skill, stand up to the rigors of a deep postseason run? Would his slim body snap under the intensity of professional basketball’s sternest tests? The results are in: Wembanyama will this week lead the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals. At just 22 years of age, basketball’s next superstar has arrived: slightly ahead of schedule, but with every part of his brilliance emphatically affirmed.
“Wemby” landed in America as the NBA’s No 1 overall draft pick in 2023, an alien in both stature (his official height is listed as 7ft 4in, though many claim he may be as tall as 7ft 6in), nationality (French), and foreign-language proficiency (fluent in English, despite never having lived outside his home country). Sure enough, “The Alien” quickly became his nickname. But the flood of tears with which he greeted his team’s defeat of Oklahoma City in Saturday night’s Game 7 of the Western Conference finals revealed a different side to this outlier of outliers: the human side. More than his freakish physique or the sheer absurdity of the spectacle he presents on court, towering over established giants of the game like some basketballing Burj Khalifa, it’s Wemby’s humanity that makes him such a compulsively interesting and watchable star. He is the alien who longs to be among us.
Continue reading...Oregon man with extensive criminal record fired at three officers while speeding away from a traffic stop in 2025
A man with the unusual name Loony Toon and a lengthy rap sheet has been given 20 years in prison after admitting that he shot at police officers in Oregon, according to authorities.
The 43-year-old whose name calls to mind the classic television cartoon franchise Looney Tunes – as well as a colloquial term some invoke when describing an eccentric or irrational person – fired a gun at three officers while speeding away from a 20 June 2025 traffic stop in the community of Milwaukie, local prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday.
Continue reading...Sentri7, drug diversion software powered by artificial intelligence and used at hundreds of U.S. hospitals, did not catch a monthslong string of fentanyl thefts in Tennessee in 2025, according to a state document.
Marianna Mitchem grew up in the Denver suburbs, where she played high school soccer. One day in April 1999, her team faced off against a nearby rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people.
The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem. After graduating from Providence College, she joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Fearing for my friends and watching what was happening — you don’t forget things like that,” she told me. “I wanted to make a difference.”
She started in the ATF’s Denver office as an industry operations investigator, the bureau’s term for inspectors who ensure that firearms dealers are conducting the required background checks on buyers and maintaining sales records. When the bureau found discrepancies, it tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans, rarely going so far as to revoke a dealer’s license.
In 2021, things started to change. The country was experiencing a surge of deadly violence, with homicides up more than a third since 2019, and the administration of President Joe Biden was desperate to reverse the trend. For years, data had shown that a large share of guns used in shootings came from a small fraction of dealers, and that guns that were trafficked — sold by stores to straw purchasers (people other than the intended users) or resold on the street — were far more likely to be used in shootings.
Acting on this data, the administration in June 2021 announced what became known as “zero tolerance”: Dealers found to be willfully violating the law would lose their licenses, period. Revocations spiked, from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.
Also in 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, started urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. A year later, Congress passed a law that added a firearms trafficking conspiracy charge to the federal criminal code, a crucial new tool for prosecutors.
After 2021, the homicide rate started falling, which criminologists attributed to several factors, including repair of the social fabric since the coronavirus pandemic and a closing of the breach in police-community relations that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. One other factor got less attention: the clampdown on the illegal flow of firearms.
The Biden administration struggled to broadcast its gains on public safety, and Donald Trump won the election in 2024 partly by vowing to restore order. By the time Trump reentered the White House, Mitchem had risen to associate assistant director for industry operations, overseeing inspectors across the country. “We were making incredible progress on trafficking, on violent crime,” she said late last year.
But the Trump administration, driven both by gun-lobby advocacy and its own political priorities, quickly set about undoing much of its predecessor’s moves to combat gun violence. It repealed the zero-tolerance policy, going so far as to invite revoked dealers to reapply for new licenses. It shifted hundreds of ATF agents to immigration work. And it scaled back on prosecutions for gun trafficking. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the ATF and the Department of Justice.
The homicide rate fell further last year, but criminologists warn against complacency, because the illicit gun trade is a classic pipeline problem: The harm can take a while to make itself felt. Research has found that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to about three years, which means that any positive lag of the anti-trafficking efforts of the Biden years would still be in effect now, with any negative effects of the Trump pullback lying in the years to come.
Among those now sounding the alarm is Mitchem. Dismayed at the policy reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.
“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted,” she told me.
“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”
Estimates put the number of guns in the United States at close to 400 million, but the odds that any of them will be put to ill use rise exponentially if they are obtained illegally. Of the 2.3 million firearms traced from crime scenes between 2017 and 2023, half were bought less than three years earlier and 87% were recovered in possession of someone other than the original, legally authorized buyer. Over that period, stores sold almost 1.3 million guns to traffickers that were subsequently recovered in a crime, according to an Everytown analysis of ATF statistics.
This is why the laws governing gun sales carry such high stakes for public safety. But enforcement of these laws has long occupied an unusual no-man’s-land in this country, scrambling the standard political lines around criminal justice. Conservatives favoring tough-on-crime rhetoric are frequently torn when it comes to firearms trafficking: On the one hand, traffickers are helping fuel the violent crime that conservatives decry; on the other, prosecution of gun laws brushes against tenets that conservatives hold sacrosanct. It is liberals who are more likely to push for tougher enforcement, though they can be conflicted, too, as their belief in stricter gun laws runs up against a general preference for a less punitive approach to lawbreaking.
Marooned in this no-man’s-land for decades now has been the agency assigned the task of enforcing federal gun laws, the ATF. Going back to an episode at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where an ATF investigation of illegal gun dealing led to federal agents killing the wife and son of a white separatist, the ATF has been viewed with scorn by people who otherwise might side with armed government authorities. “ATF IS GAY” read the T-shirt worn by one attendee of a big gun show I attended earlier this year in Manassas, Virginia.
The agency’s radioactivity with the gun-rights lobby has left it on shaky political ground. It went seven years without a Senate-confirmed director. Its budget has not enjoyed the same expansion as that of other federal law enforcement agencies. And stringent laws constrain any ATF capabilities viewed as potentially threatening the rights of gun owners. To comply with a 1986 law preventing the creation of a federal gun registry, for example, the ATF uses software with some features disabled. Steve Dettelbach, who served as director under Biden, joked in a 2024 congressional hearing that the ATF might be “the only customer of Adobe Acrobat that pays money to remove search function.”
Despite these constraints, the ATF has developed its investigative capability. In the 1990s, the agency started sharing with local law enforcement agencies its National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which collects the unique marks on bullet casings found at shooting scenes. The system has become much more potent as it became easier to share large numbers of images from crime scenes rapidly and compare them against the NIBIN database. The work was boosted further by the creation, starting in 2016, of 25 crime gun intelligence centers to process the data.
Given that a tiny share of the nation’s guns are used in shootings, with many of those used multiple times, the leads produced by the technology can have an outsized impact, said Daryl McCormick, who retired last year as special agent in charge of Ohio and southern Indiana. “It’s crazy how it might spiderweb out,” he told me, “because you have a gun that’s used in three shootings, but in one of those three shootings, there’s a guy that’s linked to three more shootings.”
Starting in the spring of 2020, that technology was put to the test. As homicides rose sharply, so did sales at dealerships. By one estimate, there were 3 million more guns sold between that March and July than would have been expected. Many soon turned up in shootings; the number of guns recovered at crime scenes that had been bought from a dealership less than a year earlier, an especially strong indicator of firearms trafficking, jumped by nearly a third from 2019 to 2021.
Meanwhile, many shootings involved ghost guns assembled from kits, which had begun proliferating a few years prior. Amid other factors driving the killing, the sheer plenitude of weaponry on the streets was pivotal, said Daniel Webster, a gun-violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “We know,” he told me, “that a small number of dealers can create a substantial amount of harm, and traffickers as well.”
In the spring of 2021, a 25-year-old man was summoned to help a friend in a confrontation at a low-income housing development in Middletown, Connecticut. It was a petty beef arising from disrespectful comments made to someone’s girlfriend, but Tylon Hardy responded anyway. “He was one of the guys who wanted to protect his community,” his sister, Tianna Hardy, told me later. “He showed up to protect his friend.” After he arrived, Tylon was fatally shot in the back.
Guns are tightly regulated in Connecticut, where buyers must first obtain a permit. But this gun had not been sold by a Connecticut store. It had been purchased six days earlier at Smokin’ Barrel Guns and Ammo in Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 600 miles away.
It was a particularly rapid movement up the Iron Pipeline, the name for the trafficking channel from southern states with lax gun laws to northern states with stricter ones. And it turned into a clear example of why trafficking enforcement matters. Investigators obtained camera footage from the shop showing a young man emerging after buying the gun, a Taurus 9 mm pistol, to make a call on his cellphone.
The following spring, the Biden-nominated U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Michael Easley Jr., produced indictments in the case that started with the camera: Four people were charged with having engaged in a conspiracy to traffic dozens of guns from shops in eastern and central North Carolina. All told, the ringleader had bought more than 100 guns from straw purchasers in North Carolina; 10 of the guns surfaced at crime scenes in Connecticut and New Jersey. The ringleader ended up pleading guilty and being sentenced to more than 10 years in prison; the other three received sentences ranging from 18 months to five years.
Easley kept pursuing trafficking cases, poring over spreadsheets full of NIBIN data showing information for every gun traced from shootings in his district. His office would zero in on guns with a short “time to crime” from the initial sale and see if investigators could build leads from purchase records. His team made its interest in trafficking plain to the local ATF division, motivating agents to build cases. “Prosecutors have the ability to send a demand signal to the marketplace of agents, that we have an interest in these and if you bring us the cases, we will push them over the end zone and get convictions,” he told me.
Prosecutors kept getting more encouragement from Washington. In April 2022, the ATF issued a rule decreeing that ghost guns had to conform to the same regulations as regular firearms, including carrying serial numbers and requiring background checks.
Two months later, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which got crucial Republican backing from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. In addition to the new trafficking conspiracy charge, the law included a new straw-purchasing charge, expanded background checks for buyers under 21 and funding for states with red-flag laws permitting gun confiscations from those judged dangerous. And a month after that, the Senate confirmed Dettelbach, giving the ATF its first confirmed director since 2015, one who had prosecuted gun crimes as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
Across the country, federal prosecutors took on trafficking cases with gusto. Over the remainder of Biden’s term, they charged more than 500 defendants using the new trafficking statutes; others brought cases using laws already on the books.
In Ohio, McCormick and his ATF colleagues took on a sprawling case that started with a shooting with a machine gun in Avondale, outside Cincinnati, and led to a six-year prison sentence for a 24-year-old man who had made and sold over 80 machine-gun conversion devices; two other men who trafficked the devices to Cincinnati gangs were sentenced to nine and 11 years. As in North Carolina, the Ohio agents were getting encouragement from prosecutors, including Kenneth Parker, the then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “I made it clear, through my edicts, my announcements to them that we wanted those cases involving violence, that they know how seriously we were taking them,” he told me.
In February, I drove to Raleigh to meet with Easley and visit Smokin’ Barrel — or what used to be Smokin’ Barrel. The shop closed after the ATF revoked its license in early 2023, not for having sold the gun in the Connecticut case, but for an earlier incident, in which the owner sold a gun to an 18-year-old woman, in violation of North Carolina’s 21-year age minimum for buying a handgun. The shop, a small outbuilding adjacent to a used car lot, now sat empty; its fading sign still stood roadside.
Not far away, I found the former owner, Richard Humphries, at his home. He told me how upset he still was over the revocation, especially since, he said, he had self-reported the improper sale.
When I asked him about the Taurus that ended up being used six days later in the Connecticut killing, he initially had trouble recalling it, confusing it with another case in which a man had used a gun bought at the store to kill his wife. What was it like to learn about shootings with the guns he sold? “I hate it,” he said. “I hate that I sold it and he might have used it, but there’s nothing I can, you know …” He trailed off.
I pointed out that in the Connecticut case, investigators had been able to uncover the trafficking ring after tracing the gun to his shop. Was that a good use of resources? “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, they need to be able to do that. But they just, you know, they need to pay more attention to the crooks than people trying to make an honest living.”
I heard similar complaints from other dealers who had their licenses revoked during Biden’s term for transgressions they insisted were mere clerical mistakes. One in Indiana told me that his violations included a mix-up involving an Amish customer’s name; one in South Carolina told me his violations included filling out forms on behalf of elderly customers with shaky handwriting. “If it had been six months earlier, they would have given us a slap on the hand,” he said.
Even some within the ATF had misgivings, worrying that the policy would strain the agency’s relations with law-abiding dealers and make them less likely to offer alerts on suspicious behavior by buyers. “The industry is probably one of the best ways we get information about trafficking,” McCormick, the retired Ohio agent, told me. “But if there’s friction between us and the industry, they’re less likely to report it.”
Gun-safety advocates discounted that risk, saying the policy had both shut down many lawless stores and encouraged countless other sellers to make sure they were complying with the law. “It’s not only targeting bad dealers but sending a message to the entire industry: button up,” Josh Scharff, general counsel of Brady United, told me.
In 2024, revocations rose yet further, to 183. This represented a mere sliver of dealers — only 2% of those inspected that year — but it provoked new ire, not only from traditional lobby groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation and National Rifle Association but from ascendant groups of gun owners with even more aggressively anti-regulation stances.
Some dealers challenged their revocations in federal court. In 2023, the ATF revoked the license of a shop in the Phoenix suburbs, Chambered Group, after four inspections in five years turned up a host of violations. The business sought unsuccessfully to block the revocation in court, with a federal judge, Steven Logan, finding that the business had “purposefully disregarded [federal] regulations by repeatedly violating the same regulations despite being given multiple opportunities to cure its mistakes.” In 2024, one of the shop’s co-owners tried to get a new license under a slightly different name, Chambered Custom Firearms, and the ATF blocked him, noting his past role with the revoked store. (A lawyer for the shop declined to comment.)
But after Trump returned to the White House, his administration announced an end to the zero-tolerance policy, urged revoked dealers to reapply and started settling the court cases, one after another. In April 2025, the DOJ informed the court that it had started settlement talks in the Arizona case and a month later alerted it that Chambered Custom had submitted a new application “which ATF will expeditiously process.” It issued the license in July.
In Oregon, a dealer had gone to federal court to challenge the ATF’s 2024 denial of his license renewal for South Valley Firearms in the town of Monroe due to his past conviction for domestic violence. Trump’s DOJ initially contested the dealer’s bid, but early this year, the department notified his attorney out of the blue that his client would be getting his license, after all. “They didn’t give any explanation as to why,” said the lawyer, Leonard Williamson. “They just said, ‘Have him resubmit his application and we’ll give it to him.’”
The end of zero-tolerance was, on its own, hardly a surprise for an administration elected with the strong support of gun-rights and gun-industry groups. What has differed from the first Trump term has been the wholesale shift of resources away from the enforcement of gun trafficking laws and toward the immigration crackdown, both at the ATF and DOJ.
Last spring, the administration began shifting large numbers of ATF agents to a new assignment: assisting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions against undocumented immigrants. ICE records obtained by the libertarian Cato Institute in September showed that nearly 1,800 of ATF’s roughly 2,500 agents had taken part in enforcement and removal operations.
While ATF agents were shifted to immigration operations, criminal referrals fell. ATF referrals for common trafficking-related charges, including the two added in the 2022 law, decreased 15% in 2025 from 2024, according to a ProPublica analysis. Asked about the drop, ATF spokesperson Tanya Roman pointed at DOJ prosecutors. “Not every ATF referral is accepted by the [United States Attorney’s Office] for prosecution,” she said in a written response to questions.
Eventually, the shift toward immigration enforcement reached even beyond ATF’s agents to the industry operations investigators who inspect dealers. Terrence Robinson had served in that role for six years, based in Baltimore. He took pride in the work, but soon after Trump’s second term began, Robinson realized it would be a turbulent year for his agency. As part of the push by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government, the ATF offered early retirement to many of its 800-odd inspectors. In the end, some 125 took the offer, threatening to overburden a corps already struggling to inspect even a sliver of the nation’s 130,000 licensed firearms dealers. “ATF does not comment on personnel matters,” Roman said.
Around the same time, Robinson went to inspect the location of an applicant for a dealership license in Baltimore. The city, long wracked by gun violence, has come to have virtually no licensed dealers within its boundaries; those that remain are mostly in the suburbs. Robinson was startled to discover that this applicant intended to sell guns from his apartment in a building downtown, a few blocks from Camden Yards. Robinson voiced his concerns to his supervisor, who told him that he had to approve it. “According to our rules and regulations now, he passed a criminal background check, and he’s a citizen, so …,” Robinson said. “It’s mind-boggling.”
Most upsetting, though, was the directive that he and other industry operations investigators received in late summer to start spending at least six hours per week on immigration-related work. It was hard to understand what this even meant — their job was to inspect firearms dealers. To comply, he began scouring dealers’ sales records looking for buyers with foreign-sounding names, which were then relayed to the Department of Homeland Security. This struck him as a monumental misuse of resources.
This was what pushed him over the edge and made him decide to take early retirement, too, in September. “I didn’t sign up to be an immigration person,” he said. “I’m just not that.”
Asked about such orders, the ATF’s Roman said: “In support of President Trump’s whole of government approach to combat illegal immigration, ATF is assisting the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement partners with their immigration enforcement efforts. To ensure operational security and the safety of our agents and partners, ATF does not disclose details or specific numbers of personnel deployments or enforcement activities.”
Now that Robinson was gone, his former team was down from 10 to six, with a temporary supervisor. He worried what the changes at ATF meant for public safety. “I’m not saying I can see the future, but I don’t see things getting better,” he said. “I see things getting worse.”
“Everyone’s been in a little bit of shock about what’s going on,” Marianna Mitchem said last December, speaking from the stage of a conference on gun violence at the Center for American Progress, the center-left think tank in Washington. She described what the ATF had accomplished in recent years, then she laid bare the extent of the pullback now underway.
Mitchem told the advocates that they would have to look to officials in their home states and cities to try to fill the void left by the Trump administration. “It’s up to the states to start tackling this trafficking problem, because unfortunately, you’re not going to have the support of the ATF,” she said.
This has already started happening in a few places. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, a city that suffered one of the worst pandemic-era homicide spikes but has since experienced dramatic improvement, county sheriffs have started doing more inspections of dealers to make up for the decline in ATF enforcement. A member of the conference audience asked Mitchem what else states could be doing to respond. Her answer suggested she wasn’t sure.
“ATF wasn’t always the most widely known agency. I think we sort of liked it that way. We did really, really good work and kept our head down,” she said. “And so now, you’re trying to let everybody know, unfortunately, there are still good people there, but they’ve been redirected.”
In February, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Robert Cekada, downplayed that redirection at his confirmation hearing. Cekada is a 20-year ATF veteran, a fact in which gun-safety advocates have tried to take some reassurance. Cekada testified that the agency was continuing to “do dealer inspections uninhibited.”
But ATF has made it much harder for researchers and the public to track that work. It took the administration more than 15 months to release a tally of how many dealer licenses it had revoked: 56 in 2025, down 69% from the year before. Cekada also challenged a report last fall that 80% of the ATF’s agents had been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The reassignment had never amounted to more than 100 agents at a given time, Cekada said. “ATF in those operations has been focused on offenders that were illegally armed with firearms,” he told senators.
But as the former federal prosecutors and ATF agents I spoke with noted, the key question when it comes to the fight against trafficking is whether prosecutors are seeking out cases. After all, the ATF investigates cases, but U.S. attorneys prosecute them. And here the evidence suggests a pullback. A ProPublica analysis shows that in the first year of the Trump administration, the DOJ declined 30% more referrals from the ATF for the main trafficking-related charges than it had the year prior.
Despite the high rate of declinations for ATF referrals, the DOJ last year ended up prosecuting nearly as many gun-trafficking cases from all sources as it had in 2024. But a growing share of the cases, roughly 30%, were under the new trafficking conspiracy charges included in the 2022 law, which since its inception has proven especially useful in cases involving gun trafficking across the Mexican border: About a fifth of all people charged under that law over the course of 2024 and 2025 are in a single district, western Texas. Asked about the rise in declinations of ATF referrals and the shift toward border-related cases, DOJ spokesperson Katie Kenlein said, “The department declines to comment on prosecutorial strategy.”
Webster, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said numbers leave little doubt as to the shift away from general anti-trafficking enforcement. “Everything is diverted,” he said. “It’s all about immigrants.”
On April 29, right after being confirmed as ATF director, Cekada announced 34 proposed rule changes, including requiring dealers to hold records for only 20 or 30 years, not indefinitely, and limiting ATF scrutiny of the state-issued permits that can replace background checks for buyers. “We are proposing to remove unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses,” he said, flanked by leaders of the NRA and National Shooting Sports Foundation.
One crucial Biden-era reform has persisted: the clampdown on ghost guns. The 2022 ATF regulation survived a Supreme Court challenge last year, and lawsuits by several cities helped drive the leading producer of ghost guns out of business. Webster and other criminologists note that the reduced flow of ghost guns correlates with a sharply lower rate of shootings by teenagers, who had been heavy users of the guns during the 2020-21 homicide surge.
Even that progress seemed as if it might be at risk. In early April, a joint status report issued to the federal court in Texas where the case originated stated that “ATF has advised that it plans to take agency action to amend the challenged rule” (even though the rule has been upheld by the Supreme Court). A day later, the White House’s 2027 budget called for reversing “the imposition of excessive restrictions on homemade firearms.” But five days after that, the DOJ notified the court in the Texas case that “the government has decided to maintain the definition” that underlies the ghost gun rule. Asked for clarification, the ATF’s Roman said last week: “ATF is still conducting legal reviews for other, more technically challenging rules. If changes are needed following the review, a proposal will be published.” For now, one key valve in the pipeline remains closed.
The post “No One Is Watching”: How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking appeared first on ProPublica.
Senate Democrats are launching a coordinated effort to kill the Trump administration's $1.7+ billion "anti-weaponization fund."
Airline’s shares hit highest level in three months as investment group Castlelake says it is considering offer
EasyJet has called a potential £3bn bid by a US investment group “highly opportunistic” as shares in the airline shot up to their highest level in three months on news of the takeover interest.
The US private credit firm Castlelake said on Friday it was considering a takeover offer for the airline. On Monday, it said it had already bought a 2.14% stake in the business and its offer would value easyJet at least at 403p a share, or about £3bn overall.
Continue reading...Amazon's "Subscribe & Save" program — for recurring purchasees — has triggered a new lawsuit, reports Oregon Live. "The lawsuit contends that after luring in customers with 'artificially low prices,' the world's biggest online retailer jacked up the prices in the months after their first shipments arrived." In some cases, the lawsuit claims that customers were paying more for the exact same items through the Subscribe & Save program than they would be if they bought the items from other sellers on the site. That was true even when the up to 15% discount that the subscription program offers was calculated into the final purchase price, according to the suit. The Seattle law firm that filed the May 15 lawsuit says that Amazon's business practices amount to "deceptive," "misleading" and "bait and switch tactics." The firm is seeking class-action status in U.S. District Court for western Washington, a move that could potentially draw tens of millions of Amazon customers from across the U.S. into the litigation... [The suit says the plaintiffs' first order of espresso coffee grounds was $16.60.] When their order auto-renewed a few months later, the price had gone up to $17.04. A few months later, it rose to $21.25. Then in October 2024, the price increased to $28.69 — about $12 more than the Hermans had paid at the beginning of their subscription, according to the lawsuit. [The discount can be as little as 5% or up to 15%, Amazon told Oregon Live in a statement, noting customers do receive an email showing "applicable savings" before the orders ship. But...] The suit says Amazon gave the Hermans little notice to cancel the order or to shop around because it notified them of the latest price increase in an email at 8:54 p.m. — the same night it processed their order and charged them. The suit says if the Hermans had been given the time to shop around for a better price, they would have found that another Amazon seller was charging $25.90 — or $2.79 less — for the identical item. Amazon's "Subscribe & Save Terms & Conditions" page tells customers that it "may change the price for a Subscribe & Save subscription at any time for any reason...." The analytical group Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says about 25% of U.S. Amazon customers are enrolled in the Subscribe & Save program. Oregon Live got Amazon's response, which suggested their program saves customers time and money "through convenient, flexible, and recurring deliveries". (So when customers saw "Subscribe and Save", they were perhaps supposed to intuit the word save referred in part to... time-saving?) The plaintiffs' lawyer argues instead that "When you sign up for something that is called 'Subscribe & Save,' you'd expect that you're saving by subscribing. But that's not actually what's happening in many cases."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PARIS, June 1, 2026 — Bull, a leader in advanced computing and AI, and Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn), the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and leading technology solutions provider, announce a strategic collaboration to manufacture AI and Cloud infrastructure, from Europe to the global market.
The partnership will combine Bull’s leadership in AI systems design, deployment and go-to-market, with Foxconn’s global manufacturing scale and supply chain capabilities, to enable the delivery of AI infrastructure solutions, including computing systems and related components leveraging Bull’s factory in Angers (France) and Foxconn’s factories in Pardubice (Czech Republic).
Strengthening a resilient European supply chain for neo-cloud providers and AI factories
This approach will address the growing needs of European AI Factories initiatives and neo-cloud providers to reinforce regional industrial capacity, while maintaining competitiveness in terms of cost, quality and time-to-market.
The partnership focuses on European AI Factory and Infrastructure, closely aligning with the strategic vision for Sovereign AI. By anchoring the localized AI supply chain and computing capabilities in France, the initiative aims to serve as a key enabler for Europe’s sovereign AI ecosystem. To execute this strategic deployment in France, the project is expected to involve an initial investment exceeding EUR 120 million.
At a time when artificial intelligence is becoming a critical economic infrastructure, industry analyses show that Europe remains significantly dependent on external markets for key components and technologies, exposing it to potential supply disruptions and limiting its industrial autonomy. Today, Europe accounts for around 8% of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity, according to ING, and holds less than 5% market share in several key AI infrastructure segments, including cloud and advanced computing platforms, as highlighted by McKinsey.
Delivering next-generation AI servers and systems from France and the Czech Republic
Bull and Foxconn will initially focus on the manufacturing enablement and industrialization of AI system, designed for demanding workloads such as AI training and inference. These systems will integrate advanced processors, including GPUs and other accelerators, together with high-performance memory, storage, scale out and scale up interconnect technologies.
Designed as standalone systems or rack-level configurations, they will address the needs of a wide range of users – including enterprises, cloud and neo cloud service providers, research institutions and emerging AI factories, contributing to the expansion of a more structured and scalable AI ecosystem made within the European borders.
From an industrial perspective, manufacturing and initial testing will be carried out in Foxconn’s facilities in the Czech Republic, before assembly, final integration and system-level validation at Bull’s factory in Angers (France).
“This partnership with Foxconn accelerates our transformation by positioning Bull as a key European player in AI and cloud systems, leveraging Bull’s technical leadership in HPC, with the ability to deliver the most advanced infrastructure at scale and with competitive time to market,” said Emmanuel Le Roux, CEO of Bull. “It marks an important step in the execution of our strategy to address neo-cloud providers and AI Factories across Europe, India, Latin America. By joining forces with Foxconn, we are taking a concrete step to deliver competitive AI infrastructure made in Europe while contributing to a more resilient digital ecosystem within Europe.”
“Leveraging our global manufacturing expertise and growing European footprint, we aim to provide scalable and high-quality production capabilities to support the deployment of Bull-led AI systems across the region,” said Jesse Chao, Head of AI & Quantum at Foxconn. “This collaboration, which advances building sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe, reflects our commitment to enabling a resilient and competitive AI supply chain for the European market.”
About Bull
Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.
Source: Bull
The post Bull and Foxconn Partner to Scale Europe’s Manufacturing Capabilities for AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
Major investment to strengthen France’s AI infrastructure, support European technological sovereignty and anchor advanced data center manufacturing in Dunkirk with Schneider Electric
PARIS, June 1, 2026 — SoftBank Group Corp. has announced its commitment to develop and operate 5 GW of AI data center capacity in France, representing an investment of up to €75 billion. The first phase, comprising an initial €45 billion investment to deliver 3.1 GW of AI data center capacity in the Hauts-de-France region, is part of the 2026 Choose France summit hosted by President Emmanuel Macron.
The commitment marks SoftBank Group’s largest AI infrastructure investments in Europe. It is designed to support the rapid growth of artificial intelligence by expanding access to high-performance compute capacity in France.
“AI is entering a new era, and the countries that build the infrastructure for this transformation will shape the future of technology, industry and society,” said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO, SoftBank Group Corp. “SoftBank is proud to make this major commitment to France. With its industrial capabilities, talent base and national ambition, France is uniquely positioned to become a leading AI infrastructure hub in Europe.”
The first phase includes plans to deliver 3.1 GW of AI data center capacity in the Hauts-de-France region by 2031, with data centers in Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel and Bouchain. SoftBank Group also plans to develop additional sites across France, reinforcing the country’s role as a leading European hub for next-generation digital infrastructure. SoftBank Group will work with SB Energy and other strategic partners to develop the projects.
Roland Lescure, Minister of Economy, Finance, & Industrial, Energy, & Digital Sovereignty, said: “SoftBank’s decision to invest massively in AI datacenters in France – a first for the group in Europe – is testament to President Emmanuel Macron’s ambition to position France as a leading destination all along the AI value chain. It reflects our country’s substantial assets: fast access to the most reliable electrical grid in Europe, a strong digital and industrial ecosystem with a skilled workforce, and a government that works in unison with local authorities and stakeholders to fast track procedures for strategic projects. By partnering with leading French companies EDF on the Bouchain data center, and Schneider Electric for a robotized plant, SoftBank displays a long-term commitment to building the future of an industry-centric AI in France. We are proud to support an investment that creates jobs, strengthens our digital infrastructure and contributes to our goal of digital sovereignty.”
Bernard Fontana, Chairman and CEO of EDF, said: “The project selected for the Bouchain site demonstrates France’s ability to host large-scale digital infrastructure, supported by competitive, sovereign and low-carbon electricity. It reflects EDF’s commitment to selecting projects that combine industrial excellence, high environmental standards and long-term value creation for local communities, while giving a new purpose to its former industrial sites.”
SoftBank Group’s AI data centers will support growing demand for high-performance computing from AI companies, cloud providers, enterprises, public institutions and research organizations. The projects will build on France’s strategic advantages, including its advanced grid infrastructure, industrial land availability, engineering talent and strong national commitment to artificial intelligence.
Strategic Industrial Partnership with Schneider Electric in Dunkirk
To accelerate this buildout, SoftBank Group will partner with Schneider Electric to leverage its energy technology solutions and develop a large-scale industrial production cluster at the Port of Dunkirk.
The cluster will be a key industrial pillar of SoftBank Group’s AI infrastructure program in France and will include two facilities: one operated by SoftBank Group to manufacture enclosures, and one operated by Schneider Electric to integrate data center power modules. It will combine SoftBank Group’s robotics and automation capabilities with Schneider Electric’s industrial expertise and local supply chain network to support the deployment of next-generation AI data centers at scale.
By pairing AI infrastructure with advanced manufacturing, SoftBank Group and Schneider Electric aim to build a stronger, more localized and more resilient supply chain for data center infrastructure in France and Europe. The industrial cluster will also support Dunkirk’s ambition to become a leading hub for robotics, advanced manufacturing and industrial innovation.
Olivier Blum, CEO of Schneider Electric, said: “The challenge of AI is to deliver both speed and energy efficiency at scale — and Schneider Electric’s role is to enable and accelerate this transformation as the energy technology partner. By connecting energy and AI, we provide the electrical and digital backbone that makes high-performance, efficient and sustainable infrastructure possible. Our prefabricated power modules are a key lever to combine speed, scalability and energy optimization. Together with SoftBank, we are proud to contribute to a major investment strengthening France as a leading European hub for next-generation digital infrastructure.”
Creating Jobs, Skills and Regional R&D
SoftBank Group’s investment is expected to create thousands of high-skilled jobs across data center development, engineering, energy systems, robotics, operations, maintenance and advanced manufacturing.
The company also plans to support regional research and development through partnerships with local universities, engineering schools, and training institutions. These partnerships will focus on the skills needed for the next generation of AI infrastructure.
Together, the AI data center program and Schneider Electric partnership will help provide the compute capacity, industrial foundation and skilled workforce required to support AI innovation, industrial adoption and technological sovereignty in France and across Europe.
About SoftBank Group
The SoftBank Group invests in breakthrough technology to improve the quality of life for people around the world. The SoftBank Group is comprised of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), an investment holding company that includes stakes in AI, smart robotics, IoT, telecommunications, internet services, and clean energy technology providers, as well as a majority stake in Arm, which is building the future of computing; and the SoftBank Vision Funds, which are investing to help transform industries and shape new ones. To learn more, please visit https://group.softbank/en.
Source: SoftBank
The post SoftBank Group to Build 5 GW of AI Data Center Capacity in France appeared first on HPCwire.
Powerful winds and rain expected in parts of Japan and Australia, while temperatures in Spain could hit 40C
A powerful tropical storm is forecast to track near Okinawa, Japan, on Monday before moving towards the south-east of the country. Typhoon Jangmi (also known as Typhoon No 6) has formed within the monsoonal gyre over the Philippine Sea.
A monsoonal gyre is a large, slow-rotating weather system that spawns typhoons through smaller vortices formed within it. This flow can intensify storms. Such typhoons are typically characterised by broad areas of low pressure and extensive wind fields, often without a distinct eye.
Continue reading...TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA has announced the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform is ramping into full production to power agentic AI factories worldwide.
Taiwan’s top server makers and global supply chain leaders are manufacturing Vera Rubin-based systems at scale — fueling AI labs, cloud providers and hyperscalers to build tomorrow’s intelligence.
Credit: NVIDIA
Vera Rubin delivers NVIDIA’s most extensive POD-scale platform — five purpose-built racks operating as one massive AI supercomputer for agentic workloads. The platform unifies NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, NVIDIA Vera CPU, NVIDIA Groq 3 LPX, NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX storage and NVIDIA Spectrum-6 SPX Ethernet racks into a fully integrated system. Vera Rubin delivers 10x agent throughput at scale compared with the previous-generation NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform.
“Agentic AI is a new kind of workload. One prompt can launch a thousand-step journey of reasoning, retrieval, tool use and response generation,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Vera Rubin was built for this moment — an AI factory engine that delivers intelligence at scale, with the performance, efficiency and security needed to power the next industrial revolution.”
Vera Rubin Ramp
Vera Rubin marks the third generation of NVIDIA MGX rack-scale systems. With a proven, open source MGX design, hundreds of NVIDIA supply chain ecosystem partners — 150 in Taiwan alone — across 350+ factories and 30 countries are ramping Vera Rubin.
Top system builders, infrastructure software and storage partners are in full-scale production of Vera Rubin. This includes Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro, as well as AIC, Aivres, ASRock Rack, ASUS, Cloudian, Compal, DDN, Everpure, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, Hitachi Vantara, Hyve Solutions, IBM, Inventec, MinIO, MiTAC Computing, MSI, NetApp, Nutanix, Pegatron, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), VAST Data, WEKA, Wistron and Wiwynn.
Building the Fabric for Million-GPU AI Factories
To support scale-out and scale-across AI factory deployments, the Vera Rubin platform introduces NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, the world’s first co-packaged-optics (CPO)-based switches with 200Gb/s SerDes — now in production.
Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, a new generation of switching technology built on CPO, delivers 5x better power efficiency, 5x longer AI uptime and 1.3x faster time to deployment than networks using traditional transceivers.
By simplifying design and freeing more power for compute, NVIDIA co-packaged optics networking provides the foundational fabric for million-GPU AI factories, with CoreWeave, Lambda and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure among the first ecosystem partners and adopters.
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform also integrates NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs, featuring software-defined networking at speeds of up to 800Gb/s and built-in multi-tenant isolation. With the NVIDIA BlueField-4 Advanced Secure Trusted Resource Architecture, customers can simplify network operations, improve tenant isolation and gain greater control across million GPU AI clusters.
Secure AI for AI Factories
AI factories are increasingly processing proprietary data, regulated content and mission-critical models in agentic workflows. This requires advanced infrastructure security tailored to autonomous agents in shared or cloud environments where infrastructure cannot be implicitly trusted.
The Vera Rubin platform was designed with full-stack NVIDIA Confidential Computing for a trusted execution environment at rack scale. Vera Rubin NVL72 combines Vera CPUs, Rubin GPUs, NVIDIA NVLink networking and security features into a unified platform, encrypting data across high-speed interconnects. This provides hardware-level attestation to ensure the system is tamper-proof.
Cloud providers CoreWeave, Firmus, GMI Cloud, IBM Cloud, IREN, Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Nebius, Nscale, SpaceXAI and Vultr are adopting NVIDIA Confidential Computing.
Delivering this level of protection at POD scale also requires a programmable software layer capable of enforcing, orchestrating and adapting security policies across the entire system. The NVIDIA DOCA software platform delivers advanced security across every Vera Rubin platform rack and layer of the AI factory — protecting data, agents, context memory and AI inference through capabilities enforced directly in BlueField-4 silicon.
DOCA enables multi-tenant network isolation, zero-trust policy enforcement, runtime threat detection and end-to-end encryption at speeds of up to 800Gb/s, all without taxing host CPU resources, so enterprises can scale AI factories with confidence.
Accelerating the Buildout of AI Factories
The NVIDIA DSX platform provides the complete design and operational foundation for Vera Rubin AI factories — unifying reference designs, simulation, infrastructure software, facilities and ecosystem technologies to help build and operate energy-efficient AI factories optimized for lowest token cost.
Built for the Vera Rubin POD architecture, DSX aligns every layer of the stack — from silicon and systems to lifecycle management and multi-tenant operations — dramatically accelerating deployment and setting a new bar for operational reliability and resiliency at scale.
Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro together with ASUS, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, Pegatron, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Wistron and Wiwynn are adopting NVIDIA DSX to accelerate AI factory ramp with Vera Rubin.
Availability
Production shipments of Vera Rubin are set to begin starting this fall.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Vera Rubin Ramps into Full Production to Power Agentic AI Factories Worldwide appeared first on HPCwire.
HOUSTON and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — HPE today announced the expansion of its industry-leading server portfolio with the introduction of the HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12, powered by NVIDIA Vera CPU. This next-generation server is engineered specifically to address the compute demands of emerging high-performance AI and data processing workloads delivering industry leading agentic AI CPU performance, memory bandwidth and low latency. Built on a foundation of advanced architecture, the platform also features HPE’s enterprise-grade Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) as security, while HPE Compute Ops Management provides a unified dashboard to manage and automate server environments.
The HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12, based on NVIDIA Vera CPU, was launched at COMPUTEX 2026 as part of a new collaboration with NVIDIA and Redpanda, that is being explored by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The new server features technology optimized for the specific demands of agentic AI, across data storage and processing, monitoring, management and security capabilities, ensuring smooth and secure operation for agentic AI.
“The shift from generative models to agentic systems is redefining the role of compute across the enterprise,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “These workloads require high-performance servers with exceptional CPU performance to enable real-time reasoning across agentic AI and financial services applications. With our new HPE ProLiant Compute server, we are delivering a new class of infrastructure to help customers accelerate insights and operate with confidence in the most demanding environments.”
“At the NYSE, our focus is to optimize the latency, throughput, and reliability of the systems underpinning our unrivaled infrastructure,” said Lynn Martin, President of NYSE Group. “NYSE processes more than 1.1 trillion messages per day, and in collaboration with Redpanda and HPE, using NVIDIA Vera CPUs, we will be scaling our capacity while further optimizing latency to power a high-performance, resilient and AI-ready market infrastructure.”
“Agentic AI has arrived, and it needs a new CPU,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Vera was built to orchestrate AI factories—delivering 2x the efficiency and faster task completion than x86. With HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12, enterprises can put Vera to work, and NYSE shows what purpose-built AI infrastructure can do in the world’s most demanding environments.”
Solving the Memory Challenge
HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 is a 2U server that helps customers advance the adoption of AI computing in their organization. The server leverages NVIDIA Vera CPUs with a monolithic design, unlike traditional high-core-count chiplet architectures that suffer from non-uniform memory access (NUMA) issues, which results in variable latencies and non-deterministic performance can develop latency in multi-processor systems. By leveraging low-power double data rate 5X (LPDDR5X), a highly efficient form of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the HPE server achieves 1.2 TB/s aggregate bandwidth—up to 14 GB/s per core—enabling the HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 to ingest and process data at high speed. This architecture enables NVIDIA Vera CPU to act as a high-speed orchestrator, ensuring resources are efficiently balanced to meet the most demanding AI workloads, while reducing capacity waste.
Embedded Security and AI-Driven Operations with HPE ProLiant
HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 embeds security at every level with Silicon Root of Trust, HPE’s firmware technology. Additionally, HPE ProLiant Compute servers with iLO 7 – like the HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12, are enabled by the secure enclave, an HPE innovation that safeguards servers at every phase of its lifecycle. These next-generation servers are the first to meet NIST’s quantum computing resistant security requirements, giving organizations a more secure and future-ready platform for protecting sensitive workloads and regulated environments.
To enable AI-driven insights and enhance operational agility, the server is also equipped with HPE Compute Ops Management which provides a single, unified solution for overseeing distributed environments. This management layer provides customers with AI-driven operations that can reduce server management time and minimize the risk of revenue loss due to downtime.
Availability
The HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 will be available in fall 2026, as a new addition to the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio.
This server can also be acquired through HPE Financial Service’s 90/9 Advantage program that offers no payments for 90 days and an additional nine months at one percent.
About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.
Source: HPE
The post HPE introduces CPU server with NVIDIA-Vera CPU, purpose-built for Agentic AI appeared first on HPCwire.
Optimized for cloud-native, virtualization, 5G analytics, content delivery, and throughput-intensive workloads
SAN JOSE, Calif. and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. has announced the launch of 12 new server platforms optimized for new Intel Xeon 6+ processors. Featuring up to 288 efficiency cores per socket and delivering improved performance-per-watt, the new systems are designed for high-density cloud, virtualization, 5G analytics, and other throughput-intensive workloads.
“By working closely with Intel, we have optimized our DCBBS with the new Xeon 6+ processors to deliver breakthrough core density and efficiency,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “These new X14 platforms, with up to 576 E-cores per server, dramatically improve performance-per-watt and help customers shorten time-to-deployment while lowering TCO and energy consumption in large-scale cloud and enterprise data centers.”
Intel Xeon 6+ systems offer double the core count, up to 17% higher instructions per clock (IPC), five times more last-level cache, and 25% faster memory support to deliver impressive performance gains, compared to previous generations.
Key Product Families:
DCBBS delivers complete, modular AI infrastructure built from validated components and subsystems, enabling flexible deployment from individual servers and networking to full rack-scale and data center-level solutions, including software and services.
Supermicro’s comprehensive portfolio of AI infrastructure solutions will be on display at the Supermicro booth during Computex.
For more information, visit www.supermicro.com/x14.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Unveils 12 Xeon 6+ Systems Targeting Cloud and Data Center Efficiency appeared first on HPCwire.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced that the world’s technology leaders are planning to adopt NVIDIA Vera, the first CPU built for AI agents.
Now in full production, NVIDIA Vera is a new class of processor enabling 1.8x faster task completion compared with x86 CPUs to drive diverse workloads across industries — including agentic AI, reinforcement learning and data processing — generating more data center token revenue.
Credit: NVIDIA
Building on the success of NVIDIA Grace CPUs, which have nearly 2.5 million shipments to date, Vera takes CPU performance and energy efficiency to new levels for the most demanding AI workloads in modern data centers — where agents move from answering basic questions to taking actions, running code, using tools and evaluating results.
Customers exploring the Vera CPU include finance leader NYSE, global AI labs Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI, and hyperscalers ByteDance, CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Vera is also being integrated into AI infrastructure from world-leading system manufacturers such as Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro, along with Taiwan system builders.
“AI agents will be the largest users of computing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Vera is the first CPU designed for that future — built to run agentic AI at hyperscale with extraordinary performance, efficiency and programmability.”
“At the NYSE, our focus is to optimize the latency, throughput and reliability of the systems underpinning our unrivaled infrastructure,” said Lynn Martin, president of NYSE Group. “The NYSE processes more than 1.1 trillion messages per day, and in collaboration with Redpanda and HPE, using NVIDIA Vera CPUs, we will be scaling our capacity while further optimizing latency to power a high-performance, resilient and AI-ready market infrastructure.”
Anthropic, the AI innovator behind Claude, is evaluating adding Vera to scale CPU-intensive agentic workloads.
“Scaling compute is an important accelerant for the growth of models,” said James Bradbury, head of compute at Anthropic. “We’re excited to see Vera emerge as a promising part of the ecosystem when solving for agentic workloads.”
OCI Supercluster powered by NVIDIA Vera represents the next frontier in hyperscale AI supercomputing.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is rapidly scaling AI infrastructure to meet surging demand for training, inference and agentic AI,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “By deploying NVIDIA Vera CPUs, OCI will support high-throughput reasoning and data processing workloads across next-generation AI environments.”
According to Phoronix, which offers a comprehensive, open source benchmarking suite, NVIDIA Vera delivered the fastest overall performance across agentic workloads including code compilation, Python, Java and database processing. These workloads sit on the critical path of modern AI factories, including for agent tool use and sandbox execution, where faster CPU performance delivers higher agent throughput and interactivity.
A Custom CPU for the Agentic Era
AI factory economics are shifting from cores per dollar to tokens per dollar, requiring CPUs that complete agentic, data-processing and orchestration work faster and more efficiently.
Vera is powered by Olympus, a custom NVIDIA CPU core engineered for the CPU work behind that shift, from Python runtimes and sandboxed code execution to orchestration logic and analytics pipelines.
Vera is built to process more instructions, anticipate application behavior and move data across large numbers of concurrent environments, queries and data processing tasks — featuring 88 Olympus cores, Spatial Multithreading and a LPDDR5X memory subsystem that delivers up to 1.2TB/s of bandwidth. This helps agents spend less time waiting on CPU-bound steps and lets AI factories keep accelerators moving.
The Vera CPU can also be deployed across the full AI factory — from the standalone CPU infrastructure to tightly coupled accelerated systems. Vera helps AI factories deliver higher end-to-end throughput and faster time to solution for users, improving responsiveness and efficiency across training, inference and agentic execution.
Vera serves as the host CPU for NVIDIA Vera Rubin platforms through second-generation NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology, which provides up to 1.8TB/s of coherent bandwidth between CPU and GPU. It extends NVIDIA Confidential Computing at rack scale, protecting agentic workloads.
The NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX processor integrates Vera with high-performance networking, storage acceleration and in-silicon security to create secure-by-design AI-native data platforms.
Extensive Ecosystem Support
Vera CPUs are available in dense, liquid-cooled racks for large-scale agentic AI and reinforcement learning environments, as well as flexible two-socket air-cooled systems for enterprise, cloud, data processing and AI factory deployments.
Leading infrastructure providers offering Vera CPU-based systems include Aivres, ASRock Rack, ASUS, Compal, Dell, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, HPE, Hyve Solutions, Inventec, Lenovo, MiTAC Computing, MSI, Pegatron, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Supermicro, Wistron and Wiwynn. Major original equipment manufacturers — Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro — will be offering Vera in standalone CPU server configurations, the first standard CPU option beyond x86.
Leading cloud service providers planning to deploy Vera CPUs include Akamai, ByteDance, Cloudflare, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Redpanda, Starburst, Together AI and Vultr.
Availability
Vera systems will be available from system builders and cloud partners starting this fall.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Launches Vera CPU for Agentic AI appeared first on HPCwire.
‘Megafires’ in California, Canada, South Korea and Europe in 2025, but changes to farming slowed spread in parts of Africa
“Devastating” wildfires ripped across the wealthier parts of the world in 2025, a study has found, even as globally, the area ravaged by flames fell.
Catastrophic blazes claimed lives, homes and jobs last year in California, Canada, Europe and South Korea. But the 335m hectares burned was the second-lowest since 2002, the review found, largely owing to the expansion of African farms that have fragmented landscapes and hampered the spread of large savannah fires.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: What an unprecedented scheme reveals about an increasingly uninhibited leadership – and what it might mean for American democracy
Good morning. It has been two weeks since details of a settlement in the case of Trump v the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) first emerged. An out-of-court agreement with the US president created a $1.8bn fund for the Trump administration to dish out at its discretion. In response, the outrage has been unrelenting.
Critics argue the result stinks of cronyism and corruption, effectively a “scheme for the Trumps to reward political friends while indirectly benefiting the family”. There has been rare pushback from within Trump’s own party: more than a dozen Republican senators have reportedly urged the administration to change course. YouGov polling found a majority of Democrats and Republicans oppose the fund.
UK politics | A trove of government documents about Peter Mandelson contains no record of any measures taken to mitigate serious security concerns over his appointment as Washington ambassador, the Guardian has learned.
Health news | A daily pill can double survival time in patients with the world’s deadliest cancer, according to the results of a clinical trial that experts are saying is a “gamechanger” and one of the biggest breakthroughs in decades.
Lebanon | European leaders have condemned Israel’s expanding incursion into Lebanon, after its military captured the medieval Beaufort castle and Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to push even deeper into the country.
Employment | An Indian citizen who came to the UK to work as a care worker through the post-Brexit visa scheme has been awarded nearly £30,000, because his employer failed to give him a single day of work for a year.
UK news | Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams was forced to sit in silence on stage at an event at Hay festival, after lawyers advised her not to speak because of ongoing legal action brought by Meta.
Continue reading...The new SoC promises class-leading performance for creation and gaming, and, of course, generative AI and agents.
Coalition of more than 100 organisations says move could lead to more children ending up in adult detention facilities
A coalition of more than a hundred refugee children’s organisations has said controversial plans to use AI to assess the age of young asylum seekers could lead to more children wrongly ending up in adult prisons or detention centres.
The warning follows a Home Office announcement on Friday of a contract to roll out AI facial age estimation technology on young asylum seekers whose age is disputed.
Continue reading...All you need to know about the 16 host stadiums in the US, Mexico and Canada
The 2026 World Cup is the largest tournament ever, and as such it involves more stadiums in more countries than ever before. A total of 16 venues will play host to this summer’s big games, and each has a story to tell about the past, present and future of sports in its city. Stadium names may look unfamiliar, as we are using the Fifa-approved names instead of the sponsored names that run afoul of the governing body’s clean venue rules.
Australia v Turkey, 13 June
Canada v Qatar, 18 June
New Zealand v Egypt, 21 June
Switzerland v Canada, 24 June
New Zealand v Belgium, 26 June
Round of 32, 2 July (1B v 3EFGIJ)
Round of 16, 7 July (W85 v W87)
Continue reading...The costs of democratic drain.
Why a cease-fire is now a real possibility.
How the world can do more with less.
"Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine," reports ScienceDaily. "Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries." (The research team was led by University of Rochest professor Chunlei Guo and published their results in the journal Light: Science & Applications.) The University of Rochester has made an announcement: The technology uses solar panels made of black metal etched with femtosecond lasers to make the surface super light-absorbing and superwicking — or extremely attractive to water. The panels have a laser-treated active region that pulls a thin layer of water across the surface, absorbs nearly all solar radiation, distills the water, and deposits the leftover salts and minerals into the panel's untreated sides or "passive" region so that the salt does not clog the active region and disrupt continuous desalination... Guo's team precisely etched the black metal's grooves so the various salts and minerals in ocean water would simply slough off... [I]t extracts nearly 100 percent of the salts in solid form. This could not only produce an abundant supply of table salt, but it could also be used to extract more precious minerals, including lithium, which is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and other electronics. In a related paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Guo and his colleagues show how they can use the same superwicking solar panels to separate lithium from the rest of other salts in desalination. Embedding nanoparticles made of hydrogen titanate in the tiny grooves of the black metal surface isolates the lithium from other salts and minerals...Using water samples from Great Salt Lake, the researchers extracted about 50 percent of the lithium from the salts left behind by the desalination process. Guo says now that the superwicking desalination technology has been demonstrated in proofs of concept on small-scale devices, he sees the technology inherently scalable, capable of improving global access to drinking water and building more sustainable supply chains for precious minerals. "The National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Worldwide Universities Network supported this research."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 1.
ScienceAlert reports: In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth's outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet's usual westward flow. This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it... [I]t seemed to have a large, wave-like structure — as though a chunk of molten core material suddenly thought better of where it wanted to go, surging in the other direction... This finding suggests that there are processes that can influence it strongly enough to alter its behavior in bulk — and that our planet's interior may be more dynamic and variable than we thought. A new analysis captures what we know so far — and "It's from the roiling, molten, conducting metal at Earth's heart that the planetary magnetic field is generated... vital to our continued existence. It helps keep the atmosphere we breathe in and harmful cosmic radiation out."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Georgia town’s lawsuit against turning a warehouse into an immigration detention center could have a wide impact, experts say – key US politics stories from 31 May at a glance
Social Circle, a small town in Georgia, is complaining that a proposed ICE “megacenter” would violate the state’s “public nuisance” law – meaning it would harm the “health, safety, and wellbeing” of the town’s 5,000 or so residents.
The town has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the plan, and aspects of the complaint show Social Circle “is willing to pursue a new legal theory to defend their rights, to defend their town”, said Adam Lauridsen, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys. Social Circle is located in a county where nearly 75% voted for Trump.
Continue reading..."Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world's intercontinental telecommunications data," reports CNN (since fiber cables offer speeds of terabits per second, carry much more data than satellite links). And "networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting to sprawl across the world's seabeds." Now to protect them, the U.S., Australia and the U.K. "are planning to develop new unmanned undersea vehicles" as part of their trilateral security partnership. Western governments see a growing risk of Russian and Chinese sabotage of undersea cables and are also concerned that Iran may seek to exploit the many data networks running through the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The "seabed is a battlefield" said Australia's Defence Minister, Richard Marles, in Singapore, calling for tougher action against so-called shadow-fleet vessels... The programme will improve the three nations' reconnaissance and strike capabilities, "and bolster superiority in anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare," as well as mine countermeasures, [according to a statement from their trilateral AUKUS partnership]... The new AUKUS project will sharpen all three countries' ability to respond to threats, including those targeting underwater cables and pipelines, through a range of "cutting edge sensors and weapons systems for undersea drones," UK Defence Secretary John Healey said. Marles said undersea internet cables — "the arteries of modern civilization" — were being cut at an unprecedented rate, with island nations like Australia acutely vulnerable. "Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed a series of attacks against subsea critical infrastructure at a scale and frequency that is historically unprecedented," he said. The UK government has also highlighted the vulnerability of the world's digital highways. "Every international payment, every cross-border trade executed in milliseconds, every flow of data between businesses here in the UK and markets overseas — all travel along the seabed," Telecoms Minister Liz Lloyd said Friday... Last month, the UK said it had tracked three Russian submarines covertly surveying undersea cables in the north Atlantic... A UK parliamentary inquiry warned last year that UK infrastructure might be targeted in a crisis, adding it was "not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period." The UK Navy is already exploring the creation of a hybrid force that incorporates the widespread use of underwater drones to combat Russian threats in the Atlantic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The WHO said these five cases exemplify that recovery from the illness is possible, even without approved treatments or vaccines.
 | Recently got a pint s and loving it so far. One thing I’ve noticed though is this really intermittent buzzing noise and wanted to get some opinions. Doesn’t seem to be on any speed in particular. Acceleration or deceleration doesn’t seem to contribute to it. Is this normal or should I be concerned? So far the board has 47 miles on it [link] [comments] |
I'm lucky, I only have two problems.
2 I live in Europe Brussels: so difficult to have parts to repair an American brand.
Could someone help me, give me advice?
Where to find a BMS, a controller and batteries so that my +XR WoW is operational again because I'm really tired of not being able to drive!
Thank you to anyone who will answer me to help me find a solution.
Robin
I'm lucky, I only have two problems.
Tout le Power pack de ma Onewheel +XR à griller après une infiltration d’eau.
(je pense … )
2 J’habite en Europe Bruxelles: donc difficile d’avoir des pièces pour réparer une marque américain.
Quelqu’un pourrait m’aider, me donner des conseils ?
Où trouver un BMS, un contrôleur et des batteries pour que mon +XR WoW soit de nouveau opérationnel car j’en ai vraiment marre de ne pas pouvoir rouler !
Merci à toute personne qui me répondra pour m’aider à trouver une solution.
Robin
How’s it going ladies and gents,
Here’s hoping this is the place to ask this to get real humans to help me out over AI bots 🙏🏽😭. I’m on the bigger side, nearing 300lbs currently and I usually like carry some gear with me, (camera, laptop, iPad, drone, other electronics as well as a sketchbook, some pens and pencils & paint and brushes + a tripod) which adds more weight. Before u tell me to hit the gym lol: yes I am on a weight loss path right now, tryna go for 0.5lb-1.0lb weight loss per week to keep things safe, healthy, manageable and steady. Initially I dismissed these cuz of my weight restrictions (been looking at mid-drive E bikes instead) but seeing the new GT S-series XLs, im reconsidering em despite knowing the official weight limit is 275lbs (which I’m hoping to hit [including the gear weight] in a few years! 🙏🏽). My added weight for the gear is a non-negotiable since I do a few creative things on the daily (drawing, painting, photography, videography).
As for the use case, I’ve always wanted to get one of these cuz how incredibly fun they are but never pulled the trigger before. Now, I can afford to splurge a little, since I got my savings built up, emergency fund loaded and finances covered and all that. It’s gonna be like a bike trail cruiser, urban last mile vehicle, and a joy ride for scenic views and sometimes a little off-roading to get to nicer spots for said nicer views. I’ve loved riding my longboard since I was a teen and seeing as how these carve and cruise even nicer it’d be so rad to enjoy one. While E-bikes are enjoyable and decently fun to ride, these would be a dream.
Would you all say I could ride this thing, despite being over the official weight limit? I don’t care about going fast, just about having a good time with good vibes and sweet carving & cruising ✌🏽🤙🏾🔥💯
Edit: Looks like it comes down to FM’s GT S-Series XL and the Fungineers’ X7 supercharged that’s coming out on June 15th with some changes! 🤙🏾 I think I’ll wait till then to make a decision and do some more research and reviewing in the meantime.
Thank you guys for such swift responses and willingness to help out; may your pockets always be full and u gain +10 smiles per hour on your boards 🔥 im stoked that even now, I might be able to carve and cruise on one of these this summer! 💯🙏🏽
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 1, No. 1,086.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 1 No. 820.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 1, No. 616.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 1, No. 1,808.
Smart thermostats offer huge upgrades to home heating and cooling, with some surprising cost savings to boot.
Modernisation bill would require GPs and hospitals in England to share data, reducing errors and duplication
Sharing access to patients’ health data across NHS providers in England could result in 20,000 fewer A&E visits a year and save £20m annually, the government has claimed, before the second reading of the NHS modernisation bill on Monday.
The bill, which would also abolish NHS England, sets out measures including single patient records (SPR) for every person receiving health and social care in England, requiring GPs and hospitals to securely share data as part of the government’s 10-year health plan.
Continue reading...Germany is undergoing a significant military rearmament. The change has been driven by the ongoing war in Ukraine and U.S. pressure on Europe to shoulder more of its defense.
Demand for egg freezing has skyrocketed as women put fertility on hold. The costly procedure has brought happy endings to some women, but it doesn't offer any guarantees.
Jennifer Lannon, co-founder of Freeze.Health, a website for comparing fertility clinic prices, and Lesley Stahl discussed the high costs for women to freeze their eggs without insurance coverage.
Far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella and far-left Ivan Cepeda are advancing to a runoff in Colombia's Presidential Election.
I got some fairly heavy duty impact shorts (Demon D30 V6) and they make my ass look phat! So I'm just wondering if you guys wear anything particular to kind of hide that look a bit?
Pitching for ideas for both shorts and pants.
Fans estimated at hundreds of thousands fill north London streets to celebrate women’s and men’s teams’ triumphs
About 75 people had to be rescued from height and 16 people were arrested during Arsenal’s victory bus parade on Sunday, emergency services said.
What were estimated as hundreds of thousands of fans lined the streets around the Emirates stadium in north London to celebrate the Gunners winning the men’s Premier League for the first time since 2004 and the women’s team lifting the first ever Fifa Women’s Champions Cup.
Continue reading...A historian-turned-software engineer warns that "so little is ever written down" by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company: Perhaps there's an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to molder in the codebase. Somebody might have left a comment in the code itself, but typically it's a warning not to change something or else something else will break... Software engineering has an ambivalent relationship with documentation. Everyone agrees documentation matters in theory, but in practice it's inconsistent, outdated, or missing entirely. Part of that is simple inertia. Writing documentation is usually less interesting than writing the code itself. But it's also ideological. The Agile movement emerged in part as a reaction against the heavily documented Waterfall methodology, and one of Agile's core values explicitly prioritizes "working software over comprehensive documentation." In escaping bureaucratic overdocumentation, the industry also normalized underdocumentation. High turnover at software jobs always brings "a constant drain of domain knowledge." And he's he's skeptical that generative AI will be able to fill in those gaps: [H]aving it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you. But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there's a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I'm writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision... An LLM can read code that I've written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it's doing. But it can't assess authorial intent. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Picking up a used PintX next week, under 500km usage. It was purchased in 2023 but the owner said he kept the battery in good health during the winter (between 20-60%). should it be able to hold a full charge?
DoJ filing did not say why Timothy Severo is replacing Matthew Petracca in case over ex-FBI director’s ‘86 47’ post
The lead prosecutor in former FBI director James Comey’s case over a social media post has withdrawn, according to a new court filing.
The justice department filed notice with the court on Friday evening that Matthew Petracca, a prosecutor from the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of North Carolina, had been replaced by assistant US attorney Timothy Severo.
Continue reading...⚽ Christian Pulisic ends goal drought in co-hosts’ victory
⚽ Sadio Mané scores twice to lead Senegal fightback
⚽ Read Pablo Iglesias Maurer’s match report from Charlotte
Based on the broadcast countdown, kickoff is slated for 3:38 pm Eastern. Just under 15 minutes until the United States men’s first chance to respond after March’s dour displays against Belgium (L, 5-2) and Portugal (L, 2-0).
Should be a good lineup for assessing three storylines I’m planning to watch closest in today’s friendly as well as next weekend’s test against Germany.
Will Christian Pulisic snap his scoring slump?
Is Alex Freeman more likely to factor at right center-back than right-back or right wing-back?
Will Gio Reyna or another player cement themselves as a trusty super-sub?
Continue reading...Pulisic scores and assists in first half to break rotten run
Sergiño Dest opens scoring just seven minutes in
US final tune-up comes v Germany on 6 June in Chicago
The dry spell is over.
Christian Pulisic broke a nearly six-month period without a goal on Sunday, assisting on the US opener and scoring a lovely goal himself not long afterward to lead the US to a 3-2 victory against Senegal in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Continue reading...Social housing landlords to be able to evict perpetrators, while right-to-buy tenancy requirements to rise
Social housing landlords will be able to evict domestic abuse perpetrators under a new bill, which will also increase the length of tenancy required before residents qualify for the right-to-buy scheme from three to 10 years in England.
The government said the bill, which will be debated in the House of Lords on Monday, would fix “the long-term decline in social housing” and offer new protections for social tenants who were subjected to domestic abuse.
Continue reading...Almost exactly 18 months after 3.19, the MorphOS team has released MorphOS 3.20. This is a major release, as it adds support for the upcoming Mirari PowerPC motherboards, which we talked about when that project was first announced. I’m quite excited about the Mirari, and can’t wait to have one, and MorphOS is the one operating system I really want to run it on. I have an almost mint condition PowerBook G4 17″ specifically for MorphOS, but the hardware is simply too outdated to keep up with modern demands, which is sad, because MorphOS can clearly keep up if it had modern hardware.
So, MorphOS 3.20 adds support for the Mirari platform and its various components, like its thermal management solution, networking, and so on. MorphOS 3.20 also expands the number of support Radeon graphics cards, improved support for various HDMI and DisplayPort ports, better support for multiple monitors, and overall better graphics performance in general. There’s also SFS2 support throughout the operating system so MorphOS now supports file sizes of up to 4GB and partition sizes of up to 2TB. The Ambient UI has also seen extensive work to improve performance and stability, as well as add a bunch of new features.
Several new applications and utilities are included in MorphOS 3.20, such as DriveImager, MirrorBackup, SMARTDoctor, OFHTTP, OFHash, OFDNS, Replace, and Automator for scripting and controlling MUI applications. Iris has been updated to version 1.53 and now includes the new Contacts companion application for CalDAV-based address books. FlowStudio received extensive improvements for project management, printing, Markdown support, and development workflows.
Networking and connectivity have also been improved with updates to OpenSSH 10.3p1, TLS 1.3 support in RDesktop, expanded SMB2 filesystem improvements, and improved USB, audio and multimedia subsystem stability. Numerous system libraries and frameworks including MUI, ixemul, Cairo, Harfbuzz, Freetype, OpenSSL4, and ObjFWRT have been updated or significantly modernized.
↫ MorphOS 3.20 release announcement
Of course, there’s also the long list of smaller changes, bugfixes, and performance improvements. MorphOS has wide support for Apple PowerPC hardware, which is probably your best bet for using the operating system for now, at least until the Mirari becomes available for purchase.
Axios reports: The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade "unless there is a compelling reason," such as supporting students with special needs. The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I." The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards. Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy." And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Bristol trip-hop group will perform in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in August
Massive Attack are set to tour Australia for the first time in 16 years.
The influential British trip-hop group, made up of Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, will play Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in August. The upcoming tour will be the band’s fourth appearance in Australia and their first Australian shows since 2010.
Continue reading...Security came to inspect aircraft in Newark after report of Bluetooth device with a ‘certain four-letter word’
A United Airlines plane bound for Spain from Newark Liberty international airport turned around mid-flight on Saturday due to a possible security threat.
That came one day after another United Airlines flight bound for Minneapolis from Chicago was diverted to Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday because an unruly passenger evidently tried to breach the cockpit.
Continue reading...President Trump's changes included somewhat significant changes, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations.
 | i made an IR bandpass filter for a post-apocolypsye style ride [link] [comments] |
Disney's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu "suffered a catastrophic 70% drop in its second weekend," reports Variety, suggesting the movie isn't finding audiences "beyond an aging group of core fans." "Despite playing on far more screens, The Mandalorian and Grogu landed in third place on weekend charts behind Backrooms and Obsession." (described as "two buzzy horror films.") Suprisingly, both movies were directed by 20-something YouTube stars, "and cost nearly nothing to produce." Analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations tells Variety, "We knew indie horror was hot, but we didn't know how hot. It's actually competing with the big summer blockbuster." Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, "Backrooms" has earned $118 million globally so far... With a production budget of roughly $10 million, it's already one of the most profitable movies of the year. Though a sequel hasn't been announced, Parsons has already started toying with the idea of turning "Backrooms" into a film franchise... [The "Backrooms" premise seems to have originated on 4chan, then expanded in a YouTube video Parsons filmed when he was 16.] "Backrooms" also ranked as the biggest debut in history for original horror, as well as the best start for a first-time filmmaker on a non-franchise film. Parsons is the youngest director, by far, to have the No. 1 film at the box office. Based on Parsons' hit web series, "Backrooms" follows a furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who finds a secret doorway that leads him to a seemingly endless stretch of nondescript rooms. When he disappears, his therapist (Renate Reinsve) ventures into the unknown to rescue him. Nearly 85% of audiences were under the age of 35, and more than 50% were 25 or younger, according to PostTrak data. Parsons and [26-year-old Obsession director/writer Curry] Barker are part of a wave of YouTubers who have turned their talents to the big screen — and brought their enormous, youthful fanbases along with them. Earlier this year, YouTube creator Mark Fischback directed, self-financed and distributed the horror film "Iron Lung," which earned a stellar $50 million against a $3 million budget. What's all the more impressive is that "Backrooms" and "Obsession" aren't cannibalizing each other at the box office. In fact, "Obsession" rose 10% from the prior weekend, which was already up a stunning 39% from its solid $17 million debut. It's defying box office norms as the first film since "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" in 1982 to see ticket sales increase in its second and third weekends outside of the holiday season, according to Focus. After three weekends of release, "Obsession" has grossed $106 million domestically and $148 million worldwide against a mere $1 million production budget. The first-weekend box office for The Mandalorian and Grogu was the worst since 2002's Attack of the Clones, but then it's second-weekend drop in sales was also the largest ever, reports ScreenRant. The next-worst drop in sales (for a second weekend) was 2017's The Last Jedi, they point out, but The Last Jedi was dropping from a 2.5x larger debut. Their article suggests The Mandalorian/Grogu box office "may not ever hit a total large enough for the titular duo to return to the big screen," although it could eventually show a profit. "While it likely won't break even in theaters, it will earn additional revenue from merchandising on top of its impending streaming, video on demand, and physical media releases." Variety adds that Disney "is hoping that next summer's Star Wars: Starfighter, an original adventure directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling, serves as a fresh start for the franchise."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New data suggests success in Gavin Newsom’s crackdown, as Illinois, Hawaii and Florida also report notable decreases
California reported one of the largest decreases in homelessness over the past year, according to a new report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud).
The Golden state recorded a total unhoused population of 181,934 in 2025 – an almost 3% decrease since the year prior, placing it among the five states with the largest decreases from 2024. However, more significant drops were recorded in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%) and New York (8%).
Continue reading...This is the first time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made this accusation, which may constitute a war crime.
Visits were canceled after detainees began hunger strike, which prompted heated protests outside detention center
Family visitation at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center is being restored to at least part of the facility, New Jersey’s governor and US homeland security officials confirmed on Sunday morning, after a week during which heated demonstrations at the site were met with aggressive policing tactics.
Meanwhile, families of detained immigrants grappled with conflicting information about exactly whom among them would get visitation after the announcement from Governor Mikie Sherrill and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And local officials by Sunday had also indefinitely imposed an overnight curfew beginning at 9pm for a blocked-off area including Delaney Hall.
Continue reading...Lead rescue diver Mikko Paasi said it took him a moment to realize the four trapped miners had "self-rescued."
I thought this would be my laundry-folding show, but it's too good for that.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" that he hopes "we are on the way" to a U.S. drone deal
The suspect accused of killing three elderly men in a rural part of Hawaii's Big Island has been charged with murder, among a number of other offenses, police said Sunday.
Almost a fifth of the earth's population lives in Africa. And Africa's next generation of power projects "is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage," reports the Associated Press, "as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster and more reliable electricity." The shift is visible in a $1.5 billion energy agreement between China and Zambia announced in early May that includes three separate 300-megawatt projects spanning solar, wind and coal-fired power. While the inclusion of coal underscores the continent's continuing need for stable baseload electricity, African countries facing rising fuel import bills as a result of the Iran war, unreliable grids and growing industrial demand are increasingly turning to renewable energy projects that can be deployed faster and more cheaply than traditional plants. Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the energy research firm Electron Intelligence... Utility-scale solar power costs have dropped by nearly 90% globally since 2010, while onshore wind costs have fallen around 70%, making renewables the cheapest source of new electricity generation in many African markets... Much of the growth is through distributed solar and battery systems installed directly in mines, factories, telecom towers and homes. "Most official statistics still measure the energy transition the old way, by counting megawatts connected to national grids," [said Matt Tilleard, CEO of CrossBoundary Energy, which invests in renewable energy in Africa]. "But solar and batteries don't need central utilities." Data from the Africa Solar Industry Association shows 23.4 gigawatts of operational solar projects had been tracked across Africa by the end of 2025. But Chinese export figures indicate 58.1 gigawatts of solar panels have been shipped to African countries since 2017, suggesting solar adoption may be growing far faster than official figures capture. Investor Tilleard says "Renewable energy is now unequivocally the fastest, cheapest, and most bankable way to connect people, companies and economies to the megawatts they need to grow." And the article also includes this quote from Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya. "Africa is not on the periphery of the global energy transition, it is sitting at its center. The continent holds the world's best renewable resources, and the economics have now decisively turned in favor of clean energy."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and former Vice President Mike Pence join Margaret Brennan.
US senator says Platner, whose wife says he sent sexually explicit messages to other women, has ‘questions to answer’
A high-profile Democrat has expressed concerns with party candidate Graham Platner’s Maine US Senate campaign amid revelations that Platner reportedly sent a number of sexually explicit messages to other women while married.
“Yes, I have concerns,” Cory Booker, the US senator from New Jersey, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week when host Jonathan Karl when asked about the Platner revelations. “That guy has questions to answer – and that’s what campaigns are for.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Papers to be published on Monday cast doubt on assurances provided by senior Whitehall officials
A trove of government documents about Peter Mandelson contains no record of any measures taken to mitigate serious security concerns over his appointment as Washington ambassador, the Guardian has learned.
Multiple sources who have seen or been briefed on the files, which will be published on Monday, say there is no detail about any steps put in place to deal with flags raised about his associations with senior figures in foreign states.
Continue reading...Former Vice President Mike Pence said on Sunday that he hopes the administration will drop its new "anti-weaponization fund" that has sparked pushback on Capitol Hill among Republicans.
More than 200 people have been killed in the monthslong campaign against alleged drug boats traversing the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.
Sarah Wynn-Williams did not speak during event after lawyers warned of possible sanctions from tech firm
Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams was forced to sit in silence on stage at an event at Hay festival, after lawyers advised her not to speak because of ongoing legal action brought by Meta.
Wynn-Williams, whose bestselling memoir, Careless People, details her years working at Facebook, was due to appear in conversation with the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.
Continue reading...I’ve had my pint s for a couple months now, it has 200 miles on it and I’m really wanting more but I don’t know if I want XR more or GT more.
My question to you rippers out there is how much better is upgrading? The one thing that strikes me is that I could have more room for my feet. I love the pint s and I am definitely pushing it to its limits but now that I know that I love riding these what’s my next advancement? I’ve read about the x7 as well but I’d love some direct information in my situation. I’m 35 at 140 pounds if that matters any.
The transition from Samsung Messages to Google Messages is simple if you start now and a headache if you wait until July.
Experts say capture is largely symbolic, but it complicates efforts to extend the ceasefire between US and Iran
Israeli troops have captured a clifftop castle as they made their deepest incursion into Lebanon in more than 26 years, further shattering a nominal US-brokered ceasefire and complicating efforts to extend the separate truce between Washington and Tehran.
After days of intense fighting and airstrikes in nearby villages, the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said the military had captured Beaufort Castle, also known as Qalaat al-Shaqif, which it had used as a base during its previous occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000.
Continue reading...Marta Kostyuk dismissed four-time champion Iga Swiatek, while there were also wins for Rafael Jodar, Elina Svitolina and Alexander Zverev
Terrific return from Kostyuk, a backhand hooked on to the sideline for a winner … ruined by a forehand looped long; 15-all. A double follows, the misses by far enough to intimate nerves and reinforced by a wild forehand that donates two break-back points. And Kostyuk only needs one, a decent return forcing Swiatek to net, and she looks encouraged – rightly so, that felt like a tightening. It’s 5-5 in the first, and this might just mature into an epic.
“Every point is good, every point is high quality,” kvells Chrissy in commentary as murderous shots are traded from the back, Kostyuk overhitting to cede 15-40. But from there, she recovers to deuce, competing like an equal; for maybe the first time, she believes she can do this, a service winner raising advantage, but then she’s fractionally late on a backhand down the line and it’s just a little wide, Swiatek – whose return was good – nowhere near it. And from there, the birthday girl dominates the next point with forehands, making advantage, then elicits the error for the third break in row. At 5-4, she’ll now serve for the first set – just as Cirstea is at 5-3 in our other match, a netted volley ceding deuce.
Continue reading...Attempted murder investigation launched after police officer struck by vehicle in Downpatrick
Police have launched an attempted murder investigation after an officer was hit by a stolen police vehicle in Northern Ireland.
The officer, who fired his gun during the incident at 4.45am on Sunday, had been chasing a suspect on foot after another vehicle had earlier failed to stop for police in the Fountain Street area in Downpatrick, County Down.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with former Vice President Mike Pence that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 31, 2026.
"In the future, AI agents will be able to find one another using the Domain Name System (DNS), instead of crawling about and probing ports or checking configured resources," writes The Register. InfoWorld writes that "numerous proprietary agent registries are on the market, but the Linux Foundation suggests we simply extend the distributed, open Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure we already have." The foundation is now inviting contributions to the DNS-AID project, a standard way for AI agents to discover, verify, and communicate with one another over DNS that requires no new infrastructure. It enables agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to use DNS as a global, vendor-neutral directory. While many details remain to be worked out, the proposal suggests domain owners create a new well-known address that can provide a starting point for agents looking for one another: _index._agents.{domain}. This approach ensures that agent discovery remains scalable, secure, and compatible with the protocols that underly the internet, the Linux Foundation said. The Linux Foundation descrbes DNS-AID as enabling a standard way for AI agents to discover and communicate with one another. "By leveraging the internet's existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, DNS-AID provides a robust, decentralized alternative to the centralized registries and hardcoded URLs currently limiting AI interoperability." The standard was originally developed by Infoblox, their announcement notes, but "Because the protocol is implementation-agnostic, it functions across any DNS provider, ensuring that organizations maintain control over their agent infrastructure without relying on proprietary, centralized services."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Interior minister says 57 officers injured as rioters set fires and vandalise shops in about 15 cities
French police have detained 780 people involved in violent clashes in Paris and other French cities that erupted on Saturday night after Paris Saint-Germain defeated Arsenal to win the Champions League.
The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said 57 officers were wounded, with most suffering minor injuries, as football fans set off fires and vandalised shops. One small group even tried to storm a Paris police station.
Continue reading...  | As always a good time was had by most. I think we only had one collar bone broken this year. I didn't realize that I could get 2 onewheels in the frunk. [link] [comments] |
Doug Burgum complains some musicians ‘segmented their audiences’ after artists back out of 250th anniversary event
The Trump administration’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, complained on Sunday that some musicians “seem to have segmented their audiences” after artists bailed on participating in a concert series planned for the 250th anniversary of the US’s independence.
In the interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Burgum also dismissed calls to publicly identify who had made donations for the concert series – and maintained it was a “nonpartisan” event despite Donald Trump referring to it as a rally.
Continue reading...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes appeal after protests against protocols for handling victims’ bodies in Ituri province
Containing the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo requires community cooperation and is “everybody’s business”, the World Health Organization has said.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organisation’s director general, made the plea on Sunday during a visit to eastern Congo where some residents have protested against stringent medical protocols for handling victims’ bodies.
Continue reading...You can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new "virtual museum," according to a new article by ZDNet. Their reporter downloaded the ancient OS NeXTSTEP, and was "shocked" by how easy it was to run it, "and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from." Essentially, what you do is download a zipped file, unzip it, change into the newly created directory, and run the executable. VirtualBox then opens to a Debian Linux instance, where you can select from a very long list of operating systems to run... You can run operating systems like Amiga, Apple I/II/III, Atari, Avigo, Commodore 64, Cray, DEC Alpha, Einstein, Game Boy Advance, GE 200, HP 3000, IBM 1130, iPod touch, Jupiter Ace, Lisa, Macintosh, MIPS-based SBCs, Neo, Newton, NeXT, NORC, Palm, and so many more. You can test the earliest mainframes, later mainframes and minicomputers, workstations and Unix variants, home computers, personal computer operating systems, mobile and embedded adOSes, and research-based and obscure systems. As far as Linux is concerned, you can run early Debian and its derivatives, Red Hat and its derivatives, early Slackware, and more... There are two editions of the Virtual OS Museum: full and lite. The full edition is currently 174GB and includes everything you need to run these old-school operating systems. The full version does not require a network connection to run. The Lite version is only 14GB and requires an internet connection because it downloads the full OS image you want to use. Gizmodo notes "this project is all the more remarkable for being the work of one man: Andrew Wartenkin, who has been collecting OS images for over two decades." Of course, Wartenkin didn't write all the emulation software himself, and he maintains a list of credits to give credit where it's due... The Museum itself runs in a virtual machine, which seems kinda fitting — it opens in a virtualized Linux installation and presents you with the full list of available operating systems. Did you know someone has written a GUI for the Commodore 64? Neither did I! There are simulations of ancient mainframes, like the IBM 1130 (yours for the low, low price of $32,280 — or $41,230 with a disk drive — back in 1965). There's also a YouTube channel. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00Kfor sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From digital twins to models ‘sculpted’ by programmers, generative AI has been popping up all over the fashion industry. When an Australian e-commerce retailer started using AI-generated models to sell products, lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman had to see if the garments were more than mere pixels.
The Iconic, which sells the dress worn in this video, said in a statement: ‘Where AI-generated imagery is used to advertise products for sale on our platform, our expectation is that it is clearly labelled and that the product itself is represented as accurately as possible for customers.’
Meanwhile, Atoir, the designer, said: ‘The Australian fashion industry is highly competitive, particularly for independent brands. We believe that when used responsibly, tools like this can help smaller businesses to operate with greater agility while still maintaining the creative standards and product integrity that matter to both the brand and the customer’
Continue reading...A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland – screen readers and the like – but apparently, the input side has languished. People with reduced mobility need affordances and tools to use computers, but those aren’t ready for Wayland.
A popular set of tools here is Talon Voice, which allows people with reduced mobility to create powerful hands-free input methods. The examples the article gives are incredibly cool, and it’s easy to see how Talon would become a cornerstone for people with reduced mobility who needs hands-free (or hands-fewer?) computer input methods.
So what’s going wrong here?
Talon requires deep integration with the window manager and compositor to carry out even the most basic of its duties, and Wayland offers… Absolutely no way to perform any of those actions.
[…]
Frustrated by the endless lack of progress towards a real set of solutions for the entire ecosystem, and inundated by an endless series of requests for Wayland support which he cannot provide, Aegis, the main (and only) developer of Talon, has made a declaration: Enough. Talon Voice will imminently remove ALL Linux support from the public release, as X11 continues to sunset and users are switched to an environment in which their system can no longer function, with no option to go back.
↫ Insane Rambles About Technology
So not only will Talon not gain Wayland support any time soon, its developers are even removing X11 support from it. What this means is that even if you decide to stick to X11 because Wayland doesn’t fulfill your needs, you’re eventually going to run into a brick wall. This is merely annoying if you need to use a different application for remote desktop or whatever, but it’s absolutely devastating when it involves the very input method you use to use your computer in the first place.
There is some important nuance here though that the article doesn’t mention. The article takes the word of Talon’s developers as gospel, but in my conversations with KDE developers, a different story emerges. What they tell me is that Wayland implements all the APIs needed for Talon to work, but that Talon’s developers are simply not interested in using them. Apparently, KDE developers and others have tried to contact Talon’s developers, but their offers to help are being ignored. They’re being told Talon is simply not interested in supporting Wayland, “end of story”.
So, the story here seems to be a lot more complex than just “Wayland bad”, and I’m getting a bit of a vibe that the Talon developers are, despite claims to the contrary in the article, indeed removing X11 support out of spite. Talon is entirely within their right to not want to work on Wayland support, but then just be honest with your users and say so, instead of pinning everything on “Wayland bad”, being dishonest about Wayland’s capabilities, and ignoring offers of help and support from some of the most knowledgeable and capable developers in the field.
Of course, that’s absolutely of no relevance to people like the author of this article who depend on these tools to use their computers. They’re caught in the middle of a transition and experiencing the worst byproducts, and that’s a huge failure on everybody’s end – Wayland, Talon, and desktop environments alike. I hope the parties involved can sort this out quickly, because everyone deserves equal access to computers, doubly so in the open source world.
Those lucky enough to have disposable income can forgo immediate gain to attain a comfortable retirement
It was recently reported that nearly half of the members of my generation are delaying retirement as rising costs and stagnant wages are draining savings. Even worse, a new Gallup poll found that as many as 69% of all workers fear they’re not saving enough for retirement.
I get it. I feel it too. But whose fault is this, really? The government? Businesses? I think it’s time we all look in the mirror.
Continue reading...Yves Sakila died after being restrained by security guards ‘in broad daylight’
Irish authorities have agreed to a second postmortem on the body of a Congolese man who died after being restrained by shop security guards on a Dublin street, prompting an outcry and comparisons to the death of George Floyd.
A forensic pathologist from England is to conduct an independent postmortem this week on Yves Sakila, 35, an alleged shoplifter who was pursued and pinned to the ground in the city centre on 15 May. The police force, An Garda Síochána, is investigating.
Continue reading...Driver faces two counts of involuntary manslaughter in Friday crash that killed five and injured more than 40 others
The driver of a motor coach bus that killed five people and injured more than 40 others after crashing in Virginia on Friday morning has been criminally charged.
Jing S Dong, 48, faces two counts of involuntary manslaughter, with additional charges likely, according to Virginia state police.
Continue reading...A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote.
More recently, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued on his social media platform, X, that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” – our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.
Continue reading...The Texas senator was emblematic of the era between Reagan and Trump, as Republicans shifted from the party of business to a cult of personality
The defeat of John Cornyn is a milestone in the downfall of the Republican party. His virtue for decades as a “steady conservative institutionalist”, as the New York Times described him, became his terminal liability. His expenditure of $92m, the greatest amount ever dropped by a candidate in a Senate primary, could not forestall his humiliation at the hands of the scoundrel Ken Paxton, with his lengthy rap sheet of allegations of bribery, abuse of office, felony securities fraud and impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas house, along with his hostile divorce by his wife on “biblical grounds”. Despite Cornyn’s blast of TV ads against “Crooked Ken”, the “Home Wrecker”, Paxton, carrying the imprimatur of Donald Trump, trounced him by 28 points. Immediately after the primary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Cornyn had once led, set about scrubbing the ads as if there had been no Cornyn campaign at all and the villainous Paxton was the rightful successor to hold the Senate seat Cornyn had occupied for 24 years. The Orwellian erasure was a further measure of the relentless Trump effort to stamp out of existence the remnants of the old party and to build on its ashes his golden idol.
Cornyn’s ignominious rejection is not his alone. His loss represents the ongoing shattering of the Republican party whose foundations were laid by Ronald Reagan, laboriously built in Texas by the Bushes, both father and son, with their operative Karl Rove, and, within the Senate, where Cornyn arrived in 2002, the ruling Republican structure established by Mitch McConnell. Cornyn rode on the Reagan wave that swept aside Democrats in Texas, to be raised up as a factotum of the Bush operation, and serve as the indispensable conduit of funds from the oil and gas industry to fuel McConnell’s dark money machine that financed Republican candidates, destroyed campaign finance reform, and secured the conservative majority on the supreme court.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
Continue reading...US president also decries judge’s ruling on Kennedy Center and praises progress on reflecting pool in posting spree
In a spree of posts made to his Truth Social account on Saturday, Donald Trump lauded his administration’s efforts to turn the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue, denounced a judge’s ruling removing his name from the Kennedy Center and announced he will hold an “America Is Back” rally next month to replace a concert series after a number of performers backed out.
After arriving at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11.08am, Trump posted to his social media platform 25 times in the next two hours. The president’s posts included a series of apparently AI-generated images, including one of him playing for the New York Knicks and dunking over Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor; another of him riding a horse alongside George Washington and a Trump-branded race car tearing up the White House lawn; and one depicting the “Obama presidential library” as a huge garbage can holding a giant trash bag.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
The state’s Council on Development Finance is set to consider issuing $20 million in bonds for a local charter school, and whether a private student loan provider should receive more than three quarters of a million dollars in grant funding at its meeting on Monday.
The CDF oversees funds that are used to attract and retain jobs, or create new business investments in Delaware. Its role has come under the microscope of Gov. Matt Meyer, who has opposed major cash grants to corporations in order to locate or grow in Delaware.
This time, the Newark-based ASPIRA bilingual charter school is seeking $20 million in bonds to fund various capital improvement projects across its campus. Some of those proposals include building a new athletics complex at the ASPIRA high school and additional classrooms at its K-8 campus.
Along with considering ASPIRA bonds, the CDF will also determine whether the private student loan provider GradBridge should receive its $787,500 grant request.
GradBridge, according to its website, provides a “second-look private student loan program” for borrowers who have been denied access to traditional private loans.
📍 The CDF is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Monday inside the Delaware Public Archives, located at 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd N in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Sussex County Council is set to once again consider a pair of proposed development reforms on Tuesday, one of which has been the subject of scrutiny by farmers across Delaware’s southernmost county.
One proposal could discourage a long-criticized practice of building large housing developments on land that is located far from established cities and towns and is targeted for preservation. Specifically, it would ban subdivisions with more than two homes per acre on farm fields and require more open space within those developments.
Advocates say the rules will encourage developers to instead build new homes where infrastructure already exists. But some farmers said the proposal would also devalue their land, which they often rely on as collateral for loans needed to operate their farms.
The second proposal would reform Sussex County’s affordable housing program. The ordinance would raise limits on rent, and lower the required number of affordable units for a housing development to qualify for a county program that incentivizes developers to build affordable rental units, specifically in areas near the Delaware beaches.
📍 The Sussex County Council is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday inside Council Chambers at the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
The Wilmington Learning Collaborative is set to discuss its more than $8 million budget for the 2027 fiscal year at its meeting on Wednesday.
The WLC is an appointed working group focused on improving educational achievement in the city of Wilmington.
The group’s largest budget line item includes more than $2.8 million to fund flexible staff positions across its member school districts aimed at reducing class sizes, up from $2.7 million during the last fiscal year.
📍 The WLC is scheduled to meet at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Warner Elementary School, located at 801 W. 18th St. in Wilmington. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
The Kent County Levy Court is set to consider two resolutions on Tuesday opposing bills working their way through the General Assembly that would institute development reforms across the state.
The two resolutions would oppose Senate Bill 23 and House Bill 450, respectively. The two bills, if passed, would place new requirements on municipalities across Delaware that are meant to spur the development of more affordable housing options.
Levy Court commissioners, in their resolutions, say the two bills would create legal uncertainty and operational challenges for the county, along with infringing upon local control over development regulations.
The resolutions are the latest in a series of steep opposition to SB 23, which was the subject of scrutiny by local government leaders during a recent Senate committee hearing.
📍 The Kent County Levy Court is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Kent County Administration Building, located at 555 Bay Road in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Jacob Owens and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.
The post Get Involved: Charter school bonds, Sussex development reforms, more appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
For more than a year, Delaware and federal officials have warred over the release of sensitive employment data from 15 state businesses. But two successive judicial rulings against the state will now require it to release that data.
More than a dozen businesses in Delaware will soon be scrutinized by federal immigration authorities over their purported hiring of undocumented workers, following a judicial order earlier this week.
A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out the Delaware Department of Labor’s appeal of a previous circuit court ruling that compelled the agency to turn over employment data from 15 unnamed businesses to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE originally sought that data — detailed wage records that include names, addresses, and Social Security numbers — in relation to federal investigations over alleged employment of undocumented workers.
The denied appeal comes a year after the federal government subpoenaed the Department of Labor seeking that sensitive employee data as part of President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
But following two successive rulings against the state, officials say they will comply with the order.
In a press release following the ruling, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings lambasted the federal government’s request for the data, saying the “public has lost faith” in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
Still, she said now that the appeals court struck down its request, the state must release the data.
“The Court has spoken, and with no viable alternative before us, the state must honor its ruling — but this was a fight worth losing on our feet,” Jennings said in the release. “This was not just a question of what the law demands, but of what our conscience permits.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Gov. Matt Meyer also expressed his disappointment in the ruling in the press release.
In the year and a half since Trump’s second inauguration, Delaware has signed onto a number of lawsuits challenging actions the federal government has taken, including the stalling of offshore wind permits, cutting food stamps, and restricting gender-affirming care.
Meyer said those challenges would not stop in the coming years.
“We will not stop fighting against Trump administration actions that hurt Delawareans and our businesses,” Meyer said in the release.
Following Delaware’s passage of a statewide ban on local police cooperation agreements with ICE under the 287(g) program, the successful acquisition of labor data could open a new front in the Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdown in the First State.
Prior to the state’s appeal, Delaware District Court Chief Judge Colm Connolly issued a blistering 27-page ruling in April compelling the state to turn over the subpoenaed employment data. That ruling picked apart the state Department of Labor’s arguments, which he said were political, not legal.
“This court is not the proper forum in which to air [the Delaware Department of Labor’s] generalized grievances about the conduct of government,” wrote Connolly, a former U.S. attorney who was appointed to the bench in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term. “It would be wholly inappropriate for me to consider this line of argument, and I decline to do so.”
Connolly’s ruling was largely expected, however, after a hearing where the judge grilled the Delaware Department of Labor’s attorney Jennifer-Kate Aaronson, saying it was not her “best day” when she wrote the legal brief presenting her case.
During that court hearing on April 2, Connolly publicly dissected the regulations that Aaronson cited by projecting his computer tab onto a large screen at the head of the courtroom. He asked Aaronson where the law shows the state Department of Labor has “full discretion” to decide not to comply with a federal subpoena as he highlighted law text.
Aaronson was not able to point to a specific subsection of the regulations in response, but she maintained that disclosure of sensitive information to ICE has never been mandated by federal law.
The case stems from a subpoena ICE issued to the Delaware Department of Labor in April 2025 seeking wage records for 15 Delaware businesses for the final two quarters of 2024, which the agency suspected of employing undocumented immigrants.
The subpoena, which originated from “hotline tips” that ICE received, sought employees’ names, addresses, wages and Social Security numbers from 15 Delaware businesses, according to court records. ICE’s subpoena efforts align with the Trump administration’s broader strategy of using federal and state agency data to bolster its promised immigration enforcement push.
Attorneys with the U.S. Attorney’s Office argued in court documents that wage records would help ICE further its focus on “worksite enforcement” and may help determine whether employees are using fake Social Security numbers or if employers are paying workers “under the table,” or using cash and without reporting it to the IRS, court records show.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Pare asked Connolly to seal the April subpoena when the case was first filed, arguing that ICE did not want to have the 15 business names become public and “prematurely alert” the targets of the agency’s worksite investigations.
Conversely, Deputy State Attorney Jennifer-Kate Aaronson filed a motion to unseal the subpoena in August. The 15 businesses suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants should have the opportunity to come to court and argue against their information being transmitted to ICE, she said during a previous court hearing.
Connolly initially declined to rule on those motions, although he said it remained a good decision to keep the subpoena under seal. If suspected businesses are made public and associated with potentially hiring undocumented employees, it could harm their reputation if they’re ultimately found to be innocent, he said.
DOL officials have received at least four subpoenas from ICE since February 2025, Aaronson said during an August court hearing. Department officials complied with one ICE subpoena that sought information about a single individual, Aaronson said.
According to other subpoenas obtained by the News Journal, ICE has also reportedly investigated the potential employment of undocumented workers at a Perdue plant in Seaford along with a fencing company and a northern Delaware restaurant.
Connolly noted in his ruling that prior to 2025, the Department of Labor routinely complied with subpoena requests from ICE and other federal agencies.
Jose Ignacio Castaneda Perez, Jacob Owens and Tim Carlin contributed to this report.
The post Appeals court compels Delaware to turn over employment data to ICE appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
It’s time once again 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!
Elisa Bertino, the Samuel Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, was elected by members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to lead the group this month.
Elisa Bertino
Over Bertino’s 40-year career, she has made pioneering contributions to information and systems security and privacy. She currently is the vice president of ACM and previously served as the Secretary/Treasurer, as well as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC). Bertino also co-founded the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY).
Bertino is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and AAAS. Among her honors, she has received the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, the IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award, and the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomo Kanai Award.
Joining Bertino will be incoming Vice President Rashmi Mohan, Sr. Director of Engineering at Cisco (Splunk) and Tom Crick, professor of digital society and policy at the University of Bristol, who will serve as Secretary/Treasurer. In addition, two new Members-at-Large have been elected to four-year terms: Lydia Tapia, Professor, University of New Mexico; and Holly Yanco, Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts.
“Computing now stands at a defining moment,” Bertino said. “Transformative advances are reshaping research, industry, and society at unprecedented speed and scale. At the same time, they raise profound challenges. Meeting these challenges requires not only continued excellence in foundational research, but also strong professional leadership and sustained dialogue across disciplines, sectors, and regions. ACM has a unique responsibility–and a unique capacity–to provide that leadership.”
Matt Wood
Matt Wood announced is returning to AWS to be its new Chief AI and Technology Officer. Wood left AWS nearly two years to become the chief technology and information officer (CTIO) at consultancy PwC, but now he’s back.
“Matt helped build much of our AI and ML platform over 14 years at AWS, including shaping Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock,” Julia White, AWS CMO, said in a LinkedIn post. “He then went to PwC and helped some of the world’s largest enterprises put AI into production.”
Wood’s return also grabbed the attention of Werner Vogels, who announced last fall at re:Invent that he is stepping down as CTO of AWS.
“Matt Wood helped put some of our most important developer tools into the hands of builders, from SageMaker to Bedrock, services that changed how developers build with AI,” Vogels said in a LinkedIn post. “Matt is a polymath, from medical science to machine learning to cloud infrastructure, and that’s what it takes to build the next generation of tools. The next chapter is about giving builders the tools to evolve with AI, and I look forward to working with Matt to deliver for our builder community. Welcome back, Matt!”
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory selected two senior leaders to fill roles focused on advancing capabilities, driving research, and shaping strategies for basic science and national security across PNNL.
Douglas Mans (left) and Daniel Stephens
Douglas Mans will serve as associate laboratory director for PNNL’s science mission areas, which span the physical, computational, Earth and biological sciences, while Daniel Stephens will serve as associate laboratory director for PNNL’s National Security Directorate.
Mans and Stephens join newly appointed Associate Laboratory Director Angela Becker-Dippmann, completing PNNL’s senior research leadership team. Together, they will help shape PNNL’s research portfolio and drive strategic planning, the DOE facility said.
Mans brings 20 years of research and leadership experience in Earth systems science, biological sciences, chemistry, and computational science, making him ideally suited to lead PNNL’s science organization focused on fundamental research.
Stephens will lead PNNL’s National Security Directorate, overseeing strategy and operations focused on reducing threats posed by weapons of mass destruction. He brings more than 20 years of experience to the role, including leadership in radiation detection, nuclear sciences and program management.
“Douglas and Daniel bring extensive experience leading complex, multidisciplinary research organizations. They have strong records of advancing research and building strategies that create new, partnership‑driven opportunities,” said PNNL Laboratory Director Deb Gracio. “Their leadership will help ensure we remain aligned with national priorities, accelerating scientific discovery and advancing mission-ready solutions.”
Kristin Persson, a Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley and faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is one of the 252 new academy members inducted this year.
Kristin Persson
Persson’s work uses HPC to study the physics and chemistry of materials. She is the founder and director of the Materials Project, an open-access database with millions of properties on hundreds of thousands of crystalline structures and molecules.
The Materials Project is the most widely used repository of information on inorganic materials in the world, used by hundreds of thousands of people and vital for developing new materials for high-performance batteries, fuel cells, and data storage. The Materials Project’s curated datasets enable AI-powered materials design for faster scientific discoveries.
Persson also served as the director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab, from 2020 to 2024. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow; and fellow of the Materials Research Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Physical Society.
Hajara-Yasmin Isa
Kristin Persson, a doctoral student in computer science at the Grainger College of Engineering, last month was awarded the 2026 Fiddler Innovation Fellowship by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
The $10,000 fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to support the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream). The eDream Institute awards exceptional, creative, and interdisciplinary students and faculty who propose significant projects that address cultural and global challenges using art, science and technology.
“Being selected for the Fiddler Innovation Fellowship is a significant milestone that validates our collective vision at the University of Illinois. This award recognizes the importance of shared, innovative progress and ensures the next wave of technological development is shaped by a commitment to building solutions together,” Isa said.
“I am very passionate about advancements in technology, and this fellowship provides the momentum to advance Littafin Fasaha, transforming our integration of AI and design into a catalyst for real-world inclusion,” she continued. “It empowers us to bridge the gap between complex research and accessible technology, fostering a future where innovation is built by and for a global community.”
CData Software announced the appointment of Raviv Levi as chief product and technology officer (CPTO), along with the additions of Amit Naik as vice president of AI architecture and Craig Sanchez as senior vice president of embedded sales.
(from left) Raviv Levi, Amit Naik, and Craig Sanchez
Levi joins CData from Sift, where he also served as CPTO, following senior leadership roles at Cisco. He has led product, cloud security, and platform initiatives focused on enterprise-scale infrastructure and AI-driven technologies.
Amit Sharma, founder and CEO of CData, says Levi’s hiring will bolster the company’s AI strategy, in particular the need to present customers with live, governed, context-aware access to data wherever it lives.
“Raviv’s experience building and scaling enterprise technology platforms makes him the right leader to drive the next phase of growth at CData,” Sharma continued. “We’re also excited to welcome Amit and Craig to the leadership team as we expand our AI platform and embedded partnerships to meet growing enterprise demand.”
As Vice President of AI Architecture, Naik will lead the design and evolution of CData’s AI architecture, working across product and engineering to ensure the platform meets the technical demands of enterprise AI deployments. He joins CData from Calix and previously held senior leadership roles in AI/ML solutions and infrastructure at PayPal, Financial Engines and Oracle.
Sanchez will lead CData’s embedded sales organization, helping software vendors and platform providers integrate enterprise-grade connectivity and AI data access directly into their products. He joins CData from Vectara and previously held senior sales and business development leadership roles at Elastic and Cloudera.
For the previous edition of HPC Career Notes, click here.
The post HPC Career Notes for May 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
A highly publicized campaign by the Dover police union to oust the city’s police chief last summer raised questions about the structure of the department, and its function within city government. A Spotlight Delaware review of messages exchanged between key actors in the conflict indicates a friction underscoring the union’s claims and city leaders’ defense of the chief.
Messages exchanged last summer reveal an unwavering solidarity from Dover city leaders in support of Police Chief Thomas Johnson despite calls for his resignation and investigations into his behavior spurred by the local police union.
Thousands of pages of documents obtained by Spotlight Delaware via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request include communications between Mayor Robin Christiansen, Johnson and city council members. In those messages, city leaders staunchly defended Johnson’s leadership and strategized about how to address the union’s criticisms.
The messages also raise questions about the relationship between Johnson, city leaders and his own police officers amid an extended period of turmoil in Dover and scrutiny over the police department’s tactics.
What is not clear from the documents, however, is what prompted the Dover Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) – the local police union – to call for Johnson’s resignation last August. It also is unclear from the messages what, if any, negotiations between the FOP and city leaders led the officers to seemingly end their public campaign against Johnson.
Christiansen and City Council President Fred Neil, the two most vocal Johnson defenders, both declined Spotlight Delaware’s repeated requests for comment. Christiansen said his schedule was too busy for a meeting, and Neil cited the ongoing investigations into the situation as preventing him from commenting.
Johnson, however, said in an interview that he and the police union were working on their relationship. He said he believes the department is heading in a positive direction.
“I think I’m making progress with my relationship with my officers,” Johnson said. “I made the mistakes that I made. I could have done some things differently. I’m looking for us to move forward. I’m looking for us to be successful.”
Spotlight Delaware initially submitted a FOIA request for text messages and emails about the FOP-chief conflict in September 2025. Following roughly eight months of appeals, including a ruling by the Attorney General forcing Dover to turn over the documents, Spotlight Delaware obtained the thousands of pages of responsive records earlier this spring.
Years of friction between Johnson and his officers led up to the Dover FOP publishing a letter in August 2025 announcing a 93% vote of no confidence in Johnson’s leadership.
The disagreements seemingly began when Johnson was sworn in as only the second-ever outside hire to run the police department in February 2020. The union wrote in a Facebook post last summer that the city’s decision to hire a chief from outside the department’s ranks was “not something our organization desired.”
Johnson said he did not want to comment on any tension about being hired from outside the department.
“All I can tell you is I submitted my resume when the position was available, and from the day Dover said yes, I’ve been trying to do the best that I can to serve the city, serve these officers,” he said.
Union leadership did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment about their campaign for Johnson’s removal and the unrest within the department.
In late 2022, union members filed a complaint with the city’s Human Resources department over Johnson’s alleged use of his police vehicle for non-work purposes, including traveling to his second job as an adjunct instructor at Penn State University, and to a family vacation in Fenwick Island.
FOP leadership described these issues in its resignation social media posts as evidence of Johnson “failing to connect with his officers,” and “allowing the morale of the Dover Police Department to reach an all-time low.”
The officers also said they did not receive any update on findings from the 2022 investigation.
Johnson said he does not know what the final outcome of the investigation was, as it was discussed during a 2023 city council closed-door session. The mayor subsequently told him “nothing had changed,” he said.
Dover City Attorney Dan Griffith said the terms of Johnson’s employment contract allowed him to use his city vehicle to get to his second job teaching at Penn State, so long as he re-filled the gas tank on “extended distance trips,” and worked full-time hours with the city of Dover.
Spotlight Delaware requested Johnson’s employment contract through FOIA. In response, the city provided a copy of Johnson’s employment offer letter. The document does not include the terms Griffith described.
Johnson said the city does not write employment contracts for its department heads.
After receiving his offer letter, Johnson said he was told to flesh out the specific terms of his employment with Christiansen.
He asked the mayor for a formal written contract, but Christiansen declined and said he would rather negotiate things as they came up through in-person and email conversations, Johnson added.
“I explained to the mayor what I needed to be successful in the role,” Johnson said. “He agreed with me, and I think you’ll find I’ve done everything that I’ve done with permission not forgiveness.”
As of 2025, Johnson was the highest paid city employee with an annual salary of $180,253, according to data from The News Journal.
In addition to the social media blitz calling for Johnson’s resignation last summer, the FOP put up billboards around Dover and Upper Darby, Pa. – where Johnson used to work – urging his removal. Officers also initiated multiple investigations into his behavior.
These investigations include an internal police department investigation and a criminal complaint filed with the state Department of Justice (DOJ) over the chief’s conduct.
The DOJ dismissed the criminal complaint in early February, and the city “considers the matter to be closed,” it wrote in a February press release.
The FOP also accused Christiansen and Johnson of telling them to focus their attacks on city council members Brian Lewis and Roy Sudler in an Aug. 26 social media post.
This claim led the Dover City Council to launch a third-party investigation by 21 Century Policing Solutions, a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm, last fall into Christiansen and Johnson’s conduct.
A copy of the contract between 21 Century Policing Solutions and the city of Dover indicates the investigation was going to cost $50,000. It was scheduled to be completed by January 2026.
One city council member told Spotlight Delaware they just received a copy of the final investigation report in recent weeks.
That report has not yet been publicly released, and the city denied a Spotlight Delaware FOIA request for a copy, citing exemptions for personnel files and pending investigations.
Top city leaders, including Christiansen and City Council President Fred Neil, staunchly defended Johnson’s behavior, both publicly and privately, throughout the FOP campaign to remove him.
Both Christiansen and Neil declined Spotlight Delaware’s requests for comment on the situation.
On Aug. 12, after the FOP took its no-confidence vote in the chief but before it released its public statement calling for his resignation, Christiansen wrote to Johnson telling him he was meeting with union leadership that same day.
“Standing fast,” Christiansen wrote. “You are my Chief.”
Johnson said he did not recall that specific meeting. He also declined to comment on the details of the discussions between himself, Christiansen and the police union.
In another text exchange between Christiansen and Johnson on June 22, roughly two months before the FOP’s public efforts to oust Johnson began, the mayor called out both the union and a newly launched, activist-led complaint form for residents to recount their experiences with the police department.
“Who is going to review the complaints against the thugs. Brian Lewis?” Christiansen wrote. “Where’s the FOP with perhaps an editorial or some PR of their own.”
Lewis, a Dover City Councilman, did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
Johnson responded in the message thread that he was going to talk to union leadership shortly. He told Christiansen he expected FOP leaders to attend the city council meeting the next day.
“I’m trying to figure out my communication plan,” Johnson wrote. “I don’t like sitting there looking stupid unless I know that someone is going to defend the department.”
Johnson told Spotlight Delaware he took issue with the activist initiative, set up by the group Neighbors Organized for Credibility and Accountability in Policing. He said the group was trying to “harvest complaints and not include us in the conversation about any complaint.”
He added that because the structure of city council meetings does not allow him to respond to public comments directed at the police department, his text message was an effort to ensure the mayor would defend the department against citizens’ criticism.
Email communications indicate that City Council President Fred Neil was also directly involved in coordinating the city’s defense against FOP criticisms.
Following up on a meeting the pair had to discuss the situation, Neil wrote in an email to Christiansen on Aug. 28, “I hope we can deescalate. No lynching will be allowed.”
Neil also wrote strongly worded defenses of Johnson’s leadership to a number of outside entities in August and September 2025, including the Association of Retired Dover Police Officers, the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce and some community advocates.
“We need our officers to do what they were trained to do and swore to do, PROTECT the PUBLIC and not spend time on [sic] campaign on ghost problems or hurt feelings,” Neil wrote to the retired officers on Aug. 26, “Let me repeat, the police are under attack.”
The FOP broke its nearly four year silence on social media in August 2025 with its letter calling for Johnson’s resignation. Over the next month and a half, the union made roughly two dozen posts with allegations against the chief, photos of yard signs calling for the chief’s removal, and responses to city officials’ defense of Johnson’s leadership.
The union unceremoniously stopped making update posts at the end of September, a couple weeks after the city council voted to launch a third-party investigation into the situation.
It is not clear whether the investigation led the officers to go silent on social media.
Following the Aug. 12 meeting between Christiansen and FOP leadership, which Christiansen referenced in a text message to Johnson, email communications indicate that future attempts at organizing a meeting between stakeholders in the conflict failed.
Christiansen wrote an email to Tim Mullaney, the FOP president, on Aug. 28, inviting officers to an open forum the following week.
The forum would have featured a moderator and been open to the public as “an opportunity to have a candid discussion” and “allow all parties to present their points,” Christiansen wrote.
Mullaney did not appear to respond via email to Christiansen’s invitation. Mullaney also did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s multiple requests for comment.
In a Sept. 2 statement expressing his “full confidence” in Johnson’s leadership, Christiansen wrote that he had invited FOP leadership to a public forum “where their concerns could be discussed openly,” but the union did not respond to his request.
The day after Christiansen’s open forum invitation, Neil wrote to Mullaney offering for union leadership to discuss their concerns with city officials during a city council executive session.
Mullaney declined that invitation, citing concerns that an executive session is confidential. He would not be allowed to discuss the meeting with other union members, he said. He did say the FOP was open to other avenues of expressing their concerns.
Despite Mullaney already having turned down the invitation, Neil wrote him an email the following day to “rescind the invitation.” He had misunderstood the rules of an executive session meeting, he said.
FOP and city leaders did not exchange any more emails about arranging a meeting. The officers continued calling for Johnson’s resignation for another month.
Johnson said he respects FOP members’ First Amendment rights, including the posts they made about him last summer. But he has “made a lot of progress” in his relationship with the union since then, he said.
“I genuinely care about the city, I genuinely care about my officers, and I think we’ve got a good future together,” Johnson said.
It remains unclear where the relationship between Johnson and his officers stands today. It is also unclear what, if any, new information was uncovered by the city’s third-party investigation into Johnson and Christiansen’s behavior.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
The post Messages show Dover leaders rallying around police chief amid controversy appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
How America can help the continent finance its rearmament.
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